Mad Science Institute

by Sechin Tower

Victor looked me in the eye and mouthed a single word: “antimatter.”

  Ridiculous, I wanted to say. Preposterous. Laughable. But when I looked into their faces they both looked so serious that I couldn’t say anything.

  “Another secret invention,” Nikki explained. “Just like with the teslanium, we don’t quite know how it works. But our engineering students—like you—have found it pretty easy to copy the reactor design. It also scales down really well, so you could power your house with something that fits into your pocket.”

  Superconductors and antimatter. This wasn’t decades ahead of the rest of the world, this was centuries ahead. These were the kinds of things that could change the course of human history in every conceivable way. With that kind of power, I could turn my wildest dreams into functioning inventions. I could create giant robots, make cars that fly, and send rockets to distant planets… heck, with that kind of power, I could bring distant planets to us!

  I had a million questions, but Victor brought me back to the immediate reality of the lizard-beast running loose inside our building.

  “The chupacabra is pretty obviously heading down to the reactor,” he said. “It must be either really well trained or have some kind of guidance system, because it knows right where it’s going. My guess is, the Professor wants to knock out our power supply so we’re defenseless.”

  “So what do we do about it?” I asked.

  To answer my question, Victor went to a locker on a nearby wall and pulled out a heavy-duty rack of big, bulky brown suits with rounded helmets. They looked like space suits, except they were flat and featureless, without even any openings for eyes, mouth, or nose. From the way he had to heave and strain to move the rack, I could tell the suits must have weighed about a hundred pounds apiece.

  “Radiation suits,” Victor announced. “We’re going to have to wear them down in the reactor room while we’re looking for that creature.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Do they come in black?”

  Chapter 19 ~ Dean

  Hot rage pumped through Dean’s veins. He pounded on the unbreakable glass, but it did no good. The creature was in there. The gang of angry bike-thugs was in there. His key was in there—he could see it on the dining room table, right where he left it. And here he was, trapped outside like an idiot.

  He attacked the glass with other tools he found in the shed: a hammer, a pick, an ax. None of them worked. Finally, he flipped open his cell phone. All he had to press was 911, the three little numbers that had summoned him to so many disasters.

  Before he brought his finger down on the 9, he heard another commotion at the front door. Dean ran to the edge and saw, to his amazement, the Blitzkriegers running out of the building. Hidden loudspeakers around Topsy simulated the sound of approaching police sirens, and inside of sixty seconds they had made it to the parking lot, mounted their bikes, and roared away. Their departure was as sudden and inexplicable as their arrival, but Dean decided he would need to figure it out later because the lizard-thing was still in there, crawling around in the walls.

  If he called 911 now, the local emergency services would need to get into the building, maybe deep into the building in order to find it. McKenzie had always said the Institute held some important secrets, and part of Dean’s new job was to protect those secrets. Having a platoon of emergency responders searching through Topsy House didn’t seem like something he wanted to bring about. Besides, he, too, was a trained emergency responder. What could they do that he couldn’t?

  He flipped the phone shut and put it back into his pocket.

  Dean then rummaged through the tool shed. Before, he had grabbed whatever had come to hand most quickly, but now he actually had time to find what he was looking for: an ax. Not a fire ax, as he was most accustomed to wielding, but a sturdy wood-chopping tool, with a heavy, chiseled head and a long, wooden handle.

  Ax slung through his belt, he gathered up a length of garden hose, tied one end to the heaviest tree he could find, and lowered the other end down the side of the building. He swung his leg over the wrought-iron fence and began his descent. His rib protested all the way down, but otherwise it wasn’t a difficult climb, and the thick, rubbery hose afforded a secure grip while his feet moved from window sill down to brick ledge down to gutter brace.

  The doors of Topsy House were still wide open. There was a black plastic box about the size of a small laptop next to the door, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that this was what they had used to trigger the entrance to open. He scooped up the plastic gizmo, carried it past the threshold, and stomped on it once he was inside. When he did, the big doors slid shut behind him and sealed with a satisfying clang.

  It looked like the bikers hadn’t been very interested in the entry hall because it was pretty well unscathed, save for a few portraits that had been knocked off the wall. Still, there was no telling what they had left behind, so Dean readied his ax and proceeded cautiously. Three steps later, all the lights went out.

  “Stupid lizard must be chewing on the wires,” he muttered to himself, digging in his pocket for the keychain flashlight. If he was lucky, maybe the creature electrocuted itself when it caused the blackout. Somehow, Dean knew he wouldn’t be that lucky.

  His tiny flashlight was designed to shed enough light to see a door lock on a dark night, but here in the high-ceilinged entrance hall it could hardly illuminate the floor in front of him. He needed to do a fair amount of groping to make sure he didn’t collide with the statue of the person Dean had assumed was Edgar Allen Poe. As he passed, his flashlight beam reflected off the brass plaque at the statue’s foot. The word “founder” caught his eye. Dean took two more steps, stopped, and went back to get a closer look.

  It wasn’t a statue of Edgar Allen Poe after all, but some guy named Nikola Tesla. Dean had never heard of him, but the important thing was that he was the founder of the Institute.

  What they want is in our founder’s head.

  Dean rose to take a close look at the head of the statue, leaning in to study the details. The sculpture was so lifelike it almost felt rude to invade its personal space. With the flashlight at point blank range, Dean could see the individual lines representing the hairs on the man’s mustache, the delicate texturing on his lips, and the intricate curves of his alabaster ears. It also allowed him to see the seam that ran along the back of the statue’s head.

  In full light, the seam would have been invisible, washed clean of its visible depth by the lack of contrasting shadows. Here in the dark, the little flashlight revealed a perfect little door. The sight of it hit Dean like a slap in the face. This was what McKenzie had tried to tell him on that fateful day. “Inside our founder’s head” wasn’t figurative language for an idea or a piece of information. It wasn’t a riddle pointing him to a secret invention. She had been saying, flat out, that Dean should look inside the head of the statue of Nikola Tesla, founder of the Mechanical Science Institute.

  With shaking fingers he used the blade of his pocket knife to pry the compartment open. There was no egg inside, but it did contain a single piece of paper. Dean drew it out and squinted at it in the glow of the flashlight.

  Chapter 20 ~ Soap

  Luckily, the power didn’t cut out until after we had reached our destination, a narrow, overheated underground cavern nearly five hundred feet below Topsy. It seemed like a ridiculous depth, but Victor said it predated the Institute, and it was convenient because it ensured that no gamma rays escaped from the reactor to the surface.

  To protect us from the radiation, our suits didn’t have gaps for eyeholes, but instead used fiber-optic video feeds to little screens placed on the inside of our helmets. When I turned my head the video also moved, so I was seeing the world around me, but at the same time the image was distorted because it had to display three dimensional objects on a flat screen. It’s okay to watch something like that on television, but when you’re trying to navigate the real world by video relay it can seriously mess up yo
ur depth perception. I walked smack into a wall almost as soon as I was out of the elevator car, and it took us a while to get me standing again because the suit was so heavy. Cadmium-plated depleted uranium clothing blocks gamma rays pretty well, but it weighs a ton.

  All of us moved slowly in those heavy suits, and I began to wonder how well we would be able to defend ourselves if we could barely lift our arms. Nikki wanted to use the rail gun I had been fiddling with upstairs, so I had reassembled it as best I could. I still had a pair of screws left over after I put it back together, but that always happens. Victor said he wanted to take the creature alive if he could, so he had a rifle loaded with special tranquilizer darts he’d designed. The fingers of the suits were so heavily insulated that they might as well have been iron mittens, so the two of them needed to tie strings from their triggers to their wrists in order to operate the weapons. I carried a big stun rod that apparently had been designed to fend off great white sharks. We looked pretty funny in those big suits with our little weapons. If we had a photo of us at that moment, the caption would say “Astronauts on Safari.”

  We set off down a corridor that turned sharply in one direction, proceeded about twenty feet, and then turned sharply again. It went on like this until after the third turn in the corridor, I noticed some etchings in the wall. I stopped and leaned in so my camera could get a better angle.

  I was looking at really faded carvings of some creatures dancing around what might have been a big, reptilian face. It was too faded to make out most of the other details, except that the dancing figures came in many shapes and sizes. Some were up on their hind legs with their arms stretched over their heads. Others ran or jumped or fought with each other. Around these carvings was faded writing. It was hard to see in the narrow beam of light from my suit’s headlamp, but I was certain the writing didn’t even remotely resemble any language I had ever seen because it contained lots of jagged little lines and maddening spirals. I might have dismissed it as a random design, but the patterns were too regular. This was meant to communicate something… but not to me.

  “Those were down here long before the Institute,” Nikki’s voice buzzed in my headset. “In fact, near as we can figure, it dates back to the Triassic period, although we have no idea who carved them.”

  “The Triassic period?” I echoed. “The Triassic period that had a bunch of dinosaurs in it? Wasn’t that, like, a couple hundred million years before human beings existed?”

  “That’s the only Triassic period I know of,” she said.

  “Then how could these designs be so old? It isn’t like anyone was around back then to carve them.”

  “We don’t know who—or what—built this cavern,” Victor said. “But it isn’t a natural formation, and those carvings were made when this place was built. That’s the fun part about science: there are always mysteries to unravel.”

  I looked at the reptilian eyes carved on that wall. Those eyes had supposedly been staring out into the darkness for longer than the human species had existed, yet they looked strangely… familiar. Where had I seen them before?

  We moved on until we passed under an archway, and the cavern opened up into a vaulted underground dome. Judging from the curve of the walls, I guessed that the room was maybe a hundred feet across and thirty feet high, but I couldn’t be sure because the outer reaches were shrouded in darkness. There were more carvings here, all around us. Hundreds—thousands—of those creepy stone eyes stared out from the darkness on all sides. But in the middle of the room was something much newer and more demanding of my attention: the antimatter reactor.

  The reactor looked like a giant kettle-bell, a half-globe that was as big as an SUV and had a loop of pipe running from one chamber to the next. Its body was marked by a big red radioactive symbol, and it was hooked into a gently curving pipe that ran from its top up through the stone ceiling above, while another pipe ran down from the ceiling and into the dome on the opposite side. I wanted to rush over and pull it apart to see how it worked, but there was a chupacabra loose down here that we needed to deal with first.

  “You guys—there it is!” Nikki said urgently. She pointed with her glove off into the far distance. It was the chupacabra, all right. It stood at its full height, its forelegs up against the wall and its face pressed close to the carvings. At its feet was an angular pile of something white and metallic.

  “What’s he got?” I whispered. “What is that thing down at its feet?”

  “You don’t have to whisper,” Nikki said. “It can’t hear our intercom. And that thing at its feet is our reactor core, which explains why the lights went out. That core’s pure teslanium—it’s incredibly valuable to us.”

  “That creature must be pretty smart to be trained to find that core,” Victor said. “Okay, you guys wait here and turn off your lights. I’ll loop around try to get on the other side of it.”

  “Let’s get this over with,” Nikki said. “I’m worried this radiation suit is making me look fat.”

  Nobody laughed at Nikki’s joke. I was too busy thinking about what would happen if the creature spotted us before Victor got to it. Suddenly my suit seemed ten times heavier, but that might have been good because its weight was about the only thing keeping me from running away.

  Victor shuffled silently around the outside of the cavern and disappeared behind the reactor. With our lights off, I could barely see anything, so I pressed up against the wall and watched the chupacabra, which was outlined in a very faint beam generated by a red light in its collar. The creature looked like it was in some kind of trance, leaning its head in really close to the wall, almost like it was sniffing those carvings. Or reading them. I wondered what the chupacabra was seeing when it looked at those designs.

  Then it struck me with a jolt why the carvings had seemed so familiar. The snake eyes, the flared nose, the short, flat mouth—it was a two hundred million year old bas-relief of the same creature that now stood, alive and in the flesh, not far away from us.

  “Nikki!” I was panicking. “Nikki! Nikki! It lives here!”

  “What?” she reached out and grabbed my arms to hold me still. “What lives here?”

  “The chupacabra! The chupacabra made this place! Or maybe his ancestors did, I don’t know. All I know is, it’s connected to this cavern somehow. Look at the carvings!”

  I stepped towards the wall, intending to point out the similarity between the creature and the spooky, eons-old carvings, but I misjudged the distance again due to the flat video screen. I smacked face-first into the wall and bounced backwards, pinwheeling my arms in a vain attempt to keep my balance. Nikki tried to catch me but the suit was too heavy to hold up and I plopped down onto my butt, dropping my stun-stick with a ringing clatter.

  The chupacabra’s head snapped around in our direction. Then it charged.

  I don’t know how fast a human athlete can cover fifty yards, but I found out that a chupacabra can travel that distance in close to zero seconds flat.

  Nikki snapped on her helmet lights, raised her rail gun, and pulled the string tied to the trigger. The gun didn’t fire. Actually, the gun’s slide pulled free and all those shiny barrels bounced uselessly down to the floor.

  I tried to rise to my feet, but I was like an upside-down turtle, and I couldn’t avoid the incoming chupacabra. When it pounced, I felt the suit buckle around my chest and saw the screen inside my helmet cut to static for just a second. When it came back on, my entire field of vision was filled with red eyes and pointed teeth.

  I had no chance of getting up, so I reached blindly for my stun-stick, but I couldn’t turn my helmet to look for it. Nikki tried to push the thing off me, but she lost her balance and ended up falling, too.

  Suddenly Victor appeared around the reactor. I could see him over the creature’s shoulder, coming to my rescue as fast as a person could run while wearing armor that weighed almost as much as he did. He moved in a slow, determined stagger as he struggled in close enough to get a shot. He raised
the rifle and yanked the string-trigger… the dart went wide of the target. I could hear the clink! as it harmlessly bounced off the stone wall next to me.

  The creature turned at the sound of the dart whistling over its head, and that gave me just enough room to roll away. I didn’t get far, but I got far enough to feel the handle of my weapon. When the chupacabra jumped on my chest again, I swung the stun-stick and jabbed for the creature’s neck. There was a jolt and a flash, and my attacker jumped backwards. It was apparently unharmed. Except that now it no longer wore its collar.

  The chupacabra crouched there for a second, just staring at me. It wasn’t hurt or frightened as far as I could tell. If anything, it looked… curious. Then it reached up to caress its neck, running those long, clawed fingers from its ear-slits all the way down to its shoulders, as if gently probing its skin in search of the collar that it no longer wore.

  My suit was way too heavy to allow me to sit up, so I had to roll to my stomach and push up to my knees from there. When I did, I could see the collar on the stone floor, still smoldering from the charge the stun-stick had released.

  By then, Victor had reloaded, and this time his dart found the creature’s haunch. The chupacabra spun and slashed the air behind it, but before it could close in on Victor it slumped forward onto the stone floor, its long tongue lolling from between its pointed teeth.

  “This tranquilizer won’t last long,” Victor said. “Soap, do you think you can repair that reactor so we can take the elevator back upstairs before this thing wakes up?”

  By the time he spoke the words, I was already standing over the reactor core, puzzling out how it worked.

  Chapter 21 ~ Dean

  Discovering the location of the egg was important, but Dean wanted to take care of the lizard-creature before he did anything else. He moved systematically through the ground-floor lab, ax at the ready, peering under tables and listening at walls for any sign of movement. His boots crunched over plenty of broken glass left behind by the Blitzkrieger’s little rampage, but he discovered nothing else of interest, even after the electric lights came back on.