Double Cross

by Sigmund Brouwer

  That’s all I could see inside this huge black box.

  I had my instructions from Rawling. “Just observe and record,” he’d said firmly. “Disengage at the first sign of danger. Let the video lenses do the work. Do not interfere with anything.”

  I had to know, however. Was that rotating globe hanging from something?

  I wondered about waiting until I’d discussed it with Rawling. But what if the black box closed? What if exposure to the Martian atmosphere damaged it?

  I decided to get as close as possible. I rolled forward until I was almost at the black box.

  The gleaming globe hung there, like a silent eye staring back at me. I saw that it rotated from left to right, then up and down, then right to left, then down and up.

  How could it rotate in so many different directions if it was hanging from something like a black wire hidden in the darkness of the box? But if nothing was holding it, how could it hang there against the force of gravity?

  I wasn’t going to touch the globe. No, I had Rawling’s instructions. All I wanted to do was pass the titanium hand of the robot body over the top of the suspended globe. I wanted to see if somehow something was holding it in place.

  So I carefully reached into the box.

  And my entire world exploded.

  CHAPTER 16

  I woke to darkness.

  Not the darkness of the blindfold that covered my own eyes. But the darkness of the Martian night, with the pinpoints of light—the stars—coming through the clear plastic of the platform buggy’s minidome.

  “Hello?” I croaked. “Hello?”

  I heard the sound of footsteps as Rawling and Dad both rushed toward me.

  “Tyce!” Dad said. I heard the worry in his voice.

  “Tyce!” Rawling said a millisecond later.

  The loudness of both their voices struck like a sledgehammer to the side of my head. “Whisper,” I pleaded. “Just whisper.”

  A tiny light appeared in Rawling’s hand. “I want to check your pupils.” He beamed the light in my eye. “Better. Much better.”

  “It was worse?” I asked as I lay on the bed with Dad and Rawling now beside me.

  “Somehow a massive electrical current short-circuited the robot computer drive. For you, it was the equivalent of running your head into a wall.”

  “Felt like it,” I said, groaning.

  “How’s everything else?” Rawling asked. “Fingers, hands, arms. Start moving.”

  I sat up carefully. “Oh no!”

  “What?” Dad asked. “What is it?”

  “My legs! I can’t move them!” I stopped, pausing dramatically. “Forgot. I couldn’t move them before either.”

  “Very funny,” Dad growled. “Very, very funny.”

  I thought it was. I mean, if I couldn’t joke about being in a wheelchair, then it meant I was feeling too sorry for myself. I’d learned to accept it a long time ago.

  Dad helped me into my wheelchair.

  Rawling had moved to the platform buggy controls. He turned up the interior lights. “Let’s talk,” he said, pulling up a chair beside me.

  Dad did the same so that we formed a small semicircle.

  “We have everything on video until you reached inside,” Rawling continued. “Then the short-circuit cut everything out. I thought you’d promised not to touch or interfere with anything you saw.”

  I nodded. I explained that all I’d wanted to do was see if the thing was floating. I hadn’t intended to touch anything at all.

  “Maybe there was some kind of protective force field,” I said.

  “Maybe,” Rawling said. “But we won’t find out until tomorrow. Your dad’s going to go down there in a protective suit and pull the robot body away from the black boxes. Hopefully all he’ll need to do is replace a circuit breaker in the computer hard drive and Bruce will be ready again. But we can’t have you knocking yourself out. No damage was done this time, but next time …” He didn’t need to finish his statement.

  “What do you think that globe was?” I asked. We were still speaking in low voices. Not only was it easier on my headache, but it seemed to fit. After all, we were 200 miles away from the main dome, sheltered from the Martian night only by a thin layer of plastic that held in the warmth and oxygen we needed to live. We were alone and isolated in the dark, only a stone’s throw from a mysterious set of objects that might have been left in the crater by aliens.

  “We’ve reviewed the videos again and again,” Dad said. “We’re afraid to let ourselves believe what we think it is. Rawling doesn’t want to send a satellite feed of the video to the main dome yet, even though Blaine Steven has gone from asking for reports every six hours to calling us every hour. Because if it’s what we think it is …”

  Rawling let out a deep breath. “You see, Tyce, we have no idea how long those black boxes have been buried. No idea how long that globe has been spinning and spinning. For all we know, it’s been there for thousands of years, waiting for someone to discover it.”

  “Have you heard of a perpetual motion machine?” Dad asked me.

  “I’ve heard about people trying to find a way to make one,” I said. “It’s a machine that never loses energy. It’ll stay in motion forever.”

  “Right,” he said. “Inventors on Earth have been trying to come up with one for centuries. Tell me, why is it impossible to make one?”

  “Easy,” I said. “Friction. No matter how efficient a machine is, it will lose energy as it fights friction. The moving parts inside cause friction. Air outside causes friction. Contact with the ground will cause friction.”

  “What if the machine has some force that actually allows it to act against gravity?” Dad asked. “Then what?”

  “Antigravity. That’s as impossible as perpetual motion.”

  Neither replied.

  “No way,” I said. “You think this thing has both? Antigravity and some energy source to allow perpetual motion?”

  “How else can you explain it?” Rawling said, scratching his head in thought. “We’ve run the video in slow motion and reviewed it dozens of times. This thing has no apparent source of power and nothing to hold it in place. Yet we can’t guess how long it’s been spinning against gravity.”

  “Wow,” I said. “It must be alien.”

  “That fact alone would be staggering beyond belief,” Dad said. “But if somehow humankind could understand how to make an antigravity force, it would change our history forever. We could put buildings together that don’t need support. Transporting goods would be cheap. People might travel in the air as easily as walking across a street. Add on top of that a way to keep a machine in motion without losing energy and …”

  Rawling shook his head in awe. “If that’s truly what it is, I don’t think we can comprehend how much this means to the human race.”

  CHAPTER 17

  “I don’t think we can comprehend how much this means to the human race.”

  As I tried to sleep, Rawling’s words echoed again and again in my mind.

  Antigravity? Without gravity holding them down, cars and trains would move with no more than the push of a fingertip. Airplanes would be weightless. It would change all types of transportation so fuel would barely be needed. And what if small antigravity devices were made so people could float?

  Wow! If scientists could figure out what made that globe revolve, they might be able to apply the principle of perpetual motion to large motors. What would Earth be like without fights over energy?

  The whole purpose of the Mars colony was to help the overpopulated world. It was expected to take 100 years or more. In that time, millions of people might die from starvation or war.

  And now?

  Just maybe, machines with antigravity or perpetual motion motors might solve the problems. Lives would be saved. Earth would be saved.

  Thinking about all this, I couldn’t sleep. I twisted and turned in my bed.

  I saw that Dad was sitting near the side of the
platform, staring through the clear plastic at the dark, still Martian landscape.

  “Dad?” I whispered.

  “Yes, Tyce,” he whispered back.

  “You can’t sleep either?”

  He laughed softly. “Just thinking.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  Dad stood. He rolled my wheelchair toward me and stopped it near the bed. He sat in it, facing me. “Thinking about what?”

  “How what we’ve discovered might solve so many problems for humans.”

  Dad was quiet for so long, I wondered if he’d heard me. He sighed. “A lot of people will think that. But they’ll be wrong.”

  “Wrong?” I asked. I propped myself up on my elbows. Above me, the stars were intense against the black sky.

  “It’s sad and funny,” he answered. “For as long as there have been people, we humans have always looked for ways to make the perfect society. And we’ve always failed. People think the next solution will work, but it never does.”

  “The perfect society?”

  “Everybody happy. No wars, no crime. Enough property and resources shared so people aren’t greedy or hateful. For the last four centuries, science has tried to accomplish that. Better medicine. Better computers. Better psychiatry. And on and on and on. But nothing works.”

  “Antigravity,” I protested. “Machines that conserve energy forever. Now people won’t need to fight or steal, right?”

  “Wrong. You know we’ve had talks about this. Humans have souls, Tyce. We’re empty without God to fill us. We keep looking for other solutions because we don’t want to admit the need.” Dad laughed again. “So people on Earth are going to hear about this and think we’ve been saved. By aliens. They’re going to be more willing to believe in aliens than in God. But I’ll tell you what. They can have all the money, power, and resources in the world, and they’ll still feel like they’re missing something. Antigravity machines or perpetual motion machines aren’t the answer.”

  I thought that over. “That’s why you and Mom aren’t afraid, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a matter of perspective. Finding peace with God, looking at life as something beyond satisfying hunger and pleasure.”

  I ran my fingers over Ashley’s silver cross earring, which hung on the chain around my neck.

  “Tyce?”

  I guess I’d been quiet for a few minutes. “Dad?”

  We were still whispering.

  “That make sense to you?”

  I smiled in the darkness. “Yeah, it does.”

  CHAPTER 18

  “Done?” Rawling said into the handheld communication device.

  “Done.” It was my dad’s voice. He was in the crater, in his space suit, with a handheld too. “Your guess was correct, Rawling. All it took was a fuse.”

  A few minutes earlier, Dad had reported finding the robot body frozen in place a few paces back from the mysterious black box, which he’d found closed.

  “Good,” Rawling answered. “Box still closed?”

  “Still closed.” There was a pause. “It’s opening again. All I did was tap it, just like Tyce did yesterday.”

  “Good again. And the antigravity gyroscope globe?”

  “Hang on. The door’s still opening. It’s … it’s … yes. It’s still there.”

  “I’ll send Tyce right down,” Rawling said. He nodded in my direction.

  I was already on the bed, my legs strapped into place. I’d been awake since dawn, waiting for this chance.

  Rawling stepped over to the bed. We went through the regular checklist as he got me ready.

  “The other boxes are opening too,” Dad said into his handheld.

  Now I was on my back, blindfold over my eyes.

  “I can’t believe this,” Dad said. “I just can’t believe this! Get Tyce here as fast as you can!”

  Rawling slipped the headset over my ears.

  Ten seconds later, I began that deep fall into deep black.

  Light entered the robot body’s video lenses.

  I scanned four directions. The boulders were behind me, with one black box open directly in front of them. The gyroscope globe still floated and rotated in its eerie, awesome way. I knew better than to reach inside that black box.

  “Dad?” I said through the robot voice speaker. “Dad?”

  “Over here, Tyce!” His voice was muffled coming out of his space helmet. “Get ready to record all this!”

  Dad was around the corner of the black box open in front of me. In his space suit, he looked like a marshmallow man. He pointed at the inside of the box as I rolled into his sight.

  The edges of the box threw dark, crisp shadows on the rocky soil. But I didn’t spend much time admiring the blue of the sun or the butterscotch of the sky.

  Not with what caught my eye.

  Aliens!

  Human-size aliens! Frozen in position. Two of them.

  They were like giant ants with six arms and a two-sectioned body instead of three. In place of an antlike head, however, each had a smooth, egg-shaped face. Their eyes were black. Two, like a human, but easily five times the size of human eyes, and on the bottom of the face. Black, gaping holes were open wide on their foreheads.

  Neither wore clothing or anything that I recognized as clothing. Each was coated with a layer of thick, clear plastic. The material might not have been plastic, but that’s the only way I could describe it.

  Their arms were tucked against their sides. I wondered if they were alive.

  “Hibernation?” I asked Dad. “Or dead and buried like this?”

  “I don’t know,” Dad said. “All the other boxes are identical. Two per box. Except for the one box you opened yesterday. That holds the antigravity gyroscope globe.”

  I scanned the inside of the box with the robot’s video lenses, trusting all this was showing up on Rawling’s monitor back on the platform buggy.

  I went from box to box, doing the same with each. Dad was right. There were two aliens per box, each about the same size.

  I wondered what had happened. Maybe they’d allowed themselves to be sealed, expecting that someday other aliens would come back and revive them.

  Or maybe they’d been killed and thrown into the boxes, like prisoners of some intergalactic war.

  Or maybe they were old and had died of natural causes, and the clear plastic coating was the alien way of mummifying them.

  Or maybe …

  “Tyce!” Dad shouted in panic.

  I reversed the robot and sped as fast as I could in the direction of his voice.

  I reached Dad quickly and stared at the inside of the box he pointed at. The alien forms were beginning to melt down, as if an invisible fire had taken hold of them.

  Five seconds later, the box itself exploded, knocking me backward and slamming me into a boulder.

  As the robot body wobbled back into balance, a second box exploded. Then a third. And a fourth. And a fifth.

  After that, the ground began to slide into itself, as if it were water in slow motion, going down a drain.

  “Dad!” I yelled. “Dad!”

  CHAPTER 19

  I wheeled in tight circles until I found Dad.

  The blast had thrown him against a boulder. His eyes were closed, and he was slumped and limp. His space helmet was cracked, and blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.

  Since everyone at the dome is required to take first aid, I knew one of the first rules was not to move the injured person. But that only applied if the person wasn’t in further danger where he was.

  In this case, with the ground slipping away, I had to move Dad quickly.

  I knew his space helmet was fine for now. If the crack had gone all the way through, I’d be seeing a hiss of vapor as the moist, oxygen-filled air of his space suit leaked away, along with his life.

  I didn’t know about his back. He could have broken it. Under ideal circumstances, two men would carefully place him on a stretcher and strap him so he was immobile.


  These were not ideal circumstances.

  Whatever booby trap the aliens had left, it was working quickly. It felt like a hole had opened beneath the circle where the black boxes had been. The hole was sucking sand and small rocks downward.

  With the robot’s titanium arms, I lifted Dad as gently as I could.

  I spun a tight circle, grateful that the robot had strength I’d never hope to get in my own body.

  The cable hung over the edge of the crater. Earlier, when Dad had gone into the crater to fix the robot’s computer drive, he’d climbed down alone, using the grippers. Now the robot would have to carry him.

  I raced to the cable, fighting the moving rivers of sand that tried to pull me down into the hole.

  Only then did I realize how much trouble this would be. I couldn’t strap Dad to my back. In the practice runs, Rawling and I had assumed that any passengers would strap themselves into place.

  Dad was unconscious.

  And the sand began to suck at my robot wheels.

  In my mind, I shouted Stop! to disengage myself from the robot controls.

  I woke up in the platform buggy.

  “Rawling,” I said into the darkness and the silence. I was blindfolded and in the headset, so I had to trust he’d listen. “You’ve seen what happened on the monitors. I need to get Dad back up. But I can’t without your help. Back the platform buggy away from the edge of the crater. Now!”

  With time running out for Dad, I was glad Rawling had made me go on so many practice runs. I knew how to slip back into the virtual reality of the robot controls without his coaching.

  Into the darkness, I began to fall. …

  Light entered the robot’s video lenses.

  Straight ahead were the red rock walls of the crater. The cable dangled in front. And in the robot’s arms was my dad’s quiet body.

  I grabbed the cable with a gripper clamp in the robot’s right hand and held Dad firmly in the left arm. I braced myself, hoping Rawling understood what I needed.