The Lost Tribes, page 8
“You see any other way to find the dialer?”
“It wouldn’t be up there. Too tall.”
“Maybe, but you know we can’t rule anything out.”
“Awww man!” Carlos placed the Rongorongo tablets on the ground, scrunched up his face, then cupped his hands and held them out. Ben placed his oversized Sky-Jump sneaker inside Carlos’s palms and pushed upward. He brushed his fingertips across the top of the hat and felt grooves — circular grooves. Grabbing the top of the hat, Ben tried to use leverage to peer over the top. But Carlos stumbled backwards sending them both tumbling to the ground.
“Sorry!” Carlos said, laying flat on his back.
Ben rubbed his sore bottom. “There’s something up there. Let’s try again.”
“My turn,” Carlos said. “Besides, you’re the one with the giant muscles, Mr. Universe.”
“We needed more height. I couldn’t see over the top.”
“So let me sit on your shoulders!”
Ben looked at Carlos as if he had lost his mind.
“Come on. We’ve only got a few minutes before I have to go home. Remember? Expedition in your future if we solve this. Can YOU stand to have Serise ahead of us? Or April?”
Ben gave Carlos his most evil look, then knelt so Carlos could climb on his shoulders. It was like trying to hoist a rhinoceros. “Stop wiggling,” he said, as he teetered back to his feet.
“It’s up here!” Carlos kicked his feet, pummeling Ben in the chest as he tried to stand on his shoulders. “You can’t see it at first, but when you touch it glows. Hand me the tablets.”
“No! I’ll read the numbers and you dial.”
Ben stooped to pick up the tablets, then struggled to his feet again. His thighs burned from the effort. Carlos wobbled then gripped the topknot and hoisted himself up.
“How do I get up there?” asked Ben.
“Maybe you don’t need to. I’ll hold your hand before I push the final code.”
Horrified, Ben asked, “And what if only my arm goes with you?”
Carlos burst out laughing. “Then I’ll bring it back! I promise!”
Ben reluctantly cycled through the options until he found the Spanish entry. Something nagged at him, so he cycled past Spanish and through several more versions. Ten entries later he found it — English. Carlos’ translation was accurate. No codes to break this time, but there were new options to choose from.
Machu Picchu
13 06S 72 35W
Llactapata
13 13 S 75 49W
Pisco Islas Ballestas
13 43 S, 76 15W
“I don’t see a code for Peru. I knew it was too easy.”
“Hold the tablets up so I can see.” Carlos scooted to the edge of the Moai on his belly. “Okay! Got it.” He scooted back to the middle of the hat.
“What are you doing?”
“Dialing.” Carlos grunted as he struggled to reach each of the nodes. “Llactapata is in Peru.”
“How do you know that?” asked Ben. “Have you been there too?”
“No, it’s where my dad went this week. With the National Geographic Team.” Carlos counted “Uno, dos, tres,” then reached down to grab Ben’s hand as a light shot out of the top of the Moai.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Pop Goes the Weasel
“What we see depends mainly on what we look for.”
John Lubbock
Eyes clamped shut, Ben maintained a tight grip on Carlos’s hand and braced for whatever new weirdness the game had in store. When he finally had the courage to look he was relieved to find his entire body still intact. He released his grip on Carlos. The ground was covered with grass, ferns and purple flowers. If he lost his balance this time, there would be plenty of vegetation to cushion his fall.
Carlos completed his own personal inventory, then collapsed on the granite platform. A stone obelisk rose ten feet above him, covered in more hieroglyphics. Ruins were scattered along the side of a steep slope that was surrounded by larger, snow-covered mountains. Ben had difficulty drawing enough oxygen from the thin, cold air. His chest tightened.
“You okay?” whispered Ben, still cradling the tablet in his right arm.
“Fine,” Carlos said.
“Is this it? Llactapata?” Ben asked.
Carlos put his hand up to his eyes and peered into the fog. “I don’t know.”
Mist shrouded the jungle and partially concealed the people working at the site. Porters darted back and forth, unloading bundles and setting up camp. Some hacked through the tangled brush with large machetes, while the scientists armed with digital cameras, picks, brushes, computers and satellite phones examined a wall forty yards away. The jungle was alive with the sound of chirping birds and insects.
Two scientists, a man and a woman, walked within ten feet of Ben and Carlos without giving them a single glance. Even so, Ben crouched low and hugged the tablets to his body. Large leafy vines kept him hidden in shadows. From the look of the overgrown plants, this part of the site had not yet been discovered. The computer generated avatars looked like the real thing.
“Did you hear what they said?” Ben whispered, unable to translate their Spanish dialect.
“They found a ceremonial chamber,” Carlos said. “Something about sacrifices, drainage holes and sun worship. Sounds very gory.”
“Sounds like a clue!” said Ben.
“Sacrifice. Remember?” Carlos whispered. “There might be booby traps. Do you want to be a human sacrifice even if it’s a computer simulation?”
“No, but maybe we should follow them anyway.” Ben shivered. In fact, he was freezing. “Hey? You cold?”
Carlos shrugged. “No. I feel fine.”
Goosebumps erupted on Ben’s arms. “Well, I can’t breathe. There’s no oxygen up here.”
“We’re in the Andes Mountains,” Carlos said. “That would put us pretty high in the atmosphere. Air is thinner, but you’ll survive because we’re really in your bedroom. It’s just your imagination about the air.”
Ben gulped air to push oxygen into his lungs. Through the leaves, he spotted a lone scientist — dark, shoulder-length hair, neat mustache and goatee — sitting on a low wall near the excavation site. The man took a long slow drink from a flask then placed it into a bright red pouch slung across his chest. Jotting notes into a digital tablet, he pointed a device at the ruins. A laser shot out of the opening, expanded into a triangular arc of red light, then bounced back.
Ben blinked. Despite the distance and the mist, the scientist looked a lot like Carlos’s father. But this was a game. It was just a coincidence that they dialed the same place where Dr. Lopez had gone. Of course his uncle would program sites into the game that were visited by the parents. That would make it easier for Ben to figure out the clues.
Another man joined the first — short black hair, slender build. He looked like Grace’s father. But Dr. Choedon wasn’t in Peru. He was on his way back from the United Nations headquarters in New York. The men looked so real, Ben had to keep reminding himself that this was just a simulation. He stood to get a better look. Across the valley, a storm cloud loomed, dark and menacing. It enveloped a nearby mountain, then hovered as if waiting for new prey. A warm breeze settled over Ben making it easier to breathe. He gulped air to replenish his starving lungs.
The first scientist narrowed his eyes, then pulled a pair of binoculars from a brown backpack sitting on the ground. He stood, panned the jungle and paused to examine the storm cloud. Seconds later, he continued his visual sweep of the area before stopping in Ben’s direction. He gestured to the other scientist who followed his colleague’s line of sight, then glanced up at the sky. The Dr. Choedon avatar looped something around his ear and spoke into a tiny wireless headphone.
“Either they see us, or they’ve just discovered the location of our ruins,” said Ben. “I want to get closer and listen in case it’s another clue.”
“Huh?” Oblivious to this new set of events, Carlos continued to examine the dial. “Ben? Do you remember the code for Sunnyslope? I’ve got to get home before my mother has a cow.”
“Yeah, in a minute. It’s on the tablets. Look over at that wall on the right! Don’t those guys look a lot like your dad and Dr. Choedon?”
As Ben spoke, both scientists retrieved their gear, retreated into the jungle, and disappeared into the fog. Others broke from the main site and hurried into the jungle behind them.
“Who are you talking about? Where? I don’t see anyone over there.”
POP!
The hologram disappeared.
Frowning, Ben’s mother stood in the doorway of Ben’s bedroom. Aris lay perched in her arms, his glowing eyes fixed on Carlos who balanced precariously on top of Ben’s bookcase. The computer showed a PBS website on Easter Island. Instead of the wooden tablets, Ben found himself cradling an oversized book on the history of the National Basketball Association.
His mother took a long look at the basketball book in Ben’s hands. “Uh huh.” Her tone was half amused, half exasperated. “Carlos? When you’re done bonding with the bookcase your mother has asked for you to come home. Your father’s home early. Ben? Dinner’s ready. You can eat when you can tell me how to compute a hypotenuse.”
In the monitor, Ben could see Grace hiding something behind her back. Her eyes were wide, but her mouth was clamped shut.
Grace’s mother peered into the camera. “Hi Medie! April’s fine. We’ll make sure she gets home safely.”
“Thanks. See you tomorrow bright and early!” Ben’s mother scanned the room one more time, then ejected the disk and waved it at Ben. “You can have this back when you pass the math exam. At the rate you’re going, that will be two hundred years from now. I’ve got April’s copy so there will be no cheating.” She walked out of the bedroom.
Ben and Carlos winced, looked around the newly restored bedroom, then, in unison, mouthed the word AWESOME!
As soon as Dr. Choedon left her daughter’s room, Grace brought her arms to the front and, with a triumphant grin, held out her stuffed bear, Theodore.
The camera feed suddenly went dark.
Ben and Carlos stared at each other without muttering a word. But it was clear they were thinking along the same wavelength.
A phone call shattered the silence. Ben put Grace on speaker.
“You guys okay?” asked Ben.
“What happened?” asked April. “Did someone hit an escape key by accident?”
“Don’t know,” Ben said. “Grace? What’s up with the bear? Is it a clue?”
“I was holding something else a minute ago. A Tibetan statue with an emerald.”
“Wicked vision quest,” Serise said. “Kind of makes me want to do that sweat lodge thing with you guys in the morning.”
“That was AWESOME!” repeated Carlos. “AWESOME! Felt like we were actually there!”
Ben was still focused on Grace’s earlier comment. “You found a statue?”
“Oh! Yes!” Her trance broken, Grace became very animated. “We found clues near the emperor’s tomb. The soldiers are guardians to protect him from evil. We skipped the actual tomb because it’s supposed to be booby trapped, and nobody wanted to die even if it was just a computer simulation, but we found a dialer under one of the soldiers.”
“It was cool,” April interrupted. “It moved when I touched it. There was a hidden room.”
“We found a scroll and used the clues to find the next destination,” Grace explained at an increasingly rapid pace. “Serise looked at the pattern on the scroll and said it reminded her of Navajo sand paintings. But I thought it looked like Buddhist sand paintings. So we had to pick — Arizona or Tibet? We went to a Tibetan Monastery but the platform was empty. So I said we should backtrack and go to Arizona, figuring that Native Americans once traveled from Asia to North America on an ancient land bridge. But Serise reminded me that the land bridge was gone before the Terra Cotta army was built. Then we remembered that the jewel could have traveled with the Dalai Lama when he went into exile after China invaded Tibet. So we went to India and a monk gave us the statue.”
Ben sighed. Grace hardly stopped to take a breath. Carlos nodded as if he had followed the whole trail of logic.
“Let me get this straight. A monk gave you something? You could talk to him?”
“He didn’t say much. Just that he was expecting us and that we were on the ‘path of enlightenment’, whatever that means. At first, I thought we’d have to do some martial arts fighting because that seems like your uncle’s style. But your uncle promised there wouldn’t be any violence so we showed the monk the diagram on the scroll. He pointed to a sand painting of three girls walking toward the sun, then he took us to a secret chamber and gave us the statue. Oh! And he gave us a star chart with a triangle pointing to the letter ‘S’.”
So much for being ahead. Ben wanted to ask how they were able to accomplish so much in a such short time, but realized he was competing against Serise’s instant programming skills, Grace’s supercomputer brain, and April the straight-A obnoxious teacher’s pet.
“But what do we do now?” April asked. “Grace’s mom just took the laptop!”
“Why?” asked Ben.
“She said there was too much homework, a big math test on Monday and that Ben was a bad influence.”
“Hey! I resent that!” Ben said.
Grace winced. “Can we play on your computer? We’re stoked and on a roll. We need to find out what the emerald does when we get it back to the altar. We can retrace our steps.”
“We don’t have to,” Serise said. “I linked the games when we decoded the pigpen clues. Anything done on either game should have transferred data files to the other.”
“Doesn’t do us any good,” Carlos said. “Ben’s mother took his disk.”
“Why?” Grace asked.
“I still haven’t figured out how to compute a hypotenuse.”
“A squared plus B squared equals C squared,” Serise yelled, clearly exasperated. “How basic can you get? Just add the sum of the squares of the two sides adjacent to the right angle of a triangle then take the square root of that. Easy!”
Ben groaned. “Gee thanks. I’ll try that.”
“We’ve got to get that disk back,” Carlos said.
“We can use mine!” April yelled, elated.
“Sorry, but Mom has confiscated all known copies in the Webster household.”
Everyone slumped. After a few minutes, Ben perked up. “Yes! We can still play!”
“How do you figure that?” asked Grace.
“Did your mother take both computers or just yours?”
“Just mine. The PC’s still here.”
“How does that help … ?” Carlos paused. Ben could tell the answer was dawning on him.
“Grace. Is the downloaded version still on that computer?”
“Yes!” Grace said, throwing her hands up with joy.
“But it doesn’t do those cool 3-D graphics,” April said.
Ben grinned. “Not on her PC. But if she transfers the files back to me over the Internet …”
“The data files from our trip are still on Ben’s hard drive!” Serise said.
Grace slapped Serise’s hand. “Yes! We’re back in the game! The transmission’s on its way.” Within seconds, Grace reestablished their connection. She was beaming.
“Carlos! I’m sure I don’t have to repeat myself!” yelled Ben’s mother.
“Yes, Ma’am.” Carlos raised his hand and extended his thumb and little finger into the sign of a phone receiver and mouthed, Call me! before rushing out of the bedroom. It sounded as if he cleared the staircase in three leaps.
“You’re awesome,” he said, once he and Grace were alone. “I can’t believe how far we’ve gotten.”
“Ben! Get off that computer. NOW!” His mother’s voice boomed up the stairs. “Good night, Grace,” she added sweetly.
“Want to know the answer to my riddle before I log off?” Ben whispered.
“Nope. I’ll figure it out.” Grace winked but her smile said everything.
Best friends forever.
Chapter Fourteen
The Vision Quest
“Where there is no vision, there is no hope.”
George Washington Carver
What would the Paradise Circle dads think up next? It was midmorning but the temperature was cooler than normal. Ben stood at the entrance of the sweat lodge and almost looked forward to the heat. He adjusted his makeshift toga and wondered if Serise’s walkie-talkie was still hidden in the ferns. He considered checking but didn’t want to get Serise in trouble. They needed her programming skills.
“I hope this doesn’t take too long,” Ben said after Carlos jogged across the lawn and joined him. “I spent all night thinking up game strategies. I can’t wait to try the holograms again.”
Carlos dragged over two lawn chairs and sat down. “I know. We’ve got to catch up with the girls. There were two more locations on the Rongorongo tablet. Did we go to the wrong place?”
“I don’t think so.” Ben sank into the other chair. Frank Lopez and Shan Choedon were deep in conversation with his father but glanced in his direction occasionally. He couldn’t get over how much they looked like the computer-generated avatars in the game. Ben smiled at them, shot air balls at the lodge, then lowered his voice. “Wouldn’t lost tribes be in a long-forgotten jungle?”
“That would be my guess. Machu Picchu is a bunch of ruins on the top of a mountain but it’s out in the open and its filled with tourists.”
Ben’s jaw dropped. “You’ve been there too? You lucky dog!”
“Told ya, I’ve been dragged everywhere.” Carlos scowled. “And Islas Ballestas? I looked it up on the Internet while Mom was in the shower. They’re islands. The only things living there are birds and sea animals. It’s completely covered with poop.”
Ben grimaced. “I’m glad we didn’t dial that location. Can you imagine what realistic smells and bird slime were waiting for us?”
“Getting slimed by a bird is supposed to be good luck. But from the look of that place, I doubt it.” Carlos shot his own air ball at the lodge, then waved at the dads who continued whispering and nodding towards them.
