We reached the log bridge that crossed over a narrow crevasse. The cave system was close, a little ways past Penny’s favorite waterfall, where the land started to climb steeply toward the jagged mountains.
I had just put my foot carefully up onto the log, clenching my stomach at the view of rushing water in the shadows far below, when the Robot’s hand gripped my shoulder. Remember how I said there were only three words he ever said, and they were bad news?
Well, he said them:
“Danger, Will Robinson.”
CHAPTER
I froze, pulling my foot back from the log and scanning the forest around us. It was still quiet, except for my breathing and the hum of the Robot’s systems.
Then I heard a crunch. And another. Footsteps. Big, heavy ones. I leaned back against the Robot. He was looking off to the right, so I peered in that direction. More crunches in a rapid, steady rhythm. Like running.
“Is it a mothasaur?” I whispered. We’d crossed paths with them before out this way.
The Robot didn’t answer. His lights had gone almost completely still, like they were hovering.
The footsteps pounded and the ground began to quake. Now I heard branches snapping, roots tearing—it sounded like this thing was in a hurry.
“Should we run?” I asked, but the Robot stayed still.
A blur of movement in the corner of my eye. The big creature burst out of the bushes on the far side of the crevasse. Its body was armor-plated and it looked like a cross between an old Earth rhino and a stegosaurus. It was running at a heavy gallop, trampling everything in its path. A second creature broke through behind it.
The Robot’s fingers flexed, and his whole body seemed to tense.
“No,” I said, even though my heart was pounding. “Remember, we don’t hurt them if we don’t have to. Got it?” They mainly fed on those moths—and plants, too, I think—but they didn’t seem to mind the idea of making us into a meal when we got in their way.
The Robot made a whooshing sound kind of like a sigh.
“They’re not very interested in us anyway.”
The mothasaurs charged right by, parallel to the crevasse. The one in the lead tilted its big head toward us for a second, but it seemed like it was more concerned with where it was going.…
Or what it was running from.
“Hey,” I said, pointing to the second creature. “I think it’s injured.” There was a long gash along its back flank, oozing purple blood.
“Danger,” the Robot repeated.
The creatures thundered past and disappeared into the brush. As their noise faded I turned to the Robot. He was still gazing in the direction they’d come from. His lights had changed to the figure-eight pattern. “You’re not talking about them, are you? The danger is from something else.”
The forest grew silent again. I tapped my communicator and refreshed my scan of the area.
“What’s that?” A new bright dot had appeared to the north. A white blinking light that I’d never seen before. I held my communicator out for the Robot to see. “There’s something up there, emitting a ton of energy.… It’s right by that north section of caves.” We hadn’t explored there yet, either, but from my scans, those caves had looked less expansive than the ones to the south. I tapped the flashing dot and cycled through different frequency filters to analyze the source, but the results were the same each time: COMPOSITION UNKNOWN.
“Could it be a piece of your ship? Or maybe it’s another part of the Resolute,” I said. “We should probably investigate.”
I stepped back onto the log bridge—
The Robot’s hand gripped my shoulder again.
“Danger.”
“Yeah, I know there’s danger.” I felt a flash of frustration. Sometimes, the Robot could be worse than Mom with trying to protect me. When those eels had been eating our fuel supply, he’d even locked me in a supply closet. I knew he’d been trying his best to keep me safe, but I was stuck in there for hours. “If that’s a part of one of our ships, it could be important. We’re right here, and everyone else is busy.”
I checked the scan again. Whatever this thing was, it was giving off a massive amount of energy. “Trust me, okay? But keep your sensors peeled. If it really is dangerous, we’ll take off. Deal?”
The Robot’s lights made a spiraling pattern like he wasn’t happy, but he moved his hand off my shoulder.
I crossed the log bridge, holding my arms out to either side for balance. The Robot waited until I was on the other side to cross himself. We pushed through the heavy underbrush, following the mothasaurs’ path of trampled leaves and broken branches. As the ground became more uneven and the trail steeper, I started to see the shadows of the mountains through the trees.
We emerged from the forest briefly and crossed a shallow area of the stream. The water was still swirling with mud from where the mothasaurs had run through it, and there was a large, cascading waterfall to our left. The caves were close now.
We ducked back into the shadows and traveled a little farther, until we finally reached the spot where the forest met a high wall of crumbling rock. Between the edge of the trees and that cliff, there was a flat, smooth area of ground with a long rectangular pit. The pit ran parallel to the cliff and had straight sides and square corners, as if someone had dug it. From my current position, it was deep enough that I couldn’t see the bottom.
On the other side of the pit, I spotted a jagged triangular hole in the wall; it looked like an entrance to the north section of the cave complex.
Suddenly, my communicator started to beep and flash with a warning: RADIATION SOURCE DETECTED.
“I think whatever’s giving off the signal is in there,” I said, pointing to the pit. I stepped out of the bushes, but the Robot didn’t move. “Come on. It won’t kill us to take a quick look.”
I moved carefully to the edge of the pit. It was even deeper than I expected. Like, if I fell in, it would be way over my head. Deep enough that there was a shadow over the bottom, but that couldn’t dim the brilliant white light that was shining down there, so bright that I had to shield my eyes.
“Whoa. Do you see this?”
The Robot joined me at the edge.
At first it seemed like the whole floor of the pit was glowing, but as my eyes adjusted, I saw that the light was really coming from long cylinders. There were six of them lying on their sides. Each one was a couple of meters long; standing straight up, one cylinder would probably be taller than the Robot. The cylinders had smooth metal sections at each end, and their middles were made of some clear material, like glass. I squinted and could just make out what looked like chunks of glowing mineral inside.
Another warning began to beep on my communicator: RADIATION LEVELS CRITICAL.
I opened my scanner, zoomed in on the glowing mineral, and tapped ANALYZE.
The status bar blinked and then reported: SUBSTANCE UNKNOWN.
“Are those from your ship?” But even as I asked I knew that didn’t make sense. If these were parts of the Robot’s crashed ship, they wouldn’t be arranged neatly like this.
The Robot just gazed at the cylinders.
“Well, they’re definitely not from the Resolute. They sort of look like batteries. Could they be fuel cells? Maybe that mineral is an energy source?”
The Robot kept looking at them.
“But fuel cells for what? And why are they lined up like that? It’s like someone put them here on purpose.”
My radiation sensor beeped more urgently.
“Okay, okay,” I said to it. Also, I was maybe starting to feel a burning sensation on my arms and face. I stepped back from the edge of the pit so that the cylinders were out of sight. Blinking at the leftover brightness in my eyes, I peered around the pit and spotted something else.
“Check it out,” I said, circling to the other side. The Robot didn’t follow. “Come on.” He trudged after me, looking over his shoulder as he did. “You think those mothasaurs are coming back?
” He was probably right. They were easily spooked, but they were also territorial.
I crouched on the far side of the pit and ran my fingers over the ground. There were large depressions in the soil, like tracks. They were wide and rounded, almost circular, and definitely not mothasaur. And it wasn’t just one set—well, unless whatever made them had a lot of legs. It looked more like a few different sets had followed the same path: The tracks made a straight line from the pit to the cave entrance.
Something crashed in the trees. Now a snorting growl.
“Danger, Will Robinson.”
“Okay, okay, we’ll go. Just one sec.”
I slipped off my backpack and got out my video recorder and its trigger stick, then held it in front of my face and hit RECORD. “This is Will Robinson of twenty-fourth colonist group. I am”—I checked my map—“approximately three kilometers northwest of our camp, and I have just made a major discovery.” I rotated the camera to take in our surroundings, and then zoomed in first on the pit, then the footprints. “It seems like someone—I don’t know if we’re talking human or some other life-form or what—put these containers here on purpose and then went into that cave. I mean”—I moved the camera around the clearing—“I don’t see any footprints coming from anywhere else, or going anywhere.… Is it possible they came out of there? That wouldn’t make any sense unless… well, unless there are beings living in the cave complex. An advanced race by the look of those cylinders. I don’t see how that’s possible, but—”
A mothasaur roared.
“Okay, more in a minute,” I said to the camera. “First we’ve got to shake these creatures.” I clicked it off. “Ready?” I said to the Robot.
But he had turned back toward the edge of the clearing, and I saw that it was too late. The triangular head of one of the mothasaurs was peering out of the brush on the far side of the pit.
Another growl: The second one appeared to our right, edging toward us. To our left, the cliff wall curved and gave way to broken piles of rock slabs that would be almost impossible to climb over.
“I, um,” I said, “I think they have us cornered.”
CHAPTER
My heart pounded. I could feel myself tensing up, like my muscles were made of metal, my joints made of gears. I took a step backward. As if that was a signal, the mothasaurs stepped forward and growled louder.
The Robot looked at me, then back at the creatures. He lifted his hand and flexed his fingers, and the metallic bands around his back began to rise and move.
“No!” I said, grasping his forearm. He was changing into the version of himself that fought, the one that was bad. I knew he wouldn’t hurt me when he was like that, but still…“We don’t need that. Not yet. Remember, only if we have to, right?”
The Robot’s bands returned to their normal position.
“Good,” I said, except he looked at me like he was waiting for instructions, and I had no idea how we were going to solve our current problem. The Robot wasn’t going to fight the mothasaurs, but we couldn’t outrun them, and they had us boxed in. Which left that cave entrance. Would we be safe there? I took a deep breath. Had to think!
When Mom and Judy wanted to solve a problem, they made lists of pros and cons.
I glanced back at the cave entrance. Pro: It was tall, but pretty narrow. A mothasaur probably couldn’t fit through it, so if we went in there, maybe we’d be out of their reach. Except, con: We’d be stuck in a cave. A cave with strange tracks leading into it… But, pro: Maybe we wouldn’t have to be in there long before the mothasaurs got bored and wandered off. Only, con: What if that took until after dark, or even later? And we couldn’t radio for help, because Mom and Dad were too far away, and I didn’t want to bring Judy and Penny face-to-face with these things.
Another growl, another step forward.
The cave seemed like the only option that didn’t immediately end in fighting or being chewed to pieces. I sized up the distance between us and the entrance. We could beat the mothasaurs there, right?
“Okay, get ready to follow me,” I said.
The Robot looked at me, then back at the cave, then back at me. His lights had begun to swirl quickly.
“I know,” I said. “But it’s our best shot. Ready? On three.” I counted down, and then spun and sprinted for the cave.
The Robot ran right beside me with his giant strides.
The mothasaurs screeched, their hooves pounding right behind us.
Come on! I thought, pumping my legs as fast as I could. Almost there… I lunged and stumbled into the mouth of the cave, plunging into darkness. The Robot twisted sideways to fit through, his back scraping on the rock. He was barely inside when the first mothasaur’s snout came snapping through. As it shoved its way into the entrance, I saw that I might be wrong, that if the mothasaur wanted to, it probably could wriggle through that opening.
I took another step back into the dark, my quick breaths making clouds in the cool cave air. This space was shaped like a tunnel, the rock walls fairly smooth, with some small stalactites hanging from the ceiling, not far above the Robot’s head. If the mothasaur did come in, it might not want to follow us too far into the dark, but if we went farther into the tunnel, we’d have to go slow to be sure we didn’t fall into a bottomless fissure. The mothasaur was thrashing and snorting and it had already gotten its front legs through.…
The Robot looked at me again.
“Yeah,” I said, “I think we might have to go with plan B.…”
But just then the creature stopped advancing. It sniffed the air, its snout working, and then roared, but this sounded different. It shook its head and backed out of the entrance. Once it was outside, it snorted and twisted toward its hind leg. This was the one with the wound there. It retreated a few more steps and then ran around the pit to where the other creature was still standing. They growled at each other and then leered back at us, but they stayed where they were.
“Okay,” I said, breathing hard. “See? No problem.” Except my insides were twisted in a knot. I looked at the cave floor and saw those same heavy tracks leading past us and into the darkness, where the tunnel sloped gently out of sight, and I felt pretty sure that the mothasaur hadn’t backed off because of us; it was scared of what had given it that wound. The same thing that had made those tracks.
I tried to peer deeper into the tunnel, but my eyes hadn’t adjusted from being outside, and I still had green blobs from looking at those radioactive cylinders. That said, nothing seemed to be walking out of that dark toward us, at least not yet.
“Well, I guess now we wait them out.” The two creatures had begun to pace along the far side of the pit. They didn’t seem interested in coming any closer, and yet they also didn’t seem interested in leaving. “They’ll get hungry and go eventually, right?”
The Robot just watched them.
I tapped my communicator and tried to call the Jupiter, but I didn’t have a signal. “Must be the cave walls,” I said.
I looked around the floor. Other than those tracks, the dirt was smooth and damp. There was a stick lying half inside the entrance. I edged out and bent to grab it, which made one of the mothasaurs roar, but they still kept their distance.
“Here,” I said, scraping the stick on the floor. “I still need to teach you tic-tac-toe.” The Robot and I had started to play once before, but we hadn’t had a chance to get very far before we’d gotten interrupted.
I etched the grid in the dirt. “So, the goal is to get three in a row. I’ll be Xs and you can be Os.” I drew an X in the middle square. “Now it’s your turn.” The Robot bent and made a circle with his finger in the square to the left of mine. Then I drew an X in the square above mine. The Robot drew an O beside it, on the same side as his other one. “No,” I said. “I mean, see, now I can win.” I drew an X in the bottom middle, and drew a line over the three. “You want to get three, but you also want to stop me from getting three.”
We started again and I drew my first X i
n the corner and decided to let him win to see if he got it. He won in three moves.
“Okay, quick learner. Or did you let me win that first game?”
The Robot bent and erased the squares. We tied, and tied again, and tied a third time, and then I got sort of distracted and the Robot won again.
“We’re going to need a harder game,” I said. “How’s it going out there?” I looked out of the tunnel entrance. Now that my eyes had adjusted to the dark, I had to squint. The mothasaurs were still on the other side of the trench, though one had lain down. “Maybe they’ll nap or something.” I felt my stomach rumble. “I’m gonna have a snack.”
I twisted to reach my backpack—
Something caught my eye from farther down the tunnel. Had that been movement? No… but there was a light. It was faint and pale green, and for a moment I thought it was just my eyes making stuff up.
But no, it was really there: an eerie greenish glow coming from somewhere out of sight.
“Hey,” I said, tapping the Robot’s arm. “Do you see that?”
His head swiveled and cocked to the side. For a moment, his processors hummed. “Danger.”
“Yeah, what else is new?” I said in a half whisper.
What could possibly be down there making light?
And now I thought I heard something: a faint whir… but steady, almost like a machine. It might have just been a trick, like that time back on Earth when Mom had told us to listen inside this giant seashell so that we could hear the ocean.
The green light flickered a little. There was a slight hitch in that whirring sound.
This wasn’t a trick. There was something down there.
I took a step forward without even realizing it. The Robot held his hand in front of me. I knew I should probably listen to him, but at the same time…“Come on,” I said. “It’s like with those battery things outside. It’s our duty to check this out.” I knew I sounded braver than I felt, that really, there was no way I would have walked farther into that cave without a giant, super-powerful robot at my side.… But hey, why have a Robot friend if you’re not going to be a little braver?
Lost in Space Page 2
