Five Hundred Little Noes

The beetle exhibit was supposed to open in forty minutes, and the model had already burst twice.

Not exploded. Burst. There was a difference, and Soren had written it down.

The clear plastic tube lay on the floor of the museum workshop like a dead noodle. A puddle spread under the table. The exhibit engineer wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist and left a stripe of blue paint there.

"It only has to work for opening day," she said. "One big whoosh. Children love a whoosh. Then I can rebuild it properly tonight. Probably. If the aquarium pump stops sulking."

Maya crouched beside the cracked tube. "It hated the whoosh."

"Tubes don't hate," said the engineer. "They fail. Usually in front of donors."

Soren touched the torn edge, then looked at the beetle tank on the next table. Inside, three dark beetles crawled over bark chips under a warm lamp. They were small enough to disappear under a leaf. Next to them, a sign waited on its stand.

The sign said: Bombardier beetles store two chemicals in separate chambers. When threatened, they mix them in a reaction chamber. The reaction heats to near one hundred degrees Celsius and blasts a spray at the attacker. The spray comes in pulses up to five hundred times each second.

Soren had read the sign twelve times. It still sounded impossible. A boiling defense inside a body smaller than his thumb, and not one blast, but hundreds.

The exhibit engineer picked up another tube. "We will lower the pressure. Less dramatic, but less swampy."

"Then it will be wrong," Maya said.

The engineer blinked at her.

Maya pointed at the broken tube. "You keep making one big thing. The sign says little things. Fast little things."

"Visitors cannot see five hundred anything per second," the engineer said. "They will see one misty squirt and go home happy."

"I won't," said Soren.

The engineer looked at him, then at the clock, then at the spreading puddle. "You may be my least convenient audience."

She went to hunt for towels.

Maya stood on tiptoe to look into the model. It was a glass beetle as long as her forearm, with two colored reservoirs feeding a tiny clear chamber and a nozzle at the back end. The colored water was only colored water. The heat came from a safe warmer under the table. The blast came from an aquarium pump.

Soren picked up the pump and pressed the test button. The motor hummed. Water jumped in one steady push through the tube until the crack spat drops onto his shoes.

"Again," said Maya.

"It leaks."

"The sound."

Soren pressed the button again. Hummmmm. A smooth, bored sound. Like a refrigerator thinking about lunch.

Maya went to the real beetle tank. Beside it was a small speaker mounted under a button that said, Hear the beetle's defense slowed down. She pressed it.

The sound that came out was not a whoosh.

It was a rough wooden rattle, a machine-gun purr, a zipper pulled through gravel. Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop, but so close together the pops became a note with teeth.

Soren's hand tightened around the pump. "That's not one thing."

"It's a lot of no," Maya said.

He pressed the model pump again. Hummmmm.

She pressed the beetle recording. Brrrrrrrp.

The workshop changed size around them. The clock ticked once. Inside that one tick, the beetle could have fired hundreds of bursts, each one made, heated, pushed out, stopped, made again. One second was not a second anymore. It was a room packed wall to wall with tiny doors opening and slamming shut.

Soren set the pump down carefully.

"If it doesn't stop," he said, "the pressure stays in the tube."

Maya nodded fast. "So don't make it brave. Make it blink."

"Water doesn't blink."

"Air does if you hit it."

Soren looked around the table. Aquarium pump. Warm water. Plastic nozzle. Spare wires. A small speaker from the broken frog-call display, its cone exposed, with a label that said, Do not discard unless you enjoy silence.

The engineer returned with towels under one arm and a sandwich in her mouth.

Soren pointed to the speaker. "Can we use that?"

"For what?"

"For making pressure in pulses."

The engineer took the sandwich out of her mouth. "That speaker plays frog noises. Badly."

"It moves air," said Soren.

"At sound frequencies," said the engineer.

Maya smiled. "Exactly."

The engineer looked at the clock again. Her face did several calculations and disliked all of them. "Low voltage only. No real chemicals. No heating above the approved setting. No opening the beetle tank. If you flood the donor plaque, I never met you."

Then she dropped the towels on the puddle and ran to answer someone shouting from the hall.

Soren turned the frog speaker over. The cone shivered when he touched the wires to the test box. Thup. Thup. Thup.

"Too slow," Maya said.

Soren turned the dial on the sound board. The thups hurried. Thupthupthup. Then a buzz. Then a steady note that made the water in the cracked tube tremble.

"Five hundred," Soren said, reading the small screen. "If the display is right."

"If it isn't, it is close enough to be interesting," Maya said.

"Close enough is not my favorite place."

"It's not a place. It's a bridge."

They taped a new tube from the warm water reservoir to the nozzle. They set the speaker against a small air chamber behind it, so the cone would shove and release the air instead of forcing one long push. Soren added a one-way valve from the spare aquarium parts. Maya held the tube up to the light and saw the first bubble line up like a pearl waiting to be chosen.

"Test," said Soren.

He pressed the button.

Nothing came out.

The speaker buzzed. The reservoir burped. The nozzle coughed once and spat on Maya's sleeve.

"Rude," she said.

Soren pulled the tube off. "The valve is backward."

"How do you know?"

"Because the part that should be wrong is behaving too right. It is blocking everything."

He flipped it. Maya retaped the joint before he could ask for tape.

The engineer called from the doorway, "Please tell me the beetle is becoming educational."

"Not yet," said Maya.

"Honest answer. Horrifying."

She vanished again.

Soren pressed the button.

This time the nozzle did not whoosh.

It stitched.

A thin silver thread leaped out in broken pieces too fast to count. It struck the clear shield in a tight oval. Not a splash. Not a fog. A chain of tiny impacts, close together, separate if you knew to look. The model made the beetle sound, not perfectly, not alive, but close enough that the hair on Soren's arms lifted.

Maya leaned so near the shield her breath clouded the plastic. "Again."

Soren pressed the button again.

Brrrrrrrp.

The oval on the shield darkened dot by dot. The dots overlapped until they became a mark, but at the edge Soren could see them, a border made of little arrivals. The brokenness was the shape.

The exhibit engineer came back carrying a roll of labels and stopped walking.

"Oh," she said.

No one said anything for a moment. The model buzzed softly as the speaker cone settled.

The engineer set the labels down. "Visitors will think it is broken."

"Only until they hear the beetle," said Soren.

Maya pressed the recording button.

Brrrrrrrp.

Soren pressed the model button.

Brrrrrrrp.

The two sounds met in the workshop, one from a living beetle no bigger than a coin, one from wires and water and a rescued frog speaker. They were not the same. That made it better. The real one had chemistry in it. Heat. Oxygen. A chamber that took separate quiet liquids and made boiling refusal, five hundred times in the space where people usually heard one moment.

The engineer picked up the sign and stared at the last line. "I wrote that sentence," she said slowly. "I don't think I believed it."

"We need a strobe," Maya said.

"Of course we do," said the engineer. "Why would opening day remain simple?"

There was a strobe in the hummingbird wing display. There was always something useful in a museum if a person was willing to be a little rude to a different exhibit. The engineer fetched it muttering apologies to birds.

Soren set the strobe to flicker just out of step with the buzz. Maya dimmed the workshop lights. The model sat in the sudden blue-white flashing like a beetle from the moon.

"Ready," said Soren.

Maya pressed the button.

The silver thread broke open.

In the flashing light, the stream was not a stream at all. It became beads hanging in the air, each one separated from the next, each one on its way to the shield. A necklace fired from a tiny cannon. A row of boiling seconds made visible with safe warm water and light.

The engineer whispered something that might have been a deadline and might have been a prayer.

Visitors began gathering beyond the glass doors. Shoes squeaked. Someone laughed. A small hand slapped the outside of the exhibit hall window.

The engineer straightened the sign with both hands. "You two," she said, "stand by the button. If anyone asks, the beetle is not a flamethrower."

"It's a drummer," said Maya.

"It's a valve problem with chemistry," said Soren.

Maya grinned at him. "Also a drummer."

The hall doors opened.

The first group poured in, bright jackets and wet sneakers and faces turned toward the giant glass beetle. The engineer began her welcome too quickly, as if words could trip over each other and still arrive.

Maya waited until the faces were close to the shield.

Soren set the strobe.

Maya pressed the button.

In the white flashes, five hundred droplets crossed the dark.