Carl nodded solemnly.
“It goes without saying,” said Ben Resnick, his brown eyes now locked onto Carl’s in a cool, unblinking gaze, “that you’re not just deciding what to do about two kids, but what to do about me and Amanda as well.”
Carl nodded unhappily. “Yes. I do realize that. This is truly a horrible situation with no easy answers. This does not involve criminals, spies from other nations, saboteurs, or terrorists. That would be easy. No, this involves innocent kids who are the children of two of our key scientists. Not to mention that Ben here just made an incalculable contribution to this project. Yet the importance of keeping this project absolutely secret could not be greater.”
“We won’t tell anyone,” pleaded Regan. “We swear.”
Ryan vigorously nodded his agreement beside her.
Carl pursed his lips but said nothing. He considered the two young intruders in silence for an agonizingly long time, his mind obviously running through a number of possibilities. No one in the room spoke or even seemed to breathe. “Although I believe it is a great risk,” he said at last, “it may very well be that trusting you to keep this absolutely secret is the best option we have.”
“But kids are terrible at keeping secrets—even if their intentions are good,” said a plump woman with glasses who, like most of the scientists in the room, had remained silent until this point.
The same is true of most adults, thought Carl, but aloud he said, “We don’t have a choice. Not a real one, anyway.”
The head of security sighed and turned toward the kids with a very serious, and very troubled, expression. “Listen very closely,” he said. “I need for you to understand just what is at stake here. This city could easily change the world’s balance of power. Even though we don’t intend to apply what we learn here to create weapons—the world has plenty of these already—there are many governments that would never believe us. If they knew this city was in our hands they would panic. It’s not a stretch to say that this panic could ultimately lead to World-War Three.”
Ryan and Regan gulped.
“Are you with me so far?” said Carl.
They both nodded. Every word was etched in their minds.
“This is one possible nightmarish consequence of this secret getting out. But there are many others. What if terrorist groups got wind of this? What would they be willing to do to try to get this city under their control? The technology here could make them unstoppable.” He paused. “I could go on for hours, but I trust you get the point.”
“Absolutely,” croaked Ryan while Regan nodded beside him.
“Good. The stakes could not be higher. Because of this we have considerable power to protect this secret. If you keep this a secret, everything will be just fine. But if we ever learn you discussed this project, or joked about it, or talked in your sleep at a campout about it, we’ll be all out of pleasant options.”
He turned toward Ben and Amanda Resnick and gave an apologetic look. “And your parents will be affected as well. What options am I talking about? Imprisonment. Planting evidence that your entire family has a history of mental illness leading you all to rant about aliens and spies and ray-guns. Probably both. And if you fail to keep this secret, don’t think for a moment that we won’t find out. We will.”
Carl leaned in as he finished, looming over his far smaller listeners to add even more menace to his words. “Now—have I made myself perfectly clear?”
“Perfectly,” they both whispered at the same time.
“Amanda? Ben?”
“Understood,” said Mr. Resnick. “Given the circumstances, this is a very fair solution. I know my kids. They will keep this a secret.”
“Kids,” said Dr. Harris gently. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am that this has happened and how sorry I am that the seriousness of this situation had to be spelled out in this way. If we could undo things so you would never discover this city we would. We have truly placed a great and terrible responsibility on your young shoulders.” He nodded solemnly at them. “But given the initiative, guts, and cleverness you displayed finding your way here, I’m confident that you’re up to it.”
“We won’t let you down, Dr. Harris,” Ryan assured him. He took a deep breath and mustered his courage. “Now that this is settled …” he began. “Now that this is settled … can we… well, can we help you explore this city?”
Dr. Harris shook his head as if he had heard wrong. “What?” The entire group looked just as shocked. “Are you kidding?”
“Ah … no,” said Ryan timidly. Then, far more firmly added, “Why not? It’s a huge city and you have a very small team. We would stay out of your way and I know that we could help.”
“Ryan’s right,” added Regan. “We could help. You could think of us as assistants. We could do whatever you told us to do.”
“We promise not to cause any trouble,” insisted Ryan.
“I’m afraid it’s totally out of the question,” said Dr. Harris. “You heard your mother. This city is likely to be the most dangerous place on Earth.”
“I don’t know, Harry,” said a tall, bald-headed scientist. “Maybe the kids have a point. We could use all the help we can get. And we’re being extremely careful to limit the danger. I know it would be unusual, but I think adding a couple of bright kids to the team could prove very valuable. I think they could turn out to make unexpected contributions. Kids aren’t afraid to think of ideas that adults would consider crazy. We need that here.”
“You do have to admit that any kids able to get past our security the way they did might just come up with a few clever ideas, at that,” added another of the scientists.
“I’ve already acknowledged that these kids are very impressive,” said Dr. Harris. He paused for several long seconds in thought, but finally a frown crept over his face and he shook his head. “But the answer is still no. I believe that—”
“Mom!” shouted Ryan in horror. “Look out!”
A bolt holding a heavy portable generator to the pole above Mrs. Resnick had worked its way lose. Ryan had caught it out of the corner of his eye as it popped free and the generator began its fall—straight down toward his mother’s head.
Ryan watched the generator fall in horror, knowing that his warning had been too late to save his mom.
Chapter 13
Bug Attack!
Just as Mrs. Resnick was beginning to react to her son’s warning the generator completed its fall, smashing into the top of her head with a sickening thud. “No!” screamed Ryan frantically.
His mom sprawled to the floor, unconscious. Blood was pouring from her head.
The scientists reacted immediately, surrounding her.
Tears came to Mr. Resnick’s eyes at the sight of his badly injured wife. He tore his shirt from his body and wrapped it around her head like a turban to help staunch the flow of blood, and then gently cradled her head in his arms. Ryan knelt beside him, horrified, while Regan looked on in total shock.
Dr. Harris gave her a quick examination. He didn’t even need to say anything; the look on his face was enough. She was in trouble.
“Is she going to make it?” whispered Ben Resnick.
“It doesn’t look good,” said Dr. Harris grimly. “But if we can get her to a hospital in time she has a small chance.”
“Let’s move then,” said their father, fighting to hold himself together. “Kids, I need you to run as fast as you can back to the elevator. Take it to the top and then send it back down so it’ll be waiting for us. Call 9-1-1 and have an ambulance meet us at the main building.” He didn’t wait for a response. “Go!” he commanded.
The Resnick siblings dashed off, leaving the group by the stairs. But just as they passed into the next room on the way to the outside they were stopped in their tracks by a blood-curdling scream.
They turned back toward the room and were greeted by a sight straight out of a horror movie. An infestation of insects was pouring out of the floor, completely surroundi
ng the group of scientists and their mom. They were pitch black and were the size of very large ants. They had six perfectly identical body segments, and each segment had a pair of both legs and pincers that seemed to be in constant motion. There must have been millions of them; a living sea of relentless alien insects so dense that they were stacked on top of each other, several inches deep. Large chunks of rock had appeared as well, maybe from under the floor, and as the insects swarmed over them on their way to the group of scientists the rocks completely dissolved, like ice-cubes in a pot of boiling water.
The scientists were frantically searching for a way around the swarm, but there wasn’t one. They were completely encircled and were even cut off from the staircase.
Both kids froze in horror as they watched. Their father spotted them out of the corner of his eye. “Go!” he shouted from the middle of the sea of hungry insects. “Get out of here!”
“We won’t just leave you!” cried Regan.
“This is not a discussion!” he shouted. “You can’t help us. You have to save yourselves. Go!”
Both kids still hesitated.
“Go!” screamed their father, louder than he had ever screamed before, and with unmistakable panic in his voice. Ryan saw the pleading look in his eye and realized he was far more afraid for them than he was for himself— afraid they wouldn’t run to safety as he was desperate to have them do. This alone sparked Ryan into action.
“We’ll bring help,” he shouted as he sprinted from the room, yanking on his sister’s shirt so she would follow. He knew the odds were one in a million that they could bring help back in time, but they had to try.
They were halfway to the building’s exit when, in his haste, Ryan smashed into a strange, shimmering podium that promptly retracted into the ground and disappeared. Wincing in pain, he put on a burst of speed and caught up with his sister who was now running toward three oval exits. He could have sworn there had only been a single doorway when they had entered. He followed his sister through the center doorway and was relieved to find that they had chosen correctly and it led to the outside.
Ryan looked for the walkway that would help speed them back to the cavern, and possible help, hoping it would still accelerate their pace even when they were running. He was about to sprint onto it when Regan grabbed his arm from behind. “Ryan, wait!”
“What?” he said impatiently, unable to believe his sister was trying to slow him down.
“Remember the blowtorches we saw just outside the room Mom and Dad were in?” she said excitedly. “They were outside the circle of bugs. So we can get them! We can use them as weapons on the swarm! I don’t care how alien they are, those bugs are bound to be afraid of fire. Come on!”
Ryan’s eyes widened. “Great idea!” he said.
They raced back into the building with a renewed sense of hope and purpose. Maybe they could save their parents.
They each gathered a blowtorch and shot through the entrance to the staircase room, gasping for breath, their eyes darting across the floor, searching for the best place to begin waging war on the eruption of relentless alien attackers. But what they saw was totally unexpected and took their breath away.
The alien creatures were gone. All of them. And everything else in the room was gone as well.
They looked on in horror, knowing they had been too late. The room was completely empty. Completely.
The insects must have devoured everything in their path.
Not a single trace of their parents or any of the other scientists remained.
Chapter 14
Vanishing Act
Ryan raced up the wispy stairs in desperation. He returned moments later and shook his head. No one was on the second floor either.
How could this be happening, he thought in despair.
A tear rolled gently down Regan’s cheek. “Could they have escaped out another exit?”
Ryan shook his head sadly. “Those insect things picked the room clean,” he whispered woodenly. “Look at it. There’s no trace that anyone was ever here. No people, no equipment—nothing. The pole that was leaning against the stairs is gone. There’s not even any blood stains where Mom was hit.”
“But how could they eat through solid steel, Ryan? How?”
“I don’t know,” said her brother sullenly. “But you saw how quickly they devoured solid rock. I guess steel and . . .” he was about to say bone but thought better of it. “I guess steel is no different.”
“But we were only gone about two minutes,” persisted Regan. “They couldn’t be that fast. Are you saying they devoured the equipment and all those people and disappeared again in less than two minutes? I don’t believe it. Mom and Dad are still alive,” she insisted. “I know they are. They have to be.” And with that she broke into tears.
Ryan wiped away several large tears that had escaped from the corners of his own eyes and put an arm around his sister. He tried to find words to comfort her, but there were none to find.
After a few minutes Regan managed to get her emotions back under control. Her parents were alive, she told herself, and she was going to figure out where they were.
She forced herself to concentrate on the room once more. It was uncanny how quiet it now was and even more uncanny how selective the swarm had been. None of the many alien objects in the room had been touched, nor had the stairs, the floor, or the doorways. Nothing. The insects had devoured every last microscopic shred of everything from Earth, people or otherwise, and hadn’t touched a single atom of anything that was already here. She pointed this observation out to Ryan. “How did they know?” she asked him. “Why would they prefer Earth stuff?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Probably because the alien building material is too tough for them. You saw how tough just those thin strands are.”
“But they were able to eat through the floor,” Regan pointed out. “Yet there’s no trace of any damage to it. Where did they come from? Where did those rock chunks come from? What kind of … creatures … like to eat metal, plastic, and people? And how did they know that Earth stuff wasn’t poisonous?”
“You’re right. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Do you think the swarm will return?” said Regan.
Ryan shuddered. “Let’s not wait around to find out.”
They retraced their path back to where they had first entered the perilous city in numbed silence. This time, instead of marveling at the fantastic architecture around them they kept their eyes on the ground, searching for the return of the piranha-like insects and trying not to think about the fate of their parents.
Finally, after a period of time that seemed far longer than it really was, they arrived at the edge of the city, to the place at which they had entered. The opaque wall of energy ran in a smooth curve in front of them, distorting their vision. They looked for the swirling colors that would mark the hole in the energy shield that their father had torn open.
It wasn’t there! The entrance was gone! How could that be?
They were trapped!
Trapped in a city that had already shown how deadly it could be.
And who knew how long it would be before the swarm of alien insects became hungry again?
Chapter 15
Trapped!
They looked around frantically. There must be some mistake.
“Are we sure this is the right place?” said Regan.
“Positive.”
Yet where was the opening?
“We’re never going to leave here, are we?” whispered Regan.
“Don’t be silly. Of course we will,” said Ryan, trying hard for his sister’s sake to sound far more confident than he felt.
“Maybe the entrance moved,” offered Regan. “Carl said the city seemed like a living thing sometimes. We didn’t find out what he meant. Maybe parts of the city can move around on their own.”
Ryan shook his head. “We’ve stayed on the walkway all the way back so we know we didn’t get lost. This is where
we entered. The cavern is a few inches from us and we know it didn’t move. If the original entrance moved somehow, the lasers and other machinery in the cavern would have torn another hole here.”
They stood in silence for several minutes straining to see an opening in the force-field wall that wasn’t there. Ryan felt totally helpless and he had no idea what to do. If only his parents were there. They always knew what to do.
So what would they do in this situation?
The answer came to him almost at once. If they were confronted by this puzzle they would try to solve it using a process called the scientific method. His dad had gone over the scientific method with him in great detail just a few months before. First, you observed things. They had done that. They had observed a swarm of deadly insects devour everything human and nothing alien. They had observed that the entrance to the city was gone. Then you formed a hypothesis—some kind of idea that could explain everything you had observed. An idea that would allow you to make predictions, and to design experiments to test these predictions. If the results of your experiments failed to support your predictions, you would have to modify your hypothesis or even throw it away completely. Your goal would be to find a hypothesis that would account for all of your observations and allow you to successfully predict the outcome of additional experiments.
To make sure Ryan understood his explanation, his father had borrowed a feather from an old pillow and marched him into the backyard. Mr. Resnick was soon holding his arms out in front of him over the lawn, at exactly the same height, with the feather in one hand and a large rock in the other. Then he let go of both at the same time. The rock quickly slammed into the grass with a thud while the feather lazily made its way down to earth.
“What did you observe?” asked Mr. Resnick.
“The rock fell faster,” said Ryan immediately.
Trapped (The Prometheus Project Book 1) Page 5