by Nate Ball
We both looked at Amp. He shrugged. “Sure, I don’t see why not. We’re also going to need wire. Thick wire. It has to have insulation on it, like a plastic or rubber casing. And we need a lot: enough to wrap tightly around your zucchini-bolt a lot of times.”
We all sat in silence, thinking.
I pulled one of the wires off the yam on my experiment. “Could we use this?”
“Totally unacceptable,” Amp said. “Too short. Too thin.”
Olivia jumped up. “Hey, if you kept the receipt you could return these wires and buy the kind we need.”
I sighed. “I’m sure my mom has it. She keeps the receipt for everything. But I’d have to explain to her that I’ve changed my experiment. Plus, I’d have to go to back to the hardware store. No experiment is worth that.”
“Too bad,” Olivia said. She started stuffing my experiment’s wires back into the plastic bag they had come in. “We can swing by the hardware store before we drop you off at tryouts.”
“We?” I said.
Olivia patted my shoulder. “I’ll tell your mom you’ve gotten excited about science again. Let your pal Olivia handle the details.”
“Oh, this is turning into a total nightmare,” I said, holding the mitt to my face.
“Amp and I will keep working while you’re playing catch and hitting your balls.”
I couldn’t even respond to that one.
With a growl, I grabbed the bag with all my baseball gear. My weekend had been hijacked. I was no longer in charge of my own science experiment. And making the baseball team suddenly seemed like a long shot.
Worst of all, I just wanted to take a nap.
10
Sleep Magnet
“I asked you if you realized that the Earth itself is one big magnet,” Amp said.
“What? What time is it?”
“Don’t worry about the time. Worry about what I’m telling you,” Amp’s voice needled from somewhere in the dark.
I groaned and peered at the glowing numbers on my alarm clock with one half-closed eye. 2:46 a.m.
I couldn’t see Amp, or I would have backhanded him off my bed and through the wall.
“What is Earth’s core made out of?” Amp’s voice asked casually.
“Oh, c’mon, I don’t know,” I moaned.
“Think about it.”
“Sugar and spice and everything nice?”
“That is a horrible guess,” he said.
Then I heard him whispering into his ridiculous recorder.
“Council Note: Human children seem unaware that their planet is primarily made out of iron. And that some of it is molten, which, of course, means it’s in a heated, liquid state. All of which helps make this planet one big magnet. Not only do they not know, they don’t even seem to care, which may explain their failure to achieve interplanetary travel. Amp over.”
“Stop talking into your arm, please,” I said, closing my eyes. “And we have been to the moon, wise guy.”
“Oh dear, the moon is not a planet,” Amp sighed. “It’s a . . . well, it’s a moon.”
I didn’t care. I was exhausted. Baseball tryouts had sapped whatever interest I had in my lousy experiment. Plus, my neck hurt like crazy.
The tryouts had actually gone better than I imagined they would. I hit the ball better than ever. But toward the end of the session, I had to catch pitches thrown by Max Myers, a fellow fourth grader who looked like a truck driver with anger issues.
Max didn’t so much pitch as catapult the ball in my direction with a whirling and wild windmill motion. He was all speed and no control. Not only did his fastballs make my hand feel like it was melting inside my mitt, many of them bounced before the plate.
Toward the end, one of Max’s wild pitches caught the front edge of home plate, ricocheted off my glove, and shot straight up under my mask and off the side of my neck.
Catchers are never supposed to let a pitch get past them, no matter how badly it’s thrown. The catcher’s curse, my dad called it. All three coaches were watching. But I kept Max’s wild pitch in front of me. That’s what matters. I could tell the coaches were impressed by the way they didn’t stop spitting sunflower seeds.
I started dozing off again thinking about it, but Amp was on a roll.
“See, Earth itself is one big magnet,” he declared. “It has two poles, just like a magnet. The Earth’s magnetic moment is really huge, meaning its ability to exert magnetic force on things is super big.”
“I’m having a moment of my own right now,” I said. “A moment of pain.”
Amp ignored me. “I think I’ve found a way to provide a boost to our little experiment. My ship has a small device that can tap into a bit of Earth’s magnetic field,” Amp said. “Does adding that sound okay?”
“Nothing anybody says at three in the morning sounds okay,” I said, keeping my eyes closed. “Even Mrs. Einstein told Albert to shut up at three in the morning.”
“Splendid,” he said. I could hear him clapping, which sounded like two marshmallows being thumped together. “I’ll get to work right away.”
“Terrific,” I said, mostly into my pillow.
Looking back, I wish I had paid closer attention to what he was saying. Only later would I realize the mistake I had just made.
11
Breakfast Breakdown
I stood frozen in the kitchen doorway early the next morning.
“It’s about time, Rip Van Winkle,” Olivia said.
She was sitting cheerfully with my family at our kitchen table.
“What are you doing here?” I blurted out, looking down at the pajamas I was wearing, the ones I had outgrown two years ago. “I’m not even dressed.”
“Oh, hush up,” Mom said. “She’s here to help with your project. A girl can’t do science on an empty stomach.” She smiled at Olivia.
My mom loved Olivia. She was the daughter Mom never had.
“Olivia’s been telling us all about your new science project,” Dad said, looking up from his smartphone.
“She has?” I croaked.
That’s the thing about Olivia. She loves to talk. And half the things she says make me cringe. I constantly worry that she’ll spill the beans about Amp by accident one day. She talks so fast and says so much it seems bound to happen.
“She thinks your new experiment could go all the way to the tri-county finals this year,” said Taylor, looking up from his oozing egg yolk. “Gosh, you should have worn a robe or something, Zack.”
“Why should I have to wear a robe in my own house?” I complained.
“Where else would you wear a robe, except in your own house?” Dad asked, without looking up from an email he was reading.
I skittered to the last open chair and sat quickly, covering myself as best I could with a napkin.
Taylor looked at Olivia suspiciously. “She thinks it’s even better than my robot last year.”
Taylor was not only the first kid in kindergarten to enter our school’s science fair, he won it. He had built a robot that flipped pancakes. The robot’s name was Flip. Get it? Anyway, he was out to prove that a robot could cook a pancake better than a person. He called his experiment “The Big Flip-Off!”
Taylor had some parents who came to the science fair face off against the robot over a big, two-foot griddle. When Taylor and Flip won first place, they both went to the Tri-County Science Fair Competition, where Taylor and his flapjack-flipping robot took second place. He was interviewed on the evening news. My mom posted a link to the interview on her Facebook page and got over three hundred likes.
“So, Zack, do you really think your magnet can top Flip?” Mom asked excitedly.
I groaned. “It’s an electromagnet, and no, I’m just hoping to get an A. That’s it.”
“Really?” Dad said. “Olivia here says you’re going for something truly spectacular.”
I glared at Olivia. “Maybe she set the bar too high.”
“I’m pretty sure my spider is gonna
beat his lame-o magnet, Dad,” Taylor boasted. “It actually weaves its own web.”
“Really? Cool!” Olivia exclaimed. “Oh, that sounds a lot better than Zack’s magnet thingy.”
I glared at her again. Olivia returned my glare with a fake smile and shoved a giant piece of bacon in her mouth.
“Is there any more bacon?” I asked, looking at the empty plate in the middle of the table.
“The early bird gets the bacon,” Mom said, and laughed too hard at her own joke.
“Thanks,” I sighed. “And don’t forget, today is the second day of baseball tryouts.” Nobody at the table seemed interested in my hopes and dreams. I cleared my throat. “If it’s okay, I’m going to go change into something more comfortable.”
“You mean something more uncomfortable,” Taylor said.
I didn’t answer. I zipped out of the kitchen, down the hallway, and into my dad’s office. I walked over to the giant bolt that was resting on two wooden hooks that extended from a plaque mounted on the wall behind the desk. I lifted the bolt off the hooks. It was surprisingly heavy. I almost dropped it on my naked toes.
I tiptoed up the stairs holding the heavy bolt with both hands.
At the top step I froze. My ears had picked up on something faint.
High-pitched screaming.
Very high-pitched!
AMP! AMP WAS IN TROUBLE!
12
Spider Attack!
Still holding the doorknob, it took me a moment to understand what I was looking at.
Spider robots were crawling all over my bedroom floor. Each had a tiny video camera mounted on top of its body. They were scampering this way and that. One was under my bed. Its camera had become stuck on the edge of a blanket that hung down.
“Don’t just stand there, Zack!” Amp squeaked. “HELP ME!”
I closed the door quickly, silently. “Where are you?”
“On the spider by the hamper!” he screeched in his squeaky voice.
Then I saw him clinging to the back of a frantic yellow spider.
The spider robot was rotating crazily around and around in circles, then suddenly reversing direction, like it was trying to buck Amp. Amp was holding on for dear life. He had his hands on the wire leading to the back of the camera. With one great pull, he yanked out the wire and the camera’s red light instantly went off. “These floofy things came out of nowhere! They have cameras.”
“I can see that,” I said.
“I can’t be invisible to cameras,” he growled, holding on to the tiny camera to keep from getting thrown. “I can only be invisible to a human being!”
“I thought you were kidding about the invisibility thing,” I said.
“I’m getting captured on video right now. Look at these antennas. The video is being transmitted somewhere.”
That shook me out of my frozen state.
I ran to my window, threw it open, flicked out the screen, and let it drop down into the bushes below in the backyard. Then I spun and, grabbing two robots at a time, flung them out my second-floor window. There were at least a dozen of them in different shapes and sizes. One was so small and so fast it took me half a minute just to catch it.
Soon they were all gone and the room was quiet. I peered down at them from my second-story window, trying to catch my breath. Some of the robots had exploded into pieces when they hit the patio. A few were upside down, moving their legs madly in the air. But half of them were still crawling, limping with their cameras across our backyard.
“What are you waiting for?” Amp cried.
I turned from the window and saw Amp at the door. “What now?” I cried.
“We have to erase whatever your brother’s robots recorded!”
“Oh, right,” I said. I scooped up Amp, emerged silently from my room, and crept quickly down the hall to my brother’s room, being careful to avoid the hallway’s squeaky spots. Everyone was still at the breakfast table, chatting away. I opened Taylor’s door and stepped into what looked more like a robot factory than a kid’s room.
“He must have been sending the signals back to a recording device in his room,” Amp said, leaping into action.
After some frenzied searching, we found a small antenna connected to a metal box near Taylor’s laptop computer.
“This must be it,” Amp instructed as I put him down on the computer. He popped opened the CD drive and somehow managed to crawl inside. I heard some banging and some strange sounding Erdian curse words. A few minutes later, he reemerged, dusty but no worse for wear. “That should take care of it,” he said, smiling.
“You didn’t just wreck his computer, did you?”
“Wreck it? No,” Amp said. “But I wouldn’t do any of your homework on it ever again.”
13
Down to Business
As I came back downstairs, Taylor was blubbering like a baby. He had spotted his precious robots in pieces in the backyard. “Robot bully,” he cried, pointing at me.
“Spy,” I yelped right back.
Dad wasn’t having any of it. He sent us both to our rooms. Olivia followed me upstairs. Amp was in his usual hiding place. We sat quietly until Olivia remembered the magnet wire we’d bought yesterday. That shook Amp from his glum mood. “This is perfect,” he said, crawling out from the bookshelves to examine the wire. Olivia and I wrapped the wire around the giant bolt. “Leave no space between the wire, no overlapping,” Amp pestered us. He made us start over again three times because he said it looked sloppy and uneven. The fourth time, we finally satisfied him. “The more wraps around the bolt, the more grabbing power the electromagnet will have.”
“It’s a monster,” Olivia exclaimed, admiring our handiwork.
I noticed about ten inches of wire hanging off each side of the bolt. “Should we cut this part off?”
“Heavens, no!” Amp cried. “That’s where we attach it to the power source.”
We used a bit of sandpaper to rub the coating off at both ends of the wire and attached them to a battery I took out of my flashlight. We were amazed at how easily the electromagnet picked up paper clips and tacks off my desk.
“Whoa!” Olivia and I exclaimed, amazed by its strength.
The instant a wire stopped making contact with the battery, the paper clips dropped to the desk.
“I thought it would make a noise,” I said. “Like crackling electricity.”
Amp shook his head at me. “Magnetism is generally silent,” he said with a sigh.
“Pretty cool, Amp, but how do we make it super-duper?” Olivia asked.
“It’s all about the power source,” he said. “Take my ship out of Zack’s stinky hamper and I’ll remove the battery from my ship. It’s quite powerful.”
“What if you win the whole enchilada?” Olivia asked me dreamily. “The winner gets to be on TV and their school gets five thousand bucks.”
“Ah, who cares about that?” I said. “I just need to get my A and get on with my life.”
After I removed Amp’s ship from my laundry hamper, he went to work somewhere inside of it. “Don’t just stand there, start the paperwork,” he shouted from inside the ship. “I plan on winning all the bananas on this one!”
Olivia and I looked at each other and laughed silently at Amp’s bossiness. “What does ‘winning all the bananas’ even mean?” Olivia giggled.
I opened up my laptop to start on the paperwork that Miss Martin loved so much. Olivia was at my side the whole time. We even made a label for my project and spelled everything correctly.
By the time I had to go to baseball tryouts, everything seemed to have worked out perfectly. And my new science project was looking pretty spiffy.
“Should we test it more?” I asked.
“Go, go,” Olivia said, pushing me in the back. “Amp and I will finish up and you’ll be ready for your demonstration tomorrow.”
I smiled. “This science stuff isn’t so bad after all.”
14
Magnetized
/> At dinner Monday night, I was puffed up with pride.
My in-class science project demonstration went off without a hitch. And even better, the three projects presented before mine were big duds. Davey Swope’s volcano didn’t erupt with spaghetti sauce, it just made a bad, burning-meatball smell. Max Myers head-butted his experiment so hard he disconnected the glowing display board and wound up in the nurse’s office. And all of Nino Sasso’s flies had died in their jars. He had to settle for explaining what should have happened if they had lived.
Then it was my turn.
As I stood nervously at the front of the class, everyone in front of me had seemed bored by my electromagnet. I hit the first button and a couple of paper clips jumped up and skittered across Miss Martin’s desk. Cool, but not enough to open anyone’s eyes. Then I hit the second button.
Miss Martin’s coffee cup of paper clips tipped over and about a hundred paper clips flew to the magnet like an angry swarm of bees to a jelly sandwich at a picnic lunch. A lizard-shaped metal paperweight shot across the room. An antique globe on a metal stand nearly broke my wrist as it careened across Miss Martin’s desk.
All three objects seemed as if they were glued to my experiment. CRACK! SLAP! SLAP!
The entire class gasped.
It had all happened in the blink of an eye.
I slapped the power button off before it could do any serious damage. The metal objects fell to the desk with an audible clunk.
My classmates were utterly silent for a split second before exploding into applause. Even Max Myers gave me a standing hoot and fist-pump.
Whoa. A new science star was born.
After I told my family all the glorious details over beans and weenies—my mom’s embarrassing name for pinto beans and hot dogs—Taylor said he had something to talk about, too.
“Look at these photos one of my robots took in Zack’s room,” he said, pretending to sound concerned. “I was able to save them off my hard drive.”
“What?” I croaked.
“Not again, Taylor,” Mom said.