Following Baxter

by Barbara Kerley

  But I held still as it inched across my stomach. I didn’t even breathe.

  “Jordie?” he yelled again.

  Down my legs, over my knees, down my shins—I held still. My left foot started to itch, but it hadn’t been scanned yet. I didn’t scratch.

  “Jordie!” TJ yelled.

  Baxter woofed.

  Finally, the warm beam slid past the end of my feet. “I’m OK!” I yelled back. And then the whirring started as the teleporter sent the instructions to the auxiliary computer.

  About this time, I knew that Baxter was going to hide under a desk.

  The whirring got louder, and I knew the other auxiliary computer was commencing T-wave generation—right . . . about . . . now!

  The teleporter shuddered.

  The vibrating started, and it felt jittery, like Rollerblading on a rough road. “I-I-I-I’m-m-m-m Oh-ho-ho-ho K-ay-ay-ay-ay!”

  The vibrating got stronger, and the red light got redder, and the buzzing got buzzier, and the teleporter started rattling . . .

  . . . and rattling . . .

  . . . and rattling—

  “JORDIE!”

  . . . but I couldn’t answer, couldn’t talk anymore, couldn’t breathe anymore, but who needed to breathe when you were floating and floating and floating into a million pieces of nothing and nothing and nothing . . .

  . . . and maybe I heard the POP, but I wasn’t sure because suddenly everything around me was light and windy and swirling and whooshing, and I was whooshing and whooshing . . .

  . . . and maybe I felt myself drop down, and maybe I thought, The bounce . . .

  . . . but then I was flying back up into the whoosh and the swirl, and then down I dropped . . .

  Wham!

  I felt myself pull into myself, tightening and tightening until I could feel my arms and legs and the hardness of something hard beneath me, and it took a second to remember to breathe.

  And then I gasped and coughed and heard a small cry of surprise, and it was Professor Reese.

  “Jordie!”

  I tried to open my eyes and sit up, but I was woozy and wobbly like everything was still whooshing. “Uhhhh . . .” I groaned, and thought, This must be why Spike lay in the bottom of the hat with his feet sticking up in the air for so long.

  “Lie still,” Professor Reese said. “You’ll feel better in a minute.”

  So I lay back down and closed my eyes again. “Where are we?”

  “The science museum,” Professor Reese said.

  The spinning began to slow. I opened my eyes. Professor Reese was sitting on the floor next to me, her clothes wrinkled and her hair a mess, looking small and pale.

  “Are you OK?” I said.

  “Better. I’m better.” She smiled weakly. “And I’m remarkably happy to see you. But, Jordie, you shouldn’t have come. Teleporting is far too dangerous.”

  “I had to find you!” I said. “No one else would even know how to look!”

  Professor Reese nodded. “That’s true.”

  I sat up slowly and looked to see if everything was attached in the right places. Both arms had elbows and wrists and all ten fingers. My knees pointed in the right direction. I could wiggle my toes. It felt like the reconfiguration instructions worked.

  Professor Reese looked attached in all the right places, too, just small and tired.

  “I brought a first aid kit,” I said. I looked around and saw it on the floor, the water bottle standing beside it.

  “Thankfully, I’m not injured.”

  “And I brought water and something for you to eat.” I pulled a granola bar out of my back pocket, but when she reached for it, her hand was shaking so badly, I unwrapped it for her.

  “Thank you, Jordie. I was so happy to get the apples you sent, but that was many hours ago. . . .” She bit into the granola bar, closed her eyes, and chewed.

  While Professor Reese ate, I looked around the little room—the concrete floor, the work sink, and in the center of the room, a huge set of shelves filled with dusty old equipment. There was a door on one wall, but all I could hear outside the room was a steady, loud whirring sound. “What is this place?”

  “The storage room in the basement where I keep extra equipment. I was aiming for my office, of course, but those darn landing sites . . .”

  “Oh. You bounced down here.”

  “What?”

  So I explained all about the starburst pattern of pins on the map and discovering the bounce and how Baxter being King of the Bounce helped him find the landing sites, and Professor Reese kept saying, “Goodness!” and “Oh my!” and once, “Jordie! You figured all this out yourself?” and then, “I knew there was a reason I chose you as my lab assistant!”

  I tried to imagine what it would be like to be stuck in this room for three whole days. There was an overhead light but no window, so you’d just have to sit there on the hard concrete floor and try to sleep when you could. You’d be hungry, and you’d probably have to pee in the sink (that’s what I would do, because who could hold it that long?). It would be lonely and a little bit scary the first few hours, I guessed, but mostly you’d just think and think, probably about how you wished you hadn’t teleported yourself without first telling your lab assistants where you were going.

  “Does anyone ever come in here?” I asked.

  “Not very often, I would imagine,” Professor Reese said. “I haven’t heard anyone go by since I got here.” She pulled the cell phone we’d teleported out of her pocket. “I tried calling out on this, but it doesn’t work—though I do appreciate your sending it, dear.”

  “I think it got messed up in the teleporter.”

  She nodded. “Sorry about that.” She took another bite of granola bar. “The first few hours in here, I tried yelling for help, but that whirring sound outside is the ventilation system for the whole building. No one heard me. And after a while, I started feeling weak.”

  “Well, I’m not tired. Maybe I can get us out,” I said. “And hopefully TJ and Baxter will be here soon to help.”

  “Oh?”

  “They’re coming on foot because we figured it out.”

  I explained all about the microchip humming and Baxter’s ears and TJ recognizing the microchip number matching the latitude, and she kept saying “Oh my!” again, and her smile got bigger and bigger.

  When I finished, she said, “Amazing!”

  “I know! Cool, right?!”

  “Very.”

  “OK, so let’s get out of here.” I went over and checked the door, but even though the doorknob turned, the door only budged a tiny bit.

  “Unfortunately, it’s padlocked from the outside.” Professor Reese finished the granola bar. “I put the padlock on myself, a couple of years ago.”

  I looked around the room. There wasn’t a window, and no one could hear us yell. That just left the door—padlocked from the outside.

  “Maybe I can break down the door, somehow?”

  I took a few steps back.

  “Be careful, Jordie!” Professor Reese said.

  I ran toward it as fast as I could, letting my shoulder crash into it. “Oooof!” But I just bounced back. The door didn’t budge.

  “Maybe I can kick the door down,” I said. “I’ve seen that in movies.” I took a few steps back and ran toward the door and kicked as hard as I could, but I just bounced back again, and now my shoulder and my foot hurt.

  “Maybe I—”

  “Enough!” Professor Reese said. “Let’s use our noggins. And I don’t mean headbutting the door.”

  So I walked over to the shelves in the middle of the room. “What’s all this stuff?”

  “Scientific apparatus from the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. This is where I store the equipment I’m not using in the displays upstairs.”

  There were all kinds of crazy equipment with little parts bolted together: small glass domes, big glass beakers, disks with tiny arrows and Volts stamped across the front, small cranks
and big cranks, pulleys and pipes and thick glass lenses. Everything looked like it could have been in Frankenstein’s laboratory or maybe a pirate ship.

  On the bottom shelf was a big jumble of coiled wire and old rubber tubing and a funny-looking microscope. “Is that a spectrometer?” I asked.

  Professor Reese beamed. “It is! I’m so pleased you recognized it!”

  “We can’t use it somehow to get out of here, can we?”

  She shook her head. “Unfortunately, no.”

  I walked around behind the shelves. Back in the corner of the room, sitting on a wheelie cart, was a big metal ball with a hand crank attached to it. “Hey! There’s one of those TJ zappers, just like the one in the Physics Lab!”

  “A Van de Graaff generator, yes,” Professor Reese said. “Sometimes when we have a large school group, we bring it upstairs and split the group into two teams. Then we have a competition to see which team can crank the fastest to generate the most electricity.”

  “Oh, cool!” I said. “But that can’t get us out of here, either, right?”

  Professor Reese shook her head. “I don’t see how.”

  I walked around the room, looking at things up close and far away, from the right and from the left. But no matter how many angles I looked at everything from—even if I stood on my head—I couldn’t think of any way out of that room.

  I went over to the door, sat down, and leaned against it. “I have one more granola bar. Do you want it?”

  Professor Reese came and sat down next to me. “I think we’d better save it for later . . .” She didn’t say any more, but she didn’t have to. I knew what she was thinking:

  All we could do was wait—and hope that TJ and Baxter found us.

  26

  Cranking the TJ Zapper

  Me and Professor Reese sat, leaning against the door, waiting and hoping for TJ and Baxter.

  Then we sat some more and hoped for TJ and Baxter even harder. “What do we do if they can’t find us?” I asked.

  “Don’t say that,” Professor Reese answered. “They will.”

  I didn’t think it would be possible to get sleepy, but after a while my head kept konking over until finally I rested it on Professor Reese’s shoulder and let myself drift off . . .

  A tap-tap-tap on the other side of the door jolted me awake. “Jordie?” I heard TJ say.

  Baxter whined.

  “TJ! Baxter!” Professor Reese cried. “You found us!”

  “Yeah, you were right, Jordie,” TJ said. “Baxter’s microchip did start humming louder and louder. Once we got near the river, he was able to follow the humming all the way here!”

  “Good boy, Baxter!” I said.

  Baxter woofed.

  “But how did you get into the building?” Professor Reese asked. “Did someone let you in?”

  “6-5-4-3-2-1 blast off!” TJ answered. “I remembered the code number for the employee door. I don’t think anyone’s here yet. It’s still early.”

  “Good work,” Professor Reese said. “Unlock the padlock and get us out of here!”

  “OK!” But then a second later, TJ added, “This is a weird lock.”

  “It’s an electronic padlock,” Professor Reese said. “I couldn’t resist. I set the combination myself: 9-22-1791.” She turned to me. “Michael Faraday’s birthday.”

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “A British physicist. One of the pioneers of electromagnetism.”

  “OK, hang on a sec. . . .” TJ said.

  Baxter stuck his nose down at the small crack beneath the door. He sniffed and sniffed, so I stuck my finger through the little gap so he could sniff it better. He whined. He missed us.

  “The lock doesn’t work,” TJ said.

  Professor Reese frowned. “It’s powered by a battery. The buttons should light up blue when you punch the numbers in.”

  “Nothing is lighting up.”

  “The battery must be dead.” Professor Reese sighed. “You’ll have to wait until the museum opens, and then bring someone down to let us out, TJ.”

  “But how will you explain how we got in here? The door is locked from the outside!” I said. “If you tell people about the teleporter, it won’t be a secret anymore.”

  “True,” she said. “But we have to get out of here.”

  “Wait a minute.” I stood up. “You always say when you get new information, it’s good to see how it fits into what you already know, right?”

  “True. But what new information do we have?”

  “We still have a locked door, only now TJ and Baxter are on the other side of it,” I said. “So things aren’t the same anymore.”

  “Good point.” Professor Reese nodded. “Let’s think about this.” She closed her eyes for a minute. Then she opened them. “If the padlock battery is dead, there’s a way to recharge it enough to unlock the lock.”

  “Good!” TJ said. “How?”

  “Do you see the little handle at the bottom of the lock? Pull down on that.”

  “Hang on. . . .” TJ said. “OK, it’s open.”

  “That’s a battery jump slot,” Professor Reese told him. “We can insert a fresh battery into the slot to power the padlock.”

  “Good!” TJ said. “Do you have a fresh battery? You can slide it under the door.”

  I looked around. “Maybe. There’s a lot of stuff in here.”

  So me and Professor Reese looked all over the shelves, from the top to the bottom. But the shelves were filled with old equipment, and none of it used a battery.

  Professor Reese’s shoulders slumped. “No luck, TJ. I guess we’ll just have to wait until the museum opens.”

  She sat down on the floor, leaned against the wall, and closed her eyes.

  But I wasn’t ready to sit yet. I walked back and forth across the room and thought, Since science got us stuck in here, maybe science can get us out. “It seems like with all these domes and beakers and cranks and pulleys and pipes, there should be something we can do.”

  From the other side of the door, Baxter whined.

  “What is a battery, anyway?” I asked Professor Reese, because I realized just then that I didn’t really know.

  “A battery converts stored chemical energy into electrical energy,” she said.

  Baxter whined louder.

  “OK, so a battery gives off electricity. That makes sense.” I looked at the shelves. “Can’t we make a battery with all of this equipment? Or the TJ zapper?”

  Baxter woofed!

  Professor Reese’s eyes flew open. “The Van de Graaff generator! Jordie, I have never been more proud of you than I am at this moment! And never more grateful to have you as my lab assistant. You and TJ both!” She stood up. “We don’t need to make a battery—I think we might be able to generate enough electrical energy to unlock the padlock!” She hurried around the big shelves to the back corner of the room. “Come help me, dear!”

  She took hold of one end of the cart, and I took hold of the other.

  “What’s going on?” TJ asked.

  “I think we’re going to use the TJ zapper to make electricity!” I said as we wheeled it over to the door.

  “There’s a zapper in there?” TJ asked.

  While I told him about all the stuff on the shelves, Professor Reese untangled a long piece of rubber tubing and a small coil of wire from the bottom shelf. She slid one end of the wire all the way through the tubing until it stuck out the other end. “The wire will carry the charge, and the tubing will work as insulation.”

  She fed the rubber-covered wire under the door. “Pull that toward you, TJ. You’ll need about five feet in order to reach up to the lock.” She turned to me. “Wrap the other end of the wire around the big ball, Jordie. Since your end isn’t covered in rubber, it will conduct the charge.”

  At first, I was scared to touch the ball. But then I remembered that the zapping didn’t start until you turned the crank. “OK!” I wrapped the wire around and around until the ball look
ed a little bit like a globe covered in latitude lines.

  “Put the tip of the wire into the battery slot, TJ,” Professor Reese said. “I’ll hold the tubing still.” She turned to me. “Jordie, start cranking!”

  So I cranked and cranked and then cranked some more.

  “It’s working!” TJ cried. “The lights on the padlock are lighting up!”

  “Punch in the combination, quick!” I yelled. “My arms are getting tired!”

  “9-22-1791!” Professor Reese added.

  I cranked and cranked until I thought my arms were about to fall off, with Baxter woofing to cheer me on.

  Just when I thought I couldn’t crank anymore, TJ yelled, “It worked!”

  The door opened, and Baxter rushed in. I let go of the crank and let him crash into me. “You found us, Baxter! Good boy!” I nodded extra hard.

  Baxter nodded back.

  Both halves of Baxter wiggled crazy happy to see Professor Reese and crazy happy to see me. Professor Reese patted him, while I gave him a big hug. Sure enough, the microchip had stopped humming. Baxter had gotten where he needed to go.

  “Let’s get out of here!” TJ said.

  So we closed the door (but this time we were on the other side of it) and put the padlock back on.

  “There’s an elevator over here,” Professor Reese said. She walked so slowly that I unwrapped the other granola bar and handed it to her, and we just kept moving forward at half-starved-physicist speed until we were into the elevator. I pushed the button for the ground floor.

  The elevator door opened up into the Turbine Hall. Outside, the sun was already up, and joggers were starting to pass by.

  I knew we wouldn’t be able to walk all the way home—Professor Reese was too weak. “Do you think you can make it to the streetcar platform?” I asked as we crossed the hall and left through the employee entrance.

  Professor Reese nodded and gripped my arm. TJ and Baxter led the way.

  We waited at the far end of the streetcar platform, which would be the last car of the streetcar, farthest from the driver. And when the streetcar got there, we just sort of slipped on with the other passengers. Technically, there was a sign that said All Dogs Must Be in Carriers, but untechnically, Baxter was better behaved than some of the people on the streetcar (seriously, I swear) and besides, a carrier big enough to fit Baxter would have had to be the size of a car, practically, and then we just could have driven. Nobody seemed to mind him being there, anyway, and most people even liked it.