For all of their rivalry, Tanner wasn’t going to let Ocean run off blind. “The delivery ship isn’t what you think it is, Ocean,” Tanner said. “I don’t think it’s meant to save you—but I have an idea that might!”
“You’re out of your mind!” Ocean said, and then he looked at Tanner in a way he never had before. Tanner actually saw compassion in his eyes. A seedling of humanity pushing its way through his arrogance. “Listen, Burgess—we haven’t always been friends, but that doesn’t matter now. We’re all colonists. Come with me, both of you. Get on the delivery ship, and if you want to argue, we can argue after we land.”
Tanner shook his head. “I won’t set foot on that ship, Ocean—and neither should you!”
Any compassion in Ocean’s eyes vanished as quickly as it had come. “Fine—stay here and die here for all I care. It’s what you deserve.”
Then he ran off to join the others.
Morena turned to Tanner. “If you really do have a plan, you had better tell me about it.”
Tanner sighed. “I will. But you’re not gonna like it.”
The delivery ship launched from T-Bin. All colonists were accounted for except for two. With just a few minutes left until T-Bin entered the planet’s atmosphere, Tanner and Morena raced from Tanner’s homestead toward the silo hold, both of them wearing radiation suits. Around them, entire orchards were uprooted by the spin-quake. Patches of earth flew past them as if they had been ripped up by a tornado. It was almost impossible to keep a sure footing as gravity kept shifting beneath them.
“This is pointless!” Morena yelled as they ran. “Nothing can save us—T-Bin is going to crash and burn.”
“It’s going to crash,” Tanner agreed. “But it’s not going to burn. If it burns, then the mission fails.”
“But the radioactive core—”
“If I’m right about this, it will be ejected into space. The builders wouldn’t risk contaminating the planet with radiation.”
And sure enough, as they approached the silo hold hatch, all of T-Bin was plunged into darkness. It could only mean that the core had just ejected.
They stumbled over tree roots and bits of the buckling road in the dark until they came into the silo hold. Here, emergency lights every ten yards gave them enough light to see the curves of the silos but nothing more. The stench was unbearable, and Tanner could hear the sloshing of the awful stuff within the silos. As bad as it smelled now, he knew it was going to get a whole lot worse. He sealed the soft helmet of his radiation suit, activated its oxygen supply, and found the ladder on silo #106.
“Start climbing,” he told Morena.
She glared at him through the face mask of her radiation suit. “Do we really have to do this?”
“Do you have a better idea?”
She didn’t answer him. Instead, she started climbing. “I hate you for this.”
But that was all right. She wouldn’t hate him for long if they survived. And she wouldn’t hate him for long if they died, either.
When they reached the top, Tanner opened the silo hatch and peered inside. Darkness—but he knew what was in there. Rather than thinking, he just jumped, submerging himself in the sickening stew. The stuff was thicker than mud. Maybe—just maybe—it was thick enough to absorb the force of a crash landing. In a moment he felt Morena beside him, and he grabbed onto her. Now there was nothing to do but wait, and listen to the metallic groaning of the ship around them as it fell from space and into the atmosphere of Primordius.
Ocean Klingsmith, like most of the T-Bin colonists, trusted the designers’ master plan. Even after T-Bin failed to settle into geosynchronous orbit. Even after the spin-quake forced everyone to evacuate earlier than planned, he still trusted the designers to deliver them to the new world safely.
As the delivery ship hit the atmosphere, it shuddered violently. Ocean could feel his teeth rattle, so he clenched his jaw. The air in the cabin grew warm, but the shields protecting the craft from the searing heat of reentry did their job. The ship held together. Finally, through the small oval windows of the craft, clouds came into view, white and puffy, just like images they had seen of Earth. The air became turbulent as they hit the clouds.
“Normal!” called out Governor Bainbridge, who sat in the front row. “Not to worry, turbulence is normal.”
Even so, Ocean gripped onto the harness that held him in his seat. The computer flying their huge glider banked them to the left. Toward water, he thought—maybe even the kind of water I’m named for. He could imagine the craft landing smoothly on an ocean and coming to rest where the waters kissed the shore. They would step out, like the pilgrims on Plymouth Rock, and claim this world as their own.
But it didn’t happen that way.
When the delivery ship punched through the clouds, the colonists weren’t met with an ocean vista. Instead they were met with the prospect of a jagged mountain range. Those looking out of the windows gasped in fear.
“It’s all right,” Governor Bainbridge said. “The ship knows what it’s doing. It can navigate us out of this.”
They flew between the jagged peaks, banking left and right—then suddenly the entire dome of the delivery ship ripped away, exposing them to the sky. They were pummelled by a violent force none of them had ever felt before.
Wind! thought Ocean, in a panic. This is wind! He could barely keep his eyes open against it, but he forced himself to look, and what he saw explained everything. Up ahead, the front row of seats were jettisoned skyward, sending Bainbridge and a dozen others up and out.
Of course! Ocean thought. These are ejection seats! It made perfect sense; the delivery ship was doing exactly what it was supposed to do! It couldn’t find a safe place to land, so it was ejecting everyone to safety, sending them down by parachute. Ingenious! The designers thought of everything!
The second row ejected. Then the third. Finally, it was Ocean’s turn. He gripped the harness, closed his eyes, and felt the sudden surge of force as he, and everyone beside him, was shot out into the open air of Primordius.
He opened his eyes, waiting for the parachute to open. He was still shooting forward at an incredible speed—he hadn’t even begun to fall yet. Up ahead he saw the stone face of a cliff. The parachute will open any second now . . . , Ocean thought. Any second . . .
But it didn’t. And it finally dawned on him that maybe there were no parachutes. For anyone.
No! This can’t be! Ocean’s mind screamed as the face of the cliff swelled before him. I’m a clean-cut! I’m the best and the brightest! I’m the future of humanity! I’m . . . I’m . . .
Ocean Klingsmith hit the face of the cliff at 200 miles per hour—so fast that his body liquefied like a bug on a windshield. The chair fell away, leaving a big red splat on the mountain—proof positive that the delivery ship did exactly what it was designed to do: deliver its payload of warm, nutrient-rich biological material to Primordius.
The massive drum of the Transtellar Bacterial Injector—T-Bin for short—burst through the atmosphere, delivering a sonic boom to announce the arrival of life on Primordius. It plunged through the upper atmosphere, showing no sign of slowing down.
Within silo #106, Tanner and Morena clung to each other, afraid to be alone within the foulness around them. The fall through the atmosphere, the not knowing where or how this would end, was beyond terrifying. With their face masks pressed close, they couldn’t see through the muck, but they could hear each other’s muffled voices as they tried to comfort one another, until the roar of reentry drowned out everything.
Outside, the great drum, still smoking from reentry, plummeted in freefall, but the icy air of the upper atmosphere cooled it. Then, once it hit the dense, cloud-spotted air of the lower atmosphere, a multilayered array of massive parachutes deployed, slowing its descent.
Within silo #106, the sudden pull of the opening parachutes sent Tanner and Morena plunging deeper in the thick brown miasma but not quite to the bottom. All was silent then.
“Are we dead?” Tanner heard Morena say. “I think we’re dead.”
“Not yet,” Tanner told her. But he knew that one way or another, it would all be over soon.
Even with a mile-wide array of parachutes to slow it down, T-Bin was far too heavy for a gentle landing. As it swooped into a valley where the mountainsides were curiously speckled with hundreds of red measle-like spots, it struck a jutting peak, then another, then another, until finally it began to rupture.
When T-Bin struck the first peak, Tanner and Morena were hurled sideways within their silo of sewage, but Tanner had been right—the stuff was so thick that it absorbed the worst of it. It acted like a gelatinous shock absorber. They struck the side of the silo but not hard enough to do anything more than shake them up.
The second and third strikes were worse. They bounced back and forth, and they could hear the crunch of tearing metal. “This is it,” Tanner shouted in the darkness, gripping Morena tighter.
Then, five seconds later, their world ended.
When the great interstellar drum hit the valley floor, it tore completely apart, spreading its inner lining of farmland in a deluge of soil, shredded plants, and splintered trees that rained upon the valley.
The bacteria-rich storage silos broke free, the swollen canisters bursting as they hit the landscape, spewing fetid filth upon the jagged rocks from one end of the valley to the other.
Silo #106 tumbled end over end, until it finally split open, spilling forth its bubbling nastiness, along with two kids, who came to rest in a shallow pond of the viscous sludge.
The two had been pulled apart by the force of the deluge, and Tanner frantically searched for Morena, trying to wipe the grunge from his facemask but succeeding only in spreading it like finger paint. For one panicked moment, he thought that she had been thrown out of range, or worse, impaled upon the jagged metal of the burst silo. He ripped off his helmet, ignoring the gut-wrenching smell around him, and he saw her struggling to stand on shaky legs. She fell over into the stuff, clearly too dizzy to stand, and just gave up. She sat in it, waist deep, until Tanner arrived, helped her up, and they climbed onto the first boulder they could find that wasn’t covered with yuck.
He helped her take off her radiation helmet and smiled at her. “Welcome to Primordius!” he said, and Morena smiled back.
“Crash,” she said, “but no burn.”
“Told ya!”
Finally they took in their surroundings. They were in a great valley between towering peaks. There was a massive scar miles long where T-Bin had crashed. Now the great steel drum lay in two jagged halves, like a broken egg, and its innards lay strewn across the entire valley. They also saw the wreck of the delivery ship. There were no signs of survivors. Not even bodies. Tanner didn’t want to consider why that might be. Then, as he looked out over a pungent valley of funk, something occurred to him.
“You know what this is? This is primordial soup! The bacteria will grow. It will get carried by the wind. It will evolve!”
“And what about us?”
Tanner considered the question. “The seeds from T-Bin are all over this valley. This stuff around us might be nasty, but it’s fertilizer. Plants will grow, and in a single season, there’ll be stuff to eat—and in the meantime, there’s plenty of food packed in the cargo hold of the delivery ship.”
Morena nodded. “It would never have been enough to feed an entire colony,” she said, “but it’ll be enough to feed the two of us.”
“And,” added Tanner, “we can use the parachutes to build ourselves shelter. . . . To build us a home.”
Tanner and Morena took a long look at each other, both stunned by the implications of all this. The two of them. Alone. In the single life-filled valley on an otherwise dead planet. A valley that would soon be a garden.
“Let’s move upwind before I hurl,” Morena finally said.
“Sounds like a plan.”
About a mile upwind, where the stench of new life faded, they found a fresh spring forming a small lake. The water hadn’t been fouled by “Brown Betty,” which was the name they’d already given the pungent stew of microorganisms that now flavored the rest of the valley.
By the side of the lake, they shed their dirty radiation suits. Tanner found that his own personal fragrance now smelled fresh and sweet compared with the malodor of Brown Betty. The air around them was crisp—cooler than what they were used to in T-Bin but not so cold as to be uncomfortable. It was refreshing—and the water of the spring was steaming and warm to the touch.
“I’ve been thinking,” Morena said as they gazed at the rising steam of the crystal-clear water. “The builders never truly intended to start a colony, except for a bacterial colony, right?”
“Yeah. . . .”
“And yet they provided that riddle—the star code that let us break into the silo hold. That means that they wanted someone to figure it all out, Tanner. Maybe not the whole colony, but someone smart enough—clever enough—to uncover the truth and come up with a way to survive.”
Tanner realized she was right. The clean-cuts were always talking about survival of the fittest, and how it was the builders’ driving philosophy—but the builders had a very different idea of what that meant. It made him feel noble to know he was the kind of survivor they had in mind.
“I don’t know about you,” Tanner said, “but I could use a bath.”
Morena smiled. “You read my mind.”
They stripped down to their skivvies, which might have felt awkward before today, but after what they had been through, nothing felt awkward anymore.
Together they dove into the warm spring water, and for the first time in as long as he could remember, Tanner Burgess felt sparkling clean.
PLAN B
BY REBECCA STEAD
Wednesday
April 19
Dear ____________,
Because whoever is reading this, I have no idea who you are. I haven’t even figured out where I’m going to stick this thing when I’m done with it, but it’ll be somewhere secret, somewhere hard to find, and it might be a long time before anyone reads it. A year. Ten years. Maybe more.
You can’t write a text or an email and hide it for someone to find someday. You need pen and paper for that. And opposable thumbs. Speaking of which: I probably should have started this letter hours ago, when I heard the key turn on the other side of my bedroom door.
I keep listening for the sound of the lock and squinting to see if maybe the doorknob is turning. But I don’t know if I’m hoping that the door will burst open or stay closed. I don’t even know how much longer I’m going to be able to hold this pen.
Opposable thumbs. Let me tell you something, whoever-you-are: If you have opposable thumbs, you probably take them for granted. If you knew how much you love your thumbs, you would write them a love song, sing it in your underwear, and post it on YouTube. You would be willing to totally humiliate yourself for those thumbs.
And if you don’t have opposable thumbs? Well, that would answer a lot of the questions I have running through my head right now.
Let’s just say I hope you have thumbs.
I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about us. Obviously. But when sixth grade started last year, I finally found a real friend. And I had kept this big secret inside me for such a long time.
Mom says I’ve got “forty-nine good friends,” and yeah, we have the monthly Skypes with the others: Caleb from California, Isaac from Indiana, Toby from Texas, Cody from Colorado, and so on. But the Skypes are so awkward, with all the parents looking nervous in the background. A big part of friendship is just hanging out with nobody watching. Which is hard to do when you know all the grown-ups are scrutinizing (vocab word!) everyone else’s skin.
Evan is different. He moved to New York City last year, and he’s just a good friend, you know? He laughs at everything, even when the joke is on him. And he’s not worried all the time, like me. And one day this winter I just—said it. I told him ab
out us. All I wanted was for someone to know me, to understand me. I hate hiding. And, like, pretending all the time. I’ve been pretending my whole life, pretty much.
I knew Evan wouldn’t flip out on me, and he didn’t. He was real cool about it, all things considered. And I’m so much happier, having someone I can talk to about real stuff. But right now I’m worried about him. He was supposed to come over after school today, after my appointment with the doctors. What if he stops by with a bag of Ms. Pena’s empanadas?
Did I mention I’m missing Foods of Spain Day?
Yeah. While I’m locked in here, Señora Pena is bringing all this amazing food to school to share with our Spanish class.
I mention Foods of Spain Day because I’m kind of hungry. Everyone totally freaked out this morning, and the question of lunch never really came—
Man! I just fell asleep. Second time that’s happened since I got locked in here! Maybe the third time.
I haven’t heard anything through the door in a while.
I wonder if my parents are okay.
I wonder what the doctors are doing right now.
And if Evan shows up with those empanadas, what will they do to him?
Maybe the empanadas are just wishful thinking.
I’m going to tell you what happened now. (Sorry, Mr. Barker, I know that was a terrible transition. I should have said something like, “speaking of thumbs, here’s what happened,” or even better: “speaking of being locked in my room, here’s what happened.” So I hope you aren’t a sixth-grade English teacher, because if you are, this letter will probably annoy—
Shoot, I think I just fell asleep again.
So here’s what happened:
Five days ago, when we got back from our vacation in Florida, Mom said to dump all our stuff on the floor right inside the front door. She was carrying the beach bag, with the sandy plastic buckets and shovels, the Kadima paddles, and the fake sunscreen, and she let the whole thing just drop off her shoulder and spill out all over the floor, which was weird because Mom always pretends to be this perfect person with a perfect husband, a perfect son (that’s me), and a perfect house. (Or in our case, a perfect apartment.) I watched the little rubber Kadima ball bounce a couple of times and then roll under the hall table, where my schoolbooks were neatly stacked, ready for school on Monday. She didn’t even notice. I figured she was still thinking about the fish fry that we never made it to.