Read 90_Minutes_to_Live Online

Authors: JournalStone

90_Minutes_to_Live (33 page)

“Bev, I don’t think....”

Too late. She had the screen focused on a heavy, round leaf and she hit the Enter key.

The sharp odor of overheating transformers filled Kit’s nose and once more the yellow orb started growing between the antennae.

Pop.

A moment later, the orangey-colored leaf fell to the tabletop. Kit reached out a tentative hand to touch it but she stopped him.

“Don’t. It could be poisonous,” she used a pair of needle nose pliers to pick up the thick frond. Unlike the tree leaves Kit was used to seeing, this
one had no veins running through it. The top and bottom were the same shade.

Bev placed the alien plant sample into a plastic bag that had previously held her USB cables, folded the edge over and sealed it with a piece of tape.

A disquieting thought came to life in Kit’s head. “Uh, what about bacteria or diseases?”

She looked at him and he’d never seen her eyes more serious, even when they’d been in the ambulance, on the way to the hospital for their bee stings.

“After the monkey-bird, if there’re any viruses or bacteria in that world’s atmosphere or on the animals that can hurt us, we’re probably already infected. And so is the rest of the neighborhood.”

Kit imagined everyone in a three block radius dropping dead from an alien disease. How would he explain
that
to his parents?

“So what’s next?” he tried to banish the grim picture from his thoughts but although it moved away, it didn’t disappear completely.

“We keep collecting samples until we have a good variety to bring to the authorities, like NASA.” Bev played around with the Arrow, Page Up, and Page Down keys, changing the scene showing on the monitor.

“I think I’ve got it now. Left and Right shift the view back and forth, Up and Down arrows are zoom in and out and the Page Up, Page Down keys move the view to another location entirely. I don’t know if it’s on the same world or another.”

She tried each of the other keys on the board but none of them affected the picture.

After a few minutes of practice, Bev started focusing in on various rocks, soil and plant life. She figured out the zoom had to be relatively close up to an object, in order for it to be drawn through to the garage.

Kit busied himself with sample bagging. He snuck a box of zip lock bags, along with some Tupperware and a roll of kitchen garbage bags, from Bev’s pantry.

As soon as she brought something over, Kit—now wearing a pair of gardening gloves—would bag it. Then he’d stick a Post-It note on it, as a makeshift label.

Thirty minutes later, they had a growing pile of samples on the table and floor. The garage smelled like an electrical fire and Bev’s parents were due home from her brother’s Little League game in a few minutes.

“I think we better stop now,” Bev said. “We’ve had the machine on for almost ninety minutes and it’s getting really hot. That must be its limit.”

“What are you going to tell them?” he asked as she shut the machine off.

“My parents? Nothing.” Bev laid a plastic tarp over her invention, and taped a piece of paper marked ‘Do Not Touch!!’ on it. “They’d freak. They’ll find out when NASA comes knocking on the door. Then it’ll be too late for me to get in trouble.”

“You know, you can’t just send a letter to NASA or call them,” Kit said. The samples had been packed into two empty boxes, which they planned to store in Bev’s closet.


No kidding
. But we can bring a couple to Mr. Sloan and have him contact NASA for us. Him they’ll believe.”

He figured she was right. They’d had Sloan for eighth-grade Biology this past year. Unlike most teachers, he was actually pretty cool and he didn’t mind when students brought him dead bugs or snakes to identify.

Bev paused at her door. “You better not say anything either. Promise?”

“Cross my heart.” He made the motion, held out both hands to show he hadn’t crossed his fingers. “I can’t wait to see everyone’s faces when we’re famous!”

 

*   *   *

 

Getting Mr. Sloan to believe their story had been harder than Kit had thought it would be. He’d figured they could just say they found these new plants and could Mr. Sloan please identify them? But the teacher had wanted to know where they found them. When they didn’t have a believable story, they’d ended up showing him the machine and demonstrating it.

He’d wanted to tell their parents, tell the police, tell everyone but they’d finally convinced him to contact NASA or some similar agency. Of course, that was after Bev had threatened to hide the machine and tell everyone Sloan was a liar.

Sloan had brought one of the funny round leaves to the Botany department at Oklahoma State and they’d run tests on it. The results had been as crazy as Kit had expected. In addition to carbon, the cellular material contained silicon and gold, of all things. The cells themselves had three distinct walls or layers and fluids flowed through intracellular channels instead of xylem and phloem.

That had been enough for the university’s botanist, Dr. Hez Ramzallah, to authorize sending a sample to NASA.

Three days later, a plain white van pulled up at the Pietro house.

 

*   *   *

 

“Kit, you’ve got to come right away!” Bev’s voice was so loud Kit had to hold the phone away from his ear.

“What’s wrong?”

“They’re here. NASA!”

“What?”

“They want to see us use the machine, right now. Hurry!”

She didn’t give him time to respond. He stared at the silent phone and tossed the book he’d been reading onto the bed and ran out of the house, stopping just long enough to grab his Whattaburger baseball cap from the floor.

 

Six strangers stood inside Bev’s garage. With them were Mr. and Mrs. Pietro, Mr. Sloan and the botanist from the college, Dr. Ramzallah.

The three NASA scientists introduced themselves as Drs. Cooke, Tunney and Ching. They mentioned what they did; something with xenobiology in the title but Kit didn’t listen. He was too busy trying not to stare at the other three men, the ones in the plain black suits and matching sunglasses who didn’t introduce themselves. Stories about aliens always mentioned the
men in black
. He knew they weren’t super-spies but they did look like the CIA or Secret Service agents he’d seen in movies and TV shows.

What if they’re here to take away Bev’s machine?

Or arrest us?

She didn’t seem worried about them and neither did her parents, who were busy chastising her for not telling them what had been going on. Kit was glad his parents had gone to see his grandmother in the nursing home and wouldn’t be back until that evening. He’d stayed home because he had a Little League game later in the afternoon.

When he’d first arrived, Bev had pulled him aside and told him how the scientists had originally exited the van in protective gear but they’d run tests on air samples from the garage, which came up negative for any unusual viruses or bacteria.

“They told me they didn’t find anything on the leaf we sent them either but they were really mad. They lectured me and Mr. Sloan on how we could have contaminated the whole world. Mr. Sloan told them he hadn’t worried about it, because by the time he saw the samples, we’d already been breathing around them and touching them for days and we were fine. Plus, by then we’d already spread any potential diseases too far to be controlled.”

“Did you tell them about the monkey-bird?” Kit watched the scientists walk around the workbench, taking pictures of her invention but not touching anything.

“Are you crazy? They’d probably quarantine the city.”

The scientists finished their examination and approached her.

“Please, Miss Pietro, can you show us exactly how you brought the samples over?” Dr. Cooke was the tallest of the scientists, an older man with white hair and eyebrows. Tiny glasses perched at the end of his long nose.

“Yes and also how you handled the samples?” Dr. Ching asked. Several inches shorter than Cooke or Tunney, he had shiny black hair and a chubby face.

Bev separated herself from her parents and turned the power on to her machine, which she and Kit had nicknamed the
transporter,
after the device on
Star Trek
. The various multi-colored lights winked on, accompanied by the muted sound of humming fans whirring to life.

She stationed herself at the keyboard, while Kit stood next to her, wearing his gloves. He had some of his zip-lock bags ready.

On the screen, the twirling, sparking light devil appeared.

“Is that apparition always there when you turn the monitor on?” Tunney asked as he took a picture of the rainbow dervish.

Bev nodded. “Yes. We don’t know if it’s actually some kind of storm or dust cloud or just the pattern on the monitor that indicates it’s ready to use.”

“We never tried to bring it across as a sample,” Kit said.

They need to know we have some common sense.

“You shouldn’t have used the machine at all,” Ted Pietro said from the edge of the garage.

“Dad....” Bev rarely used her whiny voice, except with her parents. Kit always found it amazing how just a simple change in her inflection turned her from an overly-mature, serious science geek into a typical thirteen year-old girl, who’d just been told she couldn’t buy the expensive jeans she wants.

“Don’t
Dad
me young lady. Didn’t you hear these people? You actually put the entire world in danger!”

“Geez, we didn’t do it on purpose. We thought we were just looking at pictures and we tried to change them and then Kit hit the Enter button and the next thing we knew....”

“The leaf appeared on the table,” Kit cut in; worried she might slip up and mention their first sample.

The one still running loose someplace—

She shot him a squinty-eyed glare and he shut up.

“Well, the harm, if any, has already been done.” Cooke slid his glasses up. “We’ve conducted exhaustive tests on the plant material we received and it’s our belief that because the life forms of our two worlds are so radically different, there’s little chance of microorganisms from one place being harmful to the other.”

“Can you show us how you bring forth a sample?” Tunney asked.

“Sure.” Bev began working with the Arrows and other buttons, explaining how they’d figured out what each one did.

She located one of the round-leafed trees. “That’s like the tree we got the leaf from.”

She zoomed in on a branch and touched the Enter key. Tunney switched his camera for a digital camcorder and filmed the entire sequence of events, leading up to the appearance of the sample, from the initial yellowish glow to the final
Pop
as the luminescent orb changed into the black disk.

“We were always careful not to touch anything directly,” Kit explained, as he picked up the leaf and dropped it into the plastic baggie.

“Really? So you didn’t touch the gloves when you took them on and off? Did you place them on the table and then perhaps move them or rest a hand the table?” Ching asked as he drew on latex gloves and took the baggie from Kit. He dropped it into a larger sample bag, added his gloves, and sealed the bag.

“Well, uh....”

“We found lots of other stuff too. Do you want more soil or rocks?” Bev interrupted.

“Actually, we’d like to do some sample collecting ourselves, if that’s all right,” Cooke said.

“Just don’t use it too long at a time.”

“Yeah, the transporter starts making a funny, overheating kind of smell after about an hour or two,” Kit said.

“Ninety minutes,” Bev cut in, always precise when it came to her experiments.

“Transporter?” Ching asked.

“That’s what we call it.” Bev stood up and let Cooke take her chair.

Ching gently moved Kit out of the way and arranged a series of heavy-duty sample bags, along with a box of latex gloves, on the table. At his feet sat a large Styrofoam container to hold the bags.

Cooke shifted the view on the screen from one place to the next, stopping each time to bring across samples of dirt, rock and some small grass-like growths.

“Have you seen any animal life?” he asked at one point.

“Uh....” Kit didn’t know what to say.

“Sort of. We saw something in a tree once but we didn’t, um, want to transport anything alive, ‘cause we wouldn’t be able to do anything with it.”

Bev’s voice seemed to scream
“I’m lying!”
but Kit hoped the scientists wouldn’t realize it. Ching and Tunney glanced at each other, giving Kit momentary heart failure.

“What did it look like?” Cooke asked.

“It was hard to see. It was behind some leaves. We know it had big yellow eyes and brownish fur.”

“Hmmm.” Cooke zoomed in on another tree, panned back and forth across the branches. No eyes peeked out at them.

“Nothing there. It would be interesting to see if it was something avian or primate in physiological appearance.”

Other books

Princess From the Past by Caitlin Crews
Shades of Passion by DePaul, Virna
The Last Innocent Man by Margolin, Phillip
Valley of the Shadow by Peter Tremayne
The Painted Lady-TPL by David Ashton
Shallow Waters by Rebecca Bradley


readsbookonline.com Copyright 2016 - 2024