The Icarus Project (5 page)

Dad paused. “That’s a good point.”

“You said the billionaire had a compound and lived in the Arctic year-round, so I could stay there. And I promise to keep out of the way. Please, Dad.”

He started to waver. “OK … Let me make some calls. It’s not entirely up to me.”

“Yes!”

“No, that’s not a yes.” He pointed at me as he stood. “It’s a possible, a maybe. I don’t know if your principal will allow you to miss school. We’ll just have to see.”

“Please
don’t make me stay at home. I really want to go.”

“I’ll try.”

There was no way I would hear tonight. It was late. I ran to my room and jumped on the computer. Maybe I could convince Dad that I was serious about going by doing some mammoth homework, even though I already knew more about mammoths than any other thirteen-year-old on the planet. Dad had been telling me bedtime stories about the hairy beasts since I was a kid. Mammoths had dark gray skin with reddish-black woolly hair and stood ten to twelve feet high.

I read through a few websites, picking up more details. As I was scrolling through a web page on the National Geographic
site, Dad knocked on the door. “Can I come in?”

“Sure,” I said.

He sat on the side of my bed. “I don’t want you to think that I am punishing you or that I don’t want you to come with me. We’re pals, and there is no one I would rather have by my side at the dig site than you. It’s just that I don’t want anything to happen to you. Your safety means everything to me.”

“You mean like baby Lyuba?” I asked. I sat down next to Dad. Baby Lyuba was an important mammoth discovered on the permafrost of the Siberian steppe. She had been caught in a mudflow and had suffocated. Sediment had been found in her tiny lungs. I was trying to impress Dad with my mammoth knowledge, which was really not mammoth at all, but puny in comparison.

“What do you know about Lyuba?” he asked.

“That the scientists don’t think her mother left her, but that she was too small and got stuck in the mud during migration. She drowned or suffocated in the mud.”

He stared at his hands. “I couldn’t forgive myself if anything bad happened to you. This is real. It’s not a movie or a TV show. I will have high expectations put on me, and I won’t be able to spend a lot of time with you.”

“I know. But I’ll be good. I promise. I won’t get in the way. Plus, Mom is always saying how responsible and mature I am.”

“Well, she’s right about that. Let me see what your principal says tomorrow, and we’ll decide from there. If she approves the trip, then we’ll talk. Deal?”

I jumped up and threw my arms around Dad in a bear hug. “Deal!”

Dad drove me to school, and we walked to the principal’s office together. It turned out that the expedition was starting immediately, so if I was going to go with him, we needed to get permission right away. I sat on a dingy orange chair in the waiting room outside the office and stared out the window. Pale green daffodil stems poked through the soggy spring dirt. Pale green was the color of potential, of “maybe.”

Dad was taking forever. I hoped he was convincing. Finally, he emerged from the office and headed right out the front door. I followed quick on his heels.

“What did Mrs. Pettyfield say?” I asked, my pulse racing as we headed across the parking lot toward the car.

He stared at his shoes, fumbled with his keys. Dad was a terrible liar. I knew by the way he was trying to suppress a smile that I was going.

“Yes!” I yelled. “How did you convince her?”

We climbed into the car.

“Well, the fact that you have a week off for spring break helped. But the clincher was that Mrs. Pettyfield owes me big-time after that night-at-the-museum fiasco from three
years back.” Dad put on his seat belt and wrinkled his nose.

“I had forgotten about that.” I cringed at the memory.

“How could you forget?” He shuddered.

A few years back he had done a favor for the principal by setting up a night-at-the-museum slumber party at the Natural History Museum for the entire fourth grade. We had a tour of the museum, followed by watching short films and playing dinosaur games, and everything was going great, except that one of the parent chaperones had brought along her famous pork pockets as snacks. Everyone who had a pork pocket got food poisoning. It wasn’t pretty, and it smelled even worse.

“They should’ve known better. That pork looked a little gray. And besides, who eats pork that late at night?”

“Twenty of the kids and three of the chaperones, that’s who. It was a nightmare. The janitor resigned the very next day.” He shook his head to clear it, then looked at me seriously. “Now, there are conditions in allowing you to go on this trip. You have to stay caught up on all your schoolwork, and you have to write your own field report and do an oral presentation when you get back, sharing everything you learned on the expedition with the other students.”

“I can do that! I can bring my camera and record videos and e-mail them to my science and history classes.” I didn’t tell him I was already planning on doing that for Zoey. “It
can be a serious expedition, not a vacation. I’ll have a field notebook and do reports.” My mind raced with plans for the trip.

“Good idea. Once I finalize it with Randal Clark and OK it with your mom, we’ll be all set. As long as they don’t have a problem with you joining the team, then you can go.” He ruffled my hair. “But be warned, it’s going to get cold up there.”

“I can handle the cold. No problem.” I beamed.

It was really going to happen—my first expedition.

I clutched the shoulder strap of my backpack
and glued myself to Dad’s side. I wasn’t exactly afraid to fly, but the nerves and excitement had kicked in. We were flying to Montreal, Canada, and then on to Kuujjuaq, Nunavik, which was in the northern part of Quebec. Once up there, we’d take a helicopter to the base camp.

The first flight was uneventful, smooth as silk. Not the second flight. We were crammed inside a small commuter plane, and my whole body rumbled along with the engine and my teeth rattled in my head. The plane glided over the earth like a silver bird, and I watched the world float beneath my feet, rough as cement.

Wisps of torn white clouds drifted by my window.

White was the color of an open door. We had come to a frozen place of sky and ice. Seeing the pale surface, I realized I was entering a world that was almost colorless. My theories seemed shallow up here, hovering above the real world. Mom had said digging was a family trait, but colors were just surface traits. In the Arctic, if I wanted to find something, I was going to have to dig.

When I stepped onto the runway to catch the helicopter, a stinging coldness slapped me in the face, a wake-up cold. My nose started to run. Dad and I prepared to board the helicopter. The pilot’s name was Justice, and he was an Inuit guide who also took care of Randal Clark’s sled dogs. He wore mirrored aviator sunglasses, a black jumpsuit, and black lace-up boots.

“How long have you worked for Randal?” Dad asked him as our gear was being loaded into the back of the chopper.

“About four years. Since he came up here and set up shop. He’s put a lot into his place. Living the dream.” Justice smiled a big white toothy grin. White was now the color of charismatic pilot smiles.

“It’s a big investment. Never know if it’s going to pay off,” Dad said.

“That’s right.” Justice handed me a piece of peppermint candy. “Ready to head out? You’re gonna love it.”

Two other passengers made their way over to the helicopter. While passing out headphones, Justice introduced them as Dr. Katsu Takahashi and Dr. Ivan Petrov. More scientists. Randal must be spending a fortune on this expedition.

Dad was going to sit up front with Justice, while I would be squeezed into the backseat between the two strangers. Dr. Petrov was Russian. He told us to call him Ivan. He had a peppery beard and a cracked front tooth, and there was a
star-shaped scar next to his eye. I wondered if science was a rough profession in Russia. He slid into the chopper first and immediately buckled his seat belt. He clutched the armrest so hard, his knuckles turned white. And I thought
I
was the nervous one.

Dr. Takahashi was from Japan. He wore thick, round black glasses and nodded politely when our eyes met. After buckling his belt, he pulled off his gloves, took a tiny bottle of antibacterial gel out of his pocket, and squeezed a drop in his palm before he shook my hand. The sharp smell of alcohol tickled my nose.

Dad waved from the front seat. “Nice to meet you, Doctor Takahashi.”

“Please call me Katsu. We will be friends and colleagues.” His smile was kind, but his eyes dissected me like a surgical knife. He held a silver briefcase on his lap. He fiddled with the combination lock on the side. He saw me watching him. He patted the case. “The instruments of my trade are safe inside.” I knew when he said
instruments,
he wasn’t referring to an innocent flute or clarinet, but something sharper.

I shifted uncomfortably in the stiff seat, and our nylon coats rubbed together. My backpack weighed heavily on my lap. It was stuffed full of reference books on the Arctic. I had probably brought too many, but I wanted to be prepared. Books were my anchors.

“Maya is a pretty name,” Katsu said in a casual tone.
“Did you know that in my language my name means victory? I must live up to it. Victory always.”

“Sounds like a motto—victory,” Dad said.

“A motto. Yes, I am always victorious. You will see.” He gripped the case. “We will have a great expedition.”

What a strange thing to say. Dr.
Victory
was going to be an interesting person to watch on the trip.

The helicopter lifted off the ground and my stomach dropped. Just an arm’s length away, the scenery pressed in, dizzying. There was nothing else around for miles except for the jagged icy teeth of the rugged landscape. It felt like the sky went on forever. Emptiness washed over me. We were so far away from … everything. The helicopter dipped. I gripped my knees and felt my teeth grinding. I hoped Justice would hurry up and get us to the base camp.

“You look a little green,” Dad said, glancing back at me.

I gave him a weary smile. Green was now the color of airsickness, I guessed.

“Press your tongue to the roof of your mouth. It helps with equilibrium,” Justice said. “Don’t worry. You’re safe with me.”

My peppermint had dissolved, leaving my tongue coated in sticky sweetness. I didn’t want to think about my tongue or my mouth or what might come out of my mouth if he didn’t land the helicopter soon. Ivan gnawed on his gum and when he caught me looking at him, he
pointed at his ears, buried under thick furry earmuffs on top of his headphones and said, “Popping,” and kept on smacking his gum.

After about twenty minutes Justice motioned to the ground. Our destination appeared below us: an outcropping of rectangular wooden buildings that were linked together. From the air, they looked like a lost herd of caribou. There was a landing pad built for the helicopter—a big red X—that would be our main way in and out of the station.

Finally, we descended. It felt like the ground rushed up to meet us, even though we were floating downward. I closed my eyes and rested my head against the back of the seat.

“Takes a few days to get used to the environment up here. But you’ll acclimate,” Justice said as he set the chopper down, soft as a metal feather.

A man wearing a black snowsuit with a silver Clark Expeditions patch on the front waved us into the nearest building. Once we were all inside, he shook everyone’s hand and introduced himself as West Higgins, Randal Clark’s assistant. West had a full brown beard and a sharp crew cut. His face was rugged, reddened from the cold and wind, and he chewed on his chapped lips.

West led us through the main building, which held some offices and the communication center, a room with a radio, satellite hookup, and computers. West kept calling
this room “the comm.” On the way from the comm center, we passed by a closed door. West stopped abruptly and crossed his arms over his massive chest. He waited for us all to gather around him before he spoke.