Double Cross (9 page)
“It's on my computer,” Ashley said, ignoring the question about the explosion.
“Has anyone else seen it?”
“No,” she said. “I thought I should let you be the first to know.”
“No one else has seen it.”
“I just told you that.”
“I needed to be sure,” Director Steven said. “Thank you.”
“You're welcome. Are you going to find out who triggered the devices? Are you going to tell people the aliens were fakes, planted by an Earth mission?”
“Let's go for a walk,” Director Steven answered.
“Walk?”
With a sudden movement, he grabbed Ashley's wrist and pulled her to her feet. Then he tightened his arm around her waist and clamped a hand over her mouth so she couldn't scream.
“A long walk,” he said in a menacing tone. “Out on the surface of the planet.”
I'd been waiting for this moment.
In the robot body, I rolled out from behind the plants that had kept me hidden from Director Steven. With his back to me and one arm wrapped around Ashley's waist, he didn't see me coming. So I reached out and grabbed his wrist with titanium fingers. I locked my grip.
“Let her go,” I demanded.
Director Steven found himself looking straight into my front video lens. His eyes bulged with surprise. Not at my appearance, though that would have surprised most people. No, Director Steven knew what the robot body looked like. That's not what surprised him.
“Impossible,” he said. He had to know as soon as he saw the robot body that we hadn't been blown up.
“Not impossible,” I said through the robot's voice box. “Dad and Rawling are in the platform buggy about five miles from here, where they are letting me control this robot body. Now let her go.”
I tightened my grip. The titanium fingers of the robot body were capable of bending bars of steel. He screamed in pain. I lessened the grip slightly but did not release his arm. “Let her go.”
Reluctantly, he did.
“It was you,” I said. “Someone high up in the Science Agency on Earth is in on it too, right? So you were placed back as director?”
“This is insane,” he protested.
Ashley backed away from Director Steven. Her face was not afraid but angry. “Jerk!” she said to him. She kicked him in the shins, then sat down on the bench.
“It is not insane.” I held out my other hand. “Recognize this?”
Director Steven drew in a big breath of surprise. He tried to pull himself out of my grip.
“So you do recognize it,” I said.
I held a small, gray, plastic box, with what looked like antennae sticking out of the sides. It was the same box we'd pulled off the axle of the platform buggy. Filled with high-powered explosives, it was just like the one on the video that had exploded the black boxes.
“Take it outside,” Director Steven said, his eyes wide as he stared at it in my hand.
“Outside? Why?”
After I'd seen the little box on the monitor and remembered the one on the axle, Dad and Rawling had gone out of the platform buggy to remove the box. They'd taken the cover off but left the explosives intact, with the antennae in place. We'd driven safely away, leaving the explosives near the base of a hill. It hadn't surprised us when it blew only 15 minutes later, taking much of the hillside with it, leaving people at the dome with the mistaken impression that we'd died. And that's when Rawling and Dad had come up with their theory.
“Just take it outside!” Director Steven was frantic. “The whole dome could be destroyed!”
But a theory was only a theory unless it could be proved. Rawling had reassembled the cover of the gray box and inserted wires that would look like antennae. But only in dim lighting. Like right here and right now.
“Destroyed?” I said. “Are you suggesting this thing in my hand is a bomb? But how could you know, unless you were the person behind this?”
“No! No!” Director Steven finally realized what he might have admitted.
“Well,” I said, “if it is
not
a bomb, we have nothing to worry about. Why not go for a ride in the other platform buggy? Just you and me. Once outside the dome, we will see if it is an explosive or not. How does that sound?”
“No!”
If the bomb went off, Director Steven realized he'd be the only one hurt. I, after all, was controlling the robot body. If it was destroyed, it wouldn't harm me.
“No? You do not want to go for a ride? Because maybe you know what this is?”
“Yes,” he said. “I do. Let go of me, and I'll tell you everything.”
I let go of his arm.
He backed away from me. He grinned. “I'm going to go get security. They'll take you away. And Ashley. When I erase her computer files, it will be your word against mine.”
“The explosive,” I said.
“I doubt very much you'll do anything with it here. In the dome? Where it will kill Ashley and your mother and everyone else?” Another grin of victory. “Fool.” He turned and ran before I could stop him.
I rolled my robot body around to face Ashley.
She was frowning. “That didn't work exactly like you planned.”
“Are you kidding?” I pointed at my video lens. “From the moment he got here, I recorded every word.”
08.06.2039
I don't really want to be sitting here in front of my computer. It's early evening, and I want to leave my minidome and go up to the telescope. But I know I'd better put the rest of what happened into my journal while it's still fresh in my head.
Rawling and Dad had guessed right. That's why we'd taken so many hours to return to the dome. They'd spent a lot of time throwing ideas back and forth until they'd realized exactly why and how all of it must have happened.
The entire alien thing was fake. It had been set up secretly right when the dome was first established. Director Steven had been part of it from the beginning. All those years ago Science Agency techies on Earth had made those fakes. And just to show how coldly careful the Science Agency had been, they'd used two techies who were battling terminal cancer, knowing that when they died they'd take their secret with them. The Science Agency had even planned the “alien discovery” by projecting which asteroid would hit 15 years later, because even back then the science committee knew the Mars Project funding would come up for review around that time.
Why go to so much effort for something fake?
How about $200 billion a year? That's what the Mars Project needs. And that's what it was going to get for another 10 years when the videos arrived at the United Nations budget committee by digital satellite ⦠just in the nick of time to get everybody excited about aliens and new technology. Let's see ⦠that's a total of $2 trillion. Not bad for a fake setup. And a couple of murders, if it had worked.
Director Blaine Steven â¦
I stopped keyboarding as a familiar chime on my computer alerted me to a new text message via IM. I saved my journal writing but didn't close the program, then clicked on my IM alert.
Tyce
Are you going to meet me tonight? I want to talk.
I smiled and sent Ashley a message.
Talk? How about up at the telescope?
Seconds later, she wrote back.
Sounds good. How about I stop by and we'll go together? I'll bring Flip and Flop. They've been restless. I think they miss you!
I smiled again.
Come on over. And bring the koalas. I miss them too.
I sent the message, then returned to my journal.
Director Steven heard about our planned trip from one of his techie molesâsomeone who spied for him and kept him informed of things happening at the dome. It was a techie whose job was to help prepare the platform buggies for field trips. This techie planted the bomb.
After we left the dome, this same techie helped ex-Director Steven send a coded message to the higher-ups in the Science Agency who had helped him set up this plan many years ago, while Steven was still on Earth. They pulled the strings to get Steven put in place as dome director again. From there, all that Director Steven needed to do was monitor our progress. As soon as he received the digital video scans, it served his purposes to get rid of the only witnesses to the fake aliens.
But now Steven is back under guard, along with the techie who helped him. They'll be going back to Earth on the next shuttle to face criminal charges there.
As for the funding, the funny part is this: it went through without the alien report. Members of the budget committee didn't even hear about the aliens. With a 7â5 vote in favor of budgeting more money, they decided to keep the dome going simply because it truly was important to Earth. Although Steven had sent the digital video scans back to Earth by satellite transmission, Dad and Rawling followed them up with the whole report about fakes. The Science Agency kept all of this out of the public news and is now investigating who else was involved.
Yet without a flat tire, it would have turned out much differently. I shiver when I think of what would have happened to Dad and Rawling and me out on the surface of Mars if I hadn't seen that small gray box.
But all thoughts about death are scary. I can understand why people would rather listen to music or watch television or play computer games or do anything else to distract themselves from wondering about death. Because then you have to ask questions about God and why we're here and how the universe started and â¦
I stopped keyboarding. And smiled again. Tonight I'd be happy to talk about all of this with Ashley. It was great having a friend my age.
I heard her voice as she called out for me and then Mom's voice as she told Ashley I was in my room. I saved my writing, shut down my computer, and turned my wheelchair around so I was facing her when she entered.
“Hey,” I said. “You got here fast.”
“I ran,” Ashley said. “I've got some news. You've got to promise to keep it secret. At least until my father announces it officially.”
“Sure.”
She stepped closer and whispered, “Interested in going to Jupiter?”
Ambush!
Rawling McTigre, the director of the Mars Project, had warned me that, on this practice run in the Hammerhead space torpedo, I wouldn't be alone in the black emptiness 3,500 miles above the planet. But I'd already circled Phobos, one of the Martian moons, twice and seen nothing, so it was a complete surprise when my heat radar buzzed with movement from below.
Actually, it's wrong to say I had seen nothing. What I'd really seen was the silver glint of sunlight bouncing off Phobos. To do that, I'd raced at the moon with the sun behind me. At the speed I moved in the Hammerhead, the moon was almost invisible coming from any other angle. It was so tiny, and the backdrop of deep space so totally dark, except for the pinpoints of stars.
Without the sun at my back, straining for visual contact with Phobos was like trying to see a black marble hanging in front of a black velvet curtain.
It was also wrong to say the movement came from below.
In space, there
is
no up and down. It's difficult, though, not to think that way because I'm so used to living in gravity, weak as it is on Mars. So I thought of the Hammerhead's stabilizer fin as the top.
When the movement came from the belly side of the space torpedo, my mind instinctively told me it was below. Just like my mind instinctively told me to roll the Hammerhead away from the movement.
In one way, rolling my space torpedo was as easy as thinking it should roll. It's similar to how you move your arms or your legs. Your brain wills it to happen, and the wiring of your nervous system sends a message to your muscles. Then chemical reactions take place in your muscles' cells and they burn fuel, causing you to move.
It was the same way with the Hammerhead. My mind, connected to the computer, willed it to roll and it obeyed instantly. But it was really the computer on board that did all the hard work. It ignited a series of small flares along the stabilizer nozzles, allowing the torpedo to react as though it were flying through the friction of an atmosphere, not the vacuum of outer space.
I rolled hard to my right, then hard left, then downward in a tight circle that brought the giant crescent of Mars into my visual.
The top of the massive red ball shimmered with an eerie whiteness, the thin layer of carbon dioxide that covered the planet. And behind it was the glow of the sun.
But I didn't have time to admire this beauty. The planet was getting closerâfast.
I told myself I wouldn't crash, that its closeness was just an illusion because it filled so much of my horizon. After all, the top of the Martian atmosphere was still over 3,000 miles away.
But I was moving at over four miles per second. That meant if I didn't change direction within the next 10 minutes, at this speed, I'd get fried to a crisp upon reentry.