The Candymakers and the Great Chocolate Chase

  “Leave that to me,” AJ said, slipping the vid com into his pocket. “I’ll have that camera back in an hour. Daisy, you’re in command now.” He tossed her the keys. “And, Miles, if this works, anything you want, it’s yours.”

  “Wait,” Daisy said as AJ began walking away. “I know you’re fast, but you’re planning to hunt this guy down on foot?”

  AJ shook his head and continued to the rear of the RV. They all watched as he reached underneath, pressed a few buttons, and then stood back as a previously invisible rear hatch opened up. “Stay back,” AJ said, stepping inside as four mouths hung open.

  A minute later he came out wearing a leather jacket and a helmet and wheeling what looked like a cross between a motorcycle and a scooter. He slid the vid com into a slot on the dash, and it clicked into place. “I started a trace on Mr. Brennan McCabe’s license plate. It won’t take long to track him down. Go get yourselves some sandwiches, and pick me up a ham-and-cheese.” He flipped down the visor on his helmet, revved the engine, and zoomed off.

  “Man, he’s good,” Logan said as the bike disappeared around a bend.

  “He has his moments,” Daisy agreed. “Here, lunch is on me.” She handed them a fifty-dollar bill.

  “Hey, isn’t this mine?” Miles asked.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t leave money under your pillow like you’re the tooth fairy,” she replied. “I’ll have a veggie sub, extra mayo.”

  “I’ll take that,” Philip said, plucking the bill from Miles’s hand. “Pretty sure it’s really mine.”

  “I’ll let you boys work this out,” Daisy said as she climbed into the RV. Now that AJ was handling their current problem, she couldn’t wait to get inside. According to her calculations, the tests should be done!

  When the boys returned with their bags of sandwiches and chips and soda and pickles, they found Daisy sitting cross-legged on the couch, the cat purring in her lap. Miles wasn’t sure which was more disturbing, the fact that Aurora had suddenly decided to like Daisy, or the look of shock on Daisy’s face that he was pretty sure didn’t have anything to do with the cat.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  When AJ returned, he found them all sitting on the couch playing Role with It. “Mission accomplished,” he reported, slinging his jacket over a seat. “The camera is safely back at the dead drop where hopefully no more cachers will stumble across it before we leave.”

  “Awesome!” Miles said, laying down the controller. “How’d you do it?”

  “Let’s just say I can be very persuasive when I need to be.”

  Philip stood and stretched. “So basically you told them they took the wrong thing and they gave it back to you.”

  AJ grinned. “Essentially, yes.” He turned to Miles. “Thanks, kid, for your help back there. I’m going to inform the powers that be that dead drops aren’t as secure as they used to be.”

  “I’m happy to help,” Miles said. “Did you really mean I could choose anything I wanted?”

  “Within reason,” AJ said, washing his hands at the kitchen sink.

  “Well, the kids we met at the first campground told us about this telescope dedication happening tonight. I know it’s taking us out of the way, but Philip’s contest isn’t until the day after tomorrow, so maybe we have time?” Miles tried to give him his best hopeful puppy-dog look.

  “I’ll look up the info,” AJ said. “If it’s doable, we’ll go. It would be good to add something educational into the trip.”

  Miles and Logan high-fived.

  “By the way,” Philip said, eyes still on the game, “if you’re thinking about talking to Daisy, don’t bother. She hasn’t said a word since you left.”

  AJ unwrapped his sandwich and began wolfing it down. With his mouth full, he asked Daisy, “If bis bue?”

  Daisy just kept petting Aurora with one hand while her rock-star alter ego blew up aliens with the other.

  “Yes, it’s true,” Philip answered for her. “I checked the lab results, and from what I could tell, she wired them to another lab to check them over. I don’t know if she heard back yet or not, but she’s in full-on zombie-ate-my-brain mode. As to why the cat is her new best friend, I’m guessing bribery was involved.”

  AJ finished his sandwich and slid into the driver’s seat. “She’ll bounce back. I’m not too worried.” He pulled out some maps and began plotting their course. “Hey, the country’s largest ball of twine is on our way. Should we stop?”

  “That might be good for you, Philip,” Miles said, “you know, as a knitter.”

  Philip grunted. “I am not a knitter. Plus you don’t knit with twine.”

  “A fact only a true knitter would know,” Miles replied.

  Daisy allowed herself a tiny smile. On the screen, one kick from Philip’s goat leg knocked Cowboy Miles off his horse.

  By the time Harvey began climbing the mountain that would lead to the Phyllis E. Glorian Radio Telescope, the sky had darkened considerably.

  “We’re going to be entering a radio quiet zone,” AJ announced as the road got steeper. “That means no electronics. Everything’s gotta be shut down. We won’t get any outside service at all.”

  “Not even the vid coms?” Logan asked.

  AJ shook his head. “Any slight interference could ruin the readings from the telescope.”

  A look of relief crossed Daisy’s face.

  “Is no electronics a good thing for some reason?” Miles asked her.

  She shook her head. “It’s just that if everything’s turned off, I won’t hear from the outside laboratory tonight. I can put it out of my mind.”

  “Glad to have you back, then,” he said.

  After climbing for another twenty minutes, they began going downhill again, until the road flattened out. They were in some kind of valley. AJ pulled off into a huge, gravel-covered parking lot full of cars and trucks and a few other RVs. The only lights breaking up the darkness were the headlights blinking off as cars pulled into spots. They could see out the window that most people carried flashlights, a lot of them with red lenses, which were supposed to help your eyes see the night sky better.

  AJ handed them each a flashlight that hung from a chain. “Cool,” Miles said, slipping the chain over his head

  “You are easily impressed,” Philip noted.

  “I also have two pairs of night-vision goggles,” AJ said, holding them up. “We can take turns. Now, stick together. We don’t know what to expect, and you can already see how dark it is up here.” Philip took one pair and AJ kept the other. Then they grabbed sweatshirts and headed outside.

  Miles was last off the steps, and as the door swung shut behind him, his jaw fell wide open. He could only stare up at the clearest, widest, most star-packed sky he’d ever seen. The Milky Way arched overhead in a long streak of dazzlingly bright stars while the last of the sunset left orange, yellow, and purple blasts of light behind. It was literally the most beautiful sky he’d ever seen. Every few seconds, a meteor zoomed across its path.

  “Great Galileo’s ghost! Look at that!” a boy shouted as he got out of the car next to them. Miles couldn’t help glancing over. The boy stood with his mouth open, staring straight up. Miles smiled, knowing exactly how the kid felt. He turned back to the sky and would have stood there forever if Logan hadn’t pulled him off the steps.

  It was cold, much colder than any summer night had the right to be, but he barely registered it. His chest felt both heavy and light at the same time, so overwhelming was the beauty of what lay above him. Miles remembered from his research that telescopes were usually built in areas known for having especially clean, dry air so electromagnetic signals could pass through the atmosphere easier. The air here sure was clean! No wonder the stars were so bright. Nothing exists except atoms and empty space. In that moment, he understood exactly what the line meant that he’d copied before the trip.

  The crowd—old and young alike—began to move toward a square building at the end of the parking lot, where a podium and
rows of chairs had been set up in front of a flat, grassy field. The enormous telescope was impossible to miss. The curved dish was about a thousand times bigger than a TV satellite dish on someone’s roof. As they got closer, more and more lampposts flickered on—still dim, but they could clearly see each other now.

  They chose seats in the last row, feeling a little like they were crashing someone else’s party. A tall man in jeans and a long white lab coat climbed up to the podium. The excited crowd hushed. “Friends, fellow scientists, members of planet Earth!” He shouted in the absence of a microphone. “I am Dr. Ian Randis, the director of this fine observatory. Welcome to a historic evening. Our a-little-too-close-for-comfort comet friend is treating us to the year’s best meteor shower! There goes one now!”

  The crowd whistled and laughed as the shooting stars zoomed overhead as if the timing had been planned.

  “We live in a grand age, an era when we can see nearly to the beginning of time itself with the help of little guys like these.” He gestured behind him, and the crowd laughed again. The structure was anything but little.

  He beamed and continued. “Just a few weeks ago NASA’s Juno spacecraft reached the orbit of Jupiter. Soon we will know all the secrets this baby sun that never ignited has been hiding in the far reaches of our solar system. The Phyllis E. Glorian Radio Telescope you see behind me will peer much, much farther than that to teach us about the energy released from black holes and to enable us to watch the evolution of far-flung galaxies. But perhaps most exciting of all, it will be at the cutting edge of extrasolar exploration—the discovery of planets around other stars. Maybe it will take a day or a decade or ten decades, but we will find life out there in this vast universe—of that I have no doubt. Thank you for being here tonight to help celebrate the dawn of a new era in space exploration.”

  The crowd clapped and hooted and cheered. Miles leaned over to AJ. “Thank you for bringing me here,” he said, wiping his eyes. AJ nodded and blinked fast.

  Dr. Randis motioned for six kids to come onto the stage. They stood on either side of him, looking excited and nervous. One of the girls clutched some kind of pouch hanging around her neck. Miles recognized the boy who had shouted out in the parking lot. He and one other girl were the youngest in the group, probably about eleven or a little older. The others looked to be about thirteen or fourteen.

  “This must be the naming contest!” Miles whispered to Logan. Logan nodded absently—he was too busy staring at one of the girls. She had long dark hair and dark eyes and was easily the prettiest girl he had seen in real life, ever.

  “I have the honor of introducing a group of very special kids who call themselves Team Exo! With a little guidance, they used a telescope, a computer, and some excellent math skills to confirm a suspected exoplanet around a distant star last summer. Please welcome Ally and Kenny Summers, Bree and Melanie Holden, Jack Rosten, and Ryan Flynn.” The audience applauded.

  Miles spotted Zack and his family from their first campground, the ones who had told them about this event. “Hey!” Miles called out to them, waving until Daisy gently pushed his arm down.

  Dr. Randis put his hands on the two nearest kids’ shoulders. “Now, the right to name the exoplanet would have rightfully been theirs, but I’m going to turn the floor over to Ally Summers, who’s going to explain why they chose to have a contest to name it instead.”

  The girl with the pouch stopped clutching it and stepped forward. “Wow,” she said, pushing her thick hair away from her face and looking out at the crowd. “This is so exciting. When you grow up on a campground, like my brother Kenny and I did, you spend a lot of time looking up at the sky at night. I used to pretend I had friends on other planets, and maybe one day that will really be true! We wanted to open up the naming to all kids in the hopes that they’ll get as excited about astronomy and science as we are. Jack and Bree are going to announce the winning name.”

  She stepped back, and the girl with the long, shiny hair and the boy next to her stepped forward. The boy squeezed Ally’s hand as they switched. “We received over five thousand submissions,” the boy, Jack, said. “Five thousand. From all over the world. It really blew us away. A lot of people wanted us to name the planet after their dog or cat or favorite candy!”

  Daisy giggled. “We could have voted for Aurora.”

  “Or Oozing Crunchorama!” Logan whispered back, glad that Daisy’s weird mood had at least temporarily lifted.

  Bree opened an envelope and pulled out a sheet of paper. “But in the end,” she said, “we wound up choosing one that worked for us on a lot of levels—the name reminds us of kids discovering new worlds, of friendships being made and tested, of possibilities and wonder.”

  The other kids in the group lifted a large white poster up over their heads. It showed a map of the galaxy with an arrow pointing to Earth and one more pointing to the new planet, around a distant star. Together, all six of them said, “Let us introduce you to… Planet Narnia!”

  The crowd clapped and cheered, especially the portion of it that contained a whole lot of eleven-year-olds who had just won for naming the planet after their favorite book series.

  Jack shouted over applause. “So if Mr. Denberg’s fifth-grade class from Lake Mohawk Elementary will please come up, we have something for each of you!”

  About twenty kids ran out of the audience and up to the platform. Dr. Randis put a pouch like Ally’s around each of their necks. The kids, of course, immediately opened the pouches to see what was inside.

  “What do you think it is?” Logan asked.

  Miles shook his head. “I can’t tell.”

  “It looks like a rock,” Philip said. “I think it is a rock.”

  Ally stepped to the front again. “We’ll almost certainly never get to see Planet Narnia, or Kepler-438b, or Gliese 832c, or any of the other exoplanets that might harbor life. They are millions and millions of miles away and impossible to get to in person. But sometimes pieces of outer space come to us.” She lifted up her own pouch and held it out. “In here is a meteorite—a tiny piece of a comet or asteroid—that my grandfather found. Or rather, it found him. Now you each have a meteorite of your own.”

  The fifth graders all started talking excitedly and holding up their space rocks.

  Dr. Randis took the stage again. “Inside the observatory, the button has now been pressed. Radio waves are streaming toward us and landing right there!” He pointed to the face of the dish. Everyone stood up to get a better look. It didn’t help. They couldn’t see anything happening.

  “Hey, you guys made it!” Zack said, jumping in front of them. Mia and Beth were with him, too.

  “Pretty stellar up there, right?” Zack said, pointing up.

  Miles laughed. “Stellar!”

  Daisy rolled her eyes. “Vocabulary humor.”

  “Any of you want to go meet those exoplanet kids?” Zack asked. “Even though they didn’t choose my name?”

  Daisy and Beth chose to get a closer look at the telescope while the boys made their way through the crowd toward Team Exo. “What was the name you entered?” Logan asked.

  “Planet Mango,” Zack said a little sheepishly. “After a very special cat. Guess it wasn’t too original.”

  “It’s not that bad,” Miles said.

  “Narnia is better,” Zack admitted.

  “Yeah.”

  They’d expected Team Exo to be swamped with people, but most of the crowd was gathering around the telescope. They came upon Bree first. Logan hung back a few feet behind the others. He couldn’t make himself go any closer to her.

  “Hi!” Zack said cheerfully. “Was it this clear out the night you found the planet?”

  She shook her head. “Rain, misery, drama. Even the best night at the campground isn’t clear like this. Dr. Randis said this whole area is some weird microclimate or something. Like, the weather’s totally different on the other side of the ridge.”

  “You know what else is weird?” Zack asked. ?
??That all these stars are still here during the day but you can’t see them.”

  Bree smiled. “Just wait for the next eclipse. You’ll see them, all right.” The oldest of the Team Exo kids pulled Bree away with a simple “Sorry, need to steal her.” Logan was relieved. Zack went to join his family, and Miles went up to Ally.

  “Hi,” he said shyly. “I think it’s really cool that you wear that.” He pointed to the pouch. “I never knew either of my grandfathers, but if I did and they gave me that, I’d wear it, too.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “Sometimes kids at my new school look at me a little weird, but I’ve got these guys, so I’m okay.” She gestured to her exoplanet friends.

  “And it looks like you’re starting a trend,” Miles said, pointing to all the little kids running around with their meteorites bouncing on their chests.

  Ally laughed. “It’s true! Do you want to see it?”

  “Sure,” Miles said, holding out his hand. She pulled out a small, craggy-looking rock and dropped it into his palm. Logan inched closer to take a look. The silver-gray rock was only about half an inch long.

  “Wow,” Logan said, touching it with one finger. “This was in space!”

  Even Philip couldn’t help sneaking a peek at it.

  “It almost looks more like a magnet than a rock,” Miles said, handing it back. “Is it magnetic?”

  She nodded. “It’s made of iron, nickel, aluminum, and silicon. And iridium, of course. At least that’s all I know of.”

  Philip had been doing his best to seem bored, but he was really silently blaming Mrs. Sweet for not putting warmer clothes on the packing list. At the sound of the word iridium, he perked up. “Excuse me,” he said politely. “I’ve never heard of iridium before. I mean, not until recently. But what do you mean by ‘of course’? Why is it ‘of course’ made of iridium?”