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Chapter 17

SECTOR 16

The admiral was floating in front of a huge iron door. It was marked “Sector 16”.

He quickly learnt that the door was locked with a person identifier, a security device he had engineered himself. The person identifier recognised the characteristic brainwaves of whoever approached it, and would only open the door if the person was authorised to enter.

Clearly, this door had been programmed to keep the admiral out.

He knew there was no way to bypass this technology, as he himself had built it to be absolutely foolproof. The door looked thick and very solid. He contemplated the prospect of blowing it up. He had to find out what was hidden away in his own Space Ark!

There was only one person who could be behind this, he thought. But there never had been secrets between him and Uranus Drake – they’d been friends since their early school days. Back then, schooling on the islands had been limited and so the young Abraham Atom had been sent away to a boarding school, where he’d met the young Uranus. They’d shared a love of science and nature, and had quickly become firm friends. Together they’d hiked mountains and done crossword puzzles on lazy Saturday afternoons, and after school they’d elected to attend the same university. Abraham Atom had pursued his scientific career in the navy, and later they’d both been founding members of US.

Though Admiral Atom had to admit that his friend had been acting increasingly strange recently.

The admiral steered his weightless form towards the passage with the intention of going to the workshop to look for a tool that could penetrate Sector 16. As he moved away from the door, he heard a soft hissing sound. He looked back and saw that the seal around the door appeared wider and was bulging slightly.

The door was unlocked!

Swiftly he turned and moved towards the door. A firm metal click announced that the door had locked itself again. He repeated the experiment by moving away and towards the door a few times. The door locked and unlocked itself, as if unable to make up its mind.

The person identifier on this door had somehow been reversed. The door locked itself as he approached, and unlocked when he left. It therefore recognised his brainwaves, and instead of unlocking the door, the person identifier was locking it as soon as he approached!

The admiral was now more determined than ever to enter this sector. As U6 was clearly programmed to keep Sector 16 a secret, it was no use asking her for help. He’d have to figure this out by himself.

How was he to fool the person identifier?

The admiral suddenly thought of the device he’d been working on over the past weeks. It was something he called a “molecular scrambler”; an instrument that was meant to jumble up the molecules of a biological life form and piece them back together again in their exact formation after a short period in a sort of liquid state. Admiral Atom had conceived of the idea for the molecular scrambler while trying to solve the mystery of the fateful accident that had caused his own molecules to become so unsettled. Now he was developing it as a way to transport large and dangerous animals like crocodiles. The molecular scrambler, if it worked, would be able to reduce such an animal to a simple package that could be reconstructed when it arrived on the Space Ark.

It was still early days though, and he hadn’t yet successfully got the molecular scrambler to work. The frog he’d used during his last experiment had merely looked stunned after being hit by a carefully calculated dose of the rays, although the instruments monitoring the frog had clearly registered a disturbance in its electrical field. The pattern of its brainwaves had been masked, and the effect had lasted for a few minutes before the frog had hopped off again, unperturbed.

Could the molecular scrambler shield his own brainwave pattern, at least long enough to get past the person identifier?

The admiral hurried to his laboratory. For a quarter of an hour he worked on the settings of his new toy to adjust it to his own body mass and physical structure. He had to do all the intricate calculations without the aid of U6, and he could only hope that they were accurate. What made it more difficult was the fact that his atoms were permanently in an unstable state because of his accident – he had no idea how they would react to the molecular scrambler!

At last he was ready to try his experiment. The molecular scrambler was too big to carry around, and he knew he would have to reach Section 16 before its effect wore off. Fortunately his lab was just down a short corridor, and he calculated that it would take him a minimum of ninety-six seconds to get back to Sector 16.

Admiral Atom focused the molecular scrambler on himself, and with a shaky finger he pressed a command on the control screen. He felt something like a warm glow as the rays penetrated his body. Two minutes later, the instrument indicated that the process was complete, and he immediately kicked himself off towards Sector 16.

He felt odd and heavy. There was a strange humming sound in his ears, and it was suddenly more difficult to move. Instead of floating like usual, he was hopping along the floor of the Space Ark like an ordinary man would in the weak gravitational pull of the Space Ark as it orbited Earth. The door of Sector 16 loomed before him.

The door was unlocked. He reached for its handle and opened it.

It had worked! He had fooled the person identifier! And even more importantly, the molecular scrambler had somehow stabilised his atoms into a solid state. But before he had time to rejoice, the effects of the instrument began to wear off. The humming in his ears subsided, and he felt himself becoming lighter as his molecules loosened up again.

The reversal was too much for his system. He was overwhelmed by a wave of dizziness, and then he passed out.

Weightless again, his unconscious body drifted off the floor and into the “classified” section of the Space Ark.