2015 Young Explorer's Adventure Guide Read online

  Outside, she slowed down and took a deep breath. Summer vacation was almost here, and Ellen thought the neighborhood smelled green. Like leaves and sunshine.

  She kicked at pebbles on the sidewalk as she walked to her house three blocks away. The fact that they lived so close to school made her nervous, just thinking about how easy it would be for one of her friends to find out what her family was really like.

  Ellen snorted. Not so much of an issue anymore, was it?

  And her mom had called her Eriko! How many times did she have to tell her she wanted to be called Ellen? The name was much more elegant and grown-up. Eriko sounded like a little kid’s name.

  Not to mention her friends couldn’t pronounce it very well.

  “Mom’s lived in America for thirteen years,” Ellen mumbled. “Why hasn’t she learned to speak English yet? It’s not hard.”

  Nobody was around to answer her, so Ellen just slouched the rest of the way home.

  She reached their driveway at house number 544 and walked up it, careful not to step on any cracks. No weeds poked up from them, thanks to her dad’s meticulous yard work every weekend. Their potted flowers added splashes of red and pink to the front walk and porch, all done in a traditional Japanese fashion.

  Little Sister has been scribbling on the driveway again, she noticed. Addition and subtraction problems covered the cracked concrete, and dotted lines connected circles like a path on a treasure map.

  As if the thought were a magic conjuration, Risako appeared from the back yard. “What took you so long?”

  Ellen rolled her eyes. “You first-graders get out an hour earlier than the sixth-graders do.”

  “Oh, right. Well, do you want to come to Saturn with me?”

  “Saturn?”

  “I just finished my spaceship!”

  Ellen pictured the cardboard and plastic monstrosity that had taken up the corner of the back yard for the past week. “Oh. Okay, I guess I can play with you for a little while.”

  The longer she could delay going inside and seeing her mom, the better.

  Ellen followed Little Sister around the house, her backpack clinking with every step.

  She had to admit, Little Sister’s construction was impressive. Any six-year-old could throw slabs of cardboard together and claim it was a spaceship, but Little Sister’s creation actually looked like a space-worthy vessel.

  Paper towel tubes were bunched together with rubber bands and glued to the sides to be thrusters. The front was a pointed nose cone. Properly curved cardboard fins jutted out of the top and sides. The garden hose curled around from place to place. She even had the clear plastic lid from their toy box as the windshield.

  “You sit in the co-pilot’s seat, Ellen,” Little Sister directed, lifting the toy box lid and clambering into the other side.

  Ellen held up the lid and swung her legs into the seat. She put her backpack at her feet.

  Inside, it smelled like cut paper and crayons. Little Sister had drawn a control panel at the front with buttons labeled in both English and Japanese. The seats were just big, black rectangles on the floor and back wall of the cockpit.

  “Okay, I’m ready for lift-off,” Ellen said.

  “It’ll take a minute,” Little Sister said, poking at some of the drawn buttons. “It runs on green energy, so it needs to collect enough green from the grass first.”

  “Green energy?” Ellen asked.

  “We’re learning about it in school this week. Mrs. Carter says green energy is better for the planet, so I made my spaceship run on it.”

  Ellen’s lips quirked up, but she didn’t say anything. Why couldn’t their spaceship be powered by the color green?

  “Okay, we’re ready,” Little Sister said. “Hold on tight.”

  “Okay.” Ellen leaned forward to put her hands on the control panel.

  The thrusters fired up, and Ellen flew backward against her black crayon seat as the ship zoomed into the air.

  “Ahh! What’s going on?!”

  Little Sister looked over at her. “We’re going to Saturn, dummy. I told you to hold on.”

  “It’s pretend! What did you do?” How could Little Sister just pilot her cardboard spaceship like it flew through the air every day?

  Little Sister didn’t answer her question, too focused on propelling them through the turbulence of the atmosphere.

  Higher and higher they flew, and Ellen held her breath. Her ears popped.

  Weren’t airplanes pressurized so people’s heads wouldn’t explode or something? She didn’t want her head to explode, and she definitely didn’t want to get Little Sister’s brains splattered all over her school clothes. Mom would throw a fit.

  The cardboard and plastic rattled all around them as air buffeted the ship. Ellen scrabbled her fingers around the cockpit, searching for something to hold onto. They flew faster and faster, up and up, and the rushing wind grew louder and louder.

  The shaking stopped. They smoothed out and shot away from planet Earth and into the inky, star-speckled darkness of space.

  Ellen twisted in her seat, trying to look back towards home, but she couldn’t manage it.

  “I should have put a window in the back,” Little Sister admitted.

  Ellen settled back in her seat, letting out a shaky breath. “How long until we reach Saturn?”

  Little Sister poked at some of the crayon squares and squinted at the big one in the middle. Ellen realized that it was supposed to be a display screen, but nothing appeared on it.

  It was just a square drawn on cardboard, after all.

  “Probably only twenty minutes,” Little Sister said with a shrug. “Green energy is very efficient.”

  “Watch out!” Ellen screamed.

  The Moon loomed before them through the plastic toy box lid, so bright it was blinding.

  They were headed for a collision!

  Little Sister wrestled with the controls. The spaceship turned to the right, but the Moon still got closer and closer.

  “We need more speed!” Ellen shouted. “Full power on the thrusters!”

  She jabbed at the square labeled THRUSTERS , and the ship lurched. They pulled away to the right, just skimming a few feet above the surface of the Moon.

  Ellen watched the craters whizz by, trying not to think about how close they’d just come to becoming a crater themselves.

  “That was too close, Little Sister,” Ellen said, slumping back in her seat. “You have to be a responsible driver.”

  Little Sister giggled. “You sound like mom.”

  “I do not.”

  “Do, too.”

  “Mom doesn’t know the word ‘responsible,’ and she sounds stupid when she tries to say ‘drive.’ Doraibuuuuu.” Ellen extended the last syllable, trying to make Little Sister laugh.

  Little Sister did laugh. “Yeah, but she says the same things in Japanese. Be responsible, do your homework, study Kanji! I wish we didn’t have to go to Japanese School on Saturdays.”

  Ellen sighed. “Me, too.” Normal American kids didn’t have to go to Japanese School.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t like her Japanese heritage. Anime was cool, and she had a whole collection of manga. Some of the video games were fun, when she could convince dad to buy them for her. But the tea ceremony was boring, and calligraphy and Kanji sucked. She worried about her culture project again.

  She sighed once more, then sniffed.

  “I smell burning paper,” she said.

  “Oh, no,” Little Sister moaned. She poked at the buttons and squinted at the blank display. “The brush with the Moon damaged the fuel tank. We’re running on fumes!”

  “Green has fumes?” Ellen asked.

  But there was no time to question it. The sputtering, jerking motion of the ship shook the left thruster loose, and it sent them spinning.

  Little Sister and Ellen grappled with the controls to pull themselves into a straight path. When they reached a semi-steady trajectory, a bright plane of rusty re
d filled their view.

  “Mars!” Little Sister squealed.

  “We’re gonna crash!”

  They hurtled through the atmosphere of the red planet. Sweat rolled down Ellen’s face and back as their entry heated up the cockpit. The smell of burning paper surrounded her, and she squinched her eyes closed and pressed her lips together to keep from screaming.

  A hard jolt and a loud ripple of crumpling cardboard signified their arrival.

  …………………………

  For having crash-landed on Mars, the spaceship didn’t look too bad. The nose was stuck in the red dirt and crunched up, and one thruster dangled by a thin strip of masking tape, but otherwise, it looked as flight-worthy as it ever had.

  Little Sister tugged on the back to pull it out of the dirt. The garden hose flopped amongst the rocks, and Little Sister groaned.

  “The fuel tank’s been completely drained,” she said. “I can fix the hole, but we need to find more green stuff to get home.”

  Ellen glanced around. “But we’re on Mars. There’s no green here.”

  Little Sister frowned at the back of the ship, rubbing her chin the way dad did when he was trying to solve a problem.

  “I could make an adaptor,” she mumbled. “Something to let the ship run on red. But I would need some construction paper and red and green building bricks.”

  Ellen’s heart sank and rolled around in her tummy. “I don’t think we’ll find any of those here.”

  “Then we’ve got to look for them.”

  Ellen wrapped her arms around herself and followed Little Sister away from the ship. She glanced back at it, trying to imagine how any of this could have happened.

  A reddish-brown smudge streaked across the horizon to their left, and Ellen worried about Mars’s famous dust storms. She didn’t want to get caught in one. The dust rose in puffs around her feet, and the wind dragged it across the ground. It pushed at Ellen’s back with its dry chill, urging her to catch up with Little Sister.

  Far ahead of her, Little Sister stopped and pointed down. “A rover! Ellen, look.”

  Ellen came up beside her at the edge of a short drop. They were on top of a plateau. At the bottom, just as Little Sister said, a Mars rover sat motionless.

  She thought it looked like a big bird with a long neck and six legs. Maybe a weird dragon? But not a Japanese dragon, because the solar panels looked like wings.

  “Great! Maybe we can contact NASA and get them to get us home,” she said. She inched herself over the edge and slid down it in a shower of rocks and red dust.

  “Hello?” she said to the silent rover. “Uh, Houston?”

  Little Sister came over to the rover, brushing dust from her pants. She peered at the machine, and swept a hand over the flat table of dusty solar panels.

  “I think it’s sleeping, or broken,” she said. “Look, it’s stuck in the dirt here.”

  Ellen looked at the rover’s wheels. Dirt had piled up around them, rendering the machine immobile. “Can we dig it out and get it running again?”

  Little Sister shrugged. “Let’s try.”

  They both got on their hands and knees, scooping the dirt away from the wheels until some of them were unburied.

  Little Sister sat back and wiped her hand over her forehead, smearing red dirt across her face. “I don’t know if we can get it out. Let me see if I can get it to turn on.”

  Little Sister clambered up onto one of the solar panel wings and tapped on the camera.

  “Be careful you don’t fall off,” Ellen said as a strong gust of wind whipped around the plateau.

  The landscape was nothing like home. No trees or grass grew, no water flowed. Having lived in a flat part of Michigan all her life, Ellen found all these hills unsettling. The red everywhere made her think the place should be blazing hot, but she shivered every time the wind whistled by. If it was going to be cold, there ought to at least be some snow to play in.

  Ellen wanted to go home, where she knew how to interact with her environment.

  “Agh, I can’t do anything without materials!” Little Sister lamented. She leapt off of the solar panels and landed in the dust with a flump. “If I had some more cardboard and some pipe cleaners, I could get it working again.”

  “Is there anything green on it?” Ellen asked. If they could at least get some fuel for their ship, the rover wouldn’t be a total dud.

  “Maybe underneath? Or inside. Computer chips are green, right?”

  Ellen and Little Sister knelt back in the dirt and wriggled beneath the rover’s belly.

  Ellen ran her finger over a seam in the body. “Let’s get this open.”

  “Halt!”

  Ellen and Little Sister both gasped and jumped. Ellen bumped her head against the rover.

  From her spot on the ground, she saw four metallic legs marching through the dust and rocks towards them. Each leg was capped with a flat, round foot, which pivoted to conform to the rocky ground.

  The metal legs stopped just by the rover, and a whirr of machinery accompanied the appearance of a pair of binocular-like eyes. The eyes scanned over the two of them on the end of a long, snaky metal cord.

  “Come away from the silent watcher, Earthlings.”

  Ellen and Little Sister hurried to obey. Before them stood a four-legged, two-armed robot. The binocular eyes snapped into place above a square metal speaker.

  “Are you a rover?” Ellen asked.

  The robot rotated its eyes and speaker around the pole that made up its body. “I am a grave keeper. Why have you come to our resting place, Earthlings?”

  “We didn’t mean to,” said Little Sister. “We were going to Saturn, but we crash-landed here. We’re out of fuel. Do you have any green stuff?”

  “Grrreeeeen?” the grave keeper repeated, lengthening the word like he didn’t understand how to pronounce it.

  “Green, like grass or trees or Oscar the Grouch?” Little Sister pressed.

  The grave keeper rotated its eyes again. “Are you a new version of the silent watcher? We spoke with it before it died, but it did not understand our concept of ‘two.’ You have a new concept that I do not understand, this grrreeeeen. My analysis shows that this may be blasphemy, and I should take you in.”

  “Wait, what?” Ellen said.

  The grave keeper did not elaborate but reached out with its two arms faster than Ellen could blink. It picked both of them up and hoisted them over its binocular eyes.

  “Hey!” Ellen yelled, kicking her legs and pulling on the arms with her hands. “Put us down.”

  The grave keeper ignored them and walked away from the rover. Its metal feet crunched over the rocks. “I will take you down to City 542 and show you to the Server. It will judge this grreeeeen, and you.”

  …………………………

  The grave keeper took them to an underground city made of red and brown buildings. The streetlamps shone orange over the pink stone of the roads, where large robots with thick wheels trundled from place to place.

  Other types of robots crawled along the sidewalks or hopped across the street. A few tiny ones even flew through the air with rotating helicopter blades.

  All of them spoke to each other in a strange, beeping and clicking language of computer sounds.

  “What are they saying?” Little Sister asked as two robots swiveled their eyes to watch them pass.

  “You don’t know?” asked the grave keeper. “That is embarrassing. Our language is simple. They are preparing for our Festival of Calculations tomorrow. Your arrival interrupts our work.”

  Ellen glanced up at a long yellow banner stretching between two buildings and tried to make out the words on it.

  The grave keeper carried them into a large brown building lit with red light bulbs.

  A computer hum vibrated down the long corridor, and Ellen stared at the bundles of cables and pipes running along the walls. The grave keeper’s four feet clopped like a horse’s hooves on the sheet metal floor plates.r />
  They passed under a large ventilating fan. Ellen peered up into it and thought she could see a tiny speck of brown Martian sky far above her. The whump-whump of the blades drowned out any sound of outside, though.

  Even with the fan, Ellen was sweating from the heat of the machines. Her school clothes stuck to her skin, and beads of moisture collected on her face. She struggled to wipe at them in her awkward position above the grave keeper’s head.

  The corridor widened, and they arrived at a large doorway. The grave keeper stepped through it without pausing and walked to the center of the room.

  Then it brought its arms down and dropped the two girls onto the floor.

  “Server, I found two Earthlings on the surface, desecrating the remains of both our dead and the silent watcher. They speak of a concept called grreeeeen, which I calculate may be blasphemy.”

  Ellen rubbed at her elbow where she’d bashed it against the floor and stared at her surroundings.

  The walls of the room flared with tiny lights. They blinked in patterns she couldn’t understand. Cables crisscrossed the walls and the floor. The whole place smelled hot and sterile, without a speck of dust in it.

  The computer hum increased, and Ellen slid towards Little Sister. Whatever was going to happen, she wouldn’t let it hurt her sister.

  “Earthlings, hmmm? And a blasphemous concept. The penalty for blasphemy is imprisonment until your circuits rust over.”

  The deep voice came from every direction at once, and Ellen hunched over Little Sister, feeling like a cornered animal.

  Little Sister shifted to sit cross-legged. “We don’t have any circuits, we’re humans. Does that mean we’ll be imprisoned forever?”

  “Risako!” Ellen hissed.

  The deep voice surrounded them again, and Ellen noticed that a number of speakers were set into the walls to create a stereo effect.

  “You will be imprisoned for an appropriate time if you are guilty of blasphemy. Tell us more about this grreeeeen.”

  Little Sister huffed a tired sigh. “Like I told the grave keeper, green is like grass or trees or Oscar the Grouch. It’s the fuel our ship runs on. If I could just borrow some construction paper and some red and green building bricks, I can fix our ship and get us back home. The construction paper can be any color, whatever you have is fine.”