Jack and the Geniuses

by Bill Nye

  Quick glares from Hank and Matt informed me that it was not appropriate to ask how much he’d offered. “But she refused,” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  “So you left her out here to die.”

  “No, no, no, mate, you misunderstand,” Danno said. He reached around to the side of his snowmobile and pulled out a gun.

  I shuffled back a few steps. Hank instantly stepped in front of us and held out his arms. “Please, Mr. Perkins,” Hank said. “Surely there’s another solution.”

  “You won’t win the Prize by killing the judge,” Matt noted.

  Danno shrugged. “And I won’t win now that the judge knows I’ve sabotaged his friend, will I? I figure they’ll find another judge. Or now that I’ve got the machine tuned up, I can sell it to the highest bidder.”

  Staring at the weapon, I remembered a detail from my reading. “Guns aren’t allowed in Antarctica,” I said. “That’s a fake.”

  Danno fired a bullet into the snow.

  Ava and I jumped back. “That sounded real,” she said.

  The ice groaned below us. Danno edged closer, aiming the gun at Hank’s chest. “You see, I didn’t really leave her out here to die,” he said. “I left her out here to freeze. Which is exactly what I’m going to do with you. But first we’re going to put a few more miles between you people and the base. Wouldn’t want you to show up in the morning alive and kicking, would I? So start marching, or one of you gets a bullet.”

  In my twelve long years of life, I had made plenty of enemies. On the playground. In at least two foster homes. The entire poetry profession despised my siblings because we sold more copies of that one book of verse than all of theirs added together. These enemies had called me names and knocked me down. I’d been spat on once. But no one had ever threatened to shoot me. And as we started marching north, with Danno driving the snowmobile at a crawl behind us, towing our gear, I have to say I was dealing with it pretty well. Maybe the spirits of Shackleton, Scott, Amundsen, and the rest of the famous Antarctic explorers were whispering over my shoulder. Either way, I realized pretty quickly there was no point getting all weepy and scared. That wouldn’t help us survive.

  Danno’s plan wasn’t a bad one. My guess was that he’d push us as far as we could go, ditch us, then head back to the base. The blizzard would hide our tracks. He could drop our gear somewhere close to the station. It would look like we’d ventured off alone. When we were found, the rescue crew would assume we’d gotten lost in the storm. A perfectly reasonable tragedy.

  Ava had her old smartphone out, pressed close to her stomach.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Setting Fred to follow us,” she said. “He’s still hovering back there, out of sight.”

  “Why?”

  The snowmobile’s engine quieted. “Cut it out!” Danno yelled. “What are you talking about up there?”

  The wind roared, then calmed, and I could hear the faint pings of seals calling one another in the water below. My heart beat faster. We were miles from open water. The desert of ice stretched far out from the mountainous coast. But there were seals below us. And seals needed to breathe. Which meant there had to be holes in the ice. But where? I stopped and crouched in the snow. The ice in front of us was smooth and white in all directions.

  Danno stepped off his snowmobile and stomped forward, the gun at his side. “What are you doing?” he growled.

  “I need a rest,” I lied. “I’m exhausted.”

  He pressed his foot against my back and pushed me forward. I threw out my arms to stop myself from face-planting. “You’ve barely walked half a mile.”

  Matt took a step toward him, but Danno raised the gun. “Stay where you are, kid,” he said. “And you,” he added, kicking me lightly, “get up and get moving.”

  “Really, Mr. Perkins,” Hank said, “I’m sure there’s some solution that doesn’t involve—”

  “Move or I shoot,” he shouted.

  Danno returned to his snowmobile. The wind rose again, whipping up swirls of snow. We could only see fifteen or twenty feet in front of us. But that was all I needed. Just ahead I spotted the slick back of a seal as it slid down into the icy water. Ava raised her arm to point. “There’s a—”

  I coughed and elbowed her. “Walk around it, but whatever you do, don’t stop. Just keep walking.”

  “What are you going to do?” Matt asked.

  “I’m going to need you to use those legs.”

  “What are you talking about?” Hank asked.

  “Just trust me,” I pleaded.

  “You want me to run?” Matt asked.

  “No, I want you to bust open a trapdoor.”

  “But—”

  “Just stay close,” I said.

  The snow was blowing so hard that the seal hole was nearly covered by the time we reached the edge of it. The slush was already beginning to harden into ice. If I didn’t know it was there, I might have missed it entirely. I didn’t want to give Danno any clue, so I toed right along the side, then collapsed to my knees on the other side. The ice wobbled slightly beneath me. “Pretend you’re helping me up,” I mumbled to Matt.

  The snowmobile stopped again. I could hear Danno’s footsteps pounding over the ice. “What are you doing?” he yelled.

  “I can’t go on,” I shouted into the wind.

  “We haven’t even walked a mile! Get on your feet.”

  “He’s exhausted,” Matt said.

  There was no point faking tears. They just would’ve frozen on my face. So I went with some straight-up begging. “Please! Please! Don’t leave us out here to die!”

  “I said, get moving!” Danno shouted again.

  “I can’t,” I lied. “Please help me.”

  The crazed engineer looked frustrated and angry enough to lift me up by the back of my Big Red and hurl me the thirty miles to Anna’s last dive site. Fortunately, though, he never managed to get close enough to try. He was so focused on the cowering brat who refused to go along with his murderous plan that he didn’t bother to look down. “Now!” I yelled to Matt, and my brother stomped down hard with one of his partially robotic legs. His right boot broke open the ice as he desperately clambered backward, preventing himself from slipping into the water.

  Danno was not so lucky. When his foot struck the newly opened trapdoor, he lost his balance and toppled forward. His eyes flashed with a mix of terror and confusion as he plunged down through the slush, falling up to his waist into the icy water. He flailed out with his arms to stop himself from going under and loosened his grip on the gun. The weapon slid across the ice.

  I stood up, and for a nanosecond I believed we were free.

  Then one of Danno’s huge gloved hands wrapped around my ankle with the force of a boa constrictor death-gripping a helpless rat. My heels lost their grip as he yanked me down. My back slammed onto the hard-packed snow. The ice below me cracked. The water rose up out of the hole, spilling out over the snow, soaking my pants. He pulled me farther. The burning cold water wrapped around my legs.

  The water was above my knees when something tightened around my arms and chest and yanked me back. I looked down. A climbing rope was wrapped around me, and the others were pulling me toward them. Hank had some lasso skills, after all, and with several great heaves I was nearly pulled clear of the seal hole. Then my progress stopped. Danno was still holding tightly to my ankle. There was no feeling left in either one of my feet, but I lifted my right knee and kicked. My boot glanced off his glove. Again I was yanked backward, and this time the heel of my boot met his knuckles, and he released me with a cry of pain.

  The mad inventor plunged down below his shoulders. He tried to hold himself up, but the sides of the hole were too slick with snow and slush. In all the chaos I don’t know if he cried for help. As Hank and Ava propped me up onto my feet, Matt threw another line into the hole. Danno grabbed it, and my older brother dug his feet into the snow, pulling our attacker from the water. />
  Hank raced across the ice, grabbed the gun, then tossed it in the seal hole. “I despise those things,” he said.

  Ava loosened the rope they’d thrown around my chest.

  Danno was shivering wildly. Slowly he sat and pulled his knees to his chest. He was soaked through, his face blue. He stuttered as he tried to speak.

  “He’s going to freeze to death if we don’t get him warm,” Hank said. He tapped Matt. “Let’s get our gear.”

  I pulled my soaked legs up inside my oversize Big Red. Ava crouched beside me, putting her arm around my shoulders.

  Hank hurried over with blankets, but Matt pulled a utility tool out of his coat and started cutting up the deflated roof and walls of the Snowgoer.

  “Brilliant!” Hank said. He leaned over to me. “Wonderful heat retention. If it were softer, it would make an amazing blanket.”

  First Matt handed a large square section of the shiny material to Ava, who helped me wrap myself up. Then he did the same for Danno. I can’t say I was warm right away, but it blocked out the cold.

  As Hank and Ava set up a stove, and Matt began digging through our packs for dry clothes, the ice began to shake. The frozen white ground rumbled like an earthquake. Was this night really going to get worse?

  Two blurry yellow lights appeared in the blinding snow. There was still no feeling in my feet, so I couldn’t even stand on my own. Wrapped in the remains of our inflatable vehicle, leaning on my sister, I saw the lights brighten. The rumbling intensified, and a vehicle took shape in the snow. A very large, very beautiful, and very warm-looking blue truck.

  “Is that the Rambler?” Ava asked.

  Hank waved them away from the thin ice near the seal hole. The doors on either side swung open. Britney jumped from the passenger side and raced over to me with a blanket. Levokin followed, wrapping a coat around Danno. The driver stepped out last, and even if the Rambler was her vehicle, I was more than a little surprised to see the director. She pulled at her hat and glared my way. “Everyone into the back,” she ordered.

  The interior was large, loud, and wonderfully warm. We stayed in place with the engine running. The heat was cranked up so high that it felt like three or four people were aiming blow-dryers at my face. Immediately Danno and I changed into dry clothes—the girls covered their eyes—while Matt removed his snow pants and unbuckled himself from the robotic legs. Warming up was somehow more painful than falling into the icy water in the first place. Then I remembered I was wearing my self-drying underpants. I pressed the button on the waistband, and a blast of wonderfully warm air rushed through the fabric. The skin of my lower legs burned, so I kept the boxers running for added warmth. I decided I’d have to talk to Hank about making an entire line of such clothes. Pants, for example, would have been nice. I’d forgotten to pack spares, so Ava offered me the Hello Kitty sweats she despised. They were pink and covered with tiny cat faces, and I did not care in the slightest.

  We still hadn’t started driving yet, and the director and Hank rotated the front seats around to face the rest of us on our bench seats in the back. Danno, Levokin, and Matt on one side, Ava, Britney, and I on the other. Britney put her arm around me, and I was so cold that I didn’t even bother to check to see if Matt was jealous.

  Levokin poured a few cups of hot chocolate from a thermos, and Ava and Matt told our story. The Australian sat quietly shivering through it all, avoiding the director’s cold stare as Levokin forced him to drink. At one point, she leaped out of her seat and charged at Danno. She lifted the back of her hand as if she was going to strike him, then stopped and punched the roof of her beloved vehicle. “Ten winters! I should’ve known you’d lose your mind.” She turned to us and tapped the side of her head. “No one can stay sane when they winter-over ten years in a row. The darkness gets to you. All those months without sunlight. I never should’ve let him stay here for ten winters.”

  “I’m . . . I’m s-s-sorry,” Danno said.

  “Too late,” she spat back. “I don’t even know what to do with you. We don’t really have a court system here.”

  After a long pause, I raised my hand. Holding my own mug of hot chocolate just below my mouth, struggling to get the words past my chattering teeth, I asked, “Wh-wh-what made you come after us?”

  “Sophie told me about your plan after the first round of the karaoke contest,” Britney said. “She was worried. And so was I. Two days of Happy Camper training doesn’t exactly make you Ernest Shackleton. Why didn’t you guys tell me what you were up to? Didn’t you trust me?”

  “You would have tried to stop us,” Ava said.

  Britney shrugged. “Good point. You’re right.”

  “So you decided to come get us?” Matt asked.

  Britney nodded to the driver. “First I had to tell the director, since we needed the Rambler to get out here quickly.”

  The director squinted menacingly at Hank. “I had to plow straight through that ice ridge. If there is so much as a scratch on my baby, you’re covering the damages.”

  “Then we recruited Evgeny,” Britney added. “By that point it was clear he was going to whip Golding, anyway.”

  “Really?” Ava asked. “You won?”

  “No, I leave early,” the Russian said. “I already prove I am best thanks to the Billy Joel. Every time. In my home they call me the Karelin of Karaoke.”

  “Huh?” I said.

  “Karelin was an amazing Olympic wrestler,” Ava said.

  I didn’t bother asking how she knew that.

  Hank jutted out his chin and massaged his throat. “Next time I might like to challenge you, Mr. Levokin. I’ve been compared to Sinatra on occasion.”

  This was light-years from true. Matt shook his head my way, silently suggesting I ignore the boast. “How’d you know where we were?” Matt asked. “You could’ve driven right past us. Or even in another direction altogether.”

  “That would be your sister’s doing,” Britney said.

  “What did you do?” I asked Ava.

  Ava made a clicking noise with her tongue. “I wanted to make sure they knew where we were, in case they didn’t hear from us. So last night I kind of wrote a little program that allows you to track Fred’s location from a laptop, and I showed Sophie how to use it.”

  “Kind of?”

  “That’s why you had him with us,” Hank said, smiling proudly.

  “And why you set him to follow us once he went airborne,” I added.

  “Stupid robot,” Danno said.

  “Quiet!” Levokin shouted at him.

  “You sound better already, Mr. Perkins,” the director added. “Warming up, are we?”

  He sneered and said nothing.

  The director turned to Ava. “I’m impressed, young lady,” she said. “We might never have found you otherwise.”

  Ava was watching Hank. “It’s not that I didn’t trust you to get us there and back safely . . .”

  He laughed and shook his head. “What? Oh, no, please. Don’t worry about that for a second. I wouldn’t trust me, either.” He peered out the window at the distant mountains, then eyed Danno, wrapped up and shivering. “I’m not really suited for this kind of adventuring, anyway. It’s far too intense.”

  Britney laughed, but the director’s face was blank.

  “What about you?” I asked the director. “I thought you would’ve been happy to get rid of us.”

  She huffed. “Believe me, young man, I would love nothing more than for you to disappear from McMurdo. But I don’t want to get rid of you by losing you out on the ice. That might cost me my job. I want to see you safely onto a plane home.” She stared at each of us in turn, then lingered on Hank. “What? Did you expect something warm and fuzzy? You’re not going to get it. Not from me. This station is for scientific research. Not intellectual tourism and silly prizes from a sock manufacturer.” She eyed Danno again. “And it is certainly no place for thieves and saboteurs.”

  “Do not speak poorly of Mr. Clutterbuck,�
� Levokin said. He reached down and snapped the top of his socks—the same pair he’d been wearing two days before. “Almost seventeen days. This man is genius.”

  “What are you going to do with Perkins?” Britney asked the director.

  “We’ll figure it out back at the base,” she said. “Evgeny, do you think Mr. Perkins is now well enough to travel? No signs of hypothermia?”

  Levokin placed the back of his hand against Danno’s forehead, checked his pulse, then elbowed him in the shoulder. “He is fine. You worry too much about cold water. In Russia, we do these plunges for health.”

  “Good,” the director replied. “Then would you mind tying Mr. Perkins to the back of the snowmobile? At least a dozen knots, please. Bind him like luggage, and make sure that silly inflatable vehicle is securely strapped to the back, as well. We don’t want to leave that out here. That would be littering.”

  “Will be my pleasure,” the Russian answered, grabbing Danno out of his seat.

  “It’s not silly,” Hank said under his breath.

  The director started to follow Levokin and Danno outside. “Good luck to the rest of you.”

  “Wait,” Ava said. “What do you mean? Aren’t we all going back to the base?”

  “McMurdo? Of course not,” the director answered. “I’ll take Mr. Perkins back to the base on the snowmobile. We can determine what to do with him there. Evgeny will join you when he’s finished with his chore here, and I trust he will keep you safe.”

  “Safe from what?” I asked.

  “You have a long trip ahead of you,” the director said. “You’ve come all this way already. You might as well go rescue your friend.”