Jack and the Geniuses

by Bill Nye

  16

  WORLD OF WONDERS

  My brother had just spent the last few days in a scientific paradise meeting with some of the brightest minds in the world. He had solved a biological puzzle that had stumped Hank—figuring out the importance of Anna’s creatures. He’d road-tested a pair of mechanical legs, without their inventor’s permission, and quite possibly saved all our lives. But the highlight of his time at the South Pole may have been driving the Rambler. Once the director was gone, Hank declared that he didn’t feel like taking the wheel, and Matt begged the others to let him drive. Now, as we plowed through the snow, he leaned so far forward, he nearly had his forehead pressed against the windshield, and his smile looked like it might be permanent.

  The worst of the storm struck an hour after we watched Danno and the director ride away, leaving a miniature blizzard in their wake. The wind tore down from the Transantarctic Mountains, slamming the side of the Rambler like some angry old mountain god trying to knock us onto our side. Yet the vehicle kept slowly grinding onward—warm, loud, and beautifully dry. The weather was not going to stop us, and since we’d grabbed our supplies and equipment from the Snowgoer and stashed them in the back, we were prepared for just about anything.

  The warmth was slowly seeping through me. My feet and ankles were still burning from the cold, but I could feel the Rambler’s tracked wheels crunching over the snow below through the thick fleece socks Ava had lent me. Both she and Levokin had nodded off to sleep. Hank sat beside our young driver, and Britney was leaning forward from her spot in the back, watching Matt carefully. As the Rambler rolled over the ice, I couldn’t help thinking about the world below. How strange that there was water beneath us! And not just any water, but a sea stocked with vibrant, weird, and wild forms of life. Crablike creatures and starfish and huge, fat, slick seals were darting and kicking and playing around in that frigid and hidden world. Trillions of tiny shrimplike krill. Anna Donatelli had found her amazing creatures in that icy darkness. What other undiscovered life-forms might be lurking down there?

  Several hours later the vehicle stopped shaking and rattling from the wind. I’d gotten so used to the noise that it took me a few minutes to realize it had stopped. The worst of the storm was over, and the sky was transforming slowly into a brighter blue canopy. This was Antarctica’s version of dawn, and the timing could not have been more perfect. The others in the back were still sleeping, but I was staring out the half-defrosted windshield. Matt pointed into the distance. A lone woman stood waving.

  She wore a Big Red. The air was far below freezing, and yet she was, standing out there on the ice, with the mountains rising high behind her, and her short blond hair was bright in the sun. After those first few waves of her arms, she stood with her hands on her hips, waiting. Hank rubbed his eyes with his gloves, then clapped. I elbowed Ava.

  “That’s her, right?” Matt asked Hank.

  “That’s her!”

  Levokin unbuckled his harness and crawled forward for a closer look. “Is she okay?”

  “Anna? She looks fine!” Hank exclaimed.

  “No, not Anna,” Levokin said. “My wet suit. Can you see her?”

  Anna’s camp slowly came into focus. The shelter behind her was tall and wide enough to drive a minivan through the middle. From our position, I couldn’t tell how far it stretched back, but it looked enormous. It had taken five of us to build our tiny fort during Happy Camper training. How in the world had she constructed that beauty all on her own?

  “My hab!” Hank yelled.

  “Your what?”

  “My self-inflating habitat. Another one of the items I’d sent down here ahead of time.” He caught Levokin’s confused stare and explained. “It’s designed for space missions. Landing on the Moon or Mars. The same technology as the Snowgoer, only instead of a vehicle, it blows up into the walls and ceiling of a rather roomy living space. I thought this would be the perfect place for a test. Anna must have borrowed it.”

  “Yes, like she ‘borrowed’ my wet suit,” Levokin grumbled. “Where I come from, this is called stealing.”

  When the Rambler finally rolled to a stop in front of her camp, Hank jumped out and rushed to Anna, but she dodged his attempted hug and climbed into the back of the vehicle before we even had a chance to get out. “What have you got to eat?” she demanded.

  Matt pointed to one of the bags.

  Anna started digging through the wrong pack, so Ava tossed her an energy bar. The scientist grabbed it, tore off a chunk with her teeth, and chomped with a wide-open mouth. Her eyes closed. Her face relaxed. “Thank you.” As she grabbed a candy bar and flopped down into a seat, Hank joined us in the back. “I ran out of food yesterday,” she said. “What took you so long?”

  He patted her affectionately on both shoulders. “How’s my hab?”

  Our mentor was so excited that Anna’s open-mouthed chewing didn’t even bother him. “Phobos?” I mouthed to Ava. She smiled.

  “The habitat? Spacious, warm, altogether pleasant,” she said. Her cheeks were full and red, and she was larger than I’d expected. She had the build of an ultimate fighter, a slightly husky voice, and a strong accent. “You don’t mind that I used it, do you, Henry?”

  “Of course not,” he said. “All in the service of science. Congratulations on your discovery. Those creatures are a true marvel.”

  She leaned around Hank and held up her hands in the direction of the Russian. “Evgeny, your wet suit is in perfect working order, and I hereby swear”—she placed her hand on her chest—“that I will not borrow it again without telling you.”

  “You say this last time.”

  Dropping her hand, she frowned and glanced up at the sky. “Yes, right, I did, didn’t I? Well, then, you know that my vows aren’t worth much. So I’d advise you to keep a closer watch over your inventions. That’s good advice for you, too, young lady,” she said, pointing to Ava. “I hear you have a bright future. Men are often threatened by intelligent women, as they should be, and I assure you, they’ll do whatever they can to slow you down. You have to keep pushing, pushing, pushing!” She glanced around. “You know it was that Australian who sabotaged me, yes?”

  Ava’s mouth hung open slightly, and Matt was equally flabbergasted. This woman switched subjects like they were TV channels.

  “Yes. It’s a long story,” Britney said. “The director and Danno were actually with us, but she took him back to the base.”

  “After he tried to leave us for dead,” Ava added.

  “Yes, well, he certainly surprised me. Those long winters do fry the brain, though. That is why most people go home for at least a few months. I wonder what they’ll do with him back at McMurdo.” She didn’t wait for an answer; something like a smile formed on her face. “Now, you three . . . you are Ava, obviously. You’re Jack,” she said, pointing to me, “the one who writes Hank’s e-mails, and I suppose that makes you Matthew.”

  After all he’d done, I felt bad. “Sometimes he prefers Matt,” I said.

  “Matthew is fine,” my brother said. Staring at Anna, he mumbled, “You’re b-b-beautiful.” Then he closed his eyes, clenched his teeth, and tried again. “Your research, I mean. Your research is beautiful.”

  “Wait, how do you know I write his e-mails?” I asked.

  “Punctuation,” she said. “Hank’s is perfect. He’s quite the grammarian. Lately his messages have displayed the careless affectations of an iPhone-addicted tween. Be careful, young man. Following the rules of writing is good for your brain. You should consider the rules of fashion, too.”

  My pants. I’d forgotten all about the Hello Kitty sweats. That one burned a little. “I’ll work on my wardrobe if you go easier on the exclamation points.”

  “Touché!” she replied. She stood and started out of the vehicle. “Let’s get inside the hab. There is much to see.”

  Levokin hurried into the habitat first, and Hank and Anna followed, firing questions as if it were some kind of competition.
Matt was barely a half step behind them, trying to catch every word.

  Inside, all I could manage was a simple, dumbfounded “Wow.”

  “Seriously,” Ava said.

  The inflated walls and roof created a lofty space lined with solar-powered lights, and Anna had shaped beds, couches, and even a kind of dining nook out of snow. A central mound with a flattened top served as a table, with a semicircular ice bench around it. She’d even carved designs into the snow, resembling etching vines and trees. Anna caught me staring at her handiwork. “I set up the inflatable and some of the equipment during my last visit, and there is a lot of downtime when you’re all alone out here, so I did a little extra work,” she said. “Plus I knew you’d all arrive eventually, so I wanted the place to look nice. You got the Verne reference, Henry?”

  “No, he did,” Ava said, pointing to me.

  Anna’s eyebrows creased downward. “How?”

  I told her about discovering the interview in the magazine. If she was impressed with my detective work, she didn’t show it, but she was absolutely delighted that one of Hank’s minions, as she called us, had solved her puzzle before him. “What did you think I meant by my first love?” she asked him.

  Hank blushed. One of us laughed. Okay, it was me, and lasers practically shot out of Hank’s eyes. With great effort I kept my mouth closed, stifling a smile. “Nothing, nothing,” Hank said. He walked over and kneeled before a large hole she’d carved into the ice floor. “This is your access point?”

  “Yes, that’s it,” she said. “It’s a constant fight to keep it open for my dives, especially since all I had was a pickax and a snow saw. One night a seal popped through and tried to get into my sleeping bag. If you hadn’t arrived today, I might have had to invite him back for dinner.”

  Standing in a far corner, inspecting the seams of his precious wet suit, Levokin muttered something in Russian. “Seals! Often they are in my nightmares, playing cards in basement of my mother’s house, barking. Always with the barking.”

  No one spoke; some stories are better off ignored.

  “I still can’t believe you swim in there,” Ava said.

  “I’d suggest you try it yourself, but at your age, you’d probably go into shock,” Anna said. “That would be unfortunate.”

  “Have you found more of the creatures?” Matt asked.

  “What kind of question is that?” she fired back.

  Matt’s face paled, as if she’d punched him in the stomach.

  Anna pulled a plastic tarp off one of the walls, revealing six clear containers filled with water and the wriggling, mucus-like creatures. “Thanks to this lovely hab, I was nearly able to set up a proper laboratory. I have thirty-seven creatures here at the moment, but there is an enormous population down on the bottom. These alone are producing far more water than I can use.” She watched them in silence, then turned and crouched before the hole. “I wish I could show you all what it’s like down there,” Anna said. “It’s a true world of wonders.”

  I nudged Ava. “Do it.”

  “No,” she whispered.

  Matt whispered, “Come on.”

  “No,” she replied, a little louder.

  “What?” Anna asked. “Tell me.”

  Ava shifted her jaw to one side. She stared at the roof as she replied. “Well, I kind of . . . I built something and brought it down here to test, but it’s probably not . . .”

  “She brought a submarine,” I said.

  Anna brightened. “Perfect! Let’s take her for a swim, then, shall we? She captures video?”

  Ava nodded nervously.

  “Then let’s see what she can find.”

  After my sister went outside to grab Shelly from the Rambler, then returned to get her submersible ready, Levokin lay down his wet suit and watched. “This is very nice work! You built this?”

  “She did,” Hank said with pride, “and I get goose bumps thinking about what she’ll be capable of in five years’ time.”

  Ava opened her laptop and set it on a blanket. She plugged an Xbox controller into the computer.

  “Seriously?” I said. “You took the other one?”

  She apologized, shrugged, and ran another set of cables from the laptop to the submarine. Then she clamped one of the submarine’s panels shut and spun the rear propeller. “She can run on her own, too, without the cables, but I think we’re better off this way, so we can control her and watch the live feed.”

  “What’s her maximum depth?” Anna asked.

  “About fifty meters.”

  “Perfect. It’s no deeper than twenty here. She’ll be fine.”

  The Russian lightly rapped his knuckles against the aluminum hull. “This submarine is girl?” he asked.

  “Her name is Shelly,” I said.

  “Beautiful. Beautiful.”

  With Anna’s help, my sister lowered the craft into the water. Moments later, a live feed from Shelly’s camera appeared on Ava’s screen. The scene was similar to what we’d pulled off the memory card from Anna’s headcam, only the resolution was incredibly clear. Spires of bluish white ice rose up from the bottom. The water was thick with translucent plankton and krill. The shadow of a seal passed over the submarine.

  “Take her lower,” Anna suggested.

  Without hesitation Ava steered Shelly closer to the seafloor. Soon we could see the yellowish creatures crawling through and across the grayish mud, and the tiny chunks of pure, freshwater ice floating up toward the surface. Hank gasped. Matt actually used the word “marvelous,” like he was suddenly English. And, believe me, I understood that this was a serious moment. Those weird little creatures had the potential to save millions of lives. I got that. Totally. But as I watched those little ice cubes drift upward, I couldn’t help thinking about where they’d come from.

  “Seriously?” Matt said. “You’re laughing?”

  I shrugged. Funny is funny.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?” Anna said. Then she grabbed Hank by the shoulder. “So, what do you think? Is this a million-dollar discovery?”

  “Well, I’ve looked over the other proposals, and I wasn’t terribly impressed with any of them, but you didn’t formally enter the contest, and I’m not—”

  “I entered.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Sure, I did,” she said, pointing at Levokin. “Under his name.”

  “My name?” Levokin asked.

  “That’s the least I could do,” she said. “Without your wet suit, I never would have found these guys. So if anyone should get the money, it’s you. What do you think, Henry?”

  “Well, unless the judge is perfectly insane,” Hank said, “I suspect you will emerge victorious.”

  The Russian wrapped Anna in a crushing embrace, swinging her around twice before dropping her back to her feet. She was as stiff as a totem pole. Then she brushed off her jacket as if the hug had somehow dirtied her clothes. Levokin’s laugh was so loud that it threatened to collapse the entire habitat. A few days earlier, I might’ve said the singing, violin-playing, wet-suit-inventing Russian was the oddest creature down at the bottom of the world. The F. E. might have received a vote, too. Maybe Victor Valenza. But this strong and brilliant woman wiping the affection off her shirtsleeves had to be the strangest of all. She’d bolted into the frozen wilderness to protect a discovery, risking her life for the sake of science. But what she’d just done there in her makeshift lab catapulted her to a whole new level of crazy. She was about to give away a million dollars.

  And don’t tell the others, but that made me admire her all the more.

  17

  THE FUTURE OF ENERGY

  Okay. Some news. But first let me catch you up on what happened down in Antarctica. After staying in Anna’s surprisingly comfortable temporary habitat, we survived the trip back to McMurdo Station, arriving in plenty of time for the Clutterbuck Prize. By that point, Danno was already gone. The director had him flown out to an old station in the middle of the Antarctic conti
nent with enough supplies to last him a month. The spot was so remote, he wouldn’t even be able to find any penguins to talk to, let alone people, and she figured this would be a fitting punishment until she decided what to do with him. As for the Prize, Anna Donatelli and Evgeny Levokin won as expected, and dozens of scientists crowded around the tank full of creatures, eager to drink the delicious water. And, yes, I laughed every time someone remarked on the taste. Go ahead, call me juvenile.

  The real fun started when J. F. Clutterbuck joined us via satellite video, appearing on a large screen to congratulate the winner. Levokin was so excited, he pulled off his boots and waved his socks in front of the camera, urging the billionaire to smell them. This wasn’t possible, of course, but the rest of us certainly did catch the odor, and it was pungently obvious that the stink-fighting power of the material had long since faded. Victor Valenza fainted. Others coughed and pressed their woolen hats to their noses. And when Clutterbuck realized what was happening, he was completely dismayed. He demanded that Hank collect the socks and send them to his research headquarters for analysis. Then he decided he wanted Levokin flown in along with them, to have his feet tested. From that point the evening generally crumbled into chaos.

  After a few more days at McMurdo and then four endless flights, we arrived back in Brooklyn. Was it good to get home? I don’t know. My room is larger than the space I shared with my siblings down in Antarctica, but somehow it feels smaller. And the whole world seems different, too. Everything is a tiny bit duller, as if the city had been retinted in some kind of photo-editing app. The sky just isn’t the same, either; it just doesn’t feel as grand or cosmic. At the moment, I’m at my desk, scribbling all this down so I don’t forget anything we’ve just been through. Maybe it’s a way to relive the experience, too, and make sure the bottom of the world remains alive in my brain. But I’ll admit, it’s kind of hard to concentrate. Why? Well, Hank and Min just left, and we’ve had an exciting development.

  Let me back up again. Three days ago, when we returned to our apartment, Min was already waiting at the door. Bags loaded with groceries and takeout were piled around her feet. She practically tackled us when we got out of the wide black sedan, and I’d never seen her smile so genuinely. We plowed through all the food, slept forever, then woke to find that Min had brought us more provisions. Soups and cookies and breads, still warm from the oven, that tasted like cake. She must have visited us five times that first day and six or seven the next. This morning, she was once again packing our fridge with goodies and stocking our cabinets with vitamins when Hank burst through the door. We hadn’t seen him since our return. His face was red. There were deep, dark circles under his eyes and dark blotches on his chin. His fingers were stained with Sharpie ink. When he saw Min, he stopped. “You,” he said.