Life on Mars

  I began to think that we might be walking forever. I started to feel far away from home. A nervous squickiness started to rise in my stomach.

  “Hey,” I asked. “How much farther?”

  But just then I saw what looked like illumination between some of the branches up ahead. Not man-made illumination, but more like the blue light of a clear summer night sky.

  “Is that where we’re going? What’s up ahead?”

  “You ask a lot of questions, kid,” Cash grumbled over his shoulder, but he tromped on.

  Finally, he stopped, and I eased next to him. “Whoa,” I breathed. “I didn’t know this was back here.”

  23

  The Tuna Salad Corpse Moon

  Before us was a huge clearing on a hill, which rose out of the ground, a rolling mighty mound of earth. From this perch you could see the farmland behind us, more hills, silhouettes of a few cows with their muzzles stretched to the ground, a sleepy farmhouse snuggled into a valley like a baby in a crib. Beyond the farmhouse, a pond, throwing the moonlight back up into the sky, looking like a slick of silver on the ground. I thought maybe I could even see the ball field way out in the distance.

  Best of all was what was above us. With no streetlights or house lights or stop lights or stadium lights anywhere near us, the hill set the stage for the sky. The moon sat upon us, huge and marbled, and surrounding it were more stars than I’d ever seen before, twinkling and undulating, almost as if they were beckoning me. If ever I believed that something in the sky might be alive, this was the moment of proof. In that moment, I finally understood what Carl Sagan meant. I felt like starstuff.

  I took a few steps and sat down, my neck craned. Suddenly I could feel gravity working, could feel myself being pinned to this earth by the motion of our spinning through the great galaxy.

  Cash walked up next to me and stood with his hands on his hips. He, too, surveyed the sky.

  I laid back, my hands behind my head, and watched the sky come alive, as if it were putting on a show just for me.

  There she was, Ursa Major, the Great Bear, her back thigh the bowl of the Big Dipper and her tail the handle. I watched her lumber along, the stars her joints and rippling bear muscles. I remembered the old Native American tale about the three stars that form the Big Dipper’s handle being three warriors who were chasing Ursa Major, her blood staining the autumn trees red. I’d known the story since I was a little kid, but I’d never actually seen it in motion before, not like this.

  “I have a blanket,” Cash said, and I jumped, having forgotten that he was here with me. He rummaged around in his trash bag and pulled out a ratty old quilt. He dropped the quilt on the ground next to me and then reached in again and pulled out some sandwiches and a couple of water bottles.

  Aha! Tuna salad and a blanket! Not a dead body and instruments of torture at all! What was Tripp thinking? Wow, he’ll feel really dumb when I tell him how wrong he was with the whole zombie thing.

  Cash grabbed the box and pulled it open. I gasped again.

  “Whoa! Are those Fujinon twelve-forty-D third generation with image stabilizer binoculars?”

  He held them out toward me. “You want to look through them?”

  My mouth hung open so long that my tongue turned to dust and I might have eaten a bug. I nodded. He pressed them into my hand. He might have just as well handed me a block of gold or a wriggling baby Saturnite or the keys to the International Space Station.

  I took the binoculars and peered through them, training them on star after dazzling star. I pointed them at the moon, that great chunk of rock that hurtled around us, pulling at our tides, riling up our werewolves. I roved through the sky, looking for the red dot of Mars, hoping for the return blink of light I’d been waiting so long to see.

  “Do you think it’s possible to make contact with Mars from Liberty?” I asked.

  Cash pulled his tuna sandwich out of its baggie and took a bite. “A good scientist thinks anything is possible,” he said.

  I lowered the binoculars and opened my sandwich. I took a bite. Much better than egg salad, and it had the added benefit of not smelling like the Porta-Pottys at the apple orchard, too. “I want to be the first person to discover life on Mars,” I said. “I’ve pretty much devoted my whole life to it.”

  He met my eyes. “Me, too,” he said. “But I suppose you’ve got a lot longer to prove it than I do.”

  We chewed, side by side, and he helped me find the teapot shape of Sagittarius, pointing at the “steam” coming out of the spout—otherwise known as the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

  “Cash?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Doing what, kid?”

  I shifted so I was facing him. “All of it. Why did you tell me about Hermie Schwanlaker and why did you let me in your space room and why did you take me out here?”

  Cash glanced at me. “You ask too many questions, kid. Anyone ever tell you that?”

  I nodded. Actually, yeah. A lot of people have told me that. “But why are you?”

  He studied the sky for a bit more, and at first I thought he was going to ignore me again. “Earlier you asked me why I stay out here all night,” he said. “And the answer is that I can’t tear myself away. I know I should go home, get in a warm bed, sleep. But I can’t make myself stop looking.” He jabbed a finger upward. “Up there. Does that make sense to you?”

  I tipped my head back and drank in the stars greedily. “Yes,” I said. “Totally.”

  “That is why I’m doing this,” he said. “Because it makes sense to you.”

  After we finished our sandwiches and our waters, Cash took the binoculars and placed them back in their box.

  “I suppose I should get you back before your parents have my hide,” he said.

  Reluctantly, I stood and folded the blanket. I didn’t want to go back. I wanted to stay out on the hill forever, looking through the binoculars and talking stars with a real-life astronaut.

  But if I ever wanted to come back again, Cash was right, it wouldn’t be a good idea to freak out Mom. She was pretty irrational about Cash. It was like she thought he was a serial murderer or something. (I know, I know. You don’t need to remind me. But that was weeks ago. I was a kid. I could think crazy stuff.)

  “Can I come back here with you again sometime?” I asked as we shoved the blanket back into the trash bag.

  Cash produced a cigar out of his hoodie pocket and lit it up. He grunted and shrugged. By now I knew that was his way of saying yes.

  24

  Martians, Morse-Shuns

  The next time we went to the hill, I brought CICM with me.

  We got settled, spread out our quilt, and unwrapped our sandwiches, which were corned beef. I brought a bag of potato chips to share.

  “So I was thinking,” I said, after we were done eating. I unzipped my backpack and pulled out CICM. “Maybe we could try to communicate with Mars together. We could be the first two people to discover life on another planet.”

  “Let me see that, kid.”

  Cash looked at my ragtag machine and suddenly I felt embarrassed by it, like I was carrying around something a kindergartner would make. He pulled and tweaked at some things here and there, moving the mirrors around, adjusting the magnifying glass. He pushed the power button on the flashlight and watched the beam sprout. Up on the hill I could see how there was no way the beam was reaching all the way into space. It was barely making it more than a few feet in the air. I felt silly for ever thinking it could make contact with a Martian.

  “It’s stupid,” I mumbled, embarrassed, snatching it back from him. “Forget I brought it.”

  “No, no,” he said, reaching for it again. “This is a good model.”

  “You had way better stuff at NASA,” I said. I sounded pouty, but I couldn’t help it.

  “Yes, but that doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course it matters. If NASA can’t find life on Mars with all their
equipment, how am I going to find it with a flashlight and a few mirrors?” I hated that this was the first time I’d ever realized it, that no way could I do what NASA hadn’t yet done. What a dummy for thinking I could.

  “You won’t,” Cash said. “But I like your idea.”

  My head snapped up. “You do?”

  He nodded and fidgeted with the contraption for a few more minutes. “We’ve just got to make it bigger.”

  “We do?”

  “I’ve got a spotlight in my basement. And I can get us some mirrors. Maybe even a magnifying lens. We can play around with it a little bit, see what happens.”

  “We can?”

  He handed CICM back to me. “You ever heard of Morse code?”

  I had. We’d talked about it very briefly in American history class during our pony express unit. For a while Tripp and I tried tapping messages to each other during class with our pencils, but Tripp only ever answered with gibberish—ISBYKKQ—and when I asked him about it, he always said he got sidetracked thinking about playing the drums. And then Mrs. Hamill, our teacher, would get a funny upward crick in her neck and holler out, “Stop tapping your pencils on your desks!” and we’d have to stop.

  “What if we tried to send messages via Morse code?” he asked. “That way, if we get an intelligent response, maybe it will be in the form of actual words.”

  “You think Martians know Morse code?” I asked.

  “I told you, Arty, a good scientist thinks anything is possible until proven otherwise. Tell you what. Next time, you bring this little guy back here and I’ll bring some other supplies, and we’ll get started.”

  We talked a bit more about design, and I started to get really excited, like maybe this could really happen for me after all. Maybe, after all this time, my dream would turn into a reality. I, Arcturus Betelgeuse Chambers, Armpit of the Central One, would prove that there is other life out there.

  25

  The Huey Discovery

  A few days later, I awoke to the sound of Vega crying.

  I followed the noise down the hall and into her room, squinting and scratching the morning away. “What’s going on?” I asked.

  She was hunched over in her bed, a dome of sadness, her face buried in her hands, a journal spread out on the bed in front of her. Across the pages of the journal, she had scrawled broken hearts with “Vega” in one side of the heart and “Mitchell” in the other. She’d also doodled “Mrs. Mitchell Bacturn” several times across the page.

  “His last name is really Bacteria?” I asked, almost laughing.

  “Bacturn, you idiot, get out,” she said. “And stop reading my private thoughts.”

  Still. Close enough to be funny. Bacteria/Bacturn. Perfect.

  “Sorry,” I said, edging for the door. “I was just coming in because you were crying and I wanted to see what was wrong.”

  Her face crumpled again. “Everything is wrong. Mom is packing today,” she said.

  I tipped my nose up. The smell of cardboard was in the air, and if I listened carefully I could hear the sound of packing paper being wadded and packing tape being stretched.

  This was it.

  They’d found their adorable Vegas house. Dad had fixed everything wrong with our crummy old house and painted up the ruddy parts of it. Mom had cleaned all the closets. It was only a matter of time now.

  “How long until we leave?” I asked. I was really wondering, How long do I have to contact Mars with Cash?

  “I didn’t ask. A week or so probably. Which means my life is over.” She leaned back into her mattress and started sobbing even more.

  I walked to her and awkwardly put my hand on her back. I patted it a few times, feeling weird about comforting my sister in her pajamas. I did kind of feel sorry for her. The Bacteria was just a half a step up above amoeba on the intellectual scale, but he seemed like an okay guy sometimes. And she seemed to be really in love.

  After a few minutes, I slunk back to my room and locked the door. Maybe if I just stayed locked in here, they could never pack it and we would never have to go anywhere. I could stage a sit-in!

  But then who would build CICM on the hill with Cash? And who would flash Morse code at the Martian yeti? This seemed like no answer at all.

  That night, Cash and I brought a whole wheelbarrow full of stuff to the hill. Cash had already toted up the giant floodlight and a huge battery that looked like it could power half of Liberty. He’d also brought some mirrors and a huge telescope almost as good as the one in Dad’s observatory.

  We hardly looked at the sky at all, we were so intent on building what I’d begun to think of as Giant CICM. Which, by the way, was only adding another consonant to the name, thus making it no better to have on a T-shirt than the original name.

  “Hey, Cash,” I said, wrapping duct tape around the corners of two mirrors. “Do you think my friends Priya and Tripp could come up here to see this some night?”

  Cash grunted, which was usually his unhappy noise. But come to think of it, grunting was also his happy noise. And his thinking noise. And his hungry noise. “This isn’t a playground,” he said. “I’m not a nanny.”

  “I know, I know,” I said. “And I’ll explain to them that they can’t come up here unless we’re here and we’ve invited them. It’s just … they’ve known about CICM since I started it with Cassi three years ago, and I think they’d really like it up here. They’re my friends. I don’t have a lot of time left with them.”

  It was the last part that seemed to get his attention. I thought I saw his eyes soften at the words “don’t have a lot of time left.”

  He went back to his positioning of the mirrors and grunted again.

  “I suppose as long as they don’t touch anything,” he said.

  I grinned. “Great! Thanks, Cash!”

  We put the final touches on Giant-CICM and looked at each other, our hands on our hips.

  “Well …,” Cash said, studying our work.

  “We should try it out,” I said, but neither of us made a move. I think we were both afraid that it wouldn’t work and that all of our hard work would have been for nothing.

  Finally, Cash leaned forward and flipped the switch. The light bloomed into life and caught the mirrors, which amplified it so far it turned into a pinpoint too small for either of us to see. Cash leaned over the telescope and trained the light at a particular spot.

  “Got her,” he said. “Got Mars.”

  We both crossed our arms over our chests proudly, the intensity and excitement over having achieved our goal too big for words. I felt excitement building up in my throat. I wanted to scream and holler, gallop in circles spanking myself, throw a hat in the air, flail on the ground and scoot myself in victorious circles. But that is the kind of celebrating you do only when you’re alone in your bedroom. Otherwise people think you’ve been out in the sun too long and have gone all wonky on them.

  Instead, I leaned toward the switch and started flipping. Four dots. One dot. Dot-dash-dot-dot, twice. Three dashes.

  HELLO

  Cash and I both stood, neither of us breathing, and then he bent toward the telescope at the same time I lifted the binoculars to my eyes.

  Nothing.

  I flipped the switch again. Four dots. One dot. Dot-dash-dot-dot, twice. Three dashes.

  Again, nothing.

  So I flashed the code again. And again. For an hour we stayed after it, and for an hour we got nothing back. Mars was a distant red glimmer and that was all.

  “We should probably call it a night,” Cash said, after a while. “Try again tomorrow.”

  I tried not to feel dejected, and even though I didn’t want to give up—what if the moment we turned our backs, the aliens started flashing back their planet’s history for us, in Morse code?—I knew he was right. We overturned a wooden box to cover the device and started packing our things away.

  “It needs a name, don’t you think?” Cash said as he gently placed the binoculars back into its box. r />
  “I’ve been calling it CICM,” I said. “For Clandestine Interplanetary Communication Module.”

  “That’s a terrible name,” Cash said. “You can’t put that on a T-shirt.”

  We loaded the rest of our things into the wheelbarrow, and I pushed it down the hill and toward the tree line again. “I can’t think of anything better,” I said.

  We walked through the woods, the wheelbarrow getting heavier with every step.

  And then, just as we stepped out of the woods into his backyard, Cash stopped and took the wheelbarrow from me. “Huey,” he said.

  “Huh?” Thinking he might have been going old-person bonkers like my grandpa Muliphein did when he suddenly thought you could take the Macy’s escalator to a pizza place on the outer ring of Saturn, I pointed to my chest, Tarzan-style. “No, Arty,” I said, enunciating slowly.

  Cash rolled his eyes and cuffed the back of my head. “I know who you are, kid. I was talking about the doohickey on the hill. We should name him Huey.”

  I blinked. “Huey. What does that stand for?”

  “Well, it doesn’t have to stand for anything. It’s just a name.”

  “And that name is Huey.”

  He shrugged. “Why not?”

  Why not? I thought interplanetary devices were supposed to be named something inspirational, something exciting, something important. Like Odyssey, Discovery, Spirit, Curiosity. Not Huey.

  But I kind of liked it.

  “Sure, why not?” I said. “Huey, it is.”

  26

  The Silent But Deadly Nebula

  “Okay, before we go in, there are a few rules you have to follow.” I stood at the edge of the woods facing Tripp and Priya. “No running or jumping or wrestling or throwing your shoes or dive-bombing or sword fighting with sticks or anything else that might involve throwing things into the air. No loud talking. No singing songs about burps. Or singing songs in burp language. You have to act normal around Huey. Cash won’t put up with any …” I reached for the right words, but realized the best word was, “anything. Cash won’t put up with anything. Got it?”