by Bill Nye
“We don’t exactly have Wi-Fi around here,” Matt said. “We’d need a big antenna if we want to connect to the satellite.”
The three geniuses were silent. Normally, I would’ve been worried. But this was a very particular type of silence. Their faces were blank and their brains were so busy that their bodies looked paralyzed.
My brother squinted at Ava, who turned to Hank. He shrugged back at her. “The arrow could be the antenna.”
“We could write the code to reprogram Cheryl.”
“Then if we connect the laptop to the antenna—”
“Does the laptop have a name?” Pepedro interrupted.
“She names things, not him,” I explained.
“We’ll call it Ronaldo,” Pepedro said.
Alicia leaned toward me. “He was a great footballer.”
“Okay,” Matt said, “so we connect Ronaldo to the arrow—”
“Pete,” Hank suggested. “I had a childhood friend named Pete. He was very resourceful. Ronaldo connects to Pete, then Pete talks to Cheryl.”
“And Cheryl takes the pictures,” Ava finished.
Matt was biting his lower lip. “We still have to get Pete up into the trees, so there’s a clear line of sight to Cheryl.”
“I brought Betsy,” Ava reminded him.
“Who is Betsy?” Alicia asked. “A friend of Cheryl?”
The geniuses didn’t even hear her question. “We need someone to use Betsy to get up there,” Matt said.
“Up where?” Alicia asked.
“The roof of the rainforest,” Hank said.
“Stop,” Pepedro said. “Can you please explain to us what you’re talking about?”
Hank grabbed a stick off the ground, then kneeled in the dirt and began to draw in the center of the clearing. He started with a long, curved line. “This is Earth, okay?” Next he drew a squiggly semicircle on the planet’s surface and a small “x” inside. “This is the rainforest, and this is us, on the floor.”
Bobby scooted forward. “Where am I?”
Hank thought he was joking. I leaned forward and pointed to a random spot in the center of the jungle. “You’re there,” I said.
“Good,” Bobby said. “Go on, Dr. Witherspoon.”
Our mentor was staring at Bobby as though he’d just spoken in Klingon. Hank breathed in through his teeth, then continued, drawing a small square high above the roof of the rainforest, with an arrow showing its path above the surface. “When you launch a satellite into space, it completes a circuit of the planet every ninety minutes or so.”
“So it passes over our heads once every ninety minutes?” I asked.
“That’s fast,” Bobby commented.
“Yes,” Hank said, “it is fast, but no, it doesn’t exactly pass over our heads every ninety minutes.”
Matt was nodding along. “It takes at least a few days for a satellite in one of these orbits to return to the same spot overhead, because the Earth’s spin is not the same as the satellite’s speed, and Cheryl’s orbit is a little tilted.”
Alicia pointed up. “So when exactly is Cheryl coming back?”
Neither Matt nor Ava had an answer. “That’s a really good question,” my brother replied. He removed his laptop and started typing. “I can’t get online, obviously, but I should be able to look at our old data of the satellite’s path and figure out when it’s going to cruise overhead again.”
“Yeah,” Bobby said, “you do that.”
Ava was pacing. “If we can connect with Cheryl, we could also have Internet access.”
“Can I check YouTube?” The question shot out of my mouth like a rocket. The guy in the overalls was definitely sleeping. And Ava was glaring at me. “What? I’m joking!”
“No, you’re not checking anything,” Ava said. “But we could start alerting people.”
“I have all the right contacts in the government and rainforest organizations,” Hank said. “I could draft e-mails warning them about the planned activities.”
“Then if we program Cheryl to take pictures and post them online,” Ava continued, “they’ll be able to see proof of what’s happening.”
“And then the government will be able to stop them,” Alicia said. “This makes sense. This could actually work.”
“Some of the trees will fall,” Ava noted.
“But we could save so many more,” Pepedro added.
Matt whistled. “I have good news and bad news,” he said. “Cheryl is set to fly overhead on Saturday afternoon, the day the logging starts.”
“That makes today Thursday?” Hank asked. “I honestly have no idea. I lost track of the days a while ago.”
“Yes,” Alicia replied. “Today is Thursday, and we should be able to catch them before they do too much damage.”
I watched my brother. “What’s the bad news?” I asked.
“Well, we have to reprogram her before that if we want to alert everyone.”
“And . . .”
“And the only other time she’s going to be overhead before that is in”—he clicked a few buttons on his keyboard—“roughly four hours. At a little after one o’clock this afternoon.”
“So we need to get that computer up in the canopy in less than four hours?” I asked.
“Right.”
Hank clapped and started wringing his hands together. “Okay, then. Let’s get to work!”
Ava held up her climbing device. “I’ll make sure Betsy is ready.”
“I’ll start working on the code to reprogram the satellite,” my brother added.
“I’ll focus on the antenna,” Hank said.
“Maybe Pepedro and I can find a good tall tree?” Alicia suggested.
“That would be fantastic,” Hank said. “Ideally one that rises above the canopy.”
“What should I do?” Bobby asked.
“Why don’t you look for a possible tree, too?” Hank suggested. “Alicia, you two head south. Bobby, you look to the north.”
My fishing buddy clapped his hands. “Got it,” he said. “Which way is north?”
Hank pointed, and Bobby was on his way.
So now Alicia and Pepedro had a task. The geniuses were busy. Bobby had a job, too: to get out of the way. I wasn’t going to be able to tune up Betsy. I wasn’t capable of reprogramming Cheryl or fixing up Pete. But I had to help somehow. I gazed up at the canopy. “So how far up am I going, anyway?”
Everyone stopped what they were doing and stared at me.
Hank spoke first. “You don’t have to—”
“I’m too heavy,” Matt said. Then, with his eyebrows raised, he added, “Isn’t that right, Ava?”
“Someone your size might burn out the battery too quickly,” she said. “You, too, Hank.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “I’m going.”
Alicia laid her hand on my shoulder. “They said you were very brave.”
They did? That was nice of them. Definitely. But sometimes I wasn’t so sure. There’s a very thin line between brave and stupid, and I dance around it way too often.
15
THE SLOTH LORD
We finished our preparations a few minutes before noon. Alicia lent me her wristwatch to track the time. The geniuses had readied a backpack for me with all the key equipment, including the laptop, and we started down the path. Bobby was mad that Hank had chosen Alicia and Pepedro’s kapoktree, not the one he’d picked out, and he spent most of the walk talking about his father, the owner of the second largest car dealership in New England. His dad wanted him to move into the car business, too, but Bobby refused. Instead, he had tried to start a bunch of his own companies, including Kwik Kale, a chain of vegan fast-food restaurants, and Male Salon, a nail spa that served only men. All of them had failed.
At some point, I stopped listening and started thinking about the task ahead of me. My hands were shaking already. If I was going to climb up into the canopy, I needed inspiration. I needed to connect with this rainforest on a deeper level. I needed to be one with t
he jungle. I interrupted Bobby and asked, “How do you say sloth in Portuguese?”
“Preguiça,” Alicia answered, drawing out the last two syllables so they sounded like geese-ah.
“Why?” Pepedro asked.
“No reason,” I lied.
The sloth might not have seemed like the most inspiring choice. I was going to need to move quickly. Plus I definitely got the chills whenever I imagined all those beetles living in its fur. And I was way more regular than once a week. So we weren’t exactly alike. But the sloth was my spirit animal. I was no longer Jack. I was Preguiça.
Matt reminded me that our one opportunity to connect with Cheryl before Saturday was only an hour away. If we missed that, we’d have to wait another week, and that would be too late. He didn’t need to tell me twice. But he did, anyway.
Once we talked through all the details, we reviewed them again. And again. After what felt like the fiftieth time, I said, “I’m starting to think you guys don’t trust me.”
No one answered. At least they didn’t lie.
My feet were aching, but Matt’s were worse. He must have stubbed his toes twenty times on the walk. When we arrived at the base of the enormous tree, I stared up into the green shadows of the canopy. Was I really going up there?
I noticed that Hank was watching me. One corner of his mouth was angling upward slightly. I considered going in for a hug, even the one-armed guy version. Instead I just nodded. My sister was straight-faced and serious. She quietly wished me luck. Matt offered a fist bump. Then he winked. “You can do this, Jack,” he said.
But Jack was gone. I was Preguiça, Sloth Lord of the forest, and I had no time for emotions.
The tree looked impossibly tall. The base was easily ten feet wide. It flared out at the bottom and narrowed as it rose. A monkey hiding somewhere in the canopy roared down at us. Vines thicker than baseball bats hung from the branches high overhead. I grabbed one.
“I think it would be better to use Betsy,” Pepedro whispered. He pointed to a thick limb in the canopy high above us. “See that one?”
I squinted. “Pretty much.”
“Maybe aim for that?”
Ava helped me strap into Betsy’s harness, which was kind of like a babyproof swing seat, and buckled it around my waist. The device was made up of a football-size spool of wire, a powerful electric motor, and a super awesome wrist-mounted crossbow. Following Ava’s instructions, I connected the thin line from the spool to a metal dart and clipped it into the miniature crossbow. She was watching me to make sure I did it right. I pulled back the dart to load the device.
“Okay?” I asked.
“It’s all you,” she said.
I lifted my hand, closed one eye, aimed, and fired.
The dart shot high into the tree, trailing the thin line.
And it completely missed.
Just two attempts later—or maybe four—I had my bull’s-eye. The dart dug into the limb.
“Test it,” Ava suggested.
I pulled with all my might.
“Good,” she said. “If it’s going to come loose, you want it to come loose now, when you’re on the ground, not a hundred feet off the floor.”
Sometimes my sister was a little too direct.
“But it won’t come loose,” Hank added. “Right, Ava?”
She hesitated. “Oh, sure. Right. Of course not.”
I flipped the switch that converted Betsy to climbing mode. Do I wish I’d tried the thing out beforehand? Definitely. Especially since the one time I messed around with Betsy, I almost broke my finger. And the last test I’d seen ended with Ava splashing into the dive tank in Hank’s lab. But there was no time for a practice session. The motor whirred, turning the spool, and she sucked up that cable like a hungry giant slurping up the world’s longest strand of spaghetti.
The line tightened.
The harness jerked around my waist.
And I flew up off the ground.
The first thirty feet were actually kind of fun, as if I’d just launched off the world’s most extreme trampoline. Then I hit the lower section of the canopy. Small branches smacked me in the arms. Leaves slapped against my face. Monkeys and macaws hollered, and I jerked to a stop a forearm’s length from the thick limb. I reached up, grabbed hold with two hands, and pulled myself over, into a sitting position. The dart was impossible to pull out of the tree limb, so I unclipped the wire and left the dart in the tree.
Preguiça still had two more darts remaining.
Straddling the tree limb was like sitting on the back of a giant horse. Carefully, I slid backward toward the trunk, reminding myself not to look down.
Then I looked down.
The ground was really, really far away.
Another monkey roared at me. This one was only ten feet away. Opening its huge mouth, it flashed a nasty set of teeth. Normally, I don’t talk to myself. Or not much, anyway. But I needed a little pep talk, and the growling monkey wasn’t helping. “Come on, Jack,” I said aloud. “You’re Preguiça the Sloth Lord. You live in trees. You sleep in trees. You can do this.”
Sure, I was a hundred feet off the ground. But my siblings and Hank, my family: they were depending on me. In a rush, I attached another dart to the cable, raised the wrist gauntlet, and eyed my next target. This shot was trickier, since I had to fire it through a gap in the branches above me to reach the top of the kapok tree. Carefully, I squinted, aimed, and fired.
The dart shot toward the top of the kapok tree, burying itself near the trunk. The line held. I flipped the switch, and Betsy whisked me up through the canopy. The kapok trees rose higher than the rest of the rainforest. They poked up and out of their surroundings like seven-foot-tall basketball players scattered on a crowded city street. And now I felt like one of those giants, staring down at the top of the canopy.
Then my shoulder slammed into the trunk.
The dart was buried in the wood. I kept the line clipped in place and switched the device over to safety mode. This way, Ava had explained, the line would spool out enough for me to climb, but if I fell, Betsy would lock and keep me from dropping straight to the ground.
The trunk of the enormous tree didn’t stop, exactly, but it split into five limbs at the top, almost like someone reaching their arm high into the sky with their fingers outstretched. I settled into a spot between the limbs, leaning back against one, with my feet jammed up against two others. The bark below me was decaying. I pressed into it with the heel of my hand. The wood was soft, but the surrounding trunk was still solid. Most of the kapok tree’s leaves had fallen, so the view was clear, and I looked out at the surrounding jungle. The clouds had drifted away, but a layer of mist had settled on the tops of the trees below me. The thick canopy reminded me of a huge, rolling, uneven field marked by bumps and hills, carpeted with grass that had never been mowed. I checked Alicia’s watch. Fifteen minutes remained until Cheryl was supposed to fly over the horizon.
But I wasn’t really in a perfect position. A little higher and I’d be able to set up Pete so the antenna had a totally clear connection to the satellite. I breathed deep and climbed, pulling myself higher. The branch above me was softer than I’d expected, and wet. My fingers slid. I tried to grab on, but they slipped free, and suddenly I was grasping air. I landed barefoot on the branch below. For a second I balanced there with nothing to hold.
Then the branch cracked. My feet slid down along the length of the slick wood, and I dropped straight toward the forest floor.
16
THE ROOF OF THE RAINFOREST
In the long history of humankind, there have been many great wedgies. The legendary hero Achilles gave them to his friends when they borrowed his spear. Presidents have given them to vice presidents. But when Betsy finally engaged in safety mode and stopped unwinding, the wedgie she gave me had to rank as one of the most painful. The underwear-ripping torture I’d received from the bearded twelve-year-old I briefly shared a room with when I was eight? Not even close.
/> Breathing slowly through my nose, I performed a systems check, like a captain at the controls of a spaceship. My brain was working. My fingers moved. My toes still burned. My feet were still aching. Sure, it felt like two construction workers had just swung a pair of sledgehammers at my butt, and we’re not even going to talk about what I was feeling up front, but I’d survived. I was pretty sure I’d be able to walk. Eventually. And my backpack was still tight around my shoulders, which meant the computer and the rest of the gear was secure.
The canopy was only a few body lengths below me. My destination was now towering high above. And Betsy was beeping. “Ava!” I yelled down. “Why’s this thing making noises?”
If my sister replied, I didn’t hear her. The crowded canopy was like a rock concert hosted by crazed, caffeinated zoo animals. I checked Alicia’s watch and panicked. Now only twelve minutes remained, and I needed to get back to the top of the tree. I clicked Betsy into climbing mode again. She was beeping slower and softer. Was that a good sign? Or a bad one?
“Don’t be the battery,” I muttered to myself.
Betsy pulled me upward at a painfully slow pace, and I repeated the phrase over and over, turning it into a kind of chant. But chanting wasn’t going to charge a dying battery.
Ten feet from the spot where the dart was lodged into the branch, Betsy died. The motor whirred to a stop, and I was dangling with nothing to hold on to. I gripped the cable and tried to pull myself up. I was a pretty good rope climber. One time in gym class I placed seventh out of twenty kids in a contest. Or maybe it was seventeenth. Either way, this cable was far too thin to grip. I wasn’t making any progress.
The trunk of the tree was only fifteen feet away, and it was scattered with the stumps of broken branches. If I got close, I could use them as steps and climb my way up. Hopefully. So I swung my legs back and forth, building momentum. The clock in my head started ticking. Finally I reached out and grabbed one of the broken stumps. A splinter dug into the base of my thumb. I winced but held on and stopped swinging. Then I placed my right foot on another broken limb, found a spot for my left, and started to climb. This time I settled on a lower perch, a branch that felt far too strong to snap. The position wasn’t ideal for linking up with Cheryl, but it was good enough, and I couldn’t risk climbing higher. The branches up there were too weak, and I had too little time. My heart was racing again. My hands were quivering. I shifted my backpack around to the front and unzipped the main compartment. Channel Preguiça, I told myself, breathing slowly.
