Dinosaur Boy Saves Mars

by Cory Putman Oakes

  But I might have been imagining things.

  Sushi in Space

  “Eighteen minutes to Mars orbit,” my grandfather said cheerfully.

  I was finally sitting on one of the chairs. I had to perch on the very edge to avoid smashing my plates against the back and to allow my tail to curve over the front. But my butt, which had fallen asleep after sitting on the floor for so long, was much more comfortable now.

  I hadn’t had any warning that I’d be taking a trip to Mars that day, so I didn’t have much stuff with me. Just my lunch sack (with the remains of my lunch inside), my notebook, and a pen. I opened the notebook and added “Preventing the Extinction of Polar Bears” to my Possible Passions list.

  “Is that for your paper?” Elliot asked, reading over my shoulder. “You got the extension?”

  I nodded.

  “I got a B minus on mine,” Elliot said and flopped into the chair next to mine. “Ms. Filch doesn’t think basketball is a good enough passion. She told me I needed to ‘dig deeper.’”

  “Hmmm,” I said and frowned down at my list until a large bowl of salad greens appeared under my nose. I looked up to find my grandfather grinning at me.

  “Dinner?”

  My stomach growled loudly. It felt like a million years had passed since I ate lunch at school. Had that really been just a few hours ago?

  Well, a few hours, two polar bears, and a stowaway ago. No wonder I was so hungry.

  I put the notebook aside and dug into my salad while my grandfather handed small, rectangular black boxes to everybody else. I looked over with interest as Elliot opened his. I was expecting to see some sort of exotic, dehydrated space food. Like the powdery ice cream I had eaten at the space museum in second grade. But instead, the food inside the box was unmistakably—

  “Sushi?” Elliot asked hesitantly.

  “Sushi,” my grandfather agreed, holding his box at eye level and letting out a deep sigh of satisfaction.

  In the next chair over, Venetio was sniffing suspiciously at his box.

  “I’m not familiar with sushi,” he admitted as he fumbled the lid open. “Is it? I mean, could this really be—”

  “Fish,” Sylvie finished for him, wrinkling her nose and setting her box (unopened) on the empty seat beside her.

  “It’s from Sushi Zone,” my grandfather informed her, breaking apart his chopsticks with a loud snap so they were ready to use. “The best sushi restaurant in Portland.”

  “It’s still fish,” Sylvie said distastefully, pulling a Laffy Taffy rope out of her sweatshirt pocket and unwrapping it.

  “Fish,” Venetio murmured. He picked up something bright pink perched on top of a mound of rice. “I’ve heard of fish. Never seen any up close before.”

  “Never?” Elliot asked through a mouthful of rice. He was already halfway done with his meal. I’d never known Elliot to be particularly keen on sushi. But he was also the least picky eater I had ever met.

  “Fish is not very common outside Earth,” my grandfather explained, expertly dipping a piece of sushi into a small tub of soy sauce. “I try and stock up on it whenever I’m home. Good barter material. Plus, it’s delicious,” he added.

  He closed his eyes, took a bite, and mmm-hmmed loudly.

  Venetio continued to study what I assumed would be his first bite. Eventually.

  “It’s too cold for liquid water on Pluto,” he told us. “No water, no fish.”

  “Well, at least there’s one good thing about Pluto,” Sylvie snarked as she bit off an enormous piece of taffy.

  Venetio scowled at her, but instead of responding, he took a tiny nibble of his sushi. Nodding with approval, he picked up a glob of green stuff.

  “What’s this?” he asked, aiming for his mouth.

  My grandfather stopped Venetio’s hand just in time.

  “I wouldn’t eat that all at once,” he advised and set about explaining to the Plutonian about fiery wasabi and how he could mix it into his soy sauce.

  Under the cover of the demonstration, I turned to Sylvie.

  “Why don’t you like him?” I asked quietly. I was genuinely curious. Sylvie usually liked everybody, unless they did something to annoy her. But she had been snippy with Venetio from the beginning.

  Sylvie looked over at me. At some point during the trip, she had removed the clips that usually kept her antennae flat against her head. Her antennae were sticking straight up now. Each of them had a slight kink near the knob on the top, where the clip normally was.

  She waved her hand toward Venetio.

  “He’s a Plutonian,” she said impatiently.

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “And I’m a Martian,” she elaborated. “We don’t get along.”

  “You didn’t seem to have a problem with Ms. Helen,” I pointed out, thinking of how Sylvie had convinced our school’s Plutonian administrative assistant to help us break into the school. Twice. Which reminded me of something else…

  “Hey, why isn’t Ms. Helen blue?”

  “She is,” Sylvie answered. “She just wears a lot of makeup at school. As to why we get along…” She thought about this for a moment, shredding her Laffy Taffy wrapper as she did. “I guess it’s because we don’t talk about soccer. Ms. Helen isn’t really a fan.”

  “Soccer?” I asked, thinking about Venetio’s ticket. “What, are Martians and Plutonians rivals or something?”

  “Sort of,” Sylvie grumbled. “I mean, they’ve never been very good, so it’s not much of a rivalry. But they had a decent team in 2014. The 2014 Intergalactic Cup came down to Pluto and Mars, and things got kind of ugly.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because we beat them,” Sylvie said immediately. “In the final game of the ’14 Finals. One of our best strikers got fouled—”

  “‘Took a dive,’ you mean,” Venetio interjected in an icy voice from the other side of the circle. “He dove.”

  “I said ‘fouled,’” Sylvie growled at him. “He got fouled—”

  “He took a dive,” Venetio said again, gesturing with his chopsticks so violently that the piece of fish he had on the end was in real danger of being flung at Sylvie’s head.

  “He got fouled,” Sylvie insisted.

  “Well, I guess you’d know,” Venetio said, giving Sylvie a very pointed look.

  Sylvie glared at him as Elliot let out a guffaw.

  “What would Sylvie know about it?” he scoffed. “She hates sports.”

  “I was there,” Sylvie hissed at him. Then quickly, before Venetio could open his mouth again, she went on. “The score was tied two to two, with just three seconds left in regulation. Tycho Brawn, the best striker in Martian history, got fouled and scored the winning goal off a penalty kick. We—the Martians—won the cup. And the Plutonians have been mad about it ever since.”

  “Of course we’re mad,” Venetio said. “You’d be mad too if your team got cheated out of the cup because of a dive—”

  “Foul!”

  “Dive!”

  “Enough!” my grandfather thundered, standing up abruptly.

  Sylvie and Venetio were both out of their chairs and glowering at each other across the portal window. My grandfather, who was taller than both of them by at least two feet, scowled at them until they sat back down.

  “Word to the wise,” my grandfather said, leaning toward me as he settled back into his chair. “Never bring up the ’14 Finals in mixed company with Martians and Plutonians. They’ll argue about it until they’re both blue in the face.”

  “I’ll try and remember that,” I said.

  • • •

  I finished my salad and my grandfather took the bowl away, along with an armload of empty sushi boxes. He and Venetio had demolished at least six boxes between them.

  Elliot had eaten only one box. Which se
emed strange to me. Normally, he ate everything in sight. He had also been sort of quiet today. At the moment, he was stretching out his long legs and glaring at something across the circle.

  I followed his eyes. They were fixed on Venetio—who was also staring at him.

  “What?” Elliot asked the Plutonian irritably.

  “Nothing,” Venetio answered. “It’s just…you’re really tall.”

  Elliot, who did not enjoy talking about his height, narrowed his eyes even farther at the much-shorter alien.

  “Plutonians never get that tall,” Venetio continued, sighing wistfully. “We’d give anything to have someone your size on the Kuiper Kickers. Do you play soccer?” he asked, suddenly anxious.

  “No,” Elliot said, looking like he was trying to decide whether to be annoyed by this conversation or not. “Basketball.”

  “Are you any good?” Venetio asked.

  Elliot looked sort of embarrassed, so I answered for him.

  “He’s really good,” I said. “He even tried out for the county team. They travel all around the state for games and stuff. You have to be really good to play for them.”

  “Too bad,” Venetio said. “With those long arms of yours, you’d make a bang-up goalie.”

  “Really?” Elliot said thoughtfully. “A goalie?”

  “He could never play for you,” Sylvie informed Venetio with an odd edge to her voice. “He’s an Earthling. Not a Plutonian. He’d never pass the DNA scan.”

  “Well, there are always ways around that,” Venetio muttered.

  Sylvie’s mouth dropped open, but before she could say anything, there was a loud buzzing sound from her front pocket.

  She dug around, eventually extracting her cell phone. When she had it in her hand, she frowned at the screen, hit IGNORE, then shoved the phone back in her pocket.

  “You have service?” I asked, incredulous. Shortly after we’d taken off, I’d texted my mom that my grandfather had picked me up early from school for a “surprise research trip” (which I guess was at least technically true), but I hadn’t been able to get a signal since.

  “I’ve been on the Martian network since we passed the moon,” she said.

  “Who was that calling you?” I asked.

  “Nobody. Just my mom.”

  “Oh. Then why didn’t you—?”

  “I don’t want to talk to her right now.”

  Sylvie bit her lip, and I hesitated, thinking of Mr. Juarez’s message.

  “You don’t want to tell her about the distress signal?” I asked finally.

  “We don’t even know what it says,” Sylvie pointed out. “Not really.”

  “What do you think he meant?” I asked. “‘Tell Sylvie not to’…”

  “Worry,” Sylvie said immediately. “He was telling her to tell me not to worry. He thinks I worry too much.”

  “Do you?” I asked.

  Sylvie shrugged.

  “It looks like I was right to worry this time. Doesn’t it?”

  Before I could answer, my grandfather came back inside the circle of chairs, grinning and pressing buttons on his iPad.

  “We’re coming up on Mars!” he told us.

  The Problem with Plutonians…

  The main thing you notice about Mars when you’re really close is that it isn’t actually red.

  It’s more orange. Like tomato soup with a lot of cream in it. There are darker parts too, plus lot of dents and craters. And there’s a really big gash that stretches across the middle, kind of like a giant mouth.

  We headed straight toward the mouth as we entered Mars orbit and started our descent to the surface. When we got closer, I could see that the gash was actually an enormous canyon with walls so far apart that when we followed one down toward the bottom, we couldn’t even see the one on the far side.

  Once we were in the canyon, the ground started coming up fast beneath us. And our UFO showed no sign of stopping.

  Elliot and I exchanged worried looks across the portal.

  “Are we going to crash?” Elliot asked, trying to sound calm.

  My grandfather spoke into the iPad instead of answering him.

  “Marineris Outpost 6? Marineris Outpost 6? This is the Lost Beagle. Come in please.”

  “Copy, Lost Beagle,” came a voice from the iPad. “You are cleared to enter Mars. Proceed to the nearest screening dock and have your documentation ready.”

  The voice was reassuring, but we still weren’t slowing down. I braced myself for a crash, suddenly regretting the lack of seat belts. But just before we hit the orangey Martian dirt, the floor of the canyon opened up beneath us and we continued to travel down, past the surface and into the Martian underground.

  Across the portal, Elliot’s eyes were wide. Mine probably were too. Even though Sylvie had been telling us, pretty much since we found out she was a Martian, that she lived “in Mars” as opposed to “on Mars,” the distinction hadn’t really hit me until then.

  I looked over at my grandfather.

  “Are we going to have to wear space suits?” I asked. The thought of squeezing my dinosaur butt into one made me cringe.

  He shook his head.

  “The underground Martian atmosphere is very similar to Earth. It’s a simulation of what Mars’s atmosphere used to be like. Before the Martians destroyed it.”

  “They destroyed their atmosphere?” Elliot asked. “How?”

  “The same way humans are currently destroying Earth’s,” my grandfather said matter-of-factly. “The Martians had to go underground centuries ago to avoid the surface radiation and declining oxygen levels. But don’t worry, their underground environment is very suitable for Earth dwellers.”

  “What about Plutonians?” I asked, looking at Venetio.

  “Oh, I’ll be cool,” Venetio assured me, patting the chest of his black bodysuit. He had zipped it back up over his Kuiper Kickers jersey. “Literally. This is a cold suit. As long as I have it on, I’ll be fine. And I don’t need nearly as much oxygen as Martians or Earthlings.”

  “Here,” my grandfather said, handing us each something that looked like the gel inserts my dad puts in his tennis shoes. Except these had “Amalgam Labs” written on them instead of “Dr. Scholl’s.” “Put these inside your shoes. They’ll account for the gravitational difference. Mars’s gravity is just a little more than one-third of Earth’s. Without these, you’d bounce all over the place.”

  “Awesome!” Elliot grinned. He was taking off his shoes, just like the rest of us, but I could tell from the look on his face that he’d find a way to take the inserts out at the earliest opportunity. “Let’s go to Mars!”

  “Easy, tiger,” my grandfather said. “We have to get through customs first.”

  • • •

  “Craft is named the Lost Beagle, registered to Amalgam Labs LLC. Model 2012, Martian engineered, Hohmann class—”

  “Actually, it’s a 2004,” my grandfather corrected the Martian customs official. “Amalgam Labs has done a lot of updating.”

  The official glanced up at my grandfather. He was short, with extremely round eyes and two pink antennae sticking out of his bald head. He patted the wood-paneled wall beside him with new appreciation.

  “A 2004. Never would have guessed,” he muttered and then returned to his form, checking things off as he listed them. “Cargo includes spare parts, miscellaneous lab equipment, one ancient Earth revolver…for which I’m assuming you have the proper paperwork?”

  My grandfather handed him a faded piece of paper that said “Antiques Permit.” The official read it over, handed it back, and then continued down the form. “One box of ammunition for the revolver, some personal items, and fourteen individually packed restaurant portions of sushi. Crew includes two Earthlings, one dinosaur-Earthling hybrid, one Plutonian, and one Martian-Earthling hybrid.”


  “Correct,” my grandfather agreed.

  “It’s the Plutonian that’s going to be the problem,” the official said. Then he looked over at Sylvie and his eyes grew wide. “Say! Are you by any chance—”

  “What do you mean the Plutonian is going to be a problem?” my grandfather interrupted.

  The official continued squinting at Sylvie for a moment and then turned his attention back to the rest of us.

  “Plutonian travel is restricted in Mars,” he explained.

  “The Planetary Equality Treaty provides for free travel between the planets,” Venetio piped up. I got the feeling he had practiced saying that, just in case it ever came up. “The law requires you to permit me entry, sir.”

  “For now,” the official sneered. “Last time I checked, Pluto wasn’t exactly a planet anymore. The law is in flux. All Plutonians visiting Mars during the summit are required to have a Martian escort.”

  “A what?” Venetio squealed.

  “An escort. A Martian citizen in good standing who vouches for your behavior and pledges to stay within ten meters of you at all times for the duration of your stay.”

  “What?” Venetio said again.

  The official’s eyes came to rest on Sylvie again.

  “You’re the only Martian here,” he pointed out, sounding bored. “Are you willing to act as escort for this Plutonian?”

  Sylvie looked over at Venetio. A small smile slid across her face.

  “Say it,” she commanded.

  “Say what?” Venetio asked, raising his eyebrows.

  “Foul,” Sylvie said, her smile broadening. “Say it was a foul.”

  “I will not!” Venetio balked, looking shocked at the mere idea.

  “Foul,” Sylvie encouraged him. “Say it, or no escort for you.”

  Venetio’s hands curled themselves into tiny fists.

  “Never,” the Plutonian said, shaking with anger.

  “Do you want to see that game or not?” Sylvie teased, looking like she was thoroughly enjoying herself. “Say it.”