Chapter 5

5 T.EDISON CHARGES INTO MIDVILLE MENLO BASEBALL PARK. "All right! Who knocked this baseball into my lab, broke my roof, and wrecked my experiment?!" Mr. Chimp looks around the baseball diamond and sniffs. No one answers T. Edison because there is no one there. T. Edison walks around the pitcher's mound. "Fresh marks in the dirt," he observes. "Someone was just here." Mr. Chimp knuckle-walks his way into the

visitors' dugout. He picks up a sunflower seed. He looks at it. He pinches it. He smells it. He pops it in his mouth. "Mmmmm," says Mr. Chimp, tasting the salt. T. Edison stomps around the infield, looking for clues. Mr. Chimp cracks the sunflower seed between his top and bottom premolars. He spits out the empty sunflower shell with a satisfying p-tuuu sound.

T. Edison crawls around home plate on his hands and knees. He holds a dirt-covered piece of bubble gum up in the light. "Aha! I can isolate the saliva from this gum, extract the DNA, match it to the DNA of everyone in Midville, and identify the glass- breaker!" Mr. Chimp leans back on the visitors' bench. He picks up another sunflower seed, pops it in his mouth, and shakes his head.

"What?" fumes T. Edison. "Yes, I can! Every living organism has DNA. It is a molecule that carries the instructions for how every organism is formed. It is what every organism uses to reproduce." Mr. Chimp cracks the sunflower seed, this time using his incisors, and signs:

T. Edison smacks his forehead and rants some more. "And as much as I hate to admit it, ninety-eight percent of human DNA is the same as chimpanzee DNA." Mr. Chimp nods. T. Edison shakes the dirty gum at Mr. Chimp. "Stop saying that! If you know so much, why don't you explain how we catch the vandals who wrecked my invention?"

Mr. Chimp spits out the empty shell with another satisfying p-tuuu. He holds up a worn brown baseball glove he found under the bench. He turns the glove around to show T. Edison the name written on the back in big black letters: