Jack and the Geniuses

by Bill Nye

  10

  THE UNDERSIDE OF THE ICE

  Back in the room, Ava was bent over the laptop, studying the video in slow motion. While Matt, head down in concentration, walked circles around the table, Hank stood in a corner, tapping a beat on his chin with the fingers of his right hand. Britney wasn’t there. Sophie and I waited in the doorway.

  I coughed.

  No reaction.

  Mentally, Matt was still stuck on that upside-down snowstorm. “What if, like Britney said, it’s some kind of biological waste material?” he asked. “Something an organism on the bottom is releasing. That makes sense, right?”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Hank said. Then he stopped drumming. “No, no, no. The underside of the ice sheet would be covered in the waste material if that were the case. Yet in the video we clearly see”—he took the mouse and rewound the clip to a point that showed a view of the ice sheet from below—“that the ceiling is pure and clear. Translucent.”

  “So, then, it has to be ice,” Matt said. “Like I suggested before.”

  Like he suggested? That was totally my idea.

  Hank was about to respond, when his expression transformed into a curious scowl. His nose lifted upward. “What is that delectable scent? Fresh bread?” he asked.

  Finally the threesome noticed us.

  Sophie tossed him the heel of a baguette. “I would have brought more, but I thought Americans only liked ice cream.”

  Hank lifted the chunk to his nose and inhaled. “A properly prepared baguette is truly a thing of wonder. If we ever were to make contact with an intelligent extraterrestrial race, I’d argue that the baguette should be presented as an example of one of our species’s greatest foods. Naturally, the food would have to be something vegetable- or grain-based. Meat or fish would be out of the question, as the aliens might be offended by our willingness to slaughter complex life forms like tuna and cows merely for the sake of protein.”

  “You don’t like beef?” Sophie asked.

  “No, I do,” Hank said, “but I’m talking about aliens now. Because you see—”

  “Uh, Hank?” Ava interrupted. “Jack just turned up at our door with a baker. I’m thinking maybe there’s a reason?”

  “Right, right. Come in, come in,” Hank said, closing the door behind us. “And you are?”

  “Sophie Bornholdt,” she said. “A chef.”

  “And a friend of Anna,” I added.

  “You’re friends with Dr. Donatelli?” Hank asked. “I’m Henry Witherspoon. Hank.”

  “Ah, yes, the famous Hank. And you must be Ava and Matthew,” she said.

  I waited for Matt to glare at me, but he didn’t even react. “Where’s Britney?” I asked.

  “She went to talk to the director,” Ava said. “She’s going to see if they’ll organize a search for Anna.”

  Matt breathed out heavily. “She didn’t recognize anything from the video, though, so even if she can convince the director, I don’t know if they’ll have any luck.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t believe what I learned from Sophie,” I said.

  “Tell us, tell us,” Hank said. “I’m listening.”

  “I would,” I replied, “but I think you’re going to want to see these little guys for yourself.”

  “Little guys? What are you talking about?”

  “Anna did bring back a few sample creatures, like Levokin said. She just didn’t store them in the lab. She left them with Sophie so that no one would steal them,” I explained.

  “But Anna told Levokin they’d been stolen,” Ava noted.

  “Yes, well, on the night she disappeared, I had just moved the creatures from one fridge to another, on the other side of the kitchen,” Sophie said. “The first one was too busy. Too many people used it. I worried Anna’s babies would be used in a stew.”

  “But if she couldn’t find them, wouldn’t she just ask you?”

  With the tip of her shoe Sophie traced a circle on the floor. “I don’t think she could find me. I was in the theater, watching a movie.”

  Sophie hadn’t told me this before. “Watching a movie?” I asked. “Why didn’t she just find you when it was over?”

  Covering her face with her hands, Sophie mumbled her reply.

  “What? I can’t understand you.”

  She dropped her hands and cried, “It was a movie about a little dog! A Chihuahua. So cute. With a little accent. This little dog goes on these big adventures . . .” She sighed. “I watched this film three times in a row. That is why Anna could not find me. But you cannot tell anyone, okay? I’m French. We invented cinema. Watching this movie is like eating a hot-dog roll instead of a baguette.”

  “And you ate three hot-dog rolls,” Ava said.

  “Exactement! I was in the theater so long, poor Anna had no idea where I was. She would never think to look for me in a Chihuahua movie, and when she couldn’t find her creatures, she must have thought they were stolen.”

  Matt was rubbing his forehead with the back of his wrist. “What do they look like, Jack? How big are they?”

  “The size of my hand, maybe?” I said. “They’re eerie. Freaky.”

  “Where are they now?” Hank asked.

  “Still in the kitchen,” I said.

  Hank took off down the hall at the speed of an Olympic sprinter. I just stood there, stunned. I guess I’d never really seen him run. Then Matt followed—and promptly tripped on the edge of a rug.

  For a moment I felt sorry for my athletically challenged sibling. He stood up and glared at me. He almost looked surprised to see that I wasn’t laughing. Then he bolted after Hank.

  “Should we catch up?” Ava asked.

  “No, let the boys run,” Sophie said. “They will wait for us. They do not know where in the kitchen to look. I could have yelled to them, but in life it is always better to have people wait for you, mes amies.”

  “Votre conseil est bon,” Ava responded.

  “Magnifique!” Sophie responded. “She speaks French,” she said to me.

  “I know.”

  Hank and Matt were panting when we arrived at the kitchen door. Sophie led us inside. We were a few steps away from the fridge when she stopped. “What is this?” she asked. She crouched over a small puddle. “Jack, this is new, yes?”

  She yanked open the fridge doors. The space on the shelf that had held the plastic container was depressingly vacant.

  “They’re gone,” I said. “The creatures are gone!”

  “But we left for only five minutes! How is this possible? Who would even know about them?” Sophie asked.

  The director, maybe. She’d been in the kitchen recently for a baguette. But why would she steal Anna’s findings? Why would she try to stop any scientific advances? That would make no sense. There was, however, another possibility. “What about Britney?” I asked. “You said she’d just left the room before Sophie and I showed up. How long ago was that?”

  “It’s not Britney, Jack,” Hank said. “She’s a geoscientist. Anna’s work is totally outside her field.”

  Ava was down at the far end of the aisle. She pointed to a trail of small puddles on the floor. “Whoever it was went this way,” she said. The thief had grabbed the container and hurried off, splashing water. We followed the trail to the end of the aisle, around the corner, and out a rear exit. Outside, the hallway branched off in three directions. And there wasn’t another puddle in sight.

  “What now?” Ava asked.

  No one answered.

  No one had any clue what to do next.

  The five of us wandered back to the fridge. I grabbed a towel and started drying the puddles on the floor.

  “I don’t understand,” Hank said. “She told you to store the creatures in the fridge?”

  “And they were alive?” Matt added.

  “Yes, they were alive, and she was very clear in her instructions,” Sophie explained. “I was to keep the fridge just below freezing. About negative one, usually.”

  “Cel
sius,” I noted.

  “Of course,” she said. “Is there another way to measure temperature?” Hank did his I-told-you-so thing with his eyebrows. “So,” Sophie continued, “negative one degree, and I was to check the little creatures once every six hours. I would scoop out the little icicles and transfer them into a separate jar. Then I would pour new water into the container with her creatures, from different jugs.”

  “Why?” Ava asked.

  Sophie shrugged. “Je ne sais pas.”

  “I think I know,” Matt said. “But I need the water to be certain.”

  Sophie swung open the fridge door. She grabbed a jar, then dug another one out from the cabinet beneath the steel countertop. “The thief did not find these worth stealing, I guess.”

  Matt read the Sharpie-drawn labels. “One says goat vinegar, and the other says . . . pig drool?”

  “This was my idea. Good, no? If I labeled them ‘rare creature experiment’ or something like that, they might not be so easy to disguise. But nobody is interested in pig drool. Or not here, anyway. Maybe some restaurants, they could boil it down, make a sauce—”

  Ava snapped her fingers. The trick was rude but effective. Sophie stopped rambling and explained the procedure that Anna had instructed her to follow. She removed the spoon I’d seen her use earlier that evening and went through the motions as if the creatures and their plastic home were still right there. “So I would take the icicles from the container and pour them into here,” she said, tapping the lid of the jar labeled goat vinegar. “Then I would fill up the container with water from one of these jars.”

  “The pig-drool jars,” Ava said.

  “Exactement. Every six hours. For three days now. Which is why I have these little circles under my eyes.”

  Matt grabbed one of the pig-drool jars.

  “No,” Hank said. “I should be the one. Just in case it’s not what we think.” He lifted it to his lips and poured in a mouthful. Then he swished it around and spat into the sink.

  “Seawater?” Matt asked.

  “Seawater,” Hank said. He winced. “That’s cold. Hurt-your-teeth cold.”

  Hank didn’t stop my brother when he screwed the lid off the next Mason jar—the “goat vinegar”—and drank. “Wow. Amazing. Perfectly fresh.”

  I was about to interrupt, when Sophie asked the question for me. “Would one of you please explain what is happening?”

  “Don’t you see?” Matt asked.

  No, we did not.

  “The creatures were desalinating the seawater!” Hank said.

  “Like the Clutterbuck Prize,” I said.

  “That’s right, Jack,” Matt said. He sounded genuinely surprised.

  Hank began walking in small circles. “This is amazing. World-changing! Huge. Beyond huge. Cosmic!” He stopped. “Well, maybe not cosmic. But huge. Really.”

  Matt was practically bouncing with excitement. “Those freaky little creatures you saw must be able to ingest, or drink in, the seawater, then separate the salt from the water. The output is salt and freshwater.”

  “So they suck in saltwater and excrete fresh, drinkable water,” Hank added. “But it freezes instantly in the subzero water, forming those little icicles.”

  Okay, so I’m pretty good with words, and I knew what excrete meant. That’s the way our bodies, or the bodies of any organism, get rid of the stuff they don’t want. Normally we “excrete” into a white ceramic bowl that has a plumbing system linked to the back. “So if those creatures excreted that freshwater, Matt, then you just drank their pee.”

  Hank was too excited to notice the joke. “Exactly!” he said. “Try some! It’s delicious.”

  Ava and Sophie chuckled.

  “Jack, this is serious,” Matt said. “This discovery is enormous. I mean, if you were to use these creatures, or maybe design a machine that copies the way they work, you could make clean drinking water for tens of millions of people.”

  Maybe it was his mention of millions, but an idea hit me immediately. I rushed it out before anyone else expressed the same thought. “Someone who did that could win the Clutterbuck Prize. Right?”

  Everyone was quiet for a moment. I was right. I could see it in their faces, in the way Hank drummed his fingers on his chin. Anna’s disappearance wasn’t just about science anymore. Her discovery was also worth real money. We were talking about a million dollars to start. And likely far more to come. Now any number of people could have tried to steal her creatures. Levokin, Golding, even that cranky, silver-haired director. Had she really left the kitchen after grabbing her baguette? Or had she hidden in the next aisle, listening to Sophie explain everything? Maybe she was the culprit all along. Or maybe Hank was wrong, and our friend Britney had tricked us all into believing she was on our side.

  Ava squeezed my shoulder. “The stickycams!” she yelled.

  “Sticky what?” Sophie asked.

  We didn’t stop to explain. Both Ava and I dashed out through the back door of the kitchen. The others followed. Across the hall, only a few paces away, one of Ava’s miniature cameras was lodged in the space between an exit sign and the wall. Whoever stole the creatures would’ve had to rush right past that camera. Ava was impatiently tapping at the screen of her smartphone.

  “Anything?” I asked.

  “I have to wait for it to sync.”

  A few seconds later Ava had the video running on her tiny screen. The picture was not as clear as I’d hoped. The lens was fogged; Hank guessed that the warm, humid air flowing out of the kitchen was to blame. But then Ava found what we’d been hoping for: a short video clip of someone racing out the back kitchen door, carrying a plastic container. You couldn’t see the person’s face. But that wasn’t necessary. The thief was wearing an offensively bright orange jacket.

  11

  CIRCLE MARKS THE SPOT

  Do they have special prisons for cheating scientists? Probably not. But if they did, I imagine the calculators would all be out of batteries, the protractors would be broken, and the inmates would never be allowed outside, since even a cloudy day can be interesting to a scientist. There had to be some kind of fitting punishment for Franklin Golding, the man who was too good to wear a Big Red like everyone else. I was awake half the night imagining what would happen when we caught him and Anna was safely returned.

  The night before, we’d started searching for Golding, asking dozens of people if they’d seen him. The Facilities Engineer didn’t know if he’d returned from his last outing. Walter had no clue. None of Sophie’s friends on the dining staff remembered seeing the golden boy around lately. Britney found us outside Hank’s room at one point. She said she’d failed to convince the director to search for Anna, and she had no idea whether Golding was around, either. Eventually Matt stopped a sweat-soaked Victor Valenza on his way back from the gym, and the diver insisted that our suspect was still in the field.

  “You will soon see for yourself,” he’d said. “They’re sending a helicopter tomorrow to pick him up. Maybe you can talk this crew into looking for Anna, too. The east side of the ice shelf offers the best diving—it’s full of aquatic life. That’s why Golding is there in the first place.”

  I didn’t know whether to believe him. But one way or another, we had to get on that helicopter.

  When Hank opened the door to our room the next morning, he immediately declared that I looked terrible. My mouth felt like it had been blown dry, and the skin around my knuckles was starting to crack. Matt was at the desk, reading. I sat up and reached for a glass of water as Ava, up and about, followed Hank inside. She was wearing the pink fleece. Instantly my mood brightened. As expected, she had run out of clean clothes, and I’d been only too happy to give her the secret stash I’d packed. But my victory wasn’t complete until that moment. She saw the joy on my face and scowled. “Don’t say a word,” she said.

  I coughed and drank. After our chat with Valenza, Hank had promised to work on the director to let us go on the helicopter trip. “What’
s the plan?” I asked. “Are we going?”

  “We’re going,” he said.

  “How did you convince her?” Matt asked.

  “Simple. She said she’d let us on the helicopter if we agreed to leave Antarctica on an earlier flight than we’d planned.”

  Sometimes it was good to be despised. “Did you talk to the pilots? Did they agree to search the area for Anna?”

  Hank nodded. “It’s all set. We’ll fly east of Golding’s camp, closer to the Ross Ice Shelf. They said we should be able to cover a lot of ice. Then we’ll circle back to pick him up.”

  What was Golding going to do when we found her? Lie? Deny his involvement? Pretend he knew nothing? I couldn’t wait to see how he’d react. Part of me hoped he’d sob a little.

  Hank squinted at me, sticking his chin out. “Are you sure you’re up for this trip?”

  My attempted response failed, and I coughed up something that looked like one of Anna’s creatures. “Of course,” I said.

  After I got dressed, we ate, bundled up in our Big Reds, and rushed out to the helicopter pad. The blades were spinning slowly, just enough to kick up thin clouds of snow. An official from the medical center stood waiting outside the doors.

  The official gave everyone a quick inspection before letting us past, and I prodded Ava and Matt to go first. When it was my turn, our examiner’s eyes narrowed. She leaned to one side, studying me. “Cough,” she said.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Cough.”

  I faked one. “Sorry, I can’t.”

  She clapped me on the back. A slick lump flew up out of my lungs and into my mouth. “Spit it out,” she said, pointing to the ground. And I did. A nasty yellow-brown chunk splattered onto the hard dirt. She kneeled and studied it briefly. “You’re staying here. In bed.”

  There was probably no point arguing, but I did anyway.

  I lost.

  Hank tried to look disappointed. “Health comes first with small humans, right? Maybe you can catch up on your schoolwork, too. And don’t worry about Anna.” He patted me on the shoulder. “We’ll find her.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ava said.