The Prometheus Project (7 page)

“This is not a discussion!” he shouted. “You can’t help us. You have to save yourselves. Go!”

Both kids still hesitated.

“Go!”
screamed their father, louder than he had ever screamed before, and with unmistakable panic in his voice. Ryan saw the pleading look in his eye and realized he was far more afraid for
them
than he was for himself— afraid they wouldn’t run to safety as he was desperate to have them do. This alone sparked Ryan into action.

“We’ll bring help,” he shouted as he sprinted from the room, yanking on his sister’s shirt so she would follow. He knew the odds were one in a million that they could bring help back in time, but they had to
try
.

They were halfway to the building’s exit when, in his haste, Ryan smashed into a strange, shimmering podium that promptly retracted into the ground and disappeared. Wincing in pain, he put on a burst of speed and caught up with his sister who was now running toward three oval exits. He could have sworn there had only been a single doorway when they had entered. He followed his sister through the center doorway and was relieved to find that they had chosen correctly and it led to the outside.

Ryan looked for the walkway that would help speed them back to the cavern, and possible help, hoping it would still accelerate their pace even when they were running. He was about to sprint onto it when Regan grabbed his arm from behind. “Ryan, wait!”

“What?” he said impatiently, unable to believe his sister was trying to slow him down.

“Remember the blowtorches we saw just outside the room Mom and Dad were in?” she said excitedly. “They were
outside
the circle of bugs. So we can get them! We can use them as weapons on the swarm! I don’t care how alien they are, those bugs are bound to be afraid of fire. Come on!”

Ryan’s eyes widened. “Great idea!” he said.

They raced back into the building with a renewed sense of hope and purpose. Maybe they
could
save their parents.

They each gathered a blowtorch and shot through the entrance to the staircase room, gasping for breath, their eyes darting across the floor, searching for the best place to begin waging war on the eruption of relentless alien attackers. But what they saw was totally unexpected and took their breath away.

The alien creatures were gone
. All of them. And everything else in the room was gone as well.

They looked on in horror, knowing they had been too late. The room was completely empty. Completely.

The insects must have devoured everything in their path.

Not a single trace of their parents or any of the other scientists remained.

Chapter 14

Vanishing Act

Ryan raced up the wispy stairs in desperation. He returned moments later and shook his head. No one was on the second floor either.

How could this be happening,
he thought in despair.

A tear rolled gently down Regan’s cheek. “Could they have escaped out another exit?”

Ryan shook his head sadly. “Those insect things picked the room clean,” he whispered woodenly. “Look at it. There’s no trace that anyone was ever here. No people, no equipment—nothing. The pole that was leaning against the stairs is gone. There’s not even any blood stains where Mom was hit.”

“But how could they eat through solid steel, Ryan? How?”

“I don’t know,” said her brother sullenly. “But you saw how quickly they devoured solid rock. I guess steel and . . .” he was about to say bone but thought better of it. “I guess steel is no different.”

“But we were only gone about two minutes,” persisted Regan. “They couldn’t be
that
fast. Are you saying they devoured the equipment and all those people and disappeared again in less than two minutes? I don’t believe it. Mom and Dad are still alive,” she insisted. “I
know
they are. They have to be.” And with that she broke into tears.

Ryan wiped away several large tears that had escaped from the corners of his own eyes and put an arm around his sister. He tried to find words to comfort her, but there were none to find.

After a few minutes Regan managed to get her emotions back under control. Her parents
were
alive, she told herself, and she was going to figure out where they were.

She forced herself to concentrate on the room once more. It was uncanny how quiet it now was and even more uncanny how selective the swarm had been. None of the many alien objects in the room had been touched, nor had the stairs, the floor, or the doorways. Nothing. The insects had devoured every last microscopic shred of everything from Earth, people or otherwise, and hadn’t touched a single atom of anything that was already here. She pointed this observation out to Ryan. “How did they know?” she asked him. “Why would they prefer Earth stuff?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Probably because the alien building material is too tough for them. You saw how tough just those thin strands are.”

“But they were able to eat through the floor,” Regan pointed out. “Yet there’s no trace of any damage to it. Where did they come from? Where did those rock chunks come from? What kind of . . . creatures . . . like to eat metal, plastic,
and
people? And how did they know that Earth stuff wasn’t poisonous?”

“You’re right. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Do you think the swarm will return?” said Regan.

Ryan shuddered. “Let’s not wait around to find out.”

They retraced their path back to where they had first entered the perilous city in numbed silence. This time, instead of marveling at the fantastic architecture around them they kept their eyes on the ground, searching for the return of the piranha-like insects and trying not to think about the fate of their parents.

Finally, after a period of time that seemed far longer than it really was, they arrived at the edge of the city, to the place at which they had entered. The opaque wall of energy ran in a smooth curve in front of them, distorting their vision. They looked for the swirling colors that would mark the hole in the energy shield that their father had torn open.

It wasn’t there! The entrance was gone! How could that be?

They were trapped!

Trapped in a city that had already shown how deadly it could be.

And who knew how long it would be before the swarm of alien insects became hungry again?

Chapter 15

Trapped!

They looked around frantically. There must be some mistake.

“Are we sure this is the right place?” said Regan.

“Positive.”

Yet where was the opening?

“We’re never going to leave here, are we?” whispered Regan.

“Don’t be silly. Of course we will,” said Ryan, trying hard for his sister’s sake to sound far more confident than he felt.

“Maybe the entrance moved,” offered Regan. “Carl said the city seemed like a living thing sometimes. We didn’t find out what he meant. Maybe parts of the city can move around on their own.”

Ryan shook his head. “We’ve stayed on the walkway all the way back so we know we didn’t get lost. This is where we entered. The cavern is a few inches from us and we know it didn’t move. If the original entrance moved somehow, the lasers and other machinery in the cavern would have torn another hole here.”

They stood in silence for several minutes straining to see an opening in the force-field wall that wasn’t there. Ryan felt totally helpless and he had no idea what to do. If only his parents were there. They always knew what to do.

So what
would
they do in this situation?

The answer came to him almost at once. If they were confronted by this puzzle they would try to solve it using a process called the
scientific method
. His dad had gone over the scientific method with him in great detail just a few months before. First, you observed things. They had done that. They had observed a swarm of deadly insects devour everything human and nothing alien. They had observed that the entrance to the city was gone. Then you formed a hypothesis—some kind of idea that could explain everything you had observed. An idea that would allow you to make predictions, and to design experiments to test these predictions. If the results of your experiments failed to support your predictions, you would have to modify your hypothesis or even throw it away completely. Your goal would be to find a hypothesis that
would
account for all of your observations and allow you to successfully predict the outcome of additional experiments.

To make sure Ryan understood his explanation, his father had borrowed a feather from an old pillow and marched him into the backyard. Mr. Resnick was soon holding his arms out in front of him over the lawn, at exactly the same height, with the feather in one hand and a large rock in the other. Then he let go of both at the same time. The rock quickly slammed into the grass with a thud while the feather lazily made its way down to earth.

“What did you observe?” asked Mr. Resnick.

“The rock fell faster,” said Ryan immediately.

“Do you have a hypothesis that could explain this?”

Ryan rolled his eyes. His dad could have chosen a more difficult example than this. “Heavy objects fall faster than light objects.”

“How could you test this hypothesis?”

“There’s no need to test it,” said Ryan. “In this case it isn’t a hypothesis, it’s an absolute fact.”

“Are you sure about that?” asked Mr. Resnick, his eyes twinkling.

Ryan nodded. “Positive.”

His dad grinned broadly. “Let’s try it anyway. Show me a way to test the hypothesis.”

Ryan found a small pebble and retrieved the same large, heavy rock his dad had dropped. He held them out in front of him, one in each hand, and dropped them with a bored look.

They landed at the exact same time!

Impossible! Ryan couldn’t believe his eyes.

Shaking his head in disbelief, Ryan picked up the pebble and rock and tried once again, this time making absolutely certain he released them at the same time, from the exact same height. Sure enough, he had not imagined it—they both hit the ground at the exact same instant.

Ryan still refused to believe it. His father watched, amused, as he tested rubber bands and pebbles and paperclips against basketballs and rocks and phone books. In each case, both of the test objects landed at exactly the same time.
He had been so sure
. All his instincts told him the heavy objects would fall faster. But they didn’t.

Ryan winced, feeling a little foolish. “Okay, maybe I’m not as positive as I thought.”

His dad smiled. “Okay, so your original hypothesis is wrong, after all. Good thing we did the experiments. Can you think of a hypothesis that
does
account for all of the results?”

Ryan thought about it. The only object he had tried that didn’t fit the pattern was the feather. It was the oddball. He dropped the feather by itself a few times and watched it carefully. It didn’t take long for him to realize that it was the
air
that was slowing it down. Finally, he had his new hypothesis. “All objects fall at exactly the same speed,” he said, “
unless
one of the objects is light enough to float in the air.”

His dad encouraged him to come up with an experiment to test this new hypothesis, and Ryan rose to the challenge. He taped several pieces of facial tissue together until they weighed exactly the same as a paperclip and dropped them both. Sure enough, the paperclip cut through the air and landed quickly while the tissues floated slowly to the ground.

His dad had suggested another test would be to drop a feather and a bowling ball on the moon, which had no air. If this hypothesis was correct, on the moon the feather and the bowling ball, against all human expectations, should both land at the exact same time.

Ryan remembered vividly how his father had congratulated him and confirmed that his new hypothesis was, indeed, correct and that sure enough, all objects on a given planet
did
fall at exactly the same speed
as long as there wasn’t any air to slow the objects down
.

The scientific method was simple but it had been responsible for huge advances in scientific knowledge. Could Ryan apply it here? Maybe. An idea began to form in his head.

“Wait a second,” he said finally, breaking the long silence. “Let’s imagine the city
is
alive, like an enormous animal.” He had been about to say, ‘let’s
hypothesize
the city is alive’ but didn’t want to risk confusing his sister. “If we were inside a city-sized animal, what would that make us?”

“Lunch?” guessed Regan.

Ryan shook his head. “No, we’d be far smaller than a crumb. Think much, much smaller.”

It took Regan only seconds to see the answer. “A disease,” she said confidently. Their mom was a biologist and had taught them well.

“Right. So imagine the force-field surrounding the city is like our skin—our first line of defense against invaders. The best way to avoid an infection is to not let it enter the body in the first place. Our skin helps prevent an invasion by bacteria, maybe the force-field is there to prevent invasion by . . . well, maybe invasion by . . . us.”

Regan frowned. “Maybe. But if that’s true, it failed. We did get in. We cut the city’s shield.”

“Right,” said Ryan. “But what happens when
we
get a cut?”

“Lots of things,” said Regan, not sure what he was getting at.

“Our skin eventually heals. It grows back and
fills in the gap
.”

Now she saw where he was going with this. This could explain why the entrance was gone—the barrier managed to heal itself.

“And what happens
after
bacteria enter the body?”continued Ryan excitedly.

Their mother had explained this many times. “The body’s defense force comes into action,” replied Regan. “The body’s immune system—antibodies and other cells. They kill the bacteria.”