Auerbach stroked his startled and horrified face. “Well . . . we are trying to establish a relationship with universities in the southwestern United States,” he said. “In New Mexico and Arizona, for example, these cacti could grow with proper care. I suppose we could make an arrangement in that case.”
“I could do that!” Max said. “My mom teaches everywhere. My dad’s a lawyer who represents universities.”
“Promising. Well then, put me in touch,” Auerbach said. “If it seems feasible, I can write a grant to the proper government funders. And if they approved it, we could carefully remove a sample for transportation.”
“How long would that take?” Max asked.
“Maybe two weeks, maybe six months.” Auerbach shrugged.
“That’s too long,” Max said. “We have a friend who’s got about three months to live!”
“Can’t you just grant us one or two cacti from the mountain?” Alex asked.
“Ohhhh, that would be improper indeed!” Auerbach said.
“Meaning no?” Max asked.
“No.” Auerbach shrugged. “Welcome to academia. Well then, lunch? I’m starving.”
As he turned to Rosalena, Alex leaned in to Max. “I am hoping you have a Plan B, because I’m empty.”
But Max was staring out the greenhouse window, to a distant, basketlike contraption in a scrubby field out back. He was pretty sure he recognized the shape.
We are the only team that conducts studies from the air. That’s what Rosalena had said.
Taking Alex’s arm, he blurted to Auerbach, “We have to pee!”
“First and second doors on the left,” the botanist said with an impatient sneer.
Max pulled Alex down the corridor. They veered out a side door. The field was to their left, behind the building. “That way,” he said.
“Where are we going?” Alex asked.
“Hurry,” Max said. “Let’s get out of their line of vision.”
They raced across the scrubby desert soil, to the basketlike object Max had seen. It was shoulder high. On all sides, it was attached to a steel frame that rose over the top to a small platform, which housed a contraption that looked a little like a gun and a little like a barbecue grill. Attached to that housing was a huge piece of tough fabric, like a giant’s blanket. The fabric drooped from the metal housing to the ground, where someone had neatly folded it.
The whole thing was moored to stakes in the ground by four thick ropes. Max began untying the closest one. “Help me,” he said. “And then climb in. We’re going to help Nigel and Bitsy.”
“What?” Alex said. “Is this your idea of a joke, Max Tilt? Or did someone tell you Plan B stands for ‘Bonehead’?”
“These guys are not going to let us up that mountain. Nigel and Bitsy are probably on their way. If I know them, they’re going to head straight up to the chapel and look for those cacti, right? OK, if they get caught in that trap with the cameras, our whole mission dies. So we come in at a different angle. We distract the authorities. This gives Bitsy and Nigel a chance to sneak in and take a couple, then sneak away.” Max quickly untied the knots by himself, then pulled open a little door in the side of the basket and stepped in. He reached for the handle of the contraption and squeezed it hard. A flame shot up into a hole formed where the fabric was attached to the frame.
“That is the most crackpot plan I’ve ever heard,” Alex said. “And this is a hot-air balloon!”
“I know,” Max said. “I’ve worked one.”
Alex cocked her head. “Seriously?”
“Yup. Back home.” The fabric was moving now. Expanding. This would take some time. Max glanced over his shoulder. They were pretty far from the greenhouse. Even farther from the rest of the compound. No one was expecting any activity out here. They’d be OK.
For a while.
“Tell me something,” Alex said. “That morning, a few weeks ago, when you broke into the state fair? They said you fell off a trampoline. That wasn’t true, was it?”
“No.”
“The fair had a balloon . . .”
“Yup. They lied. They didn’t want to be embarrassed that I got in under their noses. It was our little secret.”
Alex shook her head. “That was a bad move, in so many ways.”
“But . . .” Max said.
“Yeah.” Alex climbed in and latched the little door behind her. “Hurry before I change my mind.”
“You’re not scared anymore?”
Alex arched an eyebrow. “Dude, I’m me.”
The fabric was unfolding. Rising. This balloon seemed smaller than the one at the state fair. Newer. It was inflating way faster. Alex let out a squeal. “It’s just like the movie. David Niven. Around the World in 80 Days!”
“Cool, I haven’t read that part yet,” Max said.
“It’s not in the book. The movie people put it in. They took the idea from Five Weeks in a Balloon. Another awesome JV story.” Alex was bending down now, opening a canvas sack at the bottom of the basket. “Hey, there’s some equipment. Sunglasses, sunscreen, binoculars.”
Now the basket was starting to shake. The fabric was expanding like a microwave popcorn bag. It crackled and rose upward, shaking off dirt as it separated from the ground.
“Eeeeeee!” shouted Alex.
“Awesome!” shouted Max.
“Heeeeeyyyyy!” shouted a voice from the direction of the greenhouse.
Max glanced over his shoulder. Auerbach was running across the field, his white lab coat flapping behind him. Rosalena followed at his heels.
“Come on, balloon . . .” Max shouted. “Up . . . up . . .”
The basket juddered. Max felt a sharp movement to the left that forced him to grab the railing. They were rising. Swinging from side to side and rising.
“And . . . awaaaaay!” Alex shouted.
Max was scared. Petrified. His knees felt brittle.
For about thirty-nine seconds.
That was about the time it took to pull in the last of the four anchor ropes. The one that Auerbach’s fingertips just barely grazed.
They were floating now. Auerbach was shaking his fist and yelling, “You ca-a-a-n’t!” Rosalena stared up at them in total shock.
Alex held onto the railing. With a big smile, she closed her eyes and raised her head. Her hair blew back, the sun dappling her brown skin to a hundred beautiful shades. Below them, the desert was a gray-green board that seemed to roll out to the edges of the world. “Oh yes we ca-a-a-n!”
“This,” Max said, “is everything.”
“That morning you first did this, I don’t know how you could have returned!” Alex shouted. “I don’t ever want to come down!”
Max shrugged. “I had no choice. Someone tried to pull me back.”
“After we get Nigel and Bitsy, can we just keep flying . . . all the way to our next stop?”
“To Antarctica?”
“It was a joke. I think.”
Max manipulated the swing bar on the overhead mechanism to the right. The balloon moved toward the mountain, picking up speed. From a distance, the peak looked almost sheer. But now Max could see a steep footpath winding up the side.
“Max—there they are!” Alex shouted.
She handed him a pair of binoculars. He glanced through, following the footpath up to a building tucked into the side of the mountain. It didn’t look like much, a squat, square stone cube on a ledge.
A flash of white caught his attention. Nigel’s shirt.
He adjusted his focus. Bitsy was ahead of Nigel. They were almost to the chapel.
“He’s complaining,” Alex said.
“How can you tell?” Max asked.
“Body language,” Alex said. “And besides, it’s Nigel.”
“There are two people sitting by the chapel door.”
“Guards?”
“Or those authorities, waiting to catch them.” Max put down the binoculars and held tight to the steering mechanism. “Hang on. We’r
e going in.”
35
NIGEL had had his share of bad ideas in his life. Hiking the Peña de Bernal was right up there with leaping over a fire during a performance of Petrushka, in flammable tights. “Darling Bitsy, slow down,” he whispered. “It’s awfully hot, and I’m awfully old.”
“We’re almost there,” Bitsy said. “I see the chapel.”
“Would you scurry ahead and say a prayer for my knees?” With each footstep, Nigel felt every pebble like a tiny knife point through his soles. He had wrapped a handkerchief around his head, but by now it felt like he’d soaked it in warm soup.
Bitsy had crested a ridge and had turned to Nigel, her finger to her mouth. “Sssshhh.”
“You would deprive me of the pleasure of groaning?” Nigel whispered. As he stepped into a small clearing behind Bitsy, he saw the cause for her concern. Two men were asleep on webbed chairs in front of the chapel entrance.
The building, like everything else about Peña de Bernal, was a disappointment to Nigel. It was squat and square, made of old, mismatched stones that had shifted with time. Bitsy was walking silently by the men toward the back of the chapel. Nigel tried to tiptoe quietly, but the rocks were like snare drums beneath his feet.
Still, the men snored obliviously as he and Bitsy neared a metal cyclone fence. It encircled a small area that seemed at first glance to be a patch of snow. As Nigel moved closer he could make out tiny, perfect white spheres. He couldn’t help but giggle. It looked like some nefarious trap for wayward balls on a golf course. “Surely we can take a few,” he whispered.
Bitsy stood before a sign with an angry-looking message in several languages, the English stating Ecological Preservation Site: Keep Out! Grabbing onto the fence, she dug in her feet and began to climb.
In a moment she was over the top, dropping to the ground below.
Nigel swallowed hard. “My girl, you do not expect me to do that.”
“I’ll pick a few and stuff them into the vials,” Bitsy whispered. “If those guys wake up, you bat your eyelashes and look fetching.”
“I beg your pard—”
Wahh . . . Wahh . . . Wahh . . .
As an alarm rang out, Nigel screamed and whirled around.
The chapel’s old wooden door was opening. Three uniformed officers ran out, holsters flapping ominously on their belts. The two sleeping men were wide awake now. One of them was talking in very urgent-sounding Spanish into a handheld microphone, while the other had somehow unearthed a large and very professional-looking video camera.
“Good Lord, it’s a cactus sting operation,” Nigel murmured. He thrust his hands in the air and shouted, “I am a British citizen! I demand to see the ambassador!”
“Nigel, that makes no sense!” Bitsy yelled from behind him. “Come with me!”
The men were arguing. The fellow with the camera shouted instructions to the officials, who looked to Nigel as if they would prefer to eat him for lunch. Spinning around, he saw Bitsy running to the rear of the cactus patch, where she climbed the fence and dropped to the other side.
Nigel edged along the outside of the fence. There wasn’t much room. It had been built nearly to the perimeter of the ledge, and the drop-off was sheer. Bitsy was around the back, standing stock still, looking down.
As Nigel reached her side, he gasped. They were at the top of a curved stone chute, which led at a very steep angle and a very great distance to another ledge below, about the circumference of a rather large tutu. “This is doable,” Bitsy said. “We’ll use the chute.”
“Doable?” Nigel said. “Absolutely not! It is easily four stories down. And what you call a chute appears to be a torture mechanism from the Spanish Inquisition.”
“It’s either that or a Mexican jail,” Bitsy said. “I’ll go first.”
To Nigel’s horror, she swung her legs around and slid. He screamed, fully expecting the girl to bounce off the ledge and tumble to an untimely death. But she landed with a thud and immediately gazed upward. “Come on!”
Now the authorities were edging their way around the fence, followed by the cameraman. Their shoes were heavy and wide, and Nigel could tell by their cloddish movements that they clearly had not had ballet training.
Shaking, he sat on the ledge and tossed the men a kiss. “Catch us if you can, fellows!”
With a shriek, he slid down the chute and landed in a heap beside the girl. A scream ripped upward from his toes. His legs felt as if they’d been put through a trash compactor, and he was quite certain he’d shed most of his backside by about halfway down.
But the girl was silent, staring down over the ledge of this clearing.
There were no chutes here. It was a sheer drop to the bottom and no other way to get there.
“No . . .” she said. “This can’t be happening.”
“But it is,” Nigel said, “and you and I have just made the biggest mistakes of our lives.” Panicked, he raised his face to the landing above. There, the uniformed men were shouting to them all at once.
“What are they saying?” Bitsy asked. “I thought you knew Spanish.”
“They’re too far away,” Nigel said. “I’m assuming it is ‘You are dead’!”
But the men had fallen oddly silent. One by one, they were turning toward the sky.
A round white disk emerged overhead like a giant errant soccer ball. As Nigel watched in utter bafflement, it grew and swung out over the top of the mountain, trailing a square brown basket beneath it. “Elizabeth,” Nigel said. “Tell me about those cacti. Does proximity to them have some sort of hallucinatory effect?”
“What on earth . . . ?” Bitsy murmured.
A face was peering out over the edge of the basket now.
Two faces.
Nigel began cackling. “Great Scott, I am dreaming that Max and his cousin are up there . . . above us . . .”
As he turned to Bitsy, he felt a rap on his head. He shrieked, nearly falling off the ledge.
“Nigel,” Bitsy said, standing unsteadily. “It is them. Turn around.”
Nigel stood. Two thick ropes dangled just beyond Nigel’s shoulder. He followed them upward with his eyes to a massive hot-air balloon swinging high above them. Both Max and Alex were leaning over the basket, gesturing to Nigel as if his life depended on it.
Which, he realized, it did.
“Hurry!” Alex’s voice carried downward on a gust of wind.
The old man did not need any further urging. As he grabbed the rope, Bitsy looped the very bottom of it around both thighs, forming a kind of harness. Then she tugged twice on the rope.
Nigel began to rise. He gripped the rope tightly, swinging left and right like an acrobat, the wind buffeting his ears.
“Stop screaming!” Max shouted from above him.
“Am I screaming?” Nigel screamed.
“You’re not as heavy when you’re quiet!”
Nigel was mum as the two children hoisted him into the basket. Trembling, he turned and helped them lift Bitsy. As the girl swung below them, her legs akimbo, the balloon moved away from the mountain. Nigel could see the authorities near the chapel, staring up like open-mouthed zombies. “Ta-ta, you cheeky amateurs!” he cried out.
“Nigel, did you get the cacti?” Alex said, gritting her teeth against Bitsy’s weight.
“She did, the blessed girl,” Nigel said. “We are four for five.”
“Hallelujah,” Max said.
Bitsy’s fingers clutched the edge of the basket, and all three hauled her in. She fell to the floor with a gasp, her face deep red. “Did that just happen? Tell me I am not in a hot-air balloon like Around the World in 80 Days.”
“Just the movie, not the book,” Max said. He grabbed tight to the steering bar and pointed the balloon back the way they’d come. “Next stop, somewhere near the airport. Call Brandon, Alex. Tell him to fuel up, because we are heading toward the bottom of the world.”
36
Nigel? Nigel, I received your email. Thank you for
sending it, I was worried about you.
But why are you not using texts?
Is there a security concern?
I was able to trace the IP address of the email message, Nigel. It seems to be coming from Mexico.
Is this correct?
Nigel?
It must be very late there. Pls contact me asap!!!!!!!!
37
MAX was tired and cranky. Normally he wouldn’t have been. Tierra del Fuego had crisp, cold, blue skies; dark snowy mountains; a harbor that opened to an unending sea; and a restaurant with amazing steaks. Hugo, the guide Brandon hired, was friendly and very excited to talk about the battle between Chile and Argentina for the control of the islands at the tip of South America.
But Max didn’t care about any of that.
He was a fact guy. The balloon landing had not been smooth. They’d nearly flown into the flight path of a small Cessna. Brandon had had to make excuses to the airport people, and when they finally took off, he announced the flight time would be fifteen hours.
Fifteen.
Max hadn’t prepared for that, and Max didn’t like not being prepared. In his mind the flight from Mexico to South America would be like Ohio to Florida. But Tierra del Fuego was literally half a world away, at the southern tip of the continent.
At least the flight from Tierra del Fuego to Antarctica would be short. If they could get one. Which they apparently couldn’t.
And that was the other thing making Max cranky.
“When you say ‘no flights to Antarctica,’ do you mean, like, ever?” Alex said.
“September is late winter in Antarctica, and flights are limited,” Hugo said. His office had a plateglass window overlooking the frigid bay, but Max was sweating as if it were a steam bath. “You can’t just call the airport and tell them you’re on your way. Military transports get quick clearance, but commercial and personal flights? It’s a strict process. You must apply and wait your turn.”
“Cat pee!” Max screamed.
“Pardon?” Hugo said.
“He’s angry,” Bitsy explained.
“Ah, I understand,” Hugo said. “Tierra del Fuego is lovely, and ordinarily I would invite you to stay awhile. But if you are truly in a rush, I suppose I can contact my friend, Captain Oswaldo Perez, who is leaving tomorrow on a cutter to bring medical supplies.”