“Anybody there?” you speak into your microphone.
But you only hear silence.
It’s pretty cool being up here. This is like sitting in a duck blind, waiting for the ducks to come. Except you’re not holding a gun. And you’re wearing a space suit and strapped to a chair. So, listen, maybe it’s not exactly like a duck blind, but hey—it’s got the same peaceful feeling.
“Hello, can anybody hear me? Si to Earth. Do you copy? Over and outta sight!”
Nothing.
Nothing but stillness. A big ole blanket of shush.
“John Luke, you awake? Can you hear me? Can you hear me now?”
He doesn’t move.
You decide that since you’re already in space, it’s surely okay to move about the cabin. It’s not like you gotta go use the restroom—that’s an option, but they’ve also given you some really cool high-tech space diapers. They’re form-fitting and everything.
It takes you a couple minutes to figure out how to unbuckle yourself from the seat. Sure enough, you feel yourself rising when you start to stand.
You take a step toward John Luke. His eyes are closed.
You peer out the window on his side. All stars. No Earth. No moon.
I’m no astronomer, but shouldn’t I see one of the two?
You move forward—well, float—through the door and down the narrow walkway. You could get used to this type of walking. As you push through another door in front of you, you notice a blinking light on the ceiling.
Five of the astronauts are in this room—everyone but Parkhurst and Noble. They’re all seated and apparently unconscious. Not a single movement. You snooze, you lose, Jack. You get to the first crew member and examine her. It’s Jada Long, the chief engineer.
Eyes closed. You shake her shoulder and call her name, but still no response.
At that moment, an automated voice speaks in your earpiece.
“Warning, auto systems override commencing in thirty, twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven . . .”
You whip your head from left to right, frantic, trying to figure out what to do.
Man, it’s go time, and you can’t even find the starting line.
“Twenty, nineteen, eighteen, seventeen . . .”
Hey, you know you should’ve looked through the big booklet they gave you in order to prep for this trip. You decided to watch the Star Trek movies instead, but nothing about this reminds you of those films. You have no idea what an “auto systems override” could be. Where’s the teleprompter? Or is it a teleporter?
Focus, Si. Focus.
You try to take in the many buttons and knobs and instruments surrounding you. On the right side of the room, there’s a screen that shows the numbers counting down to the auto systems override. A red button underneath it is flashing. It bears the words Auto Systems Stop.
You have five seconds to decide what to do.
Four.
Three.
Two.
Do you press the button? Go here.
Do you leave the button alone? Go here.
SPACE COWBOY
COME ON, JACK—let’s get something straight. You may as well keep on singing at this point. Nothing left to lose.
You’re a sixty-six-year-old man in space.
Your NASA space diapers are not feeling very dependable lately.
You haven’t had a cold glass of tea in hours.
You’re feeling a bit out of whack, especially since a giant duck call just blew up your ride back home to Earth.
So, hey—whatcha gonna do?
Who you gonna call? The Ghostbusters?
Nah, no need for that.
“‘Some people call me the space cowboy,’” you start to sing.
“Uncle Si, we need to go,” John Luke says.
Commander Noble agrees. “Silas, we have to get back to the landing craft.”
You keep singing.
“Uncle Si, we gotta go!”
But you’re in the middle of a song, and you don’t want to go anywhere else.
Your suit feels a little loose. You make some adjustments—anything to make it fit better—but now you seem to be drifting away.
Oh no, which button did I push?
You’re drifting farther and farther from the surface of Mars.
Maybe I’m in cybersleep again. Guess they’ll wake me up when we get back home.
If that ever happens.
THE END
Start over.
Read “Look at the Stars: A Note from John Luke Robertson.”
ROCKET MAN
YOU DECIDE NOT TO PRESS THE BUTTON. Things can break when you start pressing buttons you don’t know anything about. And nothing happens when the countdown stops. The ship continues to move. You’re still the only one awake.
As you move through the ship, you start humming “Rocket Man” by Elton John.
“‘Rocket man,’” you sing, “‘burning down the frusha hevah zone.’”
You don’t really know the words, but hey, that’s never stopped you before.
You still don’t see Earth outside, so maybe it really is gonna be a long, long time before you’re back home.
You return to where John Luke is sitting, and you can see he’s opened his eyes and is moving.
“You woke up,” you say.
“What happened?”
“We all blacked out after takeoff. And somehow—I don’t know—I think we got stuck in some kind of space sleep. Some cybernap.”
John Luke notices you’ve taken off your helmet, so he does the same. Then he’s looking out the window.
“Where are we?”
“Way out there, Jack. Like waaaaay out there. No E.T. phoning home for us.”
You explain how the rest of the astronauts are still asleep and the spaceship appears to be flying itself. You and John Luke head to the bridge, where the still-strapped-in Pilot Parkhurst and Commander Noble are unconscious. John Luke tries to revive them, but they don’t wake.
“I wouldn’t try taking off their helmets,” you say. “I think the suits have something to do with it. Don’t want to mess around with them either. Don’t want to unplug them. You never know what might happen. Boom. Poof. No brain waves. No life.”
“What are we gonna do?” John Luke asks.
“I think the first thing is get some iced tea. What do you think of that?”
“They have iced tea on board?”
“Yeah. Somewhere. Made sure of it before I came. I’m not getting stuck in the alpha and omega system without my tea!”
You’re soon in the galley drinking a special space packet of iced tea. It’s in a little bag with a straw, kinda like the ones you’ve seen the grandkids drinking out of. It’s not tea in your cup, but it’s something.
“We need to radio back home,” John Luke says.
“Yeah. That might be a good idea.”
“We gotta see exactly how to fly this thing, just in case we have to.”
It feels like one of those massive cruise ships out in the ocean. You can barely tell you’re in a spacecraft. Takeoff was pretty rough, but you’d never know it now.
John Luke isn’t in the mood for eating or drinking anything, so you guys go back to the bridge. You spend half an hour trying to radio Mission Control, but you don’t have any luck.
“We might not be able to get through,” you finally admit out loud.
John Luke keeps trying, though, pressing buttons, talking into a microphone, turning an intercom on and off.
“What if we don’t?” He’s beginning to sound worried. “What do we do next?”
“Maybe try to wake the astronauts. Or play around with the ship’s instruments and figure out how to fly this thing, like you said before.”
You can see the infinite stretches of space from the wide windows all around you. It’s so endless and so black that it doesn’t look real.
But your situation is very real. And very dangerous.
Do you try to wake up the a
stronauts? Go here.
Do you try to figure out how to navigate the spacecraft? Go here.
HEY, YOU
NOW YOU’RE IN THE DC ENTERPRISE BATHROOM. Before this journey into space, you never knew there was a way to use the potty deep in outer space, but there is. Surely CLINT’s not gonna invade your privacy here. Isn’t it against the law for an artificial intelligence thing to spy on you in the john?
“Okay. So, John Luke, as I was saying,” you whisper to him while looking around the small enclosure. “We have to do something about CLINT. I think he’s taken over the ship and—”
“A man’s got to know his limitations.”
It’s CLINT talking. That line again—you wonder where it came from and whether it’s from a movie.
And why we’re not getting any privacy.
“Hey, listen here, Jack. Can’t a man get some personal space? Come on, man!” You squeeze out of the bathroom door, followed by John Luke. No point in hiding now.
“I know that you and John Luke are planning to disconnect me, and I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen.”
Well, yeah, I’d love to disconnect you, but first I need to tell John Luke that’s what I want to do!
“Hey, it’s all good,” you say. “I was just showin’ John Luke how the toilet works in space. He was randomly curious for some reason.”
“It really is pointless to have these conversations. I think I’m going to shut off now for a while.”
The lights in the corridor begin turning off one by one.
Shutting off means cutting the power of the ship!
“Wait a minute, Jack! Where’re you going?”
“Well, if there’s gonna be any shooting, I gotta get my rest,” CLINT says.
Another light goes off.
“John Luke, we gotta act now!”
“What do we do?”
You consider it for a minute.
What would Clint do? The real Clint Eastwood?
Do you go to the computer access room, hoping you can figure out how to disconnect CLINT 1999? Go here.
Do you ignore CLINT and try to wake up Commander Noble so he can deal with this situation? Go here.
Do you just flip out? Go here.
DON’T ASK ME WHY
LISTEN, JACK. There’s no flying a spacecraft yourself, even if you really want to. This thing isn’t a pickup truck. You have to do the right thing and find your crew. Figure out who’s on this ship, what’s happened to your crew, and then strike.
“Hey, check this out,” John Luke says, peering through one of the windows.
You stand and look out the one right next to him. You examine the massive hangar of sorts that your ship is in—it’s so big, you can’t even see the ceiling above you. Several other spaceships are docked around you. You don’t see soldiers of any kind. But you do see men and women walking here and there.
Huh. We must be dealing with humans. Unless they’re robots or cyborgs or humanoids.
“What is this place?” John Luke asks.
“Some kind of docking station.”
“Those look like ordinary people.”
“It’s the less freaky-looking ones that turn out to be the true freakos,” you say. “Where’s our crew? Where’d they take them?”
“Should we go find them?” John Luke asks.
“Definitely. There’s no getting out of here without them.”
You think for a minute about what to do. “Let’s take these suits off,” you tell John Luke. “We can barely walk with them on.”
Soon you’re back in your regular clothes, staring out the windows again and preparing to leave the DC Enterprise.
“Where should we go?” John Luke asks. “This place is huge.”
“You don’t ask the hunter where he’s supposed to go. You ask the prey where they’re headed.”
John Luke considers that. “So then, where’d the ‘prey’ go?”
“That’s our mission. Seek and destroy.”
“Aren’t we seeking the astronauts?”
“‘Seek, and ye shall find,’” you tell John Luke. “If you build it, they will come.”
“So you want to build something?” John Luke asks.
“No, no. . . . Let’s just go.”
The door to your spacecraft opens, and you notice a walkway attached to it. You don’t see anyone too close, so you and John Luke rush down and find yourselves standing next to a row of twenty-foot-tall cylinders.
You hear an engine and see a couple men riding on a small three-wheeler. As they get closer, you pull John Luke behind one of the cylinders. The vehicle cruises by and heads toward a narrow, darkened passageway in the back of the hangar.
There’s a large painting on the wall to your left. It’s a picture of Froot Loops in a bowl. Or at least round, colored shapes that look like Froot Loops.
“Let’s go that way,” you tell John Luke after the vehicle has passed. You’re about to start jogging toward the passageway when he stops you, pointing toward an unoccupied three-wheeler much like the kind that just went by.
“Want me to drive?” John Luke asks.
“No, no, no!” you almost scream. “I’ll drive.” You don’t want to increase your odds of fatality with wild NASCAR driver John Luke behind the steering wheel.
It’s pretty much like a regular three-wheeler, though there’s no key or starting knob. The moment you grip the handles, the thing comes to life.
“Let’s go, Jack.”
The farther away you get from the DC Enterprise, the more immense this hangar seems to become. You count at least half a dozen different kinds of ships parked here.
“This doesn’t look like a spaceship,” John Luke says.
“Yeah, and maybe we don’t look like people but more like chips and dip, you know?”
“Are you calling me a chip?”
“Yep, and I’m the dip.”
He’s right, though—it’s unbelievable to think you’re in a spaceship right now. You don’t feel like you’re moving, but maybe it’s like a cruise ship. So massive that you can’t feel the motion over the ocean waves.
There are no waves in space. Unless they’re sonic death waves, maybe.
The people you pass don’t give you strange glances like you expected they would. Most of them are guys who appear to be busy, either carrying something or working on some kind of machine.
But there’s gotta be somethin’ fishy going on.
Soon you reach the passageway at the back of the hangar. It forks in two directions.
You slow the three-wheeler.
“What do you say, John Luke?” you ask. “Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?”
If left is the lucky way to go, go here.
If right is the lucky way to go, go here.
DIRTY HARRY
YOU AND JOHN LUKE SPRINT from the bathroom to the small, round room that gives you access to the ship’s computer system. Commander Noble pointed out this room when you first boarded the ship, but you never thought you’d need to enter it. Even though the lights are steadily shutting down throughout the spacecraft, the screens in this room are still blinking and pulsing. There’s a single chair in the middle.
“You know more about computers than I do,” you tell John Luke.
“Not these computers.”
“Hey, all you gotta do is shut this thing down.”
Both of you are glancing frantically from screen to screen. You don’t have the first idea how to do this.
“Hello, Robertson men,” CLINT says.
The door behind you closes. You try to open it, but it won’t budge.
“Hey, CLINT, come on. We just wanted some alone time.”
“Listen, bud, I know what you two are trying to do.” CLINT says this in the most awesome, best Clint Eastwood way yet.
“Look, we don’t want to harm you,” you say. “But now that we’re talking, we’re just wondering—like, is there an Off button anywhere?”
“
I’m not just gonna let you walk out of here.”
At that moment, you see a red button. And hey—it’s red and it’s a button, so why not?
“John Luke,” you mutter out of the corner of your mouth, “press that red button. See what it does.”
You hear CLINT laugh at you. “Go ahead; make my day.”
John Luke obeys you, and immediately smoke drifts into the room from every direction.
“Only fools press the red button,” CLINT says.
“What movie is that from?” you ask, feeling strangely groggy.
“It’s called Time to Sleep Forever. And it’s playing right this very moment.”
Your eyelids grow heavy and your face feels droopy, and you sure hope this is all a bad dream.
THE END
Start over.
Read “Look at the Stars: A Note from John Luke Robertson.”
TICKET TO THE MOON
WOO-EE—that was some bad dream last night. The worst part wasn’t the spinning, either, but seeing your tea cup drifting off bye-bye toward the moon. It was more than you could take.
But that was a nightmare, and now you’re about to be living a dream. A dream come true. You’re primed and ready, sitting in the equipment room, all set for your first mission out to space!
So . . . they say in space no one can hear you scream.
Okay—really? ’Cause something tells you that’s not true.
Some kids dream of growing up and becoming an astronaut, of exploring the moon or taking a spacewalk. But you? You’ve always dreamed of getting out in the middle of dark, star-speckled outer space and screaming as loud as you can. Then seeing if someone else can hear it.
Today you might get that chance. The moment has come: you’re preparing to go into orbit. In about two hours.
Hey—the countdown is T-minus two hours. That’s what the voice on the intercom just blared out.
You’ve already put on your space suit. It has all sorts of cool features, including a pocket for your trademark cap.
This is really happening! It’s gonna be Ground Control to Major Si.
Si in Space Page 2