Our mother was generally ignorant of our various science experiments. We carried them out in the playroom so she would think we were just playing. Imagine her surprise when she entered the room one Saturday morning, tugging the vacuum cleaner behind her, and ran right into Rubik.
Rubik was our latest creation. It all began when we invented the scale machine, a device that could make our toys much, much bigger or much, much smaller. We had enlarged a Rubik’s cube to 10 times its normal size and did the same for a slate-blue-colored marble. Fortunately, our machine changed the size of objects without changing their mass, so we were able to pick the big objects up easily. We put the giant Rubik’s cube on the floor, yellow face up, and placed the marble on top of it.
“It almost looks like a person!” my brother said.
“What?!” I replied in my usual minimalist style.
“Yeah,” said my brother. “Let’s give him arms and legs. And a face!”
“What?!” I repeated as I experienced a total failure of imagination.
“C’mon, it’ll be fun!”
So we proceeded to make a new friend. We enlarged two crayons for his arms and attached the red one to the blue face of the cube and the blue one to the red face as my brother explained ironic juxtaposition to me. I didn’t really understand anything he was saying but I still thought it was hilarious.
“Now we’ll put some spring into his step,” said my brother as he pulled two slinkies out of the toy box and dropped them into the machine, setting the dial to enlarge - 600%. We attached the über-slinkies to the bottom of the Rubik’s cube and put the unattached ends into two suitably enlarged yellow and orange matchbox cars. “That’s so he can roller skate!” declared my brother.
“Cool,” I said.
“Now for a face,” continued my brother. He rummaged through the closet and found two old dart boards. “Good thing we added a shrink feature to the scale machine!” he said as he fashioned two eyes from the now one-eighth sized dartboards and glued them to the marble. He then decided that a badminton shuttlecock was already the right size for a nose (no scaling required) but the coiled up, red jump rope was a bit large so he shrank it a little and recoiled it to form a round mouth.
As we stepped back to admire our work something happened that we, as junior scientists, could not explain. The marble head began to move back and forth on its own! Then the slinkies moved forward in a shuffling motion resembling a human’s walk! We were astonished... and delighted!
“Hey!” my brother said. “I’m just like Dr. Frankenstein. And you’re just like Igor.”
“No, you are!” I said.
“You are!” he replied and thus started one of those exchanges so common to siblings. When we gave up the argument we just stood for a moment and stared at our creation as he stood in front of us, swaying a bit on his wobbly legs. I took him by his crayon arm and helped him skate to a chair where he plopped down his cube body and let his slinky legs compact until the were the perfect length to just touch the floor.
“Let’s call him Rubik,” I said, demonstrating once again my lack of imagination. My brother agreed. We managed to keep Rubik a secret (he didn’t eat much) until that fateful morning when my mother decided to clean the playroom. My brother, as usual, blamed it all on me.
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