Waste of Space

by Stuart Gibbs

  “What on earth happened here?” Dr. Janke stood at the doorway to the rec room, gaping at the Sjobergs. Now an adult had shown up.

  Sonja pointed at me accusingly. “He boke by doze! And he bade by babies eat excrebent!”

  Dr. Janke looked at her curiously. “I’m sorry. Was that Swedish?”

  Kira immediately came to my defense. “They attacked Dash first! He was defending himself.”

  “He made Patton and Lily swallow poop!” Violet said, then burst into laughter again.

  “He did?” Dr. Janke asked. It looked as though he was on the verge of laughing himself. “That’s unfortunate.”

  Patton finally appeared to have coughed up most of the poop that had gone in his mouth. He staggered to his feet, trying to claw brown gunk off his tongue, and started for the door.

  “Batton!” Sonja yelled at him, then pointed at me. “Kill him!”

  “I’ll do it later,” Patton whined. “I have to wash my mouth out.” And then he scurried out the door.

  “Me too!” Lily gasped, and then she raced out after him.

  Sonja let out a scream of frustration, as though she was upset that her children had opted to rinse the excrement from their mouths instead of causing me bodily harm. She fixed me with a hard stare and threatened, “Dis isn’t over. You will bay for dis.” She pointed to her damaged nose, then stormed out of the room.

  “They won’t really try to kill you,” Dr. Janke told me, trying to be supportive, although it sounded as if he wasn’t quite so sure of this. “They’re just very upset right now.”

  “Look at it this way,” Kira said. “Even if they do want you dead, we’re leaving tomorrow. You only have to watch your back for one more day, and then you’ll be in the clear.”

  Assuming the rockets actually get here on time, I thought. Or they don’t blow up while landing. Or the oxygen doesn’t all leak out of the base.

  I didn’t say any of that out loud, because I didn’t want to upset Violet. But the fact was, things rarely worked out exactly as planned in outer space. The only thing you could really count on was that you couldn’t count on anything. And even if things did work out, and the rockets came right when they were supposed to, that was still hours away: easily long enough for the Sjobergs to try to get their revenge.

  Plus, Nina was still blackmailing me into helping her hunt for a killer, sending me into Chang’s room to hunt for evidence against him and then who knew what else. It seemed there were plenty of ways that could go wrong as well.

  Overall, it was shaping up to be a pretty lousy birthday.

  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)

  SPACECRAFT

  It should be noted that there is a significant chance that our primary contact might not be with the physical IEL itself, but merely with the craft by which they have traveled here. This might take the form of the craft merely passing through our solar system, or hovering in our atmosphere, or perhaps (sadly) crashing into our planet and leaving no survivors. It is also quite possible that primary contact will be through probes sent here, rather than craft bearing actual IEL. Once again, given our limited knowledge of the universe, there are most likely an infinite variety of possible craft that could appear. Whatever the case, the craft should be assessed carefully. DEXA will send engineering and military specialists for this exact purpose. Wait for them to get to the scene. They will be there as soon as humanly possible. DO NOT APPROACH THE CRAFT OR ENGAGE IT IN ANY WAY UNTIL DEXA HAS FORMULATED A PLAN FOR THIS.

  14

  ILLEGAL ENTRY

  Lunar day 252

  T minus 16 hours to evacuation

  I got the message from Nina shortly before dinnertime:

  DIVERSIONARY TACTICS UNDERWAY. LOCKING MECHANISM DISMANTLED. INITIATE PROCEDURES IMMEDIATELY.

  Which I figured was Nina-speak for “I’m distracting Chang. His door is open. Go break into his room.”

  I was helping my parents pack up their experiments in the science pod at the time. (I was no longer allowed to help Dr. Goldstein since I had swiped excrement from the greenhouse and used it on the Sjobergs, even though most of the other Moonies were secretly thrilled I had done this.) Kira was helping with Dr. Iwanyi’s experiments nearby. No one was keeping an eye on us, though. They all had a hundred other things to do. So all I had to do was say, “Kira, want to take a break?”

  “Sure!” she said, trying to tamp down her enthusiasm. Kira loved going places that were supposed to be off-limits to her. When I’d approached her with Nina’s plan earlier, all I’d had to say to convince her to break into Chang’s room with me was, “Want to help me break into—” She had exclaimed, “Yes!” before I’d even said where, let alone launched into an explanation of why we were doing it.

  Kira set down the equipment she was packing, and we hurried through the base.

  I knew our mission was taking place much later than Nina had hoped; a lot of unexpected things had happened to me that day. Thankfully, Nina hadn’t come looking for me yet; she’d had her hands full as well. In addition to her standard duties of running the moon base and overseeing the evacuation, she now had to deal with the Sjoberg excrement incident. Lars had already been furious about not getting first dibs on an evacuation rocket. When he learned that his children had been smeared with space poop, he went nuclear. He had raged so violently that I thought he might collapse from a heart attack, negating the whole point of investigating his attempted murder. He had been particularly enraged at me, because his wife and children all claimed that Patton and Lily had been merely minding their own business in the rec room when I had entered and attacked them out of the blue.

  So Nina had been forced to take statements from everyone involved and then compare what we claimed against the security footage from the rec room, which of course proved the Sjobergs were lying through their poop-stained teeth. This reinforced Nina’s insistence that the Sjobergs didn’t deserve any priority for seats on the rockets home, which only angered Lars Sjoberg even more. He claimed I had obviously doctored the footage (as if I even knew how to do such a thing, or could manage it on such short notice) and that I had been a constant menace to his family. He also warned that, once he got back to earth, he was going to sue NASA for every penny it was worth as well as make life miserable for Nina and everyone else from MBA.

  Which probably left most of the other Moonies wishing that whoever had poisoned Lars the night before had done a better job of it.

  At least, that was what I was wishing. I knew it wasn’t right to wish someone dead, but on the other hand, Lars Sjoberg seemed to want the exact same thing for me. Eventually, he stopped shouting at Nina and me and retired to his residence, but he continued to rage in there for a long time afterward. And even once that had stopped, there had been periodic bursts of what I assumed were Swedish obscenities from behind his door all afternoon.

  Meanwhile, Patton and Lily Sjoberg had used up most of the base’s remaining toothpaste supply brushing and rebrushing their teeth.

  Chang’s residence was located almost directly below the Sjobergs’ suite, right across from the rec room. Through the open rec-room door, I could see Violet, Inez, and Kamoze in there, but they couldn’t see me, as they all had hologoggles on. Now that Patton and Lily had been vanquished and Roddy had been roped into helping his mother pack for evacuation, the little kids were all free to use the veeyar system. They were galloping around while Violet kept yelling things like “Blast them with sparkle power!”

  “Looks like they’re playing that unicorns-versus-aliens mash-up you created,” I told Kira.

  “It’s more fun than I expected,” Kira said. “You should try it.”

  “Boom!” Violet yelled. “Nice work, GlitterWings!”

  Kira and I waited while Dr. Balnikov carried some equipment past and Dr. Marquez wandered by aimlessly b
efore the coast was clear. Then we tried Chang’s door.

  As Nina had promised, it wasn’t locked.

  Normally, all our doors had electronic locks that could only be opened by the people who lived in those rooms, but Chang’s clicked open when I turned the knob. We quickly slipped inside.

  “How do you think Nina managed that?” I asked, keeping my voice low.

  “She must have the ability to override any lock in the base,” Kira said confidently. “Makes sense that the moon-base commander would be able to do that.”

  “So Nina could come into our rooms any time she wants?”

  “Maybe. I wouldn’t get too worked up about it. After tomorrow, it’s not going to matter anymore.”

  Kira and I cased the room. It didn’t look like it would take long to search. To begin with, it was significantly smaller than our room, as it was designed for only one person. There was only a single sleep pod built into the far wall, with a cheap chest of drawers, a SlimScreen table, and an InflatiCube. There was no window. It was small, square, and drab. Like living in a walk-in closet. It occurred to me that Chang didn’t spend much time in his room. Now I knew why.

  If Chang had hidden evidence, there was almost no place to hide it.

  “I’ll take the drawers,” Kira said quickly, before I could claim them myself. “You take everything else.” She made a beeline for the spindly bureau.

  Since Chang wasn’t evacuating the next day, he hadn’t packed anything yet. Not that any of us had much to pack.

  I wandered over to his SlimScreen table. It was in sleep mode, the screen saver a rotating collage of photos. They were all of people who looked a good deal like Chang, so I figured they were family. There were parents, grandparents, people about Chang’s age who were probably siblings or cousins, and some nieces and nephews.

  A clarinet lay atop the table: one of the few personal items Chang had brought. In addition to being a genius, Chang was also a gifted musician. Dad said he could play the piano, too, but it was impossible to bring a piano into space—or even a keyboard, really. Both were too big and heavy. So the clarinet had come instead. Occasionally Chang treated us to performances at night.

  I gingerly picked the clarinet up and shook it. Nothing rattled inside. I peered into the bell at the end and didn’t see anything jammed up into it.

  “You should take that apart,” Kira said. She had already gone through the first drawer of the bureau.

  “There’s nothing in it.”

  “Well, make sure.”

  “What do you think? Chang had a bunch of leftover cyanide, so he jammed it into his prized clarinet?”

  “Maybe.”

  I examined the clarinet closely. There were multiple parts to it, but I wasn’t quite sure how they all fit together. “If you want to take this apart, be my guest. But I’m not doing it. If I break this, Chang will kill me.”

  “Scaredy-cat,” Kira taunted. But I noticed that she didn’t rush to touch the clarinet either.

  I set it back down, drew my fingers across the SlimScreen, and got an ENTER PASSWORD command. I had no idea what Chang’s password would be, so I abandoned the SlimScreen altogether and checked out the sleep pod.

  Chang’s pod looked exactly like mine. Same crummy, smelly sleep pad. Same rumpled sheets. It was even the same size, despite the fact that Chang was much bigger than me. To him, it must have felt even more like a coffin than mine did.

  I lifted the pad and rapped my knuckles on the area beneath it, trying to see if there was a hidden compartment. I would have considered this ridiculous if Kira and I hadn’t found just such a hidden compartment under Nina’s pad a few weeks before. I didn’t find anything, though.

  “Hmm,” Kira said, like she’d come across something interesting.

  I hurried over. “What is it?”

  “These were under his shorts.” Kira held up a few pressed flowers. They were all small and pink.

  I recognized them immediately. “They’re from the pea plants in the greenhouse.”

  “Why would Chang have flowers in his drawers?” Kira asked suspiciously.

  “To remind himself of earth?” I suggested. “To have a little color in this crummy room?”

  “Then why are they hidden?”

  “Maybe he had them out when they were alive, and then they started to die, so he pressed them and tucked them away.”

  “Whatever the case, it shows he’s been stealing things from the greenhouse. And that’s where the apple seeds were.”

  “That doesn’t mean he stole the seeds, though. In fact, it makes him even less suspicious.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Dr. Goldstein was wondering what Chang was doing in the greenhouse. Now we know.”

  “I suppose.” Kira sighed, like this was disappointing. Then she slid the drawer shut. “There’s nothing else in here. Just a bunch of clothes.”

  “Looks like Chang’s clean,” I said, pleased by the thought of it. “Let’s get out of here before he comes back.”

  I started for the door. As I did, my watch buzzed.

  It was a message from Nina, in red capital letters to indicate how urgent it was: ABORT!

  Unfortunately, Kira hadn’t followed me to the door. Instead she was standing in the middle of the room, looking all around, as if trying to spot any other possible hiding places.

  “Kira!” I exclaimed. “Nina wants us to leave. Now!”

  Kira sighed, like I was being overly dramatic, then turned to go and banged into the SlimScreen table. The clarinet wobbled and rolled off.

  Kira lunged for it, but it glanced off her fingers and clattered to the floor. A few pieces of metal popped off and skittered under the table.

  “Aw, great,” I muttered.

  Kira dropped to her knees to pick the pieces up.

  “Forget those!” I hissed. “There’s no time!”

  “If we leave them, Chang will know someone was in here!”

  “So? He won’t know it was us!”

  Kira ignored me, sliding on her belly under the table to get the clarinet parts.

  “I’m going,” I told her. I had already ended up in enough trouble that day. If she wanted to be there when Chang got back, that was her problem.

  Only, as I was reaching for the doorknob, Kira gave a gasp of surprise.

  Despite my best survival instincts, I turned back around. “What?”

  Kira reached up and pulled something off the underside of the SlimScreen table. Something that had been taped there.

  It was a syringe. Inside it was the remains of a slight bit of golden liquid.

  I had no idea how to recognize cyanide, but I knew that it had been injected into Lars Sjoberg’s lutefisk. So a hidden syringe was awfully incriminating.

  Before I could even say anything, though, the door opened, and Chang Kowalski entered the room.

  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)

  RESPONSE

  Once DEXA has been activated, our experts will immediately assess the messages from and/or physical presence of the IEL to determine the appropriate response. THIS MAY TAKE TIME. In an event of this magnitude, it is extremely important to not rush our response. Once the appropriate response has been determined, it will be up to officials from DEXA—and only officials from DEXA—to deliver it. The response may be delivered in a variety of ways (e.g., mathematical signals, music, light patterns) based upon the method of primary contact from the IEL. Once again, DO NOT ENGAGE THE IEL UNLESS AUTHORIZED TO DO SO BY DEXA. Any unauthorized communication is a federal offense.

  15

  RATIONAL ARGUMENTS

  Lunar day 252

  T minus 15.5 hours to evacuation

  Chang didn’t seem very surprised to see us. “I knew Nina was up to something,” he grumbled. “How on earth did she rope you two into this?”


  “She blackmailed Dash,” Kira said. She had already moved the syringe behind her back so that Chang wouldn’t see it.

  “With what?” Chang asked.

  “My family’s seats on the rocket tomorrow,” I admitted. “She said she could give them to the Sjobergs instead of us.”

  Chang looked surprised, then sighed. “Man, I knew that woman could be cold, but . . . blackmailing kids to do her dirty work? That’s absolute zero.”

  “It is,” Kira said. “Maybe you should go give her a piece of your mind.”

  She said it a little too quickly. Chang didn’t bite. Instead, he looked at her skeptically. “What do you have behind your back?”

  “Nothing,” Kira said. Again, way too quickly.

  “That is one pathetic acting job,” Chang informed her. “Do yourself a favor and just—”

  To Kira’s surprise, he didn’t finish the sentence. Instead he sprang across the room, moving with startling speed for someone so big. He caught her arm, spun her around, and pried the syringe from her grasp in the space of a single second.

  I tried to bolt from the room—though I wasn’t abandoning Kira. I was hoping to get help.

  But once again, Chang moved faster than I could. He caught my arm and yanked me backward, throwing me into Kira, then stood between us and the door, blocking our escape.

  Then he held up the syringe. When he’d grabbed it from Kira, the protective cap had come off, leaving the needle exposed. Chang looked at it curiously. “Where did you get this?”

  “Where do you think?” Kira said defiantly. “Under your SlimScreen.”

  “Really?” I had expected Chang to be angry, if not downright dangerous. Instead he seemed amused. “Do you have any idea what this is?”

  “It’s a syringe with cyanide in it,” Kira said.

  “Yes,” Chang admitted. “But it’s also the most blatant piece of planted evidence I’ve ever seen in my life.” To our surprise, he started laughing. As though we’d found a rubber chicken in his room, rather than a syringe full of poison.