Return of the Homework Machine Read online

  RONNIE TEOTWAWKI. GRADE 6

  I figured it was probably Snik who set off the alarm at my house. When he told me he wanted the chip back, I pretended like I didn’t know what he was talking about. To tell you the truth, I thought those guys had a lot of nerve, chucking their homework machine into the Grand Canyon and expecting me to just hand the chip over to them. If they wanted it so badly, they shouldn’t have thrown it away in the first place. That’s what I should have told him. When Snik threatened to beat me up, I told him to lay off or I’d call the cops and tell them that he was trying to break into my house. That shut him up.

  BRENTON DAMAGATCHI. GRADE 6

  After New Year’s, I never heard from Milner again. I figured he lost interest, or he decided to bother somebody else. Anyway, I was relieved.

  JUDY DOUGLAS. GRADE 6

  After New Year’s, Mr. Murphy changed. Everybody noticed it. It seemed like he wasn’t that interested in teaching anymore. He would show us videos half the time instead of doing a lesson. He seemed distracted.

  MR. MURPHY. SIXTH-GRADE TEACHER

  The Hopi Indians, I learned, tell their children that their ancestors once lived in an underground world inside the Grand Canyon. At some point they decided to leave, but there was no way out. Their chief caused a tree to grow, and the people climbed out. They sent a message of thanks to the Temple of the Sun, but that messenger never returned. And today, in Hopi villages at sundown, the old men of the tribe gaze toward the sun, looking for the messenger. They believe that when he returns, their ancient dwelling place will be returned to them.

  RONNIE TEOTWAWKI. GRADE 6

  A couple of days after our burglar alarm went off, my cell phone rings and a guy says his name is Richard Milner and he wanted to talk to me. Never heard of him. I figured he was some perv, or maybe he was really the one who tried to break into our house. How he got my number, I’ll never know.

  Anyway, this Milner guy says he wants to meet me, and that it had something to do with a computer chip. I asked him how he knew I had the chip, and he told me he intercepted an e-mail from Brenton to Snik. He knew all about the homework machine, and that they threw it into the Grand Canyon.

  So I arranged to meet him at the Canyon View Information Plaza. I figured I could call the cops on my cell phone if there was a problem.

  Well, I think we spent an hour talking. We hit it off right away. He told me that he started out as a marketing guy who made his living by figuring out what junk teenagers want to buy—DVDs, video games, fashions, software, and other stuff. But gradually, he learned that with the power of the computer, he can control people’s minds and make them do just about anything for fun and profit.

  He said he needed a smart kid who knew his way around computers. Brenton turned him down, so he thought I could help him with the tech stuff. He would be the idea man.

  I liked the guy. I liked the way he operated. We decided to team up and split whatever we earned fifty-fifty. Shook hands on it.

  The first thing we agreed on was that it would be great to have another chip just like the first one. That would double the power and let us link up two computers in a network. Man, we could control the world if we wanted to!

  RICHARD MILNER. PERSONAL DIARY

  1/22: Met with Ronnie Teotwawki. Need him to get at chip and kids. Agreed to work as a team. Booked flight to Tokyo to buy another chip.

  MR. MURPHY. SIXTH-GRADE TEACHER

  I rented a kayak one weekend and did a little poking around the Grand Canyon, looking for the site of the ancient caverns.

  The canyon is enormous, of course. Two hundred seventy-seven miles along the Colorado River. All I had was the information in the Phoenix Gazette article, and a hiker’s map. I didn’t even bring binoculars. I only had a general idea of where to look. I didn’t find anything.

  KELSEY DONNELLY. GRADE 6

  Mr. Murphy gave us an assignment to write a one-page essay on what we did over the weekend. I wrote a letter to my congressman saying we should put solar panels on every roof in Arizona to generate electricity so we won’t have to burn fossil fuels anymore. Then I wrote an essay about how I wrote a letter to my congressman saying we should put solar panels on every roof in Arizona to generate electricity so we won’t have to burn fossil fuels anymore.

  MR. MURPHY. SIXTH-GRADE TEACHER

  I was collecting their essays when Sam Dawkins raised his hand and asked me what I did over the weekend. So I told the kids I went kayaking in the canyon and I told them about the article in the Phoenix Gazette. Judy knew about it, of course, because she was the one who found it in the first place. But she had just read the first few paragraphs. She didn’t know all the details.

  I’ll tell you one thing I noticed. When I was describing the caverns and treasures, the mummies and everything, everybody was fascinated. But the one who tuned in the most was Ronnie Teotwawki. It was the first time I ever saw that boy pay attention in class. He was staring at me, and he was hanging on every word.

  Chapter 6

  February

  RONNIE TEOTWAWKI. GRADE 6

  I’m not really a book guy. I figure that if the stuff in libraries was so great, they wouldn’t have to give it away for free. You know what I mean? But when Mr. Murphy told us there was an ancient Egyptian treasure hidden in a cave in the Grand Canyon, I went straight to the library after school. I had to look at that article he was telling us about.

  It wasn’t hard to find. The library keeps old issues of the Phoenix Gazette. There it was, right on the front page. April 5, 1909. It said there were golden statues, weapons, mummies, and all kinds of other stuff hidden in a cave right here in the Grand Canyon. This explorer guy named Kinkaid supposedly found all this stuff. But nobody knows what happened to it. It’s not in any museum. There’s no record of Kinkaid taking the stuff out of the canyon. Either it vanished…or maybe it was still there. There was no record of what happened to Kinkaid either.

  Man, I sat there and felt the hair on my neck rising up. If this article was for real, and the stuff was still sitting there a century later, what was to stop me from getting it? Nothing. Finders keepers. Maybe I could use the GPS I got for Christmas to help me find it.

  The article was real long. There was a lot of detail about the location of the cave. I made a photocopy of the article so I could go over it real carefully.

  SAM DAWKINS. GRADE 6

  Everybody was buzzing after Mr. Murphy told us about this treasure hidden in the Grand Canyon. I met up with Brenton in the playground after school and told him that I was gonna try to find it. He said he would help.

  Kelsey and Judy came over and asked what we were whispering about. When I told them, they laughed and said we were silly. But when we told them we were serious, they said they wanted in on it too. We all agreed that if we found any treasure, we would donate it to a museum.

  JUDY DOUGLAS. GRADE 6

  The four of us went to the library after school so we could read the Phoenix Gazette article carefully. And guess who was sitting there in the periodicals room? Ronnie Teotwawki! I could hardly believe my eyes. He probably never set foot in a library in his life!

  RONNIE TEOTWAWKI. GRADE 6

  The four of them walked into the library and saw me sitting there. Judy was all, “What are you doing here?” Like I’m not allowed in the library, right? I told her it’s a public place and I have as much right to be there as she does.

  KELSEY DONNELLY. GRADE 6

  Ronnie left the library after we came in, but we saw his name on the sheet of paper you have to sign if you want to look at the old newspapers on microfilm. We knew exactly what Ronnie was doing there. He wanted to find out the location of the treasure. Just like us.

  JUDY DOUGLAS. GRADE 6

  We copied the article and I asked the librarian if we could look at some maps of the Grand Canyon. She had a whole bunch of them, some recent ones and some dating back to the 1920s when they were still exploring it. Mr. Murphy wasn’t very specific about where the t
reasure was. Maybe he didn’t know himself.

  Every summer, millions of tourists come here. They usually only go to Grand Canyon Village, where the visitor center is and there are some hotels. But the whole canyon is hundreds of miles along the Colorado River. Even if the secret cavern was as big as Mr. Murphy said it was, locating it would be like finding a needle in a haystack.

  BRENTON DAMAGATCHI. GRADE 6

  I often wonder if there is a square inch on this planet that has never been stepped on by a human foot. If such a place exists, it would probably be in the Grand Canyon. I’ve done some hiking in the canyon, and it is just so vast that it would be hard to imagine all of it has been explored. Even today.

  SAM DAWKINS. GRADE 6

  Brenton unrolled this old map and we were looking it over. Judy got a magnifying glass from the librarian so we could read the tiny print. That’s when we noticed something. On the north side of the canyon, in the area around Ninety-Four Mile Creek and Trinity Creek, there were a whole bunch of rock formations with names that sounded Egyptian or Hindu—Tower of Ra, Horus Temple, Osiris Temple, Isis Temple, Cheops Pyramid, the Buddha Cloister, Buddha Temple, Manu Temple, Shiva Temple. Stuff like that. Brenton and I turned to each other and whispered, “That’s where it is.”

  MR. MURPHY. SIXTH-GRADE TEACHER

  It didn’t occur to me at the time that the kids would get so excited about the idea of a secret treasure in the Grand Canyon. I had come to believe that kids today don’t care about stuff like that. They just want to watch TV and go on YouTube. I certainly didn’t think they would actually make the effort to try and find a real treasure. It’s so much easier to play a video game and find a virtual treasure.

  It was around Presidents’ Day. I remember, because I told them to do a research project about the presidents. As usual, Brenton turned in the most interesting paper. I even saved it….

  HOW TALL WERE THE PRESIDENTS?

  by Brenton Damagatchi

  Below is a list of the presidents, starting with the tallest (Lincoln) and ending with the shrimpy James Madison. Twenty-four presidents were under six feet tall, and eighteen were six feet tall or more.

  Abraham Lincoln

  6 ft 4 in

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  6 ft 3½ in

  Bill Clinton

  Thomas Jefferson

  6 ft 2½ in

  Chester A. Arthur

  George H. W. Bush

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  George Washington

  6 ft 2 in

  Andrew Jackson

  Ronald Reagan

  6 ft 1 in

  James Buchanan

  Gerald Ford

  James Garfield

  Warren Harding

  John F. Kennedy

  James Monroe

  William Howard Taft

  John Tyler

  6 ft 0 in

  Richard Nixon

  5 ft 11 1/2 in

  George W. Bush

  Grover Cleveland

  Herbert Hoover

  Woodrow Wilson

  5 ft 11 in

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  5 ft 10 1/2 in

  Calvin Coolidge

  Andrew Johnson

  Franklin Pierce

  Theodore Roosevelt

  5 ft 10 in

  Jimmy Carter

  Millard Fillmore

  Harry S. Truman

  5 ft 9 in

  Rutherford B. Hayes

  5 ft 8 1/2 in

  William Henry Harrison

  James Polk

  Zachary Taylor

  Ulysses S. Grant

  5 ft 7 3/4 in

  John Adams

  John Quincy Adams

  William McKinley

  5 ft 7 in

  Benjamin Harrison

  Martin Van Buren

  5 ft 6 in

  James Madison

  5 ft 3 3/4 in

  RONNIE TEOTWAWKI. GRADE 6

  I was wondering what was taking Milner so long to get back with the second superchip. It was around the end of February when he finally called me on my cell. He was home from Japan. I asked him if he was able to get another superchip, but he shushed me and said we couldn’t talk about stuff like that over the phone because somebody might be listening in. I agreed to meet him at the Canyon View Information Plaza.

  I don’t know what the big deal was, because when we met up, all he had to say was that he didn’t get another superchip. It wasn’t because it was too expensive. It just didn’t exist. The one we had was a prototype. We had the only one in the world. And in fact, he told me he was worried that some Japanese gangsters might have followed him home, because they wanted the first superchip back. I remember thinking, This guy is paranoid.

  Anyway, without a second superchip, we wouldn’t be able to link up two computers in a network and do all kinds of cool stuff with it. It was a good idea, anyway.

  We got to talking about stuff, and I happened to mention that newspaper article and the treasure of the Grand Canyon. I had the Xerox I made at the library with me, and I showed it to Milner. Well, his eyes lit up like headlights! It was like he forgot about the superchip and all he wanted to talk about was hiking into the canyon for the treasure. He kept saying, “I’ve got to find it. I’ve got to find it.”

  I was a little P.O.’d, you know? I mean, he didn’t know anything about the treasure until I told him about it. If anybody should get it, it should be me. I got him to agree to work as a team. It made sense for me, because he was a grown-up and he’d be able to get us a raft and supplies and all the stuff we’d need to go after the treasure.

  POLICE CHIEF REBECCA FISH

  Startin’ ’round the end of February, every coupla days a few more people would show up at the south entrance gate. They came in buses, cars, some of ’em hitchhiked. A lot of ’em used frequent-flyer miles. One guy claimed he walked from Alabama. They came from all over. Some of ’em were runaways. They weren’t your usual tourists who want to see the canyon with their own eyes, snap some pictures, buy some souvenirs, and get on home.

  No, they all said the same thing—the end of the world is comin’ on Mother’s Day. Claimed the canyon is gonna open up and the earth’ll cleave in half, like a busted Wiffle ball. They’ll be saved. I have no idea where they got them crazy ideas. What a bunch of nuts! Must’ve been the Twinkies they were all eating. They called themselves “Canyonists.” Put ’em on a bus and sent ’em home. Or we tried to, anyhow. After a while there were too many of ’em to round up.

  You’d see these raggedy people wanderin’ around, lookin’ for food in garbage cans and so forth. I’ll tell you, they were worse than the bears! They would all be babblin’ about aliens and some prophet named Notnerb. Sometimes you’d see a group of ’em out in the middle of a field, standin’ on their heads in a circle. Strangest thing.

  The Grand Canyon is a place for folks who wanna appreciate the beauty of nature. This ain’t no place for weirdos.

  JUDY DOUGLAS. GRADE 6

  Snik and Kelsey wanted to rush off and go look for the treasure—that afternoon! They were just going to hike down and get it. It was as if they were going to the store to get a loaf of bread. That’s the way they do things. Act now and think things through later.

  So I said to them, do you realize we’re seven thousand feet above sea level? Do you realize it takes a full day to hike down to the river and another full day to hike back up? Where are we going to get a raft? How are we going to pay for it? And what if there is some fabulous treasure down there? How are we going to carry it back out? You can’t just go running off to do crazy stuff. You’ve got to plan things.

  MR. MURPHY. SIXTH-GRADE TEACHER

  Judy, Brenton, Sam, and Kelsey came to me one day after school and said they wanted to talk in private. I figured it was about schoolwork, but it wasn’t. They told me they wanted to hike down into the canyon and search for the secret cave that was mentioned in that newspaper article. They asked for my help.

&
nbsp; Well, I must admit that I was flattered, honored, and pleased that they were interested. So many of the kids here never even venture below the rim of the canyon. This could be the ultimate field trip. A real teachable moment. It was extremely doubtful that there was any treasure to be found, but they would learn about indigenous plants, trees, insects, wildlife, and the geology of the canyon.

  I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I wanted to give it another shot at finding the secret caverns myself. These kids were young and strong, and they would be a lot of help.

  On the other hand, it could be dangerous. Accidents happen. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be responsible for the safety of four kids. I thought it over and agreed to be their chaperone if they each got their parents to sign a permission form.

  February is a bit too cold to be taking long hikes in the canyon. The summer is too hot. It gets up over a hundred degrees, and people have been known to die out there from heat exhaustion. I thought a weekend in April or May would be perfect.

  RONNIE TEOTWAWKI. GRADE 6

  I’m not sure if it was me or Milner who came up with the idea. Probably me. I was fooling around with the GPS I got for Christmas. It was pretty cool, but the capabilities were limited. That’s when I started to wonder what would happen if I took the superchip out of my computer and put it in my handheld GPS instead. It would make it into a super GPS!

  And a super GPS was just the thing I needed, because it could lead me right to the location of the secret caverns. Right to the treasure of the Grand Canyon.