“But why do you have to keep it a secret?” I asked. “If anyone doesn’t believe you, you can just show them.”
Professor Reese walked over to the map and touched the pins lightly. “There’s still a big problem: the hat doesn’t land where I think it will.”
“So what?” I asked.
She turned to me. “The first thing the scientific community is going to demand is a demonstration. Then they’ll ask why the landing site doesn’t match the coordinates I put into the computer, and how it is that Baxter finds it so easily when I can’t. I don’t want to give a demonstration until I can answer those questions. I don’t want to tell the world about T-waves until I have a better understanding of how they work.”
“OK.” I noodled Baxter’s ears and stared at the pins on the map. “That makes sense. You want to figure it out first.”
“Yes,” Professor Reese said. “And so far I haven’t had any luck.”
“Well, we can help you,” TJ said.
“Right,” I added, “because Dad always says three heads are better than one.” (Which I guess is true even if one of the heads is TJ’s.) “So, let’s teleport that hat again, and we can all try to figure it out together.” I nodded, and when I looked over at Baxter, he was nodding, too—so actually that meant four heads.
“All right,” Professor Reese said. “Come take a look.”
She walked over and lifted the top of what used to be a tanning bed. “I invented the teleporter by studying, of all things, a microwave oven repair manual.” She smiled. “I replaced the tanning lightbulbs so that when I bring the lid down, whatever is inside the teleporter is surrounded by metal rods.
“Electricity travels from the wall socket to this high-voltage transformer.” She pointed to a little metal box at one end of the teleporter. “It increases the house voltage to over twenty times its normal strength.”
“Wow!” TJ said.
“This powerful voltage activates the magnetron tube.” She pointed to a different metal box. “It converts the high voltage into electromagnetic T-wave energy. The T-waves bounce around inside the teleporter as they hit up against the metal rods—”
“So whatever’s inside the teleporter—” TJ broke in.
“Gets surrounded by T-waves and teleported,” Professor Reese concluded.
“Huh.” I peered in to get a better look. “Those two little boxes do all that?”
“Easy as pie. Though I do expect to get a whopping electric bill this month . . .” She shrugged. “Oh well.” She turned on power to the teleporter, the console, and all three computers. “Want to see it in action?”
I started feeling nervous, because, even though I hadn’t known what I was looking at at the time, I’d already seen it in action: vibrating, popping, and screaming. I said yes anyway. TJ just nodded, because he didn’t know any better.
Professor Reese pulled up a map of latitude-longitude lines for Portland on one of her “auxiliary” computers. “Where should we send the hat?”
I pointed to a spot a few blocks from her house.
“All right. First we need to see what the GPS coordinates are for that spot.” She moved her mouse and double-clicked. The coordinates appeared in a small box at the bottom of the screen.
She walked over to her main computer (the head of the octopus) and pulled up a new screen. “Let me just log in—” She typed in a secret password (that just looked like a row of asterisks to me). Another screen appeared that said Destination Coordinates over a little box that already had numbers in it.
“Those are the old coordinates from last time,” Professor Reese said. She hit the delete key, and the box went blank. “All right. Read me the new numbers, TJ.”
TJ leaned toward the auxiliary computer screen and read out, “45.534101, –122.697802,” and Professor Reese typed them in and pressed enter.
The numbers almost matched the little slips of paper already on the map, I noticed. “Do they always start with 45 and –122?”
“For Portland, Oregon—yes.” Professor Reese explained that there were 90 degrees latitude above the equator and 90 degrees below. For longitude, there were 180 degrees east or west of an imaginary line called the prime meridian, which ran from the North Pole to the South through Europe, Africa, and the Atlantic Ocean. For locations west of the prime meridian, the number was expressed as a negative.
“That’s why you need so many numbers after the decimal point,” she explained, “to pinpoint exact locations.”
She nodded to TJ. “Let’s get this party started.” She walked over to the console and pushed the big red button.
All three computers and the electronic equipment and the teleporter started quietly buzzing, like we were standing under a tree that had a beehive way up in its branches. “Would you like to put the hat in the teleporter, TJ?” she asked.
“Yeah!” He picked up the hat from the bookcase, placed it on the metal rods, and then closed the lid with a loud click.
The teleporter lit up, the light glowing red through the red plastic cover. TJ jumped back.
Suddenly, the buzzing got louder, like now we’d climbed up the tree and were standing in the middle of the beehive.
“Right now, the teleporter is scanning the hat to identify its molecular pattern.” Professor Reese raised her voice above the buzz.
“Once the scan is complete,” she continued, “it sends this information to the auxiliary computer.”
At that moment, one of the smaller computers started blinking and whirring. And maybe the half of Baxter that belonged to Professor Reese the physicist wasn’t scared, but my half was, so he tucked his tail between his legs and went to hide on his bed under the desk.
“The auxiliary computer stores the information,” Professor Reese said. “This will be the instructions for putting the object back together.”
“Back together?” TJ said.
“Once
