Space Case

by Stuart Gibbs

  “And he told you? You just met him.”

  “I just met you,” Kira countered. “And you trusted me to do this investigation with you.”

  “That’s different,” I said defensively, knowing it really wasn’t. “You overheard me talking about this. I had no choice but to let you help.”

  “Whatever.” Kira shrugged. “Point is, Roddy told me how to do it. I didn’t tell him the real reason why I wanted to, of course. I just said I didn’t like NASA having control of everything I did online here.”

  “And he bought that?”

  “Yeah. Although, to be honest, I think he might have a bit of a crush on me. He was a little too excited to help me hack the system. And then he kept asking if I wanted to eat dinner with him and his family tonight. Or to see his room.”

  I considered things from Roddy’s point of view. There he was, on the moon, cut off from any girls his age for months, and the first one who showed up was cute and seemed to like computers as much as he did. “He’s got a crush on you all right.”

  “Ick. So now, by helping you with this, I could end up in trouble with Nina and I’ve got the virtual-reality fiend crushing on me?”

  “Hey, you asked to help me. And besides, you said you’d done plenty of worse things.”

  Kira cast a wary glance at me. “Yeah. I have.”

  I really wanted to see what Kira had found on the computer, but I couldn’t help asking, “Like what?”

  Kira sized me up for a moment, then said, “I like going places I’m not supposed to go.”

  “You mean, like trespassing?”

  “Yeah. But not like in a bad way, really.” Kira now looked embarrassed that I’d brought this up. “It’s just that, a lot of the time, there are rules telling you you can’t go someplace for no good reason. And so I just kind of ignore them.”

  “So where have you gone?”

  “All sorts of cool places. The storage area where they keep all the paintings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The places where they keep the animals at the zoo. The tunnels underneath the Eagles’ football stadium.”

  “Really?” I asked. “How do you get in there?”

  “I just walk in.”

  “And your dad doesn’t freak out?”

  “Have you met my dad? He’s usually not paying much attention to me. I’ve wandered off for an hour without him noticing.”

  “So he’s never realized?”

  “No, he has. And he wasn’t happy, of course. But I’m not a criminal. I don’t steal anything or vandalize stuff. I’m just curious. Especially about places that people think should be off-limits. Which might be why I was so interested to come up here. How much more off-limits can you get than the moon, right?”

  “Did you ever get caught?”

  “Not really. Most people didn’t even seem to notice me. But if security did come, I’d just pretend to be a lost little kid and cry a bit and they’d take pity on me. Half the time they’d even give me candy. Dad told me to knock it off when NASA started vetting us, though. He didn’t want them to ding us because I was a troublemaker.”

  I started to ask something else, but before I could, Kira said, “Do you want to see what I found about Dr. Holtz or not?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Okay then. Computer, bring up the footage.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The computer spoke in the standard factory-setting female voice; Kira and her father obviously hadn’t bothered to customize it yet. A frozen image of security footage appeared on the SlimScreen. It was the staging area for the main air lock, viewed from a high angle.

  Kira explained, “Even though getting into the system was easy after Roddy told me how, it still took a while to track all this down. And then, after I figured out how to access the camera feeds, I still had to figure out which ones to look at. Do you have any idea how many cameras there are at this place?”

  “A few hundred?” I ventured.

  “Two thousand and twenty six,” Kira corrected.

  I sat back in surprise. “Really?”

  Kira nodded. “They’re everywhere. There are at least a dozen in every room—except for our residences. Even the exterior is covered with them. They’re on the roof, in the walls, out by the solar arrays . . .”

  “They’re supposed to be for safety,” I said. “In case a meteor takes out a solar panel or something. We can see what happened without having to go outside.”

  “I get that,” Kira told me. “But how do you explain having sixteen cameras in the bathrooms? Does NASA think there are going to be a lot of meteor strikes in there?”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s creepy.”

  “Anyway,” Kira went on, “there were a ton of camera feeds to sort through. And each one of them has months of footage logged. But I finally tracked down what you need.” She pointed at the frozen frame on the SlimScreen. “This is the widest angle I could find of the staging area. So if Dr. Holtz was with anyone, you ought to be able to see them, right?”

  “Right,” I agreed. Indeed this particular footage had been shot with a wide-angle fish-eye lens, so that frame showed not just the staging area and the main air lock, but significant portions of the hallways on either side.

  “Okay, then,” Kira said. “Watch what happens. Computer, run it!”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The camera feed began running. There was a time stamp at the bottom indicating it was 5:23 in the morning.

  After a few seconds Dr. Holtz entered the staging area, coming from the direction of the mess and the science pod. He plodded along slowly, his face drawn and sad.

  “Whoa,” I said.

  “What?” Kira asked.

  “That hardly seems like Dr. Holtz,” I told her. “Usually he was incredibly happy. He loved being here. You could even see it in how he walked. He always had this kind of bounce to his step. But look at him here.” I pointed to the screen.

  “He looks miserable,” Kira said. “Like he knows he’s about to die.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, struck by the thought. “But when I overheard him in the bathroom three hours before this, he was even happier than usual. Delirious, really.”

  “Wait.” Kira paused the footage. “What’s this about the bathroom?”

  I recounted what I’d overheard as quickly as I could, desperately wanting to see the rest of the security footage but aware that Kira ought to be up to speed on everything I knew. When I got to the part about Dr. Holtz’s discovery, her jaw dropped.

  “Whoa,” she said. “Do you have any idea what he’d found?”

  “No,” I told her. “But that’s what’s so strange. How do you go from being on top of the world like he was at two thirty in the morning, so excited to share his discovery with everyone, to looking as miserable as he does at five thirty?”

  “I don’t know,” Kira admitted. “Computer, let it run.”

  The tape started up again. Dr. Holtz opened the locker where the space suits were stored, removed his suit, and slowly pulled it on. Kira’s words about him knowing he was going to die echoed in my ears. Now Dr. Holtz looked like a man dressing for his own funeral.

  “There’s something I don’t get,” Kira said. “If he knew he was going to die, why bother suiting up at all? Why not just walk outside in his regular clothes?”

  “I guess whoever was behind this wanted it to look like an accident,” I suggested.

  “Well, that brings us to another problem.” Kira turned to me. “If there was someone else behind this, where were they when it was happening?”

  “I don’t know,” I conceded. That had been nagging at me too. In the entire wide sweep shown by the camera angle, not a single other person was visible. Dr. Holtz was entirely on his own.

  In the footage he was making a good show of taking the proper precautions for going outside. He sealed his suit. He locked the helmet on. He checked the various gauges and readouts. As far as I could tell, his suit looked like it was on correctly.

  Then Dr. Holtz star
ted toward the air lock.

  I sighed.

  “What’s wrong?” Kira asked.

  “I thought this was going to be easier,” I said. “That there’d be a bad guy forcing him out the air lock with a gun or something. But there’s not. This looks exactly like what Nina says it is: an accident, not a murder.”

  “But what about Dr. Holtz’s behavior? You said that was strange.”

  I shrugged. “That’s still not proof anyone forced him to do this. If anything, it might look like more evidence that this was an accident. Like maybe he was distracted and not thinking clearly. Or like he was depressed and this was a suicide.”

  “You’re right,” Kira agreed. “But there’s one more thing you need to see.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Watch Dr. Holtz closely once he gets into the air lock.”

  I returned my full attention to the screen. Dr. Holtz was at the air lock now. He typed the access code on a keypad and the inner door slid open. Dr. Holtz stepped into the pressurization chamber and the door slid back, locking him in.

  Dr. Holtz then slid his right hand beneath the open palm of his left hand.

  “There!” Kira cried, stopping the footage.

  “What?” I asked. “All he’s doing is moving his hands around.”

  “Yeah, but why? That’s a weird gesture to make, isn’t it? Especially if you only have a few seconds left to live.”

  I thought about it. At first glance the gesture was so small it hadn’t even seemed deliberate. But now that Kira mentioned it . . . “It does seem a little strange.”

  “Yeah,” Kira said. “If I only had a few seconds left to live, I’d be trying to say something. Especially if I knew there were cameras all around.”

  “Is there a better angle of what he’s doing?” I asked.

  “Of course. There are four cameras in the air lock alone. I just started with this angle so you could see there wasn’t anyone around. Computer, bring up angle two and run it.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” A new piece of security footage popped up. This one was taken from inside the air lock.

  “Okay,” Kira said. “We’re starting this from right after he enters the air lock. Before he moves his hands.”

  This camera was much closer to Dr. Holtz, set in the wall between the air lock doors. As Dr. Holtz stepped into the air lock, he took up the entire frame. Unfortunately, we couldn’t see his face. The moon’s atmosphere isn’t strong enough to reflect the sun’s radiation, so all space helmets have protective shielding built in, which turns them all into big mirrors. (Check out any photos of astronauts on the moon if you want to see what I mean.) Instead of Dr. Holtz, we saw the reflection of the interior of the air lock.

  The inner air lock door slid shut behind Dr. Holtz. Then, for only a fraction of a second, he turned toward the camera.

  “There!” Kira said. “Did you see that? He knows the camera’s there, but he’s trying not to look at it.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Maybe because he knew someone was watching him on it,” Kira suggested. “Check out his hands . . .”

  Once again I watched Dr. Holtz move his hands, this time from the much-closer camera inside the air lock. He’d returned his gaze to the lunar surface, as though he wasn’t even aware of what his own hands were doing. In fact the hand gestures he was making were so subtle, I might not have even noticed he was making them had Kira not pointed it out.

  From this angle we could see that he was pointing with his right hand as he slid it under the open palm of his left. Then he balled his right fist and raised it to his chest.

  Kira paused the footage again. “What is that? It’s not just fidgeting, right? His movements are too deliberate.”

  “Yeah, they are.” I shut my eyes, trying to think. There was something about Dr. Holtz’s motions that was familiar to me, only I couldn’t recall why. An idea was nagging at me, though, like I’d seen them before, but a long time ago.

  “At first I thought they might be some hand exercises,” Kira said. “You know, to get his space gloves all flexed out for the moonwalk. But then I thought, ‘If he knows he’s going to die, what’s the point of flexing his gloves?’ ”

  “Hold on,” I told her. “I need a minute to figure this out.”

  “You know what he’s doing?” Kira asked, excitedly.

  “Maybe.” I kept my eyes closed, digging through the recesses of my mind. I knew Kira had a point about the gloves. They were important somehow. Space gloves had always been trouble for astronauts. The issue was, space suits had to be inflated to the right atmospheric pressure or you’d die—but when you inflated them, the gloves filled up with air as well and got stiff, which made them hard to use. It was like having your hands inside balloons. In the early days of moonwalks, even something as simple as making a fist had been incredibly difficult. Over the years NASA had spent billions to improve the gloves—as well as the rest of the suits. Through a combination of space-age fabrics, new pressure systems, and robotics embedded in their exterior, the gloves became far easier to use—but they still aren’t perfect. Making any motion with your fingers is work, which meant that, no matter how casual Dr. Holtz was trying to appear, the signs he was making with his hands weren’t random.

  Signs.

  A sudden memory came to me. I was six years old, visiting my great-grandfather in Palm Springs, California. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the last time I was going to see him. My parents knew he was sick, though, and so did he; Mom and Dad had brought me there to say good-bye to him. I remembered being upset that Great-Granddad couldn’t play with me the way he normally did when I came to visit. Instead he was staying inside on the couch while I swam in his pool with my father. Dad had been teaching me to do a cannonball, and I wanted Great-Granddad to see, so I looked through the glass doors into the house.

  My mother was talking to Great-Granddad, her back to me so that he could watch me through the windows. Only she wasn’t talking at all. She was making gestures with her hands—and Great-Granddad was responding in kind.

  My eyes snapped open. “It’s sign language!” I exclaimed.

  My sudden outburst caught Kira by surprise so badly she tumbled off her InflatiCube. But she sprang right back to her feet. “What’s sign language?”

  “You know how people are sometimes born without the ability to hear?” I asked.

  “Sure. Deafness. My cousin had that. But they gave her a cochlear implant and she could hear right away. It’s no big deal.”

  “Right. But it wasn’t always like that. Not so long ago, you couldn’t just give an operation to a deaf person, or a blind person, or someone who was paralyzed, and make them like everyone else. Instead, if you were born deaf, or blind, or paraplegic, you stayed that way.”

  “I know,” Kira said, a little indignantly. “I read history.”

  “Well, how do you think deaf people communicated back then?”

  Kira looked at me blankly. It was probably the same look I’d given my parents when they’d asked me to guess how people had ever taken photographs before there were digital cameras. And then I saw the wheels start to turn in her mind. “They used their hands?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “It was called sign language. Almost no one uses it anymore, because pretty much everyone who’s born deaf gets the cochlear operation right away, but Mom once told me that sign language used to be one of the most common languages in the world.”

  “So Dr. Holtz might have learned it when he was a kid!” Kira suggested.

  “Right. Maybe he had a relative who was born deaf. Or who lost their hearing. That’s what happened with my great-granddad. His ears went at the end and he was too sick to operate on to fix it, so he and my Mom had to learn signs to communicate.”

  Kira whooped happily. “You’re a genius, Dash! I never would have thought of that in a million years!”

  “I’m sure you would have soon enough.”

  “No. I’ve never even h
eard of sign language before. So what’s Dr. Holtz saying?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I never learned it myself. But the base computer is programmed to understand thousands of languages. Maybe this is one of them.”

  “Of course!” Kira exclaimed. “Computer, can you translate sign language?”

  “Which Mayan language?” the computer replied. “I am programmed for Ch’olan, Tzeltalan and Q’anjob’alan.”

  “Not Mayan language!” I snapped. “Sign language. Can you translate sign language?”

  “American Sign Language?” the computer asked.

  “Uh . . . I guess.” I hadn’t known there were other kinds.

  “Yes,” the computer told me. “I have that capability.”

  “Great!” Kira said. “I’m going to play a piece of video. Please analyze it and tell us what Dr. Holtz is saying.”

  “I will do my best,” the computer replied.

  Kira rewound the footage to the moment of Dr. Holtz stepping into the air lock, then played it. We watched as he made his hand signals again and let it continue beyond the point where we’d paused the footage before. As Dr. Holtz signed, I felt a terrible sense of fear begin to overwhelm me. Because every moment took us closer to the end of Dr. Holtz’s life. I didn’t want to watch it—and yet I had to, for Dr. Holtz’s sake.

  Obviously he’d hoped that someone would watch the footage. That was the whole point of signing. To get a final message across. And yet, at the same time, he was hoping that whoever had forced him out onto the lunar surface wouldn’t notice what he was doing.

  Save for the one quick glance at the camera, he faced out the window toward the moon. His hands seemed to move completely independently of the rest of him. On occasion he moved his arms, lifting his hands close to his helmet, though he did it with a subtlety that made it look more like stretching than signing.

  After about twenty seconds the outer air lock door slid open. Although it wasn’t visible, all the precious oxygen in the air lock would have dissipated instantly.

  Dr. Holtz didn’t cower from his fate. Instead he met it boldly. He stepped out the door, onto the dusty surface of the moon. He had stopped signing by now. His message was finished. If anything, Dr. Holtz seemed to be relishing his final moments of life. After all, he was spending them on the moon. He bounded twice on the surface, then turned back toward the moon base, tilting his head back as far as he could.