But the Robot stayed where he was and pointed with the stick to our tic-tac-toe game.
“We can play again in a minute. I promise. We’ll just go close enough so we can see whatever is making that light. Get a scan and come back up.”
The Robot lowered his hand, his lights back to making their spiral, like he thought this was a bad idea.
I wonder now if he knew what was coming, if he had some idea of what we’d find. And what was I thinking we’d find as I started down that tunnel? To be honest, I had no idea: maybe a crashed Jupiter? Or maybe it had crossed my mind that we might find something from somewhere… else. After all, we’d ended up on this planet. Maybe the source of those battery things and those footprints had traveled here, too.
It’s funny to think about because in a way, I was exactly right.
And yet in every other way, I was dead wrong.
CHAPTER
We moved deeper into the tunnel, me walking as quietly as I could, the Robot right behind me. After only a couple of meters, it got so dark I could barely see my feet. There was only the bluish glow of the Robot’s lights, and whatever that green light was from up ahead. I had a headlamp in my backpack, but I didn’t want to call any more attention to us, in case there really was someone or something down here.
Besides, after another few steps, the green light had gotten bright enough that I could make out the tunnel walls and floor. The air was getting cooler, too. It felt damp on my face, although some of that was the sweat beading on my forehead. I tried to breathe slowly, to stay calm. This was no time to panic and freeze up. Relax, I told myself, this is the right thing to do, and you’ve got a super-strong robot.
After a few more steps, the green light had gotten so bright that we were casting shadows. At the same time, it had gotten completely dark above us, and I could no longer see the ceiling. The walls were widening, too, and the slope of the tunnel was getting steeper. I started shuffling my feet in smaller steps to keep my balance.
Up ahead there was a pool of light, like this tunnel was going to open up to a wider space. I held out my hand. “Wait here,” I whispered to the Robot, and then I crept ahead the last few meters, leaned against the cool rock wall, and peered around the edge.
There was a rectangular cave with a sloping floor. It was maybe twice as wide as the common room on the Jupiter, but then the ceiling was a lot higher. And the walls were different than the tunnel; in here they were straight and smooth, almost like they were made of metal. I knew there were volcanic rocks that cooled into smooth surfaces like this, so maybe this was a lava tube, except the walls seemed too straight, the corners too perfect, like they had been built.
But what really mattered was the large object standing right in the middle of the room. It looked like a doorway, its edges glowing with that green light. Except doorway didn’t seem right, because there wasn’t a door. I squinted, trying to understand what I was seeing. There was a rectangular shape, like a doorframe, except with no walls on either side of it. And then, where there should have been an actual door, there was… nothing. Well, not exactly, because I couldn’t see the other side of the cave through it. Instead, it was like I was looking into pure darkness, and when I squinted I saw tiny dots of light. Almost like I was looking into space.
The room seemed to be empty. As I turned back to the Robot, I saw marks on the wall right beside the tunnel: a vertical row of perfect squares, and inside each one was a grid of symbols, with intersecting lines and circles. They reminded me of hieroglyphs, except these were incredibly fine and accurate, like they’d been carved with a laser. I looked from the doorway to these symbols; if you came from there, you’d see these as you walked up the cave.… Maybe they were instructions.
“Come on,” I whispered to the Robot, and started toward the door. My heart was pounding. What was this thing? And how could it possibly be down here?
I got out my camera and continued recording. “Okay, I’m back,” I said. “We went into that cave to hide, and now we’re deep inside a tunnel and we’ve found some kind of structure.” I panned the camera around, taking in the doorway and the rest of the cave.
My boot crunched on something. I looked down and saw broken shards on the ground that were covered in dust. “The floor has some weird composition,” I said. “Could be sediment, except it crunches like glass. Maybe volcanic.”
I kept going and stopped in front of the doorway. The structure was composed of some kind of silver metal, and the green light was coming from thin, clear tubes. It was pulsing through these tubes almost like it was made of some kind of liquid energy. The frame ended right at the ground, but didn’t seem to actually touch it. “This doorway appears to be floating,” I said for my video, moving the camera slowly up and down to take in the whole thing. “I’ve never seen metal or circuitry like this.”
But that was nothing compared to the center of the doorway. “It’s like a window out into deep space,” I said. Not only were there millions of stars, there were fuzzy spots like galaxies, faint purple-and-green smudges like nebulas. I leaned forward and angled the camera. “You can see above it, and below it, and whoa—” A wave of dizziness washed over me. “It feels like you could fall right through this thing. Like, fall forever.” I stepped back from it, chills running through me.
“Okay, more in a sec.” I put away the camera and turned to the Robot. “What do you think it is?”
He just gazed at it, his lights now flowing out from the center in a way I hadn’t seen before. Maybe it was as mysterious to him as it was to me.
I reached out and ran my finger over the metal of the doorframe. I thought it would be cold to the touch—the air was definitely cool in here—but it was warm. Not hot, just warm. I leaned a little to the left to do this, and I saw out of the corner of my eye that the view through the doorway had flattened a little, and that there was some kind of surface there. I carefully touched it with my fingers. The surface rippled like water.
And then it started to change.
“Whoa,” I whispered.
The stars blurred, almost like they were stretching. Everything swirled and moved, faster and faster, like we were traveling through space. Lines began to appear, crisscrosses and arcs like those on a holographic map, and blocks of symbols like the ones by the tunnel flashed. A galaxy blurred by, now another, and then we were speeding toward what looked like the Milky Way, and then into it, past stars of all different sizes and colors. The map lines were spreading apart and then zooming in and then spreading again, like the scale kept changing, and the stars got more distant, farther apart, and then there was only one star… and then planets… and then:
Everything stopped. The view through the doorway froze.
“What?” My mouth dropped open. I stared, blinking, trying to understand what I was seeing.
A desk, a loft bed, a window with hazy amber sky outside. Posters on the walls, piles of clothes on the floor, a mess of gadgets and memory cards scattered across the desk. It was the one spot in the universe that I knew better than absolutely anywhere else.
“That’s my room,” I said. I looked at the Robot. He still had that spiral pattern in his lights. “Where I used to live,” I added. “The planet Earth. That’s where I slept, where I did my homework and made videos for my live channel.…”
My throat got tight and my eyes welled up. Most of the time, I tried not to think about our old home. I remembered standing in my doorway the last time I’d ever been there, Mom hugging me, then watching out the shuttle’s back window for one last glimpse as it pulled away. But it had been so long since then. And, besides, by the time that final day had come, my room had been all packed up—just bare walls and bare furniture.
But this: This was exactly how it had really looked when I’d lived in it. And the sight was almost too much to handle. Especially after all that had happened since we left.
“Sorry,” I said, wiping my eyes. “It’s just… How is this possible? I mean, okay, this doorway mu
st have read my mind somehow, right? Maybe when I touched it? But I wasn’t thinking about my room. So why is it showing this?”
Suddenly, the door to my room, the one in my house on Earth, burst open, and I came running in. The old me, from back then. “That’s me!” I gasped, but then I panicked.… Would I hear me?
But that me didn’t seem to hear this me at all, or notice a space doorway in his room. “Be right out!” he—I mean, I—shouted. He held up my old video recorder. “Did you guys hear that? This is amazing. My dad is going to be home in less than an hour! Let’s see what Captain Quasar thinks about that!” He turned the camera toward my desk and aimed it at an action figure that was standing next to the lamp: a man in an old-time silver space suit. The other me moved his fingers on the screen, zooming in and out on the figure’s face.
“I’m talking to an old toy I had,” I admitted to the Robot. “I’d had him since I was little. Dad gave him to me and I guess he was, like, a collectible, but I used to include him in my videos for comedy. Like, I’d ask him a question or say that we were going to ask his opinion, and then zoom in, and the joke was that he never responded but just always had the same face—I mean, duh, because he was plastic—but it was just a thing my viewers thought was funny.” I turned to the Robot. “It was sort of like talking to you. Not that you’re here for comedy… Well, you know what I mean. I wanted to bring him with me, but I lost him while I was packing.” I felt my throat getting tight again.
But at the same time, watching this other me walk over to my old desk and rummage through the stuff there, it fully dawned on me: “This is my past,” I said, “isn’t it? This doorway is showing me a memory.” The Robot looked at me. “Except that’s not quite right, because if it was a memory, we’d be seeing it the way I saw it. Like, through my eyes…”
“I’m coming!” the past version of me called over his shoulder.
“I remember this,” I said to the Robot. “This was, like, a month before we left for the Resolute, and Dad was finally coming home from his last deployment. He was gone a lot—well, really almost all the time—I don’t think I’d seen him in over a year.” I pointed at the doorway. “But this was the day he finally came back, and after that he was actually around. I mean, we were super busy getting ready to go, but we felt like a real family for the first time.”
I remembered thinking, back then, that of all the things that sounded cool about the new life we were headed for on Alpha Centauri, the fact that I was finally going to have a dad around, for real, might have been the best part. I didn’t totally want to leave home, but if we hadn’t gone, I don’t know if we ever would have gotten him back.
I laughed to myself. “He ended up being a couple of hours late because his flight was delayed. We sat around waiting and waiting, saving dinner for him. And then once he finally got there, it was actually kind of awkward, I mean, after the first hugs. We hadn’t sat around the table as a family in so long, and Mom and Dad had some little disagreements. Things weren’t quite normal yet, but we still laughed a lot and filled Dad in on lots of stories and… Man, it was, like, the best night.”
The past version of me was still rummaging around on my old desk. I’m getting another memory card, I remembered, and the past me did just that and then ran out, his feet skidding on the floor because I’d only been wearing socks. Man, when was the last time I hadn’t had to wear boots? Even just hanging out on the Jupiter, Mom insisted we always keep them on just in case.
Now my room was quiet again.
“It’s almost, like, what if this is really…” I reached toward the doorway again. As my fingertips touched that surface, I felt a cool sensation, only this time, I kept pushing gently, and my hand started to slide through it, and then my fingers were on the other side. They were a slightly different color, too, like they would have been in that amber afternoon light, like my fingers really were back on Earth.
“Is this thing an actual doorway to my old room?” I wiggled my fingers. “Like a portal through space-time, maybe an Einstein-Rosen bridge, you know, a wormhole, which should be impossible with any human technology, but still… Do you think I could go there?”
My old room. That afternoon…
I was stepping closer without even thinking about it, my hand sinking up to the wrist, my whole hand in the past, in my old room, my home—
The Robot gripped my shoulder firmly, stopping me.
“Danger.” He pulled gently, like he was trying to say, Don’t go.
I almost shook free and went anyway. To be there again…
But I pulled my hand back. “You’re right,” I said. Besides, I had no idea what would happen if I really went through. As soon as my fingers lost contact with the surface of the doorway, that view of my old room vanished. The surface rippled and it winked back into a field of stars and galaxies. A pit opened up in my stomach. I nearly reached out and activated it again.
“But we definitely need to investigate this thing further,” I said, starting back toward the tunnel. “Technology like this… What if it’s a way for us to get off this planet? For you, too? We should go back and tell Mom and Dad. They won’t believe it!”
I noticed I wasn’t hearing footsteps and I turned back to see the Robot still gazing at the doorway. “Coming?” I said.
He stared at it for another second before he turned and followed me. Sometimes I really wished he could say what he was thinking.
We hiked back up the tunnel, and when we got to the entrance, we saw that the mothasaurs had left. “Let’s hurry,” I said. “They’ll probably be back as soon as they smell us.”
As we jogged across the clearing and into the bushes, I glanced at those strange glowing battery things. We still had no idea who or what was responsible for those.…
But the whole way back to camp, all I could think about was that view of my room, my old life. And even though it was many months and millions of light-years in my past, suddenly it felt like I’d just left yesterday. I wanted to go back there again so badly, except if I’m being honest, it was more than that: I had to.
CHAPTER
Mom? Dad?”
No answer. Of course, they said they’d be gone awhile, but I checked the bridge and the supply rooms anyway, and continued down the curved hallway, looking into each room.
“Penny? Judy?”
No reply from them, either, but then I found Penny standing in the common room.
“Hey!” I said, but she had her back to me and her earbuds in. She twirled around on her toe, her eyes closed, threw out her arm, and sang.
“Tomorrow you’ll be worlds away, and yet with you, my world has started…” She spun in my direction and opened her eyes. “Ah! Why are you spying on me? Get out of here!”
“I’m not spying! I was just looking for everybody.”
Penny tapped at her communicator and then pulled out her earbuds, her face beet red. “Well, next time maybe knock or something.”
“The doors were open. What were you listening to?”
Penny rolled her eyes. “Just one of the very best novels-and-then-musicals ever written. I suppose I’ll be the only one who remembers it where we’re going.”
“I remember you singing that, around the house,” I said. “It was the musical you did the summer before we left, right? You were really good. I mean, as far as I could tell.”
“Thanks. I was good.” Penny sighed. “For whatever that’s worth now.”
“Have Mom and Dad checked in yet?”
“They called and said they’re going to be delayed. What else is new? Probably not back until nightfall. Maybe even the morning. Why, what’s up?”
I bit my lip. “Um… we kinda found something out at the caves. Something amazing.”
“Like what?”
“It’s hard to explain. I mean, I don’t even know if I can explain it. Maybe Mom could.”
“Sounds spooky. And way more interesting than this list Mom left me to do.” Penny’s eyes lit up. “Wanna sho
w me instead?”
“Show you what?” Judy appeared in the doorway.
“Will found something creepy out at the caves,” said Penny. “He’s going to take me out there.”
“I didn’t say it was creepy.…”
Judy frowned. “What about your list?” she said to Penny. “There’s no way you’re done.”
“Okay, Mom, no, I’m not, but I’m also about to die of boredom. Besides, why does young William get to go off tromping through the woods all day?”
Judy crossed her arms. “Because he finished his list.”
“Because he finished his list,” Penny mocked. “Come on, that’s because Mom gives him the easy jobs, not to mention he has a super-strength helper!”
“Rehabbing circuit boards is not that easy,” I said. “Also, I had to calculate thermal load limits on all six of the heat shield units for this specific atmosphere. You try that.”
“Okay, let’s all settle down,” said Judy. “Will—hey.” Her eyes narrowed and she reached toward my face.
“What?”
“What happened here?” She touched my cheek and I flinched. The skin felt hot there.
“I don’t know, what do you mean?”
“It looks like a burn. There’s even a little blistering, but the sun’s not that strong today.…” Judy moved her finger to my neck, and I winced at a stinging feeling. “Are these radiation burns?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and yet, I remembered my communicator’s warnings. “Maybe?”
“Will.” Judy was using her full Mom tone now. “What exactly did you find out there?”
“Well, I think maybe we found something… alien.”
Lost in Space Page 3