Chapter 19: A Malfunction and A Miracle
Jimmy realized that he was traveling too fast; he would approach the force field in seconds at this speed. "Slowing speed!" he shouted into the microphone near his mouth. The usual euphoria that accompanied him when he flew returned. He shook the wonderful feeling away and reached over his dashboard to the EMP. He had about twenty seconds until he reached the field.
"Press red button!" he shouted over the rush of wind flying past his face, forcing his eyes to nearly close. Each pilot leaned over and pushed the red button. The nearly silent humming quickly grew to a roar.
Jimmy's EMPs were charging fast. It took ten seconds to charge to firing capacity. If they didn't fire the EMPs within five seconds after the charging was complete, the energy would harmlessly dissipate and the EMP would have to charge again.
Jimmy watched as the bar on the device quickly rose to its maximum level. "Eight seconds away from force field!" Libby's voice rang out, barely audible among the roaring EMPs.
Jimmy poised his finger over the device. "Flick blue switch to fire! NOW!" he shouted as loud he could. As one collective body, everyone immediately reacted and flipped their switches. Then everything went to Hell.
Jimmy knew something was wrong the second after he flipped the switch. A blinding flash of light that accompanied the powerful magnetic fields should have flown from the cylinders towards the heart of the force field. Instead, only a few sparks sputtered from his mechanism. He didn't see anyone else's fire either.
"ABORT!" Jimmy screamed. "ABORT! ABORT!" he shouted over and over again. Jimmy desperately swerved his rocket ninety degrees to the right, but he knew that it wouldn't turn quick enough. He would live an extra second or two before crashing into the field a few hundred yards over.
"What's wrong?" Libby desperately shouted, but nobody was listening. The sky was enveloped with screams as everyone desperately turned their rockets in every direction.
Jimmy's pupils dilated as he stared straight ahead. He finally caught a glimpse of the field. The last time he had run into it was at night; he hadn't been able to see it. Now he saw sparks of electricity appearing out of nowhere. The sparks grew closer as his last seconds quickly ran out.
"Ah!" Jimmy screamed as his rocket closed in. He closed his eyes and covered his head with his hands. He counted down what he knew would be the last few seconds of his life. Three…two…one…goodbye world.
Yet there was no collision. Jimmy waited several more seconds before tentatively opening his eyes to see that he was quickly rising above the clouds, still heading upwards. He looked in every direction and saw that everyone else was looking around as well, confusion etched on their faces.
Jimmy pushed his amazement aside and his leader instinct kicked in. "Slow speed to minimum!" he shouted into his headset. There was a slight pause before all of the other rockets slowed down.
Jimmy and the others drifted as slowly as they could without falling from the sky. "Libby, what the hell just happened?" he shouted.
There was a long pause on the other end as Libby tried to understand why the pilots were all acting so chaotic. "What are you talking about? You took out the force field with your EMPs." She stared at the monitors again. "Didn't you?"
Jimmy leaned over his dashboard and looked at his smoking cylindrical invention. "Playback the video on one monitor and check the force field's energy readings on another."
Libby listened to his request and stared at the dozens of monitors around the control room and the hundreds of buttons. "Um," she muttered while running her hand over the keyboard, "What?"
Jimmy scowled. "Put Goddard on the headset!" he shouted. Goddard's familiar barking was heard in Jimmy's ears, and he repeated his request.
Goddard closed his eyes as he sent a command to the computer's CPU. Libby watched as the thirty-second long video of the pilots taking off began to repeat itself. She noticed that nothing seemed to happen when the kids activated their EMPs.
"Huh, looks like you didn't activate the EMPs," she told Jimmy. "Give me a minute for Goddard to teach me about all of this stuff," she said before flicking her headset off.
"Libby, don't you hang up on me!" Jimmy shouted before letting out a shout of frustration. Ok, calm down, she's never done this before. "Just fly around in circles until I give you further orders," Jimmy instructed the other thirty-nine rockets.
Jimmy absent-mindedly flew his rocket in circles for several minutes until Libby returned. "Ok, I've got some interesting data," she told him.
"Shoot," Jimmy told her, his temper momentarily weakened.
"I'm looking at the energy readings of the force field from when you first started monitoring it, when you 'activated' the EMPs," she said the word activated suspiciously, "and now. This thing is pretty messed up."
"How?" he asked, although he had a pretty good idea.
Libby cleared her throat and stared at the various monitors in the control room. "Alright, basically, this is how it played out. For all intents and purposes," she began before pausing. Whoa, I'm sounding way too much like Jimmy. "Um, let's say that the power of the force field when you first discovered it was 100, ok?"
"Understood, keep going," Jimmy said while inattentively moving his steering wheel left and right.
"Alright. About a second after you activated your EMPs, the power level dropped to zero. The force field completely dissipated. But as soon, and I mean at exactly the same time, as the last rocket completely passed through where the force field had been, it went back up. The force field reactivated itself."
Jimmy rubbed the bridge of his nose in frustration and closed his eyes. "And our EMPs, they didn't work, did they?"
Libby shook her head. "Not a bit. I've replayed the video several times and Goddard checked for readings of any extreme magnetic fields present in your area when you activated the device. Nothing. You did absolutely nothing to dissipate the force field. It went away and came back on its own."
Everyone with a headset listened intently at Libby's explanation. While most of them didn't understand the technical terms, they got the message. Jimmy's invention had failed, and yet they had gotten through the force field.
"I'm going to set down on the field and check it out," Nick said into his headset before turning around to land on the force field.
Jimmy was too busy trying to figure out what had happened to listen to Nick. It took him a moment to realize his friend's idiocy. "No!" he shouted, but it was too late. Nick was already setting down.
"He'll be electrocuted, his rocket will be destroyed!" he shouted at Libby. He anxiously spun his rocket around to rescue Nick, but he saw that he was in no danger. Nick's rocket rested on a seemingly invisible floor, and Nick was standing up in the middle of the sky.
"Dude, this is the coolest thing ever," he told everyone while jumping up and landing back down on the force field.
Jimmy began to get a splitting headache as he tried to understand the chaos that surrounded him. "Libby? Explanation please?"
"I was about to explain before Nick interrupted us," she told him. "The power levels of the force field are down to fifty percent of what they originally were. There's no electrical current. Right now, it's simply an invisible wall, albeit a thick and impenetrable one."
Jimmy closed his eyes and thought for a moment. If the force field is weakened, then I can tear it down easily if my EMP will work. He charged up his EMP once again, but all he heard was sputtering. Sparks flew out of it once more. He had to face it, his invention was a dud.
"Land on the force field," he instructed everyone. "I need to think." He spun around and began his descent onto the invisible wall. Slowly and carefully, he landed beside Nick. "Nick, get back into your rocket. I don't know where the edge of this thing is, and I don't want you stepping over it," he told him.
Nick grumbled his disappointment as he left his new toy. "Aye, aye, captain," he angrily muttered.
Jimmy leaned back in his seat and grabbed his headset's
microphone. "Libby, tell me if I've got this right. We flew at the force field and activated our EMPs. My invention completely failed and did nothing. Yet the force field disappeared just as we went through, and then reclosed itself."
"Pretty much," Libby said with a shrug.
Cindy pulled up beside Jimmy with an equally puzzled look on her face. "That doesn't make any sense. It just opened up for us for no reason?"
Jimmy scratched his chin. "It's a one in a quadrillion shot. The force field stays continuously on for nearly two weeks, then vanishes for just long enough for our rockets to get through, and then closes itself once again. Plus, its energy is weakened."
As Jimmy muttered this to himself, Cindy realized something. "Hey, does anyone else realize that we're getting communications through the force field down to Earth?"
Jimmy immediately faced her, surprised. He realized that she was right. "Libby, can you still hear me?"
"Roger that, Jimmy. This is all pretty strange, huh?" she replied.
Jimmy shook his head. This was too much. "Does anyone below at Retroland read me?"
A quick silence, and then a boy named Mike answered. "Loud and clear, Jimmy. Been monitoring your conversation. I agree, pretty strange. What do you want?"
"Send a rocket up here. Ride slowly. Get as close to this force field as you can. If it disappears, come through. If it doesn't, head back to Earth. I want to see if this thing is letting ships through, or if we experienced a freak accident."
Jimmy turned to the dozens of rockets beside him. "Get ready to fly those things. If the force field disappears again, we're going to fall to Earth." Everyone nodded.
Jimmy took a pair of binoculars Cindy handed him and stared down below. He could see a bumper car rocket flying towards him. It was going as slowly as it could. It eventually came up to Jimmy. The pilot saw that the kids above him weren't falling back to Earth. The force field was still intact. "Aborting," he calmly told Jimmy while swerving to the left and heading back to the ground.
"No change in the force field," Libby told everyone.
"We must have gotten lucky," Jimmy said in disbelief. "Unbelievably and impossibly lucky."
"You're welcome," Sheen huffed while pointing at his mask.
Cindy promptly ignored him and began thinking. "That or the Yolkians wanted you to get through. You and Nick said that they probably want revenge. They can't get revenge if you don't come to them. And now that you're outside of Retroville, there's no sense in letting anyone else out. A smaller army is easier to kill."
Jimmy took in what she had just said and slowly nodded. "They must be able to monitor our ships' positions to know that we were coming up to the force field. That means that they can track our positions at all times."
"Most likely," Libby told him after she saw Goddard nod. "What are you going to do?"
Jimmy gripped his steering wheel hard enough to drain the blood from his knuckles. Bastards. They think a little radar can help them? Takes a lot more than that to beat me. "Screw it. A smaller army makes a sneak attack easier. They'll see the asteroid coming, but they won't be able to do anything about it. That will hopefully destroy their radar bases or whatever they're using to track us. We'll still circle around the planet and sneak in."
"What about the kids still at Retroland?" Nick asked. "That's half our team, not to mention half the supplies! And guns!" he shouted.
"Doesn't matter," Jimmy told him. "Half the kids only need half the supplies. There's nothing we can do." He grabbed his microphone and held it closer to his mouth. "Mike, you read me?"
"Loud and clear," he replied. "What're your orders?"
"Go back to my lab. Libby could probably use the extra help to man all of that technology."
Cindy pulled her microphone closer to her mouth as well. "Mike, Vortex here. Use the guns you have with you down there to build a fortress of sorts around Jimmy's lab and house. Go to the stores tonight and grab all the food you can. Bring it back to the lab and house. You and everyone else will stay there until we return. Use anything you've got to build that fortress. Tear down houses for wood, break down buildings for cement, I don't care. The Yolkians are smarter and sneakier than we thought. I wouldn't put it past them to have hidden out somewhere in that city so that they could take out the control team."
There was a silence on the other end. "Jimmy, permission to follow Ms. Vortex's orders?" Mike asked.
Jimmy gunned his rocket and took off, continuing his course to space. "Of course. She's right. My house and lab is now your base. If it's too small, extend to Carl's and Cindy. But keep it small enough so that you can build a fortress around it. Keep guards alert and have sniper positions. Got all that?" Jimmy smiled, rather enjoying this army talk. "Soldier?"
"Yes sir," Mike quickly answered. "I will send twenty of my men to your lab to assist Miss Folfax in her efforts. I will send thirty to gather supplies tonight and tomorrow. The rest of my squad and myself will begin setting up a protective barrier around our new base. Is that acceptable?"
"Yes," Cindy and Jimmy said at the same time. They looked at each other for a moment.
"Yes," Jimmy continued. "Get to work at once. Neutron out," he said while leaning back and sighing.