Death Trap

by Sigmund Brouwer

  CHAPTER 18

  When I woke up on the bed in the computer lab, I was alone.

  At least I thought I was alone. Because I was blindfolded and wearing the soundproof headset, I had no way of knowing if anyone else was in the room. And because I was strapped to the bed, I couldn’t move my hands to lift the blindfold.

  “Hello?” I called out into the dark silence. “Rawling?

  Anyone?” I waited.

  Nothing.

  Five minutes later, still nothing. I was glad I didn’t have to go to the bathroom.

  Another five minutes, still nothing.

  I shouted, “Rawling! Anyone!”

  This was not fun. I had parked the robot body in a dry part of the greenhouse and given the stop command to return to my body on this bed. Now I felt like a prisoner.

  “Rawling! Anyone!”

  When the touch to my shoulder came, I nearly had a heart attack. The straps were undone first. That should have been my first clue. Rawling always took off the soundproof headset first, then the blindfold.

  As soon as my arms were free, I lifted my hands and pulled off my blindfold. Then my headset. “Oh,” I said. “Hi.”

  “I was looking for you,” my father said. “And from what your mom’s told me about your recent virtual-reality simulations with the robot, I figured you might be at the lab. I’d just reached the door when I heard you call out.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You all right?” He looked tired and worried. I could tell he hadn’t shaved yet, and his hair was messy. Because of all the love on his face, I wanted to tell him I was sorry for being such a jerk the night before.

  But I just couldn’t do it. So I simply said, “Yes, I’m all right.”

  “I thought you were always supposed to be under supervision,” my father said. “Where’s Rawling?”

  “Right here.” While my father and I were talking, Rawling had stepped into the room.

  My father faced Rawling. “This is unusual. I thought he was supposed to be under supervision.”

  “Yes,” Rawling snapped. “Believe me. This is unusual.”

  I struggled to sit up on the bed. “What’s happening?” I asked angrily. “Out there you don’t say a word when you arrive with the platform buggy. I wake up here and I’m all alone. It’s like once you had the—”

  Rawling cut off my words. “Could Tyce and I speak in private?” he asked my father.

  “Not until you tell me what’s going on,” my father replied firmly.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” Rawling said. “I’ll explain soon. But for security reasons, I need to speak with your son in private.”

  My father didn’t reply to Rawling. Instead he said to me, “Are you all right with that?”

  I was glad he allowed me to speak for myself. I nodded.

  “I’ll go,” my father told Rawling, “but I’ve already seen enough to make me wonder what’s going on. Let me tell you this. Mess with Tyce, and you mess with me. Got it? As Tyce’s dad, I won’t fight his battles for him, but I’ll fight his battles with him.”

  I was surprised at his tone. And suddenly proud. I almost asked him to stay.

  But he marched out too fast, the anger showing in his quick steps and the straightness of his shoulders.

  “You left me alone out there,” I said to Rawling. “Then alone in here. And what about the alien?”

  “There was no alien,” he said.

  “Sure there was,” I argued. “I saw you take it into the dome. It was—”

  “There was no alien,” Rawling said. “It’s that simple. No alien. Now I suggest you go back to your minidome.”

  “But—”

  “No alien. I refuse to talk about this subject with you anymore.” Despite his stern words, Rawling seemed to be quietly pleading with me.

  Confused by his sudden change in attitude, I wondered what was making him act this way. It had to be something beyond his control. Still, it made me mad. “Come on. You can’t—”

  “I can do anything I want. I’m the director of the Mars Project, and I have almost unlimited authority. Please don’t make me call security to escort you to your minidome.” With that, Rawling turned and left too.

  CHAPTER 19

  “Hello, Mr. Neilson,” I said kindly to the man on the hospital bed. “Glad to see you’re doing better.”

  If his condition hadn’t been so serious—he’d been in a coma—I might have wanted to laugh at how he looked. He was completely bald, and his face sagged with wrinkles so he resembled a round-headed basset hound. His eyes were black and blue from where he had slammed against his space-suit visor.

  “I’m glad to be doing better,” he answered.

  I nodded. “I have to tell you, when I picked you up in the greenhouse, it looked pretty bad.” I was probably fishing for a compliment, expecting he might thank me for saving his life, because he’d said so little since I wheeled into the hospital room to visit him.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Neilson replied.

  Then I realized he’d hit his head hard enough to knock himself out. The space suit had lost air and heat. No wonder he couldn’t remember. So I tried to fill him in. “No one told you? You were in the greenhouse. Something was chasing you. You fell down. Your space suit was ripped. They sent a robot in to get you.”

  “It’s not good to make up stories,” he said, frowning at me.

  “I’m not,” I insisted.

  “I was collecting rock samples,” Neilson explained. “I fell and tumbled for quite a distance. Jagged rocks ripped my space suit. Meds in a platform buggy rescued me.”

  Why was he lying? Nobody collected rock samples in the greenhouse. “I was there,” I said. “I saw different.”

  “You were there? A kid in a wheelchair?”

  “I mean I was there, controlling a robot body. I saw the path in the greenhouse where you’d been running.”

  “Not true.”

  “But I can prove it. There was a voice recording. You said something was chasing you. I heard it. That’s why I’m here. To ask you about that.”

  “You’re mistaken. Stop bothering me with this nonsense. I need to rest.”

  “Nonsense? It’s not nonsense. It’s—”

  “Med! Med!” Timothy Neilson called loudly to another room. “Could you ask this young man to leave? He persists in bothering me.”

  Seconds later, a large man appeared with Rawling behind him.

  “Tyce,” Rawling said sternly, “this man needs recovery time. He took a bad spill down a cliff. Maybe you should go now.”

  “Down a cliff! Come on. He was in—”

  “Enough,” Rawling warned me. “Say good-bye.”

  I could tell it was useless to argue.

  “Furthermore,” Rawling continued, “I suggest you talk about this with no one else. Including your parents.”

  “Or else?” I said angrily, not believing this was the Rawling I’d known for years. What had gotten into him?

  “Or else they will be shipped back to Earth,” he said bluntly.

  I turned my wheelchair and pushed past him. I was getting kicked out. Just like a half hour earlier, I’d been kicked out of Dr. Harrington’s office when I’d gone to ask him how the alien was doing.

  Now I was really, really mad.

  CHAPTER 20

  I was beginning to find that writing in my journal helped me get my thoughts straight. Early in the evening, instead of going to the telescope as I often did, I stayed in our minidome and began to type on the keyboard.

  I wrote all the things I knew for sure about what had happened.

  Earlier in the day I captured an alien. Two men in space suits met me in a platform buggy and took the alien into the dome. Since then Rawling has pretended the alien doesn’t exist. Dr. Harrington refuses to talk to me. Timothy Neilson acts like he wasn’t attacked by these aliens.

  I was in the middle of a big stretch and yawn when I thought of something else. I b
anged away at my keyboard.

  Something is strange. Rawling told me he didn’t want the alien inside the dome because our air might kill it and because it might have alien viruses or alien bacteria that might hurt humans. But the men in the space suits immediately took the alien into the dome. Does that mean they already knew it was safe for the alien and for us? If it is safe, could that mean it isn’t truly an alien?

  That’s as far as I got with my journal. I knew who could help me with this question.

  “Mom!” I shouted. “Mom!” I pushed away from the computer and rolled toward my door. “Mom! Mom!”

  She met me at the doorway.

  “I have to ask you something.”

  “That’s it? Yelling like that and all you have is a question?”

  “A big question. About genetic experiments.”

  Mom moved to my bed and sat on the edge.

  I wheeled around to face her. “How does it work? When you try to make a different kind of plant? You know, the DNA and stuff like that.”

  “How long an answer do you want?”

  “Short. Like an overview.”

  She nodded. “Picture a circle with a dot in the center.”

  “Done.”

  “That’s a simple drawing of a cell under a microscope. The circle is the outer wall. Everything inside the circle and around the dot is plasma with nutrients. The dot in the center is the nucleus. The nucleus is the computer software that runs the cell. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “As a biologist, I can only marvel at how the nucleus is so simple yet so complex. It contains the DNA you mentioned, which is microscopic strands of protein. This protein is in the form of a double helix, which is the shape of a ladder that has been twisted into a spiral. Still with me?”

  “Still with you.”

  “The double helix shape lets the DNA duplicate perfectly, so that one cell can photocopy itself a trillion times and it will still be a perfect copy, no mistakes. That’s important to genetic experiments. Very important.”

  “Important,” I said.

  “Let’s talk about flies, for example. Every creature, including a human, begins as one cell. That cell divides and divides and divides. As it divides, the DNA of the cells programs the different cells to specialize. Some cells become skin cells, other cells become eye cells, and so on.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “What’s absolutely mind-boggling,” Mom said, showing her excitement for her work, “is that the DNA packed into that single first cell contains the entire genetic code for that creature or plant. One cell, hundreds of times smaller than the head of a pin, contains the blueprint to build a fly. Or a sheep. Or a monkey. DNA is incredible. That’s partly why I first began to believe in God—because it was too difficult to believe that something this amazing could develop by accident.”

  I nodded. “Experiments …”

  “Yes. Experiments. Decades ago, back in the 20th century, scientists realized it would be very simple to change a species. All they had to do was change the DNA when it was at the one-cell stage. Let me put it this way. Is it easier to change a trillion cells, or is it easier to change the original cell and let the changes in that first cell be programmed into every cell as it divides?”

  “No-brainer,” I said. “Get to the first cell.”

  “That’s what they did. I remember reading about one of the first genetic experiments on fruit flies. Scientists changed the DNA that programmed eye growth. When these flies hatched, they had up to 14 pairs of eyes. Eyes on their legs, wings, backs, chest. Scientists had created mutant flies.”

  “Wow.”

  “Then in the 1990s scientists learned how to clone animals, and suddenly genetics became scary. It was possible to literally create new species.”

  “Could they do this to humans?”

  Mom rubbed her face. “Yes. Even before the year 2000, the technology to do this was possible. And then the worst happened. An unethical scientist not only cloned humans but also experimented on them to make them taller and stronger. They nicknamed him the new Dr. Frankenstein. He made a mistake, however, and his clones were born without arms. That was AD 2020. It made such an uproar that the government finally stepped in. Very strict laws were created and enforced.”

  “But,” I said, “it is possible to try to create new species.”

  “It’s possible. For the last 30 years, continuing public outrage has made it difficult for scientists on Earth to get funding for any genetic experiments of that type.” She smiled. “Plant experiments are one thing, but on animals, no way. Just like smoking in public places or drinking and driving, it has become unthinkable.”

  “On Earth,” I said thoughtfully. “Unthinkable on Earth.”

  Mom snorted. “Unthinkable anywhere in the solar system. If anyone tried it on Mars and the public on Earth found out, it would threaten the billions of dollars of government support needed to keep this project going forward.”

  “Thanks,” I told her.

  “Why are you asking all of this?”

  “Curiosity,” I answered. “And you’ve been a big help.”

  She had been. Genetic experiments to create an animal that would survive on Mars would be top secret.

  Now I had to find a way to prove that those experiments existed.

  CHAPTER 21

  “Greetings, earthling.” I found Ashley in the same spot I always went when I wanted to be alone. Up at the telescope.

  She jumped. “Bruce!”

  “Yes. You remember me, then.”

  I was in the robot body, of course. Back in the computer lab, in my wired jumpsuit, I had set up the software by myself. My own body was in the wheelchair, with the blindfold and headset I’d put on myself. The only risk I was taking was that I might move in the wheelchair and break the connection. If that happened, I convinced myself it would not damage my body. I hoped. And I also hoped that Rawling wouldn’t stop by the lab during the time I was hooked up to the robot’s body.

  “Remember you? Certainly. You promised me a tour of the dome.”

  “You will have your tour,” I continued in my cheesy robot voice. “However, I wish for you to help me first.”

  “Sure. It’s not like I have anything else to do.” Ashley put her hand on my robot shoulder. “That kid Tyce was talking about you. Do you know him?”

  “Yes. A very fine human specimen. Smart. Handsome. Witty. You would do well to spend much time with him.”

  “Huh. Last time we talked, he ran away.”

  “It must have been important business,” I said. “Perhaps later tonight you will see him.”

  “Well,” she said, smiling, “there is a reason I was waiting up here. Not many guys I know can talk science like he does.”

  “Perhaps you find him to be, as you humans say, appealing in a handsome way?”

  “What kind of robot are you?”

  I decided to change the subject. “One in need of help. Please.”

  “Back to that again. What would you like me to do?”

  I explained in my finest nasal robot voice.

  She agreed.

  CHAPTER 22

  Five minutes later, I was on the Martian landscape.

  I had needed Ashley to help me leave the dome. Alongside the large doors that allowed platform buggies to come in and out, there was a set of small doors to give entrance or exit for men and women in space suits. Ashley had punched in the number sequence on the control pad and promised to wait to let me in when I returned.

  I did not expect it to take long. I needed five minutes to get to the greenhouse, five minutes to return, and however long it would take me inside to accomplish my mission.

  My wheels whirred along the hard-packed sand. The sky was dark. A ghostly white object whizzed overhead. Phobos—one of the Martian moons. I knew if I waited outside, soon I would see Deimos, the other moon, whizzing in the opposite direction.

  But I wasn’t going to wait.

  I had a s
mall cage in one hand and a container of water in the other. I was gambling that I knew why the alien creatures stayed in the greenhouse. I believed they needed the oxygen given off by the plants to survive as well as the water that came down from the automatic sprinklers.

  If I was right about a few things, it wouldn’t take me long to capture another one.

  And I was right, at least about one thing. There were more of them inside. Or at least one.

  Within a minute of going inside, among the darkness of the plants, my infrared spotted a tiny red glow. It was exactly where I’d left behind the second alien earlier. As if it was waiting for its friend to return.

  Would I be right about my second guess?

  Since the robot body gave off no heat and no human smell, I hoped the creatures wouldn’t be afraid of it.

  As for my third guess, I’d find out as soon as I opened the water container.

  I put the cage down, opened the water container, and set it inside the cage. I did not back away from the cage. If my second and third guesses were right …

  My infrared showed the second alien moving closer, at first slowly, then quickly. Had it smelled the water?

  Yes!

  It came out of the darkness of the bamboo corn and into the open.

  Would it be afraid of the presence of my robot body?

  No!

  It moved almost to the cage, so close that I could have bent down and grabbed it.

  I didn’t, of course. I wanted it in the cage.

  Ten seconds later, it stepped inside and began to lap at the water.

  I saw the red glows of other creatures approaching, drawn by the water they must have sensed as it evaporated quickly in the dry atmosphere.

  All I needed, however, was one. This one. The friend to the one I had captured earlier. I snapped the cage shut before the creature could move away from the water.

  I had it! The first step of my plan had gone off without a hitch.

  Unfortunately, that was only the beginning of what I needed to do during the rest of the evening.

  CHAPTER 23