by Bill Nye
The old lady was standing in the doorway to her apartment on the second floor, stirring something in a small metal pot. I hurried past her, taking the last flight of the worn wooden stairs three at a time. More clouds of dust and mold rose up as I jumped down onto the carpet at the bottom, and when I burst out onto the sidewalk, I sneezed three more times.
The man was already at the corner.
He was checking his phone, still wearing his ridiculous mask. Was this really a time to text?
I started running. Halfway down the block, Matt and Ava called out from behind me. The man looked up from his phone and broke right. Rounding the corner, I took the turn wide, in case he planned to ambush me, but he was already at the end of the block. I dodged two skinny bearded guys walking toward me with their heads down and earbuds inserted. Clones of the first pair followed, and I squeezed between them just as a large black SUV pulled to a stop at the curb. The man in the purple mask opened the door to the back seat. He ripped off the lab coat and threw it to the sidewalk. I was only twenty feet away. No one stood between us, and for some reason, I yelled, “Stop!”
And he stopped.
This part I hadn’t really planned. Slowly, he turned around to face me. The purple mask covered most of his face, but I was certain he was smiling. He held out his left hand, pointed at me with his index finger, and said, “Jack, right?” I was mute. How did he know my name? “You are Jack, aren’t you?”
“No,” I said. “I’m Ava.”
He snickered. My nerves eased. Annoying other people relaxes me.
“I’ve got a message for your friend Hank,” he said.
Matt and Ava caught up and stood on either side of me. “You do?” I asked.
“Yeah,” the man said. “If you hear from him, you tell him he can’t keep his secret for long. I’ll do whatever I have to do to get that drive from him.”
“You already wrecked his lab,” Matt said.
“And knocked some absolutely amazing and totally harmless drones out of the sky!” Ava added.
The man glared at us under the lid of his baseball cap. “Those toys are the least of your problems. If I don’t find Hank soon, I’ll be back for you three.” He stared at each of us in turn, then rested his narrow gaze on me. “And next time we’ll see if all of you can fly.”
2
AN ELECTRIC IDEA
Right. Let me back up. I’m Jack, the charming, daring, and mildly handsome one. I definitely can’t fly. I’m pale as a paper towel. My hair is thick and blond. I should have blue eyes, but for some reason they’re brown. Sometimes I like to wear bow ties, and if I’m amazing at something, I still haven’t found it. But in my search, I’ve eliminated quite a few athletic endeavors. Basketball and surfing, for example. As for my brains, well, let’s just say that in a normal class full of kids my age I might be considered one of the smarter ones. Maybe. But I’m not part of a normal classroom. And I don’t hang out with too many kids my age.
Most of the time I’m with my brother and sister. Matt’s the oldest. Sometimes he acts like that gives him authority over Ava and me, but we pretty much ignore him when he gets that way. Ava and I are only six months apart. She’s taller than I am at this point, but don’t tell her I admitted that. Also, the three of us aren’t related, exactly, and we look nothing alike. Ava has dark skin and she wears her hair pulled back in a fierce ponytail. Matt has thick, dark hair and a perma-tan. He’s tall, too, and his shoulders get wider every week even though he doesn’t exercise. Supposedly, Ava was born in Haiti, but Matt and I don’t really know where our ancestors originated. Hank would say this doesn’t matter at all anyway, because genetically we all trace back to the same people. In one way, we’re all from Africa. Or if you want to go back even farther, we’re all from the same batch of simple organisms drifting around in the prehistoric soup.
Anyway, the real difference between us doesn’t have anything to do with height or color or hairstyle. Hank, Ava, Matt—they’re all brilliant. Ava speaks something like eleven languages now. Maybe twelve. As I mentioned earlier, she can build anything. And Matt can pretty much rattle off the entire history of the universe if you ask him, starting with the big bang and rolling forward to the birth of Earth. He’s in college. Ava’s in high school. She could probably be finished by now, but she says she doesn’t want to rush.
Me? I just finished sixth grade.
Kind of depressing, right?
How we ended up together is kind of a long story, so I’ll cut it down to the main points. About two years ago, the three of us ended up in the same foster home. There’s still some debate about who actually hatched the plan—I vote for me—but at one point, we decided to divorce our foster parents. My brother buried himself in a law school library long enough to master all the relevant legal details, and we convinced a judge to let us live on our own. We’re not rich, but we make enough money from our bestselling book of poetry, The Lonely Orphans, to support ourselves. And once we began working with Hank—another long story—we started traveling so much that it just didn’t make sense to go to a normal school. So now I take my classes online. Sure, I wonder sometimes if it would be better to be in a regular school with regular kids. But regular kids don’t get to travel to the South Pole or to private Hawaiian islands. Regular kids don’t work in ridiculously cool secret laboratories stocked with wild and weird inventions. And regular kids don’t chase masked men out of those secret labs and around city blocks, either. And I kind of like the excitement.
All around us, the neighborhood was still waking up. Trucks and taxis and cars of all shapes and sizes were rolling in both directions, but no one was slamming on their horns yet. A bearded man and a blond woman were leaning against a brick wall outside the bodega across the street, eating popsicles. For a second I thought the man was watching us. Or maybe I just wanted his popsicle. The month of August had just jumped up on us, and the heat was pretty horrifying. Luckily, the garbage bags piled along the sidewalks hadn’t started to stink yet, and a bagel shop down the block was kicking out some heavenly scents. Smell-wise, this wasn’t a bad time of day.
The three of us stood there for a moment and watched the car cruise away. Across the street, part of the way down the block, a police cruiser pulled out from behind a stopped station wagon. That must have been the source of the sirens we’d heard earlier—the cop was probably giving the driver a ticket for speeding. I stepped off the curb, hoping to signal the cruiser, but it turned right, away from the SUV.
“What now?” I asked. “Should we actually call the police?”
“Hank doesn’t want anyone in his lab,” Ava pointed out. “Not even the police.”
We started back toward the lab. Hank’s street was quieter, and for a while, no one spoke. I could almost hear their brains working.
“How did he break in?” Ava wondered aloud.
There were two ways into and out of Hank’s laboratory. The elevator in the deli across the street was my favorite. The door was hidden in a supply closet in the back, and only Hank and the three of us had the code to operate it. Why did I like that one best? Mostly because Hank had set up a charge account for us, so we could grab a bag of chips or an energy drink on our way in or out, and we didn’t even have to pay. But my sister preferred the Dumpster, which rolled away at the press of a button to reveal a hidden set of stairs. That’s the way we first snuck into Hank’s laboratory a year earlier.
“What about the deli?” Matt suggested.
“He wouldn’t know the code,” Ava noted. “The Dumpster?”
“No way he could’ve figured that out,” Matt said.
I shrugged. “We figured it out, didn’t we?”
“That was mostly me,” Matt reminded us.
Ava started to reply, then stopped herself and hurried ahead. Back inside the lab, the puddle was growing. Ava rushed off to open the drains in the tank to prevent the whole room from being flooded.
“What now?” I asked.
“Clues,” Matt s
aid. “Look around for anything that might tell us who this guy is, and why he was here.”
The tank began emptying, and Ava returned.
“He had pretty sweet high-tops,” I said.
Staring at the ceiling, Ava started tapping her foot. “And that weird purple mask,” she said. “Plus he’s gullible enough to believe we developed an invisibility cloak.”
“Plenty of smart people could’ve fallen for that,” I said. “What was he looking for? What’s this drive he was talking about?”
“The thumb drive?” my brother asked.
“Right,” I said. I was picturing a little robotic thumb that could jump off your hand and drive around. Maybe it would have a camera. Or it could go into a bathroom ahead of you to see if the air stinks from one of your brother’s recent battles.
“It’s basically a memory stick,” Matt said.
That didn’t help much.
“It’s a little disk about the size of your thumb,” Ava said. “You can store files, photos, documents. Anything you’d store on a computer, really.”
“And Hank uses one?”
My sister nodded. “I don’t know why, but he started storing all his work on this one little drive and carrying it with him everywhere.”
“Is that why he started wearing the fanny pack?” I asked.
Lately, the few times we’d seen him, Hank had been wearing a small pack with a belt that clipped around his waist. We were always trying to convince him to ditch it, because he looked like a tourist. He refused.
“No,” Ava said. “The thumb drive can fit in your pocket. I still don’t know why he wears that fanny pack.” She slumped down and sat on the rubber track that looped around the room. Then she leaned back against the self-driving car. “I don’t get it,” she said. “What was Hank working on? What was so important that someone would break into the lab?”
Our mentor was always busy. He traveled at least a few times a month to faraway cities and countries for meetings and conferences. Normally, he’d check in with us to ask what we were working on and whether we needed anything—or to find out if I’d accidentally set off an explosion that turned the lab into rubble. He’d tell Matt and Ava about his latest projects, too. He seemed to enjoy sharing his ideas with them. But lately he’d been different. Quiet. Secretive. Instead of traveling for a few days, he’d be gone for weeks. Sure, we survived. We were used to being on our own. But this was different, and I don’t think any of us really liked it. No one said it quite this way, exactly, but we felt abandoned.
“Maybe it was some kind of military project,” Matt suggested. “A new weapon or something.”
Ava shook her head. “No. Hank says the world has enough weapons.”
“Aliens?” I suggested.
“What?”
They were staring at me like I was an alien. “Yeah, I mean you guys were doing all that satellite work, and Hank’s always talking about intelligent life on other worlds. Maybe he finally made contact and he’s been teleporting to some far-off planet and learning about their culture and getting ready to introduce them to Earth.” I wanted to call them Zorbakians. And I wanted them to be green and one eyed, with tiny little hands the size of donut holes. Ideally, they’d make little high-pitched noises when they tried to communicate, and they’d be amazing but funny dancers. The kind of dancers you can laugh and point at without hurting their feelings.
“Are you really asking if he discovered aliens?” Matt asked.
“Stop,” Ava said. “We’re getting off track.”
As she said it, she stood and stepped off the track. I laughed and pointed. She closed her eyes and shook her head, and then we started back up the Matts to the biosphere. Along the way, my brother pointed out that the intruder didn’t do anything to the other stations. Each one was untouched. Yet the biosphere was ruined. Inside, the pump that kept the artificial river moving had stopped working. As Matt reached in to get it operating again, a small eel writhed near the surface. I reached forward to pet the weird, slimy little dude.
At the last second, Ava grabbed my wrist. “Careful,” she said, “that’s electric.”
“Maybe that’s why he was holding his shoulder,” Matt guessed. “Do you think he got shocked?”
“If he was stupid enough to pet an electric eel,” Ava said.
That stung a little. Matt glanced at me, but she didn’t see the connection. I moved on. “Why this room?” I asked. “Why the biosphere?”
“It’s basically a model rainforest,” Matt explained.
“People are always looking for new medicines down in the rainforest,” Ava said. “Maybe Hank found something.”
A door slammed below us. Matt grabbed my shoulder as a woman called out in a familiar voice, “Hello? Hank?”
All three of us hurried out of the room and looked down. “Min,” Ava said. “What’s she doing here?”
At one point, Min was kind of our handler, appointed by Social Services to look after us and make sure we really were capable of taking care of ourselves. Or that was her job a while ago, anyway. Then we went missing out in the Hawaiian Islands, and she flew out to help Hank track us down, and pretty soon after that she wasn’t working for Social Services anymore. Now I’m not sure what she does, but she still checks in on us, and she spends a suspicious percentage of her time with Hank. But we’d never actually seen Min in the lab. I didn’t even know she knew how to get inside.
Ava hurried to see her first. Matt adjusted something else on the pump, and the river started flowing again. After another glance at the wriggling eel, I followed him down.
Min pushed her glasses up on top of her head. “What happened?” she asked.
“Someone broke in.”
“Are you okay? Were any of you hurt?”
My head still ached a little. “I kind of—”
“We’re fine,” Ava answered.
Then we told her everything. She nodded along as she listened.
“Have you heard from Hank?” Ava asked.
“Not for three weeks. I came here to look for him.”
“Do you know where he’s been?”
“No.”
“Did you notice anything different about him?” Matt asked.
“Besides how weird he’s been acting,” Ava added.
“Like I said, I haven’t heard from him for three weeks. He hasn’t replied to any of my calls or e-mails. That’s very unusual.”
“Anything else?” I asked.
Min thought for a moment. “Archery,” she said.
“You mean like bows and arrows?”
She nodded. “Yes. We went to an archery range together. He was very impressive.”
Ava snapped her fingers. “I just thought of one more thing. He might have taken up smoking.”
“Smoking? No,” Min insisted. “That’s impossible. Why would you think that?”
Ava rushed off to the bathroom, then returned with a book of matches. “Then how do you explain these?” she asked.
Nobody knows everything. That’s impossible. But sometimes it feels like my siblings do know everything, so when one of them suddenly reveals a tiny gap in their knowledge of the universe, I’m thrilled. Delighted. Ecstatic, to borrow one of Hank’s favorite words. So when I realized Ava didn’t know why there were matches in the bathroom, I laughed. And so did Min.
“What?” Matt asked. “I don’t get it.”
This was getting even better. “The matches are for odors . . . you know? In the bathroom?”
The longest and most wonderful three seconds of my short life followed before they understood. During that stretched-out instant, I was the smart one, the one who knew that something in the smoke from a recently lit match floats up into your nose and overpowers the scent of whatever disaster the previous person dropped into the bowl, smothering those stink particles. I knew that. They didn’t.
For three seconds, anyway.
“Oh,” Matt said.
“Oh!” Ava added.
&nbs
p; “Let me see those,” Min requested. Ava tossed her the matchbook. She studied the cover. “Saudade? I don’t know this restaurant. Has he taken you there?”
“No,” I answered.
Ava was typing on her phone. She waited, then turned her head slightly as the results of her search popped up. “It’s not in New York. It’s not even in this country.” She turned the phone and showed us the screen. “The restaurant is in Brazil.”
Immediately Matt glanced up at the biosphere. “That matches up with his interest in the rainforest,” he said. “Brazil is home to the biggest section of the Amazon rainforest, one of the most diverse and unique ecosystems in the world. I heard once that a new species is discovered every three days in the Amazon. That’s where most electric eels live, too. They’re much bigger than the little one upstairs.”
Ava tapped her screen. “The restaurant is in Manaus,” she added. “A city known as the gateway to the Amazon.”
“So Hank’s in Brazil?” I asked.
No one answered at first.
“Maybe,” Matt concluded.
“Why?” Ava asked. “What’s he working on?”
“Whatever it is, it’s big enough for someone to break in here,” Matt said.
“And almost kill me,” I reminded them.
“What?!” Min asked.
Ava rolled her eyes. “He would have been fine.”
Min was checking me over. I decided to tell her all about it later. At least she might offer a little sympathy.
“Maybe we missed something upstairs,” Matt said.
He started back up, and he wasn’t even to the second landing when it struck me. “The eel!”
All three of them responded with some variation of “Huh?”
Okay. A quick little rewind here. A lot of ideas flow through Hank’s laboratory. Hank himself is responsible for most of them, of course. But my siblings are crazy productive, too. Most recently, Ava and Matt had designed their own CubeSat—a miniature satellite about the size of a toaster. They named the device Cheryl, and it had some amazing capabilities. Cheryl could take photos, send and receive data, and more. Launching her into space wasn’t easy, but Hank had made plans to send up a pair of satellites of his own. One of them failed, so I kind of sent a few notes to the rocket company from his e-mail account and convinced them to launch Cheryl instead.