Oxygen Level Zero Mission 1

by Sigmund Brouwer

  “He pushed you into the people chasing him and got away.”

  “Nobody gets away from anybody in this dome,” I said. “It’s too small.”

  “Whoever it was,” Rawling replied, “got away long enough to stop running and find a way to mingle in with the crowds. That’s the best way to hide in here. Just look like everybody else. He’s not a stranger, of course, since the only humans on Mars are the ones already living under the dome.”

  Mom asked, “Did you get a look at his face?”

  “Couldn’t see anything,” I said. “What did he do?”

  “Nothing,” Rawling said. “At least nothing we can figure out.”

  “I heard screaming and shouting in the dark.”

  “That came from the mini-dome next to ours,” Mom said.

  “Someone pushed in one of the walls when the lights went out.”

  Not that collapsing a wall would be difficult. Although the mini-domes were built to act as temporary air-sealed shelters if the big dome ever temporarily lost its atmosphere, the walls were made of lightweight, rigid plastic.

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “Neither do we. The director, of course, has a security detail looking into it. Turn over.”

  “Huh?”

  “You mean ‘pardon me,’ right?” Mom said, grinning at me.

  “Yes, Mom,” I said. “Pardon me?”

  “Turn over,” Rawling repeated. “I need to examine your

  back.”

  “It’s my head that hurts,” I said.

  “Turn over,” he insisted. “Doctor knows best.”

  Slowly I managed to flip myself over on the examining table.

  Although it would have been faster for Rawling to help me, he knew that was one thing I liked to do for myself.

  Rawling lifted my shirt and ran his fingers up my back. He stopped near my neck and felt around.

  “Does this hurt?” he asked.

  “No.”

  He took his hands out from under my shirt and squeezed my neck, just above my shoulders. “Does this hurt?”

  “No. I told you already. It’s my head that hurts.”

  He moved my head gently from side to side. “Can you feel any pain in your neck when I do this?”

  “Just my head.”

  “Good.”

  “Good? You like it that my head hurts?”

  “Good that it doesn’t appear you’ve done any damage to your back and shoulders. Come back tomorrow, and I’ll take some X

  rays to be sure.”

  “Doc,” I said, rolling over and sitting up, “why do you do this same exam of my back and shoulders every time I come in for a checkup?”

  Seeming startled, Rawling glanced over at Mom. She looked quickly at me and then back at the doctor. She shook her head, as if she was telling him no.

  “I worry about your spinal column,” Rawling said. “It’s not as strong as it should be.”

  He dropped his eyes.

  Rawling never did that unless he was uncomfortable. I

  wondered if, for the first time, he was lying to me.

  But I couldn’t imagine why. And I couldn’t imagine that Mom was in on the lie.

  Things were getting weirder and weirder all the time.

  &+$37(5

  It’s me again. Tyce. Remember, I was writing to

  all of you on Earth and got called away to

  supper. I’m back, but it’s now the middle of the

  next day. Things got crazy here, and I didn’t

  make it back to my computer right away like I

  planned.

  Last night, I was going to tell you more about

  living under the dome.

  Now it looks like all I have to write about is

  dying under the dome.

  Last night, someone stole a bunch of reserve

  oxygen tanks. My friend and doctor, Rawling, says

  it took three people to do it. One person shut

  down the generator so the entire dome was dark.

  Another person pushed down a mini-dome and ran

  around in the dark with people chasing him.

  During this distraction, a third person used a

  trolley to take the reserve tanks.

  I paused to rest my fingers. I thought about what I was writing.

  The strangest part was that security had searched the entire dome—think of exploring four football fields worth of gardens and mini-domes and small laboratory units—a dozen times and couldn’t find those tanks. They are the size of scuba-diving tanks I’ve read about on my DVD-gigarom books. Except these tanks have super-compressed air and last ten people about two days each.

  Twenty tanks were stolen. There should be no possible way for twenty tanks to be hidden. Not when the mini-domes are so small a person couldn’t even hide one tank.

  I wondered too about the three people who stole the tanks. As soon as they start to use the noisy tanks, they’ll be found.

  Unless they’re going to wait until the rest of us are no longer breathing.

  I wondered how they’d explain this when the spaceship

  finally arrived. My father and the other pilots would walk in and the people who stole the tanks would be the only ones healthy and living.

  The latest newsflash: Director Steven now says that because of the stolen tanks, even if we don’t use any electricity in the next three days, and even if all of us sleep all the time, we’ll still run short of oxygen one day before the ship arrives.

  I began to type again.

  My friend Rawling told me this morning that some

  other people had a secret meeting. He was invited

  because he’s a doctor. He was also invited

  because if Rawling agrees to something, most

  other people in the dome will agree. They trust

  him.

  Well, the meeting is no longer a secret.

  Rawling got very angry with what they

  suggested. He not only refused to join them, he

  brought their idea immediately to the attention

  of Director Steven and wants them arrested.

  You see, the people in this meeting did some

  math. They say that even after the oxygen tanks

  were stolen, there is enough oxygen under the

  dome for 180 people to survive until the ship

  arrives.

  This means the dome needs twenty fewer people

  in it than it has now.

  The people in this meeting want to draw names

  to see which twenty people should die.

  &+$37(5

  “Tyce, as you can imagine, I have very little time for anything else but the oxygen problem,” Director Steven said. “As it is, I can only fit five minutes into my schedule for you. I hope this meeting is as important as you insisted.”

  Short and wide, Director Steven has thick, wavy, gray hair.

  He likes to run his hands through it as he talks. I think he does that because he likes to remind himself that he has way more hair than most people his age. He’s over sixty, and a lot of the forty-and fifty-year-old scientists are going bald.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. I stayed very polite, even though I’d been asking to see him all day. The more I’d thought about my theory, the more I knew I was right. All of the oxygen problems could be solved. “I think I might know what’s wrong with the solar panels.”

  Behind his desk, Director Steven leaned back in his chair. His office is the size of most entire mini-domes. He also has framed paintings of Earth scenes, like sunsets and mountains, on his wall.

  No one else has paintings. Cargo’s too expensive.

  “So tell me, young Tyce, what do you know that all our experts here don’t know?”

  By his tone of voice, I knew right then that I should have had Rawling bring my idea to Director Steven.

  Rawling once told me that some people didn’t like me simply because my unexpected birth here had ta
ken time and resources that weren’t planned. Rawling had explained that Director Steven was one of those people, especially because he acted like the entire Mars Project was his. The trouble was, this far from Earth, with him as commander, it basically was his project. So everybody had to do what he said.

  “Sir,” I began to explain. Now that I was here, it was too late to turn around. “I don’t think the problem is with the solar panels.”

  “I see,” he said sarcastically, running his fingers through his hair. “So it’s just our imagination that the dome is running out of oxygen.”

  It wasn’t fair that he treated me like I was just a stupid kid, not when I’d been forced to think and act like all the adults around me for as long as I could remember. If any of the adults in the dome had come in, Director Steven at least would have listened to them with respect. But I knew I couldn’t say this, of course, or he’d get mad and tell me to leave. My point was too important.

  “What I mean,” I said as firmly as I could, “is that the tekkies have taken the solar panels down twice from the railings and found absolutely nothing wrong with them.”

  “Thank you, young Tyce, for telling me something I already know,” Director Steven said mockingly. “You now have three minutes of my time left.”

  I tried to keep a polite smile on my face.

  “If it’s not the panels that are broken in some way,” I said,

  “maybe then the problem is the sunlight.”

  “This is good,” he said, leaning forward again. “Very good.”

  “It is?”

  “You have been kind enough to help me understand this

  completely.” He shook his head in disgust. “Now I’ve discovered we have to fix the sun.”

  “Sir, that’s not what I mean. What if there is something blocking the panels from getting the sun?”

  “Clouds? On Mars? Hardly. There’s no atmosphere. Although that’s our goal, we still haven’t even found plants that will survive out there long enough to begin to create an atmosphere.”

  “What about the dome itself?” I asked. “In my virtual-reality computer sessions, the protective visors get scratched because of sandstorms. Maybe over the years Martian sand has done that to the dome, and less sunlight is getting through.”

  Director Steven stood abruptly and strode out from behind his desk. In his white lab coat, he appeared even larger than he was.

  From my wheelchair, I had to lean my head back to look up at him. I hated doing that because it made me feel small—and weak.

  “Do you think we are stupid?” he thundered, looming over me. “Do you think when we designed this project we didn’t think of that? The glass of the dome is as hard as diamonds. It was made to withstand the impact of small asteroids. A million years from now, the glass will still be as clear as the day it was made.”

  “I . . . I . . . was only trying to help,” I said.

  “You think you know all the answers,” he said, his face red and furious. “Instead, you know nothing.”

  He leaned down in front of me and stared closely into my face.

  “Dr. McTigre keeps me informed of your progress in the

  virtual-reality program, you know. He told me how you failed yesterday. How the scientist attacked you instead of letting you lead all of them across the plains in a sandstorm. And let me tell you why. It’s because you didn’t bother to explain how you could do it. You just assumed if you told them something, that’s the way it was and they should listen. You should have learned yesterday that that technique doesn’t work—before you wasted my time today. You’re supposed to be smarter than that. Or are you?”

  I kept my head as steady as I could. I knew nothing I could say would make a difference. I should have known better than to try to talk to Director Steven on my own. I should have remembered that he’d made it clear on numerous occasions that he couldn’t be bothered by me—and that my presence alone under the dome had already bothered him enough over the years.

  Director Steven’s cold blue eyes bored into mine.

  “Now please leave,” he said flatly. “I have better things to do than let some teenager tell me how to run my project.”

  I went. Slowly. My wheelchair seemed like it was glued in place. Were my arms that dead already from lack of oxygen?

  I’m not sure if I cared. My ears burned from anger and

  embarrassment.

  Why did Director Steven seem to bristle every time he saw me? Did he dislike me that much? And if so, why? Was there something wrong with me?

  &+$37(5

  That night, after a very quiet and short supper, I decided to go up to the third deck, where the telescope was, because I wanted to be alone.

  It was getting more difficult to push my wheelchair, and I needed to stop for breath a couple times. Each gasp I took reminded me of how little time was left before the oxygen ran out.

  I wondered if I was breaking the new rule about resting to save oxygen. No one was jogging on the walkway. Below me, as I slowly wheeled up the catwalk, it was quiet on the main level of the dome. Most people were inside their mini-domes. But I decided that if I didn’t have long to live, I didn’t want to waste time I could spend with the telescope.

  Tonight I not only wanted to take my mind off the oxygen problem, I wanted to forget what Director Steven had said to me.

  Maybe I did think I was too smart. Maybe I did bug people.

  Wondering about all that, and thinking about how useless and young he thought I was, I didn’t like myself much either.

  The best way to escape the dome and to escape myself was with the telescope on the third level. Because if my crippled body wasn’t able to take me places, at least my eyes and mind and imagination could. For me, the telescope was freedom, something that let me travel a billion miles across the universe with a single sweep across the sky.

  I rolled into place at the eyepiece of the telescope where the dome astronomer usually sat. I allowed myself a sad smile as I lifted my hands to the controls. The one good thing about useless legs was that you never needed to look for a chair.

  I let out a deep breath as I reached the telescope controls.

  The power to the computer controls of the telescope was down as part of the director’s energy-saving program, but I knew how to find different stars and planets without the computer map.

  After all, the solar system was my backyard.

  I brought the telescope into focus. The black of the universe and the brightness of the millions and millions of stars hit me with incredible clearness. It was a clearness no one would ever see on Earth, where the air and the clouds and the particles of pollution take away the sharpness of telescopes. But not on Mars, which has nearly no atmosphere. When you sit at the telescope, it feels like you can reach out and grab the stars.

  In the next thirty seconds, Terror and Panic passed by me.

  To anyone under the dome, that was an old, old joke. The names of the two moons of Mars are Deimos and Phobos. These Greek names translate to “terror” and “panic,” because Mars was named after an ancient god of war.

  But don’t think of these moons like the one that circles Earth.

  Deimos and Phobos are tiny moons, chunks of rock not even twenty miles across. They are lumpy, not round, and they look like potatoes with craters. To us on Mars, Deimos rises in the east and sets in the west. Phobos rises in the west and sets in the east.

  They move across the sky in opposite directions. I never got tired of watching one moon pass by the other.

  Tonight, though, I wasn’t on the telescope deck to moon-watch. I wanted to see the planet Earth.

  I turned the controls and fine-tuned the focus.

  And there it was.

  A beautiful blue ball, streaked with swirling white as storms crossed the face of it. And behind it, the round white moon, bouncing the sunlight and redirecting here to Mars.

  I smiled sadly again.

  The two hundred of us here on Mars were so far awa
y. So alone in the vast solar system. To me, the Earth of DVD-gigaroms seemed so foreign, but nice—a place of people laughing and crying and falling in love and having picnics in parks and watching the sunset behind mountains and crossing oceans and flying through the air on jet planes.

  Because of the oxygen problem, I’d never have a chance to see any of that. Or any of the other incredible things about living

  on a planet that Mom says God designed to make the existence of humans possible.

  I blinked and went back to the telescope. Thinking about what I’d never see, I wanted to cry.

  But I wouldn’t allow myself to do it.

  Because out of the two hundred people under this dome, I was the only kid, and used to being alone. I’d learned early not to cry, even when I felt like it. I’d learned early that, other than my mom and Rawling, I’d have to fend for myself. Nobody else in the colony paid much attention to me.

  I stared at the Earth and the moon, hanging in the black of a universe that was so big no human mind could truly understand its size.

  I sat there a long time, thinking and wondering and feeling sad thoughts.

  Then someone tapped on my shoulder.

  It scared me so badly, I would have jumped out of my

  wheelchair if my legs had worked.

  “Relax, Tyce,” Rawling McTigre said. “It’s only me. I

  thought I’d find you here.”

  “Yeah,” I said, my heart still pounding. “You did.”

  “Look,” he said in a strange tone. “We’ve got to talk. It’s about a secret your mom and I have kept from you for a long, long time.”

  &+$37(5

  Below us, it was dim. Shadows darkened the rows and rows of plants. The mini-domes looked like black eggs rising from the ground. Only the hum of the electrical generators broke the silence. And too soon, when all the electricity died, there would be no noise at all.

  “Outside the dome,” Rawling started to say in a low voice.

  He had pulled a chair near the telescope, and sat in it facing me directly so that our eyes were at the same height. “What does it take for a human to survive outside the dome?”

  “I thought you were going to tell me a—“

  “Outside the dome,” he said again. “What does it take for a human to survive?” He spoke firmly, like he was quizzing me and wasn’t going to say another thing until I answered.