by Anna Wu
Chapter 20: Status Report
Libby sighed as she stared at the monitor in front of her. She rubbed her eyes and strained to finish reading the last page of Jimmy's tutorial program. After what seemed like an eternity, she finished and took the floppy disk out of its disk drive. "Well, that was an exciting way to spend five hours," she muttered while standing up and stretching.
"Damn," she groaned as her leg suddenly burned when she bent down to touch her toes. She hobbled back to her seat. She looked to her left and saw that Goddard was doing the robotic equivalent of sleeping. His eyes were closed and his body still as his batteries recharged themselves.
Libby was quickly growing anxious. It had been five hours since she had seen anyone. She had left Carl and some kid named Mike in charge, a decision that she immediately began to regret. She had been sitting in Jimmy's control room since then, trying to read the lab's tutorial and get a feel on how to run the place.
Libby let out a deep breath and stood up once again. To her relief, the fiery pain in her leg didn't return. She walked as best she could out of the control room and into a hallway. She was anxious to talk to anyone. The small room had made her claustrophobic after several hours, and the solitude was slowly eating away at her sanity. She would never understand how Jimmy could spend hours, even days on end down here alone.
Libby pushed these thoughts aside and walked into the lab's main room. She saw that all the kids left behind by Jimmy were there. Some were sitting on the few pieces of furniture Jimmy had in his lab, talking, eating, and drinking. Most, however, were sprawled out across the floor, already asleep. Libby looked up at a clock on the wall and saw that it was already midnight.
Surprisingly, Carl was one of the few awake. Libby strolled over as she saw that he was setting up his sleeping bag. "Just like the first couple of nights after our parents were abducted, huh?" Carl asked while laying down and putting his glasses in his pocket.
"Yeah, just like it," Libby agreed. She was tired and her body pleaded with her to go to sleep, but she felt the urge to check in with her friends in space. She went back into the control room and put on her headset. She set the frequency to Jimmy's private channel and grabbed the microphone.
Jimmy looked down at his watch and saw that it was nearly midnight. He leaned back in his seat, his hands off of the steering wheel and behind his head. He had finished programming his autopilot and distributing it to every rocket an hour ago. It wasn't perfect, but it would keep them close enough to his path while they slept that they could easily correct it in the morning.
Man, I haven't been out this far in ages, he thought with a smile while looking at the infinite space surrounding him. Hundreds of stars twinkled and glimmered in the distance. He peered over his shoulder and saw Neptune fade into the distance.
He was about to drift off to sleep when Libby's voice swam into his ears. "Neutron, this is Folfax here. Folfax attempting to contact Neutron. Do you copy?"
He should have been upset at being awakened, but he found that he had already begun to miss the sound of her voice. "Neutron here. What's up?"
"Well, I finished reading your tutorial. I think that I've got everything managed over here. How's your end? Everything looking good out there?" she asked.
Jimmy glimpsed at the rocket gently gliding by his left. Cindy had her head on the dashboard, her hair curled over her eyes as she slept. "Beautiful," Jimmy told Libby.
"Well, I think that I'll really be able to help you guys from now on," she proudly told him.
Jimmy smiled, sensing a challenge in her voice. "Alright, let's see how much you've learned. I need to know our current position and how long it will take to reach the asteroid."
Libby nodded and cracked her knuckles. "Alright, let's do this," she told him before taking a deep breath, holding it in a beat, and then exhaling it. "Inputting command to trace location of the tracking devices installed on all the rockets," she told him while furiously typing on the keyboard. Looks like that typing course will come in handy after all.
"You should be around thirty thousand kilometers past Neptune," she told him. "Hang on," she interrupted him as he opened his mouth. "Pulling up your preset equation on how to calculate time needed to travel to a certain object."
Libby tapped a few more keys and selected a command with her mouse. "Replacing x variable with current speed," she told Jimmy while typing in the number. She kicked her rolling chair across the floor and began working on a new monitor. "Tracking asteroid and getting its location on separate monitor," she explained while pulling up surveillance photos of Little Boy. "Inputting distance away into y variable. Executing," she said while wiping the sweat off of her brow and pressing enter. The computer instantly performed the calculation.
"You should reach the asteroid in nine hours and seventeen minutes," Libby said while leaning back in her chair. "Anything else?"
Jimmy smiled. Even with the guns, he had doubted their ability to defeat the Yolkians. Strength and cunning only got you so far. He needed a constant feed of new information and a helpful hand on Earth, and Libby was quickly proving that she could provide those things for him. "No, not now. I'm going to need you a lot when we land on the asteroid, though." He paused, trying to remember what he had wanted to ask her. "Oh yeah, how's the fortress going?"
"We haven't really started. That Mike kid took a most of the kids and the hover car to gather supplies. He said that if they all went out together, they probably wouldn't have to go out again in the morning."
Jimmy nodded. "Does anyone there know how to properly fire the guns you've got?" Jimmy asked.
"A couple of kids have played some shooting games, and we've about half of them have used super soakers. That's it." She paused, starting to get a little nervous. "Are they really here in town? You said they probably aren't, didn't you?"
Jimmy sensed the anxiety in her voice. "You, I did. It's pretty unlikely they're there. I have a few samples of the Yolkian's green goo in the lab. I've uploaded their equivalent of DNA into my database. Run a search in the morning to see if you can find them in town. Even if you don't build that fortress anyway. Better safe than sorry."
"Alright, I'll run a search in the morning," Libby said while yawning. "I'll talk to you tomorrow. Oh, is Sheen there?"
Jimmy frowned. "Well, he's here, but he's asleep. Want me to wake him up? I'm sure he'd rather talk to you than sleep."
"No, no, he needs his rest. Is…" she began to ask, but Jimmy interrupted her.
"Cindy's asleep too," he told her.
Libby smiled sadly. "Alright, guess I'll talk to you tomorrow. Folfax out."
Jimmy listened as he heard her headset click off. He took his off and put it in the back with the rest of his supplies. He pulled out a blanket and wrapped himself in it while putting his feet up on his steering wheel. He yawned, and was asleep as soon as he closed his eyes.