by Stuart Gibbs
“I didn’t say she went outside without a suit,” Violet retorted. “I said maybe she went outside without her suit. Like, maybe she took someone else’s.”
Everyone turned to her, surprised.
“She couldn’t have taken someone else’s,” I pointed out. “They’re all specially designed for each of us, aren’t they?”
“Yes,” Chang said. “But that doesn’t mean that Nina couldn’t have worn someone else’s suit. She couldn’t trade with someone huge like Balnikov or someone small like Dr. Kim. But if the suit belonged to someone who was the same height and build as her, it might work.”
“None of the other space suits were missing, though,” Mom said. “The lockers were all full.” The moment the words were out of her mouth, though, she realized her mistake.
So did everyone else. “We only looked at the adult space suit storage,” Chang groaned. “Not the kids’.”
“Lily Sjoberg is about as big as Nina,” Kira said.
Everyone hustled back out the door. While most of us went down the steps to the staging area, Chang simply leaped over the catwalk railing and dropped to the main floor.
He was in such a hurry, he didn’t notice how crowded the hallway was. The capsule drop was over and everyone was leaving the common room. Chang almost landed right on top of Dr. Janke.
Dr. Janke wasn’t upset, though. He was in such a good mood, he laughed it off. “Chang! We’ve been looking for you! You missed the capsule drop.”
“Something came up,” Chang said.
“It went perfectly!” Dr. Janke crowed. “Landed right on the spot. A hole in one!”
“Excellent.” Chang slipped away from Dr. Janke. The rest of us pushed through the crowd and met him at the storage area for the kids’ space suits. Since we weren’t allowed out on the moon, our suits were stored in a separate area that was almost never opened. I’d only had my suit on once in the four months since I’d been at MBA, and that had been an unauthorized trip out onto the surface with Kira to find some evidence of Dr. Holtz’s murder.
Chang opened the doors to the kids’ space suit storage.
We all looked to where Lily Sjoberg’s space suit should have been.
It was missing.
“See?” Violet asked me tauntingly. “I was right! You just didn’t listen.”
“None of us did,” Mom said. She looked embarrassed about the whole thing.
So did Chang and Dad.
Our actions had grabbed the attention of everyone else in the area. Their celebration of the successful capsule drop instantly waned as they realized what Violet had figured out.
“Nina took Lily’s suit?” Dr. Brahmaputra-Marquez asked.
“Yes,” Mom said. “She’s still out on the surface.”
A ripple of concern went through the room.
Dr. Balnikov said, “Then she’s been out there for hours! Her oxygen must be running out. If it hasn’t already.”
Chang pushed through the crowd and entered the control room. Everyone followed him, crowding around the door.
“Computer,” Chang said, “is the GPS tracker on Lily Sjoberg’s space suit functioning?”
“Yes,” the base computer replied, in its usual calm voice.
“Can you give me the exact location of it?” Chang asked.
“Certainly,” the base computer replied. “Lily Sjoberg’s space suit is inside Moon Base Alpha.”
Everyone outside the office looked to one another, unsure what this could mean.
Even Chang seemed taken aback. “Computer, to clarify, I’m not asking where Lily is herself. I want to know where her space suit is.”
“I am well aware of what you are asking,” the computer replied calmly. “According to my readings, the space suit is inside the base. To be more specific, it is inside the staging area.”
Everyone turned around, hoping to see that Nina had somehow reappeared. As if, perhaps, she had snuck back in through the air lock while we were all busy with the computer.
She hadn’t.
“You think the computer’s malfunctioning?” Mom asked.
“No.” Chang sighed. “More likely, Nina dismantled the GPS tracker somehow. Or reprogrammed it to give us false coordinates. Or maybe she simply ripped the dang thing off and hid it somewhere in the room.”
“Why would she do that?” Dr. Janke asked.
“I don’t know,” Chang replied. “Maybe to cover her tracks. But whatever the case, I need all able-bodied adults to suit up. We’re going out on the surface. Wherever Nina is, we need to find her. She’s running out of time.”
Excerpt from The Official Residents’ Guide to Moon Base Alpha, “Appendix A: Potential Health and Safety Hazards,” © 2040 by National Aeronautics and Space Administration
FOOD
Surprisingly, choking is the fifth most common cause of death in the United States (approximately 2,500 people per year). And eating at MBA might be even more dangerous. Since the food on the moon is by necessity dehydrated, it is a bit thicker and harder to swallow than most earth food, even after the rehydrating process.I Thus, it may be somewhat easier to choke on than earth food. Please take extreme caution when chewing, try not to consume too much at one time, and if at all possible, avoid doing other activities while eating, such as exercising, running, or even talking.
Should choking incidents still result, it is imperative that all lunarnauts—no matter what age—be familiar with the Heimlich maneuver and its variations so that everyone can be prepared to dislodge partially masticated food from the windpipes of other people—and themselves. Please consult “Appendix B: First Aid and Safety Procedures” for this information.
* * *
I. But still delicious and nutritious!
SPACE JERK REBELLION
Lunar day 217
Lunchtime
Almost every adult at MBA was recruited to the search party. Only three stayed behind. Lars and Sonja Sjoberg were two of them, of course; the Sjobergs never thought about anyone but themselves. They hadn’t emerged from their suite since Nina’s disappearance had been discovered. Either they didn’t know Nina was missing, or they didn’t care.
The other adult who stayed at MBA was Dr. Marquez. The official reason for this was that someone had to keep an eye on all the kids and that Dr. Marquez, as our base psychiatrist, was best equipped to help all of us deal with the potential trauma of Nina’s disappearance. The unofficial reason was that Chang thought Dr. Marquez was an idiot. He believed Marquez was a lousy psychiatrist who’d only been brought to the moon because NASA wanted his wife up there and because he was famous. (Dr. Marquez had published a bestselling self-help book back on earth and was now working on one about mental health on the moon called Lunarnauts and Lunatics.) However, Dr. Marquez didn’t seem too upset about being asked to stay behind. In fact, he seemed almost relieved. I’d heard rumors that he’d had some claustrophobia issues with his space suit on the trip up to the moon—panicking that he was running out of air and flipping out—and so he wasn’t in any hurry to suit up again and go out onto the lunar surface.
The rest of the adults were all extremely competent, though. They quickly assigned themselves to teams and set out in search of Nina. There were twelve of them, so they broke up into six groups of two to cover more ground. Four adults stayed close to the base: Drs. Brahmaputra-Marquez, Janke, Goldstein, and Iwanyi. The other eight adults took moon rovers and spread out farther.
The moon rover garage had been badly damaged a month before, when Garth Grisan had tried to kill me with the base’s giant robot arm. Luckily, two of the three main rovers had survived the attack, only needing minor repairs. The third had been totaled, although the truth was, we had never needed all three big rovers at once anyhow. The rovers were going to be far more important once Moon Base Beta began construction. (NASA was working feverishly to get us a new one before then.) In the meantime, there was a smaller emergency backup rover that could fill in.
The big rovers coul
d seat four adults at once. They weren’t much different from the ones the Apollo missions had brought to the moon seventy years before. They looked like souped-up go-karts: basically a chassis, four tires, and a small engine. They weren’t fancy, but they didn’t have to be. All they really had to do was get everyone from place to place.
Dr. Kim and Dr. Alvarez, along with Dr. Merritt and Dr. Balnikov, set off to the north in one, planning to search Solar Arrays 1 and 2. Meanwhile, Mom and Dad and Chang and Dr. Howard went off toward the future site of Moon Base Beta. This seemed pointless to me; Nina obviously hadn’t taken a rover herself, so she probably wouldn’t have ranged too far away, especially when there were moon rocks all over the place. That was all the moon was, really—a massive ball of rocks. But Chang argued that there was no guessing what Nina might have done. After all, no one had figured she would ever leave the base solo to steal moon rocks. Therefore, if she could have gone to the Moon Base Beta site, then it was worth checking out.
In the meantime, all the kids had been assigned to go back to school.
We didn’t, though. First of all, none of us could concentrate. Second, none of us wanted to do it. Having your moon-base commander disappear seemed as good an excuse as any for a holiday, and Dr. Marquez was powerless to stop us. In fact, his own children led the rebellion.
We had all gathered in the rec room for school as ordered, but Patton and Lily Sjoberg didn’t even bother to show up, and once Cesar realized they were playing hooky, he decided to join them. Dr. Marquez was one of those parents who didn’t really believe in discipline, so the only threat he could muster against Cesar was: “If you don’t come back here, I will be very disappointed with you.” “Deal,” Cesar had said, and then walked out.
After that, Roddy had complained that he shouldn’t have to stay in school if Cesar wasn’t there, and Inez said that if Roddy didn’t have to go, then she wouldn’t either. The two younger Marquez kids stormed off, ignoring their father’s weak warnings for them to not disobey him. After that, the rest of us went on strike as well.
In truth, Dr. Marquez didn’t seem that disappointed in his children—or any of the rest of us. Instead, he seemed rather pleased to have some time to himself, and went to his residence to watch television.
Violet and Kamoze turned on the main SlimScreen in the rec room and started to watch Squirrel Force, their favorite TV show. I went with Kira to the mess hall to get lunch. I’d expected Roddy to go off to play veeyar games someplace, but instead he followed us. The only thing that interested Roddy more than virtual reality at MBA was girls.
Lily Sjoberg and Kira couldn’t have been any more different, but Roddy didn’t seem to care. His interest was constantly ping-ponging from one to the other, usually based upon whoever was closest to him. The fact that neither one liked him did nothing to deter him. He did seem to realize that Lily Sjoberg was a long shot, but he kept lurking around her anyhow, as if hoping that someday she’d see the light. As for Kira, he truly appeared to believe that her disdain for him was merely covering up her real feelings of affection. So he tried harder with her, doing everything he could to break down her resolve, unaware that this only made her dislike him even more.
On this day, as usual, he made the mistake of thinking the best way to impress her was to show how brilliant he was. He cornered us while we were rehydrating our lunches and said, “You know, statistically, the chances of them finding Nina out there are extremely slim.”
Kira regarded him with her usual distaste. “No, they’re not. There’s twelve people looking for her.”
“Twelve people can barely cover any ground at all,” Roddy sniffed. “Do you have any idea how staggeringly large the search area is?”
“If I say yes, do you promise not to tell us?” I asked.
Kira giggled.
Roddy scowled at me and then turned his attention to Kira. “We’re assuming that Nina left the base at around midnight last night, right? That’s when she shut down the security cameras to cover her exit. . . .”
“That’s only an assumption,” I said, pulling my lunch out of the rehydrator.
“It’s a good assumption,” Roddy corrected. “It might as well be a fact. The cameras go down at midnight. Nina disappears out the air lock right afterwards. Obviously, she turned the cameras off.”
“You really believe she went out on the surface?” Kira asked. “I thought you were sure she was a cloud of sentient nanobots.”
“And you were sure she’d been murdered,” Roddy countered. “Both were completely plausible theories. But in the light of new information, I realize that Nina was not murdered and is most likely human and left the base through the air lock.”
“Is ‘most likely human’?” I repeated.
“If anyone at this base is a cyborg, it’s her,” Roddy declared.
I groaned. “You mean, you think she’s part robot?”
“It’s no secret that NASA has been experimenting with cyborg technology for years,” Roddy said, which was completely wrong as far as I knew.
Kira’s food finished rehydrating as well. She had selected chicken enchiladas for lunch, while I’d picked shrimp cocktail. We took our plates and headed to the drink station.
Roddy stuck with us. “The point is, Nina has been out on the lunar surface for around twelve hours. Now, Nina was in excellent shape, so she could certainly cover three miles an hour, if not four. But for the sake of argument, let’s say it was three. Three miles an hour for twelve hours is thirty-six miles. Which means the potential search area is a circle with a radius of thirty six miles—or approximately four thousand seventy square miles.”
I paused in the midst of filling a cup with reclaimed water, alarmed by this number. “Nina probably didn’t walk thirty-six miles in a straight line,” I said.
“That’s exactly the problem,” Roddy pointed out. “If she had, we could simply search the perimeter of the circle. But instead, she’s probably at some random point inside that circle. Even if she only went three miles out, the search area would still be over twenty-eight square miles. That’s a lot of ground for twelve people to cover. It’d be like finding a needle in a haystack out there.”
I shared a concerned look with Kira. We had both been out on the surface a month before. We knew what it was like out there. The entire landscape was dull and gray. Our white space suits blended right into it. If Nina wasn’t moving, it would be extremely hard to spot her out in the wasteland, if not impossible.
Before I could say anything, Zan Perfonic appeared. So as not to startle me, she projected an image of herself wandering in from the staging area and waving for my attention. In fact, she did such a good job of being unobtrusive that I almost didn’t realize it was her at first.
“Can you excuse me?” I asked Kira. “I have to go to the bathroom.”
Kira shot me a look of betrayal, not wanting to be left alone with Roddy. “Right now?”
“It’s an emergency,” I told her, then left my lunch on the counter and hurried off.
Behind me, I heard Roddy speak in what he thought was his suavest voice. “Don’t worry, Kira. I’d be happy to dine with you.”
As I headed to the bathroom, my watch vibrated, indicating a call was coming in. I glanced at it and saw it was Riley Bock. She’d probably just woken up back in Hawaii. Normally, I would have answered immediately, but I needed to talk to Zan and I didn’t know how long she’d be around. I had no choice but to ignore the call.
Zan followed me into the bathroom. Since all the adults were out on the surface, it was unlikely anyone else was in there, but I checked the stalls anyhow out of habit. “What’s up?” I asked, trying to keep the conversation in my head.
“That’s what I came to ask you,” Zan replied. “Any sign of Nina?”
I quickly recapped everything we’d learned since I’d seen Zan earlier that morning. She listened intently, though she was obviously thrown when I got to the part about Nina smuggling rocks. “Why would she do that?”
she asked. “It seems like such a big risk to take.”
“For money, I guess.”
Zan frowned. Money was a concept that had caused her trouble in the past. Apparently, her planet didn’t have anything like it, which had seemed odd to me until she’d pointed out that even on our own planet, money was a bizarre concept as well. After all, out of the billions of species of animal, humans were the only ones who used it. And it often seemed to cause as many problems as it solved.
“Isn’t Nina being paid money for her job on the moon?” Zan asked.
“Yes.”
“And she doesn’t really need any of this money while she’s up there, right?”
“Right. All our food and stuff up here is free. The money would really be for when she gets back to earth.”
“And it would be worth jeopardizing her life, her job, and her reputation just for more money?”
“Well, according to my parents, it’d be for a lot more money,” I replied. “Millions of dollars, maybe.”
Zan looked at me curiously, trying to comprehend this. “Why would anyone need so much money?”
“So they can buy more stuff.”
“You mean, like extra food, in case of emergencies?”
“Er . . . no. Like fancy cars and mansions.”
“What’s a mansion?”
“It’s a giant house. Like with a whole bunch of bedrooms and ten bathrooms.”
“Why would Nina need a house with ten bathrooms? Does she have some sort of bowel disorder you haven’t mentioned?”
“No. It’s a kind of status symbol.”
“Having an excess of places to expel bodily waste in your home is a sign of status on earth?”
“Er . . . yes. I guess.” This conversation wasn’t going quite the way I’d expected. “It’s really more about the size of your house, though. Like, the Sjobergs are crazy rich, and I’ve heard they have one of the biggest houses in all of Europe. As well as other mansions all over the world.”