Knimble paused and scanned his classroom. Realising he had confused everyone, he coughed and changed tack.
“Now I want to teach you a most invaluable lesson.”
The teacher skipped back to his desk, picked up a photograph and circulated it among the desks. The first student to see it turned a very nasty shade of green. Snod pointed at her and guffawed. Then the photo appeared under his nose. He bolted from the room, hand on mouth.
Zeke braced himself as his turn approached. Knimble flashed the picture before him. It showed a man leaning against a wall. Zeke could only see the man’s left half. He peered closer.
“Oh…!”
The unfortunate man’s right side had completely merged with the wall. Half a mouth gaped in a frozen scream. The veins in his face had all popped, colouring his skin avocado purple. Not surprisingly, he was quite dead.
“This, ladies and gentlemen, is what happens when translocation goes wrong. In your first year you will do nothing more than theory. In the second, meditation techniques. The third you will make tests and experiments. It’s not until Year Four we allow you to actually try it. Is that clear?”
Nobody answered. Zeke glanced round at a mass of wide-eyed, pale faces.
“Is that clear?” Knimble demanded again.
“Crystal,” Zeke said, and gulped down an urge to vomit.
Chapter Eleven
Psychokinesis 101
The teacher for Psychokinesis 101 was a wobbly old man called Mariner Flounder. The newbies joked the number stood for his age. Damp eyes stared from a forest of wrinkles. His long curls of hair were the colour of dirty snow. Yet Flounder turned out to be Zeke’s first major threat.
It happened on the tenth day after their arrival. Flounder was scribbling equations on the plasma-board. The symbols had something to do with brainwaves and atomic mass. The rest was beyond Zeke’s understanding. He sat at the back doodling on his magnopad.
Zeke had started to enjoy his deception. Many of his classmates considered themselves special. After all they were humanity’s saviours, weren’t they? Zeke took satisfaction in fooling them. His satisfaction had settled into complacency, a very dangerous state.
It all changed when Flounder tapped the floor with his stick.
“Time for a demonstration,” he announced.
The entire class sat up straight. The instructor began setting up an experiment at the lab bench.
“It’s a simple enough stunt,” Flounder continued. “I have here a kettle full of H2O, which as we all know means…”
He waited for someone to respond.
“Two atoms of Hydrogen for every one of Oxygen, i.e. common or garden water.”
It was Scuff, with one eye on the lesson and the other on a manga book under his desk. Trixie Cutter ran a profitable sideline in pirated comics.
“Exactly, young Bunkum”
“Barnum.”
“Quite. So heat the water and the kettle will boil.”
He placed it on a fireproof stand.
“We can heat the water by switching the kettle on. But who needs a heat source? As psychokineticists we are able to warm up those molecules mentally. Let me show you.”
A hush fell across the classroom as Flounder stared intensely at the kettle. The ticking of the clock seemed louder with every second. All eyes focused on the spout, waiting for a telltale wisp of steam. None came. Flounder sank back into his chair, exhausted.
“Great Orion’s Belt, these things get harder as the years slip by,” he said, dabbing his sweaty forehead with a hanky.
A chorus of boos rippled across the room. Flounder looked at his class with a helpless expression. “Order, order I say!” But the boos just grew louder. Zeke and Pin-mei exchanged looks.
“Mr Flounder just needs a little time,” she whispered.
Zeke nodded. He felt sorry for the old man.
Snod, who was sitting in the next row, turned round.
“That old codger needs retiring.”
Snod had developed a cheek the size of Jupiter since joining Trixie’s gang.
“No need to be so harsh,” Zeke replied.
“Why don’t you help him then? You can kiss his boots while you’re at it.”
“He doesn’t need my help,” Zeke said quickly, wishing he’d kept quiet.
“Oi, Sir,” Snod called out. “Blue boy’s volunteering to give you a hand.”
“NO!” Zeke hissed at Snod, but it was too late.
“What a capital idea. Come here boy. You with the funny coloured hair.”
Flounder waved Zeke to the front. Zeke glanced at Scuff and Pin-mei’s horrified expressions. Scuff nodded at him to go. He had no choice.
“What was your name again, boy?”
“Hailey, Sir, Zeke Hailey.”
“Right, young man. You’re going to heat that water.”
“But, Sir! It’s forbidden for newbies to use psychic power.”
“Tish, tish Bailey. Not with an instructor’s supervision.”
Zeke scanned through the sea of faces for his friends. Now was the time to put their plan to the test. Could Scuff and Pin-mei cover for him?
“I want you to look at the kettle. Concentrate on the water inside. Imagine the molecules whizzing about.”
Zeke pretended to do as he was told. He gazed at the kettle and tensed his brow. Pin-mei’s psychokinetic skills were good. Perhaps she could boil the water from the back of the class. He could then claim the credit.
“Focus on those molecules, young Bailey. Take deep, measured breaths. See the molecules. Be the molecules.”
Zeke had to make it look good. He closed his eyes and took long gulps of air. He conjured up the image in his mind. Billions of water molecules zinging madly around. At that moment his scalp tingled. His blood pumped faster. He really could see those molecules and they really were getting hotter and hotter.
BOOOOOM!
The screech of ripping plastic blasted his eardrums. A hot tornado threw him to the floor. His eyes opened to a catastrophe of smoke, steam and shell-shocked students.
~~~
Principal Lutz kept office on top of the Chasm’s highest minaret. Outside the Sun was setting on Mariners Valley. Towering piles of rock were falling into shadow. Their weird, wind bitten shapes reminded Zeke of the monsters in his dreams. He shivered.
Lutz’s secretary, Marjorie Barnside, was tapping furiously at her keyboard. She was a stout dour woman with a strong Belfast accent.
“One cold fusion kettle, belonging to the School, destroyed. Five students cut by flying shards of plastic. Two students bruised by falls. One teacher scalded by boiling water.” She fixed Zeke with an incriminating glare. “What a shocking waste of school property! Do you have any idea how much those kettles cost?”
Zeke and Pin-mei wriggled under her beady stare. Barnside lowered her head and began typing again.
“Which one of you was it?” Zeke whispered to his friend. Pin-mei had accompanied him to the office after the accident had left him a little shaky.
“Excuse me?”
“Who blew up the kettle? It was Scuff, wasn’t it? He has to be the clumsiest psychic in the known universe.”
“It wasn’t me, Zeke. My thoughts can’t reach that far. Not yet.”
“I knew it. I’m going to barbecue that overweight yank.”
“But it wasn’t Scuff either. He swore on his father’s millions.”
Before Zeke could ask any further questions Lutz’s door opened. Three figures emerged and Zeke’s jaw dropped. The first was Principal Lutz, the second was Trixie Cutter and the third was Professor Magma. Lutz and Magma warmly shook hands.
“It’s been such a pleasure to meet you Professor. Enchanté!”
“Oh, call me Tiberius. And I have greatly valued our meeting. Can I say we have an agreement?”
“Totally. I look forward to a long and profitable association. Now young Miss Cutter will escort you back to your vehicle.”
Trixie gave Mag
ma a sly wink.
“Right this way, Sir.” She pointed to the elevator.
A high-pitched wail pierced the room. Pin-mei had fallen to the floor and was writhing wildly.
“Cushion!” Lutz shouted at Barnside. Lutz lifted off the ground and flew over the chairs cluttering the office. The secretary grabbed a cushion off her seat and threw it into the air. The Principal caught the cushion and landed beside Pin-mei, slipping it under the girl’s head.
Zeke’s thoughts raced. His best pal was lying on the ground in convulsions. He wanted to do something, but what?
Lutz in contrast, seemed calm and in control. She held onto the girl’s arms to prevent any self-injury. Pin-mei continued to struggle, frothing at the mouth. Her eyes lit up like burning magnesium.
“Is it a psychic fit?” Magma asked, arching his eyebrows in disgust.
“Of course, the greater the psychic the greater the fit. This girl must be phenomenally talented,” Lutz explained. Magma’s eyes twinkled with a greedy gleam.
Lutz wrestled to contain the unconscious girl. Then Pin-mei spoke, but the voice was deep and ghostly.
“It’s here! The Spiral’s here!”
Zeke’s entire body ran cold when he heard those words. His nightmares had spoken of a spiral. But when he glimpsed Professor Magma his blood turned even colder. The shock on the man’s face left him in no doubt. Magma recognised that name too.
Chapter Twelve
Scuff’s Room
“It’s an ill wind,” Scuff remarked sagely, crouching over his zombies. He and Zeke were on the floor of his room, separated by a large cube of light. They were in the middle of Scuff’s favourite Laserlight game, Last Zombie Standing. Little undead holograms stalked a three-dimensional town in search of fresh meat. The idea was to eat as many of the opponent’s players as possible. Zeke’s Coven of Dripping Blood had Scuff’s Oozing Ghouls on the run.
“An ill wind?” Zeke asked. He wiggled his controller and his zombie-shopkeeper sank its fangs into Scuff’s zombie-cop. While Scuff struggled to bring up reinforcements Zeke surveyed his pal’s room.
Ten days on Mars and it was already a disaster area. Candy wrappers, toxic underwear, and all manner of debris littered the floor. Textbooks and comics covered the bed. A half-fixed computer with its innards spilling out dominated the desk. Zeke was shocked that a rich kid could be such a slob.
“No, I don’t mean my room,” Scuff snapped. Zeke wondered again if Scuff was reading his thoughts.
“Pin-mei, taking poorly. Got you off the hook didn’t it, bro.”
In all the confusion Lutz had dismissed Zeke with a wave of her hand.
“Send the bill to his mother,” she instructed Barnside. The Principal then lifted the Chinese girl into her arms and hurried off to the Medical Facility.
“I hope she’s okay,” Zeke said.
“Some kids get it that way. Fits show exceptional power. You’re lucky really, being normal.”
“Guess I am,” Zeke replied. Somehow he didn’t feel particularly fortunate.
“That is if you are normal,” Scuff added with a funny look.
“What do you mean?”
“Well somebody blew up that classroom, Zeke. And it wasn’t me and it wasn’t Pin-mei.” Scuff pulled on his controller. His zombie-schoolgirl landed a bite on one of Zeke’s humans, the pizza-boy. The youth let out an agonising yell and zombified.
“In my powers!” Scuff cackled with his best evil laugh.
The new recruit lumbered off to swell Scuff’s horde of cannibals.
“Then there’s another mystery. Remember the sycamore and its jammed wings?”
“Remember? My trousers are still in the soak. So?”
“I didn’t do it.”
“What!”
“I thought I did it, at the time. Sheesh, I wanted to be a hero. But I know in my heart it wasn’t me who opened those wings.”
Too many emotions bubbled up inside Zeke.
“Rubbish! Total rubbish. Don’t mess with me, Scuff,” he barked.
“Okey-dokey, bro. Don’t get your panties in a twist.” Silence fell between them as the holograms battled for superiority.
Zeke focused on steering his putrid pack through the make-believe streets. At length he spoke again. “There’s more of that ill wind.”
“Oh? You haven’t—?”
“I have not! I mean something else happened at Lutz’s office.”
“What’s that, bro?”
“I managed to see through the open door into her study.”
“And?”
“Stuffed full of computers. Some real oldies too. The kind that use silicon chips. It must be where they—”
“Keep the records? Well done, Sherlock!”
“Do you think you could hack into them?”
Scuff sighed. “Already tried, bro.”
“Hacker proof?”
Scuff raised one eyebrow in disgust. “Zeke! You’re looking at the Pan-American Hacking Olympics Champion, 2256, 2257 and 2258. But these computers must be standalone, outside the network. I’ve been trying for days to infiltrate the Chasm’s server, just for you, bro.”
“Gosh, thanks. No success?”
“Totally bummed. Not a hint about past students.”
“So I’ll just have to sneak in when nobody’s there.”
“With the Chasm’s security? Are you totally nuts?”
“What else can I do?”
Scuff twisted his controls. The Oozing Ghouls sprang a surprise attack, rising from the sewers. Zeke’s players were caught unawares and quickly devoured.
“That’s the fifteenth time you’ve beaten me.”
“You gotta strategise, bro.”
Scuff smirked and aimed his remote at his computer station. The glowing cube between them flickered. The blood-splattered streets were replaced with an image of the School. Scuff clicked and zoomed in on the craggy finger of Lutz’s minaret. Surveillance and alarms were highlighted in yellow. Both boys studied the system without speaking. Scuff broke the hush.
“The elevator’s no good. Wall-to-wall cameras. So the staircase is the only way. But more cameras are installed in the ceiling every twelve feet. Basically as one disappears out of sight another pops up in front of you.”
He crawled over to the keyboard and punched up more data.
“That’s what I thought. They rotate for a three hundred and sixty degree view. Each rotation lasts ten seconds. You’d have to sprint up the stairs at just the right moment. So each camera is looking away from you.”
“As the camera pans round the inside of the staircase I run up the outside? But Scuff, you’d have to be superhuman fast. Can’t you just use your psychokinesis to break them?”
Scuff rolled his eyes. “So everyone knows we’ve broken in? We might as well leave a calling card.”
“Couldn’t you translocate in?”
“What! Like flying a jet without a single lesson? You want me with a vase coming out my head?”
“Then its useless.”
Scuff rubbed his chin. “Now the computerised doors are online. I could hack the office door to open in advance. All we have to do is find a way of bounding upstairs faster than humanly possible.”
The two friends stared at each other. Scuff was grinning wickedly.
“You’ve got a strategy, haven’t you?” Zeke said, and started grinning himself.
~~~
Zeke hesitated at Pin-mei’s door. The ‘do not disturb’ sign was flashing. He pressed the buzzer and smiled into the door-cam.
“Hi, are you there, Pin?”
After a lengthy pause her voice crackled over the intercom. “Yes.” She sounded frail.
“I went to the Medical Facility, but Dr. Chandrasar said you were discharged, fully recovered.”
“Yes, but on bed rest for a few hours. Sorry, Zeke, I’m not up to visitors.”
“No probs.”
Another long silence passed.
“Is there anything I
can do for you?”
“No, I just need to sleep. Really.”
“OK, well, call me if you need me.”
Zeke knew he should go but curiosity was burning him up.
“Pin, what did you see? In your premonition?”
“Zeke, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“But what you said, ‘the Spiral is here’, what did you mean?”
“It wasn’t a premonition. Just a bad dream, about a monster.”
“What monster?”
“There was this spiral in the sky, like a black hole. It was sucking people in.”
“That was the monster?”
“It came down and sucked up the whole school. It had these terrible eyes, hundreds of bleeding eyes…”
“Pin? Pin-mei?”
“Zeke, I’m really sleepy. See you tomorrow?”
“Okay. I’ll pop round after lunch.”
“Great. See you. Bye.”
The intercom clicked off.
Zeke started to walk away, down the smooth stony passage. He stopped.
That little voice was nagging him from the back of his mind. The same voice he had heard over and over since leaving Earth. Zeke told himself he was being silly and carried on. But the voice kept whispering.
She’s in terrible danger!
Chapter Thirteen
Ophir Chasma School Main Corridor Boys’ Toilets
“Cockroach pills!”
Zeke stared at Scuff’s open hand. Half a dozen glossy brown capsules nestled in his palm.
“Shh!” his friend hissed.
They were in the boys’ loo, across from the stairway to Lutz’s office. Scuff peered through the swing door. It was Sunday morning. Other than a couple of cleanomacs the wing was deserted. The robots slowly trundled along the passage, sweeping up litter with their spinning brush feet.
“The cockroach brain functions seventeen times faster than a human’s.”
“Oh?” Zeke began. “So that’s why they outrun me whenever I try to stomp one?”
“These pills are concentrated cockroach brain chemicals.”
The Infinity Trap Page 6