Nick and Tesla's Robot Army Rampage

by Bob Pflugfelder

“Yeah. What is it, Sergeant?” said Tesla.

  They both leaned forward slightly, eager to hear the brilliant deduction that would blow Dobek’s “rock solid alibi” apart.

  “I never would have pegged Dobek for a reggae fan,” Sgt. Feiffer said. “Seems more like a classical music kind of guy.”

  Nick and Tesla slumped.

  “So … now you don’t have any suspects at all,” Tesla said.

  “That’s about the size of it. Hey … maybe I should get you kids to help me with the case. You’re a bunch of ace detectives, am I right?” Sgt. Feiffer laughed.

  “Ha,” said Tesla.

  “Ha ha,” said Nick.

  “Ha ha ha,” said DeMarco.

  Silas wiped more sweat from his face.

  “Anyhoo,” Sgt. Feiffer said, turning to DeMarco, “I’ve got a free minute. Want me to help you find those sunglasses?”

  “Sunglasses?” Silas said. “What sunglasses?”

  “My dad’s sunglasses … remember?” DeMarco said.

  He elbowed his friend so hard Silas lost his grip on the envelope.

  Half a second before it hit the sidewalk, Sgt. Feiffer’s cell phone began blasting “Jailhouse Rock.”

  “Excuse me. I have to take this,” Sgt. Feiffer said. He turned his back to the kids and put the phone to his ear. “Feiffer here. Go.”

  Silas took the opportunity to whip around and pick up the envelope.

  DeMarco took the opportunity to punch Silas on the arm.

  “Another one?” Sgt. Feiffer said into his phone, oblivious to what was going on behind him. “Unbelievable. Looks like we’ve got a crime wave on our hands. All right, I’m right around the corner from the Treasure Trove. Tell him I’ll be right there.”

  He hung up and turned around just in time to see Silas punching DeMarco back.

  “No need to fight over a quarter, guys,” Tesla said. “We’re splitting everything we find four ways, remember?”

  “Oh,” DeMarco said. “Right.”

  “What?” said Silas.

  DeMarco looked like he wanted to punch him again.

  Tesla looked like she wanted to join in.

  “Sorry, kids,” said Sgt. Feiffer. “Duty calls. There’s been another theft.”

  “My goodness,” said Tesla.

  “How shocking,” said Nick.

  “What is the world coming to?” said DeMarco.

  Silas was finally learning to keep his big mouth shut.

  “Good luck with the sunglasses,” Sgt. Feiffer said. “And don’t stay out too late looking for ’em. Half Moon Bay has a ten o’clock curfew for minors, you know. I’d hate to have to throw you kids in the clink!”

  Nick, Tesla, and DeMarco all ha ha ha-ed.

  Silas kept playing it safe and stayed silent.

  Sgt. Feiffer finally put his cart in gear and drove off at top speed—about six miles an hour.

  “Great,” Nick groaned. “Now he’s going to be after us instead of whoever stole the comic book.”

  “So what do we do?” asked DeMarco.

  “That’s obvious,” said Tesla. “We have to return the R2-D2 autograph to Dobek.”

  “But we’ll get in trouble!” said Nick.

  “Big trouble!” said DeMarco.

  “Huge trouble!” said Silas. “And then we’ll never get the comic book back and my dad will lose his store and I’ll end up freezing to death in a ditch because we’ll have sold all our clothes to buy old bologna and moldy bread at the grocery outlet after we’ve run out of—”

  “Silas! Geez! We can’t get caught returning the photo! I get it!” Tesla broke in. “That’s why we’re going to be—”

  Tesla caught herself, took a deep breath, and dropped her voice to a whisper.

  “That’s why we’re going to be sneaky.”

  The boys agreed. Sneaky—that was the way to get the photograph back into the Treasure Trove.

  Sneaky how, though? That was what none of them knew. And they didn’t have time to figure it out.

  If Silas and DeMarco were late for dinner, they might get in trouble. Maybe not big, huge trouble, but big enough. How can you break into an antiques store when you’re grounded?

  So it was agreed that the four of them would meet up after dark to plan their next move. Tesla insisted on keeping the autographed picture in the meantime. She wanted to test ways to get it into the store, she said. Which was probably mostly true. Nick had a hunch there was another reason, too.

  Not only was Silas the world’s worst secret-keeper, he was also forgetful. Let him hang onto the picture, and he’d either end up showing it to his dad or leaving it by the Slurpee machine at the 7-Eleven.

  So when Nick and Tesla came pedaling up to Uncle Newt’s house, the photo was tucked away in the place Tesla had decided would be the safest and most discreet: under Nick’s shirt.

  Nick was glad the ride home was almost over.

  Manila envelopes really chafe.

  “Hey,” Nick said as he and Tesla swooped up the driveway, “who does that belong to?”

  A red car was parked behind the Newtmobile.

  “I don’t know,” Tesla said, “but I like the name.”

  It was a model of electric car they’d read about before: the Tesla.

  “What if it’s Dobek?” Nick said as he and Tesla walked their bikes into the garage. “Or Anton What’s-His-Name?”

  “How would they know to come here?” Tesla asked.

  “Maybe Silas told someone.”

  “Oh, come on. We haven’t seen Silas in, what, eight minutes? Even he can keep his mouth shut that long.”

  Nick gave his sister a dubious look.

  “Right,” she said. “Hide the envelope behind the cat food.”

  When Nick and Tesla went inside, they found their uncle hanging next to the dining room table. This was nothing new: Uncle Newt preferred to eat “astronaut style” and had bolted straps to the ceiling so he could buckle himself in and simulate weightlessness.

  What was new was that he wasn’t alone.

  Hiroko Sakurai was hanging beside him.

  “Hi, guys!” she said with a smile.

  “Grab a bowl and help yourself to some Spaghettios!” said Uncle Newt. “I put out carrot sticks and bagels, too!”

  That made it one of the fanciest meals Uncle Newt had ever prepared.

  “Oh, boy,” Nick said with a feeble smile. “Bagels.”

  But he didn’t end up taking any, even though Uncle Newt had built a pyramid of them in the kitchen nearly a foot high.

  Eureka the cat was up on the counter methodically licking bagel after bagel, his bald butt surrounded by soggy-looking crumbs.

  Nick and Tesla sighed and served themselves Spaghettios and carrots.

  On the counter beside the carrots and bagels and cat butt were the Teslanator and Frank the robot.

  “We were just admiring your creations,” Dr. Sakurai said as Nick and Tesla seated themselves at the dining room table.

  “My robot looked a lot better before a bike ran over it,” Tesla said.

  “I’m sure it did,” said Dr. Sakurai. “Still, the motor wasn’t totally crushed. I could see the modifications you’d made with tape so it would vibrate. That was really clever. I used to build my own robots when I was your age, but they were mostly rubber bands and shoe boxes. Not nearly as sophisticated as yours.”

  Tesla brightened. “Thanks.”

  She took a bite of Spaghettios, and her expression soured again. She’d forgotten how much she disliked Spaghettios.

  “If it was your lifelong dream to build robots, why did you quit the Jet Propulsion Lab and move back here?” Nick asked.

  He shoveled a spoonful of Spaghettios into his mouth. He usually didn’t mind them at all, especially the kind with the little meatballs.

  “I guess I got tired of building robots for other people. And with other people,” Dr. Sakurai said. “Every one of my ideas had to be approved by a team, a supervisor, a manager, a direct
or. By the time the idea got to the very top, it would be distorted beyond all recognition, and the answer was usually ‘no.’ So many middlemen. So many rules. It was stifling.”

  As she spoke, Dr. Sakurai’s face hardened, her tone turned bitter.

  Then she caught herself and smiled again.

  “Fortunately,” she said, “I heard all kinds of stories about a brilliant scientist who left JPL and started making amazing breakthroughs in his own basement. I found that inspiring.”

  Dr. Sakurai looked over at Uncle Newt.

  He was blushing so much, it looked like he’d smeared Spaghettios sauce across his face. But he managed to meet Dr. Sakurai’s gaze, and for a long, silent moment the two of them just looked into each other’s eyes.

  A song echoed inside Nick’s head.

  Newt and Hiroko, sittin’ in a tree…

  He suddenly found that he’d lost his appetite for Spaghettios, too.

  Tesla grew so uncomfortable she scooched her chair back from the table and asked if anyone wanted another bagel.

  “No, thank you,” Dr. Sakurai said. “I should probably be getting back to the Wonder Hut. Duncan would keep working all night if I let him—he’d never leave!—but I prefer to close up myself.”

  She began unbuckling herself with surprising deftness, considering that (one had to assume) she’d never been strung up like a piñata before.

  “Duncan’s a lot nicer now that you own the store,” Nick said. “Not that he was ever mean. But he used to just kind of ignore us.”

  Dr. Sakurai swung down gracefully and planted her feet on the floor.

  “Duncan has worked in that store so long, I think his best friends are model trains and airplanes,” she said. “I’ve been encouraging him to take an interest in people.”

  “You seem to be good at that,” Tesla said with a meaningful look at her uncle.

  He didn’t notice. He just kept gazing worshipfully at Dr. Sakurai.

  “Well, good night,” Dr. Sakurai said. “I hope I’ll see you again soon.”

  “Oh, you will! You will!” Uncle Newt said. “But don’t go yet! Let me walk you to your car!”

  He was in such a hurry to unstrap himself he plummeted straight down and crashed face-first into the floor.

  Once Dr. Sakurai was sure he hadn’t broken his nose, she let him escort her outside.

  “I know Uncle Newt’s our family,” Tesla said. “And that he’s taking care of us.”

  “Sort of,” grumbled Nick, forlornly stirring his Spaghettios. They were room temperature now, and the sauce had started to congeal.

  “But I don’t get what Dr. Sakurai sees in him,” Tesla went on.

  “Brains,” said Nick.

  “Yeah. But look what they’re wrapped in.”

  The phone in the kitchen rang, and Nick hopped from his seat and ran to answer it.

  “It only shows the number. No name,” he said when he checked the caller I.D. “And I don’t recognize the area code!”

  He didn’t say “Maybe it’s Uzbekistan,” but the excitement in his voice did.

  “Hello? Oh.”

  Nick hung up and slunk back to the table.

  “It was a recording,” he said. “Apparently, there’s never been a better time to refinance our mortgage.”

  “Now that’s what real evil robots are like,” Tesla said. “They’re not trying to take over the world. They just make annoying phone calls at dinnertime.”

  Tesla took a loud bite from her biggest carrot stick, then picked up her bowl and headed for the kitchen.

  “Come on,” she said. “We’ve got work to do.”

  Nick turned in a circle, taking in every bit of bric-a-brac in their uncle’s cluttered basement lab.

  He and Tesla had been down there for half an hour, and they still hadn’t figured out a sneaky way to return the photograph Silas had stolen.

  Nick pointed at a plasma emission spectrometer. “Maybe we could—”

  “Already thought of it,” Tesla said, shaking her head. “Won’t work.”

  Nick pointed at a chassis dynamometer. “Maybe we could—”

  “Already thought of it. Won’t work.”

  Nick pointed at a tuba. “Maybe we could—”

  “Already thought of it. Won’t work.”

  “Fine! You come up something!”

  “All right. I will.”

  Tesla turned in a circle.

  She ended up pointing at a sledgehammer.

  “Maybe we could—”

  “Already thought of it,” Nick said. “Won’t work.”

  A little while later, Uncle Newt came downstairs to tinker with the newest model of his compost-powered vacuum cleaner. He couldn’t seem to stay focused, though. After just a couple minutes’ work, he started picking rotten black banana nubs out of the compost chamber and flicking them at the wall.

  “She loves me,” he said. “She loves me not. She loves me. She loves me not.”

  The slimy nubs stuck to the wall with a sickening little splitch splitch splitch.

  “Come on,” Tesla said to Nick. “It’s almost time for that PBS special about genome mapping.”

  “Oooo! Right!”

  Uncle Newt didn’t even seem to notice Nick and Tesla as they headed for the stairs.

  “She love me,” he said dreamily. “She loves me not.”

  Splitch splitch splitch…

  Not long after Nick and Tesla went upstairs, there was a gentle knock on the back door. It was pitch black outside, but they knew who it was.

  Nick opened the door, and Silas and DeMarco came in.

  “Where’s your uncle?” DeMarco asked.

  “The usual,” Tesla said.

  She nodded at the door to the basement.

  DeMarco eyed it nervously, as he always did. He may have been a daredevil at heart, but even a daredevil can get a little edgy around a door covered with signs reading HAZARDOUS, FLAMMABLE, POISON, HIGH VOLTAGE, DANGER.

  “Did you figure out how we’re gonna get the thingamajig back to Dobek without giving away who took it?” he said.

  Nick and Tesla shook their heads glumly.

  “That’s okay!” Silas said cheerfully. “I’ve got a plan!”

  He handed Tesla a piece of paper.

  Nick leaned over to review it with her.

  “Only we shouldn’t really use an eagle,” Silas said. “It’d be a lot easier to catch a pigeon. And that way we could just throw, like, an old sandwich instead of roadkill.”

  “Uhh,” said Nick, “so the envelope is tied to the bird’s beak …?”

  Silas nodded excitedly.

  “And it flies into the store after the food?”

  Silas nodded again.

  “And when the bird opens its mouth to eat the food …”

  “The string comes loose, the envelope drops to the floor, and we go find the real comic book thief!” Silas declared.

  Nick kept squinting skeptically at the drawing. “How can the eagle say ‘yum’ with its beak tied shut?”

  “Oh,” Silas said. “I guess he’s just mumbling it.”

  “And why do we look like midgets?”

  Silas shrugged. “That’s just how you look to me.”

  “I don’t think you’re asking the right questions,” DeMarco said to Nick.

  Nick sighed.

  The only “right question” he could think of was “Silas, are you nuts?” But he didn’t think he should ask it.

  Instead, he turned to his sister, about to say “Back to the drawing board.”

  To his surprise, though, she looked thrilled, not bewildered.

  “Silas,” she said, “you’re a genius again!”

  Silas beamed. “I am?”

  “He is?” said Nick and DeMarco.

  “Yes,” Tesla said firmly. “He is.”

  And she stretched out a finger and tapped two words on Silas’s blueprint:

  OPEN WINDOW

  “Really?” Nick said when his sister sketched o
ut her idea.

  Tesla nodded. “Really.”

  “Come on,” said DeMarco. “Really?”

  Tesla nodded even harder. “Yes. Really.”

  “But…really really?” said Nick.

  “Yes! Really really! I think it would work! Geez!”

  “I don’t know why you guys aren’t into it,” Silas said to Nick and DeMarco. He turned to grin at Tesla. “It sounds like a great idea to me.”

  Tesla started having second thoughts.

  A few hours later, Nick and Tesla were on Main Street looking up at the Treasure Trove.

  One of the windows was open, just as it had been that afternoon.

  It was midnight, and no one else was around—not even Silas and DeMarco.

  DeMarco had to be home by eight thirty, Silas by nine. Nick and Tesla, on the other hand, never had any set bedtime.

  “Just turn off the lights when you get tired,” Uncle Newt would say. “I’ll be down in the lab.”

  Tesla’s plan didn’t require four people anyway. Two could get the job done while having a better chance of getting away unseen. In fact, one person would probably be best of all, but neither Nick nor Tesla would let the other go alone.

  So there they both were on a dark, deserted street pulling what looked like a basketball made out of bread from Tesla’s backpack.

  At the center of the big ball—which was actually a dozen slightly cat-chewed bagels stuck together with glue—was the envelope Silas had taken from the Treasure Trove.

  A photograph would be too light and not aerodynamic enough to throw through a second-story window. But give it some weight and the right shape, and it should be as easy as shooting a free throw … or so Tesla thought.

  “You keep lookout,” Nick said, looking up at the open window. “I’ll throw the bagels.”

  “Why you?”

  “I’m better at basketball than you are.”

  “True.”

  Tesla turned toward Main Street, her gaze sweeping from north to south to north to south.

  Even if they weren’t caught with the stolen picture, they could get in trouble. They were breaking Half Moon Bay’s curfew for kids, for one thing. And they’d never been out so late before without an adult along. Who knew what went on after midnight, even in a quiet little town like Half Moon Bay? It was creepy to think about—so Tesla did her best not to think.