Nick and Tesla's Solar-Powered Showdown

by Bob Pflugfelder

  “You want to go welcome people to the neighborhood?” Silas asked, looking confused.

  “No. I want Uncle Newt to go welcome people to the neighborhood while we—”

  “Search Julie Casserly’s house!” Nick said. “Great idea, Tez!”

  Uncle Newt looked dubious. “Uhh … it is?”

  “Absolutely,” Nick said. “She might have left some kind of clue behind in the house. Something that could lead us to her. This is our chance to look for it, while the place is unlocked”

  “But we’ll need you to distract the realtor and whoever she’s with,” Tesla said to her uncle.

  Uncle Newt thought it over for a moment and then nodded. “All right, you’ve come to the right man. If it’s a diversion you need, a diversion you shall get. Distraction is my middle … hey, look at that!” Uncle Newt pointed at a small gray bird with bright patches that had landed in the branches of a nearby tree. “A yellow-rumped warbler!” he shouted. “I haven’t spotted one of those in weeks. Has anyone seen my binoculars?”

  Tesla snapped her fingers in front of her uncle’s eyes. “Focus, Uncle Newt. You’ve got a job to do.”

  Silas started marching toward the house next door. “And so do we!”

  “So, what are we looking for, anyway?” Silas whispered a few minutes later.

  Nick shrugged. “A clue,” he whispered back.

  Silas looked around. “I don’t think we’re going to find one here.”

  Nick, Tesla, Silas, and DeMarco had managed to scramble through the front door and up the stairs while Uncle Newt cornered the realtor and her clients in the garage, introduced himself, and started talking about earthquake insurance and why anyone moving to Half Moon Bay would need plenty of it. (“Of course, it’s not cheap,” they could hear him saying, “but it’s just a matter of time before the Big One hits and half the town ends up in the Pacific.… So, where are you folks from?”)

  While Uncle Newt prattled on, the kids darted from one room to another. But bedroom, bathroom, or closet, it didn’t matter—the place was the exact opposite of Uncle Newt’s house: sunny, clean, and uncluttered, and with no traces of explosions.

  The house was much more than uncluttered. It was utterly, entirely empty. No beds, no dressers, no desks, no chairs, no pictures on the walls, no stains on the carpet. Not so much as a dust bunny in the corner.

  With so little to search, the kids needed only a few minutes to give the upstairs a thorough once-over. They soon reconvened in the hallway, empty-handed. “Let’s try downstairs,” Tesla said.

  She led the boys slowly down the steps, listening for any sign that the realtor was about to escape from Uncle Newt and reenter the house.

  “… but the wind was so strong, the dang turbine came loose, detached from the gear box, and flew right into Julie’s car. Nearly split the thing in two,” Uncle Newt was saying with a chuckle. “That was the last time I tried building a wind-power tower in my own backyard, let me tell you! Oh, how Julie and I laughed and laughed.”

  His reminiscence was followed by a moment of silence.

  “Oh, wait. No, we didn’t laugh,” Uncle Newt said. “She threw a garden gnome at me.”

  The kids, meanwhile, were zigzagging around the first floor of the house. They checked the living room, kitchen, pantry, two bathrooms, and three closets. They all found the same thing.

  “Nothing,” Tesla reported when the group reconvened in the living room.

  “Zip,” said Nick.

  “Zilch,” said DeMarco.

  “Nacho,” said Silas.

  His friends stared at him.

  “I mean nada,” he said. “Sorry. I’m getting hungry.”

  DeMarco turned to Tesla—she was usually the one with a plan. “What now?” he asked.

  “Maybe,” Tesla began, “we—”

  “Wait,” Nick said, interrupting. “Do you hear something?”

  Silas cocked his head and listened. “Nope,” he said. “Not a thing. Why?”

  Everyone else’s eyes widened.

  Uncle Newt wasn’t talking anymore.

  And someone was standing behind them. She cleared her throat.

  The kids turned to find the blonde realtor glaring at them from the hallway leading to the garage. Behind her stood a much younger man and a woman. The couple looked very confused.

  “What are you doing in here?” the realtor said with a snarl.

  “Who? Us?” Tesla said. “We’re just … uhhh …”

  “Selling homemade hot dogs,” said Nick.

  The couple looked even more confused. “Homemade hot dogs?” said the man.

  “Sure,” Nick replied. “Some kids sell lemonade on the sidewalk. We sell hot dogs door to door. They’re cooked by the heat of the sun, so they’re environmentally friendly. Shall we put you down for an order of three?”

  “Umm …” said the young woman.

  “Well …” said the young man.

  “No,” said the realtor.

  Nick backed toward the front door. The other kids followed suit.

  “I guess we’ll be on our way, then,” Nick said. “Come find us if you change your minds. We’ll be working this block all day. Just two dollars a dog, condiments included. Remember: if it wasn’t cooked by the sun, it doesn’t belong on a bun. Bye!”

  By this time, Nick and the others had reached the door. All together, they spun on their heels and stampeded out.

  “Let me show you a house in a different neighborhood,” they heard the realtor saying as they left.

  “How about a different town?” the young woman replied.

  The kids retreated quickly across the lawn, headed in the direction of Uncle Newt’s house.

  “Think that realtor lady’s gonna call the cops on us?” DeMarco asked.

  “Not while there’s still a chance she can sell those people a house,” Nick said, adding, “I hope.”

  “Well, that was a complete bust,” Tesla grumbled. “We didn’t accomplish a thing.”

  “Rule for scientists number 1: Don’t jump to conclusions,” Uncle Newt said. He was waiting for the kids on his back porch; stretched out on a rickety lawn chair, he was holding yet another hot dog.

  “What do you mean?” DeMarco asked him.

  “I mean, I got a chance to talk to that realtor alone for a few seconds, while she was showing me off the property,” Uncle Newt said. “And she promised to answer a question if I promised never to speak to her again.”

  “What did you ask her?” said Silas.

  Uncle Newt cocked an eyebrow at his niece and nephew, challenging them to answer before he did.

  “What would a realtor know about a spy?” Tesla mused.

  “Nothing,” said Nick. “All she would know about would be—”

  Tesla blurted out the words at the same time as her brother. “The house!”

  Uncle Newt nodded with satisfaction and took a big bite of his hot dog.

  “Thpeifically, thu ownuhth reah namuh,” he said.

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Tesla said, admonishing her uncle.

  “Thorry.”

  Uncle Newt swallowed and then repeated his comment.

  “Specifically, the owner’s real name. That house doesn’t belong to Julie Casserly, kids. It was bought for her by someone named Louis Quatorze.”

  “Louis Squatorzi? What the heck kind of name is that?” Silas said.

  “A rare one,” said Tesla. “Which is good news.”

  “Why would that be good news?” DeMarco asked.

  Nick was nodding. He understood immediately.

  “Because,” he said, “that’s going to make it a lot easier for us to find the guy.”

  The friends began their search where nearly every twenty-first- century investigation begins. Where even Sherlock Holmes would have begun, if he’d had the option.

  Google.

  Uncle Newt did the googling at the dining room table in his dusty, disorderly house. As he typed on his laptop,
the kids peered at the screen over his bony shoulders.

  Within seconds, Google had found three Louis Quatorzes.

  The first was a French manufacturer of designer handbags.

  The second was a racehorse.

  The third was Louis XIV, king of France from 1643 to 1715. (Quatorze, it turned out, is French for “fourteen.”)

  “Well, that makes it easy,” DeMarco said. “Obviously the handbag people are behind everything.”

  Tesla scowled at him. “You think my parents were kidnapped by a company that makes purses?”

  “You think your parents were kidnapped by a racehorse or a dead king?” DeMarco shot back.

  “Touché, DePolo,” said Uncle Newt. (Though he could rattle off the entire periodic table of elements in alphabetical order, Uncle Newt was not good at remembering the names of Nick and Tesla’s friends.)

  Nick pointed at a link that led to a webpage about Louis XIV. “I think he’s the connection.”

  “Dude,” Silas said, “did you miss the ‘dead’ part of ‘dead king’? France must be up to their fiftieth Louis by now.”

  “I’m not saying Louis XIV is who we’re looking for,” Nick said. “I’m saying whoever owns the house next door must have used the guy’s name for a reason. Just like the handbag company did, or the people who own the racehorse.”

  “What’s so special about Louis XIV?” DeMarco asked.

  “Let’s find out,” said Uncle Newt. He clicked on the link to the Louis XIV page. When it came up, he started reading it aloud.

  He didn’t get very far.

  “Louis XIV of France, sometimes called Louis the Great or the Sun King—”

  “That’s it!” Nick and Tesla said together.

  “What’s it?” asked Silas.

  “Sun King,” Tesla told him. “You know—because we think the bad guys want to somehow use space-based solar power.”

  “And probably not to cook hot dogs,” Nick added.

  Silas nodded. “Oh, I get it. It’s almost like a supervillain name. ‘Behold, the sizzling, searing might and majesty of … Sun King!’ ” He thrust a fist at DeMarco and started making laser noises. “Pshew! Pshew!”

  “Agggggh! Nooooooo!” DeMarco cried, pretending to melt.

  Nick and Tesla ignored them.

  “Does it say why he was called the Sun King?” Nick said.

  Uncle Newt scrolled down the page, passing a portrait of the famous French king. He was a pudgy man with a mass of curly black hair reminiscent of a heavy metal guitarist. He was dressed in what looked like white pantyhose on his stocky legs, and thrown over his shoulders was a flowing blue-and-white robe so ridiculously oversized it could have carpeted half the house.

  “Here we go,” Uncle Newt said. “ ‘Louis XIV chose the sun as the symbol for his rule because it was associated with Apollo, god of the arts, knowledge, and light. He also believed in absolute monarchy—meaning that he could do anything he pleased—and pictured himself as the life-giving sun around which France revolved.’ ”

  DeMarco (who was done melting) snorted. “How humble.”

  Silas (who was done pshewing) shrugged. “No one’s gonna tell the king he sounds like a jerk.”

  Nick and Tesla kept on ignoring them.

  “The why doesn’t seem to tie in with Mom and Dad,” said Nick.

  “I agree,” said Tesla. “But we’ve still got the name to go on. Uncle Newt, can you search for just ‘Sun King’?”

  Uncle Newt said something that sounded like “Absolumoe.” “That’s French for ‘I’m on it!’ ” he said as he typed. “More or less.”

  A new page of results appeared on-screen. Among other things, it seemed, “Sun King” was a song by the Beatles, a brewery in Indianapolis, and a Chinese restaurant.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere!” Silas declared. “That Chinese place is in Stockton. That’s less than an hour from here. Let’s go!”

  “You’re just saying that because you’re hungry,” said DeMarco.

  “No, I’m not,” Silas said, pouting. He put his hands on his belly. “Although I did think I was going to eat a hot dog by now.”

  “Try ‘Sun King Solar Power,’ ” Tesla said to her uncle. (When it came to Silas and DeMarco, she was still in ignore mode.)

  “Wow. That’s a popular name,” Nick said when a fresh set of results popped up on-screen. “It looks like half a dozen companies are calling themselves ‘Sun King.’ ”

  “But only one’s a neighbor,” Uncle Newt said. He pointed at a line among the search results: it was a link to a list of tenants at an industrial office park. “Sun King Solar Solutions in Mountain View, California. That’s right down the road in Silicon Valley, where all the big tech companies have their headquarters.”

  “Can you look up their website?” Nick asked.

  “Absolumoe,” Uncle Newt said again, his fingers already flying across the keys. This time when the results came up, he blinked in surprise.

  “Huh. That’s weird,” he said.

  “What is?” said DeMarco. He and Silas peered at the screen. All they saw was just another list of links.

  “I don’t see anything,” said Silas.

  “That’s just it,” said Uncle Newt. “There’s nothing to see. All the links are for other companies with similar names. Sun King Solar Solutions doesn’t even have a website.”

  Nick and Tesla looked at each other. “A solar- power company in Silicon Valley that doesn’t have a website?” Nick said skeptically.

  “It’s bogus,” Tesla said firmly. “They’re definitely who we’re looking for. They must be.”

  Uncle Newt’s hairless cat Eureka jumped onto the dining room table, sauntered over to the laptop, and sat on the keyboard, sending Google on a search for “dfe234sqwadr.”

  “Well,” Uncle Newt said, moving his hands away from the cat’s firmly planted butt, “I don’t know if it’s really so sinister that Sun King Solar Solutions doesn’t have a website, but I suppose I should check it out.”

  “You should check it out?” Tesla said.

  “Oui. Drive down to Mountain View and take a look at their office.”

  “The ‘check it out’ part I understood,” said Tesla. “It was the ‘you’ part I was wondering about.”

  “You think I ought to call the police?” Uncle Newt asked. “What am I going to say? ‘My niece and nephew have a vague suspicion based on five minutes of surfing the Web. Could you send a patrol car to this address?’ ”

  Nick placed a hand on his uncle’s shoulder.

  “I don’t think Tesla was suggesting you send someone else,” he said. “I think she meant ‘Why can’t we check the place out?’ Plural.”

  “Ohhhh. You mean I should bring you guys along?”

  “Yeah!” the kids cheered.

  “No way,” Uncle Newt said quickly.

  The cheering stopped abruptly.

  “Why not?” DeMarco asked.

  “Because, I may be irresponsible, reckless, and imprudent,” Uncle Newt said. “But I’m not that irresponsible, reckless, and imprudent.”

  “Yes, you are!” said Silas. Nick and Tesla shot him a glare that said, “You’re not helping.”

  “Think about the summer we’ve had, Uncle Newt,” Tesla said. “In the past month, we’ve rescued a little girl from kidnappers,5 defeated an army of robot robbers,6 captured a ring of spies,7 and thwarted the sabotage of both a major museum8 and a big Hollywood movie.9 I think we can handle a visit to an office park.”10

  “Well …” said Uncle Newt.

  “And we’d stay out of the way till you were sure the place was safe,” Nick jumped in. “We could even come up with some kind of signal so you can tell us if the coast is clear. Of course, we’d have to assume that cell phones and Wi-Fi might be blocked or monitored, so it would have to be something that didn’t rely on any kind of broadcast signal.”

  Uncle Newt looked intrigued—just as Nick had hoped. “Hmmm,” he said. “That’s an interesting ch
allenge. If we can’t use radio waves, maybe we could use electromagnetic radiation within the visible spectrum instead.”

  “Radiation?” DeMarco said, alarmed.

  “I don’t want to be a mutant!” said Silas.

  Nick sighed. “Electromagnetic radiation within the visible spectrum is light,” Tesla explained.

  “Oh,” said DeMarco.

  “Why couldn’t he just say that?” said Silas.

  Tesla shrugged. “Cuz it sounds more sciencey the other way …?”

  “We’ve got tons of LEDs around the house,” Nick told his uncle. “Could we use those somehow?”

  “It’s getting pretty late,” Tesla added. “LEDs wouldn’t be much good as signals when the sun’s out, but once it’s dark …”

  Uncle Newt nodded thoughtfully. “Perhaps … yes … I like it …”

  “Maybe we could figure out some way to give them lift, too,” Nick suggested. “So they’d be visible from a distance.”

  Uncle Newt kept nodding. “Lift … yes … I love it.”

  He pushed back his chair and hopped to his feet so suddenly that Eureka yowled with fright and scrambled off the table.

  “Where’s he going?” Silas asked as Uncle Newt strode purposefully out of the room.

  “Where do you think?” Tesla said.

  She and Nick looked at each other and grinned. Then they hurried after their uncle, following him up the hall, through the kitchen, and down the stairs to the laboratory.

  NICK AND TESLA AND UNCLE NEWT’S

  PING-PONG BALL SIGNAL CANNON

  THE STUFF

  • Two sections of PVC pipe labeled 2½ inches, one 7 inches (18 cm) long and one 5 inches (13 cm) long (Note: Check that a ping-pong ball can fit in the pipe before you proceed!)

  • A PVC T-connector that fits the pipes

  • 8 balloons (the long, narrow, stretchy kind used to make balloon animals)

  • A few feet of nylon “p-cord” rope (available at hardware stores and hobby shops) or a long, thick shoelace

  • Ping-pong balls

  • Duct tape

  • LED bulbs of various colors, the brightest you can find

  • Several #2032 3-volt button batteries (you’ll need one to go with each LED you use)