He glanced one more time at his watch. “Like I said, 10 minutes. Just before midnight. Make sure your oxygen mask is on. I’ll have all the adults dead and the poisonous gas cleared before your supply runs out.”
He began to roll the chair around me. “Nearly forgot.” He looked down at me and giggled. “Can’t leave you there on the floor to stop me now, can I?”
I didn’t see his fingers activate the controls on the remote, but again a grenade went off in my brain. I screamed.
“That’s a seven,” he said harshly. “Enjoy it. I’ll end your pain when I’ve released the gas. That will be your warning to put on your oxygen mask.”
With that, he rolled to the door in my wheelchair, opened the door without rising, and cackled as he scooted out of Rawling’s office.
CHAPTER 22
Ten minutes.
I could hardly move my arms, the pain was so intense. My fingers shook as I grabbed that lead belt. Twice my hands lost their grip. The third time, I managed to push it down and the shield blocked the transmission from the remote.
My head filled with blessed silence.
Ten minutes, I thought in agony.
I crawled to Rawling, dragging my oxygen tube. If he was alive, he was helpless, unable to protect himself.
I put my ear up to his mouth and heard breathing. I slipped the oxygen mask over his head and activated the tube. All of this had probably taken 30 seconds.
Now what?
Hunt the hunter.
The words of my dream came back with crystal clarity. Words that might save not only my life, but everyone’s under the dome.
I was on the floor, close to the desk. Reaching up, I grabbed the edge of the desk and pulled myself off the floor. Leaning against the desk, I could stand.
Any other time, I would have shouted with joy. My legs, weak as they were, much as I needed the desk, still supported me! It truly was a miracle!
I shuffled around the desk to the closest wall. Keeping one hand on the desk, I reached to the wall with my other hand and pulled down a large, framed print of a sunset on Earth. I smashed the middle of it against the corner edge of the desk. Glass shattered. Now I had an empty frame.
Nine minutes.
I turned the frame on its side. The top of the frame was now waist-high to me. With the bottom of it against the floor, I held it beside me and leaned on it.
Then I took the first baby step of my life.
This was no time to celebrate. I was wobbly and felt like I would fall any second. But if I did, how could I get up without crawling back to the desk? And that would waste too many precious seconds.
The phrase of the dream came back to me again, making me feel stronger: Hunt the hunter.
I took the second baby step of my life. And the third. I tottered forward to the office door.
I was desperately hoping one thing. That Luke Daab had not risked raising any questions by being seen in my wheelchair. That he had jumped out almost as soon as he’d left the office.
I opened the door and peeked around the corner.
There it was. My wheelchair. I exhaled with relief.
I wanted to drop the heavy lead belt to be able to walk faster. But if I did, the headache pain would paralyze me. So I pushed ahead. It seemed I could hear every heartbeat as I made agonizingly slow progress.
Then, finally, I reached my wheelchair. I fell backward into it and dropped the picture frame that I had used as a cane.
Now I could move. I lifted my shield briefly. Pain zapped me, and I dropped the shield back into place. That told me Luke Daab hadn’t yet released the gas.
I pictured him at the far end of the dome, hooking up the tanks of poisonous gas to the vent system.
I pictured the gas seeping into the air, an invisible killer, making this a dome of death.
I pictured Ashley and the other kids waking up in the morning, stepping outside their sealed dorm and finding all the bodies of the adults—Mom and Rawling among them.
I pictured Luke Daab forcing us to assemble the carbon-dioxide generators. The Manchurian fleet landing. And the Manchurians forcing all of us robot-control kids into slavery.
How much time did I have left to stop the release of the gas?
And what would I do about it? I wondered about rolling through the dome to yell out a warning. However, there were nearly 200 adults under the dome. Some were asleep. Some were working late or the night shift. No way would I be able to alert all of them, especially because Daab would hear me too. All he’d have to do was stun me with his neuron gun. In the confusion, he could slip away and return to the tanks of poisonous gas.
No, I’d have to stop Daab. But I was in a wheelchair. He was fully mobile and had a neuron gun.
Could Ashley help me? No, she was in the dorm. If I woke her and she opened the sealed entrance as the poisonous gas was released, all the kids would die too.
My thoughts spun wildly. What about somehow blocking the vents so that poison gas wouldn’t reach anyone? Too many vents.
Wasn’t there some way I could stop Luke Daab—and save the lives of all the people on Mars? Not to mention the future possibility of more people who would be able to make Mars their new home?
A minute later the solution hit me.
I turned my wheelchair and pushed hard toward the computer room.
The first thing I did was go to the wall and pull down an oxygen tube. I strapped it to my face. If I ran out of time, I didn’t want my own body collapsing from the poisonous gas before I could accomplish my mission.
Second, I connected my spinal plug to a computer transmitter.
I guessed I was down to a minute.
I didn’t waste time putting on a helmet. I’d keep my eyes closed and concentrate as much as possible. It was something I’d learned to do in emergencies.
The connection to my robot hit, and with it came that familiar sensation of falling, falling, falling… .
Earlier, Ashley and I had moved our robots back from the surface of Mars to just inside the dome.
When the robot’s visual lenses opened, they showed her robot parked beside mine.
I directed the robot to shoot forward.
Now it had to be down to seconds before the gas released.
My robot whirred through the dome. I cornered and hit two techies who were walking slowly, deep in conversation. They bounced off the robot body.
“Hey! Hey!” they shouted in anger.
I kept going. I would apologize to them later. If I succeeded in saving their lives along with all the other adults under the dome.
My robot crashed through some plants as I took a shortcut. A scientist yelled at me.
I kept going.
Was it my imagination, or had a green cloud just been released through the vents?
Go, go, go! I shouted in my mind.
Then I reached it. The place in the dome Daab had punctured earlier. A repair was in place, of course.
Short of a welding torch, there was only one way to break through.
And I had it. The power of a six-foot-tall titanium robot moving at close to 30 miles an hour.
I raised the right arm of the robot and stretched it out horizontally in front of me. Like a spear. I made a fist. I sped up the robot’s wheels. And aimed.
The arm of the robot pierced the repair patch at top speed. As the titanium broke through, the robot body slammed into the wall of the dome. As it fell backward, half destroyed, I yelled Stop! and severed the connection between the robot and my own brain waves.
Although the video lenses no longer sent information to my brain, I didn’t need the visuals of the robot to see if I had succeeded in puncturing the repair patch.
A great whoosh hit, as the atmosphere outside the dome began to suck out the air around me. It pulled a ribbon of green—the poisonous gas that had just started to settle downward toward the floor.
And best of all, the horns broke into full scream, sending an unmistakable warning to every person in
side the dome to grab a nearby oxygen tube and strap it on.
All they would breathe until the poisonous gas cleared was life-giving oxygen.
CHAPTER 23
07.30.2043
Three months have passed since Luke Daab’s last stand—since he almost made the Mars Dome a place of death. That night, not a single person died.
Except maybe Luke himself.
He fled during the confusion, breaking out of the dome in his space suit, running toward the space shuttle.
We knew that by the footprints we followed the next day.
By then the shuttle was gone.
Maybe he’d hoped to connect with Dr. Jordan, the other Terratakers, and the Manchurian fleet. But only if his oxygen and water lasted.
If so, he hadn’t planned on Rawling finding the surface-to-space missile triggers. Or the communications system software that Daab had hidden inside an empty oxygen tank.
So when the atomic weapons were ready and the news was broadcast to Earth, the Manchurian fleet simply turned around. Who could blame them? Even Terratakers and Manchurians weren’t stupid. They knew when they couldn’t win.
As for Luke Daab? If he had planned to meet them in the middle of space, he’d gambled wrong. Because of it, his space shuttle probably had become a tomb that would drift forever in space.
I stopped writing in my journal to think about that for a minute. The very thought made me shiver. I wasn’t sure if even a guy like Luke Daab deserved that kind of an end.
Then I smiled and continued writing my update.
As for me, Rawling had determined that the implant wasn’t going to harm my spinal nerves. At least not for years. By then, he’d said, an Earth ship would be able to bring in one of the mini-robots capable of going into my bloodstream and working the nerves loose.
Was I walking yet?
Yes, slowly. But no one in the dome knew, because I’d been practicing secretly.
And I had my own plan to show it when the time was right.
Like tonight …
Mid-afternoon that day, the robots Ashley and I each controlled stood at the base of a great, gleaming copper globe, fully five stories above the surface of the red planet. We were surrounded by all the other robots controlled by the other kids. Even so, with nearly 50 robots in formation gathered at the base, the globe appeared overwhelmingly large.
Behind us were the dome’s platform buggies. As many of the scientists and techies who could fit inside were staring upward at the carbon-dioxide generator as well.
Five minutes earlier, the robots had been swarming two half-assembled generators beside this one.
But the time had arrived—and nobody would be working for the rest of the afternoon.
After the equipment had been put aside and the noise from that died down, I could hear only the Martian wind— and the sand it carried, which tapped against the robots’ titanium shells.
Dying sunlight bounced off the copper. Already stars were visible above the darkening horizon.
“This is it, Tyce. History.”
“I am glad you are with me, Ashley.”
It just seemed right, to be out here in the robots. And it made room for other people to be in the platform buggies.
Among them were Mom, Dad, and Rawling. None of us wanted to miss this.
Back at the dome, the chief engineer was activating the first carbon-dioxide generator. A little wisp of white cloud left the top of the copper globe. It was surprisingly undramatic.
“That’s it?” Ashley’s robot said to mine. “How is that going to fill the atmosphere with—?”
Then a great mushroom of white rose higher and higher, growing wider and wider until it filled the sky above us. It would pour out this gas day after day, year after year, along with the five other generators that we’d been working so hard to assemble. And soon enough, the carbon dioxide—trapped by the thin Mars atmosphere that already existed—would begin to trap heat. It was a miracle—the way that it didn’t just float off into space. Instead it stayed—and would enable plants to grow. Once plants could grow, they would produce oxygen. In the meantime, it was enough hope for Earth to keep countries from going to war.
“Yeah,” I replied to her robot. “I guess that is it. Think it will work?”
The white cloud above us meant that millions of people currently on Earth would live. And in the centuries to come, millions and millions and millions more would survive—and thrive. It didn’t mean all our problems on Mars—or the Earth’s problems—were magically over. There were still years of work ahead—through developing new scientific theories that would lead to bigger, better technology; faster ways to move people between Earth and Mars; ways to help them adjust to a new world. But there was hope now for the future of humankind— enough hope to keep the peace. And all of us kids had had a lot to do with generating that hope. It was something we could be proud of.
Now some of the robot-control kids would choose to go back to Earth on the next spaceship, when Earth and Mars lined up in their closest orbits again. Others—like Ashley and me—could choose to stay. To make a place for ourselves and others in this exciting new world. A new world on a beautiful red planet.
Later, when the celebration at the dome quieted down, Ashley rolled me in my wheelchair to one of the garden spots. I’d asked her to take me there because of what I’d planned.
She stood beside my wheelchair, half covered with the shadows from the trees.
I rolled my wheelchair forward slightly to where I had hidden my comp-board, with its built-in DVD-gigarom player, beneath a bench.
I clicked a button. A quiet voice began to sing softly, with guitar as a background.
“What’s this?” Ashley asked.
“An old ballad from Earth,” I said. “About kids with hopes and dreams.”
“I like it.”
“Me too.”
Then I stood up calmly … and walked toward Ashley.
“Tyce! You can … you can …” She wasn’t able to finish as she began to cry with happiness for me.
“Yes, I can walk,” I said.
I extended a hand. There had been something I’d been dreaming of doing for years. And I had practiced it over the last three months too. For hours with the song playing softly in my room.
“And there’s something else I can do too.” I smiled.
With a puzzled look on her face, Ashley took my hand.
“Care to dance?” I asked.
And so we did, with her tears falling freely on my shoulders.
SCIENCE AND GOD
You’ve probably noticed that the question of God’s existence comes up in Robot Wars.
It’s no accident, of course. I think this is one of the most important questions that we need to decide for ourselves. If God created the universe and there is more to life than what we can see, hear, taste, smell, or touch, that means we have to think of our own lives as more than just the time we spend on Earth.
On the other hand, if this universe was not created and God does not exist, then that might really change how you view your existence and how you live.
Sometimes science is presented in such a way that it suggests there is no God. To make any decision, it helps to know as much about the situation as possible. As you decide for yourself, I’d like to show in the Robot Wars series that many, many people—including famous scientists—don’t see science this way.
As you might guess, I’ve spent a lot of time wondering about science and God, and I’ve spent a lot of time reading about what scientists have learned and concluded. Because of this, I wrote a nonfiction book called Who Made The Moon? and you can find information about it at www.whomadethemoon.com. If you ever read it, you’ll see why science does not need to keep anyone away from God.
With that in mind, I’ve added a little bit more to this book—a couple of essays about the science in journals one and two of Robot Wars, based on what you can find in Who Made The Moon?
Sigmund Brouwer
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www.whomadethemoon.com
JOURNAL ONE
IS DNA JUST ABOUT FINGERPRINTS?
Q: Is DNA just about fingerprints?
A: Your body comes with a complete set of instructions. This “master blueprint,” called a genome, is what told your mother’s body to make you into a human being instead of a frog or a dog or a cat. It’s what makes you you, instead of your brother or sister. And you’re still carrying that genome even as you grow up. It will never change.
A genome consists of DNA (you can think of DNA as the “building blocks of life”) and associated protein molecules contained in something called chromosomes. The nucleus of each human cell contains two sets of chromosomes. One’s from your dad. The other is from your mom.
The way it all works together is pretty complicated but also very cool. And scientists are still trying to figure out how our bodies work. That’s why the United States started the Human Genome Project in 1990—to figure out how to identify people’s genes and map DNA. Currently it’s being used to test babies for any genetic problems before they’re born and to screen newborn babies. Mapping someone’s DNA can even tell if someone is high-risk to develop cancer or confirm the diagnosis of a genetic disease. It can tell you how long you’ll probably live. And it can even ID a criminal!
All of these are very good things, but there’s also the risk of taking them too far. In Tyce’s world of 2040, the Terratakers are arguing that everyone should be automatically tested, without having a say in it. And that means the DNA test results will have to be stored somewhere. That also means that those test results can fall into the wrong people’s hands— people like Dr. Jordan, Luke Daab, and other Terratakers who want to identify skills, like those of the robot kids, that they can abuse.
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