“The entrance to the factory!” he said. “Bug got through that door, and that means we can too. We’ll go through the dark place under the streets, the underground way, and Dad’ll never see us.”
The first few joggers were out beating the pavement as he and Chip crossed the street to the park, but he told Chip to unlock the long-disused building. “Don’t worry about anyone spotting you,” he said. “We won’t be around long enough for them to catch us.”
The door opened easily, as if it were used everyday. Wide marble steps lay at their feet, and Martin could see the black granite panels of the lobby below them. Chip trotted down the stairs, his load of juice bottles swinging, and Martin turned to close the door. “That’s it for me,” he said as it shut out the view of the park. “No more suburb.”
They made their way from the factory lobby into the darkness underground, with its concrete pillars and strange whispering noises. “I wish David and Matt could have seen this,” Martin muttered as he played his Hi-beam over its mysterious conduits. “But it’s too late for that now. And too late to say good-bye.”
Eyes aglow, Chip led them to the door marked AUTHORIZED ENTRANCE ONLY, and from there, they tiptoed to the loading bay. Martin peeked in at the large space. The lights were still on, but the ominous black packet car was gone. So was Dad, home no doubt for breakfast before beginning the workday in earnest. Had his father noticed the lights, the joke on the console? Either way, it no longer mattered.
He couldn’t ignore his pet’s transformation this time, made even stranger by the load of bottles. In order not to loosen the ties, Chip couldn’t flatten out like a table, so he became long and thin, a playground riding toy with legs that arched out from wide shoulders like a swing-set frame. Strangest of all, this mechanical construction still had a dog’s head, which swiveled around to watch him as he scrambled astride, trying to avoid the uncomfortable bottles. Hand pegs and foot pegs jutted out to assist him. “Chip, that’s gross!” said Martin.
The bot dog shifted forward. Martin’s heart gave a leap. This is it, he thought. Time to try my luck in a new world. The steel gates opened, and the one-of-a-kind packet car rolled through.
The washing room past the loading bay was damp and gloomy. Martin heard water dripping loudly into a drain. Then they were in a long dark curving corridor that seemed to last forever.
“Chip, hurry up!” Martin urged. “I can hear something banging in here!” But the banging noise was only Martin’s pounding heart.
A further set of gates opened, and light flooded in, a stark contrast to the dim corridor. Chip stopped rolling. Martin stumbled off, blinking, his eyes smarting from the glare.
The first thing he saw was his own sneakers, standing in white and black gravel. Next to them, springing out of the rocks, was one of those yellow starburst flowers surrounded by jagged green leaves. Martin bent down to look at it, delighted. Then he looked up again, amazed. A veritable carpet of those flowers stretched around him.
He stood next to the rails, but they no longer ran on concrete. Now they ran on a narrow gravel road, with crossbeams of thick dark wood. No houses were here outside the suburb, but he saw metal sheds and buildings, and not too far away was a high concrete-block fence. The whole thing could have been under the steel dome, except for those heartwarming yellow flowers that sprang up everywhere out of the hard-packed ground.
“So we’re out, but we’re not out, is that it?” Martin mused. Then a huge shadow fell over them. Martin looked up and discovered for the first time what the word outside meant.
Clouds were sweeping by overhead, not painted white blotches on a ceiling, but living, moving creations of tremendous variety and grandeur. They were all shades of pink and purple, and they were all sizes as well. Some were tiny rags that tore quickly along; others were great fluffy masses that coalesced and transformed in a slow, graceful progression of dignity and beauty. Martin stared, slack-jawed, unaware of the passage of time. Never in his life had he seen a sky that changed.
“What are you doing out here, young fellow? We’ve got to get you home!” And a click at Martin’s wrist signaled that he was a prisoner.
CHAPTER TEN
Even Chip’s surreal transformations hadn’t prepared Martin for the sight before him now. An older model of bot, it didn’t have enough simulation gel to appear entirely human. Most of it was a typical steel-bodied freight bot, with a wide cylindrical base and many telescoping arms. One of the arms had caught Martin’s wrist in a tight-fitting pincer clip.
A man’s face smiled broadly from atop this mechanical creation. It was ghastly to see a living human head sprouting from a heap of metal, but then, this head didn’t exactly seem human. It looked like the head off one of Cassie’s little fashion dolls, the kind that came with its own tennis outfit.
“It’s dangerous for you to be out here, young man,” the head admonished. “We’d better get you back where you belong.”
“Let go!” cried Martin. He tried to pull his hand free of the machine’s grip, but his muscles were no match for the hydraulics in a bot’s arm.
“Back to safety,” insisted the smiling bot, dragging him along as it rolled up the gravel incline by the packet rails. “Look both ways,” it advised before it advanced onto the tracks. “We wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to you.”
“Chip!” yelled Martin in despair.
He thought his problems had doubled when his other hand was seized and a smaller twin of the security bot locked its pincer tightly around his wrist. This doll-headed bot only came up to his waist, but it smiled at him just as nauseatingly. Then he noticed that it had six big juice bottles slung, gunslinger-style, around its middle, and a folded green blanket draped around its neck.
The little twin spoke to its senior colleague in vibrating data-transfer speech, and the big security bot released Martin’s wrist. “My partner is looking after you,” it announced in its friendly way. “Be safe!” It rolled off out of sight around the corner of a shed.
In another second, Martin’s wrist was loose, and Chip was Chip once more. “Good dog!” Martin said, dropping to his knees to hug the bot. Chip was wagging proudly. “Man, am I glad I don’t own a real dog! You are such a cool pet. Let’s get out of here before any more of those guys show up. That thing’s gonna give me nightmares.”
He and Chip quickly covered the distance to the concrete fence. There, the rails were blocked by a big gate of sheet metal. Chip stopped and barked sharply. Then he cautiously stepped over to the rails and froze into a wheeled playground toy again. This didn’t seem so creepy after the security bot.
“I get it,” Martin said. “There’s another alarm here.” He climbed on, and they rolled forward. The big steel gate trundled off to the side to let them through, past the limits and controls of the world that Martin had always known.
“Wow!” he whispered. “Wow!” he exclaimed. “Wow-hoo-yahoo-whee!” he cried at the top of his lungs, scrambling off the rolling dog in excitement.
It was the distance that fascinated him first. After a lifetime of living with a steel ceiling and a concrete floor, the vastness of the living landscape was like a drug. He stood on the top of a hill, a concept he had known before only from sandbox games, but this hill was an enormous thing, and the ground fell gradually from it for a long, long way. The ground below the hill wasn’t flat either. It undulated, rising in curves and falling in scoops. Off to his left, high hills like a fence seemed ready to blockade the clouds themselves.
The colors out here were as unlike those in the suburb as they could possibly be. Ranging from tawny brown to dark olive, with every shade in between, the land coordinated beautifully with itself. And the early-morning sky, all tints of red, pink, indigo, and gray, seemed a marvel of perfect choices. These were not bright, garish, plastic colors, but soft, friendly tones. Martin’s orange shirt and electric blue backpack screamed “bad taste” by comparison.
Chip blended in beautifully. The mystery of the shepherd
’s elaborate black-and-tan decorating scheme was solved at last. It was a shame that the handsome beast had to carry the load of juice bottles around. Their labels—even worse, their contents—were a positive riot of artificial colors.
The sun attracted Martin next. He barely knew it for what it was. In class, they had studied the solar system, but they had never learned how these astronomical bodies appeared from the surface of their world. In the suburb, the sun brought light through the translucent skylights. But it never revealed itself as he saw it now, an enormous egg-yolk ball low on the horizon, filling the world with a golden red glow. Its power dizzied him, made him want to run and shout, pushed him along just as surely as the blind rush of wind that flattened itself against him and blew his hair into his eyes for the very first time in his life.
“Let’s go!” Martin yelled, and he ran down the hill. He ran and ran, tripping over stones and dodging through the knee-high flowers and leaves, catching his jeans on stiff plants that crackled and sprang back. The wind poured over him, cooling the sweat from his brow, and he jumped and ran and shouted, sure that he could run forever. Then the backpack got heavy and clumsy. It bounced around on his shoulders. He stopped and felt a stitch in his side.
“I’d be all the way—across the suburb by now,” he wheezed to Chip as he stood with his hands on his knees. “I couldn’t go—anywhere—but back. Here, I can go forever! Who thought it would be so big?!” And he joyfully tackled the shepherd, causing bottles and blanket to slide about in an alarming fashion.
“The national anthem’s playing right now,” he noted with satisfaction, sitting down in a group of pink wildflowers that sprinkled yellow dust all over his blue jeans. “Out here, it’s quiet. No television.”
But that didn’t mean it was silent. Fluted cries were beginning to sound across the open field, by ones and by twos. Small forms were whirring through the air overhead, black against the sun. Birds! Martin recognized them from the springtime tape played over the neighborhood loudspeakers and from his grandmother’s tales of those creatures like soft bundled socks. “You were right, Granny,” he whispered, shivering with pleasure. “Everything you told me was true.”
The light grew brighter every second. Now Martin noticed small noises joining the birdcalls and the rustling of plants: faint buzzes and clicks and other busy sounds. He realized that the dusty ground was alive with movement. Bugs of every make and model were marching, crawling, springing, and flying off in all directions.
“Chip!” he called. “There’s bugs everywhere! What David and Matt wouldn’t give to see this!”
While the suburbanites under the steel dome cast their votes that morning, Martin spent an ecstatic half hour collecting and cataloging bugs. He didn’t know their names, so he gave them names of his own: Superman (able to leap houses in a single bound), which came in both a green and a yellow model; and the Copycats, who followed one another everywhere in long lines. For one type, he found not the bug itself, but only its big outer hull, translucent and almost weightless, so he named this one the Ghost Bug. And then there was the bug that waited quietly, with folded hands and solemn demeanor, until some happy little bug came close enough for it to pounce on. These, sad to say, he named the Teachers.
A steady mechanical clacking distracted him. Some distance away, looking like a toy, a packet car moved along the rails. It grew steadily in size as it came toward the suburb, and Martin crouched ineffectively in the tall weeds as it passed by. It wasn’t a scary black packet, but a regular merchandise shipment. Still, it reminded Martin why he was outside.
“Okay, no more fooling around,” he told Chip. “This is gonna be easy. Cassie left in a packet, so we’ll follow the packet line. It’ll lead us right to her.”
They walked along in the open field, keeping the packet line in sight. The day grew warm and exceptionally bright, and Martin’s backpack straps began to hurt where they rubbed his shoulders. But he had a million new things to see. Several times that morning, he spotted animals crossing the fields nearby. Two had long ears like Cassie’s stuffed bunny. One looked like a thin dog. And even the things he had already seen, like the clouds, seemed to change form and color every minute.
It was noon when they came to a stand of trees about fifty feet away from the packet rails, which were running through the fields on a steep-sided, raised road of gravel about ten feet high. The trees straggled down a nearby ridge and spilled into the field, like a crowd of people who had followed two or three leaders.
Martin stood in their shade, put his hands into the ribs of their bark, and felt wonder deep in his heart. They were not tall and powerful like the I beams that ribbed the steel dome, but their branches swayed, and their leaves rustled in the wind. He could tell that they were alive.
By the afternoon, he began to feel uncomfortable. His skin had flushed pink, and he felt thirsty and feverish. He was happy when they came to a shallow creek in the valley floor. The packet rails crossed it on a long iron span, but he waded right into it and bathed his sore arms and face in the cool water.
“Chip, come look at his!” he called. “Fish! Just like in the pond at the park! But these are really teeny, and they all swim the same direction, like they’re having a parade.”
When evening came, a glorious view spread out around him. In a shallow valley, a large sheet of water shone like a mirror in the glow of the sinking sun. Beyond it rose the dark wall of the high, high hills, a band of shadowy giants. Thousands and thousands of birds wheeled and cried in the air above the lake, their shapes stark silhouettes against the golden light, and the sunset sent yellow and purple streamers of cloud halfway across the sky.
Martin sat down and watched the brilliant show for as long as it lasted. He couldn’t look away for a second. He stared at the huge crimson ball of the sun itself until black spots danced before his eyes.
Worn out by the glory he had witnessed, Martin was unprepared for the stars. They were like a surprise planned by an overly indulgent parent. “This is too much, really,” he confided to his dog as the brilliant lights clustered in the heavens. “I never thought a place could look like this.” It grew cold, and he unslung the bottles from Chip, wrapping the blanket around himself and cuddling up to the dog. It didn’t occur to him to seek shelter. From day to night and from summer to winter, life in the suburb changed very little.
An almost full moon crept into sight over the gravel embankment beside him. “What next?” he said drowsily. “I swear, you gotta be watching this place every second.” But he fell asleep in spite of his own advice.
He awoke in the half-light of dawn to a very different scene. The morning was very cold, and his blanket was wet and clammy. A chilly wind whipped down from the distant peaks. Chip’s fuzzy bulk protected Martin as well as it could, but Martin still felt as if the wind blew straight through them both.
Worst of all was the pain from his skin.
Patches of it were burning in agony on his face, his ears, the back of his neck, and all the way down his arms. Even in the dim light, he could see that those arms were deep, flaming red. When he turned up the short sleeves on his T-shirt, he could see a sharp line of demarcation, normal above and damaged below. There was no doubt about the cause: it was the sunlight.
“Oh no!” he said. “Chip, maybe they’re right. Maybe humans can’t take it out here.” He pressed a finger gingerly into the scarlet skin and watched it leave a stark white print that slowly flushed red again. “Man! I sure don’t want to die!”
As the hours passed, he hiked along in pain, miserable with a feverish thirst that the lukewarm, syrupy juice couldn’t slake. He had a limited view of his surroundings because he was huddled under the shade of the velour blanket. When the sun rose higher, this became a fluffy walking sweatbox, but Martin was too afraid of the brilliant sunlight to risk laying it aside. Hour by hour, he hoped that his skin would return to normal, but hour by hour, his suffering increased. The inflamed areas burned and itched by turns, but this was an
itch that would tolerate no scratching.
This shouldn’t be happening to him, he thought. This was a gorgeous place, a boy’s paradise. He wanted to belong here, just like the birds and bugs did. It wasn’t right for the sun to try to kill him like this. It just wasn’t fair.
As they walked on into the late afternoon, Martin began to worry. Except for the occasional packet clattering by, he’d seen no sign of human life for two days, and the suburb was long out of sight. The size of this beautiful wilderness was exhausting him, and its toxic light was roasting him alive. The torture of his burns was constant and excruciating, and he ached like a victim of the flu.
“I don’t know what to do,” he told Chip. “I wish you could tell me. Should I go back? Is it already too late to go back? Am I just going to feel this way until I die?”
They came to a wide field with a stream down the middle. A little knoll made a perfect spot to watch the sunset, and later they could climb down it and take shelter behind some rocks to escape the cold night winds. In the meantime, Martin bathed his burns in the stream and got a little relief from the pain. His red skin seemed thick, like a rubber mat.
He slept badly. He’d chosen the field because he enjoyed the sound of moving water, but other creatures seemed to like it too. Several times in the night, Chip bristled and growled, and Martin heard strange calls and noises. The audacity of his journey was beginning to eat at him too. If humans lived under domes, it was because they had to. He’d been stupid to race out into this world just because he had a toy that could unlock doors.
When the sun rose, Martin didn’t rise with it. The strain of the last few days had worn him down, and his pain had abated somewhat, so that he finally felt almost comfortable. Warmed by the rays of the sun, he drifted in and out of dreams. At last, he rolled over and opened his eyes.