The Academy for the Exploratory Sciences had been built into a wide valley of the White Mountains, most of the dark-timbered academy buildings nestled together at the foot of Mt. Arnoz, with the Simulation and Training Grounds stretching out in all directions, and the Mountaineering Hut high up in the foothills of the mountain.
The centerpiece of the campus was the huge Longhouse, constructed of gargantuan pine logs, the bark smoothed or worn away in places, pine sap still glimmering here and there on the walls.
The boys’ and girls’ cabins were a half mile north of the Longhouse, and there were many other log buildings around, some of which I’d never been inside. Sukey had told us that she’d heard rumors there were secret caves and tunnels through the mountains, but she’d never seen any evidence of them and no one knew what they were supposed to be for, so the stories may have just been . . . stories.
I turned up the collar of my Explorer’s vest against the chilly breeze coming down off the mountains and trudged along the path to the library, thinking about Sukey. Lately she had seemed preoccupied, her amber-brown eyes always darting around worriedly, her forehead scrunched in thought.
She’d told us that she’d been asked to be on a top-secret flying squadron of Academy students. They’d been taking extra classes and practicing at night and she was tired. I wondered if that was what was on her mind, or if it was something else. Before I knew it, I was standing in front of the Cruthers Memorial Library, looking up at the statue of the famous Explorer George Cruthers seated on the horse he’d used to explore Deloia and other Newly Discovered Lands.
The library was three stories high and, like the Longhouse, it smelled of the pine logs from which it was constructed. The walls of the big main room were lined with books and document boxes and, on one side, a winding staircase leading to three floors of tables and study nooks and shelves around the outside walls that were filled with books and maps.
Most of the books were new, printed since the Muller Machines had failed, taking their huge libraries of computerized books and maps with them. But one of my favorite things about being at the Academy was that there were also some really old books from before the Muller Machines. I loved to pore over them, smelling the smooth leather and musty paper. The maps and nautical charts were stored in special wooden and glass boxes that allowed you to slide them out on trays. You could examine the winding lines showing places that we’d known about for a long time, as well as the places discovered by Dad and his fellow Explorers. I’d been through them a thousand times, looking for Girafalco’s Trench. I’d had no luck, but something Sukey said had gotten me thinking.
I couldn’t find a record of Girafalco’s Trench, but maybe I could find out something about Girafalco himself—or herself.
The Academy librarian, Mrs. Pasquale, sat behind the big desk in the main room, stamping books and keeping an eye on the students working at tables on the first floor. Next to her was a pair of IronGrabbers, steam-powered gloves that got longer and longer and reached high up into the shelves with their chrome fingers to pull down the books you wanted. Mrs. Pasquale was an elderly Neo, her acid-yellow hair in a bun and her glittering spectacles suspended from her neck by a chain of flashing lights. She always thought people were trying to deface the books and maps and she kept a close watch on the students, making notes in a little notebook next to her desk about what you were reading or checking out.
I spent a half hour in the clockwork card catalog, looking for books about famous explorers, and gave her a list of the first five texts I wanted. She slipped her hands into the IronGrabbers. They clicked and whirred as the wrists telescoped, getting longer and longer until she could reach the shelf where my books were. Then, with more clicking and whirring, they shrunk down again and she handed me the books.
“Thank you, Mrs. Pasquale.” She just scowled, so I took them back up to my favorite leather armchair by the big windows on the third floor and started checking each index, skimming for mention of a Girafalco. When I finished the first pile, Mrs. Pasquale and her IronGrabbers got me another, and I went through those, feeling more and more frustrated as I failed to turn up any reference to a Girafalco, male or female, living or dead, human or animal. Ready for a break, I got up and went over to the big bureau where the Academy kept its collection of maps and nautical charts.
I’d been through them over and over, looking for a reference to Girafalco’s Trench, and now I tried yet again, straining my eyes to see the fine lines of the old documents, the strangely shaped continents and coastlines, the big, wide-open spaces of the oceans, where cartographers had drawn in sea serpents and mythical beasts. But no matter how many times I squinted at the maps, the words I was looking for weren’t going to magically appear. Dad had taught me how to memorize maps, and I was good at it, scanning the loops and whorls and lines and making a picture of them in my mind. I had most of these committed to memory now, I’d looked at them so much. By the time dinner was over and students started streaming into the library, the IronGrabbers had had a good workout, and I had made my way through all of the general histories of exploration and all of the biographies of Explorers and had started on the shelves of textbooks that were kept on reserve by the front desk.
Every time I came down with a stack of books and she had to get the IronGrabbers out again, Mrs. Pasquale would make a little notation in her notebook and look up at me with growing admiration. She must have thought I was some kind of speed reader.
I had finished the animal biology and cartography textbooks and had moved on to geology, and then suddenly there it was, at the end of a textbook called Understanding the Earth:
“The Italian scientist, mapmaker, and explorer Gianni Girafalco developed an early theory about the permeability of the earth’s surface, but it was overshadowed by Tyler’s more mainstream hypothesis during the New Modern Age explorations of . . .” That was it. Nothing more about Girafalco. The Italian scientist, mapmaker, and explorer Gianni Girafalco. I put the book aside and started on the rest of the geology texts. I found a few more references to Gianni Girafalco, most of them noting that he had explored the Caribbean in the 1800s and was an early believer in something called “trench theory,” or the belief that the planet was covered with trenches that represented entry points to the inside of the earth. Girafalco seemed to have believed that if you could enter these trenches, you could actually travel deep inside the earth. He hypothesized that many of these entry points were under the sea and that if you could explore the ocean floor, you could access the center of the earth. I found another reference in an old book about nineteenth-century exploration that contained crew lists from his voyages.
So what did Dad’s map mean? Had Gianni Girafalco found one of these undersea trenches? Had Dad gone there? And how was that possible? The New Modern Age inventors had made suits that would let you stay under water for a few hours at a time, but would that have been enough? And how was I supposed to find it, anyway? I couldn’t just search the floor of the entire Caribbean Sea.
I got more geology books and kept reading. In a huge textbook called Men of Earth and Fire, I finally found another clue in a chapter on geologic exploration before the New Modern Age. “In 1823,” I read, “Gianni Girafalco made the third in a series of trips to the northern Caribbean Sea in the Atlantic Ocean, to a region known for its strange weather phenomena, and where many ships had foundered and been lost. Girafalco believed that the rough seas and unusual weather patterns were a direct result of an ocean trench and that the points of access to the trench might reveal a mysterious source of fuel. In a stroke of bad fortune for scientific knowledge, Gianni Girafalco’s ship, the Adelaide, sunk in May of 1823. The sole survivor, a boy native to Southampton, UK, described rough and turbulent seas just before the ship had foundered. The boy was found floating on a piece of wood by a fisherman.”
The library was full of students now, and as I read, I could hear the low murmur of whispered conversation around me, the scratch of pencils on paper, the sound of books being opened and closed.
I turned the page.
There was nothing more about Gianni Girafalco. But remembering that Dad had pointed us to the map of Arizona by leaving coded messages in a book, I flipped through again, checking carefully for notations in the margins, even gently shaking it to make sure nothing was tucked inside.
I slipped the paper cover off and checked out the binding and the endpapers, but everything seemed in order. It was as I was flipping through the title pages and copyright information that I noticed the name of one of the book’s authors: R. Delorme Mountmorris.
Was it a sign? Dad had left a code for us in another book by Mr. Mountmorris. But Mr. Mountmorris was a historian. He’d written lots of books. Still . . .
I checked to make sure no one was watching me, then examined the endpapers once more.
Nothing. I turned the book over again.
The spine was stamped in gold, and I checked it with the paper cover off. Closed, the spine lay flat against the bound pages, but when I opened the book all the way so that the front and back covers touched, there was a gap between the stiff board and the glued edges of the paper. I peered down into it, but I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.
So I poked a pencil down into the space. The first time I didn’t notice anything. The second time I poked the pencil through, I felt some resistance, as though the pencil was hitting something. I checked to make sure no one was watching and used the pencil to pry whatever it was away from the inside of the cover.
Suddenly I felt it give way, but before I could catch it, it fell out on to the wooden floor with a metallic clang.
Trying not to attract attention, I looked down.
A shiny silver key lay on a square of glossy wood near my foot.