CHAPTER: 3

WAY OUT IN DEEP SPACE, that mighty white worm that we saw being born was now slurping in and glugging down everything in its vicinity, including a slew of meteoroids resulting from moons crashing into planets and planets crashing into moons, itself the by-product of the supernova whose implosion had produced the white worm in the first place.

If you were strapped to the top of one of those swallowed meteoroids, you’d right now be on the ride of your life, shooting as fast as a lightning bolt down a cosmic tunnel. Because the white worm’s electrified rear had already zapped its way through quite a long stretch of space, creating what we call a “white wormhole,” which is a shortcut straight through the universe! Where the meteoroids would end up—which is to say, where on the other side of the white wormhole the worm’s supercharged anus (to use the technical term) would poop them out—was still unclear at this hour: an open question, a random riddle, an unknowable quirk of Creation …

At the same time, on the blue orb of Earth, also moving at top speed was Byron Barnett, riding his mountain bike into the Arizona desert. He was still bickering with his robot, who flew beside him as they zipped past a lonely chlorophyll station that serviced the motor vehicles passing by on their way to the national park due east. The station attendant, a sombrero-wearing gentleman of a certain age, was just now filling a jeep’s tank with deep green liquid. Holding the pump against the vehicle’s intake funnel, he watched Byron race by on his bike, pedaling hard and yelling at a toy robot strapped by rubber band to the bike’s handlebars. But from Byron’s own point of view, José Ignacio, fully seven feet and several centimeters tall, was in jet-powered flight alongside of him.

“Why can’t you explore this cave on your own?” José Ignacio shouted as they veered off the desert road toward the canyons. “Do I really need to be here?”

“Dial it down, you insufferable semiconductor! We’re gonna take some measurements, collect a few rock samples, and be back before lunch!”

“But why do we always have to drag ourselves so far? Can’t we just go home and fight monsters in the basement?”

“Boy versus Nature, José Ignacio! That’s where the real action is. Boy versus Monster is yesterday’s news, cause your average monster only has so many tricks up its sleeve, like poison spit or flaming feces or foot-long talons to slice you into a pile of spaghetti-flesh. If I’ve been sliced up once, I’ve been sliced up a hundred times. Boy versus Boy is old hat too, and I don’t have any human adversaries anyway. Boy versus Society is no fun, cause I like society. Boy versus Him-self can be a challenge, except I’m on very good terms with myself. But Nature? You never know what Nature’s next move is gonna be. Nature is a boy’s best enemy!”

Back at the house, Mrs. Barnett—who still thought Byron was up in his room practicing the violin—was now the one in the basement, about to fight her own battle with, if not exactly a monster, then a monstrous botheration. She went into the atomic closet and flipped the circuit breaker to turn the power back on in the kitchen. But the green light next to the circuit in question did not come on, indicating that the power in the kitchen had not been restored.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

She bent down beside the safety-certified atomic generator, opened its access panel, and saw through a magnifying square that the atom-splitter inside—a laser beam of the utmost precision—kept missing its atom. The generator was broken—again! With her husband downtown at Amalgamated MegaPhysics and Taji at City Center on his date, she would have to fix it herself. She opened the atomic closet’s toolkit, swiveled her apron around so she could lie on her back without dirtying her skirt, and got down to business.

Byron was by this time ready to get down to business of his own in the desert. He and José Ignacio had entered the canyon and arrived at their destination: Devil’s Drop Cave, a dark hole in a wall of red rock. Byron was now knotting and securing his climber’s rope around a log of petrified wood while José Ignacio, still resisting the mission, complained:

“As the only person present with his wits about him—

“You’re not a person,” Byron interrupted.

“As the only ‘entity’ present with his wits about him, I feel compelled to state for the record how deeply dangerous this is.”

“I laugh at danger!” Byron said. “I spit in danger’s face!” He hocked up a glob and spat into the cave to illustrate his point.

“Which is it? You laugh or you spit?”

“I laugh then I spit. Then I befriend danger! I invite danger in for a slice of pizza! I tell danger my life story and danger loves listening!”

“You’re both a disturbed and a disturbing individual.”

“I’m an explorer! Some day they’re gonna name things after me!”

“Yes, personality disorders.”

“Just start recording what we see on your memory bulb.”

José Ignacio triggered an internal switch, causing the memory bulb in his transparent cranium to begin flickering.

Byron fastened the climber’s rope around his belt and worked it through two hooks on José Ignacio’s metallic waist. Together they entered the dark mouth of the cave, Byron shining his flashlight from side to side.

“It’s empty,” José Ignacio said. “Let’s go home.”

“Keep moving!”

They came to the edge of a surprisingly wide hole in the cave floor, at least twenty feet across.

“Zanzibar!” whispered Byron. (Yes, Zanzibar is a group of islands off the coast of East Africa, but it was also Byron’s personal word for expressing emotions of the amazed variety.)

With satisfaction, he turned to José Ignacio and announced:

“I give you ‘Devil’s Drop.’ ”

“You want to go down this? It’s bottomless!”

“And that’s why it’s gonna be good!”

A debate followed, but José Ignacio failed to stamp out Byron’s enthusiasm. So over the robot’s strongly worded objections, he and Byron were soon lowering themselves by rope down this most awesome of all local holes.

“You see?” Byron said, “it’s safe as a—

The log of petrified wood outside the cave’s entrance gave way—the log to which Byron’s climber’s rope was attached—sending Byron and José Ignacio plummeting. In free fall, boy and robot shrieked at the top of their lungs, or in José Ignacio’s case at the top of his audio-generator—until their rope snapped taut again, leaving them dangling but unharmed.

The sudden, mid-air stop knocked the wind out of Byron all the same; he needed a minute to compose himself with some deep breathing. What he should’ve guessed but was still too shaken to calculate was that although the log had gotten caught at the cave’s entrance up above, saving them, the danger had not yet passed. The knot holding the rope around its anchor of petrified wood had come loose when it hit the mouth of the cave. Now it came apart.

Byron and José Ignacio shrieked again as they plummeted a second time … but both the shrieking and the plummeting were brief, since the remaining drop to the ground was only three feet and an inch or two: enough to bruise but not wound.

Byron stood up, dusted himself off, switched his flashlight back on, and craned his neck to look up just as the other end of the rope came falling down—and slapped José Ignacio full on the face, or full on the front of the glass cranium, to be accurate about it.

“You call that securing a rope?” the robot demanded.

“Let’s not play the blame game,” Byron said. Then, glancing around, his eyes lit up. “Stalactites!” he said.

“How very thrilling,” said José Ignacio.

“Did you know that stalactites come from the minerals in dripping water? From the same stuff eggshells are made of!”

“May I just say, this whole situation confirms what I’ve long believed and often pointed out about you.”

“Namely?”

“That you’re no boy-genius! My central processing unit has twice the raw computing power of the lump of jelly you call your brain! And holds ten times as much information!”

“And yet, José Ignacio, here we both are, in the same boat—together.”

“Exactly! Because of you!”

“Land o’Goshen! Could you please—for once—stop moaning! This is just a temporary setback!”

“And why do you say that?”

“Because unlike you, you condescending calculator, I know that information is only the second best thing you can have in your head.”

“The first best being?”

“Imagination!”

“I see. And how exactly is your ‘imagination’ going to get us out of here?”

“Well, let me jiggle my ‘brain jelly’ for a minute and I’ll come back to you on that.”

Byron was of course being sarcastic about his brain jelly, but José Ignacio was unamused. A robot has no eyes, or else he would’ve rolled them to express how very unamused he actually was. Meanwhile, Byron was randomly moving his head left and right, up and down, diagonally and semi-circularly, to jiggle, joggle, and otherwise agitate his gray matter until his imagination kicked in.

“Okay!” he said suddenly, “I’ve got it!” He reached down to his belt buckle (which was the size of a tin of mints), slid open its top to get into its secret compartment, and took out a red ball of something the shape and color of a maraschino cherry. “I could detonate my gob of emergency plasma!” he said. “It’ll blow open a dimensional portal that we could jump through. I don’t know which of the eleven deadly realms we’d end up in, but at least we’d be out of here.”

“Why do you even have emergency plasma? You know it’s unstable!”

José Ignacio wasn’t wrong: emergency plasma was a dangerous substance to be carrying around in a secret compartment in your belt buckle: if it detonated by accident, it could blow off your belly button and set your intestines on fire. (And FYI: the cherry bomb that this emergency plasma in real life really was, was almost as risky.)

“Listen, you aggravating automaton,” Byron said, “do you want me to try it or not?”

“Not.”

“So you’re saying you’d rather stay stuck here?”

“Knowing you, if you try to light that gob, it’ll go off before you fling it, and I’m reasonably certain your mother would appreciate you showing up at the dinner table tonight with all your fingers still attached to your hands.”

“Okay … well, you could just fly up, re-attach the rope, and pull me out.”

“My boot jets cracked in the fall, thank you very much. I can’t fly.”

He showed off the cracks in both his heels. Byron said:

“Then maybe I can use my grappling hook to get us far enough up to climb the rest of the way.” He attached the fallen rope to a small grappling hook that he carried on his belt during spelunking scenarios, then flung it up, managing to catch it around one of a hundred rocky spikes above. Pleased with himself, he glanced at José Ignacio and gloated:

“On the first try.”

He yanked hard on the rope—and the entire shelf of foot-long stalactites came plunging down. Shrieking for the third time in as many minutes, Byron and José Ignacio dropped to the ground and lay flat on their backs, where they were pinned into position by the shelf of downward-pointing rocky daggers. By pure luck none of the stalactites had pierced Byron’s body, but he was now completely trapped: sandwiched between the floor of the cave and the rock shelf resting a mere foot off the ground, immobilized by dozens of stalactites, some of them pinning his clothes into the ground, others only a hair’s breadth from his face.

“Brilliant,” said José Ignacio. “What now?”

“I’m not quite sure. Any ideas?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. You’re going to have to use your transponder.”

The mere mention of this sent chills up Byron’s spine. “I can’t do that!” he said. “My parents will find out we’re here! It won’t be a pretty picture!”

You won’t be pretty picture when you turn into a skeleton in this cave! Use the transponder!”

Byron gnawed beaver-like at his lip, then bit halfway down his chin. He felt rather abnormally stressed. Using the transponder would most probably save his skin, but using the transponder would also alert his parents to the slight gap between being in his room practicing the violin and lying at the bottom of Devil’s Drop Cave facing a substantially reduced life expectancy.

There was already a certain question in the Barnett household about Byron’s general “veracity”—which was his parents’ word for telling the truth. What they didn’t seem to understand was that getting to the truth was like chasing a butterfly, not like following a laser beam. Nevertheless, letting his parents know that he was trapped underground in the desert without permission, or that he was out of the house at all, would, Byron feared, be seen by them as an admission of guilt on his part, proof that he lacked exactly the kind of veracity they’d been putting such an emphasis on lately.

“Use—the—transponder!” José Ignacio said.

“No! There has to be another way!”

“Give it to me!” The robot was no less boxed in by stalactites than Byron, but his metallic arm was long and sufficiently hinged to reach over and pinch his carbon-based companion. With Byron screaming bloody murder, José Ignacio managed to get a claw around Byron’s wrist, flicked open the crystal face on Byron’s transponder, and pushed its panic button.

Ultrasonic waves began emanating from the device: they shot up and out the cave, spread across the desert, and reached as far as Arizona City in a matter of seconds. In the soda shop at City Center, Taji’s own transponder, picking up Byron’s emergency signal, started flashing its warning. But in the semi-privacy of a corner booth, Taji and his date were busy “osculating,” which was the word that Arizonan teens were using at the time to mean kissing. With his arms around her shoulders, his lips pressing pleasantly against hers, and his eyes understandably closed, Taji did not see his transponder light up.

Nor did Mr. Barnett, in the Amalgamated MegaPhysics tower a few blocks away, see his. He was sitting alone now in the conference room, in a state of shock from the meeting with his bosses that had recently wrapped up. His transponder—which he’d turned off before his meeting, to avoid interruptions—was dark. Even Mrs. Barnett didn’t see her transponder flashing. It sat on the kitchen counter, beside her wedding band and wristwatch, while Mrs. Barnett herself was down in the basement, in the atomic closet, lying on her back working on the generator, the way a mechanic works beneath a car, an open toolkit beside her.

At the bottom of Devil’s Drop Cave, Byron started to worry. Apropos his transponder, he told José Ignacio:

“It’s supposed to blink green when they signal back they’re on their way.”

“I see neither blinking nor green.”

“Maybe it doesn’t work this far down.”

“So you’ve got us trapped in a stalactite prison a hundred feet underground with no one knowing we’re here and no possibility of rescue. Not how I was hoping to spend my Saturday.”

Back at the house, Mrs. Barnett only needed another minute to finish her repairs on the generator and restore the power flow. Once this was done, she packed away the toolkit, sealed up the atomic closet, went upstairs, and stepped into the kitchen—where she spotted her transponder flashing on the kitchen counter.

Snatching it up, she quickly took the back staircase to the third floor, where she found Byron’s bedroom Byron-less and the sound of his violin coming from a tape recorder. Without missing a beat, she pressed the locator-button on her transponder, causing a holographic map to be projected from the device, including a blinking dot showing Byron’s whereabouts.

Next she raced back downstairs, hurried into the garage, and ripped the emergency flight-pack from its locker. A moment later she came running outside, throwing off her apron and strapping the flight-pack on tight. She took hold of its joystick, blasted up into the sky, swiveled toward open desert, and shot off in the direction of her son’s signal.

At about the same time, at Amalgamated MegaPhysics, Mr. Barnett switched his transponder back on while exiting the express elevator into the underground parking structure. The device instantly started flashing—and Mr. Barnett’s face went white. He ran for his vehicle, dove in, and peeled out, the bubble-topped sedan squealing with speed as it shot up the ramp and out the building.

At the soda shop a few blocks away, Taji was still osculating with his girlfriend of the moment when he opened his eyes and saw her ear flashing on and off. He pulled his hand out from behind her neck, confirming that the transponder around his wrist was the source of the radiance. He jumped up from the booth, made a quick apology, ran outside, and spotted a policeman biting into a fruit tartlet beside his parked hovership.

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At the bottom of Devil’s Drop Cave, Byron’s transponder started blinking green, indicating that someone in his family had received his distress signal and was heading his way to help.

“Satisfied?” he asked José Ignacio.

And that’s when something crackled overhead. Not the pleasant kind of crackle you get in your cereal bowl after pouring milk on rice crispies, this was more a horrifying kind of crackle, like the sound your bones make when an ogre has you between his teeth and he’s snacking on you, on your hip bone and your collarbone and one or both of your fibulas, plus a couple of ribs and maybe even your skull.

Managing to wiggle his official Astral Corps multi-tool out of his pants pocket (because remember: Byron was flat on his back and trapped underneath a shelf of rock just a few inches above his face), he opened the tool’s medium blade, jabbed it up, hit a thin bit of rock, and poked through. After aiming his flashlight into the little hole he’d made, he saw that the fallen shelf of stalactites pinning him down had revealed on the roof of the cave a second rock-shelf, now cracking around the edges and threatening to come down, this one bearing clearly deadly five-foot-long stalactites. Even Byron couldn’t spit in danger’s face this time.

Fortunately, Mrs. Barnett, Mr. Barnett, and Taji were already converging on Byron’s coordinates, coming in from three different directions: Mrs. Barnett via flight-pack, Mr. Barnett in his sedan, Taji in a police hovership. Once there, the three police officers that Taji rode in with quickly set up their rescue equipment outside the cave while Mrs. Barnett familiarized herself with their electro-dynamic vocal-cone. She switched it to maximum, borrowed her husband’s handkerchief to wipe off her lipstick, put her mouth to the vocal-cone’s mouthpiece, and called into the cave, her voice dramatically amplified:

“BYRON! CAN YOU HEAR ME?!”

Up from the depths of Devil’s Drop echoed Byron’s faraway reply:

“YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO COME ALL THE WAY OUT HERE, MOM! I’M FINE!

The ludicrousness of this statement was made plain as the ranking police officer on the scene, Officer Matsumoto by name, aimed a snooperscope into the cave. He turned a knob to expand its beam and reach the cave’s floor, revealing on its screen a visual of Byron—and Byron’s toy robot—pinned to the ground by a shelf of stalactites, with another shelf of five-foot stalactites cracking apart above and ready to plunge.

Mr. Barnett took the vocal-cone from his wife and spoke into it:

“BYRON, JUST HOLD STILL, WE’RE GOING TO GET YOU OUT OF THERE!”

“NO RUSH! TAKE YOUR TIME!

From his trapped position down below, Byron could not see that two of the police officers had hurried into the cave, aimed their rope-rifles down the hole, and fired titanium-tipped cords into the bottom shelf of stalactites. They were now hurrying back out of the cave holding the loose ends of the cords—but at this exact moment the top shelf of stalactites snapped, and Byron let out an ear-splitting scream as the five-foot spikes plunged at him …

… which is when the police hovership lifted off outside, Officer Matsumoto at the controls. The ship pulled the bottom rock-shelf up with it—since Officer Matsumoto’s colleagues had swiftly hooked their cords to the hovership’s underside. The rising, bottom shelf of stalactites caught the dropping top shelf of stalactites—and Byron was saved. Watching the spikes reverse course and fly up and away from him, he felt the scream rocketing out of his lungs morph into a crazy giggle.

Soon Byron too was hoisted by rope out of the cave, courtesy of all three policemen. His parents stood watching with a mixture of distress and relief as he emerged from the shadows still giggling, his toy robot dangling by rubber band from his belt. His giggling ceased on the spot when he noticed that nobody else looked amused.

“I can explain almost everything,” he said.

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With Mr. Barnett thanking the police officers beside their hovership, Byron sat between his mother and brother in the back seat of the family sedan, its bubble-top opened for air circulation, since it was almost eleven o’clock and the desert was heating up. Mrs. Barnett was holding a water bottle for Byron to sip from, through a straw.

“No more cliffs, no more caverns, no more caves,” she warned. “Do we understand each other?”

Byron nodded.

“Say it,” Mrs. Barnett insisted.

“No more cliffs, no more caverns, no more caves.”

Especially caves. No—more—spelunking.”

Just now Mr. Barnett stepped away from the police officers to join his family. He looked down at Byron and shook his head.

“Byron Barnett, your judgment here was appalling and your behavior a scandal. But we’re going to have to discuss what’s happened in detail at a later time—because believe it or not, today’s headline belongs to me. So if no one minds, I’d like to get right to it.”

Not only did no one mind, but everyone was gripped by an intense curiosity to hear more.

“They didn’t fire me at the office,” Mr. Barnett continued, “in fact they did the opposite: they promoted me. With a transfer. To the engineering department … of the Lunar League. Bianca Barnett, Brothers Barnett—how would you like to move to the Moon?”

Mouths fell open, but no one spoke, they were all too stunned. The group silence—a rare occurrence in the Barnett family—lasted six or seven seconds, after which Taji asked:

“There are girls on the Moon, right?”

“Yes, Romeo. There are girls on the Moon.”

“A man has to have his priorities, Pops.”

Mr. Barnett turned to Byron for his thoughts; but Byron was in a trance: eyes wide, teeth showing, his mind already a quarter million miles away. So Mr. Barnett turned to the person whose opinion mattered the most.

“Love of my life? What’s your feeling about it?”

“Well, it’s an enormous decision,” Mrs. Barnett said.

“It would mean a big raise in salary. If we hate it, we can always come home after two years. But I only said we’d consider it.”

“I don’t know, Wallace. Taji has to start visiting colleges next summer. I’d miss the flower show this October: that means three years of work in the garden gone to waste. And your youngest son is a disaster-magnet right here on Planet Earth. How many more disasters are waiting for him out in space?”

“Or … looking at it another way: in lunar gravity he could fall off a cliff, land on his head, and barely put a dent in his skull. The Moon might be the safest place for him. But if you say nay, we won’t go.”

“What?!” Byron said, snapping out of his trance. “Why does mom get to decide?”

“Because she’s the brains of this operation!”

Byron bit his tongue, then focused his most significant expression on his mother. In a low voice he implored her:

“Mommy, I’m begging you. After all these years, my life finally makes sense! I’ll die if I don’t move to the Moon. I’ll absolutely keel over and expire! Living on the Moon is what I was born for! It’s the answer to my every riddle and the solution to my every problem! It’s my future! It’s my fate! It’s my personal destiny!”

Mrs. Barnett looked in no way won over.

“I do hear the Moon is quite the romantic milieu for persons of the adult persuasion,” Mr. Barnett said.

Mrs. Barnett seemed truly sorry to be the voice of reason; nevertheless she had to speak honestly. “I don’t think it’s in the best interests of this family to leave terra firma,” she explained. “I understand how exciting the Moon sounds from a distance, but I won’t apologize for wanting us to stay happy, healthy, and safe right here in an oxygen-rich environment.”

It was now that Officer Matsumoto, who for the past several minutes had been talking on the police radio in his hovership, came over to have a last word with the Barnetts.

“Byron, don’t you have something you’d like to say to Officer Matsumoto?” Mrs. Barnett prompted.

“Thank you very much, Officer Matsumoto, for saving me from being skewered by stalactites. I really appreciate it.”

“You’re welcome, Byron. Unfortunately, you’re also under arrest.”