by Stuart Gibbs
I smiled as well, pleased to be off the topic of humanity’s bloodlust and onto something I was excited to learn. The mere idea that there might be some other way to think of time was fascinating to me. “So how do you view it?”
“I’m afraid it might be too complicated for you to understand, but to begin to put it in your terms, our planet is a bit farther from our sun than you are from yours. So what you would think of as our years are a bit longer.”
“How much?”
“Approximately twice as long as yours.”
“So if I lived on your planet, I wouldn’t even be seven yet?”
“Again, that’s not exactly how we see it, but as far as the basics are concerned, you’re correct.”
“If your planet is so much farther from your sun, isn’t it cold?”
“No. Our sun is larger than yours, and it burns a bit hotter. So my planet is quite . . . I think the word you would use is ‘pleasant.’ Or ‘balmy,’ maybe?”
A question occurred to me, and it startled me that, in all the time I’d known Zan, I’d never thought to ask it. I had always assumed that she was around the same age as the version of herself she projected to me, but I now realized that might not be true. “Zan, how many times have you gone around your sun?”
She smiled coyly. “I thought that, on your planet, it was regarded as bad manners to ask a woman her age.”
“This is for science. And, to be honest, you’re not a woman. The same rules don’t apply.”
“I have orbited around my sun one hundred eighty-six times.
I gaped at her, my mind blown. I had expected Zan to be older than me, but nowhere near anything like this. “What? That’s like . . .” I tried to calculate quickly in my head. “Over three hundred fifty years old!”
“Three hundred seventy-two of your earth years. More or less.”
I sat back, stunned, unsure what to say. All I could come up with was, “Wow. You look great.”
Zan smiled again. “You tease. My real form is nothing like this.”
“About that,” I said. “You know what would be an incredible birthday present? Showing me what you really look like.”
Zan considered that for a while. Eventually she said, “I suppose it would.”
Before I could ask her to do it, though, the bathroom door banged open and Roddy stormed in.
“Dash!” he yelled. “Are you still in here?” I heard him drop to the floor to peer under the wall of the toilet stall. I tried to yank my feet up before he could see them, but I didn’t move fast enough.
“Aha!” he cried. “There you are! Wrap it up. Nina wants to see you.”
“Now?” I asked, incredulous. Although, after speaking to Zan in my head for so long, I actually forgot to say it out loud.
Roddy banged on the stall door, rattling it wildly. “No use giving me the silent treatment. I know you’re in there.”
“Tell her I’m going to be a while,” I said, out loud this time.
“Really?” Roddy asked. “ ’Cause you’ve been in there for like half an hour as it is. What’s taking so long? You didn’t bust the evaporator again, did you?”
“No. I just need a little privacy is all.”
“Sorry, pal. No can do. Nina gave me express orders to bring you to her right away. So finish up fast.”
Zan looked to me sadly. “This sounds important. I’ll let you go.”
“No!” I said, so upset that this time, I actually said it out loud.
“No?” Roddy asked, thinking I was talking to him. “I’m not going to sit around here waiting all day for you. I’ve got better things to do.” This from the guy who routinely took up one of our three toilets for hours at a time because he got engrossed playing video games on the stall SlimScreen.
I looked to Zan desperately and spoke inside my head. “Please. You can’t leave now.”
“I’ll come back soon,” she told me. “Once things have calmed down. I promise.”
And just like that, she was gone.
Excerpt from The Official NASA Procedures for Contact with Intelligent Extraterrestrial Life © National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Department of Extraterrestrial Affairs, 2029 (Classification Level AAA)
RADIO CONTACT
While we do not want to rule out the possibility of direct encounters with intelligent extraterrestrial life (from here on referred to as IEL), due to the great distances between planets in our galaxy (and thus potential civilizations) it is far more likely that initial contact with IEL will be via long-distance transmissions, most likely radio waves, which will be picked up by large satellite facilities such as the Very Large Array. For this reason, radio transmissions to and from these facilities are closely and carefully monitored at all times. Should anyone who works at one of these facilities believe they have detected an actual transmission, then they are duty-bound to report the detection to the appropriate office at once.
4
BAD LUTEFISK
Lunar day 252
Still way too early in the morning
“Lars wasn’t poisoned by accident,” Nina said. “Someone tried to kill him.”
We were in her residence, which also served as her office, facing each other across her desk. Both of us were seated on the InflatiCubes we had to use at MBA instead of chairs. Given the early hour and my exhaustion, I was struggling to sit upright on mine. Meanwhile, Nina sat ramrod straight, everything about her compulsively neat and tidy as usual. All Moonies had been allowed to bring a few personal items from earth; it spoke volumes about Nina that she had chosen to bring an iron.
I stared at her, stunned. Even though I had suspected someone had been trying to murder Lars, I had been really hoping I was wrong. The confirmation that we had a second murderer loose at MBA was extremely unnerving.
I was equally surprised that Nina was sharing this information with me. I had been half expecting her to punish me for sneaking out onto the lunar surface, so this caught me completely off guard. I couldn’t fathom why she was doing it, but I had other questions to ask first.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Your father and Chang pumped Lars’s stomach. They found cyanide among the contents of his last meal. Someone poisoned his food.”
“The cyanide couldn’t have gotten in there by accident? Like through some kind of contamination?”
Nina shook her head. “The safety of our food at this base is one of NASA’s highest priorities. Given that we have no natural source of food on the moon, contamination of our food supply would obviously be a disaster. So the agency takes extreme steps to make sure that doesn’t happen. There is no way that any poison could end up in our food. Not by accident, anyway. And certainly not at the levels that your father and Chang found in Lars’s stomach.”
“Do we have any idea if any of the rest of our food has been poisoned?” I asked, worried.
“No,” Nina admitted. “However, we have reason to believe that this wasn’t a random act. The killer appears to have been targeting Lars specifically.”
“How?”
“The food that was poisoned was lutefisk.”
“Ah,” I said, understanding completely.
Lars Sjoberg was the only person at MBA who ate lutefisk. The entire supply of it had been packed for him personally.
Lutefisk is a traditional Scandinavian food of dried cod treated with lye for several days until it turns gelatinous. It was one of the most disgusting things I had ever tasted in my life.
In the defense of the Scandinavians, let me say that I had never tasted lutefisk back on earth. Although the mere idea of jellied fish made my skin crawl, there was a chance that some people could actually make a tasty version of it. However, I had only experienced the NASA version. I had accidentally tasted a bit from a package of space food that had been mislabeled. I had expected scrambled eggs and ended up with a mouthful of lutefisk instead. It was so vile, I nearly had to get up close and personal with the space toilet afterward.
>
As Nina said, NASA had to go through a lot of trouble to make sure our space food would last for a long time without going bad. It was dehydrated, irradiated, thermostabilized, and ultimately reduced to cubes and pastes that bore little resemblance to actual food anymore. Even things as delicious as pizza, hamburgers, and cupcakes often wound up tasting like cardboard by the time the food engineers got through with them. Thus, lutefisk—which was probably an acquired taste on earth to begin with—ended up as a horrifying rancid sludge. It was disgusting on every level. It looked like pus, smelled like sewage, felt like a live snail on your tongue, and tasted even worse.
I wasn’t the only one who had a problem with it. Everyone else at MBA did as well. Even the other Sjobergs, who willingly consumed lutefisk back on earth, found the NASA version nauseating. Chang Kowalski said it tasted like “punishment for everything you’ve ever done wrong in your entire life.”
Lars Sjoberg actually liked it.
Since Lars had paid nearly a billion dollars to come to MBA as a tourist, he was allowed a few perks. One of them was that NASA would stock a few of his favorite foods. Lars loved lutefisk, so the food engineers took a crack at it—and failed miserably. Even they admitted it was disgusting, and these were the people who actually considered the chicken liver pâté they’d created to be “suitable for human consumption.” (We Moonies didn’t eat the pâté, although we had been using it as caulk.) The engineers had planned to incinerate the entire batch of lutefisk, but somehow Lars got ahold of it, tried some, and declared it the best thing that NASA had produced so far. NASA was shocked, but agreed to ship the vile substance up to the moon for Lars’s enjoyment.
Throughout the Sjobergs’ time at MBA, we had all been waiting for Lars to come to his senses and realize that the space lutefisk was vomitous, but if anything, his fondness for it grew. He claimed it reminded him of his childhood. (To which my father responded that Lars must have had the worst childhood imaginable.)
Therefore, if someone wanted to poison Lars, the lutefisk was a good way to do it. Since no one else ate it, there was little chance of poisoning the wrong person by mistake.
“Do you know how the killer got the poison into the food?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” Nina replied, “But it wouldn’t have been difficult. They could have simply injected some into the package with a syringe. A hole that small would have been easy to seal up. Sticking the descriptive label over it would have done the job.”
That made perfect sense. All our food was sealed in metallic foil packets, and thus it all looked exactly the same. So each packet had an adhesive label to describe what was inside.
“Why do we even have cyanide on the base?” I asked.
“We don’t,” Nina stressed. “At least, we’re not supposed to. Cyanide has certain industrial uses, but NASA was concerned enough about its lethality that they made sure no products at MBA contain it—or any other toxins.”
“You mean, they were worried that someone might try to kill someone else with it?”
“No, they were concerned about accidents. Leaks, accidental ingestion, that sort of thing.”
“So we don’t know where the poison came from?”
“No.”
I considered that, then had an idea. “Aren’t there security cameras around the food-storage area?”
“Of course.”
“So can’t you just review the footage and look for whoever tampered with the lutefisk?”
“Unfortunately, the nature of this crime makes that pointless. We have no idea when the killer actually poisoned the lutefisk. They could have done it anytime within the last few months. Every single person here has access to the food storage—and there’s no guarantee that they injected the poison there. They could have easily swiped a package of lutefisk, taken it someplace without cameras, such as their room, injected it, and then covertly returned it. It would take thousands of hours to comb through the past few months of security footage, while the chances of finding any evidence are infinitesimal.”
“I see.” I shifted uncomfortably. It seemed the time had come to ask my burning question. “Nina, why are you telling me this?”
Nina paused before answering, as though she didn’t like what she had to say. “Because I need you to help me find out who poisoned Lars.”
“Really?” I asked, surprised.
“Two months ago, you helped solve a murder case here.”
“A case you didn’t want me to investigate,” I reminded her.
“You also helped figure out what had happened to me last month,” Nina went on, ignoring my comment. “Therefore, it is evident that you have some talent at solving mysteries, and right now I need this mystery solved as quickly as possible. We can’t have another killer on the loose here.”
I was at once flattered by Nina’s faith in me and worried about having to track down a killer for the second time. In truth, I was worried about there being another killer, period. The last time I’d faced off against a murderer, I had almost ended up dead, squashed like a fly by the base’s robotic arm. “Nina, I’m just a kid . . .”
“I’m well aware that you are only twelve, Dashiell.”
“Actually, I’m thirteen. It’s my birthday today.”
“Oh.” Any other human being would have wished me a happy birthday, but it didn’t even occur to Nina to do that. Sometimes she could be even more alien than Zan was.
Instead she said, “That doesn’t change my opinion that you can contribute to this endeavor.”
“But there are a lot of people on this base who are way smarter than I am,” I said. “Almost everyone here is a genius. Why aren’t you asking them to help?”
“For starters, I want to keep the fact that Lars was poisoned a secret. There are two reasons for this. First, I don’t want to start a panic. Especially among the younger children. Second, I want whoever poisoned Lars to think they got away with it. If they don’t know we are onto them, they might let their guard down. . . .”
“And try again?” I asked.
“Perhaps,” Nina replied. “If they do, then we’ll catch them.”
Although she didn’t mention it, I could think of a third reason she would want to keep the murder attempt quiet: bad publicity. If the Moonies all knew Lars had been poisoned on purpose, sooner or later somebody would share that information with someone back on earth. NASA monitored and censored all our communication, so they could theoretically keep the public from finding out—but it was possible that Nina didn’t even want NASA to know what was going on. Under her command there had already been one murder, and she herself had gone missing after violating several protocols. This might be another big strike against her.
I didn’t bring that up, though. It would only annoy Nina.
“Other than you and me, only your father and Chang know the truth about the poisoning,” Nina went on. “And I have asked them to keep this to themselves. We are going to tell everyone else that the poisoning was accidental. That Lars ate some contaminated lutefisk. I expect you to stick to that story as well.”
“Sure,” I said, then asked, “Are you at least going to have Dad and Chang help investigate too?”
“Of course. However . . .” Nina paused before continuing, as though she was choosing her words very carefully. “The reason I have come to you is that I have suspicions about Chang myself.”
“Oh.” Even though Chang was an adult, I considered him a friend. He was one of the only adults at MBA who talked to me like I was an equal, rather than just a kid. However, I understood exactly why Nina suspected him. Chang was usually easygoing, but when crossed he could be scary—and he was easily the smartest and strongest person on the base. He could outsmart you or beat you to a pulp. Or maybe both. And he had locked horns with Lars Sjoberg many times.
“As you know, Chang and Lars don’t get along very well,” Nina said, which was a massive understatement. The men loathed each other. “I consider it possible that Chang might have been beh
ind this attempt. If so, he might try to cover his tracks and destroy any evidence that leads to him. Therefore, I would like another person on this case.”
“So you want me to keep an eye on Chang?”
“Yes. But also I want you keeping an eye on everyone else.”
“Everyone?”
“Sadly, given the victim of this crime, I can’t rule out anyone on this base. There is no other person at MBA as disliked as Lars Sjoberg. He has made life miserable for everyone here. It is possible that anyone might have finally had enough.”
“Well, not the kids,” I said.
To my surprise, Nina didn’t agree with this right away. She took her time, then finally said, “I suppose it’s unlikely that Violet, Kamoze, or Inez would have the wherewithal to figure out how to poison Lars this way. But even Kira or Roddy could have done it.”
Which made me wonder if Nina suspected me as well. It was completely possible that she did, and that she had asked Chang to keep an eye on me. After all, I’d had my share of run-ins with Lars Sjoberg.
“In fact,” Nina went on, “I’d like you to pay particular attention to the children at this base. Being a child yourself, you can probably question them without raising much suspicion, while Chang, your father, and I don’t have that luxury.”
“Okay,” I agreed. I didn’t believe Kira would have done anything so horrible, but truthfully, I wasn’t sure about Roddy. And Cesar was a possibility as well. Maybe they had even done it together.
“Very well, then,” Nina said, as though we had been discussing something far less disturbing than a potential murderer. “I need you to get started on this right away.”
“It’s four thirty in the morning,” I pointed out.
“It’s a known fact that with every hour that elapses after a crime is committed, the killer has an exponentially better chance of getting away with it.”
“But like you said, the killer might have committed this crime months ago. All they had to do was poison the lutefisk, then sit back and wait.”