Chapter Two

In which Mark gets an idea.

Mark didn't hear. He dashed upstairs to his room, looked for his CD-rom case and found it under the bed.

"Darn it!" He said out loud, "This stupid messy room and the bed has to be on this side. Dad says it's too heavy to move. I think he should have set it up on the other side. Then I could look out the window from the bed."

He sat down on his bed to think about his plan. He thought about the Star Trek movies. They had a lot of advanced stuff. For instance, the beaming people's molecules somewhere. That was advanced. Or maybe the automatic health scanner, what about that? A magazine he had once read said these things weren't too far off.

Maybe he could do one of these things, or at least something like it. Yeah, that's it! The problem was, how was he going to make it work? Maybe I should us Alex's new computer. I'll ask Alex some questions about what it can do. Maybe we can program people on to it and send them to a new computer and ot of it. To send people to another place. But, where was he going to send them? Someplace not entered before. He had read that scientists had discovered a prehistoric island in the Atlantic Ocean. No, that would be way too dangerous. How was he even going to get the other computer there without being eaten up by prehistoric sea monsters? Maybe he could discover some secret place. Just sending people somewhere else would not be as exciting.

This was the computer freak gang's next meeting at ten to eleven. Mark didn't know when to ask Alex about his computer. Should he do it on the walk home? Or should he include everybody and make an announcement of it? He decided to wait and think about it. Near the end of the meeting, a voice cut into Mark's thoughts.

"Hey I got us a new Star Wars computer game." Kevin said.

Mark loved Star Wars.

"Is it a sequel?" Daniel asked.

"No, but it's really cool. It's called Dark Forces."

"Let's try it out then, but it's probably not going to be really good, since its not a sequel."

Another computer game. That's boring compared to what I'm thinking about, Mark thought.

"Uh oh guys, it's been two hours already, "Kevin interrupted.

Alex and Mark were walking home together again.

"Hey, Alex, could your computer send people?" Mark asked.

"Oh yes. I'm almost positive. My uncle made it. He sent it to us from Los Gatos in the Silicon Valley in the U.S. They make a bunch of computers there. My dream world!

"My uncle's a genius. He was the first man to become part invisible. He was trying to be totally invisible, but all he could manage was his leg. In his note, when he sent me it, he said this computer could send anything.

"I'm sure people would be very easy to send. Computers are very fascinationg. I read in this book about computers of the future and it said computers would probably be able to make robots that would do people's bidding."