Oxygen Level Zero Mission 2

by Sigmund Brouwer

  I wheeled outside the dome to a Martian sunrise.

  I’ve been told that the sky on Earth is blue and the rising sun is yellow, with clouds around it colored pink, red, and orange. I’ve also been told that in the middle of the day, clouds are white, or if they hold rain, gray.

  Not here on Mars.

  The sun is blue against a butterscotch-colored sky. Later in the day the sky becomes red as sunlight scatters through dust particles at a different angle. At this hour, wispy blue clouds hung high in the butterscotch sky, but they’d disappear as the day became warmer.

  Now, this early, it was cold—about minus one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. A sixty-mile-an-hour wind hit me, but it didn’t have much force because the Martian atmosphere is so thin. Some blowing sand rattled against my titanium shell.

  Once out of the dome, I felt free. I didn’t have to wear a space suit. The cold and lack of oxygen didn’t hurt my robot body. Best of all, my crippled legs no longer mattered. I was able to wheel across hard-packed sand toward the cornfield at the speed of a galloping horse.

  Which I did.

  Five minutes later, I stopped in front of one of the sides of the huge plastic-sheeted greenhouse.

  Rawling and I had decided that the first thing I should do was check for holes in the sheeting. The greenhouse was designed to trap sunlight and heat. It was not designed to be sealed against the Martian atmosphere, so we expected that somewhere, along the miles of plastic sheeting, there might be a rip or two or twelve.

  Slowly I made my way around the outside of the greenhouse. I wasn’t just looking for rips, though.

  I was looking for a place where aliens might have entered.

  And fifteen minutes later, I found it.

  More correctly speaking, I found tracks.

  The hole itself was a couple of feet high and a couple of feet wide. It didn’t have the smoothness of a rip. By zooming in with my video lens, I clearly saw scratches, as if a claw had been used to tear the clear plastic sheeting.

  The sand below this hole was packed harder than the sand on either side. In the softer sand at the edges of this packed path, a few tracks were visible. The wind had begun to fill in the tracks with drifting sand, but I could still see enough to know the tracks were not my imagination.

  They were about the size of the palm of my hand—my real

  hand, not my robot hand—and about half an inch deep. I could not make out any more details, however, because the sand had drifted.

  I did know one thing for certain: The tracks were not human.

  And they led into the cornfield.

  I spun back and followed the plastic walls of the greenhouse tent until I reached the same entrance I’d used when rescuing Timothy Neilson. The same entrance he’d taken when he went inside to check the growth levels of the plants, unaware that minutes later he’d be desperately calling for help.

  It was much warmer in the greenhouse. Unlike the rest of the planet, there was enough oxygen in here from the plants to hold heat. That, combined with the greenhouse effect and the heat of the soil, made it above freezing.

  Not that I cared one way or another. I was well protected by my robot body.

  I rolled slowly inside, scanning in all directions.

  As before, the tall bamboo-corn blocked my view. While these plants did need some water and the protection of the greenhouse, they practically thrived in the Martian air.

  You see, while the atmosphere of your Earth is 21 percent oxygen, 78 percent nitrogen, and one percent argon and carbon dioxide, the atmosphere of Mars is 95 percent carbon dioxide, 3

  percent nitrogen, and 2 percent argon and other gases. Humans breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. Plants do the opposite, which is very handy. So plants give us what we need, and we give them what they need.

  Since Mars is already rich in carbon dioxide, the plants only needed water to survive. And since Mars is such a dry planet, the plants were genetically designed to need very little of it. Any moisture they received was sprayed through nozzles from narrow plastic tubing that ran in grids along the ceiling of the greenhouse tent.

  Because I could see so little, I followed the rows of bamboo-corn to the hole in the plastic sheeting.

  It didn’t help much.

  On the outside, there was a packed path.

  On the inside, the path disappeared, as if the alien creatures had scattered in different directions once they had entered.

  That left me with too many questions.

  Why had they entered?

  Where did they go once inside?

  Were they still inside?

  Where did they go after they left, if indeed they had left the greenhouse?

  Where had they come from?

  And the most important question of all: Why had they attacked a human?

  I wasn’t worried about what would happen to me if they

  attacked my robot body. First of all, my titanium shell was a lot stronger than human skin and bones. Second, even if they were able to somehow damage my robot body, I could leave the robot almost instantly. In my mind, all I needed to do was shout Stop!

  The combination of throat and neck muscle movement from my brain impulses, plus the sound of that one single word, would trigger the computer drive to disengage me instantly, and my brain awareness would return to my body on the bed in the computer lab.

  From the greenhouse wall, I decided to push into the bamboo-corn and try to follow one set of blurred tracks.

  My hands and arms pushed aside stems of bamboo-corn. My

  wheels rolled over other stems.

  I switched to my rear video lens and saw I was making a clear path through the plants. It was a straight path, unlike the one Timothy Neilson had made in his panicked run.

  I realized something else.

  My path was the only path.

  Yet I was almost certain that some kind of creature had ripped a hole through the plastic sheeting of the greenhouse tent. I was almost certain that many of those creatures had entered the greenhouse tent. But where were the bent and trampled bamboo-corn plants that showed their paths?

  The only answer I could come up with was that these creatures were small enough to move among the plant stems instead of plowing over them, like my robot body did.

  But if they were that small, why had they frightened Timothy Neilson? Every person chosen for the Mars Project had passed dozens of tests; people didn’t make it to Mars if they were wimps or cowards. Had the creatures frightened Timothy because he simply hadn’t expected any other kind of life-form? And how and why had they managed to do so much damage to his space suit?

  I followed farther into the bamboo-corn. I came to a spot where water from the nozzles at the ceiling had worn a small gully in the soil between the stems. Tracks littered the edge of this little depression. There was no water, of course. Even in the greenhouse, any water that didn’t soak into the soil for the plants quickly evaporated.

  A sound drew my attention away from the tracks at the edge of the gully.

  A scurrying sound.

  Then more scurrying.

  I saw nothing because of the bamboo-corn that surrounded me, but the scurrying got louder.

  I switched to infrared vision.

  As with the last time I was in the greenhouse, I saw the different shades of orange that reflected the slight heat of the plants and soil.

  Unlike the time I’d rescued Timothy, however, I saw shapes of deep red, the shapes of something alive.

  Aliens!

  Dozens of them!

  Closing in on me from all directions!

  I switched back to visual mode and saw only bamboo-corn.

  Back to infrared.

  I was about to be swarmed.

  Any second these aliens would break through the screen of bamboo-corn that hid them from me.

  I heard a click.

  A hiss.

  I strained to hear louder.

  There seemed to be hundreds of the clicking
sounds. The

  hissing became a roar in my sensitive hearing.

  As the moving red shapes leaped upward around me in all

  directions, I switched to visual again.

  I saw the darkness of moving objects in the air. Without thinking about it, I brought my titanium hands up to protect myself.

  I felt solid contact.

  In the same instant, cold hit me.

  And in the next instant, my brain seemed to explode.

  It felt like I had run into a wall at full speed in total darkness.

  Without warning, I began to fall . . . fall . . . fall. . . .

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  I awoke to see Rawling McTigre staring down at me with concern on his face.

  “Hello,” I said with a croak.

  “Glad you’re back.”

  “Back?” I struggled to sit up. I realized I wasn’t wearing my blindfold or the soundproofing headset. Nor was I strapped to the bed.

  “Back?” I repeated. “Where did I go?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Rawling said. “Your body didn’t go anywhere, but you were out for six minutes and ten seconds.”

  “What?” I replied, startled.

  “The computer shows the exact time that you disconnected from the robot body. Just over six minutes ago. Your body on the bed jerked around as if you had been shocked by electricity. You didn’t make contact with any electrical sources, did you?”

  Slowly, I remembered my last moments in the robot body.

  Clicking. Hissing. Dark objects in the air. Sudden cold. The sensation of hitting a wall at full speed in total darkness.

  “Not that I know of,” I said. “Not unless I was hit by aliens with electrical currents in their bodies.”

  As I told Rawling what I’d experienced, he listened gravely.

  Then he said, “It’s a possibility. If they are alien life-forms, they might well contain strong electrical or magnetic forces. We just don’t know.”

  Rawling helped me sit up. “The good news is, you have a clean bill of health. Your pupils aren’t dilated. Blood pressure is fine.

  Heartbeat is normal. Brain waves are fine.”

  “We’ll need the robot body to figure out what happened,” I said.

  “Sure. But it wouldn’t be right to send anyone in there.

  Timothy Neilson was attacked by those things, and it took a robot to get him out. And now it looks like they were able to take down

  an indestructible robot body. If aliens managed to stop it, how much chance do we have to survive an attack?” Rawling took a deep, deep breath. “Here’s the problem. We really need to know what those aliens are and what they’re capable of doing. But I can’t let anyone go out there if we don’t know those things. And we won’t know those things if nobody can go out there.”

  This was not good.

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  After a very quiet and quick nutri-tube supper a few hours later, I decided to leave the mini-dome. My father and I weren’t talking much. Mom seemed mad at both of us because we weren’t getting along like she wanted. It was just easier to leave. It seemed weird in there, because my parents were so into each other. It wasn’t that I was jealous or anything. Really. The guy goes away for three years, but when he comes back, he’s the king. Me? I was suddenly useless and out of place. They had each other. All I had was a robot that I’d just named Bruce, and poor Bruce was stuck in the middle of a cornfield.

  I decided to go where I usually went in my wheelchair when I wanted to be alone. To the telescope, far above the rest of the dome.

  The good thing about living under the dome in a wheelchair is that I’d never had to travel far. The total area of the dome was about four of the football fields that I’d read about on Earth.

  Besides the mini-domes (the small, dark, plastic huts where each scientist and tekkie lives in privacy from the others), there were experimental labs and open areas where equipment was maintained.

  The main level of the dome held the mini-domes and labs. One level up, a walkway about ten feet wide circled the inside of the dome walls.

  People mostly used the walkway for exercise, jogging in circles above the main floor below. Not me, of course. The tekkies had built a ramp for my wheelchair, and the only reason I ever went to the second level was to reach the third and smallest level of the dome, which anyone, including me in a wheelchair, could reach by a narrow catwalk from the second level.

  This third level was centered at the top the dome. The floor of it was a circle only fifteen feet wide. It hung directly below the ceiling, above the exact middle of the main level. Here, on the deck of the third level, a powerful telescope was perched beneath a

  round bubble of clear, thick glass that stuck up from the black glass that made up the rest of the dome. From there, the massive telescope gave an incredible view of the solar system.

  It took me less than five minutes to reach the telescope. I rolled into place where the dome astronomer usually sat and punched my password into the computer control pad.

  When it prompted me to enter a location, I simply typed in the word Saturn.

  With a whine of electric motors, the telescope automatically swung to find Saturn and focused on the planet.

  I leaned into the eyepiece.

  As always, I nearly gasped at the incredible sight of an intensely black sky filled with millions and millions of stars; they were so sharp and clear it seemed I could reach out and grab them.

  On Earth, the air and clouds and particles of pollution take away the sharpness of telescopes. But not on Mars, which has nearly no atmosphere. Looking through a telescope on Mars gives you the sensation that you are swimming through the universe.

  Hanging in the infinite blackness was Saturn.

  It wasn’t the only planet I’d observed with rings—Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune also have rings of sorts—but it was definitely the most magnificent.

  To you on Earth, it might look like Saturn only has three rings.

  But from here on Mars, I saw differently. Saturn has thousands upon thousands of rings, gleaming in reflected sunlight. The rings aren’t solid discs but are made of millions of pieces of “dirty ice,”

  ranging in size from a grain of sand to an iceberg as big as a spaceship. Gravity holds them together, and they spin around the planet, some at speeds of fifty thousand miles per hour, creating a blur that looks solid to our eyes.

  I don’t know how long I sat there, marveling at those rings and the incredible sight. Long enough that I saw shadows of some of Saturn’s moons drift across the face of the planet. Long enough that I began to pray.

  You see, it wasn’t until I faced death—I wrote about that in my last diary—that I allowed myself to have faith in God. I realized

  there must be more to being human than having a mind and body. I realized I have a soul, held within my body. Thinking of it that way has helped me deal with being crippled. You can probably run at a speed of eight miles an hour, but I can only roll along in my wheelchair at three miles an hour. In my robot body I can go three times faster than you can, but all of those speeds are so tiny compared to the vastness of the universe that it doesn’t matter at all who’s faster. What I’ve begun to understand is that I have a soul.

  And, in believing I have a soul, I was able to believe in God. Of course, as Mom says, that’s only the first step of a great journey.

  She says once you accept that, then each day is learning more about what that means. How God loves you, how you try to love God in return. And how knowing all of this helps you through the good and bad of life.

  Looking through the telescope at the marvels of the universe, I now find it easier and easier to believe that God is behind it. That the creation of the universe was carefully planned out by God, and that he’s still watching over it. Over us. It has given me comfort, too, to know that a lot of scientists look at the universe and say it points us to God.

  Rawling is one of those scientists. He says a
lot of things show that the universe was designed for the single reason of producing human life. It’s something we’ve talked about a lot in the short time since he became director.

  With Saturn there in front of me, so beautiful and awesome and stunning, it just seemed natural to close my eyes briefly and pray to God, thanking him for allowing me to see such beauty. It may sound strange if you don’t pray much, but when I finished, I felt peaceful. I felt as if I did belong, I did have a purpose, and I was supposed to be part of God’s creation. I felt as if a load had been taken off my shoulders; that since God made me and had a plan, maybe I didn’t have to worry so much about things I couldn’t control.

  This peace lasted only as long as it took for one other person to step onto the third level near the telescope.

  “Hello,” she said. She did that tilting thing, hand on her hip, as if “hello” were also some kind of challenge. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  It was Ashley.

  And this time I wouldn’t be able to hide behind a robot body.

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  “You’ve been looking for me?”

  “Sure,” she said. She grinned. It changed her. Without that grin, she looked grown-up. With it, she looked like a tomboy. “Everyone else here is ancient. Over thirty. I asked if there was anyone close to my age—I’m thirteen—and people told me about you.”

  She stuck her hand out, just like earlier when she’d introduced herself to the robot body. “My name’s Ashley. Ashley Jordan.”

  “Tyce,” I said, taking her hand and shaking it. “Tyce Sanders.”

  I was glad it was dim up here at the telescope. For some reason, my ears felt like they were burning red.

  “Looked like you were sleeping at the telescope,” she said, grinning. As if it wasn’t a big deal that I was in a wheelchair. “Not that I was spying or anything, but when I walked up, you didn’t hear me.”

  “I was . . . I was . . .” I only hesitated because, to me, praying was a private thing—and very new. But I decided I wasn’t going to lie about it. There was no shame in trying to understand the mystery of life and seeing God behind it. So I took a deep breath and explained. “I was praying. When I look through the telescope, it blows me away. I can’t help but think and wonder about God.”