“That looks like a Sit ’n Spin,” Funk snarled.
Tessa had to agree. Miss Information’s time machine appeared to be a very large version of a toy that caused her to throw up all over herself when she was four years old. Oh, what a delightful present that was, she thought. Hours of gut-wrenching fun!
“Are you sure you didn’t just swipe that from a playground?” Snot Rocket asked.
“We tried several designs, but this one promised to be the safest for the passengers,” the tired scientist replied. Tessa had learned her name was Dr. Rajkumar and that she was an expert on temporal physics—whatever that was.
“Why does it need to be safe?” Tammy screamed.
“Because it rips a hole in the fabric of time and space,” Dr. Rajkumar said. “To create the anomaly necessary for time travel, the machine has to generate power on the levels comparable to a supernova and—”
“Blah, blah, blah, science!” interrupted Miss Information. “So … how do we use it?”
“The passenger enters the precise date, time, longitude, and latitude into the control pad, then turns the wheel. A wormhole will open and everyone on board will be pulled through it. When your mission is complete, just press the HOME button and it will bring you back here.”
“Easy breezy,” Miss Information said.
“But at great personal risk to my health and well-being, I have to insist that you not do this,” Dr. Rajkumar said.
“PREPARE THE TIGERS!” Miss Information yelled.
“Please, I beg you. What you want to do could have very nasty side effects. If you go into the past and change something, there is no way of predicting the ripple effect it will have on the present. Let’s say you cause an accident that kills someone—hypothetically, say the grandfather of Alexander Fleming—”
“Who?” Tessa asked.
“The man who discovered penicillin. What if you accidently killed his grandfather? Hundreds of thousands—maybe even millions—of people would be dead because he never invented the vaccine.”
“Attention, kids, do not kill Alexander Fleming … OK—anything else?”
“Yes! Changes aren’t always so straightforward. Any little thing could change the course of human history. The simplest action could literally destroy the world—stepping on an ant, causing a traffic accident, stealing someone’s parking spot—all of these things could be tied to much bigger, much more important events. Cutting someone off in traffic could literally be tied to the birth of another human being. There’s just no way of knowing.”
“Consider us warned,” Miss Information said. “Now, let’s give my new toy a spin. Benjy, have you compiled that list I asked you for?”
“I have,” the robot said as it zipped into the room. “On August 16, 1987, Edgar Escala—Julio Escala’s grandfather—visited Washington, D.C., on vacation from Mexico City and made a stop at an immigration office to get information on becoming a United States citizen. Public records show that Edgar signed in at the visitors’ center at 8:05 A.M. on the date in question. There is a ninety-seven percent chance that this experience directly lead to Mr. Escala moving his family to the United States.”
“Well, we’re going to have to find a way to change his mind,” Miss Information said as she stepped onto the time machine’s platform.
“I’m downloading the information, time, and coordinates into your machine as well as all the information I collected about the other NERDS and their families,” Benjy chirped.
Dr. Rajkumar blanched. “This is your plan? Making sure those kids were never born?”
“You got it! Kids, let’s go,” Miss Information said, dismissing the scientist and ushering Tessa and the others onto the Sit ’n Spin platform. Tessa didn’t like the idea of erasing someone, but she couldn’t leave her father in jail. She and the others turned the big wheel at the center of the machine, and it started to spin.
“I don’t feel so good,” Snot Rocket said as the wheel spun faster and faster.
“Yeah, I’m not sure about this,” Tammy cried as the air grew very cold and crackled with electricity.
Tessa felt very nauseous herself, and it wasn’t just from the spinning. The machine was making her insides feel like a bottle of soda shaken by a mischievous child. She was sure she was going to pop.
“I want to get off,” Funk whined. “We have to stop this!”
But Miss Information ignored his plea and the wheel turned even faster. The underground lair vanished and a series of images of people and places appeared: a woman slapped a man in a nightclub, a teenager danced at a rock concert, a little boy played kickball, a dog pulled his owner down the street, a soldier hurried across a war-torn lanscape, a man and a woman got married with a little white dog at their feet. They seemed to come from all different time periods. Could the rest of the team see them, too?
And then Tessa saw her father creeping into her bedroom at the White House, sitting down next to her, and watching her sleep.
“Dad?”
There was a final flash and he vanished along with the other visions, and Tessa was startled to find that she and her team were no longer in Miss Information’s secret lair. Somehow they were in the middle of a busy Washington, D.C., street, and there was a bus barreling right at them.
TOP SECRET DOSSIER
CODE NAME: PIZZA FACE
REAL NAME: DENISE BERNAKE
YEARS ACTIVE: 1984–88
CURRENT OCCUPATION: ROCKET SCIENTIST
HISTORY: DENISE WAS ONE OF
THOSE POOR CHILDREN WHO SUFFER
FROM EARLY-ONSET PUBERTY. ONE
DAY SHE WAS A SMILING, SWEET
LITTLE GIRL AND THE NEXT SHE
HAD A FACE FULL OF ZITS. NO
AMOUNT OF ACNE MEDICINE SEEMED
TO HAVE ANY EFFECT, BUT HER SAD
AFFLICTION WAS TURNED INTO A
TREMENDOUS ASSET WITH THE HELP
OF MODERN TECHNOLOGY.
UPGRADE: USE YOUR IMAGINATION,
KID. WHAT COULD A GIRL WITH A
FACE FULL OF ERUPTING PIMPLES
DO? JUST THINKING ABOUT WRITING
IT DOWN MAKES ME GAG.
Heathcliff needed to take his mind off his parents and his heartbreak, so he decided to turn his attention to the other dilemma—namely, filling in the holes of his Swiss cheese memory. He was convinced that Benjamin was the key to unlocking the mystery, so he worked with a feverish passion, replacing each tiny chip and wire while the rest of the team had one of their stupid secret meetings in a booth at Marty Mozzarella’s.
He sat in a dark corner of the restaurant and tested circuits and installed a new cooling system. Then he worked on Benjamin’s gyroscopic flight simulator, which gave the robot its ability to fly. Finally, he snapped the ball shut. There were still functions to reconnect and tests to administer, but surely none of them were vital to Benjamin’s operation. He pushed the button on the side of the orb and listened as it hummed to life. A bright red light glowed inside, a signal that there was a serious internal error, but then the light changed to Benjamin’s familiar blue, followed by some loud clicking and beeping and then finally …