Chapter 20
Repairs
The insects fell upon a few of the broken pieces of the globe, which immediately melted away under their ever-moving jaws.
Ryan and Regan held on to each other, helpless, and braced for the end.
The insects cut a careful path around them to get to the other pieces of the globe.
Around them?
Ryan saw an opening! In their present formation he might just be able to jump beyond the swarm. He launched himself forward with all of his might.
He realized with a sickening feeling that he wasn’t going to make it.
But just as he was about to land on thousands of the insects at the edge of the swarm they scattered, leaving him an open space.
Could it be? He took a step toward the center of the swarm.
And they scattered once again. Again, his foot landed on empty floor.
“Look!” he yelled excitedly to Regan. “They’re not trying to eat us. They’re avoiding us.”
In seconds Regan had verified what her brother had said. In fact, it was impossible to touch one of the scurrying insects. They managed to completely avoid the two kids while going about their business of devouring every piece of the strange broken globe. And then, while Ryan and Regan looked on in astonishment, thousands of the bugs packed themselves into a tight ball. They stayed in this position for only a few seconds and then fell away again to reveal a perfect, intact, glass globe.
Ryan’s hypothesis had been tested, after all, and it was wrong. The insects weren’t the defense crew. They were the repair crew.
Ryan could tell from the look on his sister’s face that she had reached the same conclusion he had. Although he still hadn’t entirely lost his fear of the ferocious looking creatures, he decided to bend down to get a closer look at them. But as he began to do so the bugs chewed several holes into the floor and scurried into them, almost faster than his eyes could follow. The holes instantly filled up again to match the rest of the floor, and other than the repaired globe, no sign remained that the insects were ever there.
Unbelievable.
“You know what this means,” said Regan in elation. “It means that Mom and Dad and the other scientists are alive! Those things couldn’t have eaten them.”
Ryan’s eyes widened. Regan was absolutely right! He allowed himself a glimmer of hope for the first time since the group of Prometheus scientists had disappeared.
But Regan’s spirits sank once again as she remembered her mom’s desperate condition. “They must have found out the bugs wouldn’t hurt them and ran to take Mom to the hospital. By the time we got back, they and the bugs were gone.”
“We never even looked to see if they’d repaired the staircase,” said Ryan. Knowing that the bugs were the repair crew and not the defense crew cleared up several mysteries, but many others remained. “But this still doesn’t explain what happened to all the equipment in the room,” he pointed out. “Or how so many people could have left a room so quickly while carrying Mom,” he added. “And we still don’t know where they are and why the entrance to the city is gone.”
“Maybe not,” said Regan, “but things are certainly looking up. It would be a lot harder for us to solve these mysteries if we were bug food right now.”
Ryan smiled. “You’ve definitely got a point there,” he admitted.
“Let’s get out of here,” she suggested.
Ryan eyed the hologram floating in space, now only a few feet in front of him. This had been his goal when he had left the chair in the first place. “Okay,” he said. “But I want to try something first. Holograms were used as controls for that tram we were in. Maybe these are controls too.” He walked over to the hologram and touched the image of the large triangle suspended in air.
They gasped in alarm as the hologram disappeared and they were suddenly floating in deep space, surrounded by nothing but endless blackness and billions of stars.
Where were they?
They couldn’t survive in deep space.
It gradually dawned on them that they hadn’t gone anywhere. Their surroundings were just a perfect illusion. The small hologram with the triangles had just been replaced by a far larger one of deep space, extending as far as they could see in every direction. It totally surrounded them and was breathtakingly realistic.
Suddenly the holographic galaxy raced past them, although it seemed to them that they were the ones moving—hurtling toward a tiny grouping of stars at unimaginable speed. After only a few seconds the hologram came to an abrupt halt. In front of them, far off in the starry distance, two glowing, semi-molten planets of different sizes were hurtling toward each other. They collided an instant later, unleashing more energy in few terrible seconds than a billion nuclear bombs. A massive spray of matter exploded thousands of miles into space as the planets liquefied further and became a single, sun-like body.
Their perspective shifted again. This time a large planetary body floated in front of them encircled by spectacular rings. It could well have been Saturn.
“Hello, children,” a disembodied voice said gently in perfect English. “Do you like the view?”
For some reason, the voice didn’t startle either of them. And it should have. But there was something else that was strange about the voice, thought Ryan. What was it?
A chill went up his spine as he realized the truth. The words had not been spoken aloud. They had been spoken directly into his mind! In fact, he could feel an unmistakably foreign presence and a strange tingle in his brain. Whatever had spoken to them had used telepathy.
“Who are you?” stammered Ryan nervously.
“Why . . . I’m the Teacher, of course,” answered the voice. There was a pause. “What would you like to learn today?”