CHAPTER 2
The robot was about a foot tall, with a boxy body and arms and legs that looked like little silver girders. On top of its cylindrical head was a tiny chef’s hat, and it wore an apron with ranalli’s italian kitchen printed across it. One of its arms was raised, and spinning atop its metallic hand was a thin white disk.
The robot was twirling pizza dough.
“It just turned itself on,” Nick said. “Like it noticed we were here.”
“Motion sensor, maybe,” said Uncle Newt.
“Cool,” said Tesla.
She and her brother both liked robots. Yet despite all the gadgets they’d created together—and they loved creating gadgets—they’d never built their own robot.
Maybe it was time to do something about that.
“Uncle Newt,” Tesla said, “can we go to the Wonder Hut?”
“Oh! Yeah! Can we?” Nick chimed in. “We’re already downtown and we’ve got time to kill. Please!”
Uncle Newt turned away from the robot slowly, eyes wide.
“You know,” he said dreamily, “I was about to suggest going there myself.”
Nick and Tesla high-fived each other.
While most of the businesses on Main Street catered to the tourists zipping through town on the Pacific Coast Highway, the Wonder Hut was purely for locals. Eccentric ones, with a lot of time on their hands. Its musty, jumbled shelves were packed with model kits, toy soldiers, rockets, chemistry sets, electric trains, circuits, wires, and a long wall of radio-controlled cars, helicopters, planes, boats, and submarines. The place was cramped and dark and smelled like mildew and an old man’s armpits, but that didn’t matter. For kids like Nick and Tesla (and grown-ups like Uncle Newt), it was heaven.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Tesla said as they walked to the Wonder Hut.
“Are you thinking Uncle Newt’s acting like a zombie?” said Nick.
“No! I’m thinking we need to build a robot of our own.” Tesla glanced over at their uncle. “But you’re right—he is acting kind of like a zombie.”
A glassy-eyed Uncle Newt was shuffling along the sidewalk mumbling to himself. Only he wasn’t saying, “Brains. Brrrraaaaaains.” He was saying, “A robot that twirls pizza dough. Why didn’t I think of that?”
“I doubt that was real dough, Uncle Newt,” Tesla said. “And the robot was teeny.”
“But it could be dough. And it could be unteeny,” Uncle Newt said, his haunted stare pointed at the horizon. “It could be real. A dough-tossing robot. Yes. Put some fake fur on it, and it could be a giant, dough-tossing mouse. Yes, yes, yes. Newtie, you’re a genius! It practically sells itself!”
“It does?” Nick said.
Uncle Newt just went on talking to himself about how to build his giant, dough-twirling robotic mouse. He was a tall, thin man with graying hair so messy it always looked like he’d just stuck his head out the window of a speeding car, and he was still dressed in the stain-splattered lab coat and slippers he’d worn that morning. So he was hard to miss as he shambled past the art galleries and bookstores and coffee shops lining Main Street. Tesla noticed tourists stopping to watch him expectantly, perhaps assuming he was a street performer about to launch into some kind of kooky act. It was a good thing she didn’t embarrass easily.
“Uncle Newt,” said Nick, who did embarrass easily. “Those things you’re thinking about your robot? Did you know you’re saying them, too? Out loud? So that everyone can hear?”
“Am I?” Uncle Newt looked surprised for a moment, then shrugged. “Well, you can’t brainstorm without a little thunder. Now, where was I?”
“You were wondering how many servos you’d need on the arms to keep the dough spinning,” Tesla said.
“Right! I could see getting away with…two, maybe. No, three! Definitely three! One here, one here, one here.”
Uncle Newt began sketching an invisible diagram in the air in front of him.
“Thanks a lot,” Nick grunted at Tesla.
She didn’t answer. She was looking at something across the street, her brow furrowed.
Nick followed her gaze.
She was staring ahead at the Wonder Hut.
Nick looked at it, puzzled by his sister’s reaction. Then his brow furrowed, too.
“Does the Wonder Hut look…different?” he said.
“Yeah,” said Tesla. “It looks clean.”
Usually the Wonder Hut had a grunge you could feel even before you stepped through the door. But now the building’s grimy gray siding was blindingly white, and the letters on the sign over the door were crisp and black instead of illegible sun-faded smudges. And for the first time, the display window had a real display—an electric train running through a miniature San Francisco—instead of being jam-packed with stacks of old model boxes coated in a decade’s worth of dust.
Nick and Tesla stopped to give each other a “what the heck?” look.
Uncle Newt just kept walking toward the Wonder Hut—and the street.
“Don’t forget to look both ways!” Nick called to him.
“But should the actuators be hydraulic or pneumatic?” Uncle Newt was muttering as he stepped off the curb. “Ooooh—or solenoids? I love solenoids!”
Nick and Tesla winced as cars in both lanes screeched to a halt to let Uncle Newt cross. He didn’t even seem to notice when one of the drivers rolled down his window and called him what the kids could only assume was an extremely unflattering name.
The cars roared off with angry honks as Uncle Newt disappeared into the Wonder Hut.
“How old do you think Uncle Newt is?” Nick said.
Tesla knew what he was thinking.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But it’s a miracle he’s made it this far.”
They looked both ways before crossing the street.
The Wonder Hut was as spic and span inside as it was outside. The walls had been repainted, the flickery old fluorescent lights fixed, the shelves tidied, and the oldest unsold inventory—stuff that looked like it had been waiting for a buyer since before Nick and Tesla were born—replaced with brand-new models and rockets and kites and games. There was still a little whiff of mildew in the air, but at least the armpittiness was gone.
Even the guy behind the counter looked better, though it was the same employee they’d seen on previous visits. He was a short, jowly, bald-headed, stoop-shouldered man in his thirties or forties or fifties. (Nick and Tesla were bad at guessing ages.) Whereas before he’d kept his nose buried in a copy of Miniature Railroading Monthly or Popular Mechanics while they’d explored the store—and even when they’d tried to ask him questions—now he looked them in the eye and smiled.
“Welcome to the Wonder Hut,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
“Oh, we’re just looking,” Nick said quickly. It always made him nervous when people in stores asked “What can I do for you?” It felt like such pressure. Couldn’t people do their jobs without expecting an eleven-year-old to give them orders?
“Just let me know if you need any help with anything,” the man said.
He kept smiling at them.
Nick wished the guy would go back to reading magazines.
“I have a question for you,” Uncle Newt said from somewhere.
Nick and Tesla stepped around a rack of books with titles like Detailing Your Realistic Sherman Tank and saw their uncle standing near the back of the store.
“Where did this come from?” he said.
He was looking down at a squat, white, six-wheeled something-or-other that seemed to be looking back up at him from the store floor. Two stalklike arms protruded from the thing, and at the end of one was what looked like a camera—which was pointing up at Uncle Newt’s face. The other, slightly longer arm was straightening a display of role-playing games.
With a click and a whirrrrr, the thing rolled closer to Uncle Newt.
“Shake hands with Curiosity,” said the guy behind the counter.
“Pleased to meet you,” Uncle Newt said to the robot, and without hesitating he wrapped his hand around the gleaming pincers at the end of its longer arm and gave them a gentle shake. “I thought you were on Mars. And about five times bigger.”
“Whoa! It really does look like Curiosity!” exclaimed Tesla, who considered the famous Mars rover one of her personal heroes, even if it happened to be a remote-controlled machine.
Nick’s eyes went as round as a pair of silver dollars.
“I want to live here,” he announced.
“In Half Moon Bay?” Tesla said.
“No. I want to live here. In the Wonder Hut. Do you think they’d let me? I’d figure out a way to pay.”
There was a doorway at the far end of the store, just beyond Uncle Newt and the robot, and a woman stepped through the curtains hanging there. She was Uncle Newt’s age—older than eighteen but younger than eighty—with short black hair and a round, pleasant face. She was carrying a little black box, and when she fiddled with a joystick mounted on it Curiosity rolled past her into the back room.
“Awwww,” Nick and Tesla groaned, sorry to see the robot go.
“Awwww,” moaned Uncle Newt, clearly feeling the same way. “We were just getting to know each other.”
“She’ll be back eventually,” the woman said. “I’m not done tinkering with her yet.”
“When she is done, I’m history,” the guy behind the counter said.
The woman smiled at him. “You have nothing to worry about, Duncan. I’m not about to make Curiosity the Wonder Hut’s assistant manager. She might be able to stock the shelves one day, but she can never know everything you do about model trains and airplanes.”
“And remote-controlled cars,” Duncan added. “And rockets.”
The woman nodded. “Right. And remote-controlled cars and rockets.”
“And model kits. And building ships in bottles.”
The woman kept nodding. “And model kits and building ships in bottles.”
“And—” Duncan began.
“Excuse me,” Uncle Newt said to the woman, looking bewildered. “Are you the owner of the Wonder Hut?”
Nick was confused, too. He’d always assumed Duncan owned the place.
“The new owner, actually,” the woman said. “Mr. Kaufman, the original owner, wanted to retire, so he sold it to me. I used to be in here all the time when I was a kid, so coming back to Half Moon Bay to run the place is a dream come true.”
Uncle Newt stretched his hand toward the woman. Even from the other side of the store, Nick could see that it was trembling.
Shaking hands with a robot was no big deal to Uncle Newt. A woman, on the other hand, scared him.
“Well,” he said, voice quivering, “it’s nice to meet you, Miss—?”
“Sakurai. Hiroko Sakurai.”
Uncle Newt froze halfway through the handshake.
“Hiroko Sakurai? I know that name. It couldn’t be…” Uncle Newt blinked in disbelief at the curtains Curiosity had disappeared through, then turned toward the woman again. “But it must be! You came to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory—”
“Just a couple months after you left. Yes, Dr. Holt,” the woman said. She looked Uncle Newt up and down. “You are Newton Holt, I assume. You’re a bit of a legend down at JPL, actually. Mobility and Robotics Systems hasn’t been the same since you left, apparently. I was hoping our paths would cross sooner rather than later.”
“Well, consider us crossed, Dr. Sakurai! Our paths, I mean. This is such a treat! I haven’t talked to anyone from JPL in ages. Tell me—how did you end up shielding Curiosity’s computers from high-energy cosmic rays?”
“Well, the secret was switching to a slower, radiation-hardened microchip.”
“Ahhh, of course. Go on!”
And the woman did. In detail. So much detail, in fact, that Nick and Tesla didn’t understand 99.9 percent of what she was saying. As much as they loved robots, they couldn’t follow a conversation about the advantages of high-gain over low-gain antennas for relaying commands via a deep-space network or why iridium made the perfect containment material for decaying plutonium-238 dioxide.
Duncan, the assistant manager, soon looked lost, too, and while his boss was distracted he slipped out a copy of Model Yachtsman Magazine and started flipping through it.
“Come on,” Tesla said. “Let’s go look at their micromotors and servo controls.”
“Good idea,” said Nick.
Yet when they got to the section where the components they needed to make their own robot should have been, the shelves and racks were bare.
“Oh, come on,” Tesla groaned. “Everything else in the store is new and improved, but they’re completely out of the stuff we want?”
Nick shrugged. “I guess we’re not the only ones in town who got the sudden urge to build robots.”
“Obviously not. But did they have to take everything?”
“They must have thought so. Whoever ‘they’ is.”
Tesla just growled. The mysterious “they” had really ticked her off.
She turned and marched back to the front of the store, Nick following behind her.
They found Uncle Newt and Hiroko Sakurai still so deep in conversation, they didn’t even notice Tesla the first two times she cleared her throat. The third time she tried to get their attention, her “ahem” was so loud Nick flinched.
“Oh. Tesla,” Uncle Newt said, finally looking her way. “That’s quite a cough you’ve got there. We’ll have to get you some lozenges.”
Tesla ignored him.
“We couldn’t find any micromotors, servo controls, or actuators,” she said to Dr. Sakurai. “Are you really all out?”
“I’m afraid we are. But there’s more coming tomorrow, I think.”
Dr. Sakurai turned to Duncan.
He managed to stuff his magazine back under the counter just in time.
“That’s right,” he said. “We’ll be totally restocked by noon.”
“Well, we’ll just have to come back tomorrow then, won’t we, kids?” Uncle Newt said with a smile.
“I’ll be here,” Dr. Sakurai told him. “Perhaps we could compare notes on kinematic functions for redundancy resolution.”
“Perfect! It’s a date!” Uncle Newt’s face turned the color of strawberry jam. “A deal, I mean. It’s a deal. Ta-ta!”
Uncle Newt hustled Nick and Tesla toward the door, then stopped and sighed once they were outside.
“ ‘Ta-ta’? Really? ‘Ta-ta’?” he muttered, looking profoundly disappointed in himself. “Well, let’s go home.”
“Home?” said Nick. “What about Ranalli’s?”
“Ranalli’s?”
Uncle Newt stared at Nick as if he’d said “What about the purple ostrich clown toast?”
“You know…Ranalli’s Italian Kitchen?” Tesla said. “With the chicken vesuvio?”
“Oh. Right. Sorry. I guess I lost my appetite.”
“But we haven’t had breakfast!” Nick protested.
“Good thing we’ve got all that yummy cereal at home then, huh?”
Uncle Newt started walking back to the Newtmobile.
Slowly, begrudgingly, Nick and Tesla followed.
Tesla talked her uncle into stopping for doughnuts on the way home. Yet Uncle Newt remained distracted and subdued even as he chewed on his cream-filled Bavarian, and Nick’s chocolate-covered old-fashioned didn’t seem to cheer him up, either.
When they got back to the house, they found that the smoke had cleared and the place smelled only a little like a rotten banana muffin burning in a campfire. Nick performed his usual ritual upon walking in the door—picking up the phone to check for messages—and, again as usual, he looked at Tesla and shook his head sadly.
Their parents still hadn’t called.
Uncle Newt started to wander off past the stuffed polar bear and diving suit and stacks of beat-up computers and printers lining the hallway, obviously headed for the place he spent most of his waking day (and some of his nights, when he fell asleep at his worktable): the basement laboratory.
“What kind of idiot says ‘ta-ta’? I never say ‘ta-ta,’ ” he mumbled as he shuffled past a glum-looking Nick.
“Oh, snap out of it, you two,” Tesla said. “It’s time to build a robot!”
“But we couldn’t get any parts from the store,” Nick said.
“Since when have we needed parts from the store?” Tesla scoffed. “We’ll improvise.”
Uncle Newt had showed no sign he was paying any attention whatsoever. Just before he left the hall, though, he pointed at a stack of old PCs nearby.
“You could always use these,” he said dreamily. He waved a hand at an upside-down sombrero overflowing with electronics parts and pieces. “Or one of my spares.”
Then he turned and headed down the steps to the basement.
“How could we build a robot out of that bunch of junk?” Nick said.
“Don’t you want to find out?” said Tesla.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
Nick began mooning at the telephone again, as if his sad puppy-dog eyes would convince it to ring. It didn’t.
“Fine.” Tesla stomped over to the sombrero and started sifting through the miscellaneous oscillators and capacitors and resistors within. “I’ll build my own robot. I can make one better without you anyway.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Exactly what it sounds like. I’ve always been more interested in robotics than you. What could you suggest that I couldn’t think of first and put together better?”
Tesla held up a small circuit board, examined it, then tossed it back in the pile when she noticed that one side seemed to be coated with dried ketchup.
“You’re just trying to provoke me,” Nick said. “You know I’m just as good with electronics as you.”
“Oh? How much you wanna bet?”
Tesla gave her brother a hard, challenging stare.
He was right about her trying to provoke him. But that didn’t matter.
Because it still worked.
“How about five million dollars?” Nick said.
Tesla shook her brother’s hand.
“It’s on, dude,” she said.
NICK’S
DO-IT-YOURSELF PC LEFTOVERS WANDER-BOT
THE STUFF
□ Wire cutters
□ 4 wire coat hangers
□ Some extra wire
□ Hot-glue gun
□ 1 3-inch (7.5-cm) fan from a junky old computer (or your local electronics store) (A)
□ 1 9-volt battery
□ 1 9-volt battery connector (B)
□ Scissors
□ Electrical tape
□ 1 quarter
□ 2 nuts (any size)
THE SETUP
1. Use the wire cutters to cut the straight part off each hanger, giving you four 10-inch (25.5-cm) lengths of wire.
2. Add a big dab of hot glue to one end of each wire. Let glue dry briefly. This will give “grip” to your robot’s feet and will keep it from scratching surfaces.
3. Put the other, glueless end of each wire into the corner holes of the computer fan and glue them into place. Be sure the label side of the fan is facing down. Glue everywhere the wires touch the plastic so they won’t come out or spin. When the glue dries, your robot will have legs!
THE FINAL STEPS
1. Bend each wire leg so that your robot’s “feet” are splayed slightly outward from the fan. This will increase your robot’s stability. Also adjust the legs to ensure that all four feet touch the ground when you put down the robot.
2. Connect the 9-volt battery to the battery connector and tape the battery to the flat base at the bottom of the fan (the part that does not spin). Make sure that the wires don’t get in the way of the fan’s movement.
3. Wrap a few layers of electrical tape around the robot while pulling tightly to secure the legs and battery tape.
4. Glue the quarter onto the top of the fan so that it’s slightly off center. Secure it with a piece of tape.
5. Glue the two nuts to the top of the fan (these are decorative “eyes”).
6. Attach the positive wire from the fan to the red (positive) wire from the battery.
7. Connect the two negative wires—and stand back!
TESLA’S
DO-IT-YOURSELF SEMI-INVISIBLE BOTTLE BOT
THE STUFF
□ 2 wire coat hangers
□ Wire cutters
□ Pliers
□ 1 plastic 2-liter water bottle
□ Hot-glue gun
□ Scissors
□ Duct tape
□ 1 3-volt motor (available from most electronics stores) (B)
□ 1 battery holder for 2 AAA batteries (A)
□ 2 AAA batteries
□ 2 plastic bottle caps
□ 2 small metal washers
□ Extra wire, nuts, bolts, and other spare pieces
THE SETUP
1. Use the wire cutters to cut the hangers into sections about 14 inches (35.5 cm) long.
2. Use the pliers to bend each section of wire in the middle so that the curve of the wire matches the curve of the water bottle.
3. Adjust the bend so that each “leg” is even.
4. Bend the end of each wire to give your robot “feet.”
5. Test-fit the wire onto the bottle.
6. Hot-glue one wire onto the front of the bottle and the other onto the back.
7. Clip the wires if needed so that all four ends are the same length (this will help your robot stand on a flat surface).
8. Hot-glue the battery holder to the bottom of your robot so that the wires face toward the back of the bot.
9. Use scissors to cut a strip of duct tape about ½ inch (1.25 cm) long.
10. Fold the tape over the axle of the motor, making sure that the tape and axle spin freely.
11. Add another seven pieces of tape securely on top of the first. This will cause the motor to vibrate when it spins.
THE FINAL STEPS
1. Remove ¾ inch (2 cm) of the plastic from the ends of the battery holder wires and twist the wire onto one of the metal tabs of the motor. Repeat with the other wire and the other motor tab.
2. Hot-glue the motor onto the end of your robot, ensuring that the tape can spin fully without hitting the bottle.
3. To make eyes, glue a small metal washer onto each bottle cap and then glue the caps onto the front of the robot.
4. Use lightweight wire, nuts, bolts and other roboty-looking pieces to decorate your bot. Filling the bottle with tangles of wire creates a nice colorful effect.
5. Add batteries, and the robot is ready to go! Tip: If your robot only goes backward, add some weight toward the front.
