The Prometheus Project: Stranded Part 8

"So you're saying I'm totally cut off from the rest of you. By myself. Without any food, force-fields, or weapons. On a planet whose predators have developed a taste for humans. Is that about right?"

Regan didn't answer, but then again, she didn't have to.

He had summed up his hopeless situation perfectly.

CHAPTER 14.

Death Awaits

There was a long silence, and then Regan's telepathic voice returned.

"Mom and Dad were freaking out about you. So I told them you were okay. That you had managed to outrun or dodge all the cracks in the ground and all the lava flying around."

"Then you must have told them about our telepathy."

"No. I can't see why keeping this secret matters anymore, but I didn't. I told them I spotted you far off in the distance before you disappeared behind a hill."

"Did they buy it?"

"Of course. Why would I lie about that?" She grinned. "I mean, if you forget for a moment that I was actually lying." She became serious once again. "They're working on some way to rescue you. But they haven't had any luck so far."

"Because there isn't a way."

Ryan couldn't believe it would end like this. All alone on a savage planet trillions of miles from home. "How could this happen?" he broadcast angrily. "I've studied volcanoes. Lava doesn't act like this. It's usually thick and moves slowly enough for you to jog out of the way. And the volcano didn't erupt and shoot gas and lava into the air like it's supposed to. I mean, we had absolutely no warning. So how do you get a river of fresh lava flowing down the mountain without an eruption?"

"Hold on for a minute," she replied. "I'll ask Dad."

A few minutes later she returned. "Dad pretty much said what you just did. He has no clue how the lava acted this way, and how it could be so thin and travel so fast. But he reminded me that a volcano on Isis doesn't have to work the exact same way as one on Earth. And lava doesn't either. He said that even without an eruption, we should have had some warning from smoke and burning plants. But, apparently, there were no plants of any kind in its path."

"Just my luck," broadcast Ryan bitterly. He sighed. "Look ... Regan ... I have to go. I'm not sure how many hours I have until it gets dark, but I have to come up with some sort of plan long before then. I'll contact you with an update later."

"Good luck, Ryan," she replied. And with that their connection ended.

Ryan looked around. He was still on a barren section of the planet. So far he hadn't seen any native wildlife but this wouldn't last forever. They had seen their share of big game in areas like this on their way out from the portal. He guessed that even the planet's most fearsome carnivores didn't want any part of the raging river of scorching lava and were keeping as far away from it as possible.

But Ryan knew he wouldn't stay lucky forever. Soon enough he would encounter a predator and it would attack. It would have speed, strength and other formidable physical weapons that evolution had perfected over millions of years to allow it to survive in a hostile environment. And he would have his fists, a lighter, and a red pocketknife that contained two blades, a screwdriver, and a bottle-opener. The bad news was that he had no hope of survival. The good news was that if he needed to open any bottles, he was in great shape.

He had to find protection and he had to find shelter. A cave might be ideal, but he doubted he would be lucky enough to find one-at least not right away.

He needed a torch. The tiny flame from a lighter wouldn't scare off a rabbit. More than that, he needed a roaring fire to protect him and to keep him warm during the long night.

And that meant going back into another forested section of the planet for wood and other kindling. Into the habitat of the gray-furred, silver-eyed pack animals they had just finished battling. Ryan didn't want to go anywhere near where they might be, but he knew he didn't have a choice.

The nearest section of accessible rainforest was the area they had traveled through when they first exited the Isis s.h.i.+eld. He began jogging in that direction. He needed to have his fire raging and a large pile of kindling gathered by dusk.

As Ryan ran, it occurred to him that his best bet was to spend the night with his back against the force-s.h.i.+eld. This way no animals could approach him from behind. If he built a semicircle of fire in front of him, he might be protected. He could use his pocketknife during the night to fas.h.i.+on a spear or two from broken branches.

He jogged about two miles to the very edge of the forest, for once glad of all the running he had been forced to do in Phys Ed. He skirted the tree line, not wanting to enter until he had found a stick nearby to use as a torch. He soon found one and with the help of his lighter had it flaming only a few minutes later. The alien wood made excellent tinder. With his torch blazing he quickly made his way to the s.h.i.+eld, half a mile deeper into the forest.

Fortunately, Ryan didn't encounter any dangerous wildlife. He spent the next hour gathering wood into a ma.s.sive pile against the s.h.i.+eld, along with stones to use as weapons. He then arranged the kindling in a semi-circle about ten yards out from him and set it blazing. This accomplished, he sat with his back to the s.h.i.+eld and began whittling two spears from straight, solid branches.

Twenty minutes later the gray-furred pack animals appeared.

Just as before they emerged from nowhere and began their telltale clicking noises, far louder and more penetrating than such noises had a right to be and completely unnerving. Ryan counted fourteen of them. They were respecting the fire, but they held their ground.

Rage swelled up in him. "Leave me alone!" he shouted at the top of his lungs. He hurled rocks into the pack as hard as he could, but even if he made contact, it didn't help. The animals would disperse for a few minutes and then return, as if nothing had happened.

He screamed at them again and turned to the s.h.i.+eld, beating his fists against it in blind fury as if this would somehow open it. His hands were now in considerable pain but he didn't stop until he could barely lift his arms any longer.

After fifteen minutes of circling the fire-at a healthy distance-the pack sensed they wouldn't be getting at Ryan any time soon. But instead of leaving, they laid on the ground facing the fire. Their eerie silver eyes reflected the raging flames and their bared teeth conveyed an insatiable desire to tear out Ryan's throat. Their prey was surrounded, and they were going to patiently wait him out. It was an excellent strategy. Ryan wasn't going anywhere. No matter how much fuel he had gathered for his fire, at some point it would die out.

And when it did, there would be absolutely nothing he could do to stop them.

CHAPTER 15.

Flying Bloodhounds

Alyssa Cooper returned home from school over an hour later than usual. Her grandmother promptly informed her that her mom wouldn't be coming home that weekend-and her grandma was not happy about it. Alyssa suspected her mother and grandmother had exchanged some very angry words.

Apparently, their mom had decided to attend a conference for the weekend and couldn't be reached by phone. Alyssa wasn't all that surprised. Her grandmother may have been angry, but at this point Alyssa was more relieved than disappointed. At least there wouldn't be the almost constant fighting that seemed to go on whenever their mother was around.

When her grandmother left the room, Alyssa removed a clear plastic container from her backpack, riddled with tiny air-holes. She had picked it up on her way home from school, which was why she was so late. Inside about forty honeybees crawled around, buzzing irritably. She entered the kitchen, placed the container carefully inside the refrigerator, and sat down at the table.

All in all, thought Alyssa, it had been a horrible day. On the plus side, her dentist appointment had gone well, and she had had a good conversation with Ryan Resnick who was cute, nice, and had a good sense of humor too. She had the feeling he was really smart, also, despite the fact he didn't often show it in their English cla.s.s. She had talked to a few other kids about him and they all said the same thing. It was almost as if the courses he was taking weren't worth his time or effort. As if he was preoccupied with far more important matters than just high school. Sometimes he spoke and acted just like any other fifteen-year-old kid, but sometimes he spoke and acted a lot older. As though he had one foot in the kid world and one foot in a far more serious one. And he seemed completely resistant to stress. As if no issue that would trouble a normal high schooler could compare to what he had already been through.

Alyssa laughed at herself as she realized she was reading far too much into his behavior. Ryan Resnick was probably just a nice, smart kid who didn't try very hard and was so confident he didn't let anything bother him.

But as for herself, she was nearing the breaking point when it came to Brewster, Pennsylvania-and when it came to her mother. She couldn't take much more of this. And Kelsey wasn't doing any better.

Alyssa had been naturally cheerful all of her life. From a very young age when she was around the house and in a really good mood, which was often, she would burst into song-something that never failed to drive her sister crazy. But not anymore. Definitely not anymore. Only when she was at school could she manage to be like her old self. Only at school was she able to temporarily forget about her home life and her hatred of Brewster. But the moment she returned home all her frustrations and angers came rus.h.i.+ng back, and her mood blackened instantly.

Alyssa was outgoing and had been performing in plays since she was eight. She started taking dance cla.s.ses when she was nine and had won several compet.i.tions over the years. She was especially good at jazz and hip-hop. But that was back in Chicago. Back in a city that had numerous dance compet.i.tions and a thriving junior theatre. Not here in the sticks. Not in a place where there were no good dance instructors and little opportunity to perform at any level.

She hated it here. With a pa.s.sion. And she hated what the move had done to her mother. Whenever she thought about it she felt like throwing something through a window. Or breaking into tears.

While Alyssa had channeled her athleticism into dance, Kelsey had become a tennis and soccer star. Even though there were fewer teams and fewer opportunities to play these sports in Brewster than there had been in Chicago, she would still be okay in this regard. But Kelsey was less cheerful than her sister by nature, so she was impacted by the strain of their parents' divorce and their troubled home life at least as much as Alyssa.

Alyssa was determined to get out of Brewster the first instant she had the chance-and that meant college. College would be her escape from this horrible place. Nothing would stop her from leaving because she would leave nothing to chance. She would work harder than she ever had to excel in school, so she could get into any college she chose. And if money became a problem, she wouldn't let that stop her either. She would get an academic scholars.h.i.+p.

And the Science Fair compet.i.tion was her key to achieving this goal.

But she had recently come to believe her project wouldn't be good enough, which made her the most frustrated of all.

Alyssa was interrupted from her reverie by her sister charging down the stairs. Kelsey entered the kitchen pulling a blue hooded sweats.h.i.+rt over her head. Alyssa remained seated with a frown on her face and didn't say a word.

"Where were you?" said Kelsey irritably. "I thought you wanted to do a practice run before our big field test tomorrow. Now it might get too dark and too cold."

Alyssa didn't respond. If anything her frown deepened.

"What's wrong," said her sister.

What isn't wrong, thought Alyssa, but managed not to say this out loud.

"Are you mad because Mom's not coming home again this weekend?" asked Kelsey.

Alyssa shook her head no. "Are you?"

"No," said Kelsey, now frowning as deeply as her sister. "It's probably a good thing." She paused. "So if that's not it, what is wrong?" she asked again.

"What's wrong is that I'm beginning to think my flying bloodhound idea is stupid. It's not good enough to win at any level."

Kelsey's eyebrows came together in confusion. "What are you talking about? It couldn't be going better. All of our tests have worked. I still can't believe it," she said in wonder. "The field test will work, too, Alyssa. You'll see."

"It'll work," said Alyssa. "It just won't matter."

The project was good. Even very good. But it wasn't great. And all Alyssa could think of for the past several days were its flaws. Flaws she should have seen from the very beginning.

Ever since their mother had told them about the famous Pavlov and his dogs years before, Alyssa had been fascinated by cla.s.sical and operant conditioning and had been determined to use these ideas to create a winning Science Fair project.

Ivan Pavlov was a Russian scientist who had won a n.o.bel Prize in 1904. He was very interested in digestion and studied dogs to learn more about it. Whenever a dog was given food, it would start to salivate, or drool. The saliva made the food easier to swallow and contained enzymes that would help break down certain parts of the meal. This process was automatic, like breathing, and dogs had no conscious control over it.

It wasn't long before Pavlov noticed his dogs began to drool even before they were served a meal. In fact, after further study he realized the dogs began to drool whenever they saw a lab coat. He was fascinated, because the dogs' meals were always served by people wearing lab coats. Somehow the dogs a.s.sociated a lab coat with food and their involuntary drool responses were activated.

Pavlov immediately began to study this phenomenon, now called cla.s.sical conditioning, and did so for the rest of his career. In one of his first and most famous experiments, widely known as Pavlov's Dog, he rang a bell as he fed his dogs, meal after meal. Sure enough, before too long, his dogs began to drool whenever the bell was rung, even if he no longer gave them any food.

From the early days of Pavlov the field had expanded by leaps and bounds. While cla.s.sical conditioning operated on involuntary responses, operant conditioning worked on voluntary behaviors, using rewards and punishments to actually change complex behavior.

Alyssa was determined to come up with an unbeatable project in this field. She started by surfing the web for interesting applications that she hoped would spark ideas-and soon, she found one.

An application that could be summed up in three words she never thought she would see together. Bomb sniffing honeybees.

Bomb-sniffing honeybees?

This had caught Alyssa's attention immediately. At first she thought it was just a bad joke. But after reading about it on several official web sites she knew that it was real.

It turned out that a honeybee's sense of smell was every bit as good as a dog's. Their antenna could detect unimaginably small amounts of a scent in the air, which helped them zero in on pollen. So in the 1990's, scientists, funded by the military, had trained honeybees to sniff out bombs.

Using sugar-water as a reward, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratories were able to train individual bees to stick out their tongues whenever they smelled a bomb or plastic explosives. Since a bee's tongue, or proboscis, was even longer than its antenna, this was easy to detect. By harnessing three bees inside a small box with a camera trained on their tongues, the box was turned into a magical, bee-powered, bomb sniffing device.

Working with individual bees using video cameras was fairly advanced, but there were simpler techniques. Earlier, scientists had used sugar-water to train bees to recognize the scent of a chemical left by a number of different types of bombs. The scientists then tried to train the bees to swarm around the source of this scent whenever they found it. And it had worked!

This had given Alyssa her idea.

She would train bees in this same way to find missing persons, be they fugitives, campers lost in the woods, or kidnapping victims. The bees could be turned into tiny, flying bloodhounds. They could be given the scent of people who were lost and rewarded with sugar-water when they found them.

Alyssa immediately began to research honeybees. She soon decided that early fall would be the perfect time to proceed. It was just before bees stopped being active. They wouldn't fly when the temperature was fifty or below, which could be a problem on certain fall days, but this was also a season during which pollen was limited. A time when bees turned to other sources of food, like open garbage cans at outdoor parks. In the early fall they would be less distracted by pollen and nectar and more desperate for a perfect food source like sugar-water.

Alyssa learned that John Grace, a farmer who lived only a few miles away, was also a bee-keeper. After explaining her idea to him he had agreed to let her use his bees as test subjects. He used a variety that was on the calm side and wouldn't sting unless they were threatened.

When their grandmother had taken the girls back to Chicago a month earlier for a brief visit, Alyssa had asked one of Kelsey's tennis opponents, a girl named Lexi, to collect some of her sweat in a vial after the match. Since Alyssa and Kelsey were doing the experiments, they couldn't use their own sweat or it would mess up the results.

Back in Brewster, Alyssa diluted her disgusting container of Lexi-sweat with water and filled a large perfume bottle. The bottle had a rubber bulb attached to it. Squeezing the bulb would cause a fine mist of Lexi-sweat to shoot from the container.

Next Alyssa used this sweat to train a hive of honeybees. For six days straight she stood by the hive and sprayed the diluted Lexi-sweat into the air just before putting out a pie-tin full of delicious sugar-water.

Then, for the past three days, she and her sister had conducted experiments to determine how well the bees had been trained. The sisters had ventured one, two and three-hundred yards away from the hive. Each time they would stand by a tree or large rock with their camcorder and doc.u.ment that the bees had no interest in the tree or rock at all. Then they would spray some Lexi-sweat on these objects, and within minutes the bees would come swarming-waiting for their reward. Thousands of them. Every time. It was the coolest thing ever.

Their experiment would have two parts. In Phase One they would train the bees to swarm around the primary source of a scent. In Phase Two, which was far more difficult, they would train the bees to swarm twenty yards above the source rather than right on it. Alyssa had reasoned that any missing person who suddenly had thousands of bees swarming around them would be freaked out for sure. She wanted to use bees to find missing persons, not to give them heart attacks.

Tomorrow at noon they were set to videotape their first field test of Phase One. They would start at the hive and begin hiking, taking the perfume bottle of diluted Lexi-sweat with them. Every half mile they would spray minute amounts of the sweat into the air to help guide the bees to the source. After three miles they would stop and spray a far larger dose of the Lexi-sweat on a tree. If the bees were able to find this tree three miles away and swarm to the most concentrated region of Lexi-sweat, they would consider the test a success.

They had planned a practice run for this afternoon to make sure the bees behaved as expected, which would include the testing of different camera angles to be sure the video they took would be as polished as possible.

That was the plan, at least. Now Kelsey didn't know what was going on. Her sister was acting very strangely. "Alyssa, why are you so negative about our project all of a sudden? You were so psyched about it. What happened?"

"I've realized there are problems I didn't think of before."

"Like what?"

"Like even if the bees do find a missing person, how are you going to find the bees once they have? How are you going to keep up with them when they fly off miles away?"