by Bill Nye
But her sympathy wasn’t getting me onto that helicopter. All the excitement and energy drained from my body like water out of a tub. Look, I’ve been abandoned before. Five times, at least; that’s not even counting the first and most important time, since back then I was only an infant. But this stung like an arrow to my heart. I was the one who had thought there was something weird about Anna’s disappearance. I had annoyed everyone until they’d listened. Sure, I’d forgotten to check the e-mail, but I’d made them take this whole thing seriously. And now they were going off to save her. Without me. They were going to be the heroes, while I sat back at the base.
Watching the helicopter lift off would’ve been too painful, so I moped back to our room. I checked my homeschool assignments on the computer for about a minute, then flopped back onto my bed. The stack of Anna’s research papers that Hank had printed for Matt lay on the floor. I hadn’t read them yet. But I was tired of thinking about her. As soon as I laid down and closed my eyes, though, a movie started playing in my brain. I could see Ava spotting Anna’s shelter from the helicopter, and the group of them swooping down to rescue her. There would be tears, cheers, celebration.
I sat up. The stack of papers was taunting me. I wanted to forget all about Anna for a while, but instead I started skimming through the papers. Thankfully it wasn’t just research. There were also articles from magazines, including a few interviews, and it looked like Matt hadn’t even touched these. One had appeared in Popular Science magazine nearly ten years earlier. There was a reference to that meteorite-hunting trip Hank had mentioned. She talked about her education, her theories, her goals. And halfway down the second page of the interview I nearly shouted with surprise. I read her words twice to make sure I wasn’t imagining them.
PS: Were you always interested in extreme life-forms?
AD: My first love was science fiction. Jules Verne in particular. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was my bible.
The interview went on, but that was all I needed. I jumped up and raced to the library. Several grumpy staffers told me to slow down. One of the rugs that had tripped Matt nearly grabbed me as well, but I threw a hand up against the wall for balance and kept running.
The library was small and old-fashioned. Overstuffed shelves lined the walls, and a card catalog cabinet stood in one corner. A few comfortable chairs were arranged in the center of the room. The Facilities Engineer was lounging with a paperback in his lap, filing his fingernails. Did the nail dust land in the book? Did he even care? Over the tops of his thin eyeglasses he glanced at me. “Greetings, Earthling,” he said.
“They have science fiction here, right?” I asked.
He pointed his thumb to a section of the shelves diagonally behind him. “Back there.”
The science-fiction section was huge, and Verne was there in strong numbers. At least ten of his works, in fact. I finger-walked over the spines. Stuck between two thoroughly used copies of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was a thin, leather-bound book with no title. I removed it, and the cover was bare except for two letters in gold. Initials, to be precise. A and D. My heart beat faster.
The notes inside were all in Italian. Even if I had known how to read the language, I’m not sure I could’ve made sense of her jottings. Her handwriting was absolutely horrendous. My third-grade teacher, Mrs. Cuneo, probably would’ve sent me back to kindergarten if she’d caught me writing like that. I flipped through slowly until a large, thick piece of paper, folded over several times, fell to the floor.
“Careful,” the F. E. whispered. Had he been watching me? I glanced at him. He was still reading and filing. I leaned down and partially unfolded the paper. The only sound in the room was the steady, scratchy sanding of fingernails. My heart was thumping. But the sketch in my hands was clearly a map. I couldn’t believe it. Had I actually found it? I slipped the paper back into the notebook, took a copy of the Verne novel, and held it over the notebook.
I was on my way when the F. E. called to me again. “You do have to check that out, you know,” he said.
“Now you’re a librarian?”
“Watch your tone, kid,” he snapped back. “And, yes, in the mornings, I am a librarian, and in the afternoons I’m the Facilities Engineer. Just write the title, your name, and today’s date on that sign-out sheet.”
I dashed out the details, grabbed Twenty Thousand Leagues and the leather journal, and hustled back to the room. Once the door was closed, I spread the drawing out on my bed. The map covered an enormous square roughly one hundred miles on a side. Our location—Ross Island, with McMurdo Station at its southern tip—was penciled in near the lower right corner. The coast of mainland Antarctica started all the way on the right side, about halfway up, then dipped down underneath Ross Island and curved up again to the left and toward the top. I tilted my head. The coast looked kind of like a backward J. And in the spots where ice covered the sea, which was most of the bottom half of the map, Anna had drawn dashed parallel lines.
The mountains of the mainland, part of the Transantarctic range, stretched from the top to the bottom of the map on the left side. The volcano was on the right side, in the middle of Ross Island. And this is where it got interesting. Near the Transantarctic Mountains, along the coast, Anna had drawn a series of circles. She’d sketched them with a fine-tipped green pen and slashed several of them through with a red X. One cluster of markings was between McMurdo and the mainland—no more than five or ten miles from the base. All of these had been x-ed out in red. They must have been the sites she’d explored with Levokin and their team, the ones that she was actually approved to visit. After that, as Levokin explained, she’d snuck away to explore more-distant locations.
The green circles extended up the left side of the page, along the coast, and the red Xs continued until the northernmost spot marked on the map. More than halfway up the coast was a final green circle. I leaned back. That had to be the spot. But if those were the sites she’d been exploring, then there was another problem. The helicopter crew was searching the area east of Ross Island. That meant they were looking in the wrong place.
I stared at the final green circle. Was that where Anna had found the creatures? She probably could have gotten there on a snowmobile, when she ditched Levokin and crew, but now she was on her own. The Mechanical Equipment Center had no record of a missing snowmobile, either, so she didn’t have a vehicle. Was it even possible to travel that far on foot?
I tore a piece of paper from a notebook, then laid it along the bottom of Anna’s map. The notepaper was exactly half as wide, lining up with the fold in the middle of the map. According to Anna’s key, the map represented about one hundred miles on a side. That meant the crease mark, and the width of my notebook paper, was a distance of fifty miles. I folded my paper. The crease in the middle marked out twenty-five miles. Then I folded it twice more, to mark out twelve-and-a-half and six-something. (Give me a break, okay? I didn’t have my calculator with me. And by that I mean Ava.) I wrote out all the distances and aligned the edge of the page with Anna’s circles.
My system wasn’t exact. But each of those circles looked to be roughly ten miles apart. I measured all the way up to the uppermost unmarked circle and added up the distance. But the number was too large. That would be impossible. I checked my math, adding the sum again. And I found the same answer. So if that map was right, then the last site Anna explored was nearly fifty miles north up the coast of Antarctica. Was she really that crazy? Would she really try to march fifty miles through the snow to find more of those creatures?
I sat back. I was desperate to tell someone. But until we confirmed that it was Franklin Golding trying to steal Anna’s discovery, I couldn’t risk it. What if I was wrong and spilled everything to the real villain? All I could do now was wait for the others to return. I ordered a small pepperoni pizza to the room. I drank about fifteen glasses of water. And I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
That was prob
ably the second longest day of my life. The first? The time my foster father Herb took me deer hunting when I was six years old. We went out into the woods before sunrise, climbed up into this tiny wooden house on stilts, and sat there for ten hours looking for deer. I was cold, tired, and cosmically bored. I don’t like the idea of killing a defenseless animal, but by noon I was ready to jump out of that shack and put Bambi in a chokehold if it would get me home a few minutes earlier. Still, Herb wasn’t a bad dad. He’d tried. And I might’ve stuck around with him and Marie if they hadn’t gotten busted for running an online gambling ring.
Anyway, time did move forward, and when the helicopter finally returned, I was so anxious, I dashed outside to meet the group without fully zipping up my Big Red. The cold swept through my few thin layers of clothing and wrapped its frigid hands around my ribs. My nostrils froze solid, and I raced back inside before I even had a chance to wave.
Ava and Matt hurried in first.
“What took you so long?” I asked.
“Long?” Matt said. “We’re back three hours early.”
Ava shook a little as she unzipped her coat. A thin layer of frost had formed around the tops of her eyebrows. “Aren’t you going to ask if we found her?”
“No.”
“Why not?” Matt asked.
“Because I already know you were looking in the wrong place.”
Ava crossed her arms on her chest, striking a thoroughly doubtful pose. “You do?”
Now I lowered my voice to a whisper and patted my chest, where I’d hidden the folded paper. “I found her map.”
Matt nearly choked. “Really?”
“Really.”
Ava’s eyes widened. “Seriously?”
Was it really so hard to believe I’d succeeded? “Yes! I’m serious!”
Another blast of wind screamed through as the door opened again. At the other end of the room, Hank and a handsome blond man stomped their feet on the floor. “That’s Golding, right?” I asked.
“It is,” Matt answered.
For some reason our enemy was wearing a Big Red. “Where’s his orange jacket?” I whispered. “And how was he out there if we saw him here on the video last night?”
“That’s the thing,” Ava said. “He claims he’s been out at the dive site since the day after we got here. And he says he lost his orange jacket right before he left.”
“He’s lying.”
“Or someone’s trying to frame him,” Matt said. “I don’t know if Golding’s our guy anymore, Jack. I mean, how would he have gotten back to the base for one night? Plus he and Hank are basically best friends already.”
“That doesn’t mean he’s innocent. Hank likes anyone who can talk science or engineering.”
“What was that?” Hank asked. “Jack, how are you feeling? Better? You didn’t miss anything. Not a sign of Anna. But Dr. Golding here believes we were looking in the wrong spot.”
“Really?” I asked.
Golding pulled off his gloves and rubbed his face. “She was obsessed with the coastline,” he said. “Right along the mainland, northeast of here.”
“But . . .” My words faded. I didn’t know what to say. Why was he telling us the right place to look?
He rubbed his face again. “I hope she has a good shelter,” he said. “This is going to be a serious storm.” With a quick wave Golding left us, pulling off his Big Red as he walked down the hall.
“Storm?” I asked. “What storm?”
“That’s why we hurried back early,” said Hank. “There’s a massive Herbie coming off the mainland. They’re making everyone within ten miles come back to McMurdo and get inside before nightfall.”
“I know where she is,” I said. Hank listened closely as I described my discovery. “We have to tell the helicopter crew to go back out.”
“The director isn’t going to let anyone off the base,” Hank said. “Not even the search and rescue team. We’re just going to have to hope Anna is prepared.”
“This is crazy!” I said. “We have to help her.”
“Believe me, Jack, I know!” Hank said. “But no one is leaving the base today.”
“She’ll be able to ride it out,” Matt said.
Ava nodded in agreement, as if she were trying to convince herself. “She’s strong.”
An avalanche of ideas and emotions tumbled through my head in the next few instants. Then I took a long, slow breath, forced a smile, and patted my brother on the back. “You’re right, Matt. Ava.”
Hank exhaled. He stared at the floor for a moment, then looked up. He mumbled that he had something to do, then left us without explanation. We started back to our room. Halfway there, Matt grabbed my shoulder. I stopped. “What?” I asked.
“You never admit it when I’m right,” he noted.
Ava shrugged. “It’s true. You don’t.”
Matt swiped some imaginary dust off his shoulder.
“Then you added that weird pat on the back. You never do that, either. What’s going on?”
I paused. I’d been hoping for a little more time to figure out how to sell them my plan.
“Jack?” Ava said. “What is it?”
“Well . . . you see, I was wondering . . . Matt, do you think you can drive one of those trucks we looked at during Happy Camper training? The ones in the Mechanical Equipment Center?”
Matt’s face paled. He looked at me sideways. “Maybe?”
“Good.”
“This is not just a hypothetical question, is it?” Ava asked.
“No, it’s not,” I answered. “We’re not going to leave Anna out there in this storm.”
“We’re not?” Matt asked.
“No,” I said. “We’re going to go get her ourselves.”
12
THE WORST IDEA EVER
My brother and sister spent the next ten minutes detailing why my latest brainchild was dangerous, impossible, foolish, and completely ridiculous. The director would kick us off the continent. We’d be stripped of our status as legal adults. Hank would refuse to work with us again. Min would abandon us. And so on and so on. I sort of listened, but I was also busily building my counterattack. We’d done a unit on persuasive writing in my homeschooling program last year, and the instructor I’d had to video-chat with was always talking about how the key to developing a strong argument is understanding your weak points. In this case, my siblings were right about the logical side of my proposal. There was not much sense to what I’d suggested. So I would appeal to their hearts instead of their heads.
When my turn to talk finally arrived, I asked them both to imagine what it was like to be Anna. Ava had been adjusting one of Fred’s antennas. Tinkering with electronics helps her think, so I asked her to stop. “Really imagine it,” I said.
“Jack, I don’t think—”
“Please, just hear me out. Hands off the robot.”
“Fine.”
“Think about it,” I began. “She’s a maverick. A brave woman struggling to succeed in a field dominated by men. But she keeps pushing. Diving deeper and longer than anyone has ever dared. Yet she still doesn’t find anything. So the doubts start creeping in more and more, like a virus. But she doesn’t give up. She pushes further. She goes farther and farther out into that frozen landscape, searching for undersea creatures. She’s also searching for her soul,” I stared at the floor for a moment. Looking at one of them might break my flow. “Then, long after most sane people would have given up, she finds them. The groundbreaking life forms she’s spent her whole career searching for. Her whole life, in a way, was leading up to this one discovery.” I paused. This piece was for Matt, and I needed it to latch on. “And then someone steals that breakthrough. They steal her creatures. They even dare to steal her computer.” I paused again, shaking my head, letting that particular loss sink in with Ava. “So she races back out into the cold, frozen wasteland to save her reputation, her creatures, maybe even her soul. And does anyone help her? No. Because we’re too af
raid of a little storm.” My intensity was even getting to me now. My voice was rising. My heart was beating faster. “Was Shackleton afraid of bad weather? Was Amundsen? Or Scott? No, they—”
“Jack?” Matt interrupted.
“—they didn’t care about wind and snow. They traveled hundreds of miles across this frigid landscape, and they didn’t have giant warm vehicles or Big Reds! They shot puppies and ate penguin cutlets to survive. They didn’t have modern technology. All they had—”
“Jack, honestly, we—”
“All they had was a powerful mixture of curiosity and courage and—”
“JACK!” Matt shouted.
Ava plunked a pencil eraser off my ear.
A quick glance at the two of them confirmed what I’d suspected. “We’re good?” I asked.
“Yeah, we’re good,” Ava said. “You had me at the stolen computer.”
“And me at the theft of her discovery,” Matt added.
He took the map from my hands and spread it out on the table. I started to explain my measuring system, but he estimated the distance on sight. “About fifty-one miles, I’d say.”
“Exactly,” I said. “We can do it tonight, during the big karaoke contest.”
“All the way up there and back?”
“That’s right. A quick road trip.”
Ava ran her hand along Shelly’s yellow exterior. “Can I bring her?”
“Of course!” I said. “You totally have to test her.”
They were both quiet, staring down at the map. Was that it? Had I convinced them that easily?
Matt backed away. “No, I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all. I’ve never driven more than twenty minutes. Now you want me to drive all night? How am I even supposed to stay awake?”
“I’ll sing,” I suggested.
“What Jack means is that we’ll stay up with you,” Ava promised. “Without singing.”
Matt shook his head rapidly. “The PistenBully is too slow. We’ll never make it there and back in a night.”
“We wouldn’t take a PistenBully,” I said. And I didn’t have to say which vehicle I had in mind.