Go Big or Go Home (8 page)

O
UR RIDE BACK TO
Hill City was clouded with gloom. Gloom and disaster and defeat. Thanks to my utter and clueless stupidity, Fred was now on the bottom of the lake. I'd had him only sixty-some hours, not even long enough to look into how much he was worth, and I'd already lost him.

“Quite valuable,” I kept hearing the professor say.

“He's safe in my backpack,” I heard myself assuring Quinn.

Back at the boat ramp, the Carvers had offered to throw our bikes in the back of their daddy's pickup and drop us at home. This was totally rubbing it in. “No, thanks,” I muttered, and we got on our bikes. Out on the highway Cal honked as their pickup roared by towing the
Corpse Hunter.
Max leaned out the window and
gave us a gleeful wave.

The Carver boys were soon out of sight. Unfortunately they weren't out of mind. I knew exactly what it was like inside the cab of that truck. We'd given them so much to hoot at and laugh about, it was pathetic.

Quinn had a black cloud over his head, too. I could feel it from my vantage point as I pedaled behind his rear wheel. “I'm leading,” he had announced as were leaving Pactola. “Let's get out of here.”

Quinn had had it. He was disgusted, and I didn't blame him one bit.

As we pulled into Hill City, neither of us even glanced over at Grabba Java. It felt like we were riding in a dark tunnel. I was surprised when Quinn slowed down and stopped in front of the museum.

I looked at my watch. Four o'clock. We were right on time for our appointment with the professor, but what was the point of going through with it now?

Quinn put his bike in the bike rack and I did the same. He couldn't even look me in the eye. “You know they're going to drag the lake,” he muttered.

“I'm afraid so. What are the chances of them hooking my backpack?”

“P.D.G.”

P.D.G. was our shorthand for “pretty darn good.” This was the last thing I wanted to hear, but Quinn was right. “Probably we won't even find out if they recover him,” I said.

“You got that right. They'll slice him and dice him and sell him in tiny pieces on eBay, and you'll never even know. Let's go see the professor, Brady.”

“Do we have to?”

“Of course we have to. You have to tell him you lost Fred. Might as well get it over with. Don't you want to find out what he's learned? What happened to your curiosity?”

“Okay, but don't lay it on so thick, Quinn. I feel like a gob of slime as it is.”

A minute later our English scientist was ushering us into his office. “Mighty serious this afternoon, are we, lads? I'm happy to see it—this is serious stuff.”

Quinn and I settled onto the couch as the tall professor landed in the rolling chair in front of his computer. I was just about to cough it up about losing Fred when the professor declared, “Let's get right to it, then! I'll begin by showing you a photograph.”

“Fred through the microscope?” Quinn guessed.

“No, not Fred.” Dr. Ripley put his spidery fingers to the keyboard and punched up a grainy black-and-white photograph. It showed a couple of wormlike blobs against a sandy background. “What you're looking at is perhaps the most controversial photograph in all of science. It's from ALH84001, found in 1984 on the Antarctic ice cap but not recognized as a Mars meteorite until 1993. On August 6, 1996, NASA scientists brought it to the attention of the world as compelling evidence of life beyond our planet.”

“They look kind of like fishing worms,” I said.

“They do, don't they? But keep in mind, this photograph was taken through an electron microscope. The magnification is more than ten thousand times greater than you can achieve with a microscope that uses light. What those NASA scientists thought they were looking at were colonies of bacteria. If confirmed, their discovery would have constituted a monumental milestone in human knowledge. The confirmation, however, never came. The skeptics, and there were many, maintained that these structures might
resemble
bacterial colonies, but resemblance was hardly scientific evidence. Ever since, we've all been waiting for a definitive breakthrough—for superior evidence, or better yet, actual proof that life exists beyond the planet Earth.”

“If those were supposed to be colonies,” I said, “the bacteria themselves have got to be tiny beyond belief.”

“Indeed. You have trillions like them that help out in your digestive system, Brady, trillions of tiny, tiny living creatures that are not human. Fewer than five percent of the species that live in our guts have even been identified!”

“That's pretty extreme,” Quinn said, “living in stomach acid and all that.”

Those wisps of white hair on top of the professor's shiny head were waving back and forth like cobras above a snake charmer's basket.
“Extreme
is the word, Quinn! Of all the extremophiles—life-forms that thrive in extreme environments—the vast majority are bacteria.
You'll find them feeding on poisonous chemicals around vents on the deep-sea floor; you'll find them at home in boiling pools in Yellowstone National Park; you'll even find them a mile below the surface of the Earth digesting basalt rock!”

“That last kind I've never heard about,” I said. “Can bacteria live in solid rock, Dr. Rip?”

“Absolutely! That's what the study of geobiology is all about—life in rock! This photograph you're looking at, and the scientific paper published with it, practically created exobiology, also called astrobiology or space biology, the study of life beyond our planet. The search is on, with Mars being the most likely place to look. We've landed more Rovers, but they've barely scratched the surface, and only in a few spots.”

“So, what about Fred?” Quinn reminded the professor. “What have you found out?”

“Ah, what about Fred, indeed. Step up, lads, and take a look into the electron microscope. You first, Brady, Fred's your baby.”

Now wasn't the right time to tell the professor, that was for sure. I peered into the microscope and saw five objects shaped like tubes, like worms. “They're wiggling,” I reported.

I looked away from the microscope, to the professor. He was so beside himself, I thought he was going to explode.

Quinn came to the microscope and took a good, long look. “You're telling us these are actual Martians?”

“By the many thousands, from that nub off Fred's bottom.”

“That's impossible!”

The professor was on his feet and dancing some kind of a jig. “Why, Quinn, why is that impossible?”

“You told us yourself. Fred has been flying around in space for millions of years. Even if the bacteria were eating on Fred when he was still on his home planet, how could they possibly have survived for millions of years in space?”

“
Because they're extremophiles!
Life is surpassingly strange, my friends, and wonderful beyond imagining. All that time these microbes were dormant, and now they've come back to life!”

“Dormant for millions of years and they've come back to life? Has anything on Earth ever done that?”

“Absolutely, and I'll give you an example. Bacteria from the Permian Age, over two hundred million years old, dehydrated and dormant in a New Mexico salt bed, came out of their dormancy and caused the decay of fish that had been packed with the salt!”

Quinn nodded approvingly. “That's insane, Dr. Rip. So what exactly did you do with Fred's nub?”

“To begin with, I ground his nub into a fine powder. I tried water and a nutrient at first—table sugar—with no result. I conjectured that water in its pure and ordinary form might be drowning the little Martians, so I tried again with spit and no sugar, solely my own saliva. I guessed it might prove conducive, and it worked! They
came to life! What you see through that microscope is nothing less than the Holy Grail of astrobiology—proof positive of life beyond the planet Earth. This might even mean the Nobel Prize!”

Suddenly, Quinn was looking at me strangely. I had to stop and think what that was all about. It wasn't a look that meant, Go ahead and tell him that Fred's on the bottom of the lake. It was a look that said, I know what's gotten into you and where it came from.

“One caution,” the professor said. “Some of us astrobiologists, myself included, have theorized that the history of life on Earth has occasionally had its course altered by the arrival of dormant microbes from space. The ones that fell on fertile soil, so to speak, sprang to life and survived. We have no way of knowing what species may never have existed, including ourselves, without extraterrestrial influence.”

“That's an extreme idea,” marveled Quinn. “But why is that anything to worry about?”

“Extinctions of species! The history of first contact with exotic microorganisms can be rather frightening. Consider the host of diseases that the Europeans brought to the New World, smallpox being the deadliest. On the heels of the Spanish conquest, millions upon millions of people died, up to ninety percent of the population of Mesoamerica. It may have been the greatest die-off in human history. The native people had no immunities against germs their bodies had never fought before. This is why the astronauts returning from the first moon
landing were quarantined for a period of time, to ensure they didn't come down sick from exposure to extraterrestrial microbes.”

“Amazing,” I said.

“Theoretically, a disease brought from the moon could have spread through the entire human race.”

“In that case,” Quinn said with a grin, “how come you've been studying Fred here in your office, instead of some high-tech containment lab? I mean, were you even wearing a mask?”

“You've got a point,” Dr. Ripley replied. “Here's why I wasn't concerned. After the moon landings, the world's scientific community learned that moon rocks and Mars rocks occur naturally on Earth, having been ejected from the moon and from Mars by asteroid impacts and such. We all set aside our fears of extraterrestrial disease. Those thirty-four Mars rocks I've told you about, shaved into many pieces in some cases, have been handled endlessly in labs and gem shows. Nothing's ever happened.”

“Bet you anything,” Quinn said with a glance in my direction, “Fred's bugs turn out to be the good kind, like the ones in our guts that help us digest food. They might, like, affect our muscles and make them stronger.”

“Wouldn't that be marvelous,” the professor agreed.

A few minutes later we were back at the bike rack in front of the museum. “I admit it,” I said before Quinn could beat me to the punch. “I was too chicken to bring up losing Fred.”

“Good thing. The news might've killed the professor. No meteorite, no Nobel Prize. Tell him sometime later. Here's what I want to know—did you ever spit on Fred?”

“I don't think so…Let me think. Oh yeah, sort of.”

“What do you mean, ‘sort of'?”

“That morning you got here, I woke up with Fred against the side of my face, at the corner of my mouth. I was drooling all over him, actually.”

“Well, that explains it. Not only did you drool on Fred and activate the microbes, you even got the microbes in your mouth. Makes me wish I'd chewed on Fred instead of only handling him. Now we have to hope the Carvers don't drag him up and catch his bugs.”

“That doesn't sound very likely.”

“Can you imagine what they'd be like on the football field all juiced with bacterial Martians? How many guys would they kill in their first game?”

I
T WAS NEARLY SIX
by the time we reached home, and I was expecting my dad to be back from work. His pickup wasn't around, but Uncle Jake's Harley was parked out front. We went inside to see what that was all about.

We found a note. The two of them had taken off for western Wyoming. They'd gone over there so my father could check out the area around the Jonah gas field where Uncle Jake was looking at working. I asked Quinn where exactly that was. “Fifty miles past nowhere” was all he would say.

The note said they'd be away for two nights, possibly three if Uncle Jake decided to go ahead and move the household stuff from Lead to the trailer he'd rented on the July trip with Quinn. My dad said he thought the
two of us could fend for ourselves for a few days.

I got a large pizza out of the freezer and heated it up. Quinn noticed an empty to-go cup from Grabba Java. He wondered if his dad had mustered the courage to go back to Maggie's window. It came out kind of sour instead of as a joke. His mind was on Wyoming, on leaving the Black Hills. He'd just found out it was almost a sure thing, and he was sick about it. I knew he didn't want to talk about it, not now.

As we were devouring the pizza, I asked Quinn if he wanted to play some one-on-one. “Nah,” he said. “Maybe another time.”

It wasn't like he meant anything by it, but this hurt. Quinn was
always
up for shooting hoops, and he was at his best when he was taking out his frustration about something or other.

Duh, I realized, no wonder he doesn't want to play. He was picturing me running circles around him and dunking. I could try to make a joke and say I'd go easy on him. Right now, he wouldn't think that was very funny.

I got up and put away the plates. “Another time, sure,” I said from the sink. “It's been a long day. What are you up for?”

“Video games, I guess. Maybe some TV.”

We played
Snowboarding for the Insane,
then
Skateboarding for the Insane.
He'd given them to me, one for Christmas and the other for my birthday. With Quinn's lightning-fast reflexes, he'd always had the edge
when it came to video games, and that's the way it went for an hour or so, with him winning most games but not by much.

The only thing was, it wasn't like old times. He was agitated from the start. “You're doggin' it,” he said finally. “You're faster than that.”

“No way,” I protested. “I'm giving it my best shot.”

Truth was, I
wasn't
giving it my best shot. Talk about reflexes: mine were so hair-triggered, I could have slaughtered him. I was buzzing like a live wire. I felt like I could've beat the world's fastest human out of the starting blocks in the hundred meters.

Quinn got up and went to the couch. “Let's see what's on TV.”

My cousin started surfing channels and landed on a cable program about extreme adventures called
Boldness or Folly?
It was going to feature three different maniacs—a guy trying to row a small boat from California to China, a guy trying to swim 3,400 miles down the Amazon, and a woman trying to make it to both Poles, on foot, alone. Quinn couldn't believe it when I told him I was too wasted to stay up.

I dragged myself upstairs and sat on the edge of my bed. Quinn might wish he had whatever bug I had, but I was already hoping it would run its course and soon. All I wanted to be was normal, and have things with Quinn back the way they used to be. As far as I was concerned, Quinn would always be top dog, but how was that going to work if I could drop him on every climb, stuff the
basketball in his face, and annihilate him every time we played a video game?

I got into bed and crashed. I crashed hard, into a bizarre series of dreams. At first I was diving, endlessly diving, for my sinking backpack. I swam all the way to the bottom of the lake. Somehow I was able to see a few feet ahead in the murk. I swam every which way in search of my backpack but kept getting faked out by rocks that looked like backpacks.

Stan swam by, and he gave me the evil eye. I knew it was him because he was as big as a king salmon and the side of his mouth was torn. I reached out and tried to touch him, but he swam away. I've been down too long, I thought. My brains are about to blow out through my ears. I panicked and went up too fast, my head began to explode, and then I was at a football game.

Hill City was playing Custer under the lights. Our Rangers were stomping the Wildcats thanks to Max and Buzz. Both weighed over three hundred pounds, somebody was saying. I was in high school, I realized. Crystal was sitting next to me in the stands. I had the feeling she was my girlfriend, but I wasn't sure. Maybe not. After the game was over, we went our separate ways.

I was taking a shortcut to get to my car. Out of nowhere, who but the Carver boys appeared, all three, still in pads. They cornered me against a fence, tackled me, then sat on me. I felt like a snail getting crushed out of its shell. Max said they wouldn't get off me
until I took back what I said in fourth grade. “What was that?” I wheezed.

“Like you don't remember,” Buzz scoffed.

“All that stuff about George Armstrong Custer,” growled Max. I told them they would have to tell me what it was so I could take it back.

Buzz said, “Just say ‘I love Custer,' and we'll let you go.”

By now their weight had about collapsed my lungs, and I barely had the breath to say a thing. “I love custard,” I managed, going easy on the
d.
Max said I had to say it again, and I did, and then Cal said I had to say it again, and I did. Each time I went easy on the
d.
Finally they said that was enough times. They got off me, and I was at the entrance of a cave. It looked familiar.

“No guts, no glory,” Quinn said, and he wriggled inside. I crawled in behind him and right away fell onto some rocks. Quinn had gone ahead, and I ran to keep up. “We won't go very far,” he said, but he was lying. A couple of more corners and it was pitch-dark. “We don't need flashlights,” he declared, and it was true. I could see, just barely. We continued into the darkness, wading through pools of black water. I had a raging thirst and cupped some water into my mouth.

Quinn scooped up some cave water with his palm and looked at it close. He said it was full of bugs, and I told him to quit joking around. I filled my own palm and took a look. Bugs, sure enough. They had antennas like saw blades and mouths like octopus beaks. “Don't get
'em in your nostrils,” Quinn advised. “They'll go for your brain.” With that I found myself on the shore of Pactola Lake.

Out in the middle of the lake, a motorboat was slowly going back and forth, back and forth. It looked familiar. I squinted and recognized the
Corpse Hunter.
I didn't see any fishing poles. A guy showed up at my elbow—it was Curly, the worm grunter. I asked if he knew what was going on. Curly said they were dragging for a corpse, somebody named Fred.

Suddenly I was back on the lake bottom again, searching for my backpack. This time I definitely had it spotted and swam for it fast as I could. The prize was nearly in my grasp when a giant hook came out of nowhere and dragged it away.

Maybe it was the image of the coroner's drag hook that did it. Suddenly I was back in my worst nightmare, the one I'd been having for years. Everybody thought I was dead, only I wasn't. I was in the morgue and on my back, on the marble slab. The lights were blinding. I couldn't cry out, couldn't move a muscle. The Carvers' father, dressed in green hospital scrubs, was leaning over me, peering at me through those strange glasses of his, extra thick with lenses that magnified his eyeballs. He was staring at me like a piece of meat. Over his shoulder, all sorts of gruesome instruments hung on the wall.

My nightmare was going where it always went. The coroner leaned closer, scalpel in one hand, huge clamps in the other. The stench of his tobacco breath washed
over me. With all my might, I tried to move a muscle, if only to twitch, to blink, to do something—anything.

I couldn't, and down came the scalpel to open up my chest.

That's when, like so many times before, I frightened myself awake. It was a little after 3:00 by the red numbers on my desk clock. Across the room, Quinn was snoring softly.

I lay there in a cold sweat, my body so filled with electricity, it felt like I was a short-circuiting toaster. Me being me, I was trying to keep it to myself and not cry out. Suddenly I froze up, like I'd gotten unplugged. I couldn't feel a thing. I tried to sit up, but it was three degrees beyond impossible. I couldn't twitch a finger. Couldn't even blink. I was scared out of my mind but I kept telling myself not to go crazy. Just hang on, it'll pass, it'll pass. If I hadn't been able to see, hadn't heard Quinn's breathing and the wind in the pines outside, my mind would have come unhinged.

When I was finally able to move again, the clock said 3:45. For thirty-some minutes, I'd been completely paralyzed. I sat up, put my feet on the floor, tried standing up. Everything seemed to work.

I got back in bed, curled up on my side, and fell sound asleep. When I woke, I felt like I'd been mauled by a bear. I couldn't remember a worse night in my entire life. The nightmare about being mistaken for dead, I could live with that. I'd been living with it for years. The part about being paralyzed—had that really happened,
or had I dreamed that part, too?

Quinn was already awake. He was sitting on the edge of his bed and pulling on his jeans. “I didn't know you were such a thrasher,” he said. “You kept mumbling something about Custer. What was that all about?”

“Custard,” I said.

“That's kind of unusual.”

Suddenly I could see the way to get past the tension of the night before and get us back on track. “Hey, Quinn,” I said. “Are you still up for exploring the Halls of the Dead?”

“Are you?”

“What's the use of discovering a cave if you aren't going to explore it?”

“You aren't spooked by it anymore?”

“I dreamed about it last night. We could even see in the dark—that must mean something.”

“Maybe
you'll
be able to. I think I'll bring along some serious illumination.”