The Genius Files 2 Never Say Genius

by Dan Gutman

  One of the bowler dudes flipped a switch on the control panel, and heavy metal music filled the studio.

  “Ah, Megadeth,” Mrs. Higgins said. “My favorite slash metal band. And I can really relate to this album—Killing Is My Business … and Business Is Good.”

  The bowler dudes chuckled.

  “Good one, Mrs. H.,” they both said.

  “Stop saying that!” Mrs. Higgins scolded them. “It’s annoying.”

  “Yes, Mrs. H.”

  “You kids like loud rock music, don’t you?” she asked sweetly. “I’ll just turn this up a little.”

  She turned a dial on the control panel, and the music got louder. Both bowler dudes took earplugs out of their pockets and stuck them in their ears.

  “You’re smart kids,” Mrs. Higgins continued. “I’m sure you know that sound travels in waves through the air. You can’t see them, but you can feel the vibrations.”

  “We don’t need your boring science lesson,” Coke spat.

  “You’re right, Coke,” she agreed. “I don’t want to bore you. I want to kill you.”

  “Good one—”

  “Shut up!” Mrs. Higgins hollered at the bowler dude, causing him to stop talking instantly.

  “I told you we shouldn’t have come in here!” Pep said to her brother, tears running down her face. “You should listen to me for a change!”

  “Don’t bicker, kids,” Mrs. Higgins said. “It will all be over soon.”

  She turned the dial again, and the music got louder.

  “The human ear is a marvelous organ, isn’t it?” Mrs. Higgins said. “Sound waves enter the outer ear like a funnel, and they shoot through the ear canal to vibrate the eardrum.”

  “We don’t care what you have to say!” Pep yelled. But Mrs. Higgins kept right on going.

  “There are three tiny bones in your middle ear, and they intensify the vibrations and deliver them to the inner ear. That’s where the cochlea is. It looks like a little clamshell, and it’s filled with fluid. The sound waves make the fluid move. There are thousands of tiny hairlike cells in there that connect to the acoustic nerve, which sends electro-chemical signals to the brain. And that’s how you hear things. Isn’t that interesting?”

  “No!” Coke shouted over the music.

  “Oh, I’m terribly sorry,” Mrs. Higgins said. “I was boring you again, wasn’t I?”

  She turned the dial, and the volume went up some more. The music had became uncomfortably loud.

  “Turn it down,” Pep said, putting her hands over her ears.

  “Did you say turn it up?” asked Mrs. Higgins, giving the dial another twist. “Sure.”

  “No, I said turn it down!”

  “Can’t hear you,” shouted Mrs. Higgins. “It’s quite noisy in here.”

  “Turn it down!” Coke screamed.

  Mrs. Higgins turned the dial the other way, and the volume went down so low that the music could barely be heard. The twins took their hands off their ears.

  “But Coke,” Mrs. Higgins said, “I thought you liked your music loud.”

  “Not that loud,” he replied.

  “You know all about decibel levels, right?” Mrs.Higgins asked. “The sound of human breathing is about ten decibels.”

  She turned up the volume on the control panel slightly. Megadeth’s “The Skull Beneath the Skin” was playing.

  “Normal speech is sixty decibels.”

  She turned the volume up a little more.

  “A vacuum cleaner is eighty decibels.”

  She twisted the dial again and put on a set of noise-canceling headphones over her ears.

  “A motorcycle is a hundred and five.”

  Twist.

  The twins put their hands over their ears again. Pep was getting a headache. Mrs. Higgins leaned toward them, her eyes flashing.

  “Pain begins at a hundred twenty decibels,” she shouted over “The Skull Beneath the Skin.” “A jet taking off is a hundred forty. At one hundred fifty, your chest wall starts vibrating. At one hundred sixty, the thin membrane of your eardrum is shredded instantly. At one hundred eighty, your hearing tissue dies. The small bones in your ear snap, like twigs. And you know how glass will shatter at very high frequencies? Any sound louder than one hundred eighty decibels will literally make your heads explode!”

  “I love a happy ending!” yelled the clean-shaven bowler dude.

  “They’ve got some really powerful speakers in this studio,” hollered Mrs. Higgins over the music. “They can pump out more than two hundred decibels of sound. Of course, nobody would ever turn them up that high. It would be … dangerous.”

  “You’re crazy!” Pep yelled, holding her hands tightly over her ears. “Let us out!”

  “Get this on tape, boys,” Mrs. Higgins shouted. “I want to record the sound of their heads exploding, so I can play it over and over again to cheer me up when I’m in a bad mood. This is what they get for killing my boyfriend.”

  The mustachioed bowler dude pushed a button on the control panel. Mrs. Higgins cranked up the volume one more time.

  “Turn it off!” Coke begged. “Please, turn it off!”

  Instead of turning it off, Mrs. Higgins yanked the dial right out of the control panel. There would be no way to turn it left or right. The volume was locked into place.

  “I hate to be a party pooper, but we should go,” Mrs. Higgins said, getting up from her chair. “It’s way too noisy in here.”

  She went to the door and opened it with a key. The bowler dudes followed her out, pushing the kids away so they couldn’t do the same. Just before the door closed, Mrs. Higgins poked her head back inside for a moment.

  “To paraphrase the Who,” she said, “I hope you die before you get old.”

  The door closed with a sharp click.

  Coke and Pep looked at each other helplessly. Then they turned around and pounced on the control panel, turning every dial and flipping every switch in the hope that one of them would turn down the music.

  Nothing worked.

  Coke looked around. If he could destroy the speaker, the sound would stop. But the speaker was behind a thick metal screen.

  And then he got an idea. He reached into his backpack and pulled out his roll of duct tape. He handed it to Pep.

  “What do you want me to do with that?” she shouted over the music.

  “Wrap it around my head!” he shouted back. “Cover my ears!”

  She did what he said, pulling the tape around and around her brother’s head, trying to avoid covering his eyes. Then he took the roll of tape and did the same to her. They looked like a couple of mummies, but the sound reaching their ears was significantly reduced.

  Duct tape truly is the solution to just about any problem.

  “We gotta get out of this place,” Coke shouted to his sister, “if it’s the last thing we ever do!”

  “What?” Pep asked, unable to hear a thing.

  “Never mind,” Coke said, grabbing the electric guitar on the floor. He climbed up on the control panel and tapped the neck of the guitar against the glass ceiling of the studio.

  “What are you doing?” Pep screamed. “Don’t break the glass! We’ll get in trouble!”

  “What?” Coke asked. He hadn’t heard a word she said.

  He took the guitar again, and this time rammed the neck hard against a panel of the glass. It shattered, falling inside the studio and nearly hitting Coke on the way down. He rubbed the guitar against the remaining shards of glass to knock them out and make the opening a little larger.

  “Oh, and I suppose you’re going to climb up there and slide down outside of the pyramid,” Pep shouted. “You’re crazy!”

  “What?”

  “Forget it.”

  Coke put the guitar back in its stand and climbed up on the control panel again. Then he reached up and pulled himself through the hole he had made, grabbing onto the frame around the window. He was on top of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He reached his hand down
to help Pep climb up there with him.

  “I can’t do it!” she screamed, shaking her head.

  “Come on!”

  She stepped up on the control panel tentatively, reached up, and took her brother’s hand. He gripped it tightly and nodded his head to encourage her.

  “You can do this, Pep,” he said.

  “What?”

  He pulled her up and she held on for dear life. She managed to get her legs up on the window frame and squeeze through the opening. She was outside. She looked around to see the Cleveland skyline on one side and Lake Erie on the other. They were so high. The music was no longer blasting at their ears.

  “Okay, let’s go!” Coke said. “We’ll slide down together!”

  “No way.”

  “Come on,” Coke said, “just like we used to do it on the slide at the playground when we were little.”

  She crawled over his leg so she could sit in front of him, with his arms and legs wrapped around her.

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  “Hold on,” Coke replied. “Close your eyes.”

  She did, and he pushed off. They began to slide down the pyramid, slowly at first. When it seemed like they were picking up too much speed, Coke pressed the bottoms of his sneakers against the glass to slow them down. When he felt in control again, he eased up on the “brakes” and let them just slide.

  “Woo-hoo!” Coke hollered. “This is better than the roller coasters at Cedar Point!”

  When they were halfway down, Pep finally opened her eyes. Looking below, she could see her parents sitting on the bench where they had agreed to meet at five thirty. The twins were heading directly toward them.

  Down on the bench, Mrs. McDonald looked at her watch.

  “The kids are late,” she said.

  “We specifically told them to be here at five thirty,” said Dr. McDonald.

  “Kids,” they both muttered.

  Toward the bottom of the pyramid, Pep closed her eyes again.

  “We’re going to land on Mom and Dad!” she screamed.

  Luckily, they didn’t. They landed in some thick bushes right behind their parents. The bushes served to cushion the impact.

  “Ooooooooooof!”

  After hearing two thuds in the bushes behind them, Dr. and Mrs. McDonald turned around. Coke and Pep stood up and brushed themselves off.

  “When did you kids get here?” Dr. McDonald said. “We didn’t even see you come out the door.”

  “We didn’t,” Coke said honestly. “We slid down the outside.”

  “Very funny,” Mrs. McDonald said. “Why do you have duct tape wrapped around your heads?”

  “Huh?” Coke said. “Can’t hear you, Mom. I have duct tape wrapped around my head.”

  Mrs. McDonald carefully removed the duct tape from Coke, trying her best not to rip out his hair.

  “I asked you why you have duct tape wrapped around your head,” she said.

  “Oh, this,” Coke replied. “Remember Mrs. Higgins, the health teacher at school? Well, she locked us in a recording studio at the top of the Hall of Fame and played Megadeth at full blast. So we wrapped duct tape around our ears to reduce the noise level so our heads wouldn’t explode.”

  Dr. McDonald chuckled appreciatively.

  “Hahaha!” he said. “That’s a good one.”

  Behind their parents’ backs, Coke and Pep shook their heads. The McDonalds walked back to the RV in the parking lot. Coke checked his arms and legs to see if he had any scratches or bruises.

  “Tell me the truth,” Dr. McDonald said as they put their seat belts on. “What’s the deal with the duct tape?”

  “The truth?” Coke asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s the latest thing, Dad,” Coke explained. “Didn’t you read about it in the paper? You wrap duct tape around your head. It’s a fashion statement. All the kids are doing it.”

  “At least they didn’t get tattoos, dear,” said Mrs. McDonald.

  “Can we get out of here?” Pep asked. “I’ve had enough of duct tape and rock and roll for the day.”

  Chapter 14

  PRESERVING THE HOOVER LEGACY

  Dr. McDonald pulled out of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame parking lot and drove past the stadium where the Cleveland Indians play their home games.

  “I’m so disappointed,” Mrs. McDonald said as she thumbed through her Ohio guidebook.

  “What’s wrong, honey?”

  “The Goodyear World of Rubber Museum is closed,” she said sadly. “It would have been perfect for Amazing but True.”

  “What a shame,” Dr. McDonald said, rolling his eyes. “I’m so sorry.”

  On the inside, he was cheering. The last thing he wanted to do was visit a museum devoted to rubber. This would be one less ridiculous tourist attraction that he would have to endure.

  “But I was thinking that we could visit the Goodyear Airdock,” Mrs. McDonald said. “It’s in Akron, less than an hour south of here.”

  “Airdock? What’s that?” Dr. McDonald asked, suspiciously.

  “It’s a place where they used to build Goodyear blimps,” she told him. “It’s twenty-two stories high, and four football fields could fit inside at the same time. It says here it’s the largest building in the world that doesn’t have interior supports. It’s so big that sometimes it even rains inside!”

  “Wow,” Dr. McDonald said.

  He turned around to see the twins’ reaction. They just stared back, expressionless.

  “What do you think, kids?” he asked. “Would it be fun to visit the largest building in the world?”

  “Whatever.”

  The twins weren’t listening. Pep was feeling guilty about breaking the window at the top of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. If anybody found out who did it, they could get into serious trouble. And Coke was thinking about Mrs. Higgins. She had tried to kill them three, four, maybe five times now. Each time, they escaped. She must be really mad, and determined. What would she try next? When he tried not to think about it, the image of Archie Clone popped into his head. That lunatic was running around free somewhere, too.

  Cleveland is only about 370 miles from Washington. If they drove straight through the night, it would be possible to get there in seven hours. But everyone was tired and hungry.

  The closer they got to their final destination, the more nervous Coke and Pep became. Something evil was waiting for them there. They knew that much. They didn’t know what it was, or what it would do. But they knew it was out there, tracking their every move.

  Dr. McDonald pulled onto Interstate 71 heading south and got off at exit 226. It wasn’t long until they had reached Willow Lake Park, a campground in Brunswick, Ohio. It was a nice place, with horseshoe pits, miniature golf, and a basketball court. The family worked together to make a quick dinner, did a dump of the RV’s septic tank, threw a few horseshoes, and called it a day.

  “I have an announcement to make,” Dr. McDonald said over breakfast the next morning. “I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and I’ve decided on the subject for my next book.”

  “What is it, dear?” asked Mrs. McDonald as she leafed through her Ohio guidebook.

  “I’m going to write a biography,” Dr. McDonald replied, “of Herbert Hoover.”

  “You should write about one of the more famous presidents, Dad,” Coke said. “Like Washington, or Lincoln, or Kennedy. That would sell lots more books.”

  “Yeah, why him, Dad?” asked Pep. “Wasn’t Hoover the president who got us into the Depression?”

  “You see? That’s all anyone knows about Hoover,” Dr. McDonald said. “But he was a fascinating man. Did you know that he never took any money for being president of the United States? He donated his salary to charity.”

  “Is that so?” asked Mrs. McDonald, looking up from her book.

  “I’ll bet you didn’t know that President Hoover spoke Chinese,” Dr. McDonald continued, “and his vice president, Charles Curtis, wa
s part Native American.”

  “I actually knew that,” Coke said.

  “But did you know that Hoover was the first president to have a telephone on his desk? Did you know that his son had a pet alligator? I’ll bet you didn’t know that President Hoover wouldn’t let his wife see the White House servants. It’s true. Whenever she walked into a room, they had to go hide in a closet.”

  “President Hoover sounds like a weirdo, Dad,” Coke remarked.

  “Exactly!” Dr. McDonald said. “People love weirdos. They’ll want to know more about him.”

  “I think it’s a great idea, Dad,” Pep said enthusiastically. “I say go for it.”

  At that point, Mrs. McDonald let out a gasp.

  “I can’t believe it!” she exclaimed.

  “What?”

  Go to Google Maps (http://maps.google.com/).

  Click Get Directions.

  In the A box, type Brunswick OH.

  In the B box, type North Canton OH.

  Click Get Directions.

  “This is an amazing coincidence,” she said. “It says here that the Hoover Historical Center is in North Canton, Ohio. That’s less than an hour from here! And it’s even in the right direction.”

  “Let’s go!” Dr. McDonald shouted. Even the kids felt good about going to the Hoover Historical Center. Dr. McDonald had sacrificed so much on the trip for the rest of the family. They knew their father didn’t enjoy going to silly museums and tacky tourist sites. But he went along with the rest of the family and was always a good sport. The family hadn’t gone anywhere just for him since their short trip to the Bonneville Salt Flats, way back in Utah.

  Dr. McDonald drove back on Route 71 South and went seven miles. Then he cut across to Route 77 South to North Canton.

  Coke knew that the Pro Football Hall of Fame was right nearby, in Canton, Ohio. It would be much more fun for him to go there. But he was the only football fan in the family, and it would be so much more important for his dad to gather some information for his book on President Hoover. Besides, everybody goes to the Football Hall of Fame. How many people can say they’ve been to the Hoover Historical Center?