Rebels With a Cause Read online

“Hey,” said Klaus, “there’s only one me.”

  Everybody else just rolled their eyes.

  As Isabl piloted the rumbling van up the rutted road leading to the McGregors’ farmhouse, Klaus wrestled open a crate in the cargo bay.

  “We’ll go inside, talk to the McGregors,” said Charl. “Let them know what you’re up to on their land.”

  “Thanks,” said Max. “Come on, guys.”

  “I’ll be out in a minute,” said Klaus, rummaging through one of his wooden boxes. “I have an idea.…”

  “Saints preserve us,” muttered Siobhan.

  She, Tisa, and Max went to the crest of an emerald-green hill where sheep were grazing on both sides. They were all glad that the McKennas had lent them rubber stable mucker boots. There were mounds and pellets of sheep dung everywhere they stepped.

  “Our place is down that way,” said Siobhan, indicating the western horizon.

  Tisa pointed to the ground. “So, bacteria from that might be in your well water a few months from now.”

  “Where’s the McGregors’ well?” asked Max.

  “I reckon over there,” said Siobhan, pointing at a cast-iron hand pump in front of the barn.

  “We should go grab a sample of their water,” Max suggested. “It’d be interesting if their water is tainted, too. Cooperation in this project might prove to be its key.”

  Max was remembering something her idol once said: “Nothing truly valuable can be achieved except by the unselfish cooperation of many individuals.” She realized it would be great if the McGregors were some of those individuals unselfishly cooperating.

  As the three friends hurried over to the well to pump a water sample, they heard an annoying, high-pitched chorus of whines behind them. The whirring hum was soon accompanied by the raucous braying of startled sheep.

  “That fool eejit!” shouted Siobhan.

  Klaus had sent a robotic drone flying at the sheep grazing on the downhill slope. He was using the four-propellered hovering robot like a border collie to chase the frightened flock up the hill.

  “Problem solved!” Klaus shouted as he thumbed the drone’s remote controls. “The sheep will no longer poop on Siobhan’s side of the hill! Your well water is saved!”

  Suddenly, a shotgun blasted.

  And Klaus’s plastic drone exploded in midair before chunks of it fell to the ground with a barrage of thuds—like a flock of geese that’d just forgotten how to fly.

  25

  “Did you get what you need?” Max asked Tisa as the buckshot blast echoed like thunder around the hills and knolls.

  “Yes,” said Tisa, capping her water sample vial.

  “Get off my farm, you little brats!” shouted a farmer, who Max assumed was Mr. McGregor. He was toting a smoldering shotgun and had just cracked open its breech to reload. Charl and Isabl came running out of the farmhouse after him.

  “Everyone!” shouted Isabl, running toward the parked van. “Get into the vehicle. Now!”

  “We’re leaving, sir,” Max heard Charl tell the farmer. “We meant no harm.”

  “That idiot boy with the X-Box scared my sheep half to death!”

  “It’s not an X-Box,” shouted Klaus, as he ran toward the van. “It’s the remote control for the Phantom Four Pro V 2.0 drone you just shot down, which, by the way, cost me more than thirteen hundred euros!”

  “How much is it going to cost to have a doctor remove the buckshot pellets I’m gonna pepper in your pants, boyo?” asked the farmer, waving his shotgun.

  “Klaus?” shouted Charl. “Into the van, now. Mr. McGregor? Kindly lower your weapon.”

  The way Charl said it sounded as if the farmer would be the one with serious wounds if he disobeyed.

  Klaus, Max, Siobhan, and Tisa hustled into the van, where Isabl already had the motor revving. Charl tapped the roof as he swung into the passenger seat.

  “Go!”

  Tires squealed. Pebbles spewed. Isabl executed an amazingly tight U-turn and, as fast as she could fly without lifting off the ground, put some distance between the van’s rear bumper and farmer McGregor’s shotgun.

  “I thought it was a good idea,” said Klaus, after the farm disappeared in the distance.

  “Seriously?” said Siobhan.

  “Yes!” said Klaus, defensively. “If the sheep stay on the other side of the hill, your well water will stay safe.”

  “But,” said Tisa, “you automatically double the pollution probability for any families downhill on the other side.”

  “Herding sheep is an old solution,” said Max, “no matter how you dress it up with robots. We need to look at this problem differently. We need to use our imaginations.”

  Max knew that logic would get you from point A to point B. But imagination could take you anywhere.

  The team returned to their makeshift lab in the root cellar of Siobhan’s house. Except Klaus. He went back to the kitchen to sample more Irish food.

  “He’s not much of a team player,” said Tisa.

  “Ah, he just needs to pout,” said Siobhan. “Besides, we three are better off without him.”

  “His heart was in the right place,” said Max.

  “Maybe,” said Siobhan. “Too bad his brain was in his butt.”

  “Mr. McGregor’s well water is contaminated, too,” said Tisa after running her E. coli analysis.

  “Confirming that redirecting the runoff isn’t really the solution to our bigger problem,” said Max.

  “Then what is?” asked Siobhan.

  “Not sure. Excuse me.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Out back. I want to spend some time with your well.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  And so Max did what she thought Dr. Einstein would’ve done: She stood in the yard. For hours. Staring at the rusty pipe sticking up out of the green grass and clover.

  She wasn’t used to this kind of pressure. People were counting on her. Friends. Their sick families. Would she let them all down?

  She ran a thought experiment in her head, assisted by that imagined voice of Einstein she liked to talk to whenever she had to wrangle a problem into a solution.

  “So,” said her internal Einstein, “how does the E. coli get into the well water?”

  “It seeps into the ground,” Max silently replied. “Whenever it rains, the water becomes polluted by animal waste.”

  “Yes, that is how the bacteria gets into the water. But, Maxine, you have not addressed the fundamental issue in my question. How does the E. coli get into the well water?”

  “Okay,” said Max. “Coliform bacteria that gets washed into the ground by rain is usually filtered out as the water goes through the soil and into groundwater systems.”

  “Exactly. But what if that natural filtration is not enough? What if a well is poorly constructed, cracked, or unsealed?”

  “Of course! The wells are the problem, not the water. We need to disinfect them.…”

  “Yes,” said her mental Einstein. “Might I suggest Cl2? Chlorine?”

  “We could use chlorine bleach. Then we need to test all the well seals and fix any cracked casings.”

  Max pulled out a small, battered notebook and started jotting down notes, sketching ideas. They’d need to go through the affected area with a two-step approach. Disinfecting all the wells, then repairing any fissures or cracks in the well linings and casings.

  They’d need to first scrub and chemically disinfect the pipes burrowing down into the earth.

  In dozens, maybe hundreds of wells. Which could take a very long time.

  Unless…

  Max grinned.

  She hurried inside.

  “Klaus?” she yelled into the kitchen. “Put down that sausage. We need a new robot. Now!”

  26

  “Reading your facial expression, Dr. Zimm, I register that you are upset,” said Lenard, one side of his rubbery lips curling up into the semblance of a sinister grin. “Why? Has your
human intelligence failed you? Again?”

  “My undercover contact usually reports on a regular basis,” said Dr. Zimm. “I haven’t had a message in nearly a week.”

  “I know. You see, doctor, I have full access to all your accounts. E-mail, texts, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat. You really should spend more time thinking about your passwords. And you should not be so consistent in your use of the same eight-digit string of letters, numbers, and an exclamation point. You should make this game more challenging for me.”

  “We need to find Max Einstein!” Dr. Zimm pounded his fist on the table, rattling the three-level chessboard set up between him and his humanoid helper. Or was Lenard the boss, now? That’s what his artificially intelligent cohort had declared inside the Corp boardroom. And the board members hadn’t disagreed.

  A few chess pieces toppled to the floor.

  “Is that your move, Dr. Zimm? Rook two and knight three to the floor? Not that it would matter. I am two moves away from checkmating you on levels one and three. One move away on level two. I have surveyed all of your available options and there is no move you can make to stymie my attack. Would you like to surrender now, or should we keep on playing?”

  “What we should be doing, Lenard, is finding my informant so they might help us find young Miss Einstein.”

  Lenard giggled. “What sort of information are you looking for? News? Weather? Sports?”

  “Not ‘information.’ Our informant. Our spy.”

  “Oh. I have already taken care of that.”

  “What?”

  “As I noted earlier, I have access to all your contacts. Therefore, I know who has been supplying you with data about Max Einstein’s whereabouts. Her dwelling place above the stables in New York City, for instance. I have traced the whereabouts of your unwitting traitor… your unsuspecting spy… what is the proper or preferred terminology?”

  “Informant!”

  “Thank you. I have traced the whereabouts of your informant’s cell phone and have located its GPS chip in Ireland. Would you like its exact coordinates?”

  “Of course!” said Dr. Zimm, rolling his chair over to his computer and clacking keys to call up Google maps. “Okay. I’m ready. Tell me.”

  “I find speaking to be an enjoyable but inefficient means of relaying data. I have already entered the IP address for your preferred mapping application into your computer’s random-access memory. You should be looking at a map of the rural area surrounding Ballymahon on the River Inny. The most recent population data suggests 2,674 people live there.” Another giggle. “That survey did not include your informant and their friends.”

  “What friends?”

  “I suspect several members of the Change Makers Institute are there now. As you may not be aware, since you have not undertaken the deep data dive that I recently completed, a potato farm on the outskirts of Ballymahon is where Siobhan McKenna lives with her family.”

  “Who?”

  “Siobhan McKenna. She is a young geoscientist whom you previously met in Africa.”

  “She’s one of the genius children on Max Einstein’s team?”

  “Correct. Cross-referencing the geographic location of your informant with current events as described on the Longford Leader website…”

  “The Longford who?”

  “The local Irish newspaper. They cover Ballymahon and the surrounding area. Shall I continue?”

  “Yes.”

  “Several farming families in the area have been experiencing gastrointestinal illnesses. In such instances, well water is often considered the culprit.”

  “So,” said Dr. Zimm, stroking his tiny chin, “there’s a public health problem in need of a solution.”

  “Correct. Responding to such a humanitarian crisis, particularly as it might involve friends and family of one of its members, would match the ‘do-gooder’ profile of the Change Makers Institute and its team of young scientists.”

  Now Dr. Zimm had a grin on his face almost as creepy as the one molded into Lenard’s artificial face.

  “Well, bless their young hearts for all the good work they do around the globe,” he said sarcastically. “It makes them so much easier to hunt down.”

  27

  “I call it the Scrubitron One,” said Klaus, proudly tapping the metallic sides of his invention. “As you will notice, here on the bottom there is an array of spinning scrub brushes all equipped with small spray jets to disperse our antiseptic chlorine cleanser, which will be automatically pumped from this three-gallon tubular container in the robot’s midsection. These suction cup treads along the sides will roll in a continuous loop to maneuver the machine inside the walls of the well. And, up top, we have a ring of night-vision cameras providing a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view that will tell these two dozen miniature caulking arms where to apply their sealant. Think of the Scrubitron One as a robotic well-cleaning-and-repairing submarine, fully equipped to do the entire anti–E. coli job in one fell swoop!”

  “It looks like an upside-down squid,” said Tisa.

  “It looks like it’ll get the job done,” said Max with a smile.

  “It looks absolutely amazing!” said Siobhan. Then she surprised Klaus (and probably herself) by throwing her arms around his neck and kissing him on the cheek. “You are a bloomin’ genius!”

  “Um, thanks,” said Klaus, momentarily stunned out of his usual bluster. “I guess we all are.”

  “Which is why I wanted to work with you guys instead of the adult scientists they tried to saddle me with after we did all that testing in Jerusalem to find a team leader,” said Max.

  “You think the benefactor made a mistake?” Klaus said to Siobhan. “You think billionaire Ben should’ve picked me to lead the team?” His bluster was back. His swagger, too.

  “Nah,” said Siobhan. “I think I’m the only one who made a mistake. I misjudged you, Klaus. I thought you were nothin’ but an overgrown child playing with all your electronic toys and gizmos. Turns out you’re a top notch AI and robotics wizard.”

  It had only taken Klaus a day to develop and build his “Scrubitron One” after Max gave him the challenge (and the benefactor gave him a credit card to go buy anything he needed to build his bot). He’d come through for the team, big time. All that was left was to field test his clever device.

  “We’ll send it down your well, first,” Max said to Siobhan.

  “If it flops,” said Tisa, “nobody else has to know.”

  “It’s not going to flop!” said Klaus. “It’s going to be brilliant. Believe me.”

  The McKenna family (mom, dad, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, and assorted dogs) gathered around the well as Max and her team fed the self-contained scrubbing/sealing machine down the dark pipe.

  It took the bot two hours to clean, disinfect, and repair the well.

  “It could’ve taken longer,” Klaus told Siobhan’s father, “but your well casing was in pretty good shape, sir.” He shared a screenshot from his tablet computer where he had recorded and monitored what the robot’s night-vision cameras had seen below. “But you did have a significant fissure at about fifteen feet down. That could be where the nasty little sheep poop microbes snuck into your water.”

  Tisa tested samples of water from the well at regular intervals throughout the day.

  “The E. coli numbers have dropped dramatically,” she reported after dinner.

  “How dramatically?” asked Siobhan.

  Tisa grinned. “It’s all gone. Your water is sparkling clean again.”

  This time Siobhan hugged Tisa. Then, for good measure, she hugged Max and Klaus, too.

  “My family and I can’t ever thank you three enough,” she said, her eyes watering up. “Now look what you’ve done. You made me all weepy. I don’t do weepy.”

  They spent the next day using Klaus’s ingenious invention to clean and seal wells at neighboring farms.

  Near dusk, they went back to the McGregors’, where hundreds of sheep were out
in the hilly fields grazing.

  “Your water is contaminated, sir,” Max told Mr. McGregor. “We ran a test and—”

  “Is that what’s making my little girl sick?”

  “We think so, sir.”

  “Can you fix it?”

  Max nodded. “We just need to send a robot down your well.”

  Klaus, who, of course, remembered the shotgun blast that took down his drone, stood at the back of the van, protectively cradling the Scrubitron in his arms.

  “Thank you,” said the sheep herder. “But can I ask a wee favor?”

  “Sure,” said Max.

  “Keep that bloomin’ robot away from my sheep!”

  28

  After two dozen wells were sanitized and sealed, and Siobhan’s little brother, Séamus, was feeling better, the neighbors decided to host a party to celebrate the “young brainy ones” and to say thanks.

  “They’re throwin’ a bash for us this Friday night at Leavy’s of Foigha,” said Siobhan. “It’s a pub and grocery store combined. Should be good fun. Lots of music, dancin’, and food. All the folks we helped will be there—and the ones whose wells we haven’t gotten to yet. Séamus will be comin’, too!”

  On Friday night, Charl and Isabl drove Max, Tisa, and Klaus the three kilometers from the McKenna home near Terelicken to Leavy’s of Foigha. Siobhan rode with her family.

  “I’ll stay with the vehicle,” Isabl announced as they pulled into a parking spot.

  “Why?” said Klaus.

  “It’s standard protocol when you guys are in an unsecured public area,” Isabl explained. “We might need to leave here in a hurry.”

  “Why?” said Klaus. “Is the food going to be bad?”

  “It’s a bloomin’ party, Isabl,” Siobhan protested. “People are comin’ to have fun, not to cause trouble.”

  Isabl smiled. “Let’s hope so.”

  Klaus rolled his eyes. “Party pooper.”

  “I’ll be inside with you guys,” said Charl.

  “We’ll bring you out a plate of food,” Max promised Isabl.