When the contents of the disc had appeared on the monitor in front of Lance, he'd covered his face with his hands.
To me, it was the action of a guilty man. I found it difficult to keep my mouth shut. But Dad was the pilot. Dad would handle this.
“You don't sound surprised to find out someone has been using the mainframe for all of this,” Dad said. “You're saying someone else has?”
“I have nothing more to say.” Lance folded his big arms across his big chest. “Except that I have done nothing to threaten the safety of this ship.”
“Prove it, then,” Dad said, still quiet. “Open the log of your mainframe computer activities.”
“All right,” Lance said after several seconds of thought. He began to punch out a series of commands on his keyboard. “You'll see I'm innocent of that.”
“But guilty of something else? Like possession of a master disc with a security override program? And with masses of highly confidential Mars Dome files?”
“I have nothing more to say in that regard. But I did nothing to threaten the safety of this ship. And if you look at the activity log ⦔ Lance gasped. Lines of numbers showed brightly on the screen. “Impossible. Totally impossible. I look at this log at least three times a day, and I've never seen these numbers before.”
“What?” Dad asked.
Lance touched the screen and followed a line of numbers. “Here. A command to unlock the prisoner's cable in bunk number five, just past midnight last night. Then to open the hatch to the corridor. And a command to seal it again two hours later. I ⦠I ⦠did not program this.”
Bunk number five? That's Dr. Jordan's bunk. He's been out of his prison bunk for two hours?
“Let me get this straight,” Dad said. “Someone released Jordan last night. And then Jordan returned to the prison bunk.”
So Blaine Steven has not been lying about a mastermind on board!
Lance scanned the lines. “And the night before. And the night before that. In fact, it looks like Jordan has come and gone at his convenience almost since the ship left Mars.”
“Why would you do that?” Dad asked.
“It wasn't me. I can tell you that. The man gives me the creeps.”
“You want me to believe that someone else on this ship actually controls the mainframe.” Dad's voice grew louder.
Lance ignored him and continued to scan the lines of the computer activity log. “Here. Unauthorized log-on to a personal comp-board. ID code 0808.”
ID code 0808. My comp-board!
“What time?” I asked.
“More than once,” Lance told me, reading the lines of code. “Including less than a half hour ago. Whoever logged on stole all the information on it and kept updating the new information you added.”
That person knows about the secret conversations I was having with Blaine Steven!
“And here,” Lance said, unaware of my anger and fear. “Disable commands to the escape pods. And here, commands that override the pilot controls.”
That explains the malfunctions Dad had been fighting.
Lance looked at Dad with bewilderment. He had the face of a big kid, scared. “Wasn't me. I didn't do any of this!”
“Then who?”
“If I knew, I would tell you,” Lance answered. “It could be anyone on this ship with a comp-board and the right security codes to access the mainframe.”
“How? You don't let anyone into this computer room, do you?”
“I don't know how,” Lance said in frustration.
“Think!” Dad said. “How would you do it?”
Lance shrugged. “I'd tap into a wire off the back of the mainframe and run that wire out somewhere in the ship. But not to my bunk, because it would be too easy to get caught. Instead, I'd run it to an infrared antenna that could be hidden anywhere and link from my comp-board that way. But you can't run that wire from this mainframe without time and access. Nobody has had either in this computer room.”
He caught Dad's glare. “I know! I know! Then it really looks like I'm the one. But I'm not.”
“I can order a search of all the comp-boards on the ship,” Dad said. “That will prove you right. Or wrong. In the meantime, undo those commands. Get the escape pods in working condition. Most of all, give me complete control again of the navigation cone.”
“If I can,” Lance said. He had his finger on the screen, running it below one of the lines.
“If you can?”
“This code ⦠I have to figure out the code before I can override it.”
“Which means?”
“Whoever has been tapping into the mainframe has complete control. Without the computer that's been instructing the mainframe, it will be impossible to undo all the commands that came from it.”
“Then we'll begin looking,” Dad said grimly, “and I expect total cooperation from you.”
Dad stared at Lance. Lance stared right back at him.
I looked beyond them at the computer screen. “Dad?”
The numbers on the screen began to dissolve. At the same time, the hatch door to the computer room began to close.
Dad reacted first. He shoved off a handhold and made a midair dive for the hatch door. It shut squarely on his body, pinning him in the opening, with his legs inside the computer room and his upper body stuck in the corridor.
Normally a hatch door was sequenced by the computer to reopen if it hit any objects. This was a built-in safety feature to prevent exactly what had just happened.
I pushed toward him. “Dad? You all right?”
“Not good,” Dad grunted from the other side. The hatch door pressed hard against his ribs. “Find something to jam in here so I can squeeze out. I don't know what's happening, but the last thing I want is us trapped in this room. Or unable to reenter once we're outside.”
I looked behind me. There was nothing I could use. Just the mainframe computer, the monitor, a desk, and the chair Lance was strapped on. The rest was bare walls and ceiling.
“Hurry, Tyce,” Dad grunted. “I think the door has got my diaphragm. I can't breathe!”
Being trapped or not suddenly seemed a lot less important than saving Dad's life. I rushed back to the hatch. I wedged one hand against the edge of the open hatchway and the other against the partly closed door. I tried to pull them apart. I pulled so hard that my vision turned black and I saw little stars.
“I ⦠can't!” I peered back at Lance, who was staring at me from his desk in front of the computer monitor. “Please ⦠I need help!”
This was the moment. If Lance was really the mastermind and had lied when he told us it was someone else controlling the ship's computer, then he'd let my dad die.
I futilely tried to pull again. “Help!”
It seemed like he moved in slow motion, but finally Lance came toward me, with Ashley following.
Lance took over my position. This was the first time I was glad that he was such a big man.
I backed up and inspiration hit me. The ceiling panels!
I grabbed a handhold with my left hand. With my right, I yanked at a ceiling panel. It came loose. It was a square piece of plastic, about a foot wide and an inch thick. I didn't know if one would do it. I yanked another loose. Then a third.
I spun back toward the hatch. With all three tiles stacked together, I put the bottom into the opening first, beneath Dad's legs. The opening was less than a foot wide, however, and I could not wedge the top of the square into place.
Below where Dad was stuck in the hatch, Lance was straining hard, veins bulging in his neck as he struggled to slide open the hatch door. Above Dad, Ashley had braced herself by jamming her feet against the edge of the hatchway and pulling on the hatch with both hands. She was bent like a bow and screaming with effort.
Slowly the hatch door moved back. As Dad slipped out, I jammed the ceiling tiles in place.
Lance and Ashley let go of the hatch, and it slammed against the wedged tiles.
Dad pushed backward and let out a deep breath. “Good,” he said, as the tiles held in place. “Now we're not trapped.”
I let out my own sigh of relief.
Just then the spaceship jolted forward with sudden acceleration. All of us were hurled against the back wall.
“Is someone at the controls?” Dad shouted at Lance.
They both shoved themselves back toward the computer monitor.
Seconds later Lance gave us the answer we didn't want to hear. “Negative. Nobody is in the navigation cone,” he answered as he read the monitor. “It looks like the computer has somehow been preprogrammed to do this. And the acceleration is continuing!”
As he finished speaking, the wailing sound of an alarm siren filled the ship.
My eyes met Dad's. We both knew that there was only one reason for that sound.
Someone had just begun the escape pod countdown.
The corridor was strangely empty.
The siren wailed its piercing shriek to give notice that time was running out before the escape pod ejected. In the past few months, Dad had run the occasional drillâeven during the night a couple of timesâto prepare us for an emergency situation. Once the siren sounded there was less than three minutes to reach the pod.
But none of the ship's passengers had left their bunks to see what was happening.
Just as well.
We swung from handhold to handhold, moving as fast as we could down the corridor toward the escape pods. If the others had wandered out of their bunks into our path, it would have made for a disastrous collision.
The walls of the corridor seemed to blur in the confusion of our frantic scuttling. The noise gained in volume.
Finally we rounded the curve to reach the escape pods.
Just in time to see Dr. Jordan with Luke Daab.
They saw the three of us.
Luke's mouth moved like he was shouting for us. But his words were drowned out by the siren.
“Stop!” Dad yelled uselessly above the din of the siren. I could barely hear him myself, and I was right beside his shoulder. “Stop!” He pulled his neuron gun from his belt and aimed. “Stop!”
Dr. Jordan might not have been able to hear Dad, but he could see the gun. We were less than 20 feet away from him. He reacted by grabbing Luke in a choke hold and using him as a shield.
Dad fired the neuron gun. The discharge would stun all of the neuron pathways in both Dr. Jordan and Luke, hurting them both but not damaging either of them permanently.
Nothing happened.
Dr. Jordan grinned evilly at Dad, turning his round face into a pucker of satisfied smugness.
Then I understood. The neuron gun could only operate under two conditions. The fingerprints of the person holding the gun had to match the computer instructions in the neuron gun's microchip. And activation had to be permitted by the mainframe computer.
If Dr. Jordan was somehow controlling the mainframe, he would have also disabled the neuron gun.
Dad fired again. Then he must have realized the same thing I did.
I felt Ashley bump against me.
The three of us against Dr. Jordan. We still had a chance, even without the neuron gun. Four of us, if Luke could get out of the choke hold.
“Back away!” Dr. Jordan shouted. We were close enough that we could barely hear him above the siren. Light bounced off his round glasses, hiding his eyes from us. “I'll snap his neck like a chicken bone!”
To emphasize his threat, Dr. Jordan squeezed the choke hold harder with his right forearm and began to turn Luke's head with his left hand. Pain and fear filled the small janitor's face.
Dad stopped.
Dr. Jordan smiled coldly. “Good-bye! I know you've been looking for a bomb. Too bad you didn't think computer bomb, because the chain of events I started on your mainframe is going to be very interesting! Start putting on your sunscreen!”
With those final words, he pulled Luke into the escape pod.
The hatch slid shut behind them.
And 20 seconds later the escape pod ejected from the ship.
I stared at points of light through the clear wall of the navigation cone. Only in my imagination could I wonder if I saw sunlight gleaming off the escape pod. Even though only half an hour had passed, it was thousands of miles away.
“It doesn't make me feel better that I was right in my guess,” Dad said. A blip on his monitor showed the location of the escape pod. “Jordan's using the momentum of the ship for a slingshot effect. Add our current speed to the speed of the pod's ejection from the ship, plus the burst of acceleration from its own fuel supply, and the escape pod has effectively doubled our speed. Which means they ⦔
It took Dad a few seconds to make his calculation. “They'll be in orbit range of Earth in 10 days. And we're not scheduled to arrive for almost three weeks.”
“Wrong.” Lance had dropped from the travel tube into the navigation cone.
“Wrong?” Dad repeated.
“Wrong,” he said, frowning. “But let me give you all the good news first. That radio signal you want me to send ahead with news about his escape? Except for an emergency beacon, our mainframe won't permit any communications. In or out of the ship. It's part of the pre-programming that was coded into the mainframe without our authorization.”
“That's the good news?” Dad said.
“Sure,” Lance said in a voice heavy with sarcasm. “Plus the fact that I still can't break the computer code that has locked down all the hatches. Everyone is still stuck in their bunks with no access to food or water.”
“Any more good news?”
“Unless you want to know that I found a wire from the mainframe to an infrared antenna in the ceiling panel halfway down the corridor. Which means whoever did the new programming had as much time as they wanted to make it foolproof. Which means I'm not sure I can break the new code soon enough. Unless I find the computer that wrote that code.”