10
Jaden, Caleb, Sonja, and Benjamin walked back into the control center Sunday morning at ten thirty. The first thing Jaden did was check the countdown clock: 10:29:03.
“How are the CO2 levels doing?” Sonja asked the late-night Mission Control group.
Antonio stood up from his console and stretched. “They stayed steady,” he replied. “And as far as we know, there wasn’t any more sabotage.”
“But we weren’t able to figure out how to make a fan from this stuff,” Destiny admitted. She and Brooke stood by the table in the back that they’d been using as their makerspace.
“Our turn,” Sonja told them. “You guys have to get some sleep.”
As the other S.M.A.R.T.S. headed for the door, Benjamin plopped down in front of his monitor. He obviously wasn’t going to help — again.
Is it because he wants us to fail? Jaden wondered. Does he want Samuel out of the hab that badly?
“How about this?” Caleb asked from where he and Sonja stood at the makerspace table. He held up one of the food packets. “The outside might make good fan blades.”
Sonja nodded. “That would work, but the blades aren’t the hard part. The hard part is building the motor that spins the blades.” She looked down at the table. So did Jaden and Caleb.
“Maybe we could —” Caleb began. He shook his head. “Never mind.”
Suddenly Sonja straightened up. Her eyes glittered with excitement. “I think — yeah, I think this could work!” She picked up a miniature flashlight made up of six LED lights attached to a 9-volt battery. She pulled off the block of lights and held up the battery. “We can use this — and this.” She grabbed some copper wire.
“By Odin’s beard, she’s going to make an electromagnet!” Caleb exclaimed, using one of Thor’s favorite expressions.
Electromagnets were different than permanent magnets, like the ones used to hold stuff on a fridge. Electromagnets were created by running electric current through a wire. Lots of things were powered by electromagnets — doorbells, speakers, hard drives, and fans!
Benjamin got up from his console and walked over to the table. “That could actually work,” he said. He took the wire from Sonja and started wrapping it around his finger to make a circle of coiled wire.
He’s actually helping! Jaden thought. Good. He didn’t want Benjamin to be the perp.
“Great!” Caleb told Benjamin. “Every loop of wire will make the electromagnet stronger. And the stronger the magnet is, the faster we can make our fan spin.” It felt like they were back in the media center, teaming up to make something.
“We need a permanent magnet too,” Jaden said. He scanned the table and quickly found one.
They would tape the permanent magnet to the battery from the flashlight. Two magnets always attracted or repelled each other. The push and pull between the electromagnet and the permanent magnet would make the wire spin. Then all they’d have to do was make some blades to attach to one end of the wire, and they’d have a working fan!
* * *
Back in the hab, Zoe held the fan they’d cut out of a dehydrated food package while Dylan attached it to one end of the copper wire. They were following the instructions that had arrived from Mission Control just over an hour ago.
“I hope this works,” Goo said. “We only have about six hours and forty-five minutes of oxygen left!”
“We’re all done,” Zoe said when Dylan had finished.
“Let’s try it!” Samuel exclaimed.
He bent a paper clip to hold each end of the wire. Then he taped one clip to the positive end of the battery and one to the negative end, sending a current through the wire and creating an electromagnet.
The fan began to spin! The four colonists cheered.
“Now all we have to do is just put it inside the scrubber,” Zoe said.
It was easy to remove the cover from the wall of the hab, and there was room inside the scrubber for the new fan without removing the old one. They decided to leave it. It was still spinning, just slower than it should, so it would also help move air over the pellets.
“Now what?” Dylan asked after they’d screwed the cover back on.
“Now we send a message to Mission Control saying the fan is in place,” Samuel said. “Then I say we follow our regular schedule while we wait to see if the CO2 levels go down. That’ll tell us if the scrubber’s working.”
“We make a great team,” Zoe said. “I don’t know who keeps sabotaging us, but we’re solving every problem they throw at us. And I’m really glad we’re not trying to annoy each other anymore.”
Goo smiled. “And if our team fixed the scrubber, we’ll win the contest for sure!”
* * *
“How are my little worms?” Zoe crooned half an hour later as she looked at her monitor in the lab. It showed video feeds from the three worm cultivation chambers attached to the counter on her left.
She, Dylan, Samuel, and Goo had each been assigned an experiment to work on while they were staying in the hab. If Zoe was really on Mars, the data collected from her worms could help show how the high levels of radiation on Mars might affect colonists.
“You should see them go,” she told Samuel, who was busy putting in his time on the treadmill at the other end of the lab.
Zoe smiled as she watched the worms wiggle across the screen of her monitor. Then the image flickered and went black. The lights in the room dimmed for a moment, and Samuel’s treadmill slowed down. He hit the stop button and climbed off.
“That was weird,” he said. “The speed just suddenly dropped.”
Goo appeared in the doorway, Dylan right behind her. “I just tried to send an email to Sonja to say hi, and it wouldn’t go through. It’s like there’s no signal,” she said.
“My computer —” Zoe began. Then all the lights went out. “Houston, we have a problem.”