Oxygen Level Zero Mission 1 Read online

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  You can contact Sigmund Brouwer through his Web site at www.coolreading.com Copyright © 2000 by Sigmund Brouwer. All rights reserved.

  Cover photograph © copyright 2000 by Corbis Images. All rights reserved.

  Designed by Justin Ahrens

  Edited by Ramona Cramer Tucker

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or publisher.

  ISBN 0-8423-6137-5 (lit)

  ISBN 0-8423-6140-5 (pdb)

  ISBN 0-8423-6138-3 (pdf)

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  Sandstorm!

  Across the plains, the black shell of the gigantic dome gleamed in late-afternoon sunshine. It was beautiful against the red soil, laden with iron oxides, and the faded rose-colored Martian sky. From the bottom of the mountain where I stood, it took less than an hour’s trek across the plains to reach it—in good weather.

  But we would not get that hour. Sand rattled hard against my titanium casing, warning me of how little time remained. Much less than we needed.

  I turned my head to the left, into the wind that raked the sand across me. A huge dark wall lifted from the north of the plains, a blanket of doom that covered more and more of the sky. Winds of near-hurricane force lifted tons upon tons of red sand particles.

  Already the front edge of the storm reached out to us. In less than half an hour, those tons of sand would begin to cover me and the three scientists I had been sent out of the dome to find.

  “Home base,” I called into my radio. “This is Rescue Force One. Please make contact. Home base. This is Rescue Force One.

  Please make contact.”

  There was no answer. Just like there had been no answer the other hundred times I’d tried in the last half-hour.

  A solar flare must have knocked out the satellite beam. The sun was 140 million miles away, so weak and so far from Mars that on winter nights, the temperature here dropped down to minus two hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Yet all it took was a storm on the surface of the sun to fire out electromagnetic streams nearing the speed of light, and communication systems all through the entire solar system would pay the price.

  “Home base,” I said. “This is Rescue Force One. Please make contact.”

  One of the scientists walked in front of me, blocking my view of the base. He leaned down and pushed his helmet visor into my forward video lens.

  “What are we going to do?” he shouted.

  He did not have to shout. I could hear him clearly.

  Nor did he have to walk around in front of me. I could have seen him just as easily with my rear video lens. Or one of my side lenses.

  “Forward,” I said. “We cannot stop.”

  “No! We must make shelter.”

  Did he think I had not thought of this already?

  Standard procedure in dealing with a sandstorm was to go to high ground, unfold an emergency pop-up blanket, and crawl beneath it. The pop-up blanket made a miniature dome that would easily provide shelter for as many days as it took the storm to pass. But fools who used the pop-up blanket on low ground would be buried by the sand, never to be found again.

  “Forward,” I said. “Follow me.”

  “That’s easy for you!” he shouted. “You’re just a stupid machine!”

  He was correct both times. It would be easy for me to travel in a sandstorm. And I was just a machine.

  But he was also wrong. I was more than a machine. And I was not stupid. I knew plenty.

  I knew that during each Martian fall and winter, the carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere froze out of the air and onto the ground, making a giant hood of frost that covered from the pole to the equator. I knew that as spring arrived, the difference in temperatures between the sun-warmed soil and the retreating ice made for fierce winds. I knew these strong winds were so monstrous that sometimes sandstorms covered the entire planet. I knew if we took shelter, we might be trapped for days.

  I also knew that the last scientist of the three only had ten hours of oxygen left in his tank. If we took shelter, he would die long before the storm ended.

  “One of you will die if we stop,” I said. “If we continue, all of you will survive.”

  “We’ll get lost in the storm! No one survives a sandstorm.”

  “No,” I insisted. “My navigation system is intact. We will link ourselves by cable, and I will maintain direction. All you need to do is follow.”

  “No!” he yelled. “Not through a sandstorm!”

  “Listen,” I said, “if we stop, he has no chance.”

  “Should three of us die instead of one?” The scientist picked up a rock and tried to smash it against my head. But since he wore a big atmosphere suit and was very slow, I moved out of the way easily.

  He picked up another rock and threw it at me. I put up my arms to protect my video lenses, and the rock clanged off my elbows. The other two scientists watched, doing nothing. They were very tired. I had rescued them from the bottom of a giant sinkhole where they had been stranded for two days.

  The first scientist picked up another rock to throw. It was a big rock. Even though his suit made him clumsy, he would be able to throw it hard. Mars has very little gravity compared to Earth. A person throwing a rock the size of a grapefruit on Earth could easily throw a rock the size of a basketball on Mars.

  What was I going to do?

  If I let the scientist with the rocks force us to stop and put up a shelter, one of them would die.

  But if I grabbed the scientist with the rock in my sharp metal claws, I would most certainly poke a hole in his space suit. With an atmosphere of 95 percent carbon dioxide, he would die within minutes.

  Either way, it didn’t look like I could find a way to make sure all three scientists made it back to the dome alive. I would fail in my task. I could not allow that.

  Another rock clanged off my leg.

  “No!” I said. “No!”

  This was getting worse. If I ran off to protect myself, then all three of them might die. But if I stayed to try to protect them, one

  of those rocks might smash and disable me. Which would mean all three of them might die.

  I couldn’t decide what to do.
<
br />   The scientist threw another rock. It hit my shoulder.

  A huge blast of sand swept over us. For a brief moment, I could see nothing in any direction from my four video lenses.

  In the instant the air cleared again, I saw the scientist with another rock in his fist. But it was too late. Out of the swirling sand he appeared, aiming the rock toward my video lenses.

  The rock smashed down.

  The rose-colored Martian sky tilted. The red soil zoomed toward me. Then everything went black. . . .

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  “Ouch,” I said.

  I opened my eyes to the square, sterile room of the computer simulation lab. I was under the dome, not outside of it, stuck in a raging sandstorm.

  That was the good news.

  The bad news was that although no rock had actually hit my body, my head did hurt. That’s the way it is with a virtual-reality program. It’s like a computer game. Except you’re actually in the game. Instead of watching your players get knocked out, it happens in a small way to you.

  I pulled the surround-sight helmet off my head. My hair was slick with sweat. The concentration it took to move the virtual-reality robot controls by flexing my own muscles was hard work.

  It didn’t help that I was also wearing a one-piece jacket and gloves, wired with thousands of tiny cables that reacted to every movement I made. I’d been in the computer program for five hours, and that jacket held every scrap of my body heat.

  “Ouch is right,” Rawling McTigre 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 had wide shoulders and short dark hair streaked with gray. He said his hair had turned gray from trying to look after me. I spent so much time with him, 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 idiot

  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 next—a 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, this—“

  “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.”

  Rawling 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 of 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 want—“

  “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 torn 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.”

  Rawling 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 . . .

  “A call for everyone to assemble,” Rawling said, reading my mind.

  Which meant the dome director was going to speak to all two hundred 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 tekkie 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 tekkies had 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. And 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,” he

  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,” Rawling said. “I didn’t want to spread panic, so I kept it to myself and asked the director to get a tekkie 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.”

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  With time running out, Mom wants me, Tyce

  Sanders, to write all that is happening in a

  diary 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 I 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 to be difficult. He said writing just to
ok 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 try to put my thoughts onto a computer screen.

  I began to type again on the keyboard in my lap.

  First, today’s date. 06.20. 2039 A.D. Earth

  calendar. It’s been a little more than fourteen

  years since the dome was established in 2025.

  When I think about it, that means some of the

  scientists and tekkies 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 has been spent on

  this project, which seems a lot, until you do the

  math and realize that’s only about ten 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 two hundred

  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. Of course,

  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