“Sure,” I replied. “You’ll know he really likes you if he offers to show you.”
“Cool.”
“Why do you want to find him?” I asked.
“He promised me a tour of the dome.”
“He spends most of his nights plugged into the electrical grid,” I said. I wasn’t going to mention that tonight he was lying in the middle of the greenhouse, destroyed by aliens.
“Oh. I know he’s just a robot. But that sounds lonely.”
“He’ll be all right. He …” I pictured the robot. Stuck in the middle of the bamboo corn. At the edge of a small gully. A gully made by water from the nozzles of the greenhouse sprinklers. Which meant the robot was directly beneath …
“He what?” Ashley asked.
I thought of the last things I’d heard and felt in the robot body. Click. Hiss. Then something cold against the body. “Got to go,” I said and started wheeling quickly away from her toward the ramp. “Good-bye.”
“But … ,” she began to protest.
I didn’t hear the rest of it. By then I was already whizzing down the ramp to find Rawling.
CHAPTER 13
I couldn’t sleep after talking with Rawling about my theory. I kept thinking about what I’d be doing the next morning. So in the quiet of the night I worked on my journal. I realized even if no one on Earth ever read it, I’d at least have it for myself. Years and years down the road, as an old man, I could reread all this and remember what it was like growing up on Mars.
Keeping that in mind, I pretended I was writing a letter to myself in the future. That made it fun as I finished explaining in my journal what had made me leave Ashley so quickly.
Aliens hadn’t stalled the robot body. It was water. At least, that was my theory.
When Ashley asked me about Bruce—a dumb name, but it stuck—and when I thought about the robot beneath the water nozzles, the last sounds and sensations made sense.
Click. That was the automatic timer.
Hiss. That was the beginning of the water spray.
And the cold sensation? Water.
My robot body had been standing at the gully where the water came down and collected. Water, then, had showered my titanium shell.
It was so obvious that after I rushed to find Rawling and tell him my theory, he groaned.
Rawling searched the computer records to find out exactly when I left the robot body and went into the thrashing fit on the bed. That time matched exactly when the automatic sprinklers in the greenhouse began to spray water. Which was not good for Bruce.
On Mars, it never rains. Water is a precious resource. The dome was established near the south, where we can get water from the polar ice cap. Because water is so scarce, no one bothered to wonder what would happen to the robot body if it got wet.
So what would happen to a robot body suddenly soaked in water? An electrical short circuit, if my theory is right.
In the morning, Rawling is going to try to hook me up to the robot body again. Then we’ll find out more about the aliens. It will only work, of course, if the robot body is still fine and we can get there before the automatic sprinklers turn on again.
But we won’t find out until morning. And if it is fine …
“Tyce?” It was my father’s voice. He knocked on the door.
“Yes,” I called.
He pushed open the door. It was dim inside my room, with only the computer monitor giving light. “Up late, aren’t you?” He was framed in the doorway with light behind him, so I couldn’t see his expression.
“I’m not a kid,” I said quickly. “Mom doesn’t tell me when to go to bed anymore.”
“Hang on,” my father said. “You don’t need to get so defensive. I didn’t say there was anything wrong with it. It was just a comment.”
“In that case,” I said, “you’re right. I am up late.”
“I don’t appreciate your tone of voice.”
Well, I thought, I don’t appreciate someone who shows up every three years and tells me what to do. But I didn’t say it. I saved my file and clicked off my computer instead. When the monitor light dimmed, only the light from the common living area lit the room.
“Good night,” I said. “I’m tired.”
“Good night? But you were just—”
“I finished my computer work. I’ve got to get up early tomorrow,” I stated flatly as I wheeled to my bed.
“Tyce, I don’t understand why you act like this. I’m only trying to talk with you—”
I cut my father’s words off. “Really, I’m very tired.”
I heard him expel a breath. Then he left the room and shut the door without another word.
It left me in complete darkness.
For some stupid reason, I felt like crying.
CHAPTER 14
“Yesterday when you were out, I ran diagnostics through the remote and couldn’t get a reading,” Rawling said. His hair had rooster points, sticking up as if he hadn’t had time to comb it yet. “But this morning everything checked out fine. If your theory about water is right, that would explain it.”
We were back in the computer lab. I’d escaped the minidome without a lecture from Mom about how my father was doing his best and that he and I should try to get along.
I nodded in agreement with Rawling. “Whatever water leaked inside would have dried up after you ran the first diagnostics.”
He checked his watch. “The next automatic watering takes place in just under an hour. I want the robot out of the greenhouse before then. Even if you’re not directly beneath a nozzle this time, you’ll still get some of the spray.”
Rawling lifted my legs onto the bed for me. He began to strap me down. “Everything checks out fine with the robot. Still, I wish we could bring it in for a visual inspection. Any other circumstances but this …”
Again, I nodded. I felt sorry for Rawling. As new director, this alien issue must be stressful. He was hours away from the deadline he’d set for himself to tell everybody under the dome about the aliens. If all he could tell them was what little we knew, it would raise the level of fear so high that his announcement could do more harm than good. We definitely needed to find out more about those aliens.
“Rawling?”
“Yes?”
“I’ve got to ask. I’ve been trying to figure it out myself, and I can’t get anywhere with it.”
“Ask.”
“What if there are aliens? So far, we don’t have any proof, except for what I might have seen, but that could be a water short circuit messing up the robot computer, or maybe me trying to imagine too hard I was seeing something. But what if there are aliens? Then how does God fit into this?”
“Why don’t you ask me the square root of 5,237,676?” Rawling fired back.
“Huh?”
He smiled. “Well, that wouldn’t be much tougher of a question than your first one.” He thought for a moment. “I’m not sure I can give you a good answer, Tyce. On one hand, it’s God’s universe, and who are we to say what he can or cannot do in it? On the other hand, as humans, we naturally want to feel he loves only us in a special way. You have a special relationship with your mom, but does that mean that she’s allowed to love only you?”
Ouch. So Rawling had noticed how I felt about my father. At least Rawling was being honest with me.
“Does that help?” he asked.
“No.” I grinned.
Rawling grinned too. “Never be afraid to ask questions about God. Even if it doesn’t look like you’ll get the answers right away. God is big enough to handle anything you might ask.”
“Sure,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Ready for the blindfold?”
“Ready.”
“Remember,” he said as he put the blindfold over my head. “If anything feels or looks strange once you get in there, give the stop command and return here. Got it?”
“Got it,” I said.
Rawling ran through our checklist.
> When we’d reviewed everything to his satisfaction, he put the soundproof headset over my ears.
In the darkness and silence of waiting, I was nervous. If my theory was wrong …
I told myself that fear wasn’t going to help me. As that thought ended, once again I began to fall off a high, invisible cliff into a deep, invisible hole. I kept falling and falling and falling… .
CHAPTER 15
I stopped falling and opened my eyes among the stalks of bamboo corn in the greenhouse. Light filtered into my front video lens. Mentally, I blinked. The robot had no need to blink the way I did in my human body, but it felt natural and brought the green of the bamboo corn into focus.
I turned the video lens upward and brought the ceiling of the greenhouse into focus. I’d been right. Directly above me was a sprinkler nozzle. It would have completely flooded my robot body with water.
As Rawling had instructed me, I began a checklist of the other robot senses.
Sight, of course, was operational.
I went to hearing next. Without moving, I strained for any unusual sounds.
What reached me was the distant sigh of wind moving through small rips in the plastic fabric of the greenhouse tent. No scurrying of alien creatures. And something else. Something strange.
I turned up my hearing volume.
There it was. A slow and steady and very soft thump-thump-thump-thump. Like a heartbeat? Or heartbeats?
Sight and sound worked fine. Maybe too fine. The heartbeats made me feel like I was in some kind of horror movie.
“Hello?” I said. My voice worked fine too.
My robot body couldn’t smell or taste. So I let my mind go to the last of the senses. Touch. I became aware of another sensation through my robot body. Weight. And warmth. In my right hand.
The robot was so strong that I hadn’t noticed the weight at first. To my senses, it felt like a watch on a human’s wrist. Almost no weight at all. But there was definitely weight and warmth hitting the sensors embedded in the titanium of my three fingers.
I slowly turned my front video lens downward. At the same time, I lifted my right hand.
At first all I saw was a blurry darkness. From looking upward at the ceiling, my focus had been set on a distance farther away. Like an automatic camera, the lens zoomed in to make an adjustment.
When I saw what I was holding, I finally realized where the thump-thump-thump came from.
It was a heartbeat—from the small Martian creature gripped securely in my titanium fingers.
CHAPTER 16
I shouted Stop! in my mind.
Instantly I was back in my body. My human body. On the bed in the computer lab. “Rawling,” I said as calmly as I could.
I didn’t hear his reply, though, not with the soundproof headset over my ears.
Seconds later, he took off my blindfold and removed the headset. “You all right?” He looked worried. He quickly began to unstrap me from the bed.
“I’m all right,” I answered. “Don’t unstrap me. I want to go back. I just needed to ask you something. Not via robot but person to person.” It felt strange, staring straight up at the ceiling while I talked.
“Ask away.”
“Well,” I said. This was going to be fun. Which is why I wanted to ask my question in person. “What do you want me to do with the alien I captured?”
“What!” Rawling shouted in my ear.
“Alien,” I repeated. “I’ve got it in my hand. My robot hand. You want me to let it go? Or bring it into the dome?”
“Alien! What’s it look like? How’d you capture it so quickly? Is it alive? dead? Talk to me!” he said excitedly.
I was right. This was fun. “Remember I told you all these dark objects were jumping toward me as I blacked out in the greenhouse?”
Rawling nodded.
“I brought my hands up to protect myself,” I said. “One of them must have jumped into my hand. As the robot lost power, the fingers locked into place. The poor thing must have been stuck in the robot hand for nearly 24 hours.”
“Poor thing?”
“It’s almost cute.” I stopped myself. “Correction: it is cute.” I tried to think of a way to explain it. I had to rely on photos I’d seen in the digital encyclopedia. “It looks like a mixture between a koala bear and a small puppy. It has thick dark hair, a mixture of brown and black. Not much for a nose. Big paws. Big eyes, two of them. Four legs. Two ears that hang down. A mouth.”
“But small enough to fit in your hand.”
“Not really,” I said. I had seen photos of people holding cats and dogs, so I had an idea of the size of those animals. “Bigger than a cat. I caught it under the front legs. Most of the body is hanging out of my hand.”
“Alive?”
“Yes. But not really doing much. I think it’s close to dead.”
“Unbelievable,” Rawling said. He drew a sharp breath, then let it out with a whistle.
“Believe it. That’s why I’m back. I didn’t know if you wanted me to bring it to the dome or not. I didn’t want to do anything until I’d talked to you about it.”
“Yes, bring it back,” he said. A second later, he shook his head. “No. It might die in dome air if it’s not used to breathing oxygen.”
Rawling began to pace the room. “What if it’s carrying alien viruses or alien bacteria? If we bring it into the dome, who knows what damage those viruses could do to human bodies? Especially human bodies in a closed space like this.”
He paced more. “But if it’s close to dying, we need to try to save it. Do you have any idea what it would mean to science to be able to examine a living alien life-form?”
“How about if you drive a platform buggy out to the cornfield?” I asked. “Wear a space suit, and let all the oxygen out of the platform dome. I’ll bring the alien out to you, and you can examine it in the platform buggy.”
Rawling stopped pacing. “Brilliant. Very brilliant. I’ll take Jim Harrington with me. He’s the best geneticist we have.”
With Rawling’s praise, I felt proud—like he was my father. It was too bad my father and I couldn’t talk like this.
“One other thing before you put me back in the robot body,” I told Rawling.
“What’s that?”
“When you leave the dome in the platform buggy, make sure you take some water for our little friend.”
“Water?”
“Yes. Where I was standing was right below a sprinkler. I don’t think those creatures were attacking me. I think they wanted water. When they heard the clicking of the automatic timer, they knew the sprinklers were about to start. I think they wanted to get at the water in that little gully before it evaporated.”
CHAPTER 17
I opened my eyes again in the robot body. The little koalabear alien was still in my right hand.
I rolled away from the gully and began wheeling toward the entrance of the greenhouse.
I stopped. Had I heard correctly? I turned up my hearing.
Yes. It was a mewing sound, coming from the little alien in my hand. I lifted it and looked directly into its large brown eyes. With its last energy, it was trying to call out.
I heard another mewing sound answer from somewhere in the bamboo corn nearby.
My visual only showed thick green leaves, so I switched to infrared.
There it was! A glowing red shape, maybe 10 feet away, the size of the alien in my hand. It was calling to the alien I was taking away.
I switched back to visual. The alien’s large dark eyes made me feel sorry for it. I reminded myself that these creatures had attacked Timothy Neilson and ripped his space suit to shreds.
It mewed again.
“Sorry, little guy,” I said in a soft voice. “I do not have much choice. We will get you some water, and maybe you will feel better.”
Was it my imagination, or did it perk up at the sound of my voice?
I began to wheel toward the entrance again. The mewing followed me to the ed
ge of the bamboo corn.
At the entrance, I switched to the rear lens and looked for the other alien. It stayed hidden as I left the greenhouse, but the mewing grew louder, as if the creature was saying good-bye to the alien I’d captured.
Great, I thought. Now I am a galactic bully.
I turned my focus ahead, toward the dome. The sky had turned from early-morning butterscotch to a reddish pink. The sun was a dark blue. The wind had dropped, and the temperature had risen. It was a great day to be outside on Mars in a robot body. A great day, that is, for sightseeing.
But I had other duties.
In the empty space of sand between the dome and the greenhouse, I saw the platform buggy on its giant wheels racing toward me and headed forward to meet it. As it got closer, I saw two men in space suits. I couldn’t see their faces behind the dark visors, but I guessed it was Rawling McTigre and Jim Harrington. Dust sprayed me and the little alien as the monstrous vehicle lurched to a stop in front of us.
One of the space-suited men stepped out of the small, clear dome on top of the platform. He carried a Plexiglas cage in one hand and held the railing with the other as he climbed down the ladder. When he dropped lightly on the ground, he opened the cage without saying a single word of greeting. His visor was as dark as sunglasses, and I couldn’t see his face.
“Rawling?” I queried.
Still silent, the man extended the cage toward me.
“Dr. Harrington?”
No reply. The man in the space suit just pointed at the empty cage.
I obeyed his unspoken command and gently put the alien inside.
The man turned around and began climbing up the ladder.
“Is Rawling with you?” I shouted. “Can you tell me what is happening?”
The man ignored me and continued his ascent. Seconds later he entered the platform buggy’s dome. And seconds after that, the platform buggy jerked forward, turned, and sped back toward the dome.
Strange. Very strange.
It seemed like I was no longer part of this. Even if it did look as if I’d discovered the first alien life-form known to humankind.
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