Return of the Homework Machine by Dan Gutman Read Free Book Online

Columbus? How did they get there? And what happened to all that stuff that was found? Where is it today? Who’s got it? Where can I go to see it?
    I’ll tell you, this article really got my juices flowing. It was hard to sleep that night knowing I was just a few miles away from what could be the most important archeological discovery in American history. I got up and looked through all my American history books. There wasn’t a single word about any treasures hidden inside the Grand Canyon. Where were they?
    SAM DAWKINS. GRADE 6
    Brenton and I decided that Ronnie couldn’t betrusted with that computer chip. We had to get it back. Who knew what he might be capable of doing with it? One of us was going to have to break into his house and take it. There was no other way.
    JUDY DOUGLAS. GRADE 6
    I want it on the record that I was completely against the idea of breaking into Ronnie’s house to steal the chip. There were so many reasons….
We would probably get caught.
We would get into serious trouble.
We could get killed. What if Ronnie’s mom had a gun or a vicious guard dog or something?
It would be on our permanent records. The other kids don’t think about this stuff, but if you break the law, it ends up in some database somewhere. It will follow you for the rest of your life. It might prevent you from getting into law school, or getting a job twenty years from now. Why risk it?
It was simply wrong! You don’t go breaking into other people’s houses.
    KELSEY DONNELLY. GRADE 6
    We can’t get in trouble if we’re honest here, right? Well, then, I must admit, I thought the idea of breaking into Ronnie’s house and stealing the chip sounded exciting. Nothing exciting ever happens around here.
    BRENTON DAMAGATCHI. GRADE 6
    Judy has a very black-and-white view of the world, and I don’t mean race. To her, everything is either right or wrong, good or bad. But sometimes there’s a gray area. In certain situations, breaking the law is the morally correct thing to do. Like, if the American colonists had not rebelled against the British and overthrown their government, there would be no United States today.
    With that chip, Ronnie was capable of doing just about anything. So breaking into his house to take the chip and prevent him from using it for criminal activities was the morally correct thing to do. I thought so, anyway.
    SAM DAWKINS. GRADE 6
    We were having a tough time convincing Judy that breaking into Ronnie Teotwawki’s house wasthe right thing to do. Brenton was doodling on a pad of paper, and suddenly he says, “You know, I always thought Teotwawki was a Japanese name. But it’s not. I think I just figured out what it means.”
    KELSEY DONNELLY. GRADE 6
    We all gathered around to look at Brenton’s pad. He held it up, and this is what it said:
    T he
    E nd
    O f
    T he
    W orld
    A s
    W e
    K now
    I t
    JUDY DOUGLAS. GRADE 6
    I said, “We must get that chip.”
    MR. MURPHY. SIXTH-GRADE TEACHER
    After reading that article, I started becoming obsessed with the treasures of the Grand Canyon. The Phoenix Gazette never ran a follow-up articleabout that explorer Kinkaid. I couldn’t find a word about him anywhere else. What happened to him? How could a story that big end there?
    At first I thought that maybe it was just a newspaper hoax. But they ran it on the front page! Kinkaid was hired by the Smithsonian Institute! And the story was so long and detailed. It didn’t seem likely that somebody would have just made it up.
    It occurred to me that maybe somebody didn’t want the general public to know about this discovery. I mean, when I was a kid they taught us that North America was settled by ice age explorers who came across the Bering Strait from Asia. They became the native Americans. Nobody crossed the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans to get here in ancient times. That’s what all the scientists believed. That’s what they told us in