“Take it outside,” Director Steven said, his eyes wide as he stared at it in my hand.
“Outside? Why?”
After I’d seen the little box on the monitor and remembered the one on the axle, Dad and Rawling had gone out of the platform buggy to remove the box. They’d taken the cover off but left the explosives intact, with the antennae in place. We’d driven safely away, leaving the explosives near the base of a hill. It hadn’t surprised us when it blew only 15 minutes later, taking much of the hillside with it, leaving people at the dome with the mistaken impression that we’d died. And that’s when Rawling and Dad had come up with their theory.
“Just take it outside!” Director Steven was frantic. “The whole dome could be destroyed!”
But a theory was only a theory unless it could be proved. Rawling had reassembled the cover of the gray box and inserted wires that would look like antennae. But only in dim lighting. Like right here and right now.
“Destroyed?” I said. “Are you suggesting this thing in my hand is a bomb? But how could you know, unless you were the person behind this?”
“No! No!” Director Steven finally realized what he might have admitted.
“Well,” I said, “if it is not a bomb, we have nothing to worry about. Why not go for a ride in the other platform buggy? Just you and me. Once outside the dome, we will see if it is an explosive or not. How does that sound?”
“No!”
If the bomb went off, Director Steven realized he’d be the only one hurt. I, after all, was controlling the robot body. If it was destroyed, it wouldn’t harm me.
“No? You do not want to go for a ride? Because maybe you know what this is?”
“Yes,” he said. “I do. Let go of me, and I’ll tell you everything.”
I let go of his arm.
He backed away from me. He grinned. “I’m going to go get security. They’ll take you away. And Ashley. When I erase her computer files, it will be your word against mine.”
“The explosive,” I said.
“I doubt very much you’ll do anything with it here. In the dome? Where it will kill Ashley and your mother and everyone else?” Another grin of victory. “Fool.” He turned and ran before I could stop him.
I rolled my robot body around to face Ashley.
She was frowning. “That didn’t work exactly like you planned.”
“Are you kidding?” I pointed at my video lens. “From the moment he got here, I recorded every word.”
CHAPTER 24
08.06.2039
I don’t really want to be sitting here in front of my computer. It’s early evening, and I want to leave my minidome and go up to the telescope. But I know I’d better put the rest of what happened into my journal while it’s still fresh in my head.
Rawling and Dad had guessed right. That’s why we’d taken so many hours to return to the dome. They’d spent a lot of time throwing ideas back and forth until they’d realized exactly why and how all of it must have happened.
The entire alien thing was fake. It had been set up secretly right when the dome was first established. Director Steven had been part of it from the beginning. All those years ago Science Agency techies on Earth had made those fakes. And just to show how coldly careful the Science Agency had been, they’d used two techies who were battling terminal cancer, knowing that when they died they’d take their secret with them. The Science Agency had even planned the “alien discovery” by projecting which asteroid would hit 15 years later, because even back then the science committee knew the Mars Project funding would come up for review around that time.
Why go to so much effort for something fake?
How about $200 billion a year? That’s what the Mars Project needs. And that’s what it was going to get for another 10 years when the videos arrived at the United Nations budget committee by digital satellite … just in the nick of time to get everybody excited about aliens and new technology. Let’s see … that’s a total of $2 trillion. Not bad for a fake setup. And a couple of murders, if it had worked.
Director Blaine Steven …
I stopped keyboarding as a familiar chime on my computer alerted me to a new text message via IM. I saved my journal writing but didn’t close the program, then clicked on my IM alert.
Tyce
Are you going to meet me tonight? I want to talk.
I smiled and sent Ashley a message.
Talk? How about up at the telescope?
Seconds later, she wrote back.
Sounds good. How about I stop by and we’ll go together? I’ll bring Flip and Flop. They’ve been restless. I think they miss you!
I smiled again.
Come on over. And bring the koalas. I miss them too.
I sent the message, then returned to my journal.
Director Steven heard about our planned trip from one of his techie moles—someone who spied for him and kept him informed of things happening at the dome. It was a techie whose job was to help prepare the platform buggies for field trips. This techie planted the bomb.
After we left the dome, this same techie helped ex-Director Steven send a coded message to the higher-ups in the Science Agency who had helped him set up this plan many years ago, while Steven was still on Earth. They pulled the strings to get Steven put in place as dome director again. From there, all that Director Steven needed to do was monitor our progress. As soon as he received the digital video scans, it served his purposes to get rid of the only witnesses to the fake aliens.
But now Steven is back under guard, along with the techie who helped him. They’ll be going back to Earth on the next shuttle to face criminal charges there.
As for the funding, the funny part is this: it went through without the alien report. Members of the budget committee didn’t even hear about the aliens. With a 7–5 vote in favor of budgeting more money, they decided to keep the dome going simply because it truly was important to Earth. Although Steven had sent the digital video scans back to Earth by satellite transmission, Dad and Rawling followed them up with the whole report about fakes. The Science Agency kept all of this out of the public news and is now investigating who else was involved.
Yet without a flat tire, it would have turned out much differently. I shiver when I think of what would have happened to Dad and Rawling and me out on the surface of Mars if I hadn’t seen that small gray box.
But all thoughts about death are scary. I can understand why people would rather listen to music or watch television or play computer games or do anything else to distract themselves from wondering about death. Because then you have to ask questions about God and why we’re here and how the universe started and …
I stopped keyboarding. And smiled again. Tonight I’d be happy to talk about all of this with Ashley. It was great having a friend my age.
I heard her voice as she called out for me and then Mom’s voice as she told Ashley I was in my room. I saved my writing, shut down my computer, and turned my wheelchair around so I was facing her when she entered.
“Hey,” I said. “You got here fast.”
“I ran,” Ashley said. “I’ve got some news. You’ve got to promise to keep it secret. At least until my father announces it officially.”
“Sure.”
She stepped closer and whispered, “Interested in going to Jupiter?”
CHAPTER 1
Ambush!
Rawling McTigre, the director of the Mars Project, had warned me that, on this practice run in the Hammerhead space torpedo, I wouldn’t be alone in the black emptiness 3,500 miles above the planet. But I’d already circled Phobos, one of the Martian moons, twice and seen nothing, so it was a complete surprise when my heat radar buzzed with movement from below.
Actually, it’s wrong to say I had seen nothing. What I’d really seen was the silver glint of sunlight bouncing off Phobos. To do that, I’d raced at the moon with the sun behind me. At the speed I moved in the Hammerhead, the moon was almost invisible coming from any other angle. It was so tiny, and
the backdrop of deep space so totally dark, except for the pinpoints of stars.
Without the sun at my back, straining for visual contact with Phobos was like trying to see a black marble hanging in front of a black velvet curtain.
It was also wrong to say the movement came from below.
In space, there is no up and down. It’s difficult, though, not to think that way because I’m so used to living in gravity, weak as it is on Mars. So I thought of the Hammerhead’s stabilizer fin as the top.
When the movement came from the belly side of the space torpedo, my mind instinctively told me it was below. Just like my mind instinctively told me to roll the Hammerhead away from the movement.
In one way, rolling my space torpedo was as easy as thinking it should roll. It’s similar to how you move your arms or your legs. Your brain wills it to happen, and the wiring of your nervous system sends a message to your muscles. Then chemical reactions take place in your muscles’ cells and they burn fuel, causing you to move.
It was the same way with the Hammerhead. My mind, connected to the computer, willed it to roll and it obeyed instantly. But it was really the computer on board that did all the hard work. It ignited a series of small flares along the stabilizer nozzles, allowing the torpedo to react as though it were flying through the friction of an atmosphere, not the vacuum of outer space.
I rolled hard to my right, then hard left, then downward in a tight circle that brought the giant crescent of Mars into my visual.
The top of the massive red ball shimmered with an eerie whiteness, the thin layer of carbon dioxide that covered the planet. And behind it was the glow of the sun.
But I didn’t have time to admire this beauty. The planet was getting closer—fast.
I told myself I wouldn’t crash, that its closeness was just an illusion because it filled so much of my horizon. After all, the top of the Martian atmosphere was still over 3,000 miles away.
But I was moving at over four miles per second. That meant if I didn’t change direction within the next 10 minutes, at this speed, I’d get fried to a crisp upon reentry.
I rolled upward, back toward Phobos, hoping to buy some time.
I didn’t even bother trying to get a visual confirmation of my pursuer. Because of Rawling’s earlier warning, I didn’t need to see what was chasing me to know it was another space torpedo. This was the ultimate test of my pilot skills. Against another pilot.
I knew if I looked, I wouldn’t be able to see the other space torpedo anyway. My Hammerhead was hardly longer and wider than a human body. Plus, space torpedoes are painted black, so they’re almost impossible to detect visually in space from more than 100 yards away.
Right now, with the other pilot chasing me, I was locked in a whirling dance with another space torpedo 100 miles away, with both of us ducking and bobbing at around 15,000 miles per hour. Not even the best eyes in the universe would be able to watch this dogfight.
No, the only way I could detect the other space torpedo was with heat radar. Tiny as the vent flares were, the heat they produced showed up on radar like mushrooms as big as thunderstorms. Especially in the absolute cold of outer space.
That was good for me, being able to track the other space torpedo as easily as watching a storm cross the sky. But it also meant the pilot of the other torpedo could follow my movement.
And my Hammerhead was the lead torpedo, a sitting duck in the computer target sights of the pilot behind me.
I made a quick decision. I flared all of my vents equally for an instant. I knew my direction wouldn’t change. But it would cause a big blast of heat, hopefully blinding the pilot behind me.
An instant later, I shut down all my vents, knowing my Hammerhead was now shooting through the mushroom of heat I’d just created.
I exited the other side of the heat mushroom with no power or flares to give away my presence. To the heat radar of the pilot behind me, my Hammerhead was as black and cold as outer space itself. I was now invisible.
I congratulated myself for my smart move.
Then I panicked. There was no heat mushroom on my radar either. The pilot behind me must have done the same thing—shut down all vent flares.
It could mean only one thing. The pilot had guessed my move and taken a directional reading of my flight path just before I shut down my vents.
I knew I was dead. Without vent flares to control the direction of my Hammerhead, I wouldn’t be able to change direction until I reactivated them. It would take my computer 30 seconds to run through its preignition checklist. In space warfare, 30 seconds was eternity, because torpedo computers reacted much more quickly than human brains.
In 30 seconds, the computer of the torpedo behind me would figure out my line of travel and shoot me with a laser before I could reactivate and change direction.
Only 20 seconds left.
White flashed over my visual from the other torpedo’s target scanner. I was dead center in the laser target controls.
I swallowed hard, preparing myself for the red killer flash that would follow in an instant, blowing my spacecraft to shreds. The explosion of my Hammerhead torpedo would be soundless since you can’t hear screams in the vacuum of outer space.
Another white flash hit me instead.
I jumped. The target scanner behind me didn’t need confirmation.
A third white flash.
There was still no red laser to superheat the fuel tanks and blow the Hammerhead apart.
I didn’t understand. Three times I’d been right in the other pilot’s sights. Why hadn’t the other pilot fired the laser pulse?
Without warning, my vents reactivated at the 30-second mark. I rolled safely out of the way.
I looped, scanning my heat radar again to find the other space torpedo.
Then my visual and my consciousness melted into black nothingness.
CHAPTER 2
“I don’t get it,” I said to Rawling. “The pilot of the other space torp had me dead and let me go. What kind of computer program is that?”
A minute earlier the blackout of all my thoughts had signaled the end of my flight-simulator program. I was brought out of virtual reality and back to my body in a lab room under the dome.
I was still sweating from the effort, and my arm muscles shook from stress. I really looked forward to a glass of water.
Rawling leaned forward to unstrap me. Whenever I connected to the computer through virtual reality, my body was secured on a bed so I couldn’t roll loose and break the connection.
“Could you be wrong, Tyce?” Rawling asked. “I know it’s almost inconceivable that you might make a mistake, but …”
“Hah-ha,” I said.
Rawling scratched his hair and smiled, the way he always did when he teased me. Over the last month, we had gone beyond the robot body I had learned to control. Rawling was supervising me as I learned the controls of a space torpedo we had nicknamed Hammerhead because it looked so much like the shark I’d seen on Earth DVD-gigaroms.
“Do you think that’s been programmed?” I asked. “For the other pilot to show mercy?”
“That would surprise me. Mercy is something human.” Rawling helped me sit up, then handed me a glass of water. He knew I always needed it badly when I exited virtual reality. “You were in a flight-simulation program. The other pilot was simply computer generated. It’s not like there was another human linked into the program.”
“It’s also human to guess about my heat-vent trick. Which it did. Which in theory it’s not supposed to do.”
Instead of asking me what I meant, Rawling raised an eyebrow, something I practiced myself when I knew people weren’t looking.
“Heat-vent trick,” I repeated, still sitting on the bed and facing him. I drank deeply from the water before I continued. “At the beginning of the week, when you told me I had only a few days left to get ready for an enemy pilot, I planned to try the heat-vent trick during this flight simulation.”
That wasn’t qu
ite true. I hadn’t planned this trick all by myself. I’d talked to Ashley about it, and together we’d come up with the idea.
“It’s a way to make a light explosion in the enemy pilot’s radar,” I continued. “Then you coast out of the back side of it with so little power that you can’t be tracked by heat radar.”
Next I explained to Rawling how I had done it.
“Pretty good,” he said, nodding enthusiastically. “Except for the 30 seconds you had to wait to reignite the stabilizer vents and get directional power again. I’m very, very surprised that the computer program was able to make an adjustment to let the pilot track you. So let me say this again. Maybe it was a mistake, you thinking you were in the target scanner. I mean, according to this program, the enemy pilot is supposed to destroy you at the first opportunity.”
“Sure,” I said, not convinced. I’d been flashed three times with the target scanner’s white laser beam. Maybe once was my imagination but not three times. Was it possible the other pilot had given me three chances instead of blowing me away at the first opportunity? If so, the enemy pilot sounded too human to be computer generated.
Rawling helped me from the bed and into my wheelchair.
“I have a couple of questions,” I said. With my hands, I rocked the wheels back and forth. It was something I did when I was restless, like other people might tap their fingers.
“Fire away,” he said with a grin, like he knew it was a pun on the space-torpedo program I’d just gone through.
“Why a space torpedo?” I asked. “Don’t get me wrong. After all those years of working with a robot, this Hammerhead is a lot of fun. And you know I love being in outer space, even if it’s just virtual reality. Only …”
“Only what?”
“It seems a waste.”
“Waste?” Rawling repeated.
“I know these virtual-reality computer training programs cost millions and millions of dollars to develop,” I said. “So why would the government spend all this money to train anyone to fly something that doesn’t exist?”
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