THE FINAL STEPS
1. Carefully tape one of the motor’s wires to one end of the battery. Then tape one of the switch’s wires to the other end of the battery. (Be sure the metal wire is exposed.)
2. Use a little hot glue to secure the battery to the top of the support.
3. Attach the two remaining wires to each other.
4. Now it’s time to test the motor. To turn it on, rotate the paper clip so that it touches both fasteners. The motor should spin and elevate the hoverbot. When the propeller spins, it should blow air downward. If the propeller is spinning the wrong way, just reverse the two wires attached to the battery.
5. If the motor doesn’t spin, the wires are probably not connected somewhere. Check the wires on the motor and all other connections, and make sure you didn’t hot-glue the motor shaft.
6. The small battery is lightweight, which is perfect for hovercrafts, but keep in mind that it won’t last super long. So be sure to turn off the hovercraft when you’re not using it.
7. Happy hovering!
“Remind me again why we need to build a robo-angel hoverbot,” Nick said.
He and Tesla had been hunched over one of the worktables in the basement for an hour.
Tesla didn’t even look up from the little motor she was carefully gluing in place.
“You know,” she said.
And he did. For the most part.
The burglar who’d broken into Jewelry by Angela might be the same one who’d stolen Mr. Kuskie’s comic book. In each case, the thief had gotten inside through mysterious, undetectable means and had made off with valuable items that had just arrived in the store. So Nick and Tesla needed an excuse to go to Jewelry by Angela and snoop around, and a replacement for the stolen robot angel they’d read about in the newspaper seemed like just the thing.
“But why a robo-angel hoverbot?” Nick asked. “The article didn’t say anything about the robot angel flying.”
Tesla squirmed but didn’t answer.
“Come on,” Nick prodded her. “Why a hoverbot?”
“I want ours to be cooler,” Tesla mumbled.
Nick nodded, satisfied. “Thought so.”
A few minutes later, Uncle Newt came down to the lab.
“You’re not spending the afternoon with Dr. Sakurai again?” Tesla asked him innocently.
“She’s busy with Wonder Hut stuff today. But we’ll be getting together tonight,” Uncle Newt said. “I’m thinking of giving her a peek at the Banana Vac 9000. Maybe letting her take it for a spin around the house. You know—as long as it doesn’t get all explodey. What do you think? Romantic, huh?”
As he spoke, Uncle Newt went to the cooler in which he kept the vacuum’s fuel—thirty pounds of rotten bananas—and flipped up the lid.
A noxious cloud of banana gas and gnats spread through the basement.
“Maybe you should stick with dinner and a movie,” Nick said after he was done coughing. “Most ladies probably wouldn’t appreciate being asked to clean a guy’s house.”
“I’m not asking her to clean my house!” Uncle Newt protested. “I’m giving her the opportunity to alpha test an extremely exciting, innovative piece of technology!”
“By cleaning your house,” Tesla said.
“No! Okay, yes. Well, kind of. But that’s not the point. Listen—”
Uncle Newt opened his mouth to continue but then had to pause to pick a gnat off his tongue.
“Listen,” he said again, “do you know what your mother and father’s first date was?”
Nick and Tesla shook their heads.
“They went out for pizza,” Uncle Newt said, “so they could discuss the paper they were working on together, about the use of positronium annihilation to power gamma ray lasers. They were so excited by their ideas that they forgot to eat … but the paper went on to win an Einstein Prize for Laser Science.”
Nick slumped. He’d been looking forward to hearing about his parents—learning something new about the people he missed so much—and then his uncle had to go and mangle the story.
“Mom and Dad are agronomists,” Nick said. “They never won the Einstein Prize for Laser Science.”
Uncle Newt flapped a hand dismissively.
“Oh, well, not under their own names,” he said, as if that explained everything.
Tesla opened her mouth to speak and then her face reddened and contorted grotesquely, and she sucked in a ragged breath and put her hands to her throat.
“Tez! Tez, are you okay?” Nick said, hurrying to her side.
Tesla looked at him with wide, watery eyes.
“I swallowed a bug,” she croaked.
She started coughing. The hacking grew worse and worse as she sucked in more putrid banana gas between each cough.
Fortunately, the robo-angel had been ready for testing when Uncle Newt joined them in the lab.
Nick snatched it up and guided his sister toward the staircase.
“I don’t know anything about romance,” he said to Uncle Newt. “But I still don’t think this is a great place for a date.”
Tesla began coughing even louder, and Nick slapped her on the back as they scrambled up the steps and escaped to the kitchen.
Uncle Newt considered his nephew’s dating advice for a moment, then shook his head and chuckled.
“Kids,” he said, and he bent down and started scooping slimy black sludge into the Banana Vac’s fuel sac.
After a minute on the back porch, inhaling deep lungfuls of fresh air, Tesla was finally able to speak.
“So,” she said.
That’s when Silas and DeMarco showed up.
“It’s even worse than we thought,” Silas said. “I heard my mom and dad talking last night, and it’s not just the store we might lose. It’s our house, too! Please tell me you’ve got good news.”
“I’m sorry, Silas. We don’t have any good news.” Tesla looked down at the hoverbot, which Nick had put down on the patio. “But we’re working on it.”
“Well, we do have some good news,” Nick said. “We were able to get that picture back into the Treasure Trove last night. But then things got weird.”
He told Silas and DeMarco about the burglar in the jewelry store while Tesla got the hoverbot ready for its trial run.
“Aww, come on, guys!” Silas said when he heard that his friends might have spotted the comic book thief. “Why didn’t you run over there and tackle the dude?”
“Uhh …’cause we’re kids and he is a dangerous criminal,” Nick said.
“I would’ve tackled him,” DeMarco said.
“Me, too!” Silas said.
“Then it’s a good thing you weren’t there, because you could’ve gotten yourselves killed!”
“Guys,” Tesla said. “Chill.”
“But—” Silas began.
He ended with a “whoa!”
The hoverbot was floating.
Tesla gave it a gentle push, and it went gliding across the porch on a half-inch-high cushion of air.
“What is that?” DeMarco asked.
“An angel sent to bring us good news,” said Tesla. “Or answers, anyway.”
They made the hoverbot more angelic by painting wings and a haloed face on the Styrofoam and gluing a few cloudlike cotton balls around the edges. That was all the customizing they could do, though. Anything that added more weight would overwhelm the little motor and keep the hoverbot from floating.
As soon as the paint and glue were dry, Tesla carefully lowered the robo-angel into her backpack, and all four kids climbed on their bikes and set off for downtown Half Moon Bay.
They found Angela behind the counter at Jewelry by Angela. They knew it was her because the first thing she said when they walked in was, “Well, hi there! I’m Angela!”
She didn’t look much like the stereotypical angel. She was short and plump, with frizzy red hair, and she wore an old-fashioned dress and cat’s-eye glasses instead of white robes and a halo. But there was a cherubic quality to the way her
big, friendly grin pushed her round cheeks almost over her eyes.
“What can I do for you?” she said.
A few yards beyond her on the right was a small office, the door open.
A few yards beyond her on the left was the store’s shattered back door, which was being replaced by a workman in a blue jumpsuit.
The air in the store still smelled like smoke.
“We read about what happened last night,” Tesla said. She set her backpack on the display case and started unzipping it. “We felt so bad we decided to make you this. To replace the one that was stolen.”
Tesla pulled out their robo-angel and hooked up the battery.
The hoverbot began floating across the glass countertop.
“Oh, my!” Angela exclaimed. “Isn’t that just darling! You made this yourselves?”
Nick and Tesla nodded. Silas did, too, though all he’d done was put a dab of glue on one of the cotton balls.
“Why, you’re every bit as clever and sweet as that Hiroko from the Wonder Hut,” Angela said. She jerked her head to the side. “She brought me a new robot, too.”
The kids turned to find a foot-high metal angel standing atop one of the store’s other display cases. It was squat and blocky, with silver wings and a halo that pulsed from pink to purple to blue and back again. In one of its hands was a little harp.
“Walk up to it and you’ll get a surprise,” Angela said. “Go on. You’ll love it!”
“All right,” Tesla said.
She took a few steps toward the robot.
Its eyes began to glow red, and it turned its head as if to look at her.
“Are you a new customer?” the robot croaked in a low, electronic voice.
Tesla looked over her shoulder at Angela.
“Say yes,” Angela said.
“Yes,” said Tesla.
“The Hallelujah Chorus” began blasting from a speaker in its belly.
“Cute, huh?” Angela said when the music stopped.
“Yeah. Adorable,” Tesla said. She turned to give her brother a significant look.
“It can see,” Nick said. “And hear.”
Tesla nodded.
They both began looking around the store.
Their gazes stopped at the same spot, across the room from the robot. A small keypad was mounted on the wall there. One word was printed on it.
DependAlarm.
Nick and Tesla looked at each other, their wide eyes saying “aha!”
No one else noticed.
“I just wish these things were real,” Angela said, sending the hoverbot bouncing into the cash register with a gentle flick of the finger. “I could use a few guardian angels around here. I’m telling you—Half Moon Bay is going to the dogs. And I’m not just talking about me being robbed.”
“Oh, yeah?” said DeMarco.
Angela gave him a vigorous nod. “Yeah. Take the man who runs the antiques place across the street. Barry Dobek. I think he’s losing his mind. Yesterday, he started shouting about giant bugs in his store, but when the police showed up he was just stomping on wind-up toys!”
“Oh, yeah?” DeMarco said again.
“Yeah! Dobek claimed to have been robbed, too. But then whatever it was he thought was gone turned up in his store this morning covered in pigeon doody.”
“Oh, yeah?” DeMarco said.
It had become obvious that “Oh, yeah?” was all that was required to keep Angela talking.
“Yeah!” she said. “According to Dobek, someone tossed a bunch of bread or crumbs or something through an open window last night. The pigeons found them and started eating them and then flew around pooping on everything! He’s going to be scrubbing the place for weeks!”
Angela burst into a cackle.
Nick and Tesla exchanged guilty glances. They knew then what happens when you throw a bunch of bagels into an antiques store.
Angela noticed their expressions and choked off her laughter.
“I know I shouldn’t find it funny. But he’s really not a very nice man. Gouges customers, is rude to the locals, never gives anything back to the community.” Angela paused to consider Dobek’s list of faults, then decided to add one more. “And he’s an incorrigible gossip.”
“Uhhh … excuse me?” said Nick, hesitantly raising a hand. “I hate to interrupt, but would you mind if I asked you a couple questions about last night?”
Angela smiled. “Curious about the cops and robbers, huh? That’s only natural for a boy your age. As long as I don’t have any customers, fire away.”
“Thank you. I was wondering …” Nick nodded at the metal robo-angel standing on the countertop near Tesla. “Is that where you kept your old robot? The one that was stolen?”
“Yes.”
Nick turned to point at the keypad on the wall. “And are those the controls for your security system?”
“Yes.” Angela rolled her eyes. “For all the good that did me.”
“How does it work?” Nick asked.
“You mean how does DependAlarm claim it works?” Angela said. “Well, when it’s activated, it’s supposed to set off an alarm ten seconds after anyone enters or leaves the store. The delay is so I can go to the keypad and enter the code to turn it off. But that burglar last night opened my safe somehow, and that must have taken a lot more than ten seconds. Who knows how long he was rummaging around in here before the alarm finally sounded?”
We do, Nick and Tesla could have said. And yes—it was a lot more than ten seconds.
“Where is your safe?” Tesla said instead.
Angela furrowed her brow, suddenly looking doubtful about these strange kids and their nosy questions.
“I don’t think I should say.”
“Obviously, it’s not in plain sight, though,” Nick said. “Have you ever talked about it to anyone in the store? Maybe even told someone the combination?”
“Well, I have employees who close up for me sometimes, so I’ve told them how to—wait. I get it now!”
“You do?” Nick said.
“Sure, I do. You kids want to be junior detectives. You’re trying to solve the mystery.” Angela’s smile returned, wider than ever. “That is just the cutest thing ever!”
Tesla’s face turned scarlet red. The expression on it was not the cutest thing ever. It wasn’t cute at all.
“We’re not trying to solve the mystery,” she grated out through gritted teeth. “We have solved the mystery.”
“Oh, you have?” Angela chuckled.
“Yeah,” said Silas. “You have?”
Tesla nodded grimly.
“Hold on, Tez,” Nick said. “It’s just a hypothesis. We don’t have any proof.”
“I think we do, Nick.” Tesla turned to the little robot angel Hiroko Sakurai had given Angela. “I think we have some right here.”
She started to reach out for the robot.
“Back off, kid,” it said in its distorted electronic voice.
Everyone froze.
“Did that thing just say ‘Back off, kid’?” Angela asked.
“Yes,” said DeMarco, eyes wide with disbelief. “Yes, it did.”
“Back off or what?” Tesla said to the robot.
“You don’t want to find out,” it told her.
Tesla smiled. “Oh, that’s where you’re wrong.”
She reached out for the robot again.
Four small, black, curved objects popped out of slots in its chest.
“What the heck are those?” Angela asked, her already high-pitched voice jumping up an octave.
She got her answer a moment later.
The robot took two tottering steps forward, then toppled off the countertop.
The second it hit the floor, it began zig-zagging quickly through the kids’ feet.
“Wheels!” Nick cried as it whizzed by. “It’s got wheels!”
Tesla took off after it. “Quick! We’ve got to catch it!”
The robot zipped to the back of the store—where it
was stopped by the new glass door.
“Aha! Got ya!” Tesla said. “You can’t get away!”
The robot apparently agreed.
So instead it exploded.
It wasn’t a huge explosion. Just big enough to destroy the robot angel and blow out the glass behind it.
When the smoke cleared, the kids could see the repairman on the other side of the ruined door. He must have been loading his truck, because he’d come running up with his keys still in his hand.
“Oh, man … I just fixed that!” he said. “What happened?”
“That’s what I’m wondering,” said DeMarco.
“Me, too,” said Silas.
“And me,” said Angela. “What the heck is going on?”
They all turned to Nick and Tesla.
“We know who broke into your store,” Nick told Angela. He sounded sad rather than triumphant, though. “And Hero Worship, too.”
“And we’ve got to do something about it. Now,” Tesla added. “Before the thief destroys the rest of the evidence.”
“What evidence do you—?” Silas began.
“The comic book!” DeMarco blurted out.
Tesla nodded.
“Oh, no!” Silas wailed. “Oh, no, no, no!”
“Uhhh … comic book?” Angela said.
“There’s no time to explain,” Tesla told her. “Sgt. Feiffer should be here soon.”
“Ish,” Nick threw in.
The sergeant could be anywhere in town, and his little three-wheeled squad car couldn’t go much faster than a golf cart.
“Whenever he gets here,” Tesla said to Angela, “have him come meet us at the Wonder Hut.”
Angela frowned. “The Wonder Hut? Surely you don’t think …?”
She looked from the shattered door to the alarm control pad to the display case where the angel had been standing.
“Oh. Oh, I see,” she said. “That first angel wasn’t stolen at all, was it?”
Tesla shook her head. “No. It blew up, just like this one. That’s how she got in. Then she turned off the alarm, took her time stealing what she wanted, and turned the alarm back on so that no one would know she’d learned the code.”
“Wait,” said Silas. “She?”
“The thief,” Nick said. “Dr. Hiroko Sakurai.”
Nick and Tesla's Robot Army Rampage Page 9
