Waste of Space

  There was a knock at the door. “Dashiell!” Nina called from outside. “I need to talk to you. Now.”

  I looked at Violet and put a finger to my lips, hoping to make Nina think we weren’t there. Violet nodded understanding.

  “I know you’re in there,” Nina said. “I heard you talking through the wall. If you don’t come out on your own, I will drag you out.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’m coming.” I turned to Zan and spoke in my thoughts. “Please stay here. I’ll try to make this quick.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” Zan replied.

  As I headed for the door, Violet turned her attention to Zan and said, “What would you like to learn about today? Turtles?”

  “That sounds lovely,” Zan said.

  I wasn’t sure why, but I felt upset that Zan had been secretly talking to Violet. A mixture of jealousy and betrayal. Which was odd, because up until that point I had felt like being the only person to stand trial for humanity was a burden. And even though my conversation with Zan had been taxing, I was still annoyed with both Violet and Nina for interrupting it.

  So I was in a pretty bad mood when I stepped out onto the catwalk. It didn’t get any better when Nina ordered, “In my office. Now.” She pointed to her open door.

  I walked into her residence. Nina followed me in and shut the door behind us.

  I didn’t sit down on the InflatiCube. I didn’t want Nina to think I’d be staying a long time.

  She didn’t sit either. “Have you learned anything of importance in this investigation?”

  “I thought my father told you he didn’t want me to investigate.”

  “He did. That doesn’t mean that I agree with him. So, have you learned anything?”

  “Yes,” I said. I figured avoiding any arguments with Nina was the fastest way to get back to my conversation with Zan.

  “Well . . . ?”

  “Cyanide can be made from apple seeds. Dr. Goldstein had some apple seeds in the greenhouse, but now they’re all gone.”

  It was hard to read Nina’s face, but it seemed as if this might have been news to her. “Do you think Dr. Goldstein made the poison?”

  “Not necessarily. Anyone could have gotten the seeds. They weren’t locked up or anything.”

  “I asked you to come to me with any information you learned right away. Why didn’t you do that?”

  “I forgot,” I admitted.

  “You mean, you got too carried away eavesdropping on me.”

  “There was also the fact that we’re evacuating the base tomorrow because the oxygen is leaking out and we all might die otherwise. That was a little distracting.”

  Nina obviously didn’t appreciate my sarcasm. “I’m aware that Kira has suggested that I might be the killer,” she said coldly. “I can assure you that I’m not. Lars Sjoberg may be a constant problem for me, but that doesn’t mean he deserves to die.”

  I noticed that she hadn’t offered any alibi. She seemed to simply expect me to take her at her word. Still, I didn’t want to challenge her on it. If she actually was the killer, it seemed like a bad idea to confront her by myself in her locked room. As Kira had said, Nina had probably been trained to kill. “All right,” I said. “I’m sorry that we even thought it was you.” I started for the door.

  “We’re not done here, Dashiell.”

  I froze, not liking the tone in Nina’s voice. “We’re not?”

  “There is a killer on the loose in this base, and I still need your help to find them.”

  “But my father—”

  “Your father is not in charge here. I am.” Nina strode over to her SlimScreen table. “I need you to break into Chang’s room and look for evidence.”

  “What?” I gasped. “Why?”

  “Because I have further suspicions that he might be the killer.” Nina brought up a video file on the SlimScreen. “This is from last night, in the mess hall.” The footage was from one of the many security cameras mounted inside the base. This one was up in the ceiling of the mess hall, giving an angle down toward the food-storage area. It was time-stamped at the bottom: 00:24:35. Twenty-four minutes after midnight.

  There was no one in the mess hall, which made sense, given that it was the middle of the night. Then Chang entered. It was easy to recognize him, given the Mohawk and the tattoos. He glanced around furtively, as though worried about being seen.

  “I thought you said it was pointless to comb through all the footage from the food-storage areas,” I said.

  “I changed my mind. I didn’t think it would be likely, but then I found this.”

  In the footage, Chang rifled through hundreds of packets of food, as though looking for something specific. Due to the angle of the camera, it was hard to see exactly what he was doing; his body blocked most of the drawer. Finally he stood again, clutching a packet of food. He took it to the rehydrator.

  “He wasn’t doing anything strange,” I said. “He was only getting some food for himself.”

  “Chang knows there are cameras in the mess hall,” Nina pointed out. “If he poisoned the lutefisk and left without taking any food, he’d look guilty.”

  “He just looks hungry to me,” I pointed out.

  “That’s the same storage unit the lutefisk is kept in.” Nina closed the video file and immediately opened a second one, which had been recorded by the exact same camera. It was from the same angle, although now the time stamp said 02:01:05. “An hour and a half later, Lars came down to get some of it,” Nina said.

  Sure enough, Lars Sjoberg entered the mess and went directly to the same food-storage unit. He opened it, and quickly searched through it until he found a package of dehydrated lutefisk.

  Nina froze the image. “That’s what he was poisoned by.”

  “Why was Lars Sjoberg eating lutefisk at two o’clock in the morning?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe he had a craving.”

  “For lutefisk?”

  “Yes! The man likes lutefisk. I don’t know why. I think it tastes like paint thinner. But it doesn’t matter why Lars ate it. What matters is that Chang was fiddling around in the storage unit shortly beforehand.”

  “Even if he was trying to poison Lars, there’s no way he could have guaranteed that he’d poison the package Lars was about to eat.”

  “I’m well aware of that.”

  “And that footage doesn’t even show Chang poisoning the food. There’s no proof he did it at all.”

  “Obviously. If there was proof, I’d have arrested Chang already. That’s what I need you for. Chang’s activity last night was suspicious enough to warrant further investigation. And you’re going to do it for me.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because he won’t suspect you. This afternoon, we have a great deal of work to do closing down the science pod. All the adults are expected to be there—but not you. So while I keep Chang distracted, you will go into his room and see what you can find.”

  “No.” I said the word so forcefully, I surprised myself.

  It seemed to surprise Nina, too. “I’m the moon-base commander, Dashiell.”

  “It’s wrong,” I told her.

  “I decide what is right and wrong here. Not you.”

  I started for the door again. “My parents will think it’s wrong too. I can tell them about this right now—”

  “And I can bump your family off the rocket tomorrow and make you wait for the next ones.”

  I froze once more, my hand only inches from the knob, then turned back to Nina.

  Given what she had just said, I had expected that she would have an angry look on her face, or maybe an evil one. Instead she was calm as could be, which was somehow even worse. This was simply business to her.

  “As you know,” she said, “the Sjobergs are going to be very upset when they learn they aren’t going back tomorrow. It would certainly make my life much easier to let them leave earlier. No one at NASA would question the decision.”

  “They
wouldn’t think that you were jeopardizing our lives by keeping us here longer?”

  “Someone has to stay.”

  I considered the implications of that. Although the second wave of rockets was only a week away, I didn’t want to wait any longer than I had to for a ride home. Neither did my parents, I was sure. But it was Violet who really clinched the deal for me. I thought about what her reaction would be if she found out we’d been bumped from the first rocket. Violet was joyful enough to bounce back from most things, but a delay in our trip back to earth would be different. More importantly, it was dangerous to stay longer at MBA. The oxygen system was failing. Every extra day we remained at the base was another chance to die.

  I couldn’t do that to Violet.

  Besides, all I had to do in exchange was poke around Chang’s room for a bit, looking for evidence that probably wasn’t even there. Even though Nina had her suspicions, I figured Chang hadn’t been doing anything wrong. If I didn’t find anything incriminating, that would prove it.

  “All right,” I said.

  The look on Nina’s face didn’t change. She simply gave a curt nod. “Very good. Of course, you are not to tell your parents about this. If you do, I’ll bump you from the flight tomorrow anyhow.”

  “I figured as much.”

  “You can ask Kira to help you, if you’d like. I’m guessing you were going to do that anyway.”

  I hadn’t actually decided to do that, but the thought had certainly crossed my mind.

  Suddenly there was a howl of rage outside the room. It sounded like it had come from the other side of MBA, but was loud enough to echo throughout the base. “Niiiiiiinnnnnaaaaaaa!!!!”

  There was only one person at MBA who ever made a sound like that: Lars Sjoberg.

  Now Nina finally showed some emotion. She looked to the ceiling in exasperation. “He must have found out about the evacuation schedule. Just what I need right now.”

  “Niiiiiiinnnnnaaaaaaa!!!!” Lars roared again.

  “You’re dismissed,” Nina told me. She smoothed out her uniform with her hands, as if girding herself for having to deal with Lars.

  I hurried out of her residence as fast as I could. As I stepped through the door, I saw that Lars was already out of his room, storming down the catwalk toward Nina’s office. It was the first time I’d seen him since he’d recovered from his poisoning, although it was hard to tell if the cyanide had taken any toll on him, given his current enraged condition. His face was as red as the blast from a booster rocket. Sonja, Patton, and Lily followed him, like leaves caught in the wake of a passing car.

  “You!” Lars exclaimed when he saw me, pointing a stubby finger accusingly. “Your family is behind this! I know it!”

  I didn’t stick around to argue. I simply ducked through the door of my residence and slammed it behind me.

  Sadly, Zan was no longer there, waiting for me.

  Instead, Dr. Goldstein was.

  Excerpt from The Official NASA Procedures for Contact with Intelligent Extraterrestrial Life © National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Department of Extraterrestrial Affairs, 2029 (Classification Level AAA)

  ALIEN APPEARANCE

  It is important to note that the IEL may look radically different than we expect. Years of Hollywood movies and other mass entertainments have conditioned us to believe that any IEL will look something like us, with bipedal body structure and an obvious head, among other traits. This will probably not be the case. Although the basics of chemistry indicate that any IEL will most likely be carbon-based, as we are, there are an infinite number of possible body forms an IEL might have, any one of which might be startling, unsettling or even frightening to observe.I DO NOT JUDGE THE IEL BASED UPON ITS PHYSICAL APPEARANCE. Keep in mind that, even if an IEL appears hideous to us, that is based upon our own species-centric experience, and we might look equally as hideous to it.

  * * *

  I. A simple consideration of the myriad body forms on our own planet indicates that an IEL could look like anything, from an octopus to a beetle to a mold spore.

  12

  HONEST-TO-GOD FOOD

  Lunar day 252

  T minus 20 hours to evacuation

  “It’s such a shame,” Dr. Goldstein said.

  We were no longer in my residence, even though that was where she had been waiting for me. (Violet had let her in, but had then gone off to find my parents.) It had been impossible to have a conversation with Lars raging in Nina’s residence next door. Lars had been shouting so loud, the walls had actually trembled.

  So we were now in the greenhouse. This gave us some privacy to talk—and it also allowed me to help Dr. Goldstein get things prepared for the evacuation. All the plants she had worked so hard to grow now had to be composted in hopes that, should MBA come back online, there would be usable soil to restart the greenhouse once again.

  There was a plus side to this, however: All the fruits and vegetables that she had grown were going to be served up with dinner that night.

  “What’s a shame?” I asked.

  Dr. Goldstein waved to the plants around her. “Eight months of work right down the tubes. I was finally getting the hang of this . . . and now it’s all going to waste.” She grasped a strawberry plant by the stalk, but hesitated before uprooting it. She looked like a woman who had been asked to put down her pet dog.

  It occurred to me that Dr. Goldstein probably loved her plants as much as most people love their animals. She had spent hours each day for the past few months nurturing them, tending to them, struggling to keep them alive. There were some insects at MBA that had been brought up to see how life on the moon would affect them—ants and bees and earthworms—but they were locked away in terrariums and no one had really considered them pets. Even so, the ones that had survived would get to live: They were coming back to earth with us so their vitals could be studied. The plants all had to die.

  “Do you want me to do that?” I asked.

  Dr. Goldstein looked at me, startled, as if perhaps she had been so upset, she had forgotten that I was there. “Yes,” she said thankfully. “If you wouldn’t mind.”

  So I went to work uprooting the plants while Dr. Goldstein harvested the vegetables. She started with the snap peas, twisting each pod off the vine and plunking it in a small bowl.

  On the other side of the glass walls, the base was humming with activity. I could still hear Lars Sjoberg raging. Everyone else was doing their best to ignore it, though now and then I noticed someone glancing toward Nina’s residence, either feeling sorry for Nina or fed up with Lars.

  “I didn’t poison him,” Dr. Goldstein said.

  I turned to her, surprised. She had said it so quietly, I wasn’t sure if she had even meant for it to be out loud.

  “Lars?” I asked, then winced at my own stupidity. It wasn’t like there were any other poisoning victims at MBA.

  “Yes.” Dr. Goldstein didn’t look at me. She stayed focused on her peas. “I know you found out about the apple seeds.”

  “How?”

  “After the Sjobergs got in here last month and ate all the strawberries, I rigged up a sensor system. Now when someone enters the greenhouse, I get an alert. And then I can check the camera feeds.”

  “Wouldn’t it have been easier to just put a lock on the door?”

  “That isn’t my decision to make. This greenhouse is communal property for everyone at MBA. I only grow the plants.” Dr. Goldstein plunked a few more peas in the bowl. “I watched all the footage of you in here. I thought you might have been trying to eat something without permission at first—but you didn’t. It took me a while to figure out what you’d been up to.”

  I glanced up toward the top of the greenhouse door. Sure enough, there was a security camera there. It would have offered a decent view of us inside the room, although, like most of the cameras at MBA, it probably didn’t record sound. Otherwise, Dr. Goldstein would have known what we were doing right away.

  “I didn’t e
ven know the seeds were gone until after you noticed,” Dr. Goldstein said.

  “You didn’t?”

  “I have thousands of seeds in here. It never occurred to me that anyone would steal them.”

  “Even after you heard that Lars had been poisoned?”

  “I didn’t know that it had been done on purpose. Nina said it was an accident.” Dr. Goldstein snapped off a few more peas. “It wasn’t until you found the seeds were missing that I realized what must have really happened.”

  I uprooted the last of the strawberry plants and laid it on the pile with the rest. There was something awful about the sight of it. It reminded me of the horrible moment in The Lorax where the very last of the truffula trees has been cut down. “So you knew cyanide could be made with apple seeds.”

  “Of course. Plants are my specialty. That’s why I collected the apple seeds in the first place.”

  I looked to her, surprised. “Not for growing apples?’

  “Dashiell, apple trees are enormous. I couldn’t possibly grow one to full fruiting height in here.”

  “I thought maybe you knew how to do a dwarf version. . . .”

  “Cyanide, properly handled, is a very effective pesticide.”

  “But we don’t have any pests in the base. It’s supposed to be sterile.”

  “That doesn’t mean it will stay that way. No matter how hard we try, there’s always a chance something will get through. Especially when you’re dealing with organic matter.” Dr. Goldstein’s gaze dropped to the packs of poop she had stored under the planting table, as though they might be a breeding ground for trouble. “I figured it paid to be prepared.” She pointed to the plants I’d laid out. “Why don’t you pluck the strawberries off those?” Then she lowered her voice conspiratorially. “If one or two went missing, I’d never notice.”

  “Really?” I asked, unable to control my excitement.

  “I understand it’s your birthday.”

  I looked over the strawberries. It had been eight months since I’d had one, given that the Sjobergs had devoured the last crop. As much as I wanted one, I had conflicting emotions. It seemed wrong to take one for myself before everyone else got to share. Plus, I wondered if Dr. Goldstein was trying to distract me from the topic at hand—or buy my trust.