Luciana
Page 5
I could feel James looking at me and I refused to turn away from the screen. Why did we have to share our lab time with the RoboEngineers? Why not the Wizards or some other team that didn’t include James?
Johanna read the challenge for the day off the board. “… for three million bolts, fix the broken robot …” There were seven robots, standing still and slack on the tile floor. Some had claws, others had pinchers, and one had a hammer. “I got this,” Johanna said, running to pick a robot.
“How about we split up? Half of us start on the competition robot and the other half do the challenge with Johanna?” I said.
Meg raised her hand. “I pick Johanna!” And she raced off.
Charlotte and Ella stayed with me although Ella stood frozen, looking at the scoreboard still, her arms crossed. Charlotte nudged her but she wouldn’t move. So Charlotte reached out and pinched her.
“Ow, Charlotte!” Ella squealed. “Why are you always doing that?”
Charlotte shook her head. “Can we just start working together, please? Luci’s right, we’re on the same team, Ella. You’re ruining everything like you always do.”
Ella uncrossed her arms, looking hurt. “I never ruin everything!”
“It’s like if you’re not in charge then forget about anyone else having any fun or doing anything at all and if we were at home right now, you’d quit and spend the rest of the time sulking and this is why you don’t have any friends anymore.” Charlotte took a giant breath.
“Come on, guys,” I said, not sure if I should stay out of it. “Don’t fight.”
“WE’RE NOT FIGHTING,” they both yelled at the same time.
“No one is ruining anything,” I said. “Except for maybe me, but we’ve already gone over how I’m going to fix it.”
Ella snorted and Charlotte sent her a warning glare.
“Mallory told me about a guy who gives out big sponsorships, and I know you don’t think we can get a sponsor with our terrible score right now, but there’s no reason why we shouldn’t try.” James and the rest of the RoboEngineers were hunched over a logbook with rulers and calculators like they were making secret robot plans.
“Where is this guy?” Charlotte asked.
“Well,” I said, making a face. “He’s not easy to find apparently. But he rides a robotic unicycle, so how hard could it be, really?”
Actually, maybe really hard, because Space Camp was big and, according to Mallory and Alex, sponsors went fast.
Ella blew air out of her mouth. “Fine, we’ll look for your robot-unicycle guy later. But can we design our competition robot now?”
Charlotte clapped and hugged her. “See? There you go, Ella! Now we’re working together. That wasn’t so hard.”
Ella punched her in the shoulder.
James and his team were hanging out mysteriously in the closet by the parts wall. So that’s where Ella, Charlotte, and I started.
“What are you guys doing?” I asked, peeking into the closet. Plastic tubs for each team sat on metal shelves that lined the walls. The RoboEngineers had their own tub on the floor with what appeared to be the start of a robot inside. Mallory, Leo, and Alex sat nearby around a trash can, sorting through a container of old parts.
“No cheating!” James squawked, trying to get in front of his robot.
Ella stepped up. “We don’t cheat.”
“Yeah,” Charlotte said. “We win.”
And I felt a rush of pride and happiness because it felt good to all be on the same side.
The RoboEngineers slid their tub out of the closet, glaring at us.
Mallory tossed a broken tread into the trash can with a thump.
“Hey,” I said. “Can we have a look?”
Mallory waved me over. “Sure. It’s mostly junk, but feel free.” She picked up a cracked rubber gasket and flung it into the trash can.
Charlotte, Ella, and I looked into the boxes of parts on the floor. Lots of old batteries and ancient broken motors, a few chargers with obvious damage, and one entire bin of robot legs.
“What’s this?” I said, pulling a part from under a pile of gears.
Leo held out a hand for a closer look. “Ah, I remember when we had these,” he said. “It’s an old motor module for a walking robot.”
“A walking robot? You don’t use these anymore?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Everyone wants to build a rolling rover these days.”
I thought of all the books I’d been reading on Mars rovers and how the rocky terrain was causing damage to their wheels.
I turned to Charlotte and Ella, both doubled over, leaning into a bin of building bricks and beams. “What if we made a walking rover?” I held out the part. “It’s a motor module. You plug in a bunch of legs.”
Ella looked skeptical.
“It would probably climb right up that rocky slope to the space elevator no problem and it would be different than everyone else’s rover.” Which was the wrong thing to say to follow-the-rules Ella. “I mean, not different, but unique in a scientific way.” I set the part down and pulled out my Space Camp logbook and pencil from one of the many pockets of my flight suit. I sketched my idea and held up my drawing. “Like this.”
Ella was still unconvinced, looking around the closet. “We’re already so behind. We should just try to make the simplest robot we can and earn some points back.”
“Hey,” I said to the crew trainers. “How many bolts would an old part like this cost?”
Leo looked up and thought for a moment. “Free, I guess. If you pulled it from these junk bins, and it works, it’s all yours, no charge.”
Ella lit up. “Like, all of these parts are free?”
“Yes.” Leo tossed a broken wheel set into the trash can. “Just know that most of them are broken so it might not be worth the time you’ll lose on troubleshooting.”
Charlotte stepped out of the closet and pulled some bricks and wheels from the parts containers outside. “This right here would cost us more than a million bolts,” she said to us.
I nudged Ella with my shoulder. “You want to make a junkyard robot?”
Johanna and Meg rushed into the closet, holding up the challenge robot. “Done! That’s an extra three million bolts for team Red Rovers!”
Ella grabbed the robot, looking it up and down. “You guys fixed this?” She looked at the clock on the wall. “That fast?”
Meg bounced on her feet. “I pretty much watched. Johanna did it all. She’s like a robot-fixing genius.”
Johanna swung her arms back and forth, embarrassed. “I like to take things apart and put them back together.”
I glanced out at the scoreboard. We were still behind all of the teams by at least five million bolts, and it would be even more once the rest of the teams fixed their own robots. I looked at the motor module. Free parts were probably our only chance at catching up.
Johanna set down her robot and showed the group how she’d got it working again.
“Amazing,” Charlotte said.
I grabbed a screwdriver from the shelf behind me and unscrewed the battery door on the motor module, pulling out the old batteries. “Oh no,” I whispered, because battery acid had flooded the battery compartment. I tapped Johanna on the shoulder. “You think you can fix this?”
“Hmmm,” she said, taking the part from me, “this happens to my brother’s toys all the time.” And then she disappeared back into the robotics lab, the rest of us following her.
The RoboEngineers were hard at work at one of the tables, and as we passed, they dove over their creation so we couldn’t see anything.
“Puh-lease,” Meg said, rolling her eyes.
We had barely sat down at our own table, the farthest one from the RoboEngineers, when Johanna was back, skipping across the lab. “Try it.” She handed me the batteries and I popped them in. A green light glowed from the battery pack.
I grinned.
“Here, put these in,” Charlotte said, leaning over the table and
depositing six beams in front of me. Robot legs. I popped them into the motor module and turned it on. The robot’s legs went crazy, waving in the air, moving in synch.
I put the rover on the table and it skittered across the surface, Johanna grabbing it before it fell off.
“It works!” I said. “This is amazing! We could make our rover out of all the junk parts and it wouldn’t cost us anything.”
Johanna inspected the motor module. “Yes, I love that idea.”
“We are going to have the best rover!” Meg said. “The best, best, best one!”
James walked by, eyeing my logbook open to the sketch of our walking robot.
“Nice art project.”
I flipped it closed and we all lunged for the parts scattered on the table at once, Johanna passing the motor module to Meg, telling her to put it back in our box where it would be safest. We hid the rest of the parts in our pockets and stuffed them under our arms until James finally wandered away.
We looked at Ella, standing over the robot legs with her arms crossed.
“What do you think, cousin?” Charlotte said.
Ella looked up, and maybe she even had a small smile on her face. “I’m in.”
And together, as a team, the Red Rovers raided the broken parts closet.
The next day Mallory walked us through the Space Camp gift shop on our way back from doing the MAT, otherwise known as the Multi-Axis Trainer. It was part of the astronaut training program in the 1960s and had been used to simulate a spacecraft that was spinning out of control in space. At least, that’s what our logbook said. And I knew this because I was the kind of person who read logbooks now.
Meg shuffled behind us all, mad at herself because she had been too scared to try it. Even after Mallory had told her nobody in all of her five years of working there had ever thrown up or fallen over from dizziness. Not to mention the boys had been pretty hard on her for not being brave, which had started a James versus Ella fight all over again. Big sisters didn’t let anyone mess with their little sisters. I was taking all sorts of notes from Ella. I knew I shouldn’t worry so much about Isadora, but I couldn’t help myself. The orphanage would find her, right?
“Five minutes,” Mallory said, waving her hands across the giant store. “And then we have to get to the lab. Make your wish list and come back later to buy.”
We scattered, Charlotte and Johanna going for the rack of sweatshirts, Meg for the bin of spiky balls. Ella and I looked at the astronaut suits.
“Can you imagine?” I said. “These would be so awesome for Halloween.”
She nodded her head.
I saw a giant rack of postcards. One said “Somebunny had fun at Space Camp!” with a bunny wearing a flight suit and chewing on hydroponic greens. It had Raelyn’s name written all over it. Ella just stood there, looking at her fingernails. “Look, Ella, for my best friend back home.” I held up the postcard, trying to be extra friendly. “She has a real bunny. It’s so perfect!”
Ella gave me a little smile. “Sure.”
And then I remembered what Meg had said about Ella having no friends. I looked around the store, trying to change the subject. “Are you going to get anything?”
She was still looking at the postcard. “My best friend doesn’t have a bunny, and actually, we’re not even best friends anymore.”
“Why not?”
She sniffed and shuffled her feet. “It’s what happens when someone moves away. They just stop texting and returning your phone calls because of all their new best friends. But it’s fine.”
“How long were you best friends?”
“Since kindergarten,” she said.
Six years. The same as Raelyn and me.
“She moved a few months ago,” Ella said, pulling out a postcard that said “Actually I am a Rocket Scientist!” with a picture of the Saturn V under a Space Camp logo.
“I bet she misses you a lot.”
“If she missed me, she’d call me and ask how school is going. Also, we had this thing where we’d think up really bad jokes and she doesn’t even do that anymore.”
“Maybe she doesn’t have a thousand new best friends and she’s feeling really homesick.”
Ella put the postcard back.
“Maybe she needs you more than ever,” I said, looking at my bunny postcard.
Mallory was waving from the front door. Time to go.
“Or maybe not,” Ella said, shrugging. And then she walked away before I could tell her the story about Raelyn and me and how in third grade we almost stopped being best friends.
When we got to the robotics lab, everyone was already there and staring at the scoreboard. The MarsBots had caught up to the Space Heroes overnight, putting James’s team in third place with seven million bolts.
“The MarsBots must have found a sponsor,” Johanna said.
The top two teams were only two million bolts away from claiming the gyro sensor. It was a race to get the most bolts, and from the look of it, the RoboEngineers were not happy.
As for our team, we were still way behind. Not to mention I still hadn’t seen any signs of a guy on a robot unicycle or been able to find us any other sponsors. There weren’t many left at this point. All the museum tour guides were out of bolts. So were the scuba divers who taught lessons in the astronaut training pool. And when I asked the chef in the crew galley, all she had to offer was a bowl of fried pickles. I pulled out my logbook, flipping to the page with our robot ideas.
“Are you making a walking robot?” James said.
“Yep!” Meg said before we could grab her.
“Can’t share that information with you,” I said, flapping my logbook closed. “Top secret.”
“Where did you find the parts for that?” he asked.
“None of your business,” Ella said, pushing in between us. “Snoop.”
“Be nice, Ella,” Charlotte said.
“Forget it,” he said.
Charlotte rushed over to the challenge board and clapped next to us. “It’s a programming challenge, my very favorite kind of robotics challenge and can I do it, please, guys?”
The rest of our team looked at one another and laughed. Charlotte plopped herself in front of a series of computer screens. “Meg,” she said. “Sit.” She patted the seat next to her.
Meg skipped over, and the rest of us got started sifting through the junk parts in the closet, looking for any sensors that seemed remotely workable.
“If Charlotte and Meg do today’s challenge, we’ll get another three million bolts,” Johanna said. “We’ll even be ahead of the Wizards.” Apparently they had bought a special color sensor from the parts wall, bringing their bolts down to three million.
“If the RoboEngineers cash in their bolts for the gyro sensor,” I said, “we’ll be ahead of them too.”
“Not for long,” Ella said. “Their robots will be faster and better in the competition. We won’t even be able to compete.”
I pulled out a sensor that had no obvious damage, but Johanna shook her head. “Toss.”
I threw it in the trash.
We were deep into our search for parts when bells and whistles and an audio of clapping and cheering went off, bringing everyone to a screeching halt. Johanna and I looked out to the lab and saw Leo hand James the gyro sensor. They had already completed the programming challenge and made it to ten million bolts. We watched the scoreboard, and team RoboEngineers went all the way back down to zero, which was partially satisfying, except we knew they were probably going to win the competition anyway.
The lab got quiet after that, the RoboEngineers moving to a secret location to continue working on their robot, and soon it was only us with the entire robotics lab to ourselves.
We took our plastic tub full of parts back to a table to get started on building.
“Hey, Luci.” Ella sifted through the bin. “Where’s the motor module?”
“It’s in there,” I said, handing Johanna a busted-up claw attachment.
I stood next to her. “I thought Meg put it back in our tub. Meg?” I called. “Did you put the motor module back?”
Meg barely looked up from programming with Charlotte. “Yep! Back in the box like Johanna said.”
“But it’s not here,” Ella said, and she was right, it wasn’t.
We checked the parts closet, inspecting the floor and the dark corners, sifting through the trash cans of broken parts. Getting desperate, I grabbed my Space Camp backpack from a hook on the wall, zipped open the outer pockets, and reached around inside. Yesterday, when we had been trying to hide our parts from the RoboEngineers, we had stuffed parts everywhere. But there was nothing there.
I squatted on the floor, opening the drawstring top and searching inside. Colored pencils. A Space Camp hoodie. A map of the grounds and sunblock. No walking motor module. My heart started beating faster and I overturned my bag, dumping everything on the floor. My colored pencils rolled everywhere.
“Luciana?” Mallory said, coming over. And basically none of the Red Rovers were working anymore, kind of frozen in place because they all knew what was happening. The part was gone.
I shuffled through all of my papers again, but it was no use. The part was officially missing. “Meg? Are you sure-sure-sure you put the part back?”
“Yes!” she said.
“Check your flight suits,” Johanna said. “All of your pockets.”
We patted our suits, checking all the little zipped pockets and buttoned up hidey-holes. Nothing.
“We lost it?” Ella said.
No. I shook my head. No way we could have lost something like this.
“It’s gone?” Charlotte joined us, stepping away from the computer program, Meg linked to her elbow.
“Or maybe it got stolen.” I said it out loud and in my head at the exact same time and it all fell into place. James asking us all these questions. The RoboEngineers building their robot in a secret location. They stole our part to use it themselves.
The girls unfroze and I saw in their faces that they knew it too. We had been sabatoged.
“Wait a minute,” Mallory said. “You’re jumping to conclusions. Messing with another team’s project is a big deal that we don’t take lightly here.”