by Joshua Davis
“What if we just bend the pipe?” Lorenzo said when he came out into the hallway.
“How?” Oscar wanted to know.
“The electric heat gun.”
The electric heat gun was a sort of superpowered blow-dryer. Normally it was used to dry paint, but it got hot enough to make paint peel off a surface. Lorenzo dug it out of a cabinet in the robotics closet, plugged it in, and aimed it at one of the off-angle pipes. He flipped the switch and blasted the pipe with scorching air while Luis put pressure on it. At first nothing happened. Then the PVC weakened and started to bend.
“It’s working,” Lorenzo shouted.
Luis angled the pipe into position, and Lorenzo flipped off the heat gun. In a moment, the PVC hardened into place exactly where it needed to be. The problem was solved.
“That was a pretty good idea,” Oscar said.
“It’s okay,” Lorenzo said. “You can say I’m a genius.”
The boys broke into laughter.
“It needs a name,” Lorenzo said.
Oscar remembered Lorenzo’s choking on the glue fumes and suggested, “Why don’t we call it Stinky?”
BY THE SUMMER of 2004, Tina Lowe had been working at Scuba Sciences at Seventh and Sheridan for seven years. The building contained a store that sold scuba gear and, in the back, a forty-by-twenty-four-foot saltwater swimming pool. Over the years, Lowe had seen yuppies training for dive vacations in the tropics, ocean lovers trapped in the desert, and kids from nearby Brophy, an elite private school that charged eighty-seven hundred dollars a year in tuition and offered lacrosse and ice-hockey teams. The Carl Hayden robotics team was something different.
“Thank you for allowing us to use the pool,” Oscar said in a crisp, almost formal manner when the team arrived rolling Stinky on a cart.
“My pleasure,” Lowe said, amazed by the unusual crew filing into her facility. Luis looked like the Incredible Hulk, Cristian resembled a Mexican Bill Gates, and Lorenzo was like a mash-up of Jon Bon Jovi and a homeless kid. Michael Hanck, the skinny white kid who had designed the pumpkin-hurling trebuchet, was there too to help pilot the robot. They were supervised by an Iranian American former running coach and a white-bearded quasi-hippie. She’d never seen such a strange group walk into her scuba school.
It took them about an hour to lay out their gear. They had two battered cathode-ray-tube monitors scavenged from a dusty school district storeroom and four videogame joysticks from Radio Shack. They attached the tether, connecting the monitors to the robot’s electronics. When they plugged everything in and turned the power on, the monitors filled with warbly images from the robot’s twenty-seven-dollar black-and-white cameras. They jiggled the joysticks, and the propellers made a nice whirring noise. Stinky was coming to life.
Cristian was in charge of the joystick that controlled up and down movements. Hanck had the two joysticks that moved the robot forward, backward, left, and right, but the team hadn’t seen much of him recently. He had struggled in school and had to enroll in summer classes. Fredi and Allan had told him that he couldn’t be on the team if he dropped below a B average in his classes. As Lorenzo could attest, the rules applied to everyone.
Lorenzo manned the sensor controls. He liked to pretend he was activating the hydraulics on a tricked-out low-rider when he “hit the switches.” He was responsible for the claw, the cameras, and his water-sampling pump. He did a final check on the instrumentation and gave a thumbs-up: “I’m good.”
“Don’t grab the pipes leading into the briefcase,” Oscar warned Luis. He was worried that any pressure could create a leak. The robot resembled a twisted knot of white pipes, so it was hard to see which tube led where. Luis gingerly dipped his thick hands into the guts of the machine and hefted Stinky into the air. Oscar pulled his shirt off and slipped into the water. Stinky touched the water for the first time and drifted on the surface. It floated nicely.
“Stinky’s baptized!” Lorenzo shouted.
Oscar grabbed hold of the robot and pulled down, but it wouldn’t sink. It just bobbed around like a cork. Luis tried shoving down from the edge; Stinky refused to sink. It was as if it didn’t want to be an underwater robot.
There was too much air inside Stinky’s pipes. The team had tied on a couple of capped pipes to provide extra buoyancy, but they clearly didn’t need the extra lift, so they removed one. Stinky still floated. They took off the second pipe and Stinky plummeted to the bottom of the pool. Lorenzo found a narrower piece of PVC, capped the ends so that air was trapped inside, and affixed that to the robot. It worked: Stinky became neutrally buoyant, hovering at whatever depth it was placed at.
Their buoyancy problems weren’t over though. Stinky hovered, but it tilted forward like someone leaning into a headwind. Activating the propellers would zoom it deeper. They needed something to lift Stinky’s nose up.
Lorenzo pulled an empty bottle of St. Ives sunscreen out of a trash can by the pool. “What about this?”
“Garbage?” Oscar asked.
“It’s got air inside.”
“True.” Oscar shrugged. They weren’t going for style points.
Lorenzo zip tied the sunscreen bottle to the front of the robot and they lowered Stinky back into the water. This time, Stinky hovered perfectly upright. Oscar grabbed a Hula-Hoop that was leaning against a wall beside the pool. Scuba students learned to swim through them. Now it was Stinky’s turn.
“See if you can drive through it,” Oscar told Cristian and Hanck.
Hanck pressed forward on the controls while Cristian made Stinky dive. The robot zoomed forward, speeding through the hoops at high speed. They watched it zip through the circle on the monitors.
“That was badass,” Lorenzo muttered beside them.
Cristian and Hanck stayed focused. The robot’s tether was now threaded through the hoop. They turned the robot around and tried to go back through in order to pull the tether out. It was hard to drive though. Cristian tried to move the robot up in the water, but Stinky began to spin erratically. Hanck tried to steer to the left and the robot turned suddenly toward the wall of the pool.
“Watch out!” Oscar shouted.
Stinky slammed into the wall with a resounding thud.
“Can’t you see where you’re going?” Fredi shouted.
“Not really,” Cristian explained. The walls of the pool were white and hard to make out via the video feed.
“If you hit too hard, you’ll crack the PVC,” Fredi told the students. “You’ve got to be more careful.”
Cristian and Hanck tried piloting the ROV through the hoop again. Just before they reached it, the robot veered off as if it had a mind of its own and collided with the wall a second time. Stinky floated to the surface. Its electronics stopped responding.
“This is good, this is good,” Oscar said, buying himself a few seconds to come up with a positive spin. They had only two weeks until the competition and he wanted everyone energized. “Did you see how hard it hit the wall? This thing’s got power. Once we figure out how to drive it, we’ll be the fastest team there.”
BACK IN THE ROBOTICS CLOSET, Cristian reexamined every single connection inside the briefcase. Some of the short PWM cables connecting the joystick to the ROV controller had been damaged and caused the robot to behave erratically during its pool test. They had gotten the wires off the robot they’d taken to Atlanta and repurposed them for Stinky. That saved some money but also meant they were dealing with recycled cables. The only other PWM wires they had were eight feet long. It wasn’t ideal—the unneeded length would clutter the cramped briefcase—but it was the best they could do. Cristian coiled the long wire inside the case and made the connections. When he powered the system on again, the joysticks seemed to work fine.
“We also need to change the acceleration curve,” Cristian said. The slightest touch on the joystick sent Stinky flying. That needed to be corrected, so Cristian worked with Allan to reprogram the ROV’s software.
Lorenzo couldn’t progr
am, but he knew for sure that the robot was aesthetically challenged. The blue glue had dripped down the joints, leaving messy blue streaks across the robot’s white plastic framing. It looked as if the machine were bleeding blue blood from every orifice.
“This robot is ugly as hell,” he concluded.
Lorenzo decided to solve two problems at once by giving Stinky a makeover. He pulled red, blue, and yellow paint out of a cupboard in the robotics closet and set to work. He applied red paint to any section that Luis should avoid grabbing: the tubes leading into the briefcase and the delicate camera housings. He painted the ROV’s corners yellow so they could better see the outline of the robot underwater. He colored the rest blue and told Luis to only grab the blue parts.
“Okay,” Luis said simply.
* * *
A week later, they returned to Scuba Sciences. The competition was seven days away. Lowe was accustomed to teenage boys who talked about chasing girls and playing video games. These kids were fully focused on their robot. The lingo—acceleration curves and pulse-width modulation—sounded like a foreign language.
“What’s your girlfriend think about this?” she asked Oscar.
Oscar looked at his feet. “I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“Good,” Lowe said. “This is more important for you right now.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Oscar said, trying not to blush.
In comparison to their first pool test, this second session was a success. Cristian and Hanck steered clear of the walls, and Stinky responded better to the joystick. The robot also took accurate depth measurements, the mechanical claw retrieved a piece of PVC pipe, and they deployed the tape measure. Oscar put together a list of all the tasks and ranked them based on importance and feasibility. The easiest ones with the highest points would get done first. He got a clipboard and barked orders like the captain of a ship.
After watching the team practice all the maneuvers they would have to do in the contest, Oscar placed Lorenzo’s liquid sampling at the bottom of his feasibility list. The small, copper suction pipe was too hard to position. During the competition, they would have to insert the pipe into a half-inch hole. They tried practicing with a piece of three-quarter-inch PVC tube, but they couldn’t get the copper pipe into the larger-diameter hole. The pump system functioned, however, and could suck up five hundred milliliters of water in twenty seconds. Stinky just couldn’t make precise movements. That task seemed hopeless.
It didn’t really matter though. Stinky zipped around the pool with ease. Fredi got in the pool, grabbed on to the robot, and got dragged through the water. The trolling motors were small but powerful. Hanck and Cristian worked well together, and over their two sessions driving the robot, they learned how to steer in tandem. They were all starting to feel a touch of confidence.
So it was a shock when, the day before their departure, Fredi and Allan announced that Hanck wouldn’t be coming to Santa Barbara. They had told him he needed at least a B in summer school to travel to Santa Barbara, and he had slipped below that. As a result, he wouldn’t be allowed to compete. The team had less than twenty-four hours until their departure, and they had just lost one of their two drivers.
They were gathered around the narrow table in the robotics closet. The fumes had dissipated so it wasn’t toxic to hang out in the room anymore, but the mood was grim. Cristian couldn’t drive the robot by himself because there were three joysticks. He didn’t have enough hands. Lorenzo had already figured out how to operate all the sensors, and Luis was needed by the edge of the pool to manage the tether and lift the robot. There was only one choice.
“I’ll figure it out and we’ll be fine,” Oscar said. He sounded confident, but he knew it was a setback.
Fredi called Lowe and asked if the pool was available for another practice session. Classes were booked, but she agreed to give them as much time as she could between sessions. They packed up Stinky, raced over to Seventh Avenue, and started setting up while scuba-diving students emerged dripping from the pool and plodded past.
“Okay, you’ve got forty-five minutes till the next class,” Lowe told them.
Luis lowered Stinky into the water, and Oscar grabbed the two joysticks that controlled the robot’s horizontal movements. “Since we changed the acceleration algorithm, you can push the joystick forward a bit and it won’t take off,” Cristian coached him. Oscar tapped the joystick, and Stinky responded by cruising forward into a wall. They could hear the deep thud of the impact.
“Slow down,” Cristian said worriedly.
Oscar eased Stinky forward while Cristian pressed his joystick forward, causing the robot to descend. “Let’s try tilting forward,” Cristian said. To pick up objects, they had to be able to tilt and inch forward. Cristian gave the robot a quick hit of upward acceleration, tilting the whole bot forward. Oscar juiced the controls but gave it too much power. Stinky nearly did a somersault.
“That’s too much,” Cristian chided.
“I know,” Oscar snapped. It wasn’t easy.
“Let’s just try cruising around.”
They did a number of laps around the pool, and Oscar was able to avoid the walls. Right when he felt he might be getting the hang of it, Lowe walked out into the pool area. “I’m afraid that’s all the time I can give you.”
THE TEAM MEMBERS were due to gather at the Carl Hayden parking lot at 4:00 a.m. on Thursday, June 24, 2004. It was dark out when everyone arrived, and the roads were nearly empty. Allan and Fredi unlocked the Marine Science building while Oscar, Luis, and Cristian waited. Oscar looked at his watch. It was four and Lorenzo wasn’t there.
In the eight months since Lorenzo had missed the pumpkin-hurling event, he’d become surprisingly dependable. If the team had a meeting after school, he was always there. When Fredi told him he had to improve his grades, he studied hard and managed to raise his geometry grade from an F to a B+. He had sworn that he’d never be late again, and the team now trusted him. They couldn’t do this without him, so his absence now worried everybody.
“There he is,” Oscar said with relief as Lorenzo jogged up.
“You can all relax because I’m here now,” Lorenzo said, holding his arms up as if he were a soccer player who’d just scored a goal.
“Last thing I’m going to do is relax,” Oscar said. “Particularly with you around.”
* * *
They started hauling everything they would need out of the robotics closet: toolboxes, the two video monitors, and Stinky. Sam Alexander, a marine science teacher at Carl Hayden, pitched in. He was coming along to help chaperone. They loaded up a cart and rolled the heavy stuff to the school van, a beige 1993 Ford Econoline. Stinky wasn’t going to be traveling in style. They hefted the robot into the back and slammed the door.
Oscar and Luis piled into the cramped cab of Fredi’s 1989 Silverado truck. Since they had graduated, they couldn’t ride in a school vehicle, which was fine by them. The van was jammed with equipment, and they were happy to miss Lorenzo’s running commentary on everything he saw out the window.
Unfortunately, Allan had provided each vehicle with a portable ham radio and taught Lorenzo how to operate it. “Wassup wassup?” Lorenzo’s voice crackled over the radio as they got onto Interstate 10 and headed west. Oscar groaned.
Allan told Lorenzo to keep it to essential communications. They had a seven-hour drive ahead of them and needed to conserve the batteries. Plus, their time would be better spent reviewing their engineering presentation. Nearly half of the points in the contest were based on how well they were able to defend their ideas in front of a panel of professional engineers and ROV experts from NASA and the Navy. Each of them had to be ready to answer any question.
“What’s a PWM cable?” Allan asked.
“PWM,” Lorenzo replied automatically. “Pulse-width modulation. Esto controls analog circuits with digital output.”
“You think Luis has it down?” Allan asked. Luis rarely said much of anything, so it was hard to tell what
he knew.
“That’s an essential communication,” Lorenzo said, picking up the radio and depressing the talk button. “Wassup, wassup?”
“Can you be serious?” Cristian demanded.
“I am serious.” Lorenzo fired off, “Yo, Luis, what’s the index of refraction?”
Oscar and Luis looked at each other in Fredi’s car. “Do you know it?” Oscar asked.
“Uhhh…” Luis wasn’t totally sure, but he thought he knew. In a moment, Lorenzo’s radio rumbled with Luis’s voice: “It’s about light and water. About how fast light goes through water.”
“That’s right,” Cristian said. “Ask him what the number is.”
Lorenzo radioed the request. Luis didn’t know, so they started drilling each other over the radio. The Sonoran Desert airwaves filled with questions about spike relays, underwater-camera housings, and transmitter frequencies. They went back and forth until they crossed the California border. Outside, in the fields around the town of Blythe, laborers picked watermelons in the hundred-degree heat.
Lorenzo fell silent. His family was still struggling to avoid eviction. The Realtor they had appealed to for help had paid off their overdue mortgage payments in exchange for the deed to the property. They were now renting the house back from the guy, but it was a precarious situation. It seemed they may have only gotten into more trouble. Lorenzo worried that he could come home to find out he was homeless. There was a real chance that he’d end up picking in the fields like the people he was looking at now. This four-day trip could be his last chance to experience what it felt like to do something other than manual labor.
THREE
THE TEAM ROLLED into Santa Barbara in the afternoon and wended their way onto the UCSB campus. A low-hanging cloud layer had built up on the ocean and drifted over the area, covering the school in a blanket of gray. It was classic June gloom, a late-spring, early-summer Southern California phenomenon. The overcast skies didn’t bother Lorenzo. He caught intermittent glimpses of the Pacific and was enthralled. It was the first time he’d seen the ocean.