Blast Off! (7 page)
Authors: Nate Ball
O
livia finally broke the silence. “That was awesome,” she said, looking around the now destroyed science lab.
She walked over to an empty bottle and picked it up. “The cap split open,” she said, “which must be why the soda fizzed out like that.”
“Are you crazy?” I yelped, still standing on my stool. “We killed Skip!”
“Skip's a skeleton. He was already a goner,” Olivia said, lifting his head up for a moment to look him in the eye sockets.
“Excuse me, but I think your Mr. Hoog is coming this way,” Amp said. “He must have heard the commotion.”
“My life is over,” I whispered.
“This way!” Amp shouted. “We need to escape!” He headed for the emergency exit at the back of the lab, which opened onto the playground.
“Aren't we going to clean this place up?” I croaked.
“They'll just think the robot club made this mess,” Olivia hissed. “Besides, we don't have time. Remember?”
“What about our fingerprints?” I said. “They must be everywhere.”
“You watch too much TV,” Olivia said.
“We really should go now,” Amp warned us, picking up one of the magnets off the floor and waving it at us.
Olivia took the broken cap off the bottle and tossed it on the floor. She reached into a container of black rubber stoppers and found one that fit the bottle. “Hey, maybe we could use this to launch Amp's shipâsorta like the booster rocket they use on the space shuttle.” She shook the bottle and the soda fizzed up again. “What do you think?”
“I think I'm going to be sent to a camp for troubled youth,” I said.
“You're overly dramatic,” Olivia said.
“GUYS!” Amp shouted in an even higher pitch than usual. “NOW!”
Olivia ran for the door. I followed her through the door.
“WAIT!” I had forgotten my backpack on the lab table!
I spun and grabbed the door just before it locked me out. I dashed across hundreds of cheese balls, crunch-crunching the whole way, and grabbed my backpack just as I heard Mr. Hoog's keys jangling on the other side of the door. In a matter of seconds, I made it back out the door, scooped up Amp, hid him in my backpack, and took off after Olivia across the school's soccer field.
We squeezed through a hole in the gate at the back of the school and ran next to a dry creek alongside the back of the school.
We jogged for half a mile or so. After cutting across an old muddy field, we reached our street. Olivia spoke for the first time. “I've been thinking,” she gasped.
“Oh no,” I said, pressing my palms onto my knees as I tried to catch my breath.
“No, seriously,” she said, hitting me with the soda bottle. “If we can get the fizz to come out really strong, the bottle will fly into the air. It could launch Amp's ship.”
“But how do we force the air in and the fizz out the bottom?”
“We poke a hole in the stopper,” she suggested, “and we shake up the soda so that it's super fizzy.”
I thought about that for a second. “I don't think that'll be enough force to push Amp's ship into the air. It's pretty small and not very heavy, but still . . .”
We both stood there thinking about it. I couldn't think of anything. Apparently, Olivia was stumped, too.
“We'll think of something,” she said.
“The sooner the better,” I said, not thinking of anything yet.
“In the meantime, I'll make a hole in the stopper,” she said, jogging off. “I'll meet you in your backyard in ten minutes,” she called back over her shoulder.
“Hurry,” I said, focusing on the task in front of us and already forgetting about the mess we had made back at the school's lab. “We have exactly forty-five minutes to save the world!”
T
he more I thought about blasting Amp's ship into the air, the more nervous I became.
Amp was encouraged when I told him about our idea, but he was also distracted with worry, mumbling to himself as he punched numbers into a small calculator-looking device that he had pulled from his belt. He also sent about ten “Council Notes” off, each one sounding more and more worried. For the last one, I overheard him say:
“Council Note: Propulsion.
It means creating enough force to cause movement. Gravity. It is the Earth force that holds me to the ground. I am going to try, but I fear the propulsion from this experiment is not going to be nearly strong enough to overcome gravity. If I don't make into orbit, please have someone water my plants at home.”
We waited for Olivia to come back, and Amp tried resetting a device on his spaceship with the magnet he had picked up from the classroom floor. He shouted what sounded like Erdian curse words a few times and huffed off into the house. He emerged moments later with his helmet on, looking slightly more optimistic.
And while he was doing that, I thought about that bottle. The fizzing soda didn't seem to be powerful enough to lift Amp's ship into space. Not to mention how we'd keep the soda in if we used a stopper with a hole in it. And that's when an idea danced into my brain: What if we jammed air into the bottle, like with a straw, until it was ready to burst? That would increase the pressure in the bottle, so soda would shoot out the bottom. It would also keep the soda in until we were ready to release it.
I looked at Amp. He was shaking his head. “What?” I said.
“Keep thinking,” he said, nervously adjusting his tool belt.
The straw probably wasn't the ideal strategy. That might work for a balloon to fly around the room, but if you're building a rocket it's just not enough energy, or power, or force, or whatever.
“Ready for takeoff?” Olivia said from behind me. Her head was poking through a break in the fence between our houses. “Check it out,” she said handing me the bottle. “The hole is tiny.”
I looked at the stopper and started to violently shake the bottle as hard as I could.
“What are you doing?” Olivia asked.
I quickly turned the bottle over and looked at the stopper. The soda left in the bottle had gotten all foamy, but just fizzy drips were coming out the hole. “See, this isn't going to work,” I said. “We need more air in there. Like a ton of air. I was thinking of using a straw.”
“That'll never work,” she said, looking at me with half-closed eyes.
“I know,” I said. We both stood staring at the bottle.
“Are you helping, or just watching?” Olivia asked when she noticed Amp watching us. “Hey, nice hat.”
“It's a helmet,” Amp said, offended.
Olivia slapped her thigh. “Well? Can you throw us a bone here, spaceman, before your people show up and start shooting up the place?”
“Oh, that would not be good,” Amp said distractedly. He seemed to remember something, and started tapping again on his calculator.
“What's his problem? There's no time for math,” Olivia said, turning back to me. “If we could just pump air inside this thing . . .”
“Wait as second!” I shouted. “That's it. A pump! My bike pump! I have a needle thing I use to pump up my basketball.”
“That could work,” Olivia said. “Go get it, dude! We're at T minus thirty and counting.”
In less than a minute, I was pumping air into that bottle like a madman. The bike pump's needle just cleared the end of the stopper inside the bottle. At first, the stopper popped off before much air got it, so I removed the needle and pushed the stopper in as hard as I could. Then I pushed the needle back in and we took turns pumping.
Air bubbles rose up through the soda and the bottle became hard as steel.
We set the bottle on the outdoor wooden table. I slowly pulled the needle out, but once it cleared the stopper nothing happened. “I thought something would come out of the hole,” I said.
“Let me pull the stopper out,” Olivia said.
“Wait!” I shouted, but it was too late. Olivia was blasted with fizzing soda and the bottle shot across the table right at my stomach. I barely managed to jerk out of its way.
It flew several feet in the air then skidded across the cement. It hit a big planter with a small lemon tree in it and spun around wildly several times, making a loud
pshhhhhht
sound, spraying soda everywhere.
It had only lasted a few seconds, but Olivia and I jumped around like we had just won a million dollars in the lottery. We both gave Amp a high fiveâor a high three in his case.
Soon, we settled down and stared at the now resting bottle.
“Great, but now we're out of soda,” Olivia said.
“No worries. We just need some quick adjustments,” I said. I filled the bottle all the way up with water from the hose.
“Really?” Olivia said.
“You two do know what you're doing, right?” Amp asked. “Remember that I am the one who'll be blasting off.”
“Of course,” I said. “It's all about the air pressure,” I added confidently, pumping air into the bottle I'd filled almost completely with water. The pressure rose till the stopper finally popped out, and that one barely made it off the edge of table.
“Wonderful,” Amp sighed.
“All part of the process,” I smiled, knowing full well that science was all about trial and error. “I guess that one was way too heavy to launch.”
I filled the bottle halfway with water. Then I pumped while Olivia held the sides, pointing the rocket straight up from the table. That was much better, going almost ten feet into the air, but it still lacked the oomph we needed.
“I have an idea,” Olivia said. She filled the bottle with just a cup of water and did all the pumping while I did the holding, leaning away so the bottle wouldn't hit me in the face. That one finally popped off on its own, but it was a dud.
“Okay, one-third full must be just right, Goldilocks,” I said, “like the first time in the lab.”
“Okay, Baby Bear, but we still have a few more tweaks to make. And we better hurry, because it must be at least four fifteen by now.”
“Time waits for no alien,” I declared.