90_Minutes_to_Live
Page 27
That had been enough for the university’s botanist, Dr. Hez Ramzallah, to authorize sending a sample to NASA.
Three days later, a plain white van pulled up at the Pietro house.
* * *
“Kit, you’ve got to come right away!” Bev’s voice was so loud Kit had to hold the phone away from his ear.
“What’s wrong?”
“They’re here. NASA!”
“What?”
“They want to see us use the machine, right now. Hurry!”
She didn’t give him time to respond. He stared at the silent phone and tossed the book he’d been reading onto the bed and ran out of the house, stopping just long enough to grab his Whattaburger baseball cap from the floor.
Six strangers stood inside Bev’s garage. With them were Mr. and Mrs. Pietro, Mr. Sloan and the botanist from the college, Dr. Ramzallah.
The three NASA scientists introduced themselves as Drs. Cooke, Tunney and Ching. They mentioned what they did; something with xenobiology in the title but Kit didn’t listen. He was too busy trying not to stare at the other three men, the ones in the plain black suits and matching sunglasses who didn’t introduce themselves. Stories about aliens always mentioned the men in black. He knew they weren’t super-spies but they did look like the CIA or Secret Service agents he’d seen in movies and TV shows.
What if they’re here to take away Bev’s machine?
Or arrest us?
She didn’t seem worried about them and neither did her parents, who were busy chastising her for not telling them what had been going on. Kit was glad his parents had gone to see his grandmother in the nursing home and wouldn’t be back until that evening. He’d stayed home because he had a Little League game later in the afternoon.
When he’d first arrived, Bev had pulled him aside and told him how the scientists had originally exited the van in protective gear but they’d run tests on air samples from the garage, which came up negative for any unusual viruses or bacteria.
“They told me they didn’t find anything on the leaf we sent them either but they were really mad. They lectured me and Mr. Sloan on how we could have contaminated the whole world. Mr. Sloan told them he hadn’t worried about it, because by the time he saw the samples, we’d already been breathing around them and touching them for days and we were fine. Plus, by then we’d already spread any potential diseases too far to be controlled.”
“Did you tell them about the monkey-bird?” Kit watched the scientists walk around the workbench, taking pictures of her invention but not touching anything.
“Are you crazy? They’d probably quarantine the city.”
The scientists finished their examination and approached her.
“Please, Miss Pietro, can you show us exactly how you brought the samples over?” Dr. Cooke was the tallest of the scientists, an older man with white hair and eyebrows. Tiny glasses perched at the end of his long nose.
“Yes and also how you handled the samples?” Dr. Ching asked. Several inches shorter than Cooke or Tunney, he had shiny black hair and a chubby face.
Bev separated herself from her parents and turned the power on to her machine, which she and Kit had nicknamed the transporter, after the device on Star Trek. The various multi-colored lights winked on, accompanied by the muted sound of humming fans whirring to life.
She stationed herself at the keyboard, while Kit stood next to her, wearing his gloves. He had some of his zip-lock bags ready.
On the screen, the twirling, sparking light devil appeared.
“Is that apparition always there when you turn the monitor on?” Tunney asked as he took a picture of the rainbow dervish.
Bev nodded. “Yes. We don’t know if it’s actually some kind of storm or dust cloud or just the pattern on the monitor that indicates it’s ready to use.”
“We never tried to bring it across as a sample,” Kit said.
They need to know we have some common sense.
“You shouldn’t have used the machine at all,” Ted Pietro said from the edge of the garage.
“Dad....” Bev rarely used her whiny voice, except with her parents. Kit always found it amazing how just a simple change in her inflection turned her from an overly-mature, serious science geek into a typical thirteen year-old girl, who’d just been told she couldn’t buy the expensive jeans she wants.
“Don’t Dad me young lady. Didn’t you hear these people? You actually put the entire world in danger!”
“Geez, we didn’t do it on purpose. We thought we were just looking at pictures and we tried to change them and then Kit hit the Enter button and the next thing we knew....”
“The leaf appeared on the table,” Kit cut in; worried she might slip up and mention their first sample.
The one still running loose someplace—
She shot him a squinty-eyed glare and he shut up.
“Well, the harm, if any, has already been done.” Cooke slid his glasses up. “We’ve conducted exhaustive tests on the plant material we received and it’s our belief that because the life forms of our two worlds are so radically different, there’s little chance of microorganisms from one place being harmful to the other.”
“Can you show us how you bring forth a sample?” Tunney asked.
“Sure.” Bev began working with the Arrows and other buttons, explaining how they’d figured out what each one did.
She located one of the round-leafed trees. “That’s like the tree we got the leaf from.”
She zoomed in on a branch and touched the Enter key. Tunney switched his camera for a digital camcorder and filmed the entire sequence of events, leading up to the appearance of the sample, from the initial yellowish glow to the final Pop as the luminescent orb changed into the black disk.
“We were always careful not to touch anything directly,” Kit explained, as he picked up the leaf and dropped it into the plastic baggie.
“Really? So you didn’t touch the gloves when you took them on and off? Did you place them on the table and then perhaps move them or rest a hand the table?” Ching asked as he drew on latex gloves and took the baggie from Kit. He dropped it into a larger sample bag, added his gloves, and sealed the bag.
“Well, uh....”
“We found lots of other stuff too. Do you want more soil or rocks?” Bev interrupted.
“Actually, we’d like to do some sample collecting ourselves, if that’s all right,” Cooke said.
“Just don’t use it too long at a time.”
“Yeah, the transporter starts making a funny, overheating kind of smell after about an hour or two,” Kit said.
“Ninety minutes,” Bev cut in, always precise when it came to her experiments.
“Transporter?” Ching asked.
“That’s what we call it.” Bev stood up and let Cooke take her chair.
Ching gently moved Kit out of the way and arranged a series of heavy-duty sample bags, along with a box of latex gloves, on the table. At his feet sat a large Styrofoam container to hold the bags.
Cooke shifted the view on the screen from one place to the next, stopping each time to bring across samples of dirt, rock and some small grass-like growths.
“Have you seen any animal life?” he asked at one point.
“Uh....” Kit didn’t know what to say.
“Sort of. We saw something in a tree once but we didn’t, um, want to transport anything alive, ‘cause we wouldn’t be able to do anything with it.”
Bev’s voice seemed to scream “I’m lying!” but Kit hoped the scientists wouldn’t realize it. Ching and Tunney glanced at each other, giving Kit momentary heart failure.
“What did it look like?” Cooke asked.
“It was hard to see. It was behind some leaves. We know it had big yellow eyes and brownish fur.”
“Hmmm.” Cooke zoomed in on another tree, panned back and forth across the branches. No eyes peeked out at them.
“Nothing there. It would be interesting to see if it was something avian o
r primate in physiological appearance.”
“Or both,” Kit murmured under his breath. He winced but kept quiet when Bev ground her heel on his toes.
“Wait, what’s that?” Ching pointed at the screen. It showed a clump of five long-leafed trees against a backdrop of naked rock outcroppings. Barren ground surrounded the trees.
Off in the distance, tiny, winged creatures swooped and darted against a burnt-ochre sky.
“Zoom in on those!” exclaimed Tunney.
Oh, no. Don’t...
Against his will Kit found himself crowding forward with Bev and the scientists. Bodies pressed against him from behind as Sloan, Ramzallah and the Pietros moved closer. A glance backwards showed even the nameless, hulking guards had moved into the garage and were trying to peer over everyone’s heads.
Cooke’s fingers tap-tapped on the keys in rapid fashion as he desperately tried to zoom in and move sideways at the same time, keeping the flying creatures in view. The herky-jerky motion had Kit feeling ill until Cooke accidentally touched the Scroll Lock key and suddenly the movement smoothed out as the screen seemed to track the flight of one creature.
“Excellent! I’ve locked onto one of them,” he said, as if he’d planned it that way.
He zoomed in again and now the details of the animal became distinct.
It was a monkey-bird. Now Kit had his first real look at the flying alien.
Its wings were membranous, like those of a bat. Bluish-green blood vessels stood out clearly against the grayish-brown skin. Long arms and legs, relative to its body size, were tucked against the chest but the black, curved claws were still visible.
Remembering Bev’s previous comment about how the other one had no mouth or nose, he tried to study the face of the constantly darting and diving animal. Other than the eyes, no features were evident.
Until one of its flying partners swerved too close.
The monkey-bird drew back its fur-covered lips in a vicious snarl, and its lower jaw dropped down almost one hundred eighty degrees as the alien displayed overly-large jagged teeth. It lunged forward, snapping at the offending individual, which dodged to one side, just in time to avoid losing a chunk of flesh.
“I think it’s safe to say the creatures are carnivorous,” Tunney commented while he filmed the sequence.
“I’d like to bring one over but they appear too large to handle safely,” Cooke said.
Kit heard the disappointment in his voice.
They’re not so different from Bev and me—eager to grab proof of another world. I’ll bet, if they’d been here that first day, they’d have done exactly the same thing we did.
Well, maybe.
“We should, however, try to find something smaller, more easily managed. If creatures this large exist, there must be smaller members of the local animal kingdom present. Regardless of the environment, a food chain would still work in essentially the same fashion.”
Cooke nodded in response to Ching’s statement and pulled back from the monkey-bird troop to begin scouring the landscape again. He panned to the left, continuing in one direction. Each touch of the Arrow key appeared to move the viewing area by several miles, if not more, as the scenery constantly changed.
The spindly scientist reached a grouping of dense trees, different from what they’d seen before. These were more like palm trees, with wide fronds at the top and no branches below the middle of the knobby, flesh-colored trunk. They were packed together like pines in a northern forest, so dense it was difficult to see between them.
“This would be an excellent location for arboreals, the local equivalents of squirrels perhaps, as well as whatever passes for birds.”
Cooke zoomed in until a single tree filled the monitor and then began moving from one tree to the next. On the fourth tree, he hit paydirt.
“I saw something move!” Ching pointed at the screen.
Cooke nodded, already busy with the keypad. He narrowed the field of view to the lower fronds and waited. A moment later, one of the heavy, wide leaves jiggled and something crawled out onto it.
There was no way to tell how large the thing was but Kit had the impression it would have just fit inside his baseball glove.
“Ugh.” Mrs. Pietro frowned and moved back a few steps.
Kit understood her reaction. The creature trudging across the sand-colored frond had twelve legs, six on each side and two bulbous eyes at one end. Each eye moved independently of the other, the same as a chameleon’s, and had two pupils. One looked up while the other looked down.
“A perfect adaptation for arboreal life,” Tunney stated. He leaned past Ching, capturing every detail in his camcorder.
The three-segmented body paused, giving everyone a good look at it. Below the eyes were two sets of mandibles, one vertical and one horizontal. They slowly opened and closed first one, and then the other. The two back segments expanded and contracted in regular motion. No antennae were visible but random patches of thick, stiff hairs sprouted from various locations on the body and multi-jointed legs.
“Amazing.” Cooke tapped the Up Arrow once, increasing the magnification. Now a pattern of dark maroon blotches was visible against charcoal gray flesh.
“Is it too large?” Cooke asked.
“No.” Ching lifted an empty Styrofoam cooler. “I’ll position this so the creature drops into it. Once the lid is closed, we can bag the entire container.”
“I don’t want that thing in my garage,” Mrs. Pietro stated.
The scientists ignored her. Ching placed the container between the two antennae of the transporter and nodded to Cooke. “Ready.”
* * *
When he looked back on that moment, Kit often saw everything in slow motion. Cooke’s finger lifting up—beginning its downward path towards the Enter key.
The sudden fuzziness on the screen as something interjected itself between their mystical camera and the life form on the frond.
An impression of an eye just as Cooke depressed the Enter key.
The beginning of the yellow glow.
* * *
“Stop! There’s something in the way.” Bev jumped forward and started smashing at the Down Arrow key.
It was too late. On the monitor, the view reversed, revealing first a face and then an entire body.
They’d been wrong in their estimation of size. Unless the alien planet was inhabited by a race of giants, the palm trees were only a couple of feet high and the spidery-thing barely two inches long.
“How do you stop this thing?” Now Cooke was hitting keys as well, smashing his entire hand down on the keyboard.
“I’m trying,” Bev told him.
“Unplug it!” Kit heard his voice go up an octave but didn’t care. No way he wanted that thing coming into the garage.
Not with those teeth.
Bev’s mother screamed and the security team moved forward, pushing people out of the way. Bev reached out to hit the Off button but fell to the floor as Cooke slid back in the chair and hit her legs. Kit grabbed for the power cord but he missed. He found himself on the ground next to Bev as one of the security men shoved him away from the table.
Somehow, over the confusion of shouts and clatter, Kit heard the distinctive Pop that signaled something entering their world.
Bev’s eyes widened and he knew she’d heard it too. He grabbed her hand.
“Hide!”
They crawled across the stained cement to Mr. Pietro’s Jeep Liberty.
“Get inside.” Kit opened one of the back doors and waited for Bev to jump in, then followed her, closing the door behind him. He prayed the darkly-tinted windows would hide them in the dim light of the garage.
Movement on the table caught his attention. The nightmarish creature from the other world had fallen through the black disk. It was even larger than he’d thought, easily six feet tall. Bev gasped and he pressed his hand against her mouth until she shook her head.
More than anything else, the life form resembled a skeleto
n with the barest amount of flesh still wrapped around the bones. Its flat, expressionless face turned this way and that as it fought for its balance on the table. A pair of black pupils floated in each sulfurous yellow, over-sized eyeball.
Its mouth opened and a high-pitched, keening cry echoed through the garage, painful even through the closed windows of the Jeep.
One of the security guards had hustled the scientists, teachers and Bev’s parents out to the driveway but now he stopped and put his hands over his ears. The remaining two guards drew their guns and fired at the alien.
Several of the bullets scored direct hits, flinging the dark-brown visitor backwards off the table and into a metal rack of shelves. The alien crashed to the floor amidst a pile of cans and boxes.
The two guards moved slowly forward, alert for any movement.
It didn’t help them.
The creature bounded up from behind the workbench and leaped onto one of the guards. It sank its inch-long, pointed teeth into the man’s neck and tore out a lump of flesh. It didn’t wait to see if the man was dead; it just jumped onto the second guard, who managed to fire two more shots before his arm was pulled from its socket. He tried to scream but the alien shoved a clawed hand into his mouth and tore off his lower jaw in one quick motion.
The third guard ran forward, gun out and firing. It seemed hard to believe he could miss at that range but not once did the monster flinch or fall backwards. Instead, it dove for the man’s legs and tackled him. The two went down in a heap. The man, who looked to outweigh the alien by a good forty pounds, got on top and rammed his gun against the bulbous head.
Kit waited for the sound of the gun but it never came.
“Oh God,” whispered Bev, as the last security guard leaned to the side. A long-fingered brown hand stuck out through his back. It clutched a section of red, glistening spine.
The man toppled over, a crimson pool spreading beneath him, blotting out the old oil stains on the cement.
Bev’s parents stood frozen, their mouths hanging open, as the emaciated figure rose up and approached the end of the garage.