Diggers: The Sharp Edge of the Universe (13 page)

“If we find a book, how in the heck are we supposed to turn the pages?” Mikayla said. “One wrong move and a piece of paper might squish us.”

“Use the Grabber.” Reggie motioned to the auger head.

“What’s a Grabber?” Mikayla asked.

“It’s an extractor tool used to pull objects out of holes and caves,” Finn said, “and it just might work.”

Reggie’s fingers flew over the navigational screen until a robotic arm unfolded from the bottom of the DUMP. The arm unhooked the auger connection and replaced it with a hook on another metal arm, just like a human arm, that bent at the elbow. The base of the arm was equipped with long metal fingers used to perform more delicate extractions.

“ELAINA, navigate us over to the bookshelf by the table,” Finn said.

Mikayla eyed Finn. “What are you going to do? We can’t exactly hold up one of those books. We’ll be crushed.”

“Just trust me for once.” Finn moved closer to the view finder. Then he slid into the captain’s chair and took over the controls. “Get us as close as you can to one of the books.”

ELAINA maneuvered the DUMP to within inches of a fat book Finn figured had to be some kind of textbook. He wasn’t as fast or as good as Reggie with the control screen, so it took him several tries and a couple of near collisions before he finally latched onto the top of the book.

“Now, all back,” Finn yelled.

The DUMP engine picked up speed but didn’t move. Suddenly, the DUMP went flying backwards, tossing Mikayla onto one of the rows of seats.

“Geesh, you could warn
a per
—” The loudest boom any of them had ever heard filled the DUMP.

“Did it.”
Reggie removed his hands from his ears.

Mikayla scrambled to the front and studied the screen. The book lay open on the floor. “Lucky shot.”

Finn smiled. “No. That was pure skill. The floor is where you’ll find any boring textbook in my room.”

Reggie nodded.
“Yep.”

Chapter 19: Lost in Translation

They spent most of the morning waiting while ELAINA scanned each page of the colossal book, which proved to be no easy task. Reggie had to position the DUMP close enough to a page to allow the Grabber to get a good hold. Then ELAINA navigated the DUMP so the Grabber could drag the page along with them to the other side of the book.

At one point, Mikayla actually mentioned how impressed she was by the strength of the DUMP. Reggie and Finn just smiled. If the DUMP could dig through an entire world, it could handle a book so colossal that it made them
look
like a piece of dust.

Once they successfully turned a page without getting themselves caught between the pages, then they had to move far enough away to allow ELAINA to scan the entire page. The pages weren’t made of the type of paper used on
Vortex
—the nearly weightless, reflective polymer hologram projections, similar to old paper books from historic times. Those holographic paper pages could be turned just like the pages of the old books. But this world’s paper seemed heavy. ELAINA confirmed it by comparing the weight and size of the paper to
their own
paper holograms and found it to be at least one hundred times heavier.

“What’s this paper made of?” Mikayla asked.

“Ms. Mikayla Fishborne, the paper is a waterproof wax mixture most likely used because of its ability to resist moisture,” ELAINA explained.

“Why?” Finn asked.

“I think it’s because the air has
a high
water content,” Mikayla said. “Right, ELAINA?”

“Correct, Ms. Mikayla Fishborne.”

Finn thought for a moment. “I guess I didn’t realize all of these water droplets we passed through meant that the air here has a super high precipitation percentage. No wonder the paper is made out of wax.”

“ELAINA,” Mikayla said. “How many more pages do you need to scan?

“Estimates put full translation ability at twenty-five more pages, Ms. Mikayla Fishborne.”

It took another three hours for ELAINA to scan enough of the book to be able to begin her translations.

“We might as well take a look around the room while we wait,” Finn suggested.

“I’d like to take a look at those sinks and try to figure out how the aliens who run this place pour water without using any faucets,” Mikayla said.

The DUMP made its way over to the closest row of counter tops to hover above the place where the faucet should have been.

They saw nothing but the basin. No sensors. No space behind the sink where a hidden faucet might emerge and recede as needed. They saw only a hole in the corner of the basin, but nothing in it blinked or sent out sensor light.

“How in the heck do they get water? There aren’t any sensors,” Finn said.

“Maybe it works by voice command,” Mikayla said. “Old-fashioned, but maybe these aliens aren’t very advanced.”

Finn nodded. They might be enormous beings, but massive size didn’t mean they were an advanced species. Take the Gargantu Tribes on Megas Prime. They were sixteen feet tall, yet they still carried around clubs for weapons, the men had at least seven wives, and they all spoke mostly in grunts and chest beating.

“Let’s fly around the sink and see if we can figure out how it works,” Finn said.

“Not a good idea,” Reggie said.

“Let’s just take a quick peek.” Finn was surprised that Mikayla agreed with him, for once.

They took a couple of laps around the edge of the sink, but still saw nothing that resembled a faucet. The tiny hole on the side looked too small to be a faucet hole.

“Let’s drop down inside it,” Finn said.

“Not a good idea.” Reggie shook his head.

“Come on, Reg,” Finn laughed. “It’s just a sink.”

They descended slowly into the massive bowl.

Whoosh!

“What’s going on?” Mikayla screamed over the deafening roar of the massive waterfall.

The DUMP surged into the sink along with the rush of water coming from all around them. Reggie grabbed the navigational controls and the DUMP shot out of the water moments before the sink emptied all the water.

“Too close.” Finn shook so hard he could barely form words.

“Told yuh.”
Reggie's voice trembled.

As the DUMP hovered over the sink, they watched the flow of water diminish, like some invisible washcloth had just been wrung out.

“Where in the Milky Way does a sink just start pouring water out of thin air?” Finn asked, pressing closer to the screen.

“Maybe it
is
taking the water out of the air,” Mikayla said, obviously impressed. “The air is water-dense. Maybe the aliens have some sort of method to extract water out of the air.”

Reggie gave a low whistle.

“Can you imagine what this kind of technology would do for our solar system?” Mikayla said. “We wouldn’t have to harvest water on Mars anymore.”

Finn thought about all of the different planets that could benefit from this technology. “These humanoids must be really advanced. There’ve got to be sensors on the sink. If only we could get under it and figure out how they do it.”

“Yeah.”
Mikayla gazed at the viewing screen dreamily.

Finn couldn’t hide his shock. “Wait a minute…you agreed with me twice, and…you
like
exploring? What. Do you like science now?”

She looked at Finn’s shocked face and began to fidget with her zippers. “Well, I like
this
kind of science. This doesn’t feel like we’re tearing every good thing out of a world and leaving behind a dusty, useless mess. I just think we might have missed some cool discoveries along the way. I mean, if our Space Station actually
explored
, we’d be finding some pretty cool stuff. Like the animal at the top of the hole on the field trip. What if its poop could burn for a hundred days? But we’ll never know because my dad completely ignored that animal.”

Mikayla was right. As a discovery station,
Vortex
didn’t spend much time learning about the billions of different species and getting to know their ways. But it wasn't like the way Mikayla made it sound. They didn't just drill a bunch of big holes in every world and then leave when it looked like Swiss cheese. They cleaned up after themselves very well, to the point where no one could tell they'd ever been on the planet. But
Vortex
flat out ignored anything that wasn’t fuel or metal.

“Yeah,” Finn said. “I guess it makes sense.”

“Wow.” Reggie stared at both of them. “You agreed.”

Finn and Mikayla smiled.

“We might as well do some more exploring while we wait for ELAINA to finish translating,” Finn said.

“I want to take a better look at their lighting because it seems to be coming from nowhere too,” Mikayla said.

“Yeah, and I want to look at those microscopes,” Finn said.

They navigated the DUMP over to the closest table and slowly circled the microscope. The instrument looked mostly normal, black with binocular-type viewing screens. The only major difference was the lighting. Similar to the water in the sink, the light seemed to flow out of the air. They found no light source or fluorescence of any kind to illuminate the specimen sitting on the viewing plate. The way the light just sort of formed under the specimen seemed like magic, which was completely ridiculous. The aliens harnessed light somehow, but the children had no way of knowing exactly how. They had no one to ask because the Science Lab remained empty.

“I wish we could read the language.” Finn tried to study the lab slide from different angles, but couldn't determine much. “I wonder if we could see what they’re looking at if we take a look through the lenses.”

“We probably could, but we’d need ELAINA, and between moving us around the room and translating, I think we need to keep her on task," Mikayla said.

Finn shrugged off his frustration with Mikayla. One minute she seemed ready to dive into a sink and almost get flushed down the drain. The next minute she was worried about some insignificant detail and didn’t want to discover anything.

“Mr. Finnigan O’Reilly.” ELAINA’s silky voice jarred Finn out of his thoughts. “I have successfully translated the language. Would you like me to project the translations on the screen?”

“Yes!” they all shouted together.

“ELAINA,” Finn said. “Take us back to those boxes so we have something to translate.”

The thought of getting to look at each one of those slides and having a translation for each one was almost too much for Finn. He began to work out how they could hoist each slide onto the microscope, and he didn’t care one bit if Mikayla hated every moment of it.

They maneuvered over to the box full of slides and ELAINA positioned them in front of the symbols. Finn thought the symbols on the box looked very similar to the cuss words he’d heard the Diggers use when no one was around because, strictly speaking, cussing remained against the law.

“So what does it say, ELAINA?” Mikayla asked.

“Ms. Mikayla Fishborne, the translation in your language for the symbol on the first box is the word ‘
trash’
and the word
‘keep'
on the other box,” ELAINA purred.

“They’re getting rid of those slides.” Finn felt the blood drain from his face.

“Well, disposal has to happen at some point, Finn,” Mikayla said, irritated. “I’m sure all of the information is in a computer memory bank of some kind. I mean, do you really expect them to keep
everything
?”

“Yes.” His voice cracked with rage. He knew how she felt about the samples because she’d been the heartless disposer of the microscope slides he’d been trying to rescue back on
Vortex
.

“ELAINA.” Finn could barely contain his fury. “Take us into the box marked trash. I want to see what they’re throwing away.”

“Finn,” Mikayla said, “
we
should be exploring the room and figuring out a way to talk to the aliens when they come back, not wasting our time rummaging through the trash box.”

Finn rounded on Mikayla, but before he could say or do anything, Reggie wedged himself between them. “I would expect you, Mikayla, of all people, not to understand,” Finn seethed at her around Reggie’s shoulder. “You don’t even care about science stuff. You hate it all!”

“I don’t hate
all
of it!” Spit flew out of Mikayla's mouth. “I happen to love the discovering and investigating stuff. I told you that before.”

Finn gave an exasperated laugh and swiveled around to stare at the screen. “Take us in, ELAINA.”

Chapter 20: First Contact

The pathetically slow process felt like an ant trying to move a planet. One by one, in an agonizingly slow maneuver, the DUMP hooked onto a glass slide in the depths of the trash box, and then pulled it forward to reveal the next slide. They’d lost count of the number of times the DUMP had gotten squashed between two slides, but Finn didn’t care if the DUMP got ripped in half by the effort. He didn’t care that with each passing hour, Mikayla became more and more vocal about how they were wasting time. He didn’t care about Reggie silently took her side every single time she complained.