The Icarus Project Read Online Free PDF

think that I am punishing you or that I don’t want you to come with me. We’re pals, and there is no one I would rather have by my side at the dig site than you. It’s just that I don’t want anything to happen to you. Your safety means everything to me.”
    “You mean like baby Lyuba?” I asked. I sat down next to Dad. Baby Lyuba was an important mammoth discovered on the permafrost of the Siberian steppe. She had been caught in a mudflow and had suffocated. Sediment had been found in her tiny lungs. I was trying to impress Dad with my mammoth knowledge, which was really not mammoth at all, but puny in comparison.
    “What do you know about Lyuba?” he asked.
    “That the scientists don’t think her mother left her, but that she was too small and got stuck in the mud during migration. She drowned or suffocated in the mud.”
    He stared at his hands. “I couldn’t forgive myself if anything bad happened to you. This is real. It’s not a movie or a TV show. I will have high expectations put on me, and I won’t be able to spend a lot of time with you.”
    “I know. But I’ll be good. I promise. I won’t get in the way. Plus, Mom is always saying how responsible and mature I am.”
    “Well, she’s right about that. Let me see what your principal says tomorrow, and we’ll decide from there. If she approves the trip, then we’ll talk. Deal?”
    I jumped up and threw my arms around Dad in a bear hug. “Deal!”

     
    Dad drove me to school, and we walked to the principal’s office together. It turned out that the expedition was starting immediately, so if I was going to go with him, we needed to get permission right away. I sat on a dingy orange chair in the waiting room outside the office and stared out the window. Pale green daffodil stems poked through the soggy spring dirt. Pale green was the color of potential, of “maybe.”
    Dad was taking forever. I hoped he was convincing. Finally, he emerged from the office and headed right out the front door. I followed quick on his heels.
    “What did Mrs. Pettyfield say?” I asked, my pulse racing as we headed across the parking lot toward the car.
    He stared at his shoes, fumbled with his keys. Dad was a terrible liar. I knew by the way he was trying to suppress a smile that I was going.
    “Yes!” I yelled. “How did you convince her?”
    We climbed into the car.
    “Well, the fact that you have a week off for spring break helped. But the clincher was that Mrs. Pettyfield owes me big-time after that night-at-the-museum fiasco from threeyears back.” Dad put on his seat belt and wrinkled his nose.
    “I had forgotten about that.” I cringed at the memory.
    “How could you forget?” He shuddered.
    A few years back he had done a favor for the principal by setting up a night-at-the-museum slumber party at the Natural History Museum for the entire fourth grade. We had a tour of the museum, followed by watching short films and playing dinosaur games, and everything was going great, except that one of the parent chaperones had brought along her famous pork pockets as snacks. Everyone who had a pork pocket got food poisoning. It wasn’t pretty, and it smelled even worse.
    “They should’ve known better. That pork looked a little gray. And besides, who eats pork that late at night?”
    “Twenty of the kids and three of the chaperones, that’s who. It was a nightmare. The janitor resigned the very next day.” He shook his head to clear it, then looked at me seriously. “Now, there are conditions in allowing you to go on this trip. You have to stay caught up on all your schoolwork, and you have to write your own field report and do an oral presentation when you get back, sharing everything you learned on the expedition with the other students.”
    “I can do that! I can bring my camera and record videos and e-mail them to my science and history classes.” I didn’t tell him I was already planning on doing that for Zoey. “Itcan be a serious expedition,