Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Gets Slimed! (10 page)

“Excellent idea!” Ben exclaimed.

It took us only a few minutes to transport all our mold experiments upstairs and get the steam bath going. Once my mom's bathroom was nice and steamy, I shut off the water and shut the door behind us. “All right, then,” I said when we were back downstairs. “This is a good start. But the best part of our mold project is yet to come.”

“Better than spraying water on everything?” Ben asked.

“A hundred times better,” I told him. “A million billion times better.”

Ben's eyes got wide. “What is it?”

“I think you better plan on spending the night,” I told him. “Because in the morning we're going on a slime hunt.”

The amazing thing to me about science is that it is everywhere.

It is a lot like mold in that way.

I mean, look around you. There is dirt, water, and air. There is the sun and gravity. There are chemical reactions happening all over the place. Baking cookies is a scientific activity. Pour a little vinegar on some baking soda, and you get an explosion.

I mean, how cool is that?

And if you're reading a great book about slime mold, and you get all excited and start wishing like anything you could see some slime mold for yourself, you don't have to book the next flight to Australia. You can go out to the woods behind your house and find your very own slime mold right where you live.

This idea is more exciting to some people than to others.

“You're going out to the woods to do what?” Sarah Fortemeyer asked Saturday morning when me and Ben announced we were off on an important scientific expedition.

“To find some slime molds,” I told her again.

“The slimiest slime molds that ever lived,” Ben added.

“And this is something that would be okay with your mom?”

“My mom understands the importance of scientific discovery,” I said. I wasn't really making that up, either. It's true my mom doesn't like messes, and she pretty much hates frogs and almost any kind of insect you can think of. She has no appreciation for smelly stuff. I've asked for a chemistry set for every birthday and Christmas for the last three years, but so far her answer has been a big fat N-O. In general, she doesn't like me doing anything that has the potential to mess up her carpet or burn down the house.

But she takes me to the science museum downtown every other Sunday afternoon and whenever they open a new exhibit, and even though she complains
about the mess I make when I start a new scientific project, she never says I can't do it.

It's possible that in secret my mom kind of wishes she were a scientist herself.

The woods behind my house would not appear to be the best woods in the world for scientific research, but even the smallest ecosystem is filled with surprises.

“Look for rotten stuff,” I told Ben as we walked through my backyard. “Tree bark on the ground. Wet, rotted wood. Dead leaves.”

It hardly took any time at all to find a nice slab of yellow slime mold growing on a chunk of wet pine bark.

“It looks like somebody threw up,” Ben observed.

“Pretty cool, huh?”

“The coolest,” Ben said.

“Here's my idea,” I said as I carefully put the bark in a large bread bag. “We get a couple of these babies and we have a slime mold race. Keep track of which slime is sliming the fastest, that sort of thing.”

“You know, this is giving me a great idea for a new comic book,” Ben said, handing me another piece of slimy bark.
“Slime Man—‘Don't
Look Now, But You're About to Get Slimed!'”

Don't ever let anyone tell you science does not get the creative juices flowing.

The last thing we did was collect
some slime-free bark. The night before I'd read about an experiment where you could make your own slime mold in a plastic container. I could hardly get to sleep thinking about it—I could grow slime mold in my very own room.

All you have to do to grow your own slime mold is put a piece of paper towel in a plastic container, place some bark on top, cover the bark with water, and cover the container with plastic. Next day you dump out the water and re-cover the container. You have to wait a few weeks, but eventually you'll have slime mold growing in your room, your bathroom, on top of your TV, wherever you feel like.

By the end of the morning we had everything we needed for the start of an excellent mold museum, if not an entire mold empire.

Now all I had to do was everything else. Come up with a speech for Ben and pound out my overdue book report. After Ben left, I went up to my room to get to work. Just as I was about to write the first line of the speech—something brilliant, like “Hello, my name is Ben Robbins, and I am running for president of Mrs. Tuttle's fourth-grade class”—there was a knock on my door.

Just what I needed, a visit from Sarah Fortemeyer, Teenage Girl Space Alien. “Go away, I'm busy!” I yelled.

“I've got something I think you'll want to see,” Sarah singsonged through my closed door.

“I doubt it,” I said. She was probably just dying to show me her whole collection of fingernail polish, a million bottles of Dust Bowl Orange and Atomic Raygun
Red, Putrid Pink Peonies and Wilted Wildflowers.

Actually, for nail polish, that stuff didn't sound so bad.

It's when they call it Purple Passionflower that a scientist has got to keep his guard up.

“I mean it, Mac,” Sarah said. “You won't believe what I found.”

She'd probably gone through my mom's bottom dresser drawer, the one where my mom keeps scarves and feathery and furry things. It's the stuff she puts on when she's going out for a big night with Lyle and wants to look like somebody no one around this house even recognizes. It's sort of scary.

But not as scary as that stuff would look on Sarah Fortemeyer.

“I'm doing my homework,” I told her,
still not opening the door. In fact, I was wondering if there was a quick way of barricading my room so that I would be safe until my mom and Lyle got home.

Too late. The doorknob turned. I stared at the wall in front of me, determined not to turn around and look. I was pretty sure seeing Sarah Fortemeyer in one of my mom's weird boa things would stunt my growth.

For life.

“Look,” Sarah said. She walked across the room to my desk and shoved her hand under my eyes, which I immediately closed. “I found twelve of them. There were a whole bunch out by the swing set.”

Slowly, very slowly, I opened my eyes. In Sarah's hand were twelve dried-up worm carcasses. One of them was
almost torn in two, so it didn't count, but the others were in pristine condition.

“You found these by the swing set?” I asked her.

“Yeah,” she said, dumping the worms on my notebook. “You know, where your mom threw out all those worms last year? The ones you gave her for … oh. Sorry. I bet most of them are just fine, though. I mean, there were hundreds of those suckers when she dumped them. So if I only found twelve, the rest are probably still just dandy, Andy.”

I nodded. And felt like a dupe. Why hadn't I ever thought of looking by the swing set? It was a brilliant, maybe even a genius, idea.

I looked up at Sarah Fortemeyer with new respect. Well, I almost did. But just as I was about to communicate my
scientific regard for her worm geniosity, I noticed she was wearing pink and purple feather earrings, two per ear.

There are not enough dried worms on the face of the Earth to make up for that.