“We've got nothing, then. We're stuck on a ship with no communications and no manual piloting controls.”
“All I was able to do was reduce the burn rate of our fuel to nothing, for now. We've stopped accelerating. Even so, if we don't figure out a way to start slowing down in the next hour, we'll shoot too far past Earth for our emergency beacon to reach anyone.”
“So if we are somehow able to start slowing down right away,” Ashley said, “someone might come looking?”
“If we stop.” Dad swung in his chair to face her squarely. “And if we stop close enough to the orbital shipping lanes between Earth and Mars. Neither possibility gives us much hope.”
I hadn't spoken since Lance had entered the navigation cone. “There is,” I said, “one tiny chance.”
Everyone stared at me.
“Hey,” I finished, “the big bots are still in the cargo bay, aren't they?”
Darkness.
Since I wasn't receiving the light signals through human eyes, waiting wasn't going to help my vision adjust. But that didn't matter. I knew that within moments light from the stars and sun would flood the inside of the cargo bay.
I heard a muted clank as the lock released. Then a hiss as the vacuum of outer space sucked the air out of the cargo bay. That was the last sound I could expect to hear. Sound does not travel in a vacuum, and the cargo bay slowly swung open to expose my robot body to the open solar system.
Light entered. The light of millions of galaxies and billions of stars, so diamond clear that I felt a thrill of incredible joy.
There was movement beside me. The other robot, controlled by Ashley. Like me, she was hooked by remote to a computer hard drive in the robot center inside the
Moon Racer
.
The robot waved. I waved back.
She had a newer model, but both were constructed with similar designs.
The lower body of the robot is much like my wheelchair. Instead of a pair of legs, an axle connects two wheels. On land, just like a wheelchair, it turns by moving one wheel forward while the other wheel remains motionless or moves backward.
The robot's upper body is a short, thick, hollow pole that sticks through the axle, with a heavy weight to counterbalance the arms and head. Within this weight is the battery that powers the robot, with wires running up inside the hollow pole.
At the upper end of the pole is a crosspiece to which arms are attached. The arms swing freely without hitting the wheels. Like the rest of the robot, they are made of titanium and are jointed like human arms, with one difference. All the joints swivel. The hands, too, are like human hands, but with only three fingers and a thumb instead of four fingers and a thumb.
Four video lenses at the top of the pole serve as eyes. One faces forward, one backward, and one to each side.
Three tiny microphones, attached to the underside of the video lenses, play the role of ears, taking in sound. The fourth speaker, underneath the video lens that faces forward, produces sound and allows us to make our voices heard.
The computer drive is well protected within the hollow titanium pole that serves as the robot's upper body. Since it's mounted on shock absorbers, the robot can fall 10 feet without shaking the computer drive. This computer drive has a short antenna plug at the back of the pole to send and receive X-ray signals.
Both of our robots held handjets in their right hands to allow us to propel the robots through space. My own robot held a welder's torch in the left hand. Ashley's robot held eight narrow strips of metal, all of them about two feet long. Everything had been placed in the cargo bay before Ashley and I had started the control sequence.
I waved one more time, then pointed at the open cargo door.
Her robot waved back and nodded.
I pushed forward. We had work to do.
The cargo bay had an inner door, which sealed the
Moon Racer
from outer space while the outer door was open. For humans who had to return to the inside of the
Moon Racer
, this was important. On their return from space the outer door would be closed and sealed, then the inner door opened, allowing air back into the cargo bay. Without the outer door closed again, it would be suicide for everyone in the
Moon Racer
to open the inner door.
For robots, however, it didn't matter. Not if they didn't ever need to get inside the
Moon Racer
. That simple fact was the only chance of survival for everyone else.
Because what we had to do would mean destroying the outer wide, flat cargo door.
I hit a propellant button on my handjet and pushed toward the cargo door.
Ashley followed. Each robot was attached to the wall of the cargo bay by hundreds of yards of thin cable that would prevent it from being lost in space.
Near the hinges of the cargo door, I stopped. I was now half inside the cargo bay and half outside, with the door wide open. I looked down at my wheels. Below, nothingness stretched to infinity.
It was not the time to enjoy a view, however. I clicked the button that fired up the welder's torch.
Ashley and I had gone over this a dozen times inside the spaceship. She knew what her robot had to do. I knew my robot's job. I nodded one more time to let her know I was ready.
She tucked her own handjet under the robot arm so both hands were free.
My handjet was off, and I used it to tap a spot on the edge of the door near the lower hinge.
Immediately Ashley's robot placed the end of one of the metal strips against the spot I had touched. Her robot held it there while I welded it on. The weld cooled almost instantly in the black chill of space. I handed her robot the torch and bent the strip upward, then back down, so it formed an upside-down U. I took the torch from her robot and welded the other end of the strip in place. We had formed our first bracket.
We did it again, a little higher. The two brackets were now a shoulder width apart.
Then we moved outward, staying with the door. At the opposite end of the door, near the latch that would hold it in place when it was shut, my robot body hung motionless, with infinity stretching in every direction.
But it was still no time to enjoy the view. Or even to marvel at the fact that we clung to a spaceship moving at thousands upon thousands of miles per hour, but without air around us, we didn't seem to be moving at all.
On this end of the door, I welded one bracket, then another. These two were also a shoulder width apart, roughly parallel with the two on the other side. Now we had four primitive handholds permanently attached to the inner side of the door.
Aware of how important it was to move quickly, I pointed at the last two brackets. Ashley's robot nodded and handed me the remaining four strips of metal. I bent them in a rough circle around the edge of one of my robot wheels. I nodded.
Her robot grabbed a bracket in each hand and hung there from the outer edge of the door, as if hanging from a handhold in the corridor of the
Moon Racer
. Her robot remained there while I used my handjet to move back to the hinges. Without hesitation, using the incredible heat of the welding torch in my other hand, I cut the hinges loose. The door fell away from the
Moon Racer
.
With Ashley's robot still hanging from the brackets, I guided the door through the weightlessness of outer space, back toward the ion thruster of the
Moon Racer
.
We were halfway done.
The ion thruster was simply a giant nozzle that directed a stream of propelling ions into space. If Lance had not been able to turn down the fuel-burn ratio earlier, our plan would not have had a chance.
As it was, it would still be tricky.
When we arrived, I used my handjet to push the wheels of Ashley's robot against the outer wall of the giant nozzle. I took one of the strips of metal I'd wrapped around my own robot wheels and bent it into another U. I turned the U upside down and put it between the spokes of one of her robot wheels. I welded one end to the outer wall of the thruster, then the other. I had just bracketed her robot permanently into place. I did the same with her other wheel.
All of this happened in slow-motion ballet. Movements in outer space have to be smooth and even, something I had learned the hard way during virtual-reality sessions. I wished it could go faster, but I had to get it right the first time.
It did look strange.
Her robot was now attached by its wheels to the outside of the thruster nozzle. And its hands held the brackets I had welded on the cargo door.
Three-quarters of the way there.
I left Ashley's robot there and pushed around to the opposite side of the ion thruster. With the final two strips of metal, I welded U-shaped strips around my own wheels so that my robot, too, was permanently attached to the outside of the thruster nozzle.
I waved at Ashley's robot on the other side of the nozzle.
It was weird, thinking that each of these robot bodies moved because of the brain-wave impulses that Ashley and I were sending to computers inside the
Moon Racer
. And weird to think that very soon Ashley and I would wake up inside the robot lab, with these two robots remaining out here, doing a highly unexpected job.
If
my plan worked.
I nodded one final time and watched as her robot began to swing the door down toward the opening of the thruster. Had there been ions streaming out, it would have blown the door backward like a flap in the wind. Instead, her robot was able to lower the door until my robot could grab the handhold brackets on the opposite side.
Just like that, we were finished.
Now there was a robot on each side, holding the door like an umbrella, just a few feet above the nozzle of the ion thruster.
“Ready?” Dad asked Lance.
“As ready as we'll ever be,” he replied.
Ashley and I crowded behind Dad as he watched the monitor with Lance. Everyone else was in the entertainment cluster, waiting just as anxiously as we were.
“Then fire it up,” Dad said. “We need to start as soon as possible. My calculations show we'll barely make it as it is.”
If it works,
I thought.
Lance rapidly keyed some commands.
For several seconds, nothing happened.
“Is the fuel-burn ratio up?” Dad asked.
Lance pointed at the computer screen. “That's what it says. But it always takes a bit of time for the ions toâ”
Bang!
The
Moon Racer
lurched, throwing us to the side.
All of us hit the opposite wall as the
Moon Racer
suddenly slowed.
And we began to cheer! More cheers reached us from the corridor. The others, too, understood we had just felt sudden deceleration.
It had worked.
The cargo door was now funneling the ions in the same way that a reverse thruster would!
Dad hugged me. I hugged Ashley. Lance hugged all three of us.
“Okay,” Dad said. “Lance, monitor it closely. But thanks to Tyce and Ashley's quick work to help us slow down and the fuel we have left, we should get this thing almost to a standstill by the time we reach Earth. And with the emergency locator, someone will find us soon enough.”
Lance's big grin faded.
“I know. I know,” Dad said. “Then you'll face arrest when we get Earth-side. But with all that you've done now and if you testify against Dr. Jordan and Luke Daab, I don't think it will be as bad as you expect. And I'll do whatever I can to help.”
Trouble was, almost three weeks later, when the soldiers of a military rescue shuttle boarded the ship, the first people arrested were Dad and me.
03.27.2040
Of all my dreams about Earth, I never expected I would get here and not see anything except four walls of a prison cell. I now know the true definition of misery. My body aches. After a lifetime of gravity at only one-third of the planet Earth's, my bones feel heavy, my muscles weak, and my lungs tired. At every point where my body sits in my wheelchair, my skin is raw from the unaccustomed weight and pressure. I can't imagine how much worse this would have been if I hadn't been working out daily during the trip from Mars to Earth.
Dad said it would take a week at least to adjust to the new gravity, but I wonder if I ever will.
As for my dreams about all the different foods I'd be able to try, those too have become a nightmare. Prison food is horrible.
I don't know exactly where I am, just that it's some windowless room the size of a closet, and it has been two days since our arrest.
I haven't seen my dad. Or Ashley. And I'm not sure what happened to them or the others because we were arrested so quickly. All I have is my compboard, and even its files were searched, copied, and transferred before I could keep it.
So now I'm writing my journal in case Dad or Mom or Rawling ever gets ahold of this.
All I can do is hopeâ¦.
I stopped keyboarding at the sound of scratching on my prison door. It sounded like the guard's keys. Which meant I would get yet another rotten meal.
It wasn't a guard. But a robot!
“Hello,” a familiar voice said from the robot's speakers. “You all right, Tyce?”
“Ashley? Ashley!” I pushed forward, expecting that I would float through the air in her direction. Nothing happened. I was on Earth, not in the freedom and weightlessness of space.
“Shhh!” she said anxiously. “We only have about five minutes.”
“For what?” I asked.
“What else?” she said. “Escape. You and I have a lot to do before all of this is over.”
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.