Slowly I made my way around the outside of the greenhouse. I wasn’t just looking for rips, though. I was looking for a place where aliens might have entered.
And 15 minutes later, I found it. More correctly speaking, I found tracks.
The hole itself was a couple of feet high and a couple of feet wide. It didn’t have the smoothness of a rip. By zooming in with my video lens, I clearly saw scratches, as if a claw had been used to tear the clear plastic sheeting.
The sand below this hole was packed harder than the sand on either side. In the softer sand at the edges of this packed path, a few tracks were visible. The wind had begun to fill in the tracks with drifting sand, but I could still see enough to know the tracks were not my imagination.
They were about the size of the palm of my hand—my real hand, not my robot hand—and about half an inch deep. I could not make out any more details, however, because the sand had drifted.
I did know two things for certain: The tracks were not human. And they led into the cornfield.
I spun back and followed the plastic walls of the greenhouse tent until I reached the same entrance I’d used when rescuing Timothy Neilson. The same entrance he’d taken when he went inside to check the growth levels of the plants, unaware that minutes later he’d be desperately calling for help.
It was much warmer in the greenhouse. Unlike the rest of the planet, there was enough oxygen in here from the plants to hold heat. That, combined with the greenhouse effect and the heat of the soil, made it above freezing. Not that I cared one way or another. I was well protected by my robot body.
I rolled inside, scanning in all directions. As before, the tall bamboo corn blocked my view. While these plants did need some water and the protection of the greenhouse, they practically thrived in the Martian air.
You see, while the atmosphere of Earth is 21 percent oxygen, 78 percent nitrogen, and 1 percent argon and carbon dioxide, the atmosphere of Mars is 95 percent carbon dioxide, 3 percent nitrogen, and 2 percent argon and other gases. Humans breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. Plants do the opposite, which is very handy. So plants give us what we need, and we give them what they need.
Since Mars is already rich in carbon dioxide, the plants only needed water to survive. And since Mars is such a dry planet, the plants were genetically designed to need very little of it. Any moisture they received was sprayed through nozzles from narrow plastic tubing that ran in grids along the ceiling of the greenhouse tent.
Because I could see so little, I followed the rows of bamboo corn to the hole in the plastic sheeting. It didn’t help much. On the outside, there was a packed path. On the inside, the path disappeared, as if the alien creatures had scattered in different directions once they had entered.
That left me with too many questions.
Why had they entered?
Where did they go once inside?
Were they still inside?
Where did they go after they left, if indeed they had left the greenhouse?
Where had they come from?
And the most important question of all: Why had they attacked a human?
I wasn’t worried about what would happen to me if they attacked my robot body. First of all, my titanium shell was a lot stronger than human skin and bones. Second, even if they were able to somehow damage my robot body, I could leave the robot almost instantly. In my mind, all I needed to do was shout Stop!
From the greenhouse wall, I decided to push into the bamboo corn and try to follow one set of blurred tracks.
I pushed aside stems of bamboo corn. My wheels rolled over other stems. I switched to my rear video lens and saw I was making a clear path through the plants. It was a straight path, unlike the one Timothy Neilson had made in his panicked run.
I realized something else. My path was the only path.
Yet I was almost certain that some kind of creature had ripped a hole through the plastic sheeting of the greenhouse tent. I was almost certain that many of those creatures had entered the greenhouse tent. But where were the bent and trampled bamboo-corn plants that showed their paths?
The only answer I could come up with was that these creatures were small enough to move among the plant stems instead of plowing over them, like my robot body did.
But if they were that small, why had they frightened Timothy Neilson? Every person chosen for the Mars Project had passed dozens of tests. People didn’t make it to Mars if they were wimps or cowards. Had the creatures frightened Timothy because he simply hadn’t expected any other kind of life-form? And how and why had they managed to do so much damage to his space suit?
I followed farther into the bamboo corn. I came to a spot where water from the nozzles at the ceiling had worn a small gully in the soil between the stems. Tracks littered the edge of this little depression. There was no water, of course. Even in the greenhouse, any water that didn’t soak into the soil for the plants quickly evaporated.
A sound drew my attention away from the tracks at the edge of the gully. A scurrying sound. Then more scurrying. I saw nothing because of the bamboo corn that surrounded me, but the scurrying got louder.
I switched to infrared vision. As with the last time I was in the greenhouse, I saw the different shades of orange that reflected the slight heat of the plants and soil. Unlike the time I’d rescued Timothy, however, I saw shapes of deep red, the shapes of something alive.
Aliens!
Dozens of them!
Closing in on me from all directions!
I switched back to visual mode and saw only bamboo corn.
Back to infrared. I was about to be swarmed. Any second these aliens would break through the screen of bamboo corn that hid them from me.
I heard a click. A hiss.
I strained to hear. There seemed to be hundreds of the clicking sounds. The hissing became a roar in my sensitive hearing.
As the moving red shapes leaped all around me, I switched to visual again. I saw the darkness of moving objects in the air. Without thinking about it, I brought my titanium hands up to protect myself. I felt solid contact.
In the same instant, cold hit me.
And in the next instant, my brain seemed to explode. It felt like I had run into a wall at full speed in total darkness.
Without warning, I began to fall … fall … fall. …
CHAPTER 10
I awoke to see Rawling staring down at me with concern on his face. “Hello,” I said with a croak.
“Glad you’re back.”
“Back?” I struggled to sit up. I realized I wasn’t wearing my blindfold or the soundproofing headset. Nor was I strapped to the bed. “Back?” I repeated. “Where did I go?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Rawling said. “Your body didn’t go anywhere, but you were out for 6 minutes and 10 seconds.”
“What?” I replied, startled.
“The computer shows the exact time that you disconnected from the robot body. Just over six minutes ago. Your body on the bed jerked around as if you had been shocked by electricity. You didn’t make contact with any electrical sources, did you?”
Slowly, I remembered my last moments in the robot body. Clicking. Hissing. Dark objects in the air. Sudden cold. The sensation of hitting a wall at full speed in total darkness. “Not that I know of. Not unless I was hit by aliens with electrical currents in their bodies.”
As I told Rawling what I’d experienced, he listened gravely. Then he said, “It’s a possibility. If they are alien lifeforms, they might well contain strong electrical or magnetic forces. We just don’t know.”
Rawling helped me sit up. “The good news is, you have a clean bill of health. Your pupils aren’t dilated. Blood pressure is fine. Heartbeat is normal. Brain waves are fine.”
“We’ll need the robot body to figure out what happened,” I said.
“Sure. But it wouldn’t be right to send anyone in there. Timothy Neilson was attacked by those things, and it took a robot to get him out.
And now it looks like they were able to take down an indestructible robot body. If aliens managed to stop it, how much chance do we have to survive an attack?” He took a deep, deep breath. “Here’s the problem. We really need to know what those aliens are and what they’re capable of doing. But I can’t let anyone go out there if we don’t know those things. And we won’t know those things if nobody can go out there.”
This was not good.
CHAPTER 11
After a very quiet and quick nutri-tube supper a few hours later, I decided to leave the minidome. My father and I weren’t talking much. Mom seemed mad at both of us because we weren’t getting along like she wanted. It was just easier to leave. It seemed weird in there, because my parents were so into each other. It wasn’t that I was jealous or anything. Really. The guy goes away for three years, but when he comes back, he’s the king. Me? I was suddenly useless and out of place. They had each other. All I had was a robot that I’d just named Bruce, and poor Bruce was stuck in the middle of a cornfield.
I decided to go where I usually went in my wheelchair when I wanted to be alone. To the telescope, far above the rest of the dome.
It took me less than five minutes to reach the telescope. I rolled into place where the dome astronomer usually sat and punched my password into the computer control pad.
When it prompted me to enter a location, I simply typed in the word Saturn.
With a whine of electric motors, the telescope automatically swung to find Saturn and focused on the planet.
I leaned into the eyepiece. As always, I nearly gasped at the intensely black sky filled with millions and millions of stars. They were so sharp and clear it seemed I could reach out and grab them.
Hanging in the infinite blackness was Saturn. It wasn’t the only planet I’d observed with rings—Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune also have rings of sorts—but it was definitely the most magnificent.
To you on Earth, it might look like Saturn has only three rings. But from here on Mars, I saw differently. Saturn has thousands of rings, gleaming in reflected sunlight. The rings aren’t solid discs but are made of millions of pieces of “dirty ice,” ranging in size from a grain of sand to an iceberg as big as a spaceship. Gravity holds them together, and they spin around the planet, some at speeds of 50,000 miles per hour, creating a blur that looks solid to our eyes.
I don’t know how long I sat there, marveling at those rings and the incredible sight. Long enough that I saw shadows of some of Saturn’s moons drift across the face of the planet. Long enough that I began to pray.
You see, it wasn’t until I faced death—I wrote about that in my last journal—that I allowed myself to have faith in God. I realized there must be more to being human than having a mind and body. I realized I have a soul, held within my body. Thinking of it that way has helped me deal with being crippled. In believing I have a soul, I was able to believe in God. Of course, as Mom says, that’s only the first step of a great journey. She says once you accept that, then each day is learning more about what that means. How God loves you, how you try to love God in return. And how knowing all of this helps you through the good and bad of life.
Looking through the telescope at the marvels of the universe, I now find it easier and easier to believe that God is behind it. That the creation of the universe was carefully planned out by God, and he’s still watching over it. Over us. It has given me comfort, too, to know that a lot of scientists look at the universe and say it points us to God.
Rawling is one of those scientists. He says a lot of things show that the universe was designed for the single reason of producing human life. It’s something we’ve talked about a lot in the short time since he became director.
With Saturn there in front of me, so beautiful and awesome and stunning, it just seemed natural to close my eyes briefly and pray to God, thanking him for allowing me to see such beauty. It may sound strange if you don’t pray much, but when I finished, I felt peaceful. I felt as if I did belong, I did have a purpose, and I was supposed to be part of God’s creation. I felt as if a load had been taken off my shoulders. Since God made me and had a plan, maybe I didn’t have to worry so much about things I couldn’t control.
This peace lasted only as long as it took for one other person to step onto the third level near the telescope.
“Hello,” she said. She did that tilting thing, hand on her hip, as if “hello” were also some kind of challenge. “I’ve been looking for you.”
It was Ashley.
And this time I wouldn’t be able to hide behind a robot body.
CHAPTER 12
“You’ve been looking for me?” I asked.
“Sure,” Ashley said. She grinned. It changed her. Without that grin, she looked grown up. With it, she looked like a tomboy. “Everyone else here is ancient. Over 30. I asked if there was anyone close to my age—I’m 13—and people told me about you.”
She stuck her hand out, just like earlier when she’d introduced herself to the robot body. “My name’s Ashley. Ashley Jordan.”
“Tyce,” I said, taking her hand and shaking it. “Tyce Sanders.” I was glad it was dim up here at the telescope. For some reason, my ears felt like they were burning red.
“Looked like you were sleeping at the telescope,” she said, grinning. As if it wasn’t a big deal that I was in a wheelchair. “Not that I was spying or anything, but when I walked up, you didn’t hear me.”
“I was … I was …” I only hesitated because, to me, praying was a private thing—and very new. But I decided I wasn’t going to lie about it. There was no shame in trying to understand the mystery of life and seeing God behind it. So I took a deep breath and explained. “I was praying. When I look through the telescope, it blows me away. I can’t help but think and wonder about God.”
“Cool.” Ashley flipped back her hair, revealing her silver cross earrings. “I respect someone who’s not afraid to ask questions about God. There’s so much to figure out. What I’ve found is that when you think about this universe as being created instead of just happening by accident, you start to see God everywhere in all these amazing things. Wait until you get into Einstein’s theory of relativity. Energy turning into matter. Matter turning into energy. Wow! What really messes with my mind is the relationship between time and the speed of light. Think about it. At the speed of light, time slows down to a stop. If you could ride a light beam across the universe, a billion, billion, billion, billion miles later, not one second of time would have passed for you, even though hundreds of years would have passed by on Earth. It makes me think that if God doesn’t exist in the same sense we do in our bodies, it’s only natural that he would be outside of space and time as we know it.”
She laughed at my expression. “You can shut your jaw now. Your mouth is open so wide you could catch flies, if Mars had flies. What? You don’t think a girl should know about stuff like that?”
I lifted my hand and pushed my jaw shut. It made her laugh again.
“It’s not that you’re a girl,” I said. “I mean, my mom’s a scientist. It’s just that I never expected the one person my age in this dome to turn out to be someone who loves science too.”
“How could I not?” Ashley answered. “Considering the family I was born into.”
“What kind of family?”
She answered my question with a question. “What do you do for fun around here?”
If she didn’t want to talk about her family, I wasn’t going to push it. “For fun?” I shrugged. “Dance lessons. Try out for Olympic sprinting competitions. Things like that.”
“But you’re in a …” She hit her forehead with the heel of her palm. “Sorry. You were joking, weren’t you?”
Another shrug. “Bad habit,” I said.
“Don’t get me started on my bad habits. Let me tell you, six months crossing the solar system with no music or friends … well, halfway here I nearly asked them to drop me off without a space suit.”
“Um,” I began,
intensely curious but not wanting to pry, “exactly what are you doing here?”
“My father is a quantum physicist. That’s why I know so much about relativity and stuff like that. He’s setting up some research that’s a lot easier here than on Earth because of the lower gravity. He’s so good that when he told the United Nations’ science agency he wouldn’t go unless he could take me, they said it would be all right, since I was the only kid in our family.”
Just like me. An only kid. And a science freak. Wow! “What about your mother?”
Ashley stiffened, as rigid as a statue.
Dumb, I told myself. I’d just asked about her family again. “Sorry,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said quietly, her eyes turned downward. “I’d have asked the same question. They got divorced about a year ago. It was just pretty messy, that’s all. I think Dad wanted to be sent out here to get away from her.”
“I’m sorry,” I said and meant it. I knew what having an absent parent was like.
“Me too,” Ashley said sadly. Then she smiled, but it seemed forced. “You want to help me with something?”
“Probably,” I said. With every passing minute, it was getting easier to be around her. I felt less shy.
“Help me find this robot,” she said. “I met him earlier and—”
“Him?”
“His name was Bruce. He’s kind of a smarty-pants, but it’s cute.”
“Oh, Bruce. You met him already?”
Ashley nodded.
“Smart robot,” I said, playing along. “Knows his math.”
“I was impressed,” she said.
“Wait until you catch his juggling act.”
“Bruce the robot can juggle?” Her eyes widened like a little girl hearing about Santa Claus.
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