by Mo O’Hara
“We’re not in space yet…” Bob started to say. He was looking through a rocket manual, though, and hardly looked up. “Yeah, sure. Hurry up.”
Fang jumped down off the trash can and inhaled all the space stew in seconds flat. She was licking the side of the bowl when Diablo came walking back. She dove behind the trash can.
“Hey, man, you ate my stew! I was saving that!” Diablo pushed Bob.
“I didn’t eat your stew,” Bob said. “Maybe the wheezy kid ate it?”
“I have a very sensitive stomach. I don’t think that the space stew would agree with me, if you know what I mean,” Sanj said.
“Well, someone ate it,” Diablo shouted.
And that was the last thing Igor and I heard as we snuck away down the corridor to see what we weren’t supposed to see.
11
When Igor and I got to the end of the corridor there was another chamber. This one was taller and slimmer. Silo-shaped with lots of pods all around the edges stacked on top of one another. Walls and walls of these plexiglass pods.
I tapped on one of the pods that sat on the ground. “Empty,” I said.
You could see through the plexiglass front. They were clearly made to have someone in them, though. They looked like flat airplane seats encased in plastic.
Igor pointed up. “Urgh?”
“I guess we should check if the others are empty too,” I said, so we grabbed a couple of ladders and started climbing.
The first couple were empty, and then I spotted one that wasn’t. “Igor, that’s the Goth girl who was in the last assessment with us!” I looked at the next pod over. “It’s the trumpet kid!”
Igor mimed banging on a drum and pointed to the pod near him. “Urgh!”
“The drum kid too?” I said. “But how?”
I tapped on the pod, but they were knocked out or sleeping or something. They were down for the count.
We climbed higher. I started to recognize lots of the kids from camp.
“So, everyone who failed the tests got put into one of these stasis pods instead of being kicked out of the space dome? Maybe they keep them here until the winners are announced and we blast off into space? I guess if our parents signed a form about us going on a space station, they might have said we could all be put in some kind of temporary sleep pods while we’re waiting.”
“Urgh? Urgh! Urgh!” Igor was pointing to a couple of pods near him.
I slid down my ladder, dragged it over to where his was and climbed up.
“Phillipe? And Kirsty?” I said. “That’s weird. Why would they be in a sleep thing? Aren’t they running this with Neil Strongarm?”
“Urgh, urgh.” Igor pointed to a third pod above them.
“Dustin,” I said, looking into the pod, and then shaking it slightly. “And his hair has reverted to its normal bouncy state; look at that.”
While we were up the ladder, we heard the door below us open and a motorized gurney with somebody on it wheeled in. There was no one pushing it; it was just on autopilot or something.
The gurney stopped just by an empty pod, and the lid of the pod opened. The gurney then lifted and tilted so the body slid off into the pod. That’s when we saw who it was. “Trevor?” I whispered to Igor.
He nodded.
The gurney wheeled back to the door and out again.
We climbed down the ladder and ran over to the pod. Maybe we could wake him before he went completely under. Maybe he could find out what was going on. Besides, if all the camp counselors were sleeping, then there’d be no one to give us the Evil Emperor crowns!
I tapped Trevor’s face. “Wake up, Trevor!! We have to try to get you out of here before you end up like the rest of them.”
He hardly moved. “You try, Igor,” I said.
I moved back and Igor leaned over the pod. He shook Trevor harder, and Trevor opened his eyes a little. He mumbled, “Strongarm.”
Then a cloud of gas exploded from the pod. Igor was still leaning over the capsule when it hit.
“Don’t breathe in!” I shouted to Igor. “That might be some kind of sleeping gas.”
But it was too late. Igor turned to me and mumbled a very sleepy “Urgh” before he collapsed over Trevor’s capsule.
“Come on, Igor, just make it to the door. We’ll get you some air,” I started to say, and then I realized there was no outside air to get him to. Besides, he was already knocked out. I couldn’t budge him.
“I’m sorry, Igor,” I said.
I snuck out of the pod chamber and back up the corridor. The other kids had stopped fighting about beef stew, and I could see a small gray tail just sticking out from behind the trash can. Fang was safe.
Bob and Diablo were looking over manuals and charts.
Geeky Girl was on her laptop, and Sanj was pacing back and forth with his tablet in his hand.
“You took your time,” he whispered as I approached. “Neil Strongarm is about to tell us about our next assessment.”
“I hate to tell you when you’re right, Sanj, but you were right. There is definitely something up. I found a secret room where everyone is in some sleep-induced stasis,” I whispered. “Everyone is stacked up in pods in some suspended-animation silo.”
“Everyone from the camp?” he asked. “Dustin? The counselors?”
“Everyone,” I said. “It’s only us left.”
“Interesting,” Sanj said.
“Is that all you can say, ‘interesting’?!” I whispered a little bit louder. “I tell you that we are all being slowly knocked out and bubbled up, and you say—‘INTERESTING’?!”
The last word came out louder than I thought and everyone turned and looked at us.
“Yes, this is an interesting situation, Mark,” Sanj responded. “But one that we’ll have to deal with after the next stage of the contest.”
Sanj paused and looked me right in the eye. “You still want to win, Mark? Do you still want to go into space? Because I do, and I’m doing it with or without you. So I could mention that little gray tail sticking out over there and end this, or I could ask you to sit down and listen to Mr. Strongarm.”
Neil Strongarm stepped in front of us. “Everything OK?” he said.
We nodded.
“Are you all ready to start on the next evil phase of your evil journey into space?” Neil asked. Then he looked around. “Hey, where is the big guy?”
Geeky Girl looked around and then looked over at me. “I thought he was with you, Mark,” she said.
“Yeah, I saw him in the bathroom down that corridor.” I pointed down the way that Igor and I had been when we saw the suspended-animation pods. Neil Strongarm visibly flinched as I pointed in that direction.
“You didn’t go down there, did you?” he said with a hint of panic in his voice. “I told you not to leave the area.”
12
“We just went to the bathroom,” I said, and then I looked over at Geeky Girl. “But Igor wasn’t feeling too good. I think maybe he had too much space beef stew and he headed down the corridor, looking for some air, I think.”
Geeky Girl shot me a look that I never wanted to see. She knew I was lying, but she thought it was to get Igor in trouble on purpose.
Neil Strongarm looked at Bob. “Well, that is a blow for your team, as it means that the big kid is disqualified for going out of bounds.”
“OK, I’ll do this challenge on my own then,” Bob said.
“I’m sorry. The rules are that if a team member gets disqualified, then the whole team is disqualified,” Neil said.
“He can join our team,” Diablo said.
“Yes,” Geeky Girl agreed. “That only seems fair.”
“Why do you think this has to be fair?” Sanj interrupted. “Igor messed up and he’s out, and now Bob’s out too. I’m sorry, but it means our chances of winning just went up. So actually, I’m not sorry at all.”
Neil Strongarm smiled. “The rules stand.”
Bob looked over at me and pounded
his fist in his hand. “You did this, New Kid. I don’t know how, but you set up Igor to go out and get disqualified, and now you’ve messed up my chances of going into space too.”
“It wasn’t me,” I said, but inside I knew it was. I had asked Igor to go and sneak around with me to see what was going on. If I hadn’t, he wouldn’t be snoring away now slumped over Trevor’s pod and we would all be going forward in the competition.
“Regardless of the circumstances, this means you are out, Bob,” Neil said in a don’t-mess-with-me voice.
Bob threw his charts down on the ground and stormed off down the corridor. Neil Strongarm followed him.
“I’ll be right back,” Neil shouted over his shoulder. “Get into your teams and get ready to work.”
Neil Strongarm looked over his shoulder at me one more time as he disappeared down the corridor—and he smiled. A smile that said he was proud of me for being so vicious that I got rid of two opponents at once. As he caught up with Bob at the end of the corridor and closed the door behind him, I knew what he was going to find. He was going to find Igor slumped over Trevor’s sleep pod. He was hopefully going to assume that Igor had been alone and snooping and had gotten caught up in the sleeping gas stuff. He would sleep-gas Bob and get him into a pod too, and then there would just be four of us competing to go into space.
I was busy thinking of all these things when Geeky Girl came up and slammed her helmet into my stomach.
“Oooofff!” I said. “What was that for?”
“That was for Igor. I can’t believe you would stoop so low as to trick Igor into going out of bounds—and then tell on him! You will stop at nothing to win this, won’t you?” she said.
“I didn’t trick Igor, and didn’t do this on purpose,” I said. “Igor was helping me, and something happened.”
“Is he OK?” she said.
“He’s sleeping,” I whispered. “They’re all sleeping.”
“You’re so pathetic. You’re trying to distract me with some stupid story so I can’t work on my rocket with Diablo. Well, tough luck, because we are not going to be distracted, are we, Diablo?” I’m pretty sure Diablo growled at me then. “And we are going to win anyway,” she added. I handed back her helmet with a slightly shaken budgie inside.
“I will keep your one secret, and you keep my one secret,” I said to her. “I don’t have anything else to hide.”
She and Diablo picked up the charts that Bob had dropped and started to look at things on Geeky Girl’s laptop.
Sanj strode over to me. “I’m actually impressed, Mark,” he said. “That was the evilest thing I think I’ve seen you do. And I’ve seen you do lots. To get rid of both Igor and Bob in one evil stroke is genius. We have this contest in the bag now. You and I will be Neil Strongarm’s evil protégées in space, and Geeky Girl and Diablo will join the other losers. We just have the slight problem of actually winning the challenge.”
Neil Strongarm’s footsteps echoed in the corridor as he approached. This was it. The final challenge. The final four.
“All right then. Four people. Two teams. Two chances to be my right-hand assistants in space.” He looked at all of us one by one, and then continued. “Your instructions are in these envelopes. You have to build a rocket that can make it out of the atmosphere and into space. You can use any of the materials in this section.”
He handed out the envelopes and then turned before he left down the corridor. “I’ll be back in exactly half an hour to test the rockets outside the dome. Better get started.” Geeky Girl and Diablo ripped into their envelope and started reading. Sanj was already pulling up diagrams on his tablet and looking at rocket plans.
“I don’t get it,” I said as I walked over to Sanj. “This seems really easy.”
“Maybe Neil Strongarm already knows who he’s going to take with him into space and this is simply a formality. We just have to make something that works, and we’ll win,” Sanj said.
“I don’t trust him,” I said, “but I don’t trust you either. So we’re going to work on this rocket thing together so I can make sure you’re not going to double-cross me at the last minute. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” Sanj said.
Geeky Girl glared at me from across the room as she and Diablo started taking apart bits of equipment in the dome to make their rocket.
We worked fast. We were all good at what we were doing, and there was plenty of equipment to cannibalize. There were so many quality parts in there, I got a bit bored and started playing with stuff for my inventions. I pulled my prototype mini lunar pogo stick out of my sock and worked up a cool turbo boost for the base.
“Do you think this megaspring is long enough to bounce a pogo stick in zero gravity?” I asked Sanj.
“Only you could be bored in the middle of a rocket-making space race,” Sanj said. “Put that down and finish the control panel.”
“OK, fine,” I moaned. I put the mini lunar pogo stick up my pants leg and into my sock for safekeeping, then I attached the last few buttons and switches to the panel.
In only fifteen minutes we had put together a small, efficient rocket that could get into space.
“That’s it. It’s done,” I said as I connected the last few wires of our rocket.
“Marvelous,” Sanj said, standing back and looking at our creation. “Nearly perfect. I might want to make a small adaptation. Why don’t you use your evil skills and see if you can eliminate any of our opponents?”
I looked over at Geeky Girl and Diablo. They looked done too. Diablo was just adding some design bits to the sides of the rocket—metal twists that looked like flames shooting out. Geeky Girl left him to it and sat down to look at something on her laptop.
I nodded to Sanj. “I’ll see what I can do.” I walked up to Geeky Girl. On my way I passed Fang and whispered, “Keep an eye on Sanj, kitten. I still don’t trust that he’s not gonna double-cross us.”
She purred, licked her paw and skulked over to crouch behind a bench near Sanj. That was a yes, then, I guess. I continued over to Geeky Girl.
I motioned for her to come over to where I was standing by the entrance to the corridor. She rolled her eyes and stomped over to where I was waiting, out of earshot of the others.
“Well?” she huffed.
“Aren’t you curious?” I asked her. “What Igor and I found? Why Strongarm gave us such an easy final task (which I’m totally going to win, by the way)? Don’t you want to know what’s really going on?”
13
She glared at me.
I said it again: “Something is wrong. Don’t you want to know what?”
“Look, Diablo and I are going to win this. Our rocket is perfect.” She paused. “Something is wrong here, but I already know what it is.” She paused again and glared at me. “It’s you.”
“Look, you have to believe me. They’re all trapped in these suspended-animation pods. We saw them. Trevor, Kirsty and Phillipe are all down there. The trumpet kid is in a row on the side and the drumming kid is below him. Dustin is in there too, and you know his hair still shakes back into place even in suspended animation?”
“You checked?” she said.
“Kinda,” I answered.
“And you want me to believe that Igor is in there too?” she said.
“Yes! We came across the pod place, but then we saw that they were just about to gas Trevor to sleep, and Igor was leaning over the capsule, and he got gassed too,” I explained.
“Sure, that all makes perfect sense. So Strongarm set up this whole series of space tests just so he could trap a bunch of kids from a camp in sleep pods?” she said. “Is that what you told Igor to get him to follow you out of bounds?”
“No, we didn’t know about the pods until we saw them—” I started, but Geeky Girl interrupted.
“You can stop lying now, Mark. It’s not going to work with me. I’m not following you anywhere,” she said.
“But…” I said.
“I’m getting back to wor
k.” She turned and headed back to Diablo.
How could she not believe me? Then I thought about it. Nothing I had told her made any sense. I mean, I almost didn’t believe it myself. Why would she buy it? And especially why would she believe it from me after she thought I betrayed Igor?
Nope, I was on my own.
“Every person for themselves.” Isn’t that what Geeky Girl said right after she blasted me in the race?
If there was nothing I could do about this weird space pod stuff, then I’d get my mind back to winning this contest. One hundred percent commitment. To quote Neil Strongarm, “You’re either in the rocket or on the ground. There’s no halfway in space.”
I was going to show Neil Strongarm that I was the best evil space assistant on the planet—heck, in the universe—and he would be crazy not to pick me.
I walked back over to where they were all working. Geeky Girl was holding their shiny red rocket while Diablo put the final touches on the decoration. It had a fireball painted on the side and metal strips that had been shaped and twisted to look like silver flames coming out of it. I had to admit it looked cool … or hot … It looked good.
“I call her Fuego!!” Diablo said proudly as he wiped a smudge off the side of the rocket.
Sanj was tapping away at some buttons on the side of our rocket.
“Good, you’re back,” Sanj said. “Oh”—he paused—“she’s still with you. Well, we’ll just have to let our rocket win then after all.”
At that moment, Neil Strongarm walked into the room.
“Good. It looks like we are ready to launch the final stage of this contest. Why don’t you all join me outside and we can test the rockets.” He looked around at each of us. “This is the final countdown, people. Let’s see what you can do.”
Diablo carried out their rocket and Geeky Girl held her helmet with Boris tucked inside. Sanj picked up our rocket right away and started toward the dome entrance.