Mars Maze (Short Story)



  Mars Maze

  Deborah Jackson

  Mars Maze

  based on

  The Time Meddlers series

  Published by

  Deborah Jackson

  Copyright © Deborah Jackson 2012

  Cover Design by Jessica Jackson

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Episode 1

  Episode 2

  Episode 3

  Episode 4

  Episode 5

  Episode 1

  “Now, we just have to slip on the helmet.”

  “I don’t want to wear a helmet.”

  “If you don’t, you know what will happen.”

  Sarah wanted to slap him. Of all the insane ideas.

  “I know it’s not exactly the safest place to rescue—”

  “I thought dinosaurs were the ultimate in idiocy, but this, Matt?”

  “It’ll just be for a few minutes. Just enough time to catch hold of my dad.”

  “Or Nadine.”

  “Let’s not get carried away.”

  “You’re going to leave her in an unbreathable atmosphere, in freezing cold temperatures, with hurricane-force winds, and correct me if I’m wrong, but, where her blood might boil?”

  “She left us in a cave in the 1600s with bears and people fighting wars all around us. She tried to shoot you.”

  “All right. Fine. Be as bad as her.”

  Matt winced. Finally it looked like she was getting through to him. Now if she could just convince him to send suits to his dad through that incredibly nauseating wormhole rather than try to rescue him on the red planet.

  “Okay,” he snapped. “I’ll try to grab her too. And rip her hair out while I’m doing it,” he added in a whisper.

  She wasn’t going to argue with that. Nadine at least deserved a little hair-ripping.

  “All right. Let’s go,” he said.

  He slammed the helmet over her head, sealed it shut and activated the pressure and oxygen gauge. Sarah screamed at him, but he probably couldn’t hear her anymore.

  Then he shoved, yes, he literally shoved her, (the miserable . . .) into the wormhole and leaped in afterward. The lab dissolved, she was crushed and they emerged in a gust of wind that yanked them off their feet and whipped them against some rock. Red rock. Hard, breath-snatching, unyielding red rock.

  “Matt, I hate you,” she said.

  There was obviously some radio system embedded in the EMU suits (Extravehicular Mobility Units, not emu, although she did feel like a giant awkward bird in this suit), since he answered immediately.

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I don’t like you very much right now.”

  “That’s only because we’re flattened against a rock wall.”

  “A rock wall that goes up and up . . .” She cranked her head upwards, peeling it from the wall, then realized it was sheer and smooth, polished by the wind, and if she pushed away she could almost turn around. The gale had subsided that much, at least.

  The ground was a jumble of red rocks through what looked like a dry river bed, and on the other side, another wall.

  “I think we’re in a canyon.”

  “I know exactly where we are,” said Matt.

  “Right,” said. Sarah. “You always know exactly where we are, but you just don’t know how to keep us alive.”

  She thought he might look a little hurt by her comment, if she could see through his helmet, but then he said, “You don’t look very dead.”

  “How can you tell?” she asked. Plumped up in this oversized moonsuit, barely able to move and hidden behind sun-shielded Plexiglas helmets, who could tell?

  “I can tell by your voice in my head. Unless you’re dead and haunting me.”

  “I wish,” she snapped. What was she saying?? “I mean . . .”

  She could almost hear Matt grin. “That’s okay, Sarah. I’d rather be haunted by you than anyone else.”

  Okay. How do you respond to that? Why did he always make her want to kick him and kiss him at the same time?

  “Um, ah, where are we, exactly?”

  “We’re in a canyon.”

  “I get that.”

  “Near the equator, not too far from a group of volcanoes called the Tharsus Montes.”

  “And these volcanoes? They wouldn’t be active, would they?”

  “It’s Mars,” he said sarcastically.

  “So?”

  “No. They’re not active.” He shook his head.

  “I remember when you said, ‘Those dinosaurs don’t even look hungry,’ or ‘It’s perfectly safe jumping out of an airplane.’ The dinosaurs were starving and my ripcord didn’t even work.”

  Matt grasped her by the shoulders and tipped his helmet against hers. “Mars is a dead planet. The volcanoes are extinct. It’s just cold, and windy, and kind of dangerous if you take off your helmet. Now let’s go find my dad.”

  He began to walk along the pebbly ground, taking enormous strides and bouncing into the air. Hmm. That was interesting. Sarah took a step and bounded forward, losing her balance and crashing to the ground, only to spring up again and fall backward. When she hit the rock surface, she instantly ricocheted upward. She felt like a blow-up clown, punched down again and again, but who kept springing back.

  “Matt,” she yelled.

  “Grab for the wall to stop yourself,” he said calmly, with just a hint of laughter in his voice. The jerk.

  Sarah reached, struck, tilted, came to a stop, somewhat, against the wall.

  “Walk slowly and carefully. There’s only one third of the gravity here compared to earth.”

  “Thanks for telling me ahead of time.”

  “Hey, Sarah. Aren’t you supposed to be brilliant? Always working so hard at school, getting 90s and stuff. I thought you’d know there was lower gravity here.”

  Sarah bent down, slowly, carefully, plucked a rock from the rock-jammed ground, and hurled it at him. (Probably not the smartest thing to do, but he made her mad.) Because “hurled” is a relative term when you can hardly balance, the rock sailed through the air like a balloon. But Matt sidestepped it like a sloth, because of his bulky suit, so it just missed him anyway.

  “Hey,” he said. “You could have smashed my helmet.”

  “Or it could have bounced off your helmet and come back to me.”

  He looked like he was trying to cross his arms in disgust, which wasn’t working at all with his puffed-up sleeves. “Let’s get moving,” he snipped.

  Sarah began moving, slowly and carefully, one monstrous step after another, bounding up and down and, after a while, actually enjoying the sensation of walking on a trampoline.

  The only problem was, they kept coming to forks, branches in the canyon that led in different directions, and it seemed as if Matt, by his hesitation, didn’t know which direction to take. Along the way the path itself twisted and turned, rose and fell like a roller coaster, and sometimes it seemed as if they were heading back the same way they’d come.

  “Do you have any idea where we’re going?” she finally asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Matt, this is a maze.”

  “A maze that will eventually lead us to the base of the volcano where Dad is supposed to land. I know where I’m going.”

  “Right,” said Sarah.

  Well, there was
nothing to do but keep following Matt and keep . . . getting lost. But at least she was getting the hang of this “walking in low gravity” thing, and it made her feel airy and almost giddy.

  “Hey, Matt,” she said. “This is kind of fun.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he replied, leaping forward, making football fields seem like tennis courts. “If you bend your knees you can jump even farther and higher.” He crouched down on the next step and sprang into the air, sailing forward, upward, into the pale pink sky and . . . disappearing over the rim of the canyon.

  Oh no, she thought. Not now.

  She screamed: “Matt, Matt, MATT!!”

  But he didn’t answer. Was he hurt, his helmet cracked or his suit torn, leaking precious pressure and oxygen? Was he dead?

  And it would be just like him to lead her onto a deadly planet, through a maze with no end in sight, and then die. If he wasn’t dead, she was going to kill him!

  “Matt,” she called again. “Please don’t be dead.”