The Prometheus Project (4 page)

Regan refused to let the annoying computer voice distract her or to think about the seconds that were quickly ticking away. “Okay, let me give it a try. You count this time,” she said and without waiting began to work on shrinking the password. “WE. R. N. T. MID-L. OF. NO—”

“Still too many!” interrupted Ryan hurriedly. “And that’s using N for ‘in’ and T for ‘the’, which I don’t think Dad would do. Too sloppy.”

“You have . . . thirty seconds . . . to enter a correct password.”

“There
have to be
other tricks for shortening a message. What are we missing!” challenged Regan frantically.

Ryan continued to think furiously. She was right. There had to be another trick. But what was it? He held his head in his hands and tried to block everything else out.

“You have . . . fifteen seconds . . . to enter a correct password. Fourteen, Thirteen, Twelve—”

Regan felt sick to her stomach. If they had been caught outside they could have acted like innocent kids just looking for their parents to say hello. Now it would be obvious they weren’t innocent. Now there was no way they could just play dumb. She braced herself as the computer counted down the last few seconds remaining.

Ryan’s head shot up from his hands and his eyes widened as inspiration hit him full force. He had it! The password. At least he thought he did. If only he could enter it in time. His fingers raced over the metal keyboard as the computer continued its countdown to disaster. Regan looked on in astonishment.

“—
Three, Two, One—
”

Ryan stabbed at the last key as the computer calmly spoke what had suddenly become a horrifying word.

“Zero.”

Chapter 7

Captured

The elevator was totally silent now that the countdown had stopped. Ryan was sure he had been too late. He imagined dozens of guards racing to the elevator.

Time seemed to stop. A second ticked by.

“Correct password entered,”
said the computer.
“Security procedures have been aborted. Repeat, security procedures have been aborted.”

“You did it Ryan!” screamed Regan happily. She gave her brother a puzzled look. “But how? What did you enter?”

Ryan smiled. “I remembered another trick to making short words stand for longer phrases—where and how the words are written. Dad and I had lunch at a restaurant about a year ago while you and Mom were at a birthday party and he jotted down some riddles for me to solve while we waited for our food. He wrote the word “Headache” with each letter split in half and told me it was a shortcut to say something longer. The answer was ‘splitting headache’. Do you get it?”

Regan thought about it for a moment and then, smiling, she nodded.

“Another one he did was ‘b e d’. The answer was ‘bedspread’—the word ‘bed’
spread
out. But my favorite was ‘HOrobOD’. Robin Hood. The word ‘Rob’ in the word ‘Hood’. ROB in HOOD. Once I remembered this lunch, and knowing Dad, it was easy to solve the password. If you stick the words
we are
in the middle of the word
NOWHERE,
you have
NO-we-are-WHERE,
” he explained. “
We are
” in the middle of “
NOWHERE
.”

Regan had counted as he spelled the password. N-O-w-e-a-r-e-W-H-E-R-E. Twelve letters exactly. “Nice going!” she said. “And you figured it out in
plenty
of time,” she teased. “You had an entire half-second to spare.”

Ryan laughed. “Better late than never.”

As much as he wanted to celebrate this victory for a while longer he knew that they were running out of time and they still hadn’t learned what was happening here and how their parents fit in. He put his finger on the down button. “Ready?”

Regan nodded. “Let’s see where this thing goes,” she said far more bravely than she felt.

Ryan pushed the button and the elevator began a rapid descent. In just a few moments they would be at their destination, probably a basement facility ten or twenty feet down, hopefully a giant step closer to solving the mystery of Proact.

Ten seconds passed. Then twenty. Then fort-five. The elevator continued to pick up speed as it dropped them deeper and deeper into the earth. It was now falling at a considerable speed. They looked at each other in alarm. When would it stop? How far down could they possibly be going?

After what seemed like ages the elevator halted suddenly, causing their already nervous stomachs to jump to their throats. They had arrived.

“Ah . . . Ry,” said Regan thinly. “How far down do you think we are?”

“I don’t know,” he answered grimly. “But at least the length of a good-sized skyscraper, maybe two.”

She gulped as the doors opened slowly. They peered out cautiously.

They were in a huge cavern, roughly spherical, about the size of a large baseball stadium. A cavern with an expansive, thirty foot ceiling. The air was damp and cool and powerful electric lights attached to the walls illuminated the area.

They stepped from the elevator onto the rock floor before them, their eyes wide. There was machinery and high-tech equipment everywhere. Scores of heavy, treaded vehicles were parked along one wall, some resembling bulldozers and others military tanks with ten-foot-wide drill-bits where the turrets should have been. An impressive display of machinery. But no people. The cavern was as deserted as a ghost town. It was also perfectly symmetrical and smooth. It was clearly not a natural cave.

Incredible! Excavating a cavern of this size so far beneath the surface must have been an enormous job. Why had it been done?

All thoughts of how the cave was created were swept from their minds instantly by what they saw against the far wall. What in the world?

They walked toward it almost as if in a trance. Dozens of high-powered, high-temperature lasers were unleashing a fury of lava-red beams toward the wall. The beams were evenly spaced so that they created a perfect rectangle of blazing, continuous energy against it. And lasers were only the beginning. Arrays of generators and other equipment of unknown purpose were pointed at the wall, also, contributing what was certain to be massive levels of invisible forces and energies.

Inside the rectangle formed by the blazing lasers the wall shimmered in an ever-changing rainbow of colors. How could this wall—or anything for that matter— withstand this awesome onslaught of heat and energy?

“Amazing,” whispered Regan. “What do you suppose—”

Regan shrieked as two men popped through the shimmering, rectangular kaleidoscope of colors outlined by the beams, from behind it. Like ghosts walking through a wall.

Their reaction to Regan’s scream was immediate. Rolling in opposite directions, they each came up on one knee. They were so expert in this maneuver that the guns they were now pointing at the two young intruders had appeared in their hands as if by magic.

“Freeze!” shouted the man to their right. “Make one move and it’ll be your last!” he finished menacingly.

Chapter 8

The World’s Biggest Secret

Paralyzed with fear, the Resnick siblings couldn’t have moved if they wanted to.

“Dan! What are you doing?” barked the man on their left to the man who had threatened them. “They’re only kids. You’re going to scare them to death.”

He turned toward the petrified kids. His features softened and he lowered his gun. “Ah . . . sorry,” he offered. “My name is Carl. My partner Dan here got a little carried away.” Like his partner, he was tall, trim and carried himself with confidence and athletic ease. Without question both of these men had been elite members of the military at one time. “You surprised the living daylights out of us just now and I guess our training took over,” finished Carl apologetically.

Ryan’s temporarily frozen heart started beating again. “That’s okay,” he whispered hoarsely, barely finding his voice. “You surprised us, too.” He paused. “Anyway, we, um . . . we were just leaving, so we’ll, um . . . we’ll just be on our way.”

Carl smiled and shook his head. “Good try,” he said, walking over to his partner and standing beside him. “I think you know you’re going to have to come with us. You have a lot of explaining to do. It should have been
impossible
for you to get down here,” he said in disbelief. “And you’re in some world-class trouble.” He gently pushed his partner’s arm down so his gun was no longer pointing at them. “But I can assure you that no one is going to shoot you.”

“Let’s go,” ordered Dan gruffly, leading them away from the rectangle the laser beam perimeter had created—now clearly a doorway of some kind. Their eyes still told them that the shimmering, multicolored doorway formed a solid barrier. But it wasn’t solid at all. The men had come from the other side—and had walked through completely unharmed. And without question, on the other side of this doorway was the secret they had come to learn.

Regan refused to let this chance slip away. Carl had said he wouldn’t shoot them. They were already in huge trouble. What did they have to lose? “H . . . h . . . hold on a second,” she croaked. “I don’t feel so hot.” She put one hand to her head and one to her stomach, wincing in pain. She bent at the waist, holding her hips. “That elevator ride and those . . . swirling colors . . . making me . . . dizzy . . . and queasy . . . and—”

She stumbled two or three steps forward, toward the doorway, and fell to her knees. She put her head in her hands and made a series of loud, heaving, throaty sounds as if everything she had ever eaten in her entire life was now erupting from her mouth like lava from a volcano. Her retching sounds echoed throughout the cavern.

Ryan ran forward and stooped down beside her. “Regan, are you okay?” he asked worriedly. She caught his eye and gave him a quick wink. She then shifted her eyes suggestively toward the doorway before quickly returning them to her brother.

Ryan caught her meaning instantly. She was good, he thought in admiration. Very good. He nodded ever so slightly to let her know he understood and was in. He was game if she was.

Ryan glanced up at the guards as his sister continued her performance. The two men had backed up a few steps and had turned away, looking somewhat ill themselves as they listened in disgust to what they thought was Regan heaving her guts out onto the floor.

“Now!” shouted Regan as she sprang up and dived through the multicolored doorway with Ryan close behind, taking the guards completely by surprise. As they hit the doorway they felt an electric tingle—the same pins-and-needles sensation as if their foot or arm had fallen asleep, except that they felt it
everywhere—
for just an instant. And then they were through.

They were through! They had actually made it! Their mouths fell open in shock. They were outside! Outside?

Impossible. They were still thousands of feet underground.

But underground or not, the place they were in stretched on as far as they could see in every direction, including straight up.

But they weren’t really outside either.
There was no sky
. Just open space stretching as far up as the eye could see. No sun. No blue. No clouds of any kind.

It was as if they were in a well-lighted building so vast that they couldn’t see any of the walls or ceiling. But how could any light source other than the sun illuminate such a huge space? And the light wasn’t coming from any one place. It was
everywhere
.

The air was fresh and clean, like outside country air would be, not damp and chilly like the air in the cavern had been.

The landscape was dotted with exotic buildings of every kind and flowers and vegetation unlike anything they had ever seen before. To their left was a structure that was the size of a house but perfectly spherical, with a mirrored surface that reflected its surroundings in dazzling brilliance. Just beside this globe was a transparent building that seemed to be suspended in midair. Another building was morphing from one fantastic geometric shape to another continuously before their eyes.

They were so spellbound by the sight of this astonishing place that they completely forgot the trouble they were in. Regan was rudely brought back to reality by a firm grip on her arm. “Feeling better now!” snapped Dan angrily.

Regan gulped. “Much better, thanks,” she croaked. “What is this place?” asked Ryan in wonder.

Carl sighed. “You are standing in a city built by an alien race using technology thousands of years more advanced than ours. A city that also happens to be the biggest secret on Earth. And now you kids know about it!”

Regan swallowed hard. “So what does that mean exactly?” she asked timidly.

“It means,” said Carl angrily, “that you kids are in trouble. Big, big trouble.”

Chapter 9

Big Trouble

 “Follow me,” ordered Carl.

He stepped on what was clearly designed as a sidewalk or walking path. Ryan and Regan followed and Dan took up the rear.

The surface of the walking path was extraordinary. It was soft and cushiony and at the exact right moment it would trampoline them forward so that their steps were effortless. Ryan guessed it was allowing them to walk three or four times faster than usual. “It almost seems as if this walkway is alive,” he whispered in wonder. “As if it’s intelligent and knows exactly when to bounce us so we don’t ever lose our balance.”

“I know what you mean,” agreed Carl. “In fact, this entire city almost seems alive to me sometimes.”

“Ah . . . where are we going?” asked Regan, not sure she wanted to know.

“A building about a twenty minute walk from here—well, twenty minutes as long as we stay on this walkway. This is the only walking path we’ve found so far and it leads directly to the entrance of a single building, so we decided this building was worth investigating.”