by Stuart Gibbs
“What happened?” Mom asked over the radio.
“We wrecked the rover,” I said.
“A meteorite hit it!” Kira added quickly. “It wasn’t my fault!”
Unable to unlatch the buckle, I resorted to force, pounding on it angrily. It popped right open and I sprang from the rover.
A bizarrely calm computerized voice suddenly spoke in my ear. “Warning,” it said. “Your oxygen levels are down to twenty percent. Please search for safety immediately.” This was accompanied by a holographic display projected inside the visor, showing how low my oxygen levels were.
That seemed wrong. I hadn’t been out long enough to use eighty percent of my oxygen. But maybe, in my panic, I was sucking it down much faster than I needed to. I did my best to slow my breathing.
With the cloud of dust still drifting to the ground around us, it was impossible to tell where anything was. It was hard enough to see Kira, and she was only a few feet away. I grabbed her arm and staggered forward in the direction that I thought the lava tube should be. A few feet on, the cloud quickly dissipated and we were back under the clear dark sky. Between the fog inside my helmet and the dust outside it, it was still hard to see much of anything, but I managed to make out the tube ahead of us.
The meteorites were still coming down. If anything, they were coming down even faster.
I spotted the emergency repair kit, half-buried in the moon dust only a few feet away, and staggered toward it.
“No time for that!” Kira yelled.
I kept going for it anyhow. If we left the kit behind and it was destroyed, our rescue mission would be a failure. Besides, it was only a few seconds’ delay—although each second out there counted. I slipped my fingers under the handle and yanked it free of the dust.
“Dash! Run!” Kira yelled, as if maybe I hadn’t thought of this myself.
I did my best, but unfortunately, in addition to the standard difficulties of moving fast in low gravity, we had landed in a deep field of dust, which clung to our legs like quicksand, making our progress even more troublesome.
Everywhere I looked, clouds of dust were blooming around me. It felt like I was in one of Roddy’s virtual-reality war games, with the enemy attacking from everywhere at once, only I didn’t have anything to protect myself with, and should I get hit, I wouldn’t be able to press the reset button.
Plus, there was the whole inability-to-run thing. Our progress felt maddeningly slow, although we were actually moving. The safety of the tube was getting closer. But time seemed to be stretching out, every second feeling like hours.
An alarm sounded inside my helmet. “Red alert,” the computerized voice said. “Your oxygen levels are down to ten percent.” Once again, the holographic display was projected inside the visor. It was probably supposed to be helpful, but it was blocking what little view I had left.
Something was definitely wrong with my suit. I was losing oxygen way too fast. But I couldn’t take the time to breathe more slowly. Instead I kept doing my best to move fast, hoping there would be enough air left in my tank to get me to safety.
Kira stumbled beside me, but I took her arm and steadied her before she sprawled on the ground. A few steps later, she did the exact same thing for me.
“You’re almost here!” Mom called to us. “Hurry! Only a few steps more!”
Through the dust on my visor and the display informing me I was close to suffocation, I could barely make out the entrance of the lava tube just ahead: a subterranean ring of jagged rock leading into a twelve-foot-tall, pitch-black tunnel. The area around it had been excavated so that a slope of dust angled steeply down toward the opening. The other rover was parked near the top of the slope. We staggered past it.
A meteorite ricocheted off the mouth of the tube and zinged right between Kira and me, moving so fast it might as well have been a bullet. It missed both of us by inches.
We hit the dusty entry slope and stumbled. Slopes are difficult to negotiate in low gravity, even when you’re not running for your life. Kira and I both went down, tumbling through the dust toward the tube’s entrance. The world seemed to flip over me several times, and then I came to a hard, painful stop, facedown on the hard rock inside the tube. Kira was right beside me.
“Warning,” the computer in my helmet announced. “Oxygen levels are critically low. At current rate of respiration, you only have two minutes left.”
I pulled myself to my feet and found the air lock was only a few steps away. The operations pod was essentially an enormous white balloon that had been inflated inside the tube. It was millions of times sturdier than a real balloon, of course, but the concept was the same. It looked bizarrely out of place in the tube, like a massive sausage that was jammed in a dragon’s throat. The air lock sat at the end facing us. Dozens of moon-dust boot prints led along the rocky floor to it.
I hooked my hand beneath Kira’s arm, hauled her to her feet, and helped her toward the air lock.
“We’re here,” I announced.
“I see you,” Mom said, with obvious relief in her voice.
She must have flipped the switch to open the air lock automatically for us, because the door swung out as we approached. We clambered through the hole and locked the door tight behind us.
“Only one minute of oxygen remaining,” the computer told me. “Hypoxia is imminent. Get to safety as quickly as possible.”
Inside the air lock, a message flashed on a panel: PRESSURIZATION IN PROGRESS.
A rush of air buffeted my suit. As the atmosphere in the air lock changed to that of earth, we could immediately hear sounds around us: the murmur of worried voices inside the operations pod, the hum of machinery, the computerized voice—now coming from outside my helmet—announcing, “Pressurization complete. It is now safe to remove your helmet.”
At the exact same time, the same voice inside my helmet was saying, “Thirty seconds of oxygen remaining. If you do not reach safety immediately, you will black out and possibly die.”
I yanked my gloves off, unlatched my helmet, detached it from my suit, and gulped in air.
Beside me, Kira yanked off her helmet as well, then gave me a weak smile. “Guess we made it.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “We did.”
We both turned to the inner air lock door, which was glass. We could see our parents gathered around it with Chang, making no attempt to hide their relief that we were alive. Even Dr. Howard was giving us his full attention for once.
“The air jets here don’t have enough power to clean all that dust off those suits,” Dad told us through the door. “You’ll have to remove them in the air lock and leave them there. We can’t have you tracking all that dust in here.”
“All right,” I said, and finally noticed how much dust was caking my suit. I looked like I’d been dipped in flour. Kira looked even worse. Every time she moved, cascades of dust poured from every crevice of her suit.
The two of us quickly helped each other unlatch our suits and climb out of them. Kira shrugged off hers first, then I did mine.
Kira’s face suddenly went somewhat pale, like she’d had a terrible shock. When she realized I’d noticed, she tried to hide it, but it was too late.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“This.” Kira pointed to a gash in the right shoulder of my suit.
A meteorite had torn through almost every layer of it. And given the tear’s location, it had come awfully close to my head as well. That explained my oxygen loss; it must have leaked out through the last remaining layer. I figured the tear was from the meteorite I’d felt pass, the one that had blown our tire and upended the rover. Though it didn’t really matter when it had happened. The fact was, only one final membrane of fabric had remained between me and instant death. If the meteorite had been a millimeter to the left—or if I had been leaning a millimeter to the right—or if I’d torn the suit while hurrying to safety—I wouldn’t have been standing there. I’d have been dead out on the surface instead.
>
The mere thought of it made me weak in the knees. My legs buckled and Kira had to steady me.
The inner air lock door popped open. My parents rushed through to my side. I don’t know if they’d seen the gash in the suit as well, or if they simply had decided they couldn’t wait anymore for me. Dr. Howard came through right behind them.
My folks hugged me while I stood there, the suit still piled on the floor around my ankles. Beside me, Dr. Howard clutched Kira tightly.
“We thought you might have . . . ,” Mom began, but couldn’t bring herself to finish the statement. “In our hurry to get you here, no one thought to check and see if any meteorites were in the area.”
“We’re so sorry,” Dad said.
“It’s okay,” I told them.
“It’s not,” Mom replied. “We almost lost you two out there.”
I did my best not to think too much about that statement. Instead I said, “Remember how, for the first few months after we got here, I used to complain how boring it was on the moon?”
“Yes,” Dad answered.
“I really miss those days,” I said, and then collapsed in his arms.
Excerpt from The Official Residents’ Guide to Moon Base Alpha, “Appendix A: Potential Health and Safety Hazards,” © 2040 by National Aeronautics and Space Administration
SPACE SUITS
The potential for most danger while on the lunar surface isn’t from meteorites or lunar rover accidents; it’s from human error. A space suit that has been put on hastily—and thus improperly—is thousands of times more likely to result in harm than a meteorite. So before venturing onto the surface, check all your suit’s life-support and safety systems several times over. Then do the same for your moonwalk partner. And while on the surface, be alert! Keep checking your systems and take care to avoid any damage. Be prepared for any emergency. Should one occur, know the ins and outs of your suit, as well as the fastest route back to base. For more on the space suits and how they operate, please consult the separate NASA Guide to Your Space Suit.
VIDEO TRANSMISSION
Lunar day 217
Post-traumatic experience recovery period
The helmet repair kit had survived the trip through the meteor shower. Chang, Mom, and Dr. Howard went right to work replacing their visors. Meanwhile, Dad patched my suit the best he could. The meteor shower was letting up—Kira and I were unlucky to have been outside for the worst of it—and everyone wanted to resume the search for Nina as soon as it was over.
The pod was cramped with all of us in it. It was much smaller than I’d expected, given that four people were going to be living there once construction for MBB was under way. Most of the actual work would be done by robots, but humans were still needed there. Even though the site wasn’t that far from MBA, it still took time and energy to go from one to the other—and as Kira and I had just learned firsthand, the less time you had to spend in transit on the lunar surface, the better.
Inside the pod, there were four bunks against the side wall, four workstations, some storage areas, a tiny kitchen, and a toilet that looked even more awful than the ones we had back at MBA. This was all crammed into a tubular space smaller than my bedroom back on earth. There wasn’t even a separate space for the toilet. You could draw a curtain around you, but that was it for privacy. If anyone got bad gas, they’d stink up the whole pod for days.
“This place makes Moon Base Alpha look like the Four Seasons,” I told Mom.
“If you think this is bad, imagine what it was like for the crew who built MBA.” Mom popped her old, cracked visor off her helmet and tossed it aside. “At least the people staying here will have the option of visiting MBA now and then for showers and time off. The MBA construction crew had to stay in a pod like this for an entire year.”
“Four people? In something this small for a year?” I echoed. “I’m surprised no one went nuts.”
“They might have,” Dad said. “NASA was awfully secretive about the whole project.”
My smartwatch suddenly vibrated on my wrist. Riley Bock was calling from Hawaii.
“It’s Riley,” I said. “Mind if I take it?”
“Sure,” Mom told me. “We’re not going anywhere until these helmets are fixed.”
I accepted the call. Video of Riley sprang up on the face of my watch. She was outside my old middle school, passing from one classroom to another. As usual, it was a beautiful day in Hawaii—even though it was the middle of winter in the rest of the United States. Riley was dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, and the sun was so bright, the image was almost blinding in the darkness of the pod. “Aloha, Moonie!” she said. “Is something wrong up there?”
It took me a moment to realize she was asking this jokingly. “Why?”
“ ’Cause I’ve sent you, like, thirty texts since last night and I called once and I haven’t heard boo from you today.”
“Sorry. Things have been kind of hectic.” I picked my words very carefully. NASA monitored all our calls, making sure that no one said anything bad about the moon program or leaked classified information. If I did that, they’d stop the conversation immediately—putting a fake “transmission failure” notice up to fool Riley—and I could lose my phone privileges completely. For example, even though there’d been a murder at MBA a month before, I and all the other Moonies had been barred from saying a single word about it to anyone on earth. The entire story had been buried by NASA.
Riley asked, “Did you watch that video I sent you last night yet?”
“Video? . . . No.” It occurred to me that, in all the events of the day, I hadn’t bothered reading through all the texts from Riley. “I didn’t even realize you’d sent one.”
“Well, you should watch it. . . .” The video feed suddenly began to cut out, reducing the image to jumbled pixels and garbled sounds for a few seconds. The decaying feed wasn’t really surprising, given that I was receiving it in an underground tube 250,000 miles from earth. Frankly, it was astonishing that I’d received a clear image for as long as I had.
“Hold on,” I said. “You’re breaking up.”
Riley seemed to still be talking, unaware that I couldn’t hear or see her, but it was hard to tell for sure—because I couldn’t see or hear her. And then, a single brief burst of audible speech came through: “. . . the Sjobergs . . .”
I moved toward the air lock, where I figured the reception might be slightly better. “Can you repeat that?”
Sure enough, the image cleared up a bit as I neared the air lock. For a few seconds, I could see Riley bright and clear again, as if I were right back on earth. She was standing outside the gymnasium. A lot of students had now gathered behind her, realizing she was talking to me on the moon, and were either waving hello or mugging for the camera. Riley repeated herself. “I said, I guess you’re getting along better with the Sjobergs now, huh?”
While NASA would never have let me bad-mouth the space tourists, I hadn’t ever made it a secret that we didn’t get along. “Um . . . why would you say that?”
“Watch the video! And if they ever invite you to one of their fancy homes for vacation, tell them your best friend needs to come too!”
The picture fuzzed out again before I could respond, and was then replaced by a screen saying TRANSMISSION FAILURE. I guessed this was legit and that NASA hadn’t intervened—transmitting between earth and the moon wasn’t exactly easy—but the truth was, I had no idea.
Kira pointed to a computer station crammed between two storage units near the air lock. “Think we can watch the video on that?” She wasn’t even trying to pretend she hadn’t overheard my conversation. In the cramped pod, it would have been impossible not to.
“It might be private,” Mom told her.
“I don’t mind,” I said. I didn’t want to wait to see it. On my watch, I brought up the list of texts Riley had sent, searching for the one with the video attached. I could see why Riley had called. She’d sent the video the night before, but had then f
ired off plenty more texts that morning. I hadn’t responded to any of them, because I’d been busy trying to not get killed by Patton Sjoberg. Or meteorites.
I located the video and transferred the file to the computer. It popped up on the screen and instantly started playing. It began with the logo of InterNetwork News, and then Katie Gallagher, one of their most famous anchors, appeared.
“This is an INN exclusive,” she announced. “If you’ve been paying any attention to Moon Base Alpha—and honestly, who hasn’t?—then you certainly know about the world’s first lunar tourist family, the Sjobergs. But while the rest of the Moonies at MBA have made video logs and blog updates, we haven’t heard anything from the Sjobergs at all—leading many people to speculate that perhaps their experience up there hasn’t been enjoyable. Well, we are about to find out the truth. The Sjobergs have finally consented to break their silence and conduct an interview with me.”
“Uh-oh,” Chang said under his breath. “When did this run?”
“Last night, I guess,” I told him. “I’ll bet Riley sent it right after it posted.”
The video shifted to a view of the Sjobergs in their room at MBA. They all sat on their InflatiCubes facing the camera, looking like a perfectly decent family for once. Lars and Sonja sat in the middle, flanked by Patton and Lily. Katie Gallagher was relegated to a tiny inset down at the bottom of the screen.
“How’d they even do this?” Kira asked. “Wouldn’t NASA have blocked them?”
“Maybe they found a way to get around the NASA censors,” Mom replied.
“Thanks for joining me,” Katie said on the video.
“Oh, it’s our pleasure,” Lars replied, flashing the first smile I’d seen from him in the past few months. “We’re very big fans of yours.”
Katie beamed. “That’s so kind of you. I hope you don’t mind, but I’d like to cut to the chase. Could you address the rumors that have been swirling about your dissatisfaction with Moon Base Alpha?”
“Certainly,” Lars answered. “I’d like to take this opportunity to declare that all those rumors are completely unfounded. We have no issues at all with Moon Base Alpha. In fact, we love it up here.”