Space Case

by Stuart Gibbs

  His arrival grabbed Violet’s attention. “There’s no school today!” she shouted over her music. “And I’m having waffles!”

  “Oh.” Dr. Marquez never seemed to know how to deal with Violet’s effusive happiness. “That’s nice.”

  “We’re doing as well as can be expected,” Mom put in. “How is your family, Timothy?”

  “Oh, they’ve gone through the whole gamut of emotions.” Dr. Marquez picked a chunk of dehydrated fruit out of his teeth and flicked it away. “Shock, disbelief, grief, anger, you name it.” He looked to me. “Roddy’s had a tough time himself. He’s in the rec room right now. I’m sure he could use a friend to talk to.”

  “That’s a great idea,” Mom said.

  “Is it really?” I asked, not so convinced.

  “I think it’d be good for you to talk to someone your own age right now,” Dad said. “Besides, we still have to break the news to your sister, and it might be best if we did that on our own.” He nodded to Violet, who had returned to obliviously devouring waffles and listening to her music.

  I nodded understanding and got up. Dr. Marquez didn’t. “Perhaps I could be of some assistance with young Violet,” he said to my parents. “It might be nice to have a professional around to help cushion the emotional blow.”

  “Thanks, that’d be very helpful,” Mom said, although I wasn’t sure if she meant it. When you live in an enclosed space with only twenty-two other people, you can’t ever really afford to offend anyone.

  I went to the drink station, poured myself a cup of reclaimed water, and headed to the rec room. Although it would have been faster to go past the moon-base gym, I looped around the long way instead. In truth, MBA isn’t that big—it’s only about the size of a soccer pitch—so the long way wasn’t really all that long. But more important, it took me past the main air lock.

  MBA has a simple design. It consists of two octagons, one large and one small. The large octagon is the residential area: The apartments, gym, kitchen, and communal bathrooms line the outer wall, with the control center, greenhouse, and rec room in the center. The small octagon is the science pod, where experiments in biology, chemistry, geology, and astrophysics are conducted. The science pod is attached to the northwest corner of the main building; from above, MBA looks like a large stop sign with a smaller one growing on it like a tumor.

  My route first took me between the science pod and the control center. Almost every adult on the base works in one or the other, so on most days they would have been hives of activity. Today both were almost empty. Only Dr. Janke, one of the biologists, was in the science pod, absently fiddling with one of his experiments. He didn’t appear to be working so much as trying to distract himself from Dr. Holtz’s death.

  Nina was the only one in the control center. She was using the ComLink and had her back to me. Mission Control in Houston was on the SlimScreen. A dozen men and women had gathered to talk to her, all with very grave expressions on their faces. I considered trying to eavesdrop, but Nina turned my way and gave me a hard stare that was basically an order to keep on moving, so that was exactly what I did.

  I passed the maintenance room and the operations center for the base robots, crossed through the staging area where all the space suits were stored, and finally came to the air lock. The whole journey had taken twenty-six seconds.

  The air lock is one of the rare spots at MBA with a window. Technically there are two windows, as the air lock has two doors: an inner door and an outer door, with a four-foot safety chamber between them. The view through the windows is narrow and obstructed, but then the area outside the air lock isn’t much to look at anyhow.

  Since there is no atmosphere on the moon, the only thing that ever alters the landscape is us—and humans rarely alter a landscape for the better. What was once a pristine, white blanket of moon dust has now been trampled by a million footprints and flattened by the treads of the moon rovers, which are housed in a garage near MBA. It’s like when a fresh, beautiful snowfall gets ruined by boot prints and tire tracks—only instead of eventually melting away, it just stays in that ugly, polluted state forever.

  On the ruined lunar surface it was impossible to pick out Dr. Holtz’s footprints or pinpoint where he’d collapsed and died. All I knew was, without his space suit on right he couldn’t have gone far. There is no oxygen outside. The farthest I can get holding my breath is about fifty feet. (I’ve tested this indoors on multiple occasions, just in case of trouble.)

  There were still some traces of moon dust on the staging-area floor. At breakfast I’d learned who had recovered Dr. Holtz’s body: Daphne Merritt, our base roboticist, and Garth Grisan, who is in charge of maintenance. Normally, for sanitation reasons, there were extreme precautions to prevent tracking moon dust into the base, but it had probably been hard to follow them all when one of the three people coming back inside was dead.

  Despite being surrounded by megatons of moon dust, I’d never touched the stuff before.

  I’d been out on the lunar surface myself exactly once: when passing from the rocket landing pad to MBA after arriving on the moon. It had taken ten minutes, tops. Because I’m a kid, I’d never been allowed another chance to go outside.

  I knelt and dragged my fingers through the dust. It felt like slightly gritty powdered sugar. Moon dust isn’t really dust; it’s mostly tiny shards of a strange kind of glass formed in the extreme heat of meteor impacts. It smelled faintly of gunpowder, reminding me of fireworks.

  “Did you drop something?”

  I spun around to find Garth Grisan behind me. Mr. Grisan is in his late fifties, which is older than most of the people at MBA, but running maintenance for everything on the base requires someone with a lot of knowledge and experience. He seemed nice enough, but he tended to keep to himself. Although I’d been living at the base with him for more than six months, we’d almost never spoken.

  “No,” I said. “I was just . . . um . . . There’s some moon dust on the floor.”

  “Yeah. I’m about to take care of that.” Mr. Grisan held up a small vacuum. “With all the excitement this morning, I haven’t had a chance yet.”

  I suddenly felt embarrassed. “I wasn’t telling you to clean it up,” I said. “I just noticed it and . . . well . . .” I trailed off, not quite sure what else to say.

  Mr. Grisan smiled warmly, signaling he hadn’t been offended. “It’s all right, Dashiell. We’re all trying to deal with Dr. Holtz in our own way.”

  I nodded agreement, then thought to ask, “You went out and got him?”

  Mr. Grisan’s smile faded. “Yes. With Daphne.”

  “Did anything seem strange about him?”

  “Other than him being dead on the surface of the moon? The whole thing seemed strange. Strange and wrong.” Mr. Grisan shuddered at the memory.

  “Was he . . . ?” I began, but before I could get another word out, Mr. Grisan cut me off.

  “To be honest, I’d prefer to forget all about what it was like. And it’s probably better for a kid like you not to know. So if you’ll excuse me . . .” Mr. Grisan held up the vacuum again and pointed to the floor.

  “Right,” I said. “Sorry.” I turned to leave—and caught sight of Nina in her office. She was glaring at me, apparently annoyed that I was still within range of her.

  I took a last glance out the air lock, then hurried off. Behind me I heard the whine of the vacuum as Mr. Grisan sucked up the moon dust.

  Like his father had told me, Rodrigo “Roddy” Marquez was in the rec room. This wasn’t much of a surprise. Roddy was almost always in the rec room. That’s where the best holographic interfaces are.

  As usual, Roddy was seated on an InflatiCube, playing a virtual-reality game. His eyes were covered by thick black hologoggles and his hands were sheathed in sensogloves. Either he hadn’t heard that Nina had ordered everyone to stay off the ComLink or—more likely—he’d decided to ignore her.

  Roddy was my best friend at MBA, although that really didn’t
mean much: He was the only other kid my age on the moon. Back on earth we probably wouldn’t have been friends at all. Roddy is a decent guy, but our interests are completely different. He’s what we called a “veeyar” at my old school, short for “virtual resident”—a kid who spends nearly all his time in the computer-generated world.

  I’ve never spent much time in virtual reality myself. We didn’t even have a holographic interface at our house. Meanwhile Roddy logged more than ten hours a day online before he came to the moon. For that reason he doesn’t hate MBA nearly as much as I do. His life here is almost exactly the same as it was back on earth: He spends as much time as possible jacked in and never goes outdoors.

  Roddy was so fixated on his game he had no idea I’d entered the room. He was jerking about wildly, arms extended, his index fingers twitching like worms on a fishhook. That meant he was probably playing a war game, blasting away with virtual guns.

  I tapped him on the shoulder. “Hey, Roddy, how are you doing?”

  “I’m in the middle of a raid here,” he said curtly. “Jack in if you want to talk.”

  I sighed. This is one of the problems with veeyars: They find talking in the virtual world more comfortable than doing it face-to-face. Still, I didn’t feel like waiting around for Roddy to finish his game; knowing him, that could have taken days.

  There were plenty of hologoggles and sensogloves stored on a rack on the wall. I slipped some on, sat on the InflatiCube beside Roddy, and jacked in to his interface. With a whoosh the dull gray walls of the rec room vanished, and I suddenly found myself in one of the most startlingly beautiful landscapes I’d ever seen. I was standing in a meadow full of wildflowers by a pristine, blindingly blue lake, with verdant forest on one side and snowcapped mountains on the other. Six separate waterfalls spilled into the lake, each more breathtaking than the last.

  Roddy had no doubt combed through thousands of potential earthscapes to find one this stunning—and then selected it to wage a war in. His enemies were some sort of gelatinous pink alien creatures. Although they all had guns, they didn’t appear very menacing. Roddy had probably set the game controls to a beginner level, preferring easy victory to stiff competition. The aliens had stubby little flippers instead of hands, which meant they could barely even hold their weapons, let alone fire them. Meanwhile Roddy was blowing them away with ease. Each time he hit one, it burst into a shower of pink goo, like someone had detonated a bowl of strawberry Jell-O.

  Roddy had heavily modified his avatar as well. While the actual Roddy is flabby, uncoordinated, and not particularly handsome, virtual Roddy was built like an Olympic decathlete, with movie-star looks and bulging muscles. This was common for veeyars. Several other avatars were fighting alongside Roddy, representing people back on earth who were also playing. The men all appeared equally Olympian, while all the women looked like professional swimsuit models.

  I materialized right in the thick of things, at Roddy’s side. Since I’d never bothered to modify my avatar, it looked exactly like me. In real life I’m three inches taller than Roddy. Here I looked like a dwarf beside him. His avatar’s biceps were bigger than my head. My gun, some kind of bizarre machine gun–bazooka combo, was half the size that I was. I didn’t have a clue how to fire it. But then I didn’t have any desire to play pretend war anyhow.

  “What are we fighting here?” I asked. “Angry pudding?”

  Roddy frowned. “Don’t be fooled by the appearance of the Gogolaks,” he warned. “What they lack in agility they make up for in cunning and guile. Plus, one bite from them makes your brain dissolve into sludge.” With that he blasted three into smithereens. Their defense didn’t seem particularly cunning to me. After the first got blown away, the other two simply froze and gibbered in terror, allowing Roddy to pick them off effortlessly.

  “We’re not supposed to be using the ComLinks,” I warned.

  “Don’t tell me you bought that ‘we have to leave them open for emergencies’ garbage. Want to know what the real story is?”

  Before I could answer, Roddy told me anyhow. Roddy is prone to rants. He’s a smart kid; unfortunately, he likes everyone else to know how smart he is. “NASA is freaking out about Holtz kicking the bucket. They’ve told everyone back on earth that this place is safe as can be—and suddenly our doctor’s dead on the surface of the moon. The media will go nuts with that story, so NASA’s trying to control it. That’s why they want us off the Links. They don’t want us blabbing the truth to our friends before they can put out a press release with a nice, sanitized version of what happened. They’ll say Holtz croaked because of a heart attack or something, not ’cause he went out on the surface solo like a moron.”

  I frowned, annoyed at how Roddy was talking about Dr. Holtz, then glanced at the avatars of the other players blasting Gogolaks close by. “You’re saying all this on an open Link. Any one of these people could be listening.”

  “They’re not paying any attention to us. And they don’t have any idea what our real identities are. For all they know, we’re two yahoos from Podunk.”

  “Still, we should watch what we say. If you’re right—”

  “Of course I’m right.”

  “—and if we spill the beans, Nina will want our heads.”

  “I’m not forcing you to stay on here. If you’re so worried about breaking the rules, why’d you even jack in?”

  “Your father said I should come check on you.”

  Roddy laughed spitefully. “Of course he did. Rather than come check on me himself.” He spun around and blasted four more aliens into oblivion. “Tell him I’m totally fine.”

  “You sure?” I asked. I tried to pick my words carefully, wary of saying anything classified. Thankfully, the other players all appeared distracted with blasting the enemy into pink smithereens. “You’re not upset about Dr. Holtz?”

  Roddy’s avatar shrugged, unmoved, which meant that real Roddy had just done the same thing. “I didn’t really know him all that well.”

  I stared at Roddy, trying to read his expression, but in the virtual world this was almost impossible. The avatars don’t mimic the subtle movements of their players’ faces. Instead, everyone always looks like they’re posing for a magazine cover. I had no idea if Roddy was telling the truth or not.

  “Well, I’m upset,” I said. “I think the whole thing’s kind of weird.”

  Roddy laid down a carpet of gunfire and took out a dozen Gogolaks in one sweep. “Why’s that?”

  I decided not to repeat the story of overhearing Dr. Holtz’s conversation the night before his death. Knowing Roddy, he’d be far more interested in my breaking the space toilet—and he’d never let me hear the end of it. Instead I brought up something else that had occurred to me. “Living up here was Dr. Holtz’s dream come true,” I said. “He worked his whole life to be on this mission. And then, only six months in, he does a solo outside without authorization? I can’t believe he’d take a risk like that.”

  Roddy shrugged again. “He was kind of old. Maybe he was losing his mind. My great-grandpa’s nuttier than a granola bar. He wanders away from home all the time. Once, they found him at the zoo in his pajamas. Maybe Holtz was losing it too.”

  I shook my head. “No way. NASA screened all of us for any kind of mental issues. Especially Dr. Holtz. They wouldn’t have sent him up here if they’d found he was getting senile.”

  No Gogolaks had attacked for a while. They appeared to have retreated.

  Roddy’s avatar scanned the horizon carefully anyhow. “Maybe Holtz developed something while he was here. Some kind of space madness.”

  “Space madness?” I repeated, failing to hide my skepticism.

  “Yeah,” Roddy said. “Like where you go bonkers from being cooped up here for too long.”

  “I could imagine me getting that,” I said. “But not Dr. Holtz.”

  “On your left!” Roddy screamed.

  I spun around to find a horde of gelatinous aliens mounting a sneak attack. They
hadn’t retreated; they’d flanked us. I whipped my gun toward them and blasted away. However, since I wasn’t very adept at shooter games, I missed most of them and took out two of my fellow players by accident. They both stared at me as they winked out of existence.

  “Smooth move,” Roddy groused.

  The Gogolaks closed the gap on me with surprising speed for creatures made out of instant dessert. Apparently, they were faster—and craftier—than I’d realized. The closest one leaped at me, opening its mouth wide enough to swallow me whole. Right before I could be plunged into its digestive tract, however, Roddy blew it away. Then he obliterated the rest, whooping with delight as he blasted them to bits. I even managed to get one myself. All around us the aliens burst apart, coating us with droplets of pink goo.

  The moment Roddy vaporized the last one, a heavenly chorus swelled. Words appeared in the crystal sky over the mountains: LEVEL ONE CLEARED. PREPARE FOR LEVEL TWO.

  “You’re gonna have to be way better to survive the next round,” Roddy warned me.

  “I don’t think Dr. Holtz had space madness,” I told him. “If he did, your dad would have noticed, right?”

  “Maybe my dad did. He wouldn’t have told us. He would have told Nina. And she would have probably kept it quieter than a Bosnakkian Snork.”

  “A what?”

  “A Bosnakkian Snork,” Roddy repeated curtly, as though this were something everyone had heard of before. “An alien species from the Andromeda Galaxy renowned for not making any sound at all. Haven’t you ever played Warp War?”

  “Uh . . . no.”

  “Really? Well, point is, if the word got out that Holtz—the guy who’s supposed to be the world expert on human health in space—had gone psycho up here, it’d be an even bigger story than him dying. A massive black eye for the whole space program. I mean, the only reason they let all us kids come up here was because Holtz said it was safe—and suddenly he turns out to be loony? Before you know it, Congress will want to shut this place down.”

  I had to admit, that was a pretty good argument. While the next level of the game loaded, I thought back to all the times I’d seen Dr. Holtz recently. He’d seemed perfectly fine to me. In fact, the night in the bathroom before he’d died, he’d sounded sane as could be—although he had laughed pretty maniacally while walking out. Had that been craziness? Or had he just been really excited?