Death Trap (2 page)
“Ouch is right,” Rawling said, looking up from his own screen where he sat at a desk across the cramped room from me. “My readout shows he cracked three video lenses and shocked your computer drive. Basically he killed you. A human defeating a robot.”
Rawling McTigre, one of the two medical doctors under the dome, was stocky and in his mid 40s. He had been a quarterback at his university back on Earth when he was younger, and his wide shoulders showed it. His short, dark hair was streaked with gray. He said his hair had turned gray from trying to look after me. I spent so much time with him that there were days when I wished he were my father. I mean, because voice-to-voice calls were far too costly as my real father traveled between Earth and Mars, and because the round trip took so long, all I really had for a father was a photo of some guy in a pilot's space suit.
“What were you thinking out there?” Rawling asked.
“Thinking? I didn't have time to think,” I responded.
“I'd spent four hours tracking them down, and suddenly the one goofball decides he doesn't want to be rescued. Besides, who programmed the sandstorm into this rescue operation? Wasn't it bad enough one guy is running low on oxygen and the satellite communications are down? What was nextâa short circuit that left my robot unit with only one arm or one video lens in operation?”
“Tyce, Tyce, Tyce.” Rawling shook a good-natured finger at me. “I don't remember anyone ever making it to stage five of that program. You have this gift, this talent, thisâ”
“You're about to lecture me, aren't you?” I said, sighing. “You always start your lectures by giving me a compliment. Then you let me have it.”
He laughed. “You've got me figured out. But I have to discuss your mistakes and what you can learn from them. If I don't, how will you be able to control the perfect virtual-reality robot?”
“That's another thing,” I said. I was hot and thirsty. I was mad at the scientist who'd knocked me out with a rock. I was grumpy. “Why do I need to control the perfect virtual-reality robot?”
Rawling gave me a strange look.
“I've been thinking about that a lot lately,” I said, pressing forward. “I'm not the one who wants me to be perfect. You are.”
He still said nothing. I wondered if he was mad at me.
“Don't get me wrong,” I responded quickly. “It's fun to become part of the program and pretend I'm actually outside the dome. But I want the real thing. I want to get outside. I want to look up and actually see the sky and the sunset. Not just have it projected into my surround-sight helmet. I wantâ”
“Tyce,” Rawling said quietly, “look down.”
Even though I knew what was there, I looked down. At my wheelchair. At useless, crippled legs. At pants that never got ripped or dirty because I was always sitting, legs motionless, in my wheelchair.
“I know. I know,” I said sadly. “Sinking into Martian sand would eat up these wheels in less than a minute. But I can't let that stop me.”
He stared at me.
“You're the one,” I murmured, “who always tells me this is only a handicap if I let it be a handicap.”
Dome horns began to blare in short bursts. I counted four blares.
Four blares? That meant â¦
“A call for everyone to assemble,” Rawling said, reading my mind.
The dome director was going to speak to all 200 of us under the dome at the same time. That hadn't happened since it looked like an asteroid might hit Mars, and that had been five years ago.
“I was afraid of this,” Rawling muttered. He took my surround-sight helmet off my lap and set it beside the computer on the desk in front of me. “This may be your last computer run for a while.”
“What?”
“It means a techie has confirmed my oxygen readings. Director Steven is going to tell all of us to avoid using electricity on anything except totally necessary activities. At least until we get our problem fixed.”
“Oxygen readings? Problem fixed?” This sounded serious. Too serious. Just as serious as the look on Rawling's face.
“Over the last week,” he explained, “and during routine checkups, scientists and techies complained to me about being too tired. And I've been tired myself.”
Now that he mentioned it, my arms didn't feel that strong after pushing my wheelchair across the dome. Most of the time my arms were very strong, because I had to use them like my legs if I wanted my wheelchair to go anywhere.
“But I couldn't find anything wrong with them,” Rawling continued. “So without telling anyone, I took some oxygen readings. The dome was down 10 percent in oxygen levels.”
“Ten percent!”
“That was three days ago,” he said. “I didn't want to spread panic, so I kept it to myself and asked the director to get a techie to confirm it. I hoped I was doing the readings wrong.”
The dome horns began to blast again. Four blares.
Rawling waited until they finished. “I guess I wasn't wrong. Worse, today my own readings showed we are now down 12 percent. Somehow the oxygen generators are failing little by little, and it looks like the problem is getting worse.”
With time running out, Mom wants me, Tyce Sanders, to write all that is happening in a journal for people to read on Earth when we are gone. We'll store it on a hard drive here and have it sent by satellite e-mail to the Internet systems of Earth schools. That way kids who have been following the Mars Project will get a chance to know about our last days. She thinks it will mean more to people coming from a kid my age than from any scientist.
But I hardly know where to begin. I mean, earlier this afternoon, my biggest worry was whether I could conquer a virtual-reality program where IÂ controlled a super-robot. Now, the oxygen level in the colony is dropping so fast that all of us barely have five days to live.
I stopped and stared at my computer screen. Writing is not easy for me. I used to think that because I had a hard time with it, it meant I was dumb. Rawling laughed one day when I told him that. He said I was not dumb. He said most people found writing difficult, and it just took practice. He said sometimes adults forget that, and they expect their kids to be good writers instantly.
Hearing him say that made me feel better. And it made sense. It was unfair when adults looked at a kid's writing and expected that kid to be as good at it as adults who have been writing for years and years. So now I'm not as afraid to put my thoughts onto a computer screen.
I began to type again on the keyboard in my lap.
First, today's date: AD 06.20.2039, Earth calendar. It's been a little more than 14 years since the dome was established in 2025. When I think about it, that means some of the scientists and techies in the dome were my age around the year 2000, even though the last millennium seems like ancient history. Of course, kids back then didn't have to deal with water shortage wars and one-world governments and an exploding population that meant we had to find a way to colonize Mars.
Things have become so desperate on Earth that already 500 billion dollars have been spent on this project, which seems like a lot until you do the math and realize that's only about 10 dollars for every person on the planet.
Kristy Sanders, my mom, used to be Kristy Wallace until she married my father, Chase Sanders. They teamed up with nearly 200 men and women specialists from all countries across the world when the first ships left Earth. I was just a baby, so I can't say I remember, but from what I've been told, those first few years of assembling the dome were heroic. Now we live in comfort. I've got a computer that lets me download e-entertainment from Earth by satellite, and the gardens that were planted when I was a kid make parts of the dome seem like a tropical garden. It isn't a bad place to live.
But now it could become a bad place to die.
Today Blaine Steven, the dome director, called everyone together and told us that the gigantic solar panels that cover most of the ceiling of the dome are failing to make enough electricity to run the dome and provide all our oxygen. He said if we cut back our use of electricity to only what is absolutely needed, we can use the rest of the electricity to make more oxygen. He warned that this alone would not be enough. But the reserve oxygen in the dome's spare tanks will get us through the last few days until the supply ship arrives.
So no extra electricity can be used on anything. The only reason I'm able to use my computer is because it's running on battery. It means we won't even use electricity for running showers. It's better to be smelly and able to smell the smelliness, Director Steven said, than to be clean and dead. Everyone agreed.
Director Steven also said that most work under the dome would be shut down. He said people should rest and sleep and read e-books as much as possible because resting bodies use less oxygen. He said if all of us joined together we had a really good chance of surviving.
Let me say this to anyone on Earth who might read this. If, like me, you have legs that don't work, Mars, with its lower gravity pull, is probably a better place to be than Earth.
That's only a guess, of course, because I haven't had the chance to compare Mars' gravity to Earth's gravity. In fact, I'm the only person in the entire history of mankind who has never been on Earth.
I'm not kidding.
You see, I'm the first person born on Mars. Everyone else here came from Earth nearly eight Martian years agoâ15 Earth years to youâas part of the first expedition to set up a colony. The trip took eight months, and during this voyage my mother and father fell in love. Mom is a leading plant biologist. Dad is a space pilot. They were the first couple to be married on Mars. And the last, for now. They loved each other so much that they married by exchanging their vows over radio phone with a preacher on Earth. When I was born half a Mars year laterâwhich now makes me 14 Earth years oldâit made things so complicated on the colony that it was decided there would be no more marriages and babies until the colony was better established.
I stopped again. Because Mom tells me that much of the Mars Project has been explained so often in the media and in schools, I knew I didn't have to go into detail about the colony itself. I guessed everybody on Earth already knew that Phase 1 was to establish the dome. Phase 2, which we were just about to start, was to grow plants outside the dome so more oxygen could be added to the atmosphere. The long-range planâwhich would take over a hundred yearsâwas to make the entire planet a place for humans to live outside the dome.
People on Earth desperately needed the room. Already the planet had too many people on it. If Mars could be made a new colony, then Earth could start shipping people here to live. If not, new wars might begin, and millions of people would die from war or starvation or disease.
I wondered, though, if people really understood how different it was to live under a dome nearly 50 million miles away from the planet Earth.
I turned back to my keyboard.
What was complicated about a baby on Mars?
Let me put it this way. Because of planetary orbits, spaceships can reach Mars only every three years. (Only four ships have arrived since I was born.) And for what it costs to send a ship from Earth, cargo space is expensive. Very, very expensive. Diapers, baby bottles, cribs, and carriages are not exactly a priority for interplanetary travel.
I did without all that stuff. In fact, my wheelchair isn't even motorized, because every extra pound of cargo costs something like 10,000 dollars.
Just like I did without a modern hospital when I was born. So when my spinal column twisted funny during birth and damaged the nerves to my legs, there was no one to fix them. Which is why I'm in a wheelchair.
But it could be worse. On Earth, I'd weigh 110 pounds. Here, I'm only 42 pounds, so I don't have to fight gravity nearly as hard as Earth kids.
I thought about my father. I felt like I hardly knew him or he knew me because he didn't stay long between trips to Earth and back. For a long time I was always angry when I thought about this, because, from what I've read, most kids get to grow up with their fathers. And most kids get to grow up using their legs. But I've decided not to waste time caring about him or about what has happened to my legs.
I tapped at my keyboard, slowly putting more words together.
When my body and arms aren't weak from lack of oxygen, the lower gravity does make it easy to get around in my wheelchair.
The other good thing is that I never have to travel far. Not like on Earth, where you can go in one direction for thousands of miles. Here, all 200 of usâmainly scientists and techies, the name we give techniciansâlive under a sealed dome that might cover four football fields. (I know all this about Earth because of the DVD-gigarom books IÂ scan for hours every day.)
When I'm not being taught by my computer or Rawling McTigre, I spend my time wheeling around the paths beneath the colony dome. I know every scientist and techie by first name. I know every path past every minidome, the small, dark plastic huts where people live in privacy from the others. Between the solar panels that crowd the ceiling I've seen every color of Martian sky through the super-clear plastic of the main dome above us. I've spent hours listening to sandstorms rattle over us. I've â¦
⦠I've got to go. Mom's calling me to join her for mealtime.
I hit the Save button on my keyboard. There would be plenty of time later to report more on our oxygen crisis, millions of miles away from rescue.
Our minidome, like everyone else's, had two office-bedrooms with a common living space in the middle. Mom wasn't able to use her second room as an office because that had become my bedroom. We didn't need a kitchen, because we never had anything to cook. Instead, a microwave hung on the far wall; it was used to heat nutrient tubes. Another door at the back of the living space led to a small bathroom. It wasn't much. From what I've read about Earth homes, our minidome had less space than two average bedrooms. And I could only dream about having a backyard and fence and garden the way I'd seen in e-photos.