I was glad Ashley was still by my side … and that she still had her sense of humor. As annoying as it could be sometimes.
I wrinkled my nose at her, knowing that my small action would speak louder than words.
“There’s always tomorrow,” Ashley teased, attempting to tuck a strand of her straight, shoulder-length black hair behind her ear. “Give me one more try and—”
I sucked in a breath at the itchiness of my ribs. If only there were room to squeeze my hands inside the cast and scratch, scratch, scratch with my fingernails. Until I’d been put in this body cast, I’d spent my life in a wheelchair. But I’d never once dreamed there would come a day when I’d think a wheelchair was freedom. Yet compared to the prison of this cast, I wondered… . Tubes seemed to stick out of me everywhere. The ones I hated the most were those that fed my body wastes into a pouch hidden by my jumpsuit pants.
“This close to Mars,” I answered, “we should probably spend more time on the carbon-dioxide generators.”
I didn’t mean that she or I should hook up to a carbon-dioxide machine, of course. After all, we humans breathe oxygen. But the atmosphere on Mars needed more carbon dioxide, and that’s why we were on our way.
We meaning 50 kids like Ashley and me who had robot-control capability. After hearing about the need for human life to expand to new planets like Mars and the capabilities of the new carbon-dioxide generators to provide an atmosphere in which life could thrive, 50 of the kids had also decided to come—on their own. They were excited about being part of “saving the Earth” in a unique way—by controlling the robots that worked the carbon-dioxide generators.
And now within two days we’d land on the red planet. After a trip of 50 million miles.
But before we did, we all needed as much virtual-reality practice as possible assembling the parts to the carbon-dioxide generators. On Mars we would be building the real giant gas generators on the surface of the planet.
“I can’t give up on this pacemaker thing,” Ashley said. “One of us has got to be able to save her life one of these times. Poor woman must be tired of dying.”
The poor woman wasn’t real—just a computer model. And one of the many different programs the World United Federation had created for the Mars journey. I couldn’t imagine how many millions and millions of dollars had been spent to generate the programs since the technology first became public. But with 50 of us spending six months in space traveling from Earth to Mars, we needed something to do that could be of good use down the road.
Although the stuff we did to pass time was practical, it didn’t feel like work. The virtual-reality simulation programs were fun and good training, and we had plenty of time to read books. Ashley liked fiction; I was really getting into science. Learning about …
Ashley poked me. I was spacing out again, mentally writing in my journal. I’d first hated it—when my mom had made me start it as homework almost four years ago on Mars. But now I used it to track my thoughts and think through problems.
“She might be tired of dying in virtual reality,” I said, “but here in real life I’m dying to get scratched. Can’t you find anything to help?”
Ashley raised an eyebrow and put her hand on her hip in her trademark gesture. “Just another powder injection.”
“A wire,” I begged. “A stick with sandpaper on the end. Something to rub my skin.”
“Powder,” she insisted. “I’m your friend and you have strict doctors’ orders not to use anything but powder. Scratching skin beneath a cast can lead to sores and infections and scars.”
“Powder, then.” I made a face. Ever since I’d been in the body cast I’d needed someone to inject a special medical powder beneath my cast twice a day. It helped keep my skin dry and also had a numbing effect to get rid of the itching as my body healed from the surgery. But I really, really wanted the feeling of something to scratch at the skin. In one way, it would be great to get out of the cast.
And in another way, I was worried about the day the cast was taken off because if—
I stopped my thoughts. I was too afraid to wonder what would happen then.
“You all right?” Ashley asked, catching the expression on my face. It was hard to fool her.
I grunted, “Fine.” Then a sudden headache hit me so hard it felt like a hand grenade had just exploded inside my brain.
Ashley put the helmet in my hand and pushed away. In the weightlessness of outer space, that effort moved her easily toward the hatchway that led out of the computer room to the rest of the spaceship.
She stopped at the hatchway. “Could be worse, you know,” she said, looking at me intently. “If you have to be in a body cast, at least it’s in a zero-gravity situation.”
That’s the way the doctors had planned it. Zero gravity meant I could still be mobile. More important, it would give my spinal cord the best situation to repair the nerve splinting they had done. So they’d done my surgery only two months before I left Earth—enough time for them to make sure there were no complications but not enough time for me to go crazy in Earth’s atmosphere.
“You’re right.” I tried to smile through the incredible headache that gripped my skull. I should have expected it. These headaches were coming like clockwork, once every four hours. They were lasting longer and longer, some for 10 minutes. Was there something wrong inside my brain? I was scared to even mention them to anyone—much less Ashley or my dad, who would really be worried.
As I spoke to Ashley, I continued to smile to hide the pain. “It could be worse.”
But not much. I’d had little headaches before on Mars and on Earth. Ones that were dull and just annoying. But these headaches were different. They’d only begun a few months earlier, halfway through the trip to Mars. Every day they were becoming more and more intense. I wondered if they would kill me before our fleet of spaceships reached Mars.
And that was only two days away.
CHAPTER 3
The red planet filled much of the view from the observatory. I couldn’t believe I’d be home soon. My years on Earth had been so full of adventure that sometimes Mars hadn’t seemed real. Only the memories of my mom and Rawling were still vivid.
Funny though, how the more a person does in life, the more it brings good-byes. Good-bye when leaving Mars, then good-bye to friends when leaving Earth. I felt torn between two homes. Back on Earth, it hadn’t been easy saying good-bye to my friends Cannon and Nate. And I could tell from the other kids’ tears when saying good-bye to their parents that they felt the same. Chad had changed his mind at the last minute and stayed with his dad, the general who had helped us on Earth. It was the same with the supreme governor’s grandson, whom Ashley and I had rescued from robot-control slavery.
But what choice did a person have? If baby birds never left the nest, they never learned to fly. All of us had a destiny to follow and …
“Science book in your lap but eyes closed and daydreaming, huh?”
I opened my eyes. “Uh, hi, Ashley.”
“Learning anything?”
“The usual.”
“More science?”
“It’s interesting,” I said.
“Right.”
“Okay, then,” I said. “How bright would it seem to you if you were standing in the center of the sun?”
Although there were other kids on board the ship, she and I were alone in the ship’s observatory.
Three hours had passed since I’d wrecked the virtual pacemaker of the virtual president of the United States. My headache was gone. My skin didn’t itch quite so bad. And I was floating beneath the eyepiece of a telescope that extended through the upper panels of the spaceship.
It wasn’t until I’d spent time on Earth that I realized outer space allowed such an incredibly clear view of the stars and galaxies. On Earth, stars twinkled as the atmosphere bent their light; here in space, the stars were bright enough against a black background to hurt the eyes.
I grinned and shook my h
ead. Sometimes I could be so stubborn… .
“Huh?” Ashley’s face was buried in her comp-board.
“If you were standing in the center of the sun, how bright would it be?” I said again.
Ashley looked up from her homework. “Answering that beats trying to figure out Shakespeare. And I know it’s a trick question. You wouldn’t see a thing. You’d be burned to a crisp. Just like what nearly happened to us on the trip to Earth because of Luke Daab.”
Luke Daab … the very name made me shiver. Who would think such a mousy-looking guy could cause such big trouble?
“It’s not a trick question,” I said, swinging the telescope idly in different directions. “If you could survive in the middle of the sun, how bright would it be on your eyes?”
She paused her keyboarding.
I kept scanning outer space. I blinked as a large, dark object seemed to jump into view. It was another spaceship in our fleet, its circular shape gleaming dully because of light from the sun a couple hundred million miles away. Including manned and unmanned supply vehicles, there were 10 spaceships altogether. All of us were at least 1,000 miles apart— above, below, and to the sides—cruising through the frictionless vacuum of space at 15,000 miles an hour. To assemble this fleet, the expense for Earth had been a huge gamble. But if it paid off, it would change history. And save billions of lives because it would open up a new planet for human inhabitation.
“I want to say it would be dark,” Ashley said, her dark eyes squinting in thought. “Just because you wouldn’t ask the question unless it had some kind of weird answer. But on the other hand, maybe you’re trying a reverse on me, and you’ll laugh if I don’t give the obvious answer.”
“What’s your guess then?” I smirked.
“Dark,” she said at first. Then, more emphatically, “No. Bright. I have to go with bright. So bright you couldn’t stand it. I mean, the sun’s a couple of million degrees. That kind of heat has to be bright.”
“It’s 27 million degrees in the center, 4.5 million degrees halfway to the surface, and only 10,000 degrees on the surface,” I said without looking up from the telescope. “That’s in Fahrenheit. If you want it in Celsius, the temperatures are—”
“Remind me never to get stuck in a body cast. If all you do is fill your head with useless facts, then—”
I must have looked strange to her. To cover my body cast, I wore an extra-large jumpsuit. My legs stuck straight out, unable to move. And I was just floating underneath the eyepiece, my entire body rigid and straight.
I interrupted her right back. “And even with that kind of heat, the sun is pitch-black in the center. It would be darker to you than in the darkest cave in the middle of the Earth. No light at all would reach your eyes.”
I finally looked away from my telescope and at Ashley. She was smiling.
“Okay, you’ve got me curious,” she said. “Why is the center of the sun that dark?”
“First of all, you have to realize how big the sun is,” I answered. “Over three-quarters of a million miles across. A person your size weighs about 100 pounds on Earth. On the sun, its force of gravity would make you weigh over two tons.”
Her eyes widened in surprise. “Wow! Tyce, something amazing—”
I waved away her awe at my knowledge. “Keep thinking about that gravity. You see, gravity packs all of the atoms of the sun so tightly together that the rays of light don’t get a chance to become rays of light. It’s like a—”
“Tyce, you don’t understand! I think I—”
“Listen to the professor,” I said grandly, continuing my lecture. “Think of a big bag jammed with marbles and a little peewee marble trying to squeeze through. That’s what an energy ray has to do as it moves away from the center of the sun. The ray bounces from atom to atom as it heads toward the cooler surface. It makes no light. Isn’t it cool? Science has shown that all of the physics laws were predetermined even before the universe began and—”
“Tyce!”
Again I ignored her interruption. Science was fascinating, and I was determined to finish my little story for her. “Getting back to the sun, it takes 100,000 years for a ray to escape the center and reach the edge and finally become a light ray. Then, finally free of the interference of those tightly packed atoms, it zooms to 186,000 miles per second, flashes through space, and in less than nine minutes, travels the 93 million miles to Earth. After waiting 100,000 years to emerge.”
Lying motionless in midair, I folded my arms across my chest. “What do you think about that?”
“Interesting,” Ashley said in an almost detached tone. I stopped thinking and focused on her. Her eyes were still wide and she was staring at me. “But not as interesting as the end of your right foot.”
“Huh?”
She pointed. “Your right foot. While you were talking, I noticed it. That’s what I was trying to tell you.”
“Is this some sort of trick? To change the subject or something?” I began.
“No,” she said. Then a tear rolled down her cheek. “It’s not a trick at all.”
“I don’t get it,” I said, suddenly scared. I hadn’t had much experience with girls beyond my friendship with Ashley.
But I knew enough to realize it’s not good when girls start to cry. “What did I do wrong? Is my foot too smelly for you? Is that why you noticed it?”
She began to laugh but kept crying at the same time. “Your toes. Under the sock of your jumpsuit, I saw your toes move while you were talking.”
Toes? Move? I lifted my head and looked down my body. I could see the top of my toes. I watched them closely. Wiggle, I commanded my toes. Wiggle.
I’d tried that thousands of times growing up. Sitting in my wheelchair, I’d stare at my leg or my foot or my toes and try to move them by concentrating hard. I’d prayed. I’d begged God to let them move. Until years of disappointment convinced me otherwise, I believed that—just once—I could think hard enough to send my lower body a message. To make it listen to me. Or that God would do a miracle and poof! I’d be able to walk again.
But nothing had ever happened. Not for a kid whose spinal cord had been damaged when he was barely more than a baby. That was probably one reason it had taken me so long to believe that God not only existed, but he really cared about me.
Except now my toes moved. Just a little. But they moved!
“Oh, wow,” I said.
Ashley pushed off a wall in my direction. When she reached me, she gave me a hug. “They did move, didn’t they?” she said between a few more tears and giggles.
“Oh, wow,” I repeated. And then I began to cry too.
That’s how we were when the intercom buzzed. Hugging and crying and laughing.
“Hello?” Ashley said, wiping away her tears.
“Tyce and Ashley …” It was my dad, the fleet’s lead pilot. “Thought I’d find you there,” he said. “Look, I need you in the navigation cone. Immediately.”
CHAPTER 4
Dad was waiting for us in the navigation cone of our spaceship.
This ship had an identical design to all the other manned ships of the fleet. And while it was new, it was similar to the design of the Moon Racer, the shuttle that had taken us to Earth from Mars years earlier.
The navigation cone formed the nose of the ship and had a great view. The bulk of the ship, made of a titanium-steel alloy, lay behind it. For maximum protection and less expense, the bunks and work areas had no windows. These rooms were lit by the pale whiteness of low-energy argon tubes set into the walls.
Essentially, the entire ship was a large circular tube, moving sideways through the vacuum of space. The outer part of this large tube held the docking port, two emergency escape pods, an exercise room, all the passenger bunks, and work-area compartments. The inner part of the circle formed a corridor, which we traveled by grabbing handholds and pushing forward or backward, entering the bunks or work areas through circular hatches with slide-away covers. Also from this corrid
or, four main hatches led to tubes that extended downward like spokes. They met at a hub in the center so that the four tubes formed an X in the center of the giant circle. From the hub at the center where they connected, one short tube led backward to the pyramid-shaped ion-drive engine. Another short tube led forward to this pyramid-shaped navigation cone.
Here the titanium structure of the rest of the ship had been replaced by material that looked and functioned like glass but was thousands of times stronger and more expensive. All the walls of the pyramid were made of this space glass, including the floor. The computer and control console sat on this glass floor, as did the pilot’s seat. That’s why I liked it so much. Pushing from the hub into the navigation cone made it seem like a person was floating directly into clear outer space. This sensation frightened some people, but because in gravity situations I had spent so much time in a wheelchair, I loved the feeling of freedom.
There was something so awesome about staring into the infinite world of deep space. For me, it always brought more questions about how the matter had come to be in the first place. And more importantly, why? These were God questions. And I still had so many others that I would love to ask him directly. Sitting in the navigation cone always brought those questions back.
Normally I would have pushed into the cone and pressed up against the space glass and stared at Mars. When the sun was on it, it was a beautiful red globe, growing slightly larger each day.
Mars—my home.
But for the moment, I hardly noticed it.
My dad sat in the pilot’s seat in front of the control console. He turned as Ashley and I pushed through the hatch into the navigation cone.
Letting our momentum carry us forward, we floated toward him.
People say I look like him—even more so as I’ve grown older. I have the same dark blond hair he does. My nose and jaw and forehead were still bigger than I wanted them to be, but the rest of my face was starting to catch up. He was big, square and rugged like a football player. It would be great if I kept growing and became his size too. Of course, that’s assuming when I got out of my body cast that …
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