Nick and Tesla's Solar-Powered Showdown

by Bob Pflugfelder

  “Oh. Right. Sorry. I just wanted to tell you that it’s ten o’clock. Time to go upstairs and brush your teeth.”

  Uncle Newt relaxed a bit but didn’t take his hand from behind his back.

  “Thanks, Tesla. I think I might stay up a little later tonight, actually. CNN’s about to show a special on the new Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies.”

  “You mean the international space weapons ban?” said Tesla.

  Tesla and Nick had always been fascinated by space science—all kinds of science, really, but space science especially. So a new treaty outlawing weapons platforms outside the Earth’s atmosphere wasn’t something that would escape their notice. Under normal circumstances, they would be begging their parents to let them stay up to watch a TV special on the subject.

  “Exactly,” Uncle Newt said. And with his free hand he waved a wisp of smoke from in front of his face. “They’re going to discuss how the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration—”

  “You don’t have to say it again, Uncle Newt. I know what it’s called.”

  “Right. Well, they’re going to discuss how the new version of the treaty is different from the one we signed back in the nineteen-sixties. The show comes on at ten-thirty. Would you and Nick like to watch it with me? We could pop corn. I don’t have any real popcorn, but there’s a can of Niblets that might do interesting things if we dumped it into a pot of hot oil.”

  “No, thanks. Nick and I are … doing something else.”

  “All right, then. I’ll tell you everything they got wrong in the morning. Good night.”

  “Good night,” said Tesla.

  As she left the basement, Uncle Newt pivoted stiffly to keep whatever was behind his back out of her line of sight.

  “Any brainstorms while I was gone?” she asked her brother as she walked back into their bedroom.

  There was no answer.

  Nick was fast asleep.

  Tesla’s mother and father were talking to her, saying something that seemed to worry them, but she couldn’t hear their words.

  “What?” Tesla said.

  Her parents began shouting, looking alarmed, yet still Tesla heard nothing.

  “What?” she repeated. “What is it? What are you trying to tell me?”

  Her mother and father screamed silently. And then, at last, Tesla heard a sound.

  Footsteps. By her bed.

  She woke up.

  Tesla opened one eye and saw the ghostly gray light of early morning.

  A dark figure was standing near her feet, holding something big and bulky that made an ominous sizzling noise.

  Tesla shot out from under the covers and raised her fists.

  “Back off!” she said. “I know kung fu!”

  The dark figure laughed. Only it wasn’t a dark figure anymore, because now both of Tesla’s eyes were wide open.

  It was Nick. He was wearing a black T-shirt and a red swimsuit and he was holding a large plate. On the plate was a meat thermometer, two forks, and a half-eaten ham Uncle Newt’s girlfriend Hiroko had made for them two nights ago.

  It was the ham that was sizzling.

  “Sorry to scare you like that, but I just couldn’t wait to get started,” Nick said.

  Tesla blinked at the ham, wondering if she was still dreaming.

  “Get started with what?”

  Nick grinned. “I have a plan,” he said.

  1 Spoiler alert! This happened at the end of Nick and Tesla’s Secret Agent Gadget Battle.—The authors

  Nick didn’t explain his plan. He simply said, “Put on your bathing suit and meet me out front.” Then he turned and walked out of the room.

  He assumed that Tesla would work it all out by the time she was dressed. A warm ham, a meat thermometer, forks, swimsuits—the plan was obvious, wasn’t it?

  Nick waited on the sidewalk in front of Uncle Newt’s house, watching the sun rise over the tall forested hills to the east of Half Moon Bay. After only a few minutes Tesla poked her head out the front door, looked him over, and said, “Why didn’t you grab some towels?”

  “Because I forgot we’d need them.”

  Tesla rolled her eyes and went back inside.

  Nick had assumed correctly … the plan was obvious. At least to his sister.

  Tesla returned with two mismatched towels—finding anything that matched in Uncle Newt’s house was a challenge—and then she and Nick set off down the street, heading west.

  Tesla looked at the gold star dangling from its chain above the top of her swimsuit. “So you think these things aren’t just tracking devices,” she said to Nick. “They might be monitoring our environment and vital signs, too.”

  Nick nodded. “You reminded me last night: Agent McIntyre told us to wear them close to our hearts.2 I’d assumed she was being sentimental or something. But then I started thinking … maybe that wasn’t it at all. Maybe she wanted to watch our heart rates.”

  Tesla pointed at the meat thermometer, which was jammed deep into the ham that Nick was carrying. “And our body temperatures?”

  “Exactly. I nuked the ham pretty good in the microwave. The internal temperature’s around …” Nick tilted his head to get a good look at the meat thermometer’s red needle. “… one hundred eighty degrees. But it’s dropping fast.”

  “Of course it is. The ham’s small, so it has a high surface-area-to-volume ratio,” said Tesla.

  “Right. That means it’s going to cool off a lot more quickly than we would,” said Nick. “If we, you know, stopped producing body heat.”

  “And heartbeats.”

  “Exactly.” Nick rechecked the thermometer. “So we’ll provide a reason for the quick drop in our core temperature and the no-heartbeat thing.”

  “It’s a pretty mean trick, actually,” Tesla noted. “Making Agent McIntyre think we might be bobbing around in the ocean, dead.”

  “I know it is. But can you think of another way to start looking for Mom and Dad?”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?” said Tesla. She didn’t like to admit when she couldn’t think of something, so that was her way of saying “No.”

  Then, at the same time, Tesla and Nick both stopped walking.

  Up to that point in their sunrise stroll, Uncle Newt’s street looked like a lot of northern California neighborhoods. They had passed small yards, medium houses, big trees. But the end of this particular street was something special.

  The slow, steady rhythm of pounding surf had been growing louder as the twins headed west, and now it was impossible to ignore. Seagulls soared overhead. The salty, pungent scent of the sea was overwhelming.

  Nick and Tesla had reached a ridge overlooking Half Moon Bay State Beach and, beyond it, the Pacific Ocean. Even in the dim light of dawn—which, of course, was concentrated in the east, behind them—the horizon before them was vast. They could see nothing but a strip of sand and rocks stretching into the impossible distance. Straight ahead, gray waves were swallowing all the world.

  A narrow trail in the steep, scrub-covered hill zigzagged down to the beach about eighty feet below. Tesla started down and didn’t look back. Crazy as Nick’s plan was, she knew it was their best shot.

  Nick and Tesla walked just close enough to the ocean for the surf to wash over their toes and then they checked the ham’s temperature. It was down to one hundred fifty degrees Fahrenheit. They couldn’t put their plan into action till the thermometer registered between 97.7 and 99.5 degrees—the normal core temperature of a human being.

  Which meant the ham had to cool a bit. Tesla sped up the process by moving farther into the chilly water and dipping the ham in the surf while Nick chased off the gulls that started swooping toward them when they noticed the chunk of delicious-smelling meat. A bony, tanned old man wearing nothing but teeny yellow running shorts, black socks, and sneakers shot them a quizzical look as he jogged
past, but didn’t stop to ask why two kids were giving a ham a bath in the ocean.

  This was California, after all.

  After a few minutes of ham swishing and gull dodging, Tesla announced: “We’re there! Just below one hundred degrees! Now what?”

  “Maybe we should run around a little before we take off our pendants,” Nick suggested. “You know—spike our heart rates so it’ll look like spies are after us again.”

  Tesla ducked as a screeching gull narrowly missed flying into her face.

  “I don’t know about you,” she said, “but between these crazy birds and this freezing water, my heart rate is spiking already.”

  “Good point. Mine too. Let’s make the switch.”

  The twins walked out of the water and knelt by the plate they had left on the sand, next to their towels. On the plate were the two forks.

  Nick grabbed a fork with one hand and his pendant with the other. “I’ll go first. Give me a countdown.”

  “Three, two, one. Go!” Tesla said.

  Nick jerked the pendant over his head and wrapped the chain around the fork’s tines. Then he plunged the fork into the ham so that the pendant was speared to its pink, slimy side.

  “Right. I’m dead,” Nick said. “Your turn.”

  Tesla repeated the maneuver, pinning her pendant into the ham next to her brother’s. If the pendants worked the way Nick and Tesla thought they did, whoever was monitoring the signal would no longer be detecting their heartbeats. But because the ham was keeping the pendants at body temperature, it would seem like they were still wearing them.

  Which meant … well, it meant that whoever was on the other end of the signal would need to check out what was going on.

  “OK,” Nick said, picking up the ham. “Into the water again.”

  He and Tesla waded back into the ocean, holding the ham. When they were out far enough for the waves to crash up to their thighs, Nick bent down to keep the meat in the frothy, frigid water. He dared not loosen his grip because of an interesting scientific discovery the pair made: Ham sinks.

  Almost immediately, both Nick and Tesla were shivering. It was hardly even waist-high, but the water was cold.

  “How long do you think we’ll need to do this?” Tesla asked.

  Nick shrugged. “Depends on how near Agent McIntyre is. And if she gets the signal. And if the pendants really are monitoring our life signs. And if—”

  “OK, OK! Enough ifs!” Tesla said through chattering teeth. “You’re already making me r-r-r-regret this!”

  A sudden splashing sounded behind them, and the twins turned to see a huge golden retriever charging right at them, his leash dragging limply through the sea foam.

  “Buttons! Buttons!” a plump middle-aged woman in a powder blue tracksuit was calling from the beach. “Come back here!”

  Nick turned his back to Buttons and hugged the ham to his chest.

  Tesla wasn’t particularly anxious to put herself between an unfamiliar dog and a block of meat. But she didn’t seem to have a choice: If Tesla didn’t do something, and fast, Buttons the dog would get the ham and their pendants would end up in his canine stomach.

  So Tesla grabbed the leash and began tugging the dog toward the beach. Buttons struggled and whined at first, but eventually the food frenzy evaporated and he let Tesla lead him out of the water.

  “Thank you so much,” the woman said as Tesla handed her the leash. “I hope he didn’t scare you. I don’t know what got into him.”

  “Oh, that’s OK,” Tesla said, giving Buttons a friendly pat. She nodded at her brother, who was still standing in the ocean about thirty yards away. “He was just after our ham.”

  Nick gave the woman a friendly wave. The meat was now tucked under his other arm.

  The woman’s eyes bulged.

  “Come on, Buttons,” she muttered, spinning around and hurrying off without another word. With obvious reluctance, Buttons let her drag him away.

  Nick bent down and again lowered the ham into the water.

  “You know what I just realized?” Tesla shouted to Nick. (She had to really yell to be heard over the surf.) “There’s no reason we both have to be out there in the freezing water.”

  Nick started to yell back something sarcastic, but just then a particularly persistent gull dove at him. He frantically shooed it away.

  Tesla was right. It took only one set of hands to hold the ham in the water, and this nutty idea had been Nick’s. If either one of them had to get hypothermia from submerging a ham into frigid seawater, Nick decided that it should be him.

  He turned toward shore and was about to yell exactly that when suddenly Tesla cried out: “Nick! Look!”

  Nick’s eyes went wide with fear. Tesla was pointing frantically at something behind him.

  Tesla, and their mother, too, sometimes called Nick “Little Mr. Sunshine” or “Mr. Worst-Case Scenario,” because he had an impressively vivid imagination, especially when it came to picturing how just about anything could go ruinously, horribly wrong. But Nick suddenly realized that he didn’t even need a vivid imagination to know why it might not be smart to splash around holding a hunk of pink, juicy, cooked meat in ocean waters known to host the occasional great white shark. For once, Nick’s instinct for predicting imminent disaster had failed him—until now, that is, when it was perhaps too late. Nick whipped around, fully expecting to see a big gray triangle of a shark’s dorsal fin slicing through the water as it zoomed toward him.

  Something big and sleek was heading Nick’s way. But it wasn’t slicing through the water.

  The twins stared with mouths agape as a streamlined orange-and-white Coast Guard helicopter flew toward the beach. As it approached, it slowed and lost altitude. In a few more seconds it stopped, hovering about a hundred feet in front of, and above, Nick. The whirling blades made choppy ripples in the water.

  The chopper hung there for a moment, its rotors roaring even louder than the surf. Louder still was a jarring crackle of static and an amplified male voice booming: “NICK AND TESLA HOLT?”

  “Yes!” said Nick.

  “That’s us!” yelled Tesla.

  Another long moment passed. Then the voice blared again:

  “GO HOME!”

  The helicopter swung its nose to the south and shot off, following the shoreline. In less than a minute, it was nothing but a speck in the sky.

  “Well, I guess your plan kind of worked,” Tesla said as she and her brother trudged up the street toward their uncle’s house.

  “There’s no such thing as ‘kind of worked,’ ” Nick said bitterly. “Either we got information out of Agent McIntyre or we didn’t. And we didn’t.”

  Tesla stayed silent.

  As their uncle’s house came into view, Nick bent forward and breathed in deeply through his nose. “Great,” he grumbled. “I smell like ham. It’s gonna remind me all day that we failed.”

  “No, it won’t! Because we didn’t!” Tesla said. Nick looked up.

  A black SUV was parked in front of Uncle Newt’s house, and two unhappy-looking people were standing next to it. One was a tall, thin man with gray hair. The other was a red-haired woman wearing a dark pantsuit and sunglasses. And a scowl.

  Agent McIntyre.

  “So you’re alive, huh?” she said to Nick and Tesla as they approached the car. “Well, we might just have to remedy that.”

  2 That was at the end of Nick and Tesla’s Secret Agent Gadget Battle, remember? Like we told you in the last footnote?—The authors

  “I’m really, really sorry, Agent McIntyre. Really.”

  This was Nick’s seventh apology (and his twenty-first “really”). He and Tesla were sitting on rusty lawn furniture on the back patio of their uncle’s house, still wrapped in soggy towels. Agent McIntyre and her colleague—a taciturn man they’d met briefly once before3—stood stiffly nearby, glaring at the kids through identical black mirrored sunglasses.

  “I know it must have freaked you out thinking we might
be … in trouble,” Nick continued. “But we couldn’t figure out what else to do.”

  “It’s not like we had a bat-signal we could use to call you,” Tesla added. “How were we supposed to communicate with you?”

  “You weren’t,” Agent McIntyre said sternly. “And now I have to explain to my bosses why I scrambled a Coast Guard helicopter to intercept a couple of kids playing on the beach with a Nerf ball.”

  “It wasn’t a Nerf ball,” Nick said. “It was a—”

  “Tesla! Nick! There you are!”

  Before Nick could explain any further, Uncle Newt came out of the house, holding a cardboard container a little larger than a shoe box. He was in his modern mad-scientist uniform: frayed blue jeans, T-shirt, and a white lab coat burned in several places. His hair was even more unkempt than usual (which meant that it looked like he had just stuck his finger in an electrical socket). If he was surprised to find a pair of glowering government agents on his back patio, he didn’t show it. “What’s going on here?” would have been the most obvious thing to ask in this situation. But Uncle Newt seldom did the obvious.

  “Hey, who’s up for a barbecue?” he asked instead.

  A grill stood on the edge of the patio, next to the patchy lawn, and it was in about a thousand pieces. Scorch marks on the nearby concrete and grass made it clear that, like so many things around Uncle Newt’s house, it had, at some point, exploded.

  “Do you know what these two kids were up to this morning?” Agent McIntyre said to Uncle Newt, wagging her finger accusingly between Nick and Tesla.

  Uncle Newt looked at his damp niece and equally soggy nephew and then frowned.

  “Kids, kids, kids,” he said, shaking his head. “I am very disappointed. I manage to remember to tell you one responsible grown-up thing—never go swimming without an adult—and you ignore me. Consider your Twinkies privileges revoked until further notice!”

  Uncle Newt put the cardboard box on a lawn chair, stepped over to Agent McIntyre and shook her hand, and then did the same to the other agent.