The Pompeii Disaster

by Dan Gutman

  He opened a plastic bag full of ping-pong balls and dumped them into the water.

  Next, Mr. Martin took an empty plastic soda bottle and attached a brick to either side of it using duct tape.

  “What’s that for, Mr. Martin?” somebody asked.

  “You’ll see,” the teacher replied. “When molten rock pours out of a volcano, it’s called lava. It’s really hot, but it moves slowly, so people can usually evacuate in time. Sometimes though, the top of the mountain will just explode and release millions of tons of ash, flying boulders, pulverized rock, and poisonous gases.”

  “I think there was one of those volcanoes in the boys’ bathroom yesterday,” Stuart cracked. “Whew! Talk about poisonous gases! We all had to evacuate.”

  “WILL YOU SHUT UP FOR ONCE IN YOUR LIFE?” Isabel suddenly shouted. “Do you have to be stupid all the time?”

  Her outburst even shocked herself. She was usually quiet in school. Most of the time, she limited her displays of disgust to eye rolling and head shaking. But after everything she had been through on the Titanic and at Gettysburg, Isabel had lost some of her timidity and gained some confidence to say what was on her mind.

  Everybody stopped for a moment and looked at her. Even Stuart was shocked. He had no comeback. A few of the girls clapped their hands quietly.

  “Anyway,” said Mr. Martin, “when the top of the mountain explodes, the result is called pyroclastic flow. It moves at the speed of a hurricane and can get as hot as eighteen hundred degrees.”

  Mr. Martin put the bottle gently on the ground. Then he stuck a funnel in it and began to fill it. Kids began covering their ears.

  “What’s that stuff, Mr. Martin?” somebody asked.

  “Liquid nitrogen,” the teacher replied. “You can also use ammonium dichromate.”

  He quickly capped the soda bottle and lowered it into the garbage can full of water.

  “Now stand back, everybody!” he announced. “It should be about ten seconds.”

  The class began counting down.

  “Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . six . . . five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one!”

  Nothing happened.

  A few more seconds passed. A little smoke started rising out of the garbage can. And then, BOOM!

  The soda bottle blew its top, and red water, smoke, and ping-pong balls were launched in the air and rained down all over the courtyard.

  “Whoa!” “Cool!” “Awesome!”

  “That’s what you call a Plinian eruption,” Mr. Martin announced. “Of course, if this had been a real volcano, it would be no laughing matter. There would be death and destruction for the people who live in the area. There could be earthquakes, landslides, acid rain, or flash floods.”

  Mr. Martin had a satisfied grin as he looked at the students’ faces. Even Stuart and his obnoxious pals were locked in now. It’s just about impossible to be bored when you’re watching an explosion. Blowing stuff up is undeniably cool.

  “The biggest known volcano in our solar system is on Mars,” Mr. Martin told the class. “It’s three hundred seventy-three miles wide and thirteen miles high.”

  Nobody said “whoa” or “cool” or “awesome.”

  Mr. Martin went on to tell the students about some other famous volcanoes, but almost immediately, he realized he had pushed his luck. Isabel was still jotting down notes, but most of the class had already lost interest and were chatting about other things.

  Mr. Martin sighed, silently lamenting the short attention span of today’s kids. Maybe they got something out of the demonstration, he hoped.

  A few minutes after the dismissal bell rang, Isabel was at her locker. She turned on her cell phone to find a group text already in progress. . . .

  Julia: What R you guys doing?

  Luke: ZIP. U?

  David: Want 2 get pizza?

  Julia: Where?

  Luke: I’M IN. WHERE ISABEL?

  David: Meet at Boylston and Tremont in 30

  Boylston Street and Tremont Street intersect at the corner of Boston Common, one of the prettiest parks in America. The Boston subway, which is called the T, stops right nearby, so it was a convenient meeting spot for the Flashback Four.

  The group hadn’t seen each other since getting back from their Titanic adventure, so a long group hug was in order. Then they grabbed slices at a nearby pizza joint and sat down on a bench on the south side of the park. It reminded them of the bench they’d ended up on when the Carpathia had docked in New York.

  “It feels weird, doesn’t it?” David asked after the usual pleasantries had been covered.

  “Yeah,” Julia replied. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Isabel. “I’ve just been feeling strange ever since we got back. It’s like I’m a different person or something.”

  “Me too,” David said. “Can’t put my finger on it.”

  “I can,” Luke said. “I’m bored. We’re all bored. We were on the Titanic. We almost died. Now we’re back home, going to boring school. Doing boring homework. Living boring lives.”

  “It was exciting, wasn’t it?” Isabel said a little mischievously. “I still can’t believe we made it back.”

  “That will probably be the most exciting thing that ever happens to any of us,” Julia noted. “It’s a little depressing, huh?”

  “Remember when that rich guy—John Jacob Astor—gave us his money?” recalled Isabel.

  “Remember when he locked us in that stateroom, and then the ship hit the iceberg?” recalled Luke.

  “That was cool,” David said. “I mean, it wasn’t cool at the time, but it’s cool to think about now that it’s over.”

  “Face it,” Luke told the others. “We’re officially boring now. We’ll never do anything that exciting again. It’s all downhill from here.”

  They walked through Boston Common in silence until they reached the famous Frog Pond near the north end of the park. Some kids were tossing a Frisbee back and forth. A couple was taking selfies on the bridge in front of the famous swan boats. That’s when Luke noticed a couple of women across the pond. One of them was sitting in a wheelchair.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “Is that . . .”

  “Miss Z!” Isabel shouted.

  The foursome ran over find Miss Z with Mrs. Vader sitting near the edge of the pond, tossing pieces of bread into the water for the ducks. The office of Pasture Company in the John Hancock Tower was just a few blocks away.

  More hugs were dispensed, and the two women greeted the kids warmly.

  “It’s so good to see you!” Mrs. Vader said.

  “We framed that wonderful photo you took of the Titanic as it was sinking,” Miss Z told the kids, “and we hung it in the empty space on the wall.”

  “What are you doing out here?” asked Isabel.

  “I guess I’m . . . semi-retired,” Miss Z replied, tossing the last of her bread into the water. “Living the good life, as they say. It’s a little dull, if the truth be known. What are you kids doing out here? School must be over for the day.”

  “We were a little bored too,” said Julia.

  “Bored?” Miss Z looked surprised. “How can you possibly be bored? What are you in, sixth grade? You have your whole lives ahead of you!”

  “Yes, shouldn’t you be home playing video games or something?” asked Mrs. Vader. “Isn’t that what your generation does for fun?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Luke replied. “Video games just aren’t the same anymore. They’re not like jumping off the Titanic.”

  “I guess not,” Miss Z said. “Simulating reality is not quite the same thing as experiencing it.”

  The Flashback Four helped wheel Miss Z back to her office in the Hancock building. Always the good hostess, Mrs. Vader offered the kids some cookies before they left. The Flashback Four, of course, accepted.

  “You said you were planning to send us on another mission after we got back from the Titanic,” Julia asked. “What w
as it?”

  Miss Z hesitated, then glanced at Mrs. Vader. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” she said. “I’m retired. The program is over.”

  “Please?” the Flashback Four begged.

  “Well, I guess there’s no harm in just talking about it,” said Miss Z. “What do you kids think of when I say the word Pompeii?”

  CHAPTER 6

  HOLD ON TIGHT

  POMPEII.

  It’s pronounced pom-PAY. To some people, the word means nothing. To others, it’s the greatest tragedy in human history.

  “That’s the name of some old movie, right?” asked David.

  “Isn’t pompeii some weird hairdo from the 1950s?” asked Luke.

  “That’s pompadour, you dope,” Julia told him.

  “I learned about Pompeii at school today,” Isabel told the group. “It was a city in the Roman Empire. There was a volcano nearby, and it erupted. The whole city was buried in ash and disappeared. They didn’t find it for over a thousand years.”

  “Very good, Isabel,” said Miss Z. “Would one of you mind getting that globe near the window?”

  David went to get the globe. Miss Z lowered her voice almost to a whisper. “Here’s the story. It was August twenty-fourth in the year 79 AD. Pompeii was on the western shore of Italy, next to the Bay of Naples. Right here. It wasn’t called Italy back then. About ten miles away was Mount Vesuvius, a volcano that had been dormant since 920 BC. If the people of Pompeii knew it was a volcano at all, they figured it was a dead volcano. But it erupted that day, shooting out billions of tons of rock and ash over the next eighteen hours. It completely buried the city. Thousands of people in Pompeii died.”

  “Cool,” said Luke. “I mean the eruption, not the dying part.”

  “Here’s the interesting part,” Miss Z continued. “It all happened so fast that those people died in the middle of whatever they were doing—walking the dog, cooking some food, whatever. So they were found at the moment of death, preserved in volcanic ash. They were like statues. When archeologists finally unearthed the city centuries later, it was like looking at a snapshot of a moment of ancient history.”

  “That must have been gross,” Julia said, “finding all those dead bodies.”

  “Did any of the people survive?” asked Isabel.

  “Yes, some people got out fast and escaped,” replied Miss Z. “But for the people who stayed, their whole city was wiped out.”

  “And you were going to send us there?” asked David, incredulous. “That would be even more dangerous than putting us on the Titanic. At least on the Titanic we had the chance to be rescued.”

  “Well, my plan was to send you to Pompeii to take a picture of Mount Vesuvius as it was erupting,” Miss Z told them. “You see, it took about a half an hour before all that stuff fell from the sky and landed on the city. In that half hour I would have gotten you out of there safely. That was my thinking, anyway.”

  “I don’t get it,” Julia said. “Why didn’t the people get out of Pompeii as soon as the volcano erupted? Why didn’t they evacuate the whole city?”

  “Many people tried to get out,” Miss Z explained. “It wasn’t so easy.”

  “Yeah, it’s not like they could catch a plane or a train out of town,” Isabel said. “It was the year 79.”

  “Right,” Miss Z said, “and a lot of people just decided to stay put in their houses, waiting for the eruption to blow over.”

  “Wait a minute,” Luke interrupted. “How do we know any of this stuff is true? They didn’t have radio, TV, or internet in those days. Was paper even invented?”

  “Oh yes, they had paper,” Miss Z replied. “We know what happened in Pompeii mainly because a teenager named Pliny the Younger watched the eruption from his uncle’s home across the Bay of Naples. He wrote down everything that happened.”

  “That eruption would have made a cool picture for your museum,” said Isabel.

  “Yes,” Miss Z said wistfully. “For a long time I’ve been fantasizing about getting a photo for my collection of an event that took place before photography was invented. The first photograph was taken in the 1820s. So we really don’t know for sure what the world looked like before that time. Imagine this—a picture of Mount Vesuvius erupting in the year 79. Talk about a snapshot of a moment of ancient history! How cool would that be?”

  “Cool,” said Isabel.

  “Way cool,” said Julia.

  “Moderately cool,” said David.

  “I’ve always wanted to go to Italy,” said Luke, whose father was half Italian. “They have the best pizza in the world there, you know. Pizza was invented in Italy.”

  “I love pizza,” David replied.

  “Everybody loves pizza,” added Isabel.

  “I heard pizza was invented in China,” Julia said.

  “Get outta here!” Luke said. “Whoever heard of Chinese pizza?”

  “Lots of stuff was invented in China,” said Isabel, who had written a report on the subject in fourth grade. “Gunpowder, paper, the compass, printing . . .”

  “Did they have pizza in ancient Pompeii?” asked Luke, who was clearly obsessed with pizza.

  “I don’t know if they had it in the year 79,” Miss Z replied with a laugh. “But I bet you can get it there now.”

  “Now?” asked David. “You mean Pompeii is a city again?”

  “Yes, and a big tourist attraction,” said Miss Z. “Millions of people go there every year. In fact, after I finished college, I took a trip to Italy and visited Pompeii. It was amazing.”

  “I went there too,” added Mrs. Vader. “It’s one of those places everybody should go in their lifetime.”

  “I wish I could go,” said Isabel.

  “Hey, couldn’t you use the Board to send us to Pompeii right now?” Luke asked Miss Z. “I mean, not ancient Pompeii. Couldn’t you send us to Pompeii in the present day? You can type in any year you want, right? So you could type in this year.”

  “Yeah, you could beam us over there instantly,” David said.

  “That’s not a bad idea,” said Julia.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Miss Z told them. “Not after what you’ve been through.”

  “Let’s do it!” Luke said excitedly. “Just for a few minutes? We don’t have to take any pictures or anything. We can just go, look around, and come right back. Nothing would go wrong.”

  “What about this idea?” suggested Miss Z. “Perhaps I could send you kids to Pompeii with your families. All expenses paid. It would be a little present from me to make up for everything I’ve put you through.”

  “No thanks,” said Julia. “I don’t want to go away with my family.”

  “I haven’t gone on vacation with my family since I was eight,” said Luke.

  “Yeah, I’m too old to go on vacation with my parents,” David said.

  Isabel kept her mouth shut. She had gone on vacation to the Dominican Republic with her parents over Christmas vacation.

  “We want to go to Pompeii with you,” Luke told Miss Z. “You can be our chaperone. That way, when we do something stupid, you’ll be able to bail us out.”

  “You did say you wanted to travel now that you’re retired,” added Isabel.

  “I think it’s a marvelous idea!” said Mrs. Vader, clapping her hands together. “I can stay here at the office to send all five of you to Pompeii and bring you back.”

  “It would be interesting to visit Pompeii again,” Miss Z admitted.

  “Please please please please please?” begged the kids.

  “Well . . . okay,” Miss Z said. “But it will have to be fast. Just one hour and back.”

  “Yay!”

  “Wait a minute,” Isabel said. “We can’t go. We lost the TTT on the Titanic.”

  Miss Z opened her desk drawer. There was a TTT in it.

  “This is the last one I have,” she said, handing it to Isabel.

  “I’m going to type in the Porta Marina gate at Pompeii as our meeting spot,” said Miss
Z. “One hour should be enough to give us a quick taste of the city. Mrs. Vader, will you kindly zap us back here exactly one hour from now?”

  “Will do,” Mrs. Vader replied, checking her watch.

  Isabel grabbed her backpack and put the TTT into one of the zippered pockets.

  “No way I’m going to lose it this time,” she said.

  Luke, Isabel, Julia, and David rolled Miss Z over to the Board and crowded around her to form a tight group.

  “Okay, is everybody ready?” asked Mrs. Vader, typing some commands on the keyboard.

  “Ready as we’ll ever be,” replied Miss Z. “This is exciting!”

  The Board began to buzz and glow bright blue for a few seconds. Then the light split into five color bands that merged into a solid band of bright white light.

  “Hold on tight, everybody,” said Mrs. Vader.

  The Board began to hum and vibrate as the light reached out to envelop the group.

  “It’s happening!” Miss Z exclaimed.

  The group began to flicker. The humming got louder.

  And the next thing anyone knew, the Flashback Four and Miss Z had disappeared.

  CHAPTER 7

  BACK TO THE PRESENT

  WHEN MISS Z OPENED HER EYES AND SAW THAT she had been transported from Boston to Pompeii in the snap of a finger, a smile spread across her face. It made her look twenty years younger.

  “It works!” she marveled. “I mean, I knew it would work. But I never thought I would actually see it work.”

  Pompeii was a fortress city, built to repel an enemy invasion. It was—and still is—surrounded by a double wall, with seven gates. The Flashback Four (along with Miss Z and her wheelchair) landed about ten feet outside the Porta Marina gate, the main entry point. From there, they could see the ruins of the ancient city spread out in front of them, stretching into the distance.

  “Are you okay?” David asked Miss Z, bending over her wheelchair.

  “It’s just like I remember it,” she replied.

  Isabel pulled the TTT out of her backpack and composed a short text to Mrs. Vader. . . .