I ducked under the Jupiter to start my next job, checking the hull for evidence of corrosion, while Dad examined each of the landing struts for the same thing, peering into their hydraulics with his headlamp.
I walked back and forth, being careful to check every panel for the little indentations that were the first sign of corrosion. Streaks of rust came next, and they were evidence that the toxic air and water had eaten through the panels’ protective coating and started to affect the metal. That had only happened in one place, but we’d had to patch it immediately because our life support had started to leak out while the toxic outside air started getting in. This was the prime suspect on Judy’s list of causes for my allergic reaction. Damaged panels would also be a problem if we were ever going to launch off this planet, because we’d need the thermal shielding to work. Not to mention, if this water started to get up into the Jupiter’s internal systems, it could cripple them entirely.
So I examined the panels meter by meter, trying to pay close attention and not let my mind wander, because while it was important work, it wasn’t exactly interesting. When I reached the area we’d patched, I turned on my helmet lights and used my scanner to check the metal integrity. So far, it was holding strong.
By the time I was finished and walking back around the greenhouse, Don and Judy were outside, using long brushes to clean off the solar panel array.
“Everything looks good,” I reported to Dad.
“Nice work,” he said, patting my shoulder.
We returned to the cargo bay and pulled off our helmets.
“Want some breakfast?” Dad asked.
“Oh, that’s okay.” I tapped my communicator. “This morning is the third-lowest spring tide. I was going to explore.”
“Oh, right.” Dad nodded to himself. “You and your mom have been tracking those.” I could tell he was trying to think of something to say to me, just like I’d seen everyone doing lately. “Did you already eat?”
I stepped past him, walking quickly to the ladder. “I’ve got snacks in my pack.”
“Well, be back by midday, then. All right?”
I smiled as best I could. “Sure.” If the Robot had been around, Dad probably would have been fine letting me go out and explore all day, but without him I was just little Will, who was too young and fragile.
I hurried to my compartment, got my pack, and slung it over my shoulders. I heard Dad’s voice in the cockpit and slipped by, heading back to the cargo bay.
“Where you off to, halfling?” Penny was sitting on a couch in the hub, knees up, writing in her journal.
“Low tide,” I said.
“Cool,” she said absently, her pen scratching along.
I almost added, Wanna come? Having Penny along was a little like being with the Robot, because she was always off in her own head and didn’t really respond when I said stuff to her, except most of the time it didn’t seem like she was actually listening. We’d had fun naming islands or studying tide pools, but she rarely wanted to go out. “How’s the journal coming?” I asked instead.
“Memoir,” she said. “Like a journal, but literary.”
“Oh.”
Penny got a gleam in her eye and spoke in a dramatic voice: “I’m at the part where you’re falling into space, doomed to die, before Dad rescues you.”
“Great,” I said. There it was again in my head: the memory of my hands slipping from the ladder on the outside of the Jupiter, of falling, sure that I was doomed, my arms and legs flailing helplessly, the ship shrinking. Thinking of it made my upper arm ache; I had a wound there that hadn’t quite healed.
“Hey.” Penny was peering at me. “Don’t worry, I’m making sure to point out how brave you were to climb out there and close the air lock. Readers will know that you saved our lives—”
“Before I needed saving,” I muttered, turning and walking out.
“Hey, Will!” Penny called after me. Except I knew she wouldn’t come after me; she’d just get back to her writing. Which was how I wanted it… I think… whatever. I just wanted to get going.
Back outside in the whipping wind and damp, chilly air, I trudged across the hard sand, away from the greenhouse.
Judy and Don were still by the solar panels. They were gesturing avidly to each other, so I switched channels on my communicator until their voices popped into my helmet.
“And I’m telling you that these panels need to be recalibrated,” Judy was saying.
“That might be true,” said Don, glancing up at the clouds, “if there was any sunlight for calibrating. I doubt the tide was really that high last night. I don’t remember hearing anything shifting around.”
“With your snoring, you wouldn’t know if there had been a hurricane.”
“I—” Don paused, noticing me, and waved in my direction. “Morning, chief.”
I just waved as if I wasn’t hearing him and kept walking.
Judy waved her arms more emphatically, and I stopped. “Hey!” she called. “How’s the allergy today?”
“It’s the same, I think.” Just talking about it made my neck itch.
“Is it presenting in any new locations?”
“Presenting?”
“She means are you itchy anywhere else,” said Don.
“No. It’s just like it was.” I didn’t add I think, because if I’d wanted to be honest I might have said that the rash did feel a little more intense and burny today than it had yesterday, but saying that would fully activate Dr. Judy, and I’d lose my low tide exploring time to yet another exam. “I’ll be back by lunch.”
“Okay, be careful,” said Judy.
I nodded and trudged on, past where the chariot was parked, and skirted around the edge of the rocky bluff and Mom’s work hut. Most of the time, the water came right up and sloshed against the rocks, but this morning’s low tide meant there was a strip of sand a few meters wide between the rocks and the water. The sand was almost completely dry, scribbled with a line of dried-out, crusty kelp—the kind that, when wet, glowed with a blue-green bioluminescence.
I had just gotten to the other side of the bluff when my communicator buzzed.
“Morning,” said Mom, sounding cheery. I looked back and saw her peering between the plastic walls of her hut—we actually referred to it as the office, as in, every morning when Mom left, she said, I’m heading out to the office.
I smiled at her, but also sighed to myself. “Hey.”
“Off exploring on the spring tides?”
I nodded.
“Aren’t you proud? Our tide chart calculations were correct.”
“Yup.” I knew that Mom thought our charts were a way to bond with me—we had ones of the moon phases and seasons, too—and that she thought the bonding was important, because she was worried about me. She knew that losing the Robot had been hard for me.
When I thought about that, though, it actually made me feel kinda frustrated. It might have been nice if she’d tried to see how important the Robot had been while he was still around.
Neither of us said anything for a moment. The wind whipped against my helmet.
“Okay,” Mom finally said, “well, just—”
“Be back around lunchtime,” I finished for her. “Yeah, I know.”
“Of course you do,” Mom said to herself. “Um…”
I almost wanted to tell her that I could hear her worrying about me every time she tried to choose her words so carefully. It made me want to shout, Just stop trying!
“I’ll be careful, and I’ll have a good time,” I said, beating her to it, and I turned and started across the sand.
“Have fun!” Mom called after me. That didn’t help, either.
As I walked away, this dark anger brewed inside me. Why couldn’t everyone just stop worrying? None of them had really wanted the Robot around when he had been here, and it made their worry now seem fake.
Besides, I’m fine, I thought as I walked away. I can handle everything on my own.
&nbs
p; I had no idea how wrong I was about to be.
CHAPTER
I reached the edge of our island and paused. When the tide was low, there were three more islands in our chain. Penny and I had named the next one the Whaleback, because it was just a basic oval hump sticking out of the water. This was the only one that was actually still visible at high tide, but you had to wade through about twenty meters of water to get to it. Even though our space suits could protect us from the toxic atmosphere here, they wouldn’t last long submerged in that water. This morning, though, you could easily cross to the Whaleback. In fact, the water level was so low that the Whaleback looked like a small hill.
I jogged across the soft sandbar connector and scrambled up to the top. From here, you could see back across our island, which ended at deep water not far past the Jupiter. Beyond that there was open ocean basically in all directions.
The next island after the Whaleback wasn’t exactly an island; it looked more like a bunch of weathered rocks that poked out of the sand, with tide pools in between them. We had very creatively named this one the Pools, and it only appeared when the tides were low. This was Penny’s favorite spot to come and hang out. She liked looking at the little snaillike creatures that you could sometimes find. They had cool bioluminescent colors on the edges of their shells, like the kelp.
You had to balance carefully and hop over the tide pools to reach the third and final island: the Serpent. This one was my favorite. It started as a long, skinny sand ridge that, as you probably guessed, curved back and forth in an S shape like the body of a snake. Then, almost fifty meters later, it rose up to this broad, diamond-shaped rock made of a smooth black volcanic mineral that really did look like it might be the head of some giant creature.
The Serpent’s head ended at a short cliff that dropped into the waves. If you climbed a little way over the edge, there was a ledge where you could sit and be completely out of sight from the Jupiter, even from Mom’s office. So you could just be there and think your thoughts without worrying that somebody was watching you and wondering what was on your mind and if you were okay and blah blah blah.
Except—
As I peered ahead, I saw that today, the Serpent’s head didn’t seem to be the end of the island chain. With the flat gray sky and the wind and the constant ocean mist, it was hard to be sure, but it looked like there was something else out there. The spring tide had revealed a new island!
My pulse ticked up and a burst of excitement ran through me. You’re probably thinking that finding sandbar islands is kind of a dumb thing to be getting all excited about, but you have to remember that finding little sandbar islands is pretty much all there is to do here, except for sitting around thinking about all the things you can’t do.
I bounded down the Whaleback and hopped my way across the Pools. Out of the corner of my eye I saw little flashes of color; with the low tide, there were quite a few snails near the surface. It made me wonder if there might also be one of those spiny, starfish-like creatures out hunting them. Penny and I had only seen one of those a couple of months earlier, and we had been looking for another ever since. But that could wait.
You might think that finding sea-creature life on another planet would be pretty amazing, but let me tell you, when there’s no one else around to share your discovery with except for your family, and when the creatures’ methane chemistry makes them totally toxic to eat, they get boring pretty fast. Also, there didn’t seem to be any larger creatures in this ocean. Don had tried fishing a couple of times—not that we would have been able to eat anything he caught—but hadn’t had any luck. Even seeing some sort of fish or whales or anything in the distance would have been neat.
I leaped from the last rock of the Pools to the narrow, twisting back of the Serpent and then followed its S curves back and forth. Even with the tide as low as it was, if I strayed off the meter-wide hump, my footprints filled with puddles the minute I lifted my boot.
I was breathing hard by the time I reached the Serpent’s head. I scrambled up its slick, damp side and stood perched at the edge of the small cliff that dropped to the water, the spot that, on every other trip out here, had been the end of the line.
But not today. Sure enough, across a meter or two of deep water, a pointy black rock jutted into the air. Beyond that was a long, skinny sandbar, just barely above the waves lapping at its sides. This new shallow bar shot away from me in an almost impossibly straight line, probably a hundred meters long, until it finally ended in the distance at a triangle-shaped rock sticking out of the sand, like a finger pointed at the sky.
I tapped my communicator to activate the camera on my helmet, and zoomed in on that distant rock. Actually, it looked more like three rocks clustered together, wider at their bases and skinnier at the tops, with a sort of pyramidal shape, like three large, narrow triangles angling to the same point. There was a shadow between them, like maybe the rocks surrounded a cool little spot to hide out and be protected from the wind. I looked back over my shoulder, at the distant Jupiter and Mom’s office. That new spot was nice and far from worried eyes, too.
I looked at the new sandbar leading to the rocks and checked my communicator again: From our calculations, I had about an hour before the tide would bottom out and start to come back in. How long would this bar stay above water after that? I figured I had time, as long as I was quick.
Step one was to get across this channel of deep water below me. I opened the Exploration tool on my communicator. It had a laser measurement device, which I aimed at that rock on the other side of the channel. The laser flashed and calculated the distance: 2.2 meters. I tapped a little JUMP symbol beside the results. A graphic of me and a curving line to the rock appeared. The Exploration tool was loaded with physical activity data from tests we’d done back on Earth and on the Resolute, and it used that plus the gravity here, the weight of my suit, and my current biometrics to calculate results: JUMP DIFFICULTY: SLIGHTLY ABOVE AVERAGE. CHANCE OF SUCCESS: 67%.
Those weren’t exactly great odds. Two out of three times I would make it, but every third time I’d fall into deadly water.… This would have been a pretty good time to have a large, super-strong Robot around. I pictured him lifting me in his strong metal arms and then bounding easily across with a burst of his servos, his feet crunching onto the rock on the other side—Stop thinking about that, I told myself, swallowing hard. Gotta do things on your own, Will Robinson. Besides, those odds did say I was more likely to make it than not.
I climbed down to the ledge on the back side of the Serpent’s head. I checked behind me, confirming to myself that I was invisible to Mom or anyone else who might be looking for me… then I held my breath and jumped.
I made it—well, almost. My right foot landed on the slippery, still-wet part of the rock and plunged into the water up to my knee. I grabbed at the slick edges of the rock and managed to get a tight grip with my fingers before I fell any farther. Heart racing, breathing hard, I pulled myself up and clambered to the pointy top to sit and check my suit for leaks. A tear when I was this far from the Jupiter could be a real problem, but everything looked all right and my suit levels were normal.
I sat there for a second, catching my breath, then I scrambled off the rock and started across the narrow sandbar. It was almost like walking on a balance beam. I trudged along the wet sand, keeping my steps close together, but still going as fast as possible. I could not risk being out here when the tide shifted.
The triangle rock formation was getting closer. It was darker than the other rocks of the island chain, and unlike those others, which had jagged surfaces, these rocks were pretty smooth, like they’d been eroded over time. As I approached, I saw that the rocks were about chest high. Not that big, but still… I looked behind me and wondered: How had I not seen these before? They seemed tall enough that they would have been sticking out of the water during other low tides, but maybe with their narrow tops, they hadn’t made much of an impression amid all the waves.
My neck flared up, the burning sensation increasing, and I instinctually tried to scratch there, but of course it didn’t do any good through my suit. I was sweating now from this long walk in heavy sand, which was probably setting it off. I tapped my communicator and lowered my suit temperature.
In another couple of minutes I reached the triangle rocks. I stepped around the nearest one, running my hand over the surface. It was smooth like it had appeared from a distance, but now I could see that it was covered with little pit marks, like tiny, round gouges. And there were little grayish stripes bleeding down from each of the pits. The streaks were dry beneath my gloves, but they reminded me of the corrosion that I had to watch for beneath the Jupiter. I hadn’t seen any other rocks with these kinds of markings, but then again I’d explored approximately point-zero-zero-zero-zero-one percent of this planet, so there had to be all kinds of different geology besides just what was right on our island. I opened the scanner on my communicator and aimed it at the rock. The screen pulsed for a minute, then flashed: UNKNOWN MATERIAL. That was nothing new; it said that about everything in this place. Below that was a list of the material’s components, and while nearly 50 percent of it was an unknown composite, the rest of it was made of elements with familiar names: titanium, iron, and silica, which were basic universal building blocks. There was something comforting about that.
I peered into the gap between the three rock columns. Like I’d thought, there was a space about a meter wide that extended down below the sand I was standing on. The bottom was sloped with sand, with a puddle on one half. I stepped down inside, and immediately the sound of the wind died away. Its constant push on my body, the hiss against my visor and suit—it all quieted down. I was surprised how relaxed it made me feel, how my shoulders loosened up. I ducked, and the effect was even more pronounced. The sounds of my movements echoed off the rock walls around me. Almost peaceful—
Lost in Space--Infinity's Edge Page 2
