Microsaurs--Follow that Tiny-Dactyl Read online

  Using a half-smashed tube of superglue we found in the desk rubble, Lin and I stuck four rubber bands to the bottom of a bottle cap. Then we twisted the other ends of the rubber bands in a big loop that we would need to slide over Twiggy’s neck.

  While we waited for the glue to dry, Professor Penrod made a bridle and some reins out of the dental floss. He said he’d been raised riding horses, and that his dad had taught him how to do it with a piece of rope.

  I gave my empty backpack to Lin. She put her skateboard in it and strapped it on her back. The idea was to put the beacon inside the backpack to carry it back to the Fruity Stars Lab, and while I didn’t really know why she wanted to bring along her skateboard, I did like that she wanted to be prepared as well.

  I used my pocketknife to open the can of pineapple I’d packed for lunch, then I used it for something even more important than food: to trick Twiggy into walking through the rubber-band loops that Professor Penrod and Lin held up.

  Everything was working as planned. We had a bottle-cap basket to ride in, a pineapple-eating pterodactyl ready to give us a ride, and I was learning how to pilot the Microsaur using the reins Professor Penrod made.

  “So, pull down on the left one to go left. Then right to go right,” Professor Penrod explained.

  “Sounds easy,” I said, really hoping that it was.

  “Then let up—you know, give her a little slack—to go down, and pull back on both of the reins at the same time to go up,” he said.

  “Piece of cake,” I said.

  Lin strapped on her helmet before we climbed in the bottle-cap basket. Not only was it going to be traded for the GPS beacon, but I wanted to record the whole experience to check out later. I gave my smartphone to Professor Penrod. I tapped on the video feed and began recording. “Okay. This is where you can see through the camera on Lin’s helmet. Wave at Lin,” I said to Professor Penrod. He did, and he saw himself waving on the little screen as Lin watched the two of us.

  “Your dad built this?” he asked.

  “Yup. You two have a lot in common,” I said as I handed him the Invisible Communicator. “Now, put that inside your ear.” He did without questioning me.

  “Say hi, Lin,” I said.

  “Hi, Lin,” Lin said, trying to be funny. It worked, because Professor Penrod laughed as her voice spoke inside his head using the SpyZoom Invisible Communicator.

  “Now you can talk to Lin and she can talk back. Just talk normally—you don’t need to shout,” I said.

  Twiggy was getting restless, flapping her wings and hopping around. “Come on, Danny, she’s ready to go,” Lin said.

  “All right. Back in a few minutes with our power source!” I said, then I ran and jumped in the bottle cap.

  “Bye, Professor,” Lin said. She handed me the reins. I gave them a shake, and Twiggy took off like a dino-rocket.

  From our new viewpoint way up in the air, the Microterium looked small once again. Even Honk-Honk and Bruno 2 looked little from inside the bottle-cap basket. It wasn’t as smooth as I had imagined, because every time Twiggy flapped her wings, the whole basket rocked like a tiny boat on a wild ocean. At first, I was too excited to remember I was afraid of heights, but that wore off pretty quickly and I started getting a little queasy.

  “This is incredible, Danny. Can you believe we’re doing this?” Lin said. She didn’t look air-sick at all. In fact, she looked like she was going to start glowing with happiness any second.

  I nodded. Sure, it was pretty cool, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk about it just yet.

  “So, the plan is, you will fly Twiggy right up to her nest, then I’ll jump out and swap my helmet for the GPS beacon. Then you’ll fly back around and I’ll jump in the basket. Right?”

  I nodded my head again, and the nodding motion added to the bobbing motion of the flying basket—plus, the fact that we were WAY up high in the air did it. I was officially airsick.

  I tried to focus on deep breaths and piloting Twiggy toward the nest when …

  The back rubber-band loop that was keeping us balanced snapped, and Lin almost slipped off the back of the bottle cap as it tipped up like the bed of a dump truck. She grabbed one of the three remaining rubber bands and kept her balance.

  “That wasn’t cool, Danny,” she said.

  I totally agreed. Not cool at all. The wind was rushing fast, and I yanked back on the reins, bringing Twiggy up even higher. We flew over the big metal step that triggered the Shrink-A-Fier turning on, and continued to soar up and up toward the fish tank.

  “Professor wants to know if we’re all right,” Lin said. I swallowed hard, then just before I shouted back to Lin that we were going to be fine, something happened to change my mind.

  Another of the rubber-band straps broke.

  Lin yelped a little, and fell to her knees to try to get stable in the wobbly bottle-cap basket. “No, we’re not all right,” Lin shouted into the SpyZoom Invisible Communicator. “But we’re almost there.”

  Lin and I had a rule. It had been with us since we became friends three years ago when her family moved to my neighborhood. You don’t turn back on an adventure. But for the first time in those three years, I was starting to think that was a dumb rule. Really dumb. I could see the nest just ahead, but I made the mistake of looking down and I got so dizzy I felt like I would pass out any second.

  “It’s the bottle cap. The metal is so sharp it’s sawing through the rubber bands,” Lin said to me and Professor Penrod. “We have to hurry, Danny, or these are all going to snap.”

  I pulled on the right rein, and we dipped to the right. Lin slid from one side of the bottle cap to the other, catching herself just before she fell over the edge.

  We flew past the first shelf, then we came eye to eye with the snail-squid in the fish tank. When we were regular-sized, the fish thing didn’t look all that scary, but now that it was about ten times bigger than us it was downright terrifying.

  “It looks like a kraken from that pirate movie we saw on your birthday,” Lin said. A shiver ran down, then sprinted back up my whole body, but Lin looked like she was having the time of her life. I didn’t dare open my mouth to respond. I was doing everything in my power to hold it together. I kept pulling back on the reins, steering Twiggy up higher and higher until we were gliding over the fish tank.

  The third rubber band broke, and we were balanced on one single rubber band. I looked down and the top of the fish tank looked like an Olympic-sized swimming pool as we kept flying up toward the nest.

  I could feel the sickness creeping up in my throat, and I was afraid it was going to join us in the bottle-cap basket. Twiggy flapped three more times, and there it was: the shiny metal GPS beacon, tucked away in her nest.

  Lin saw it, too, and she tightened the straps on my backpack. “How close can you get me?” Lin asked.

  I piloted Twiggy up next to the nest and turned to look at Lin.

  “Take Twiggy back to Professor Penrod. I’ll skate back down there,” she said. She gave me a thumbs-up, smiled, launched herself off the back of the teetering bottle cap, and landed right in the middle of Twiggy’s nest.

  I leaned hard to the left, turning Twiggy back around. Then, just when I had gotten my balance, my biggest fear came true.

  The last rubber band sprang, and the bottle cap fell out from beneath my feet. I held on tight to the reins, dangling over the floor of the barn-lab-library. The noise and me wiggling around made Twiggy go a little wild, and she spun around and started soaring toward the workbench on the other side of the barn-lab. The good news was that I was suddenly so terrified that I would fall to my death, that I totally forgot to be airsick.

  I held on as long as I could, but my hands were sweaty from all the excitement, and no matter what I did I could not keep my grip on the waxy dental-floss reins.

  “Aaarrrrgh!” I shouted. I tumbled through the air, spinning around and around as I fell like a stone toward the hard wooden floor. I know it is a strange thing to
think about when you’re falling through the sky, but I wished that I had packed my dad’s antigravity sleeping bag.

  The wind was shouting in my ears as I fell, and I closed my eyes as the floor came rushing faster and faster toward me. Or, I guess, more accurately, it was me that was rushing toward it. Then less than a second before I was splatted flat, Twiggy came to my rescue.

  Nothing could have prepared me for the feeling of two long, clawed talons ripping through my grass pajama top and the back of my red SpyZoom T-shirt.

  She saved me just in time, then flapped her massive wings and the two of us soared back up into the sky.

  The relief of not being turned into a Danny puddle rushed over me, and I laughed and shouted with joy as Twiggy and I glided through the air. Not a trace of airsick remained, just pure happiness as the wind rushed through my hair.

  Honk-Honk honked, and Twiggy turned her head, tucked her wings, and dive-bombed toward the honking Microsaur. In less than a minute, she was dropping me off on the ground next to Professor Penrod, then she was on her way, flying off into the air.

  “Are you all right, Danny?” Professor Penrod asked. He looked like he’d seen a ghost.

  He helped me up and I nodded my head, because I thought that I actually was all right, although I wasn’t 100 percent sure.

  “Is Lin okay?” I asked.

  “Ask her yourself,” Professor Penrod said as he passed me the SpyZoom Invisible Communicator and my smartphone.

  “Lin. Are you okay?” I asked. She turned the camera toward her face and looked right back at me.

  “Never better. I pried the camera out of my helmet; I hope that’s okay. I just traded my old skate helmet for a GPS beacon lodged in a pterodactyl’s nest,” Lin said into the Invisible Communicator. “I can’t believe I just said that sentence. What a day, right?”

  “You can say that again,” I said. “So you grabbed the beacon?” I asked.

  The video bobbled around a little as Lin fidgeted with the straps of my backpack. “Check it out!” Lin had not only gotten the GPS beacon, but she had already stuffed it in the backpack.

  “So, give us a time check, Danny,” Lin said.

  The battery was running low on my smartphone, but the clock said it was 3:18. “We have exactly forty-two minutes and twelve seconds.”

  “Well then, I guess I better get going. Hold on to your guts!” Lin said. She looked down and I watched as she put her skateboard on top of the long wooden ruler she’d propped up against the shelf. “Hey, Danny. Do you think this is longer than the Ramp-O-Saurus?”

  I looked down the ramp she’d built. It was at least twice as long as the Ramp-O-Saurus, but I didn’t have time to tell her because she jumped onto the ramp and started skating down.

  Professor Penrod watched through the binoculars while I viewed the video feed from the little wireless camera Lin held in her hand. The ruler was so slick that Lin got up to full speed in less than a second. I took a glance at the SpyZoom app, and the GPS beacon in her backpack registered that she was moving 30.2 miles per hour. A personal BEST!

  I didn’t realize I was holding my breath until Lin reached the bottom. I’d never seen her move so fast as she zipped across the top of an old filing cabinet, grinding on the edge just for fun. She kick-flipped off the filing cabinet, launching herself over a huge gap. She really did fly for a second or two before her wheels touched down on a ladder leaning against the wall. She rode the ladder all the way down to the metal step below the Shrink-A-Fier, then her momentum burst toward the red-and-white straw that brought us to the Microterium in the first place. She didn’t even stop at the lip of the straw, she just ollied over the edge and zoomed down the big red-and-white pipe, and came skidding to a stop a few feet away from me and Professor Penrod.

  “That was CRAZY COOL, Lin! Seriously, the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. And I have it ALL on video! You are going to be a star when we put this online. Holy golden corn dogs! That … was … AWESOME!”

  I jumped around and shouted. Soon Zip-Zap was running a big circle around all of us and Bruno 2 was stomping up a dirt cloud. Even Professor Penrod got into the act as he did a little shuffling dance thing that made him look older than he actually was.

  Lin ran up to us, nearly out of breath. “Okay … how … long did … that take?” she said between gasps of air.

  I checked my smartphone. “We have thirty-four minutes and thirty-one seconds left. But that was soooo cool!” I said again. I couldn’t help shouting.

  “Okay, okay. It was cool.” Lin swallowed, then took one last deep breath to get back to normal. “But we need to get to back to the Fruity Stars Lab in a hurry. And I have an idea.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s that?” I asked.

  “Well, let’s just say I’m going to need your other shirtsleeve,” Lin said with a smile.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE EXPAND-O-MATIC 2

  Professor Penrod got a head start on Honk-Honk, rushing back to prepare the Expand-O-Matic as Lin and I worked on her genius plan.

  It was simple, really, as most genius plans are. First, Lin distracted Bruno 2 while I cut off my other sleeve. Then it was my turn to distract Bruno 2 with some serious belly rubbing, while Lin tied shirt scraps to Zip-Zap’s tail feathers.

  “If we keep going like this, I won’t have any shirt left,” I said to Lin when she climbed onto Zip-Zap.

  “Don’t worry. This is going to work. You’ll get to keep what’s left of your shirt for yourself,” she said.

  I climbed onto Bruno 2 for the second time that day, then Lin whistled to get his attention.

  Zip-Zap played along perfectly, wiggling his tail feathers and waving the red T-shirt scraps back and forth. Lin steered Zip-Zap back to the Fruity Stars Lab, and I held on for my life as Bruno 2 showed me what triceratops top-speed felt like. At first it was a bit too bumpy for me to enjoy, but eventually I got used to the running rhythm, and for the first time ever I understood exactly why Lin loved riding her skateboard so fast. Zip-Zap and Lin darted, ducked, and jumped over, under, and around trees and bushes. Bruno 2 took a more direct approach, smashing right through the very same trees and bushes Zip-Zap had avoided.

  When we arrived back at the Fruity Stars Lab, we left the Microsaurs outside, where Bruno 2 continued to chase Zip-Zap around the lab. We rushed inside to find Professor Penrod. There was black grease on his hands, his shirt, and smeared across his forehead, but he looked excited when he saw that Lin had the GPS beacon strapped to her back.

  “How much time to do we have, Danny?” Lin asked.

  I checked my watch. “Oh man. We’ve got to hurry. That took longer than I thought. We only have nine minutes.”

  “That’s fine, really. This will only take a second, and the skate park is, what, three minutes, four minutes from my house? You’ll be back in time to grab a deep-fried candy bar or something,” Professor Penrod said as he pulled the GPS beacon from the backpack. I took off what was left of the grass pajama top and put it on the workbench.

  “So, what do we do next?” I asked.

  “Simple. I’ll get this cranked up, and you two need to step outside. There’s a little square piece of copper behind the lab. Stand on it and wait to be unshrunk,” he said with a confident smile.

  He used a glop of what looked like tree sap to stick an old wire to the top of the GPS beacon, then he held the other end of the wire in his hand. “As soon as I connect this, it’ll start right up. Head outside. And let’s do this again, what do you say?” he offered, and I was so excited I might have replied too loudly.

  “YES! PLEASE! We’d love to come back,” I shouted.

  “Can we come back tomorrow?” Lin asked.

  “Ha. We’ll see each other soon enough. That’s a promise,” Professor Penrod said. “Now, quickly. Out on the copper circle, and what was it that Lin said earlier? Oh yes. Hold on to your guts.”

  We ran outside and stood on the copper slab, which I realized was a shiny penny.

  B
runo 2 was so busy chasing Zip-Zap around that he didn’t even notice I was standing in the open in my red shirt. It probably didn’t really matter anyway, because it was covered in mud, ripped to shreds, had two huge claw holes in the back, and was totally stretched out. I was a mess, but it was totally worth it.

  “All right, you two. Here goes,” Professor Penrod shouted from inside.

  Lin and I both jumped a little as we heard the loud ZAP. Then a crinkly, fizzly sound came next, followed by a loud BOOM and a crash that sounded like someone had tipped over a stack of dishes.

  We stood there for a moment, but nothing happened.

  “Did we unshrink?” Lin asked.

  “Um, no. We’re still microsized,” I said.

  The back door to the Fruity Stars Lab creaked open, and Professor Penrod tumbled out. His hair and cheeks were covered in black soot and one of his glasses lenses was cracked.

  “I’m sorry, you two. But I’m afraid I have bad news. The wiring that hooked the GPS beacon to the Expand-O-Matic 2 was a bit too chewed on and it shorted out.”

  “So we can’t go back?” Lin asked.

  The professor shook his head and looked down at his feet. “I’m so sorry,” he said.

  “Ever?” Lin asked. Her voice sounded a bit worried. I looked at the smartphone I held in my hand, and I had the spark of a little idea.

  “Oh, I’m sure we’ll solve this problem, too. I mean, look what the three of us have already accomplished today. It’s been a miracle, to say the least. If we put our heads together, I’m sure we can get us back to normal size before long,” Professor Penrod said.

  “But not in eight minutes,” Lin said. I looked over at her and she swallowed real hard. Of all the things I’d seen that day, this might have been the most amazing, because Lin was about to cry. And that made me feel like crying, too, but the little spark of an idea came back and a tiny bit of hope pushed away any tears.