Floors #3: The Field of Wacky Inventions (9 page)

“I don’t like it,” Miss Sheezley yelled, her eyes wide with terror. “I don’t like it one bit!”

“Say hello to the Brontosauruses for me,” Lucy said, smiling with excitement as she looked up into a hole only twenty feet above. The light coming out of the hole was so bright she couldn’t see past it, but if the floor above was anything like the floor below, she was all in.

Miss Sheezley glanced down the twisted ladder and thought about what the rest of her afternoon might include. She would be alone in a tiny dinosaur zoo,
eating dog food, not knowing when or if she’d ever be found and rescued. Or she could stand on the roof and be swallowed up by an egg-shaped hole, which would at least give her a chance of overseeing an entire empire of hotels.

“Oh, bother,” she said to herself as her chance to decide neared its end. The roof of her beloved Foxtrot Hotel was only ten feet from landing. It was now or never.

“Come on, Miss Sheezley!” Leo yelled from the far side of the roof, where he stood under a beam of light. “Don’t you want to know what’s been on top of your hotel all these years?”

She did want to know, that was true, and maybe that alone was what finally made her decide to step out under the light and take her chances with what lay above, not below.

She stood as tall and thin as the egg-shaped hole arrived only a foot over her head. The hole wasn’t big enough for two people, it was made for one person. She looked across the flat roof and saw Remi jumping up and down, reaching for the hole like the playful child she imagined him to be. Leo was looking at Lucy, as if he worried she might not be okay. Lucy was staring up into the hole with a look of wonder on her face. Alfred Whitney kept looking pensively between the children,
like he was afraid for their safety. And Pilf — well, Mr. Pilf was not one to revel in exciting opportunities that came his way. He had his hands clasped over his hat-covered head like he was protecting himself from marbles falling out of the sky.

As Miss Sheezley’s head went inside the egg-shaped hole and she lost sight of everyone else, she must have been thinking the same thing they all were:
What diabolical weirdness has Merganzer D. Whippet planned for us next?

One thing was for certain: They were all about to find out.

The ceiling was a hundred feet overhead, crisscrossed with hanging ropes and scaffolding piled in
crooked stacks. Monkeys swung from some of the ropes, carrying tools or plans from one place to another. They were small but frighteningly strong and very bright. They could be taught complex tasks and master them quickly, and so they were highly useful when it came to piecing together unusual floors. Four such floors were in different stages of development in the hangar. Welding sparks flew in the distance and several rolling robots whizzed by as Powell journeyed deeper into the hangar in search of his friend.

“Merganzer? Where are you? I’ve returned with the supplies you requested!” Powell yelled, his voice reverberating against the far walls.

“Over here!” Merganzer yelled back. “But do approach carefully. I’m right in the middle of something rather unstable.”

Merganzer was often in the middle of something unstable when he worked in the hangar, so Powell didn’t seem the least bit alarmed about this news until he arrived at the metal and electric shop and saw what Merganzer was doing.

“Oh my,” Mr. Powell said. “That
is
unstable.”

“Hand me that Flooger, will you?” Merganzer said, reaching his one free hand out into the air. “And tear me off some duct tape. I’m going to need to shut this iron box in a second.”

“What on earth would you have done if I hadn’t come along when I did?” Mr. Powell asked, taking up the Flooger, which looked like a foot of orange rope, and handing it to Merganzer.

“I knew you’d arrive when I needed you. You always do.”

Mr. Powell beamed with happiness. It was true. He did have a way of showing up at precisely the right time, just when Merganzer needed him the most.

“I suppose that’s what friends are for,” Mr. Powell said, tearing off a strip of duct tape that was just the right length and holding it out.

Merganzer was hunched over a long workbench covered with an intricate array of circuits and wires. The round Wyro, which Leo and Remi had retrieved from under the Whippet Hotel, was sitting in the middle. It was many layered and moved like a gyroscope, spinning in different directions at the same time, or so it seemed. It powered something big Merganzer needed done.

“They’ve just entered one of my most complicated floors sooner than I expected them to,” Merganzer said. “I haven’t even tested it yet!”

When he said this, a stream of goopy green liquid began streaming out of one of the tubes and the spinning Wyro began to slow down.

“As I expected,” he said. “Sprung a leak!”

Merganzer wrapped duct tape around the leak in the blink of an eye and everything seemed to be working as he’d intended again.

“We’re close, George. So very close!”

“You mean …
the AG chamber
?” Mr. Powell asked.

“Yes. I mean
the AG chamber
. I do believe the time has come at last. One of my greatest inventions is nearly ready.”

“It’s a good thing Leo found the Wyro. We’ll need all the power it’s got.”

Merganzer grabbed a lever to his right and pulled it toward him. An energy dial began to move, circling closer to a clearly marked red zone as the Wyro heated up. It floated a few inches above the workbench, turning from blue to purple to red and throwing off heat Mr. Powell could feel on his face.

It all seemed very dangerous to Mr. Powell — as though an explosion with the power to destroy the universe might happen at any moment. But Merganzer appeared unconcerned. He stepped back, wiped his hands on his trousers, and asked Powell about other matters of business.

“This will take a little time,” Merganzer said. “It’s stable … for the moment. What’s happening with the bids from the east?”

“The Japanese conglomerate just offered two hundred million for the furry candy.”

Merganzer tapped his lengthy chin three times fast.

“Hold out for two fifty and leak the offer to Nabisco.”

Powell nodded. They’d been developing a frighteningly furry candy in the lab, and it was set to raise a lot of money for expansion.

“And the synthetic tooth-growing enamel? What’s the counteroffer from Procter & Gamble?”

“A billion,” Mr. Powell said. It was a word he loved using but didn’t often have the chance.

“
And
per-unit profit sharing?”

Powell nodded. It had been a difficult negotiation, but he’d gotten that, too.

“Sell,” Merganzer instructed.

There was a moment of silence between the two men in which the whirring sound of the Wyro and the glugging of the liquid in the tubes filled the space.

“I’ve got that feeling I get sometimes,” Merganzer said. He was often capable of two expressions at once, and such was the case as he looked at his oldest friend.

“I can’t tell if you’re confused or concerned,” Mr. Powell said, seeing both confusion and concern on Merganzer’s face.

“I am both, which is not a happy combination. We must be careful as we near the end. We wouldn’t want everything I’ve created to fall into the wrong hands.”

Powell agreed, nodding, that it would be a great tragedy if the wrong person were put in charge of such important assets. But there was nothing to be done about it. If Powell knew one thing for sure, it was that Merganzer D. Whippet had his own methods for placing people in positions of power within his empire. He alone had the authority to take such risks, because he alone had masterminded the whole lot of it.

Powell wished it weren’t true, but with all the worldwide plans they had before them, they had to put
someone
in charge. If Merganzer wanted to make a game of who was to hold the post, so be it. It was a gamble Powell would have to accept whether he liked it or not.

While Merganzer was busy at work in the field of wacky inventions, Leo was staring at a hazy version of himself. He stood before a wall, but it was no ordinary wall, for this one was made of mirrored glass. A thick blanket of fog swirled in the air all around him, drifting on an aimless wind.

“Merganzer, where do you get your ideas?” Leo marveled, because the wall before him was one of many such walls in the hidden floor of the Foxtrot Hotel. There were, in fact, hundreds of them. They created a labyrinth of mirrors where six different people were trapped like rats in an ever-reflecting maze.

“Remi! Lucy! Alfred!” Leo yelled, but it was no use. The fog swallowed up all the names he was saying, and everything he heard seemed far off in the distance. Voices bounced off mirrored walls, but the fog was like a sponge soaking up water: It devoured every sound, turning the whole floor into a dull roar of muted voices.

There was only one thing to be done, and that was to walk. But Leo was a very smart boy. Not only had he known how important a roll of duct tape was, and gone back to get it when it might have been lost forever, he knew he’d come upon a moment
made
for duct tape. As the fog churned all around him, he stuck the end of the roll of tape onto the mirror where he stood. Only then did he begin walking, unrolling the tape with a loud screeching sound with each step he took.

“I hope I don’t get into any trouble for duct taping this mirror maze,” Leo said out loud. “At least it’s silver duct tape. It matches.”

Leo glanced behind him and saw that his footsteps left a mark in the fog, like stepping into whipped cream. The footsteps stayed there for a few seconds, then they were eaten up by a rolling mist.

“Cool,” Leo said.

He turned a corner, then another, then went down a long straight hall of mirrors until he arrived at a dead end. He ripped the tape from the roll and knew he’d need to turn back.

“Crumb,” Leo said. He thought he could hear Remi’s voice clearer now, and Lucy’s, too. But they still sounded like they were calling from a distant shore.

“What’s this?” Leo asked himself, spying something hidden in the swirling fog. He waved his hands back and forth, kneeling on the floor, and found a pile of yellow wooden blocks. Each of the blocks had a letter on one side.

“I think I better take these,” Leo said, gathering all six blocks into his hands and putting them in the big front pocket of his maintenance overalls. He backtracked, following the eye-level silver line he’d already made on the mirror. When he arrived at a fork in the maze, he took out a black Sharpie and started writing on the tape:
don’t go that way (arrow), do go this way (arrow).
Then he started taping again. In this way Leo
eventually bumped into Lucy, who was very excited to see him. She had also been taping and marking.

“Great minds think alike, I guess,” she said, snapping the top back onto her pen with a smile.

“Have you seen anyone else?” Leo asked.

“Nope. I think they’re all heading for the middle just like us, but from different parts of the floor.”

Leo had noticed that the halls of mirrors were getting shorter and narrower as he went, but it hadn’t occurred to him that it might be because he was getting closer to the center of the hotel.

“Did you find any of these?” Lucy asked. She held up a blue letter block, like the ones Leo had found.

“Yeah, I found a bunch of them —” He pulled them out of his pockets and held them in his cupped hands. “But mine are yellow.”

Leo had six, two each of the letters
U
,
Y
, and
O
.

“I found seven,” she said, looking more carefully at Leo’s. “I have one weird block in my set. It has a
2x
on it. What do you think it means?”

“I bet it’s a multiplier. It must mean Merganzer wants us to see your letters as two of each, like mine.”

Leo examined Lucy’s up close and saw that she had the letters
M
,
E
,
R
,
T
,
H
,
O
, and an extra
E
.

“Phil almost got out of my pocket about ten minutes ago,” Lucy said as the little dinosaur’s head popped
out for a look around. “I might have never found him again in this fog.”

The idea of a little dinosaur running around in a foggy maze of mirrors struck Leo as the kind of trouble that one wanted to avoid at all cost on a Merganzer D. Whippet adventure.

“Better keep a close eye on him,” Leo said as they started off together. Through the use of duct tape as a sort of bread crumb trail, Lucy and Leo had come a lot farther in the maze than anyone else had. If they could have popped the top off the floor and floated far above, they would have seen that Remi, Alfred, Mr. Pilf, and Miss Sheezley were much closer to the outside edges of the hotel. In fact, Leo and Lucy turned one more corner and found themselves staring at a wall of swirling fog.

“It looks like we’ve arrived,” Lucy said.

“What do you suppose is beyond the fog?” Leo asked. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

“Only one way to find out,” Lucy said, and she stuck her head through the fog. Leo couldn’t see past her shoulders anymore. It reminded him of the headless horseman, which made him nervous, so he grabbed Lucy by her maintenance overalls and pulled her back. When he did, Phil fell out of Lucy’s pocket and disappeared into the whirling mist.

“What did you do that for?!” Lucy yelled, then she dove headfirst into the wall of fog, and Leo lost sight of her entirely.

“This is getting superduper, very, totally
weird
,” Leo said. He put his hand through the churning white fog, hoping to feel something on the other side that would tell him what lay hidden there. Instead, he felt like he’d put his hand sideways into a swimming pool. It turned all heavy or weightless or some indescribable combination of both.

“Lucy!” he yelled.

“Come on in!” Lucy yelled back. “Just dive — it’s fine!”

Leo decided he’d rather play it a little safer than diving into a room that felt strange, so he stuck his head in, as Lucy had done. His face felt droopy and slow, and it finally struck him what was inside the room.

“It’s an antigravity chamber,” he said with a smile, because it was something he’d always wanted to step inside of. It was impossible, but then so was a hotel room that was also a working pinball machine. So much of Merganzer D. Whippet’s world seemed
im
possible, but when you believed, it was
possible
. It would have warmed Leo’s heart if he’d known the Wyro, a thing he had retrieved himself, was powering what Merganzer called
the AG chamber
.

“Help me corral Phil,” Lucy said. She was floating around the room trying not to do flips and turns as she looked for Phil. The problem was the wooden blocks, which numbered in the thousands. They were floating everywhere, and even from the door Leo had to push dozens of them aside as they drifted by.