Spaced Out

  I’d never been in the guest suite before. In fact, I’d never even had a glimpse of it until seeing the video of the Sjobergs that afternoon. Although it had been billed to them as a “luxury suite,” it looked as crummy as every other room at MBA. It was merely larger, which actually made it seem worse somehow. The Sjobergs didn’t have any more furnishings than we had, just the same cheap InflatiCubes to sit on and a SlimScreen table. In the big room, these few items seemed even smaller. Our room felt relatively cozy. Theirs felt like an empty storage locker.

  The only thing that was nicer in their room was their wall-size SlimScreen. It was bigger than ours—as their wall was bigger—and was top-of-the-line. The resolution was amazing. They’d been watching a western on it, which was now paused. Three men were frozen in the midst of a gunfight. It felt as though we were right in the Wild West with them.

  Lars, Sonja, and Lily were all staring at us angrily. Lars now had a red welt swelling on his forehead where the door had hit him. “How dare you invade our private space like this?” he spluttered.

  To their side, Patton had tensed up in fear upon seeing me. Even though it had been a few hours since Zan had scared him, he still appeared disheveled and on edge.

  Which was what I’d been hoping for. I turned to Chang. “I’ll be okay.”

  He glanced at me skeptically. “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What is going on here?” Lars demanded, then jabbed a thick finger at me. “What’s he doing here?”

  “Dash has to ask you guys a few questions,” Chang told him. “Treat him well, okay? If you don’t, I’ll have to come back and teach you to play nice.” With that, he slipped back out the door and closed it behind him.

  The angry look on Lars Sjoberg’s face suddenly turned evil. Now that Chang had left me alone with him, he looked like a cat who’d been given a mouse to play with. “You little fool,” he told me. “You have made a terrible mistake coming here.”

  “You shouldn’t threaten me,” I told him, then turned to Patton. “Remember what happened when you threatened me today?”

  Patton quivered at the memory of the alien beast he’d seen and gave a little whimper.

  “Well, I can make that thing come back,” I said. “It’s my friend. . . .”

  “That’s not true,” Patton said weakly, like he was trying to convince himself.

  “Why do you think it showed up when it did?” I asked. “Why do you think it attacked you and not me? It protects me when I’m in danger. So if any of you cause any trouble for me now, all I have to do is call to it. . . .”

  “No!” Patton screamed. He turned to his father, his eyes wide with fear. “Don’t threaten him! Do whatever he says!”

  Lars shot an annoyed glance at his son. “Patton, there was no space snake! You imagined it!”

  “I didn’t!” Patton screamed back. “I saw it! I swear! It was right in front of my face!”

  “Then where is the hole you said it came out of?” Lars demanded. “I didn’t see one! This little jerk is toying with you!”

  Rather than deal with Lars anymore, I looked directly at Patton and asked, “Why are you all lying to the news about how much you like MBA?”

  Patton started to answer, but before he could, Sonja shouted something at him angrily in Swedish. It sounded like a threat.

  Patton clamped his mouth shut.

  “Come on,” I told him. “Don’t make me summon the space snake.”

  Patton looked to his parents, then to me. He seemed to be trying to figure out which was worse to deal with, angry Sjobergs or a bloodsucking alien serpent.

  Sonja kept threatening him in Swedish.

  So I stepped up my game as well. “Okay,” I sighed. “But when you’re being eaten alive, don’t say I didn’t warn you.” I cupped my hands over my mouth as if about to call out.

  Patton cracked. “No! I’ll talk! Dad and Mom secretly invested in a space travel company!”

  “Patton!” his father roared. “Shut your mouth!”

  Patton cringed in fear and fell silent again.

  But he’d already said enough. The Sjobergs’ behavior suddenly made complete sense. “So that’s what this is all about?” I asked. “You’re trying to make the moon sound great to trick other rich people into coming to visit?”

  Lars wheeled on me. “Get out of our room! Right now!”

  He was a terrifying man, but I stood my ground anyhow. If I backed out now, Patton might realize I was bluffing, and then I’d never get him to speak again. “What company did you invest in?” I asked Patton.

  Sonja’s barrage of Swedish threats increased.

  So I leveled a threat of my own. “You should know something about that space snake you saw, Patton. It was only a baby. There are others here that are much, much bigger. There’s a whole nest of them right under the base. I think I’ll summon one of the adults this time. Or maybe two . . .”

  “Maximum Adventure Travel!” Patton squawked. “That’s the company! Please don’t call the snakes on me!”

  “That’s enough!” Lars bellowed.

  “I didn’t want anything to do with any of this!” Patton blurted, then pointed at his father. “It was all his idea! If you want to sic the snake on anybody, it should be him!”

  “Patton!” his mother gasped.

  Patton ignored her and kept pleading his case. “He made us come up here in the first place. He made us sabotage the robots the other night. . . .”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “To slow construction of Moon Base Beta. He developed the program to mess up the robots and forced us to install it on the base computer. . . .”

  “And that’s what Roddy caught you doing?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Shut up!” Lily yelled at her brother. “You idiot! You’ll ruin everything!”

  Patton screamed back at her. “I’m not about to get eaten by some freaking snake-monster to protect Dad’s scheme!”

  “And how does Nina fit into this?” I asked. “What did you do to her?”

  Patton gave me a startled look. “Nothing! We didn’t touch her! All we did was mess with the robots!”

  “She didn’t find out what you were up to?” I asked.

  “No!” Patton cried. “We never heard a thing from her! We didn’t have anything to do with her disappearance, I swear!”

  Given his fear of being eaten alive, his answer seemed genuine. Since he was spilling his guts about everything else, it didn’t make sense that he’d lie about Nina.

  Lars suddenly sprang at me. I tried to scramble back toward the door, but it was too late. Lars caught me by both arms, pinioning them to my sides, then shook me roughly and screamed in my face. “You had better keep your mouth shut about everything you have heard here!”

  “No, Father!” Patton yelled. “Don’t hurt him!”

  I recoiled from Lars’s rancid breath, then screamed, “Help!”

  “Now you’ve done it!” Patton wailed in fear. “He’s calling the snakes! We’re all going to die!” A big wet spot bloomed once again in his pants.

  I wasn’t calling for Zan, though. I was calling for the backup I knew would be there.

  The door tore off its hinges as Chang kicked it open. He took one look at Lars and ordered, “Let Dash go.”

  Lars didn’t. Either he was too angry at me to pay attention, or he didn’t hear Chang over the screams of the other Sjobergs. Instead he kept threatening me. “If you disobey me, I will make life very difficult for you! You and your whole family!”

  “I warned you,” Chang said, and then punched Lars in the face. Lars sailed across the room and bowled over his entire family, who ended up sprawled in a pile on the floor.

  Chang turned his attention to me. “You okay?”

  I nodded. My arms hurt from Lars grabbing them so tightly, but other than that, I was fine.

  Lars was much worse. His lips were both split from Chang’s punch and blood was flowing from them. “You f
ool!” he yelled. “You have just made the worst mistake of your life! I’ll have you fired for this!”

  “You were hurting a child,” Chang said calmly. “Then I warned you to stop and you didn’t. Therefore, my use of force on you was appropriate.”

  “I will destroy you!” Lars raged. “I can ruin your life, even from up here on the moon!”

  “Stop it!” Patton told his father. “If you keep threatening them, they’re going to call the snake!”

  “No,” I said. “Not this time. But you’d better keep your distance from me and all the other kids here from now on. If you bully any of us again—or even think about it—all I have to do is whistle and you’ll be snake chow.”

  Patton whimpered. “I’ll be good. I promise.”

  “There is no space snake!” Lars roared at him. “Stop being such an idiot!”

  “If you keep treating your kids like that,” I said, “I’ll sic it on you.”

  Lars stopped yelling and looked at me. There was a hint of fear in his gaze, as though despite his arguments, some part of him was afraid the snake really did exist and might come for him.

  I walked out of the room with Chang behind me. There were probably more questions I could have asked the Sjobergs about their involvement with Maximum Adventure, but I had enough to piece together a lot of the story.

  And I’d had more than enough of the Sjobergs for one day.

  “What’s all this about a space snake?” Chang asked, once we were on the catwalk outside their room.

  “It’s just a bloodthirsty alien creature I made up to keep Patton in line.”

  “Nice work.” Chang gave me a pat on the back, then sighed.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I was sure they were connected to Nina’s disappearance somehow. Now we’re back to grasping at straws again.”

  The pride I’d felt about outwitting the Sjobergs vanished. Chang was right. Nina was still missing—and we weren’t any closer to figuring out where she was.

  Excerpt from The Official Residents’ Guide to Moon Base Alpha, “Appendix A: Potential Health and Safety Hazards,” © 2040 by National Aeronautics and Space Administration

  PERSONAL HEALTH

  Despite the fact that MBA is a sterile environment, there are still ways for you to get sick, so take whatever steps you can to provide for your own personal health—and that of your fellow lunarnauts:

  • Clean your hands with sterilizing solution after using the bathroom or doing any other activity in which they may have been contaminated.

  • Get plenty of sleep.

  • Brush your teeth three times a day and floss as well.

  • Report to the medical bay as soon as you feel ill, and if you are sick, please do your best to quarantine yourself away from the other lunarnauts. Unchecked sickness can spread very rapidly in an enclosed habitat such as ours.

  IMAGINARY FRIENDS

  Lunar day 217

  Late afternoon

  My parents went back out onto the surface again. So did most of the other adults. Once Dr. Kim mapped out the possible locations that Nina might have gone to find armalcolite, they decided to fan out to hit all of them as quickly as possible. Daphne’s robots moved much slower than humans could, and we were running out of time. I think everyone suspected this might be a wild-goose chase, but they all still felt like they had to do something, and searching the base for the three-hundredth time wasn’t particularly useful. Nina obviously wasn’t there, so she had to be somewhere out on the surface.

  This time, Chang was the only adult who stayed behind. Chang was annoyed by this, but even he realized that he needed to be around to make sure the Sjobergs didn’t revolt again. “Now that you’ve provoked them,” Mom had warned, “who knows what they’ll do if we’re all gone?”

  “Probably eat our entire stash of chocolate bars,” Dad suggested.

  I was really worried about everyone going back out, but my parents did their best to reassure me that their helmets were now in perfect shape. Plus, NASA had pinpointed the location of the cloud of space junk that had rained down before and assured us it was too far away to be a problem again. So I had no choice but to let my folks go and hope for the best.

  I spent the first few minutes with Chang in the control room, keeping tabs on my parents, but this turned out to be more nerve-racking than I’d expected. Their progress in the rover was agonizingly slow and I kept imagining incoming showers of space junk. Meanwhile, Chang had his hands full talking to the Johnson Space Center, asking them to look into the Sjobergs’ connection to Maximum Adventure, updating them on the search for Nina, and listing what the rain of space junk had ruined so that repairs could be initiated. So I returned to my family’s residence, looking for a quiet place to think.

  Instead I found Zan.

  She appeared to me the moment I walked through the door.

  “Hey!” I said, locking it behind me. “Thanks for helping me out with Patton today.”

  Zan frowned. “I’ll never be able to do something like that again.”

  “I don’t think you’ll have to. Patton’s still terrified. I convinced him I can summon that snake thing whenever I want.”

  I’d been hoping Zan might find this amusing, but she seemed saddened by it instead. “My behavior in that instance was wrong.”

  “No, his behavior was wrong,” I pointed out. “He was trying to beat me up! You saved me!”

  “Even so, it violated so many rules. . . . Many of my fellow beings were not pleased.”

  “How did they even know you did it?” I asked. “Can they see us?”

  “It’s difficult to explain. But . . . there were some on my planet who felt I shouldn’t be allowed to come back.”

  “No!” I exclaimed.

  Zan smiled, seeming touched by my response. “They didn’t prevail, obviously. I’m here. But I must be very careful from now on. I take it from your mental state that this has been a very difficult day.”

  “I’ll say. Kira and I almost died in a meteoroid shower.”

  Now it was Zan’s turn to look worried. “You went out on the surface again?”

  “It was an emergency.” I filled Zan in quickly on what had happened.

  She listened intently to my whole story, then asked, “So everyone has gone back onto the surface to look for Nina once more?”

  “Yes. They didn’t get to finish the search before, with the helmets being damaged and all. . . .”

  “Even so, given what I know about your species, it seems as though it would be dangerous for Nina to range very far from the base.”

  “It is, but she’s obviously not close by.”

  “That may not be the case.”

  “Yes, it is. We’ve looked everywhere.”

  “Perhaps not.”

  “We have,” I snapped. “Unless she shrank herself—which isn’t possible—there’s nowhere else on this base she could be!”

  “Please don’t get upset with me, Dashiell. I’m only trying to help.”

  “Well, you’re not doing a very good job of it.”

  Zan didn’t say anything for a while. Then she asked, “Why are you upset with me?”

  I turned away from her, annoyed at myself for how I’d spoken to her. “I’m not. I’m upset with everything else. Nina and the Sjobergs and nearly dying because of some stupid space junk . . .”

  “No, Dashiell, you’re also upset with me. Remember, I’m connected to your mind. I can sense your emotions.”

  I realized she was right. It was disconcerting to be talking to someone who could figure out what I was feeling better than I could myself. “I guess I’m just frustrated.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re from this super-advanced alien race and you can’t even help me. You can beam your thoughts all the way across the galaxy but you can’t figure out where Nina is? You can read my emotions but you can’t warn me that satellite debris is about to rain down on the moon?”

  “I can’t pred
ict the future.”

  “Well, what can you do? Because all you ever seem to do is ask me questions! You don’t tell me about you, or your planet, or what kind of danger humans are in. . . .”

  “I never said humanity was in danger.”

  “But we are, aren’t we? That’s the whole point of this, right?”

  Zan hesitated, trying to figure out how to respond. “Not exactly.”

  “What’s going to happen?” I demanded. “Is there a giant asteroid heading toward earth? Is the sun about to explode? Are we all going to blow ourselves up?”

  “None of those things are going to happen,” Zan said, so calmly that it was maddening.

  “Then what is?!” I shouted. “You tell me it’s incredibly important that we stay in contact, but you won’t tell me why—and then you wonder why I’m frustrated with you? Do you have any idea what this is like?”

  Zan locked eyes with me, and for a moment, it was almost as though I could feel her inside my head. “It appears to be very stressful for you,” Zan said. “More than I realized. I am sorry, Dashiell. I wish I could be more help where Nina is concerned, but I’m not that powerful. However, you are correct that I need to be more open with you. And I will be.”

  “Starting when?”

  Zan considered this thoughtfully. “Soon.”

  “How soon?”

  “Who are you talking to?” Violet asked.

  I spun around to find my sister poking her head out of her sleep pod behind me.

  I mentally cursed myself for being careless. I hadn’t checked the sleep pods to see if I was alone in the room when I’d come in—and in my frustration, I’d forgotten not to speak out loud during my conversation with Zan.

  Zan seemed equally startled. Her blue eyes grew wide with concern.

  “I’m not talking to anyone,” I said quickly. “Just myself.”

  “Liar, liar, pants on fire,” Violet taunted.

  “I should go,” Zan told me.

  “Wait!” I told her. I was so flustered, I spoke out loud once more.

  “There!” Violet cried. “You did it again!”