I ran toward it as fast as I could, letting my shoulder crash into it. “Oooof!” But I just bounced back. The door didn’t budge.
“Maybe I can kick the door down,” I said. “I’ve seen that in movies.” I took a few steps back and ran toward the door and kicked as hard as I could, but I just bounced back again, and now my shoulder and my foot hurt.
“Maybe I—”
“Enough!” Professor Reese said. “Let’s use our noggins. And I don’t mean headbutting the door.”
So I walked over to the shelves in the middle of the room. “What’s all this stuff?”
“Scientific apparatus from the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. This is where I store the equipment I’m not using in the displays upstairs.”
There were all kinds of crazy equipment with little parts bolted together: small glass domes, big glass beakers, disks with tiny arrows and Volts stamped across the front, small cranks and big cranks, pulleys and pipes and thick glass lenses. Everything looked like it could have been in Frankenstein’s laboratory or maybe a pirate ship.
On the bottom shelf was a big jumble of coiled wire and old rubber tubing and a funny-looking microscope. “Is that a spectrometer?” I asked.
Professor Reese beamed. “It is! I’m so pleased you recognized it!”
“We can’t use it somehow to get out of here, can we?”
She shook her head. “Unfortunately, no.”
I walked around behind the shelves. Back in the corner of the room, sitting on a wheelie cart, was a big metal ball with a hand crank attached to it. “Hey! There’s one of those TJ zappers, just like the one in the Physics Lab!”
“A Van de Graaff generator, yes,” Professor Reese said. “Sometimes when we have a large school group, we bring it upstairs and split the group into two teams. Then we have a competition to see which team can crank the fastest to generate the most electricity.”
“Oh, cool!” I said. “But that can’t get us out of here, either, right?”
Professor Reese shook her head. “I don’t see how.”
I walked around the room, looking at things up close and far away, from the right and from the left. But no matter how many angles I looked at everything from—even if I stood on my head—I couldn’t think of any way out of that room.
I went over to the door, sat down, and leaned against it. “I have one more granola bar. Do you want it?”
Professor Reese came and sat down next to me. “I think we’d better save it for later . . .” She didn’t say any more, but she didn’t have to. I knew what she was thinking:
All we could do was wait—and hope that TJ and Baxter found us.
26Cranking the TJ Zapper
Me and Professor Reese sat, leaning against the door, waiting and hoping for TJ and Baxter.
Then we sat some more and hoped for TJ and Baxter even harder. “What do we do if they can’t find us?” I asked.
“Don’t say that,” Professor Reese answered. “They will.”
I didn’t think it would be possible to get sleepy, but after a while my head kept konking over until finally I rested it on Professor Reese’s shoulder and let myself drift off . . .
A tap-tap-tap on the other side of the door jolted me awake. “Jordie?” I heard TJ say.
Baxter whined.
“TJ! Baxter!” Professor Reese cried. “You found us!”
“Yeah, you were right, Jordie,” TJ said. “Baxter’s microchip did start humming louder and louder. Once we got near the river, he was able to follow the humming all the way here!”
“Good boy, Baxter!” I said.
Baxter woofed.
“But how did you get into the building?” Professor Reese asked. “Did someone let you in?”
“6-5-4-3-2-1 blast off!” TJ answered. “I remembered the code number for the employee door. I don’t think anyone’s here yet. It’s still early.”
“Good work,” Professor Reese said. “Unlock the padlock and get us out of here!”
“OK!” But then a second later, TJ added, “This is a weird lock.”
“It’s an electronic padlock,” Professor Reese said. “I couldn’t resist. I set the combination myself: 9-22-1791.” She turned to me. “Michael Faraday’s birthday.”
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“A British physicist. One of the pioneers of electromagnetism.”
“OK, hang on a sec. . . .” TJ said.
Baxter stuck his nose down at the small crack beneath the door. He sniffed and sniffed, so I stuck my finger through the little gap so he could sniff it better. He whined. He missed us.
“The lock doesn’t work,” TJ said.
Professor Reese frowned. “It’s powered by a battery. The buttons should light up blue when you punch the numbers in.”
“Nothing is lighting up.”
“The battery must be dead.” Professor Reese sighed. “You’ll have to wait until the museum opens, and then bring someone down to let us out, TJ.”
“But how will you explain how we got in here? The door is locked from the outside!” I said. “If you tell people about the teleporter, it won’t be a secret anymore.”
“True,” she said. “But we have to get out of here.”
“Wait a minute.” I stood up. “You always say when you get new information, it’s good to see how it fits into what you already know, right?”
“True. But what new information do we have?”
“We still have a locked door, only now TJ and Baxter are on the other side of it,” I said. “So things aren’t the same anymore.”
“Good point.” Professor Reese nodded. “Let’s think about this.” She closed her eyes for a minute. Then she opened them. “If the padlock battery is dead, there’s a way to recharge it enough to unlock the lock.”
“Good!” TJ said. “How?”
“Do you see the little handle at the bottom of the lock? Pull down on that.”
“Hang on. . . .” TJ said. “OK, it’s open.”
“That’s a battery jump slot,” Professor Reese told him. “We can insert a fresh battery into the slot to power the padlock.”
“Good!” TJ said. “Do you have a fresh battery? You can slide it under the door.”
I looked around. “Maybe. There’s a lot of stuff in here.”
So me and Professor Reese looked all over the shelves, from the top to the bottom.
