The sound of the door shutting behind her was louder than Jillian had expected. It sounded like she was being shut into a tomb. What really didn’t help the effect were the steel bars that slid smoothly out of the back wall and horizontally across the door. Or the fact that another white-coated worker was holding something out to Jillian that looked impossibly like—
“What is that? Is that a space suit? Why are you handing me a space suit?”
“Technically,” her dad said, “it’s not a space suit. It’s a podsuit.”
“But—”
“Well,” her mom said, smiling a little, “it’s like you said earlier. We thought that to really do Take Your Kid to Work Day the right way, we’d . . . you know . . . take our kid to work.”
For two seconds Jillian thought she must have heard wrong. Then a strong, unidentifiable feeling rushed up and swamped her heart, making it hard to breathe. It felt like waking up on your birthday morning, except times a million.
“Wait,” she said anyway, because there had to have been a mistake; she’d been asking for this exact thing for years, and the answer had always been: You’re too young. You’re not ready. It’s not safe without the proper training. “You mean I’m—”
“Going to space with us,” her mom said, grinning. “Yeah.”
Jillian blinked a few times. The idea of it was too big. It wasn’t sinking in. She realized they were waiting for her to say something. “Oh,” she said.
Her dad nudged her shoulder. “That’s it? ‘Oh?’ I was expecting more of a reaction. Isn’t this what you’ve always wanted?”
“Well, yeah, but . . .” Jillian trailed off. But what? She didn’t want to be having second thoughts out of nowhere. So why was she?
“Maybe we shouldn’t have surprised her with it,” her dad was telling her mom. “We should have told her this morning.”
“We just need to give her a second to be surprised,” her mom said. “It was scary our first time through the portal too. And you don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” she told Jillian. “It’s your choice, one hundred percent.”
“Entirely,” her dad said. “Nobody’s forcing you to do anything.”
Jillian’s brain felt like it had been locked up in a box, and she couldn’t hear it think. She felt like she should be jumping up and down and shrieking with how excited she was. It honestly did feel like a million birthdays all rolled into one.
And yet—the portal was staring at her with its huge silver eye, like it was judging her. Looking deep into her heart and seeing the anxiety she was trying desperately to hide.
What if they were right before? Too young, not ready, not safe to go without training? She’d always thought of space as this distant goal, like a treasure it would take her years to find. That was the whole point of the plan. To be ready when the time came. She had a supply list tacked on her wall with all the stuff she would pack when this day finally arrived. And none of that stuff was here.
It was dizzying, literally dizzying. There was nowhere to sit down. She set one hand on the pod for support.
“You said it was too dangerous to bring kids to space,” she said. “Just this morning you said that.”
“It wouldn’t have even been an option to bring you if the mission was remotely dangerous,” her mom replied. “This is an easy one, which is why it’s okay. We’ve gone to 80 UMa c plenty of times before.”
“There’s nothing at the site that can hurt you,” her dad added. “Like your mom says, we’ve been there before, and you’ll see how careful we are regardless. We’ll be there, SABRINA will be there, and even if there was anything there that could hurt you—which there isn’t—we’d all be there to protect you.”
“So here’s what’s happening now,” her mom said. “I know big new things make you nervous, so I’ll give you the rundown while you think it over. They’ve got all the calculations ready for the portal projection. They’ll open this side, run more diagnostics, send SABRINA in for—wait for it—even more diagnostics. A truly ridiculous pile of diagnostics. Then we go through, find what they want us to find, and rendezvous with the portal when they re-project it for us next week.”
Jillian was grateful for this. Grateful her parents understood that lists like this helped keep her from getting overwhelmed, and took the time to spell them out. When it came to terrifying new experiences, she needed a clear, calm, step-by-step outline to follow, or else her brain would start what-nowing and what-ifing, and then there was no shutting it up.
Still, whether she was grateful or not, the last part of the list snagged at Jillian’s attention like a thorn on a sleeve. “Next week?”
In the following silence, her brain supplied the answer. Of course next week. It’s Friday today, and their trips are five days long. It’s not like they can just zap you a new portal when you get bored of 80 UMa whatsit and want to go home.
Bored, her brain added helpfully, or terrified.
“We were hoping,” her dad said at length, “you might want to spend part of your spring break trying something new.”
“Without asking me?”
Her parents exchanged a confused look. In her mind, Jillian was pretty much giving herself a confused look of her own. She had no idea where this sudden anger was coming from. This was what she’d wanted. What she’d wanted forever. Why should it matter that it was happening out of nowhere? Just this morning she’d happily have gone into space via catapult. She wished the what-if part of her brain would just shut up and leave her alone.
“Honey,” her mom said carefully, “we thought you’d love this. We assumed you’d be, like, beside yourself with excitement here.”
“I thought if anything, you’d be running around the room right now, and we’d have to stop you from knocking over the equipment,” her dad added.
I do love it, Jillian wanted to say. I’m super excited, I swear. I don’t know why I’m like this. Why my brain can’t let me just like things without overthinking them. I’m sorry.
Her face gave one horrible twist, like she was about to start crying in front of her parents and SABRINA and the portal and all these strangers in white coats.
“You can say no if you want to,” her mom said. “As long as you’re absolutely sure that’s what you want. Aunt Alex can be here in fifteen minutes. It’s entirely up to you.”
Jillian opened her mouth. Then she closed it. She liked trying new things. She loved collecting new information. She even—sometimes—was super into surprises.
And going to space? She’d wished on all the stars and all her birthday candles and every dandelion she picked for just that exact same thing since she was little.
And it wasn’t only going to space. It was going on a space expedition. Out in uninhabited wilderness. Just like those hiking and camping trips her parents were always too busy to take her on, except in actual freakin’ space.
In the thinking part of her brain she knew all this. But seeing everything up close—the portal, the quadpod, the giant cage of this room—not to mention SABRINA, which had switched back into its near-invisible jelly state, maybe having (wrongly) decided that Jillian was more likely to trust what she couldn’t clearly see—it was a whole bunch of weird to take in.
But if she said no and walked away from this kind of adventure, she’d regret it. Intensely. Forever. All week at Aunt Alex’s, she’d be kicking herself in the butt for taking the easy way. For turning down space. And the next Take Your Kid to Work Day was a whole year from now.
On the one hand, she might be braver by then. On the other hand, there might not be another Take Your Kid to Work Day, and even if there was, they probably wouldn’t invite back some scared kid who just ran away when things got challenging. She might not get a second chance.
“We need to load the pod,” a man in a white coat told Jillian’s mom. “We were told three surveyors. Gear for t
hree surveyors. It’s right here on the manifest. I have no idea what favors you people called in above my head to even go off-script like this, but you can’t just change the manifest at the last minute. Especially not after we completely re-rigged the pod interior to stay under capacity while adding random children to the crew.”
By the end of this little speech, the man was up in Jillian’s mom’s face, waving a handheld screen at her. She gazed back at him evenly. In the end she leaned in and muttered something in his ear that made him back off fast. Then she turned to Jillian.
“It’s up to you,” she said again. “It does complicate things if you don’t want to go. The pod team worked overtime to fit you in, and we’d of course love for you to come, and I honestly think you’d have the most amazing time ever if you just gave it a chance—but we did kind of spring this on you last second, and I realize it’s a big decision.”
It was a moment before Jillian found her voice. “Will you get in trouble if I don’t go?”
“Nah,” her mom said. “They might be mad at us for a few minutes, but hey.” She cupped one hand to her mouth to whisper conspiratorially. “Betcha ten bucks they forget all about it by the time we get back.”
Jillian took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “What would I be doing?” She gestured at the great maw of the portal with her eyes, then averted them quickly. “Through there.”
“Help us set up base camp,” her dad said. “That’s the first thing. Then you help us with the expedition. Finding and carrying. Then back to camp and sleep. Next morning, rinse, repeat.”
“Finding what? Carrying what?”
“Look,” the white-coat man said. “We’re on the clock here. We’ll redo the manifest. Just you two. Call your babysitter, suit up, and get in.”
“Algae,” Jillian’s mom said, ignoring him. “Or something that looks and behaves a lot like Earth algae. They use it to make fuel cells. Just like we make here on Earth with Earth algae, but better. More efficient. And on 80 UMa c, there’s a lot of it. And we happen to work for the only company in the world with the technology to go get it.”
“Truly clean energy in abundance,” her dad said. “In time, on a large enough scale, it’d mean no more electricity rationing. No more water tickets. No more blackouts. Real world-saving stuff. Not to brag, but, you know, me and your mom, we’re basically superheroes.”
Jillian considered this. “You said you’ve been to this Uma planet before?”
“Yup,” her dad said. “Field crews have been going to 80 UMa c for about eight months now. Your mom and I have been there four times already. It’s totally safe. We wouldn’t even consider bringing you along if it wasn’t. You could breathe the air without a suit if you wanted to. You can eat the fruit off the trees. It tastes a little weird, and too much of it will give you the runs, but I mean, that’s what food bars are for. They’ll stop you right up again—”
“There’s fruit? Real fruit?”
“All you can eat. No produce rationing there. And it’s not the fake stuff. You pick it right off the trees.”
Jillian paused. “What about . . .” She had been about to say aliens. “Life? Um, intelligent life?”
Her dad grinned. “Aliens?”
“I guess.”
“Not like you’re probably thinking. There’re a few complex life-forms, but nothing really big or remotely scary. There’re some things kind of like birds, but not, and some things kind of like salamanders, but really not, and something maybe the tiniest little bit like a deer? And another thing like a fat green earthworm. About the size of a big slug.”
“Let me guess,” she said. “They have acid for blood.”
“Acid for saliva, actually.”
“Ha, ha.”
“No, really. Well, the worm things do. But they don’t bite. They live underground, and the soil is much lower in nutrients than most soil on Earth, so the acid helps them process tasty microorganisms out of the dirt. Anyway, they pretty much keep to themselves. We’ve never seen any in the field. We only know about them because another team captured a few for study a few months ago.”
“That’s seriously the worst of it? You promise?”
“Come on,” her dad said jokingly. “You really think they’d let us bring you if it was dangerous? Losing kids on space missions would really not look good for the company.”
Jillian’s mom held out one hand dramatically, like she was safe atop a cliff and Jillian was dangling off it. “So what do you say? Want to go on an adventure?”
Jillian opened her mouth to answer, but for a moment she was truly unsure what she’d say. She’d never really gone on an adventure before. Read about adventures in books, yes. Watched other people have adventures in movies, sure. Saved the world about a million times in video games. But go on a real-life adventure herself? The closest she’d come to that was—she didn’t know. Camping, maybe? Or that time she’d gotten lost on the field trip to the biome conservatory and pretended she was an explorer on her own in open wilderness . . .
What she was being offered today was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to do a thing she’d always dreamed of. You always regret it when you talk yourself into not trying new things, she told herself. Always.
“Yeah,” she said at last. “I think I do.”
Her first look at the interior of the quadpod seemed nonscary enough. It was like being inside an egg, rounded all over but slightly pointed on one end. The pointed end, the one facing the portal, was full of collapsible containers of food, water, medical supplies, and so on, all labeled neatly. Most of the containers were already collapsed, empty. For what we bring back, she realized. The algae stuff.
All the storage stuff took up the whole narrower half of the pod. The other, wider half contained the bunks. They were stacked on top of one another, one two three, with doors on the front that looked tricky to crawl into. There were more supply containers packed into either side of the stack.
The bunk doors were open, so Jillian peeked inside. It was an empty tube with no pillow or blanket, just a touchscreen panel on the inside wall.
Jillian and her parents had suited up before opening the quadpod. The podsuits were smart like the jumpsuits, and auto-fit to Jillian’s shape and size, but the material was much thicker and hard to move around in. It felt huge and bulky on her, like she was wearing a suit of armor. She eyed that narrow tube skeptically.
“We had to leave out a few crates,” the man from before said. “To fit the third bunk. You’re each going to have to stow some loose supplies in your bunk with you.”
“That sounds comfortable,” Jillian’s dad said with cheery sarcasm.
“Oh, it won’t be,” the man replied. “But you didn’t leave us with a whole lot of options.”
“It’ll be fine,” Jillian’s mom reassured her. “We won’t be in there for long. Come on. You want the top bunk?”
Jillian didn’t want any bunk. She would rather have rattled around loose in the quadpod than jam herself in there. She hated tight spaces. She wanted to scream just looking at it.
Still, she’d read enough books about the history of space travel to know that this little annoyance was nothing. At least she wasn’t being frozen alive and shipped to Mars for six months with no food.
She’d made up her mind to do this, and she was going to do it. She could take a few minutes of discomfort on the way.
She took a deep breath. “Sure,” she said. “Top bunk sounds great.”
Climbing in the suit was annoyingly hard, but there were rungs mounted on the right side of each of the round doors and grippy stuff on the gloves of the suit. She scrambled headfirst into the top bunk, worming her way into the tube.
She’d guessed right. It was the absolute most uncomfortable thing ever. Her arms were wedged under her body, layers of podsuit fabric and jumpsuit fabric were tangled around her legs, she was overheat
ing, and there was nowhere to put her head.
And then it got worse.
“Wrong way around,” the man called up impatiently. “Feet first. Get out and do it again.”
Frustration seized her, and Jillian wanted to kick her way out through the wall of the tube. Instead, she took a deep breath, worked her arms free, put her palms on the rear wall of the tube, and shoved. Her legs oozed out, then her hips, and then she was free and dropping boots-first to the pod floor. With a lot of pushing and clambering and accidental kicking, her parents helped her get in the right way around. She was really glad the suit helmet hid the embarrassed look on her face.
Right way around was marginally more comfortable. The touchscreen panel was beside her face now instead of beside her ankles, for one thing. Her mom showed her how it wasn’t a touchscreen at all, but voice-activated. She could tell it to warm or cool her bunk, dispensing with the need for a blanket, and raise or lower the section of tube under her head, replacing a pillow. But it was still absolutely nothing like a bed.
She twisted her neck around to try and see the portal from there, but her view ended at the inner egg-curve of the quadpod. Through gaps between supply containers she could make out glints of orange pod wall. “I wish we could see the portal from here,” she said.
In response, a second tech leaned halfway through the pod doorway, reached out toward the front wall of the pod, and made a motion with her hand like she was grabbing a curtain and pulling it aside.
Five feet away, the front wall of the pod became transparent.
“Window,” the tech said curtly, and ducked back out.
So Jillian craned her neck even more to look. Instead of orange between the stacks of stuff, now there was the toothpaste-ad white that she immediately recognized as a wall of the lab. Way over on the edge she could make out a bit of silver rim. She was looking into the dead eye of the portal. She suppressed a shiver that was half nervousness, half excitement.
This was it. Uncomfortable or not, in a few minutes she was going through that portal and onto another planet. No more planning, no more wishing, no more someday when I’m older. She was going to space right now.
Jillian vs Parasite Planet Page 4