Chapter 1
“Has anyone seen Tesla’s head?” Hiroko asked.
Nick Holt turned and stared at her in surprise.
“It’s not here?” he asked Hiroko. “Uncle Newt had it just a minute ago.”
Nick’s uncle Newt was hunched over Tesla’s hands, which lay palms up on the portable work bench in front of him.
“I did?” he said.
“Yeah. You had it tucked under your arm when you went to get a soda.” It was Tesla Holt, Nick’s twin sister, who answered this time. She said the words with her mouth, which was on her face, which was on her head. Which was attached to her neck.
Her arms still had hands on them, too.
Which meant it was the
other Tesla in the room who was missing hands and a head. The animatronic Tesla, made to look like famous inventor Nikola Tesla. Of course, lacking his head and hands, he didn’t look much like Nikola Tesla at the moment.
“Uh-oh,” said Nick, whose full name was Nikola Copernicus Holt.
He and his twin sister, Tesla, each shared part of Nikola Tesla’s name thanks to a family tradition handed down to their father, Albert Einstein Holt, from his father, Thomas Edison Holt.
“Why
uh-oh?” asked Uncle Newt, a.k.a. Newton Galileo Holt.
Nick and Tesla didn’t answer their uncle’s question. They were already bolting for the nearest exit. They had a pretty good idea where animatronic Nikola Tesla’s head had ended up—and why it would be a
really good idea to retrieve it as soon as possible.
“Do you realize,” Nick gasped to his sister as the two of them dashed toward the far end of the Hall of Science, “that we weren’t even supposed to be here today?” They passed Marie Curie sitting behind the wheel of one of the field hospital X-ray trucks she created to help wounded soldiers during World War I. “Uncle Newt and Hiroko finished their work two days ago.”
Which was true. Their uncle and his kinda-sorta girlfriend Hiroko Sakurai were both robotics experts, and they’d been hired to save the exhibition after delays and malfunctions resulted in the firing of the original designer. The day before yesterday it seemed as though the job was all wrapped up.
“Well,” Tesla said to her brother, “who did you expect the museum director to call this morning when she found out that Nikola Tesla’s head was loose?” The pair slowed a bit to loop around René Descartes, who was lying in bed looking up at the fly that would inspire him to create the Cartesian coordinate system. “Plus, Charles Darwin had fallen over and crushed that flock of blue-footed boobies.” She meant models of blue-footed boobies . . . blue-footed boobies being a species of seabird native to the South Pacific. “I mean, tonight’s the museum’s grand reopening!” Nick and Tesla skidded into a right turn past Percy Spencer, who was staring in wonderment at a glob of gooey chocolate, the first in the world to be melted by microwaves.
These were animatronic versions of famous scientists—mannequins, basically, that were silent and motionless at the moment. But this very night they would move and speak thanks to computer-controlled mechanisms built inside them. Because tonight was the grand reopening of the Northern California Museum of Science, Industry, and Technology, which had been christened with a brand-new name: The X-Treme Learnasium. And the museum’s centerpiece would be the Hall of Genius, where visitors could see and hear lifelike animatronic recreations of history’s greatest thinkers.
Assuming the machines actually worked.
Copyright © 2024 by Science Bob Pflugfelder and Steve Hockensmith. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
