The Drake Equation

by Bart King

  In the kitchen, Jenny had Jason fill a glass pitcher at the sink. “Here’s the idea. Jason pours out the water into the sink, and you see if you can sort of…aim at it.”

  Since the plan didn’t involve the purple-green puck, it seemed like a decent idea. But how to get ready? I touched the scar on my arm (it’s a nervous habit, okay?), and then stretched my arms over my head. After that, I bent over and tried to touch my toes.

  Finally, I shook out my arms and my fingers the way Olympic swimmers do before a race.

  “Noah, what are you doing?” asked Jason.

  “Just getting ready,” I answered, twisting my head around and from side to side.

  Jenny rolled her eyes. “Can you not be weird for like two minutes? Let’s go!”

  “Hang on.” Just in case I got brain freeze again, I wrapped the towel carefully around my head. Then I stuck my fists forward and nodded grimly to Jason. “Okay. I’m ready.”

  “You look great,” Jason said with a straight face. Then he started slowly pouring water from the pitcher into the sink. As the water splashed, I tried to force the coldness inside of me out through my knuckles.

  A few moments later, the last of the pitcher’s water swirled down the drain.

  Nothing had happened.

  “Well, that was exciting,” said Jason, as I stared at my knuckles in disappointment.

  Jenny looked thoughtful. “Maybe we just need something to get the snowball rolling.” She opened up the freezer. A second later, she slipped an ice cube into my left hand. “Hold the ice in one hand and try pointing your other hand at the water.”

  Ninety minutes ago, I was getting off the school bus. An hour ago, I saw a bird that might be a black swift. And now I’m standing in a kitchen, trying to shoot ice from my hands?

  Jason refilled the pitcher while I squeezed the wet ice cube in my left hand and closed my eyes. Then I tried to channel the ice cube’s cold sensation across my body and through my right finger.

  “Here goes,” I said. I could hear Jason pouring water into the sink, so I raised my right hand and pointed a finger in his direction.

  “Remember,” Jason warned, “don’t hit me.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, opening my eyes. “I don’t think—”

  But seeing the pouring water triggered something inside me. It was as if someone had turned on a hose. I felt a small wave of cold leave the ice cube in my hand, go up my left arm, and then cross my chest (brrrr) down my right arm and to my hand.

  A thin ray of blue-white energy shot out the end of my finger. Luckily, I was still aiming, and as the ray hit the water pouring from the pitcher there was a—

  crackle.

  Surprised, I dropped the ice cube. My finger immediately “turned off,” and I held it up to my face to inspect it.

  It still looked like a finger.

  Meanwhile, Jason reached into the sink and pulled out a handful of what looked like shaved ice.

  “It worked,” said Jenny incredulously. “It worked!”

  The three of us held still and looked at one another. Something BIG was happening here. But what?

  “HEY, YOU KIDS!”

  We flinched.

  “CAN SOMEONE EXPLAIN TO ME WHY THERE ARE ICEBERGS IN OUR SWIMMING POOL?”

  BUSTED!

  I must have looked panicked, because Jenny quietly reassured me. “Don’t worry, I got this.” Then she yelled back to her father at the top of her lungs. “We’re doing a science experiment for school!”

  There was quiet, and then some grumbling in the distance (“…DIDN’T HAVE TO FREEZE THE POOL WHEN I WAS YOUR AGE…”), but it slowly trailed off.

  “That excuse works every time,” Jenny said. Meanwhile, Jason ran out of the kitchen, and I looked out the window and watched a familiar group of younger kids pedal slowly past the house. One of them, a plump boy on a bright-orange bike, was pointing energetically at the crane and the power pole. But before I could wonder what they were up to, Jason ran back in with the puck and set it on the kitchen counter.

  I shivered.

  “Hey, Noah, just look at this thing’s menu again,” said Jason. “It might give us some clues.”

  I didn’t move.

  “Come on,” Jenny said. “We’d do it, but neither Jason or I can even read it. Think of this as a mystery. I mean, who knows what else your puck can do.”

  “Maybe you could use it to fly,” suggested Jason helpfully. “That’d be handy for watching, you know, ducks and stuff.”

  I shook my head. “Why don’t I just put it back where I found it?”

  Jason was having none of that. “Listen, I’m the guy who pried that puck from your cold, living fingers. And I say—”

  Just then, a dull crack and loud shouts from outside cut off his argument. Jason and I jostled each other rushing to the front window. To our left, we could see some of the preschoolers playing in a lawn sprinkler on Mrs. Damaschino’s front lawn. In front of us, we could see a minivan backing up fast on the street. It veered over the sidewalk—

  “Whoa!” I cried, as Jenny came up beside me. After all, it was an out-of-control driver who had swerved onto a sidewalk and put her in that wheelchair.

  The three of us stared as the minivan backed over the fire hydrant in the Brights’ lawn strip. With a WHOOSH, a geyser of water erupted as the hydrant rolled into the gutter.

  Then the minivan let loose with an unending HOOOOONK. It pulled slightly forward, and a man got out and took off running, leaving the honking car behind.

  “What’s he doing?” I yelled.

  Jenny pointed to the right. “He’s trying to get away from THAT!”

  I looked over to where the truck with the crane was parked next to a telephone pole. Its cherry picker was extended up, and a worker in an orange vest was in its nest, feverishly pushing buttons on its control panel.

  The worker didn’t care about the broken fire hydrant. That’s because he was distracted by the broken telephone pole next to him! It had snapped halfway up, and the falling pole had smashed into the top of his truck. It was balanced there, looming at an angle over the street, like a sparking teeter-totter. But instead of falling the rest of the way down, the pole was caught and held in place by its power lines.

  The minivan’s honking got even louder as Jason and I ran out of the house and down to the front yard. And from next door, the preschool kids in the sprinkler had run down to the sidewalk. Mrs. Damaschino was outside, trying to stop more children from pouring out of her front door. But one little boy kept laughing and running just out of her reach. I saw her disappear around the corner of her house, chasing after him.

  As for the other kids, a couple gawked at the wrecked car and the phone pole. But with Mrs. Damaschino out of the picture, they ran down to the fire hydrant. Its fountain was making a pool by the curb, and the kids were yelling and splashing in it.

  Jason said something, but I couldn’t hear over the shouting kids, the roaring water, and the minivan’s HOOOOONK.

  “What?”

  “Those kids are amazing!” Jason said admiringly. “You’d think they’d just gotten to Disneyland.”

  I tugged his sleeve. “We should go call nine-one-one.”

  But Jason shook his head and pointed in front of the crane. Three older kids on bikes had stopped there. Two had their smartphones out, so it seemed pretty obvious they were making the emergency call.

  But after a second, I saw they were actually taking photos. Then one kid said something, and another one laughed.

  Who cracks jokes at a disaster?

  I peered at the three figures, squinting. The one in the front had on a black baseball cap. I knew that hat. It belonged to Coby Cage.

  A respectful distance behind Coby and his pals, the small flock of younger kids on bikes had gathered. The girl with streamers on her handlebars pointed and started to pedal closer. But then the kid on the bright-orange bike held out his arm and waved the group back.

  Jason leaned in close to
my ear. “Nothing like a disaster to bring a neighborhood together!”

  The man in the crane had spotted us. “HEY, MY CONTROLS AREN’T WORKING! GO GET—”

  A loud crack cut him off as the wires on one side of the pole gave way. A split second later, the power pole came all the way down, trailing broken lines behind it—

  Whump!

  The power pole hit the street and bounced, shooting sparks all the way to where we stood. And amazingly, the little kids in the hydrant pool started cheering.

  At the same time, Mr. Bright sprinted past us, down the driveway. He spotted us, and bellowed, “GET THOSE KIDS OUT OF THERE!” He was pointing excitedly at something, something in the street—

  I followed the line of his finger and saw that the pool of water by the gushing fire hydrant was growing—and getting closer to the fallen power pole.

  That pool of water was full of little kids splashing around. And water conducts electricity—

  Jason ran down to the fire hydrant to warn the children. But before he could even get off the lawn, I tackled him from behind, losing my head towel in the process.

  Jason looked back at me in confusion. “Noah, this isn’t a good time for horseplay.”

  I shook my head. “If we get too close, we’ll be electrocuted!” I shouted. “We have to warn the kids to leave.”

  So the two of us stood at the edge of the lawn and screamed at the children: “Hey! You! Yeah, YOU! Get out of the water.”

  Some of the little kids looked over at us.

  “Move it.”

  Nothing.

  “You could get hurt if you don’t come up here!”

  Right then, the day care’s runaway kid made a break across the street, Mrs. Damaschino chasing close on his heels. That meant that getting the rest of the kids away from the hydrant was up to Jason and me. So we waved our arms around. We made threats. We pointed to the broken pole and sparking power lines to show the danger.

  And the little children just ignored us. I guess they hadn’t studied electricity yet in preschool. All they knew was that there was a cool fireworks show going on right in front of them. It was like that power pole had a hundred sparklers attached to it—and they were all going off at once!

  Only two kids paid any attention. One chubby little boy waved back to us. “We’re getting WET!” he yelled enthusiastically, splashing the water with his feet. The other kid was a five-year-old girl in a Hello Kitty T-shirt. She stuck her tongue out at us.

  At that moment, Jenny bumped into me from behind and pressed something round and cool into my hand. It was the purple-green puck.

  “You know what to do!” Jenny yelled.

  I didn’t move. Or I couldn’t move. Either way, I didn’t want to use that puck again. I managed to shake my head and say, “I’m sure nine-one-one is on the way.”

  Instead of arguing, Jenny pointed to the street. By now, Mrs. Damaschino had made it to the hydrant’s growing pool and was trying to grab the slippery children. But she was slow and they were quick—and the water was spreading so fast, it was obvious she couldn’t get them all before the power line made its deadly connection.

  “Noah, someone has to help those little kids now!” Jenny urged. “And that someone is YOU.”

  Dang it, she’s right! My hand shook a little as I pressed the stem on the side of the glittering disc and watched its egg-shaped screen blink into view. And there was the pulsing ball:

  ADEPTNESS

  I tapped the icon, got the menu, and scrolled to ICE.

  Then I stopped. Is this really happening?

  The fire hydrant gushed, its pool growing ever closer to the power line’s spraying sparks. The minivan continued to smoke and HOOOOOONK. People screamed. And there, in a tree on Mrs. Damaschino’s property, was a small black bird. Was it the black swift? No, it looked more like a black phoebe (Sayornis nigricans). Which sort of made sense, because those birds like the water, so maybe it had been attracted—

  “Noah!” Jenny shouted. “Do it!”

  Oops. And so, for the second time that afternoon, I saw the flashing screen:

  ICE

  ICE

  ICE

  Downed Power Line Nearly Sparks Neighborhood Tragedy

  Firefighter: “Those children will never know how lucky they were.”

  Santa Rosa—A quiet city neighborhood nearly became the setting for tragedy yesterday. After a broken power pole led to flooding and electrical fires, preschool children flocked to the accident—yet astoundingly, no one was harmed.

  At 4:10 P.M., Pacific Gas & Electric technician Sean Kolfax began work on a transformer on Caruthers Avenue. “It was just routine maintenance,” Mr. Kolfax told reporters. “But when I went up in the crane and accidentally bumped it against the power pole, all heck broke loose.”

  For reasons yet to be determined, the pole snapped in half and fell partly onto Mr. Kolfax’s PGE truck. The technician was uninjured, but the blow to his truck rendered the crane’s controls inoperable, stranding him.

  Glen Peabody was driving down Caruthers when the power pole initially broke. Although he was unavailable for comment, Peabody told police that he stopped and backed his vehicle up for safety. In the process, he ran over a fire hydrant and then left the scene on foot.

  Children at a nearby residential day care raced to the broken fire hydrant’s geyser. Before adults could intervene, the curb quickly filled with children playing in the pool of water.

  And that’s when things took a turn to the terrifying.

  The broken power pole collapsed into the street, its high-voltage wires landing perilously close to the hydrant’s water. Residents on the scene rushed to save their children before the expanding wading pool reached the sparking power lines.

  “If the pool had expanded that far,” said Santa Rosa Fire Chief Ray Loggia, “thousands of volts of electricity could have poured through the water. And the kids who were in it—” The chief paused. “Words can’t describe how awful it would have been.”

  Why didn’t the gushing water expand to the lethal electric wires? Surprising eyewitness accounts claim that the water froze. “I felt it freeze right over my feet,” Damien Huany, 5, told reporters.

  Cordelia Shickle, 4, added, “After the water got hard, no one could move. So we all started screaming.”

  A resident on the scene, Thomas Bright, 41, said he wasn’t sure just what he had seen. “IT WAS COMPLETE MAYHEM, WITH SPARKS AND KIDS EVERYWHERE.”

  Emergency crews arrived on the scene and quickly shut off power to the sparking electrical lines. A ladder was extended up to retrieve Mr. Kolfax, while the children were chipped out of the frozen patch of water by rescue workers.

  Asked to explain the incident, Water Bureau Chief Susan Ackerman said, “Lots of factors affect water temperature. It’s hard to state with certainty which variables caused the freezing on Caruthers Avenue. My best current theory is that it was an environmental disturbance.”

  She then added, “I really have no idea.”

  As for the faulty power pole, PGE spokesperson Sara Arrington was asked how the pole could have become so rotten. “Horizontal cracks, knots, and decay can all contribute to pole weakening,” she said. “Our records show that the utility pole on Caruthers was installed in 1968. That’s a long time.”

  So for now, questions remain and official investigations have commenced.

  Looking up from Jason’s laptop, I watched the orange-vested city workers replace the broken fire hydrant in the Brights’ front yard.

  “Okay, so after the power pole fell, there was a crazy chain reaction,” I said. “But why did the pole fall in the first place? This didn’t really explain that.”

  “Who knows? It was probably woodpeckers.” Jason pointed over my shoulder at a blurry photo of the crane and broken power pole. “Hey, I wonder if Coby took that.” The photo caption read “Electrical Storm, Icy Street—in September!”

  “Maybe.” Jenny leaned back and looked at me teasingly. “And
to think that nobody ever thanked me! After all, I’m the one who saved the day. But sadly, the real hero will never be known.”

  I tried to smile back, but the expression sort of died on my face. The twins just seemed to have the wrong attitude about this whole thing. Don’t get me wrong—I was glad the little kids were safe. But even though the purple-green puck was a lifesaver, I still wanted to get rid of it. It was like a double-edged sword. Swing one way, and you cut through a problem. Swing the other way? You cut through yourself!

  That puck wasn’t mine, it was scary and mysterious, and I didn’t want it. Yeah, the adventure we’d had turned out okay, but it was a mistake, a screwup. It was just wrong. My having that puck was in the same category as things like a toilet that won’t stop filling, or that moment when you realize your locker combination won’t work because you’re at the wrong locker.

  Yet the twins didn’t seem to notice (or just didn’t care) about any of that.

  “Seriously, Noah, you could be a hero, but one thing’s preventing it,” said Jenny.

  “What?” smirked Jason. “Courage? Strength? Fashion sense?”

  “No, no, and no,” said Jenny. “It’s that heroes don’t slouch.”

  As I sat up a little, Jason rubbed his hands together. “Topic change! Now, Noah, you may have asked yourself, ‘What’s next?’” He pulled out a clipboard from the chair next to him and handed it to me. “As your manager/best friend, I’ve written down some ideas for you to think about.”

  “My manager, huh?” I said doubtfully. Jason’s clipboard held a spreadsheet with a list of items and costs. The first one read “Noah’s Snow-ah Cones: $3.”

  This was classic Jason.4

  I kept reading through Jason’s list for the iridescent puck. “Ice-skating: $20?” I exclaimed. “Jason, what if someone gets hurt?”

  Jason looked at me innocently. “When have I ever gotten you into trouble?”

  I didn’t bother answering.

  Jenny weighed in. “If anything, Jason’s not thinking BIG enough. Noah, you just saved a bunch of little kids from being fried. If you want some real money, contact their parents. Ask them stuff like, ‘How much is your child’s life worth to you?’”