Nick and Tesla's High-Voltage Danger Lab

by Bob Pflugfelder

  Everyone ignored him.

  “Not that all the Landrigans are gone,” DeMarco said. He leaned forward over his handlebars, face solemn, eyebrows raised high. “Some say their spirits still roam the mansion, searching for their lost fortune. Maybe one has your rocket at this very moment.”

  Silas raised his hands and wriggled his fingers.

  “Woooooooooo!” he said.

  “Ghost stories are stupid,” Tesla said.

  Silas dropped his hands.

  “Well, you’re no fun,” he said.

  DeMarco started peddling his bike, doing a slow circle in the cul-de-sac.

  “Come on,” he said to Silas. “Let’s go.”

  Silas started peddling, too, and a moment later the two boys were zipping off up the street.

  “Bye!” Nick called after them. “See you later!”

  “Bye,” said Silas.

  DeMarco gave a lazy one-handed wave, but he didn’t look back or say anything.

  “They seem all right,” Nick said. “Maybe you shouldn’t have called them stupid.”

  “I didn’t say they were stupid. I said ghost stories are stupid.” Tesla jutted out her chin. “And I am fun.”

  “Oh, yeah. I’m having the time of my life.”

  Tesla scowled at her brother.

  “You want excitement?” she said. “I’ll show you excitement.”

  She turned to face the Rottweilers that were still watching them from the other side of the gate, occasionally licking their big black chops.

  “I’ll be back,” she said to them.

  Then she pivoted on her heel and began striding up the street.

  “Wait,” Nick called after her. “Who said I wanted excitement? We were talking about fun.”

  Tesla didn’t slow down.

  Nick sighed, then hurried off after her.

  Tesla banged on the bathroom airlock.

  “Uncle Newt! I need to talk to you! Uncle Newt!”

  Tesla paused in her pounding and brought her ear close to the metal door.

  Nick leaned in beside her. He could hear running water and muffled, echo-y singing.

  “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas every place you stroll,” Uncle Newt was warbling. “There’s a dee in the da-da-da, a bee in the ba-ba-ba, and a something in the lee-lee la-la-laaaaaa!”

  “I don’t think he’s coming out of there till it is Christmas,” Nick said.

  “Fine. We’ll take care of ourselves,” Tesla declared. “What we need is a distraction.”

  “You mean like TV?”

  “Not for us,” Tesla snapped. “For the dogs.”

  “Oh. So we’re really going back?”

  “You think I’m going to just give up the pendant Mom and Dad gave me?”

  Nick pondered that a moment.

  “The best distraction for a dog,” he said, “would probably be food. Maybe we could use some from Uncle Newt’s fridge somehow.”

  “You’ve looked in Uncle Newt’s refrigerator. Do you think there’s anything in there even a dog would eat?”

  Nick thought back to the four-month-old chocolate milk and the withered brown fruit so decayed it was impossible to tell if it had been oranges or apples.

  “No,” he said. “I guess not.”

  Tesla turned and started toward the stairs.

  “Where are you going?” Nick asked.

  “If we want a distraction, we’re going to have to build one ourselves. And Uncle Newt did tell us we could ‘go nuts’ with his stuff. ‘My laboratory is your laboratory,’ remember?”

  “Ahhh,” Nick said.

  He followed his sister down the steps.

  When they got to the bottom of the staircase, they turned and headed toward their uncle’s lab.

  Their lab.

  “Hey,” Nick said as he and his sister poked through the scientific bric-a-brac (and just plain junk) in the basement, “maybe we could use Uncle Newt’s spray-on clothes to give those dogs new orange muzzles.”

  “Nah,” Tesla said. She picked up an opened roll of mints off a worktable, glanced at it, then put it back. “They might suffocate.”

  “Oh. Well. I guess that would be sad,” Nick said. “Kind of.”

  He was still mad at the guard dogs for almost giving him a heart attack.

  Something on the floor in the corner caught Tesla’s eye. She crouched down, reached a hand into the shadows and pulled out another half-empty soda bottle.

  “Oh, man,” Nick said. “If we’d found that before, we could’ve used it to carry the water, and your hair wouldn’t smell like rancid cheese now.”

  Tesla shot her brother such a scowl he actually took a step back and bumped into something that had crept up behind him. He yelped in surprise.

  Uncle Newt’s bald cat darted around his ankles and ran up to Tesla. It must have followed them down the stairs.

  “Now there’s the perfect distraction for a couple dogs,” Nick said.

  He was grateful for a distraction himself—for his sister. As she scratched the cat’s hairless head, she seemed to forget she should be mad at him. In fact, she looked up at him and grinned as if he’d just said something brilliant.

  He thought back over his words—then opened his eyes wide and shook his finger at his sister.

  “No way, Tez! We are not doing that to Uncle Newt’s cat!”

  Tesla gave the cat one last scratch, then stood up.

  “Of course we’re not,” she said.

  She picked up the mints again and started for the stairs.

  “We’re going to make our own cat,” she said.

  NICK AND TESLA’S

  MINTS-AND-SODA-FUELED ROBOCAT DOG DISTRACTOR

  THE STUFF:

  • 1 2-liter bottle of diet cola

  • 1 package of Mentos candies

  • A paper clip

  • A wire coat hanger

  • A glue gun

  • Scissors

  • Paper

  • A soup can

  • 3 ballpoint pens

  • Thick cardboard

  • Wire cutters

  • Pliers

  • A nail

  • A drill

  • A pushpin

  • A binder clip

  • A responsible adult (to help with the drill and glue gun)

  THE SETUP

  1. Use the pliers to pull the writing points and ink cartridges from two of the pens.

  2. Use the nail to poke a hole through the other end of the pens. (If the ends are capped, you can simply remove the caps.)

  3. Use the wire cutters to cut two straight pieces of coat hanger about 2 inches (5 cm) longer than the pens.

  4. Put the soup can on the cardboard and trace four wheels. Use the scissors to cut out the wheels.

  5. To find the exact center of each wheel, use the soup can to trace another circle on the piece of paper. Cut out the circle and fold it in half and then into quarters. When you unfold the paper circle, the creases will intersect in the middle. Place the paper circle over each cardboard circle and use the third pen—the one you haven’t taken apart—to poke through the center.

  6. Using the pliers, bend one end of each coat hanger about ¾ inch (2 cm) from the end, forming a right angle.

  7. Slide one of the wheels onto each wire and hot-glue the wheel in place. Make sure the wheels line up nicely with the wire, and be sure the glue doesn’t get on the pen.

  8. Slide each wire through each of the empty pens and bend the non-wheel end of the wire.

  9. Slide on another wheel and glue the wire to the wheel as in step 7, making sure the wheels line up. Once dry, the wheels should spin freely inside the pen.

  10. Hot-glue the pens onto the top and bottom of the soda bottle. Use plenty of glue to make sure they’re secure, and check that the wheels line up correctly.

  11. Have the responsible adult drill a ¼-inch (0.65-cm) hole in the middle of the soda cap.

  12. Use the pushpin to carefully poke
a hole through the middle of five Mentos candies, one at a time.

  13. Straighten out the paper clip except for a small bend at one end. Poke the paper clip through each of the Mentos.

  14. Place the cap on top of the Mentos by feeding the paper clip through the hole.

  15. Use the binder clip to keep the paper clip from dropping through the cap.

  THE FINAL STEPS

  1. Determine a travel route and clear any obstacles out of the way. The rocket can travel up to 30 feet (9 m)—and once it starts, there’s no turning back!

  2. Go to your testing location outside and securely screw the cap onto the bottle. Be sure the Mentos do not get soda on them. You may need to pour out some of the soda.

  3. Remove the binder clip, allowing the Mentos to drop into the soda.

  4. Quickly tilt the rocket car onto its wheels.

  5. Stand back! When the mints are submerged in the soda, they produce plenty of extra carbon dioxide. This exploding gas is what turns a plastic bottle into a whizzing rocket car.

  Nick won the coin toss. Which meant he’d lost, really. But he couldn’t complain. There wouldn’t have been a coin toss at all if he hadn’t insisted on one.

  “Okay,” Tesla said grimly. “You’ll go over the fence, and I’ll distract the dogs.”

  She’d wanted to climb the fence and get the pendant back herself, but Nick had insisted they flip for it. After all, it was their rocket and the pendant had been a gift—maybe an important one, somehow—from their parents. And Nick had been the one who’d nudged the pump and sent the rocket flying. So why should Tesla automatically take the big risk?

  Nick could think of a good answer for that question, actually: because he wouldn’t have nudged the pump in the first place if his sister hadn’t gotten too close to the launcher. But it was too late now. He had to go and be all noble. Idiot.

  “You sure you really want to do this?” Tesla asked.

  “Absolutely,” Nick lied.

  Tesla looked dubious, but she didn’t call him on it.

  They were crouched down in the field by the Old Landrigan Place, and they both turned toward the fence and looked for the guard dogs. The animals were nowhere in sight.

  “Probably off sharpening their fangs,” Nick said. It would have gone over better as a manly, laugh-in-the-face-of-danger joke if his voice hadn’t been quavering so badly.

  “Well, don’t worry about that,” Tesla said. “Remember, we brought something for them to sink their fangs into.”

  She picked up RoboCat. She and Nick had added a crude cardboard head and paws to the soda bottle to make it look more catty. Now that the glue and paint were dry (as well as Tesla’s hair, which she’d been forced to wash in the sink because her uncle was still hogging the bathroom), it was ready. But were they?

  “I’ll make noise till I’ve got the dogs’ attention,” she said. “Then I’ll let RoboCat go. Once they take off after it, I’ll whistle. That’ll be your signal to climb the fence and find the rocket and the pendant. They should be right on the other side of that rose bush over there. You’ll probably have plenty of time.”

  It bothered Nick that she didn’t say “You will have plenty of time,” but he tried not to let his distress show.

  He gave his sister what he hoped was a jaunty salute.

  She stood and started toward the gate to the estate’s private drive. As she got close, Nick began moving toward the fence in a creeping crouch. He had to be ready to act fast when the moment came. But if the guard dogs spotted him too early, it was all over. They’d be so obsessed with the nice, juicy, delicious-looking kid that they’d never stop barking and drooling long enough to notice RoboCat. So Nick stayed low.

  About ten yards from the fence, he froze. One of the dogs had come padding around the house. The tongue that hung from the side of its mouth was so big and floppy it looked like a fat pink necktie.

  The dog scanned the horizon, looking for something to kill.

  “Yoo hoo!” Nick heard Tesla call out. “Defenseless child here! Come and get it!”

  The dog started barking, and instantly its twin came flying around the house to join it. Together, they charged off toward the gate.

  Tesla whistled, though it must have been obvious she didn’t have to. A plan’s a plan. You stick to it.

  Nick ran to the fence and started climbing. When he reached the top, he paused to see if he’d been spotted.

  The dogs were moving away from him, tearing up the looping driveway in pursuit of a brown shape zipping along low to the ground, a geyser of foam shooting out behind it.

  RoboCat was working! For maybe another six seconds, anyway. As soon as the dogs caught it—and they were gaining fast—it was history.

  Nick swung himself over the fence, climbed down a few feet, and then dropped the rest of the way. The second he had his feet on the ground, he turned and scurried around the rose bush and…

  …started calling himself names.

  “Ooo, you moron! You dummy!”

  Nick had been so concerned about the dogs, he hadn’t asked a key question.

  What if the rocket and pendant aren’t there?

  They weren’t.

  Off in the distance, Nick could hear the dogs snarling and snapping. It sounded as though they were fighting each other, which would make sense if they’d just caught something worth fighting over.

  RoboCat was toast. If Nick didn’t move fast, then he would be, too.

  He looked all around the rose bush and the lawn, but there was no sign of the rocket or the pendant. He did catch a glimpse of his sister, though. She was still standing by the gate, watching him with an expression that was equal parts anger and horror. She flapped her hands toward the fence frantically, motioning for him to GO, GO, GO! But Nick could still hear the dogs fighting over the scraps of poor RoboCat somewhere around the corner of the house, and he decided he wasn’t going to leave just yet. Why give himself a heart attack and have nothing to show for it?

  He turned and skulked off, keeping close to the fence and the trees that loomed up over it. The dogs had come from the back of the house. Maybe that’s where they’d taken the rocket. If Nick was lucky, he’d find it there. And if he was very lucky, the pendant would still be attached instead of making its way through a Rottweiler’s intestinal tract.

  When Nick could see around the house into the backyard, he finally appreciated just how rich the Landrigans (whoever they were) had been. They didn’t just have a huge house all for themselves. They had another large one for all their cars in the form of a two-story garage at the end of the driveway.

  A dog barked and Nick went still, his skin tingling. But the bark was muffled and distant. And it was more high-pitched than the Rottweilers’ deep, guttural rowff! Nick couldn’t be sure, but it sounded like it was coming from inside the garage.

  He took a step toward the backyard and then froze again. He wasn’t a believer in ESP—there was no scientific proof of it, his parents always pointed out—yet he was suddenly struck by a feeling so strong, it was almost like a voice speaking to him out of nowhere.

  You’re being watched, it said.

  Nick looked to the left, to the right, and then finally up—and there she was.

  A young girl in a nightgown was gazing down at him from a second-floor window. She had pale skin and long black hair and circles under dark, sunken eyes that bored into him with an intensity that made him shiver. It was a look of both infinite sadness and panic, as if the girl had been waiting and watching for Nick forever but, now that he was finally there, found him horrifying.

  Nick gave the girl a hesitant little wave. You don’t want to be rude when a ghost’s staring at you.

  The girl ducked away from the window. A moment later, she returned clutching a large notepad. She scribbled on it quickly, then held the pad up to the glass to show what she’d written.

  GO AWAY!!!

  !!!

  Nick was still blinking up at the girl’s message when
he realized the Rottweilers were barking again—and the barking was getting louder. As in, closer. As was another sound.

  Nick turned and saw a white van passing through the gate and starting up the driveway, the barking dogs running alongside. A ladder was secured to the top of the van, and Nick could see words printed on the side in big black letters: SIRINGO BROS. HOME RENOVATORS.

  Instead of heading to the front of the house, the van was coming around the back. Toward Nick.

  The dogs would see him any second.

  , indeed.

  Nick whirled around and sprinted for the fence. He’d just gotten his hands on it when he heard the dogs’ barks change, shifting in an instant from a yapping greeting/warning to a feral “You’re dead!” snarl.

  They’d spotted him, and Nick climbed accordingly. Fast and frightened.

  Just as he got one leg over the top, he felt a hard jerk on the other, and he nearly lost his balance.

  Nick looked down and saw one hundred twenty pounds of slobbering dog attached by the teeth to the bottom of his jeans.

  Before he could even scream, something else grabbed his hand.

  Nick fell.

  Onto his sister, fortunately. Not that it was so fortunate for her.

  When Tesla jerked her brother out of the dog’s jaws, he rolled over the top of the fence and crashed down on top of her, laying her out flat on her back on the hard, dry ground.

  “Oof!” said Tesla and Nick.

  “Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!” said the Rottweilers. Not in English, of course. They just pressed their big black snouts up close to the fence and kept barking furiously.

  “Jaws! Claws!” a man called out. “What ya got over there?”

  “Hide,” Tesla whispered.

  Nick was already scrambling behind a tree trunk.

  Tesla flipped over and crawled behind the next tree over.

  “Quiet!” the man roared.

  The dogs went from barking to whimpering.

  “I don’t see anything,” another man said. “Probably just a squirrel.”

  “Yeah,” the first man said. He sounded like the jerk who’d threatened to call the cops on them. “Maybe.”