As if on cue, the shouts of Lars Sjoberg rang through the base. As usual, he sounded angry and abusive.
Dr. Goldstein and I hurried out of the greenhouse to see what was happening.
We weren’t the only ones alerted by the commotion. Everyone else was flooding out of their rooms as well.
Nina and Chang stood on the catwalk outside the Sjobergs’ door. Despite the tirade of insults Lars was hurling, Nina remained perfectly cool and calm. Despite everything she had been through that day, she already seemed back to her old self.
“I have been brought up to speed on your behavior of the past few days,” she was saying. “In light of the fact that you have secretly invested in a rival space tourism business, sabotaged our robotics systems, and stolen food that was communal property, NASA has decided to revoke your ComLink privileges. All your access to the Link is hereby canceled.”
“You can’t do that!” Lars roared. “I have paid a great sum of money for those privileges.”
“And you abused them,” Nina pointed out. “Therefore, to prevent any more abuse, you will be allowed no further contact with anyone on earth for the remainder of your stay here.”
“What?” the rest of the Sjobergs gasped. Then they all started arguing at once how horrible their lives there would be without access to television, Internet, and friends.
“You ought to count your blessings,” Nina said. “You’re getting off easy. If I could, I’d lock every one of you up in this room for the next two months with nothing but dehydrated food and a bucket to poop in. But NASA rejected that. They will, however, be filing charges against you all for collusion with Maximum Adventure and for sabotage of federal property.”
“You’re making a big mistake,” Sonja threatened. “Start trouble with us now, and when we get back to earth, we will ruin this place. We’ll launch a smear campaign to say such terrible things about it that even your own astronauts won’t want to come here.”
“NASA has already released details of the crimes you have committed to the press,” Nina stated. “They’ll be sharing further details of your misbehavior here in the days to come. Your eating all our fresh food today, for example. By the time you get back to earth, the entire planet will know you as the liars, cheats, and thieves that you really are. So anything you say about this base will be suspect.”
Sonja recoiled as though Nina had slapped her, horrified by the idea of anything happening to her precious image. The rest of the family seemed equally upset.
“You can’t treat us this way!” Lars bellowed.
“Yes, we can,” Nina said. “It’s in your contract with us.” She started to leave, then turned back and said, “Oh, and one more thing. I may not be able to lock you up, but I can institute stricter controls over you. If you, or any of your family members, try to retaliate with physical aggression against anyone on this base, I have given Chang here full authority to beat you senseless. Is that understood?”
Lars actually fell silent for a moment. Then he growled, “This is a terrible mistake you are making. Do you have any idea who you’re dealing with here?”
“Yeah,” Chang said. “You’re the four biggest jerks in the universe.”
With that, he and Nina turned away and walked down the catwalk. Lars started screaming again, issuing threats and curses, but everyone simply ignored him and returned to their rooms, letting him know they weren’t afraid of him anymore.
Which was probably the most devastating thing we could have ever done to Lars Sjoberg.
“My, my,” Dr. Goldstein said. She was actually smiling now, looking happier than I’d seen her in weeks. “I guess one good thing has come out of this day after all.”
Excerpt from The Official Residents’ Guide to Moon Base Alpha, “Appendix A: Potential Health and Safety Hazards,” © 2040 by National Aeronautics and Space Administration
ONE LAST THING
The greatest key to your safety at MBA is . . . you! A careful and alert lunarnaut is a safe lunarnaut. So take great care to keep yourself—and others—safe and secure. Watch where you’re walking. Take care on the stairs. Don’t leave things lying where other people can stumble over them. Don’t exit the air lock until you are absolutely sure it has pressurized. Make sure your space suit is on properly before heading out onto the lunar surface. Don’t leave flammable or explosive substances out in the open. In short, exercise good old-fashioned common sense. Let’s keep MBA as safe and injury-free as possible!
THE ASTEROID
Lunar day 218
Well after bedtime
“Hello, Dashiell,” Zan said.
I pried my eyes open to find her peering into my sleep pod. Or at least, projecting the image of herself doing that into my brain.
I checked my watch. It was midnight. But even though Zan was waking me from much-needed sleep, I found myself happy to see her. “Hi,” I replied, reminding myself to keep the conversation in my head. My family was asleep in their pods around me.
My watch also indicated I’d received a great number of text messages since I’d last checked it. Most of them were from Riley, wanting to know what I’d thought of the Sjobergs’ video. With all the excitement, I’d forgotten to text her that I’d seen it.
“I’m sorry to disturb you like this,” Zan said.
“It’s all right.” Although I could have remained in my pod, talking to Zan in my head, it seemed weird to have a conversation that way. So I kicked my covers aside and slipped out into the room.
“It’s not all right,” Zan countered. “You had an extremely stressful day—partly due to my behavior.”
I gave her a confused look. “You didn’t stress me out. If anything, you helped. You let me know Nina was still alive—and then you saved me from Patton. In fact, you scared him so badly, I don’t think he’s going to be bullying anyone anymore.”
“I’m glad I could be of help. But as you pointed out, my behavior has also been frustrating. There are some things I’ve kept secret that have been bothering you.”
I paused in the middle of pulling on a T-shirt. “Well, yes . . .”
“I’d like to tell you the truth.”
“Right now?”
“Yes.”
I glanced around the residence. My family was sound asleep, but I still didn’t feel like having such an important conversation in the room with them. If I got excited and started talking out loud again, they’d wake up and think I was losing my mind. I’d already dodged a bullet with Violet once that day. “Can we go somewhere else to talk? Somewhere private?”
“Sure. As long as it isn’t the bathrooms.”
“I was thinking of the medical bay. No one’s in there right now.”
“Fine.”
I headed for the door, taking care not to wake my family. My parents, who’d had an extremely long day themselves, were out cold. Violet was shifting around in the midst of what seemed to be a very vivid dream. “Wow,” she murmured in her sleep. “That’s a big penguin!”
I opened the door and peeked into the hall. No one was about. Zan and I slipped out onto the catwalk, passing Nina’s room on the way to the stairs.
Despite the late hour, not everyone was sleeping. In the stillness of the base, I could hear a few voices coming through the doors of the residences.
Kira and her father were the easiest to hear. They were both laughing a lot. It sounded like they were playing a game, and Kira was creaming her father, but he was taking it in stride. I wondered if they did this often at night, if this was when he engaged with her, rather than during the day, when there were too many other things to distract him.
Nina was also awake. It sounded as though she was filing a report with NASA. “I believe, as the MBC of Moon Base Alpha, it is my duty to be completely open about the events of lunar day 217 and my role in them . . . ,” she said flatly, sounding as robotic as usual.
Voices also came from the residence of Dr. Goldstein and Dr. Iwanyi. They were having a hushed but intense discussion,
trying not to wake Kamoze.
“There’s no point in turning yourself in,” Dr. Iwanyi was saying. “Ultimately, no one got hurt. Nothing that happened was really your fault.”
“I still did something wrong,” Dr. Goldstein was saying. “At the very least, I led Nina to believe I could help her with her mother, and that’s not going to happen.”
“Well, maybe there’s a way we can fix that,” Dr. Iwanyi said. “We have plenty of connections in the medical community back on earth. I’m sure something can be done. . . .”
Roddy was up too. He was in the rec room with his hologoggles on. It appeared he’d reached the finale of Romeo and Juliet; he was now kissing the virtual heroine again. Evidently, the game ended much more happily than the actual play. “Oh, Juliet,” Roddy sighed to the invisible girl. “I think I love you.”
“What’s going on there?” Zan asked me.
“You don’t want to know,” I told her.
We reached the medical bay, went inside, and locked the door. Then we found two InflatiCubes and sat across from each other.
“You have been asking why it is so important that I talk to you,” Zan said. “Wondering if mankind is in trouble. I told you it wasn’t . . . but that was not completely honest of me.”
My skin suddenly felt cold, as though I’d stepped outside the moon base entirely. “So . . . humans are in danger?”
“In a sense.”
“From what?”
“Yourselves. Surely you are aware that nature is a delicate balance on every planet, and yours is in trouble.”
“Yes,” I said. This wasn’t a secret. The news from earth was always filled with stories of mass extinctions, choking clouds of pollution, islands and coastal cities inundated by floodwaters from rising seas, and other such environmental disasters.
“Humanity is running out of time to confront these problems,” Zan said. “Faster than you realize. Earlier today, you asked me if there was an asteroid heading toward earth. Well, there is, in a sense. Humanity is the asteroid. You’re doing as much damage to earth as an asteroid would. The only difference is, an asteroid would destroy life on your planet immediately, while humanity is going to take a few centuries.”
I realized I was gripping the examining table tightly. Apparently, I’d needed to steady myself after hearing Zan’s news. “How much time do we have?”
“I can’t predict the future. After all, the course you are on is not necessarily guaranteed.”
I looked at Zan, intrigued. “You mean, humanity could still survive?”
“That’s correct.”
I began to understand what Zan was getting at. “Because of you?”
“Perhaps.” Zan fixed her gaze on me, staring at me so intently that I could feel her inside my head. “Yours would not be the first species to encounter problems like this. They are, in a sense, a sort of growing pain. There are ways to harness the power of the universe that you have not discovered yet, ones that could solve many of the problems you have created for yourselves.”
“Really?” I exclaimed. “So can you tell us what to do?”
Zan didn’t answer right away, which was an answer in itself.
“You’re not going to give us this information, are you?” I asked.
“That is still being decided.”
“Why? Is it some sort of galactic test? Like, if we can’t figure it out for ourselves, we don’t deserve to survive?”
Zan laughed. “No, it’s nothing like that. This information has been passed from many species to others. In fact, that is how my own species received it. It was a gift.”
“So why won’t you give it to us?”
“Because we’re not sure you can be trusted with it. Humanity has some unusual characteristics that greatly concern us. In particular, your way of taking new technology and trying to destroy each other with it.”
“Oh,” I said sadly.
“When mankind invented steel, practically the first thing you did was make swords from it,” Zan explained. “Within only a few years of inventing airplanes, you were using them to drop bombs on each other. And when you finally figured out how to split the atom, which could have done so much good, you immediately used it to build bombs, wiping out millions of people—and ultimately threatening the lives of every being on your planet.”
I nodded, feeling ashamed on behalf of humanity. “But if we’re going to die anyhow, why not take a chance on us? Maybe we won’t make weapons with this new technology.”
“But you might. And the problem is that such weapons wouldn’t only be dangerous to you. They’d also be dangerous to civilizations on other planets. Once you start dealing with the sort of power we’re talking about, it can have effects far beyond your own tiny world.”
“Even though those other planets are light-years away from us?”
“Did you know that if a star even a few light-years away from the earth were to explode, the radiation from it could ultimately shred the delicate atmosphere of your planet, killing almost everything?”
“Yes.” When you lived in a small base with some of earth’s most renowned astrophysicists, this sort of thing tended to come up at dinner. I also knew that, luckily, there were no stars anywhere near earth that close to exploding.
“Well,” Zan said, “imagine a power even bigger and more destructive than that. A power that can travel much faster than light speed. In the wrong hands, it wouldn’t simply destroy your earth and every living thing on it; it could destroy innocent lives on planets all through the galaxy.”
I sagged, daunted by the thought. “So how do I fit into all of this?”
“As I have told you, we have been observing your species for some time now. However, observations can only tell us so much. They allow us to suspect why you might behave the way you do, but they don’t tell us for sure. Now, there are some among my species—and those on other planets—who believe they have seen enough. They say your behavior has already proven you unworthy of our help. But there are others—myself included—who feel we may not fully understand all there is to humanity.”
“So you came to me to explain it to you? To see if we can be trusted?”
“Yes.”
It seemed that I should have been flattered by this, but instead I felt uneasy. Like an enormous burden had been placed on my shoulders. “Why me? Out of all the people in the world . . . ? Why not somebody smarter than me? There’s a dozen geniuses on this base alone.”
“Who’s to say that you aren’t as smart as they are?”
“Well, they’re older than me. I’m only a kid!”
“That’s not necessarily a bad thing. After all, who builds the weapons and then uses them in your society, adults or children?”
I bit my lip, trying to stay calm. The idea that I was standing as a representative for the future of all humanity was almost as unsettling as the idea that humanity was in jeopardy.
“I know this is all a lot to deal with,” Zan said, sensing my feelings. “It is why I tried to keep things secret as long as I could.”
“So what is it that I’m supposed to explain?” I asked. “What do you need to know about us?”
“They’re not the sort of things you can simply tell me. It’s more like I need to experience them through you.”
I looked at Zan, concerned. “You mean, when you’re in my head, you’re not just talking to me? You’re . . . being me?”
“I suppose you could say that. But that’s not exactly it either. Have you ever asked someone a question and known that they’re not giving you the full answer?”
“Of course.”
“Well, suppose you could know the full answer every time you asked the question. And more.”
“I see. I think.”
“There are many things that concern us about humanity,” Zan said. “I know I do not have to go into them with you. Many have been on display here at this very base: brutality, greed, jealousy, pride, cruelty. . . .”
“And that’s
just Lars Sjoberg,” I muttered.
Zan laughed. “Yes. And many of these things are unusual—if not unique—to your species. However, I have also learned that there are many good things about humanity. Things that are not quite as common in the galaxy as you might think.”
“Like what?”
“Music, for one.”
“You don’t have music on your planet?”
“We didn’t until we encountered humanity. It never occurred to anyone to make it. And even now that we know about it, we don’t seem to have the gift for it that you do. We have never made anything as beautiful as Mozart did. Or the Beatles. Or Coronal Mass Ejection.”
“You like CME?”
“Very much so. And there are other wonderful things you have developed besides music. Painting. Theater. Sculpture. Poetry. The amazing things you can do with food. Empathy. Love.”
Everything on the list was shocking. But the last one blew me away. “You don’t have love?”
“We have something like it, I suppose, but what you experience is far more powerful. With my own kind, I have never felt anything like what you feel for your parents. Or Violet. . . . Or me.”
I locked eyes with her, surprised by this last revelation. Because up until that point, I hadn’t realized it myself. But now, there was no denying that I had a massive crush on Zan.
“Is that why you chose me?” I asked. “Because I like you?”
“It didn’t hurt,” Zan said with a smile.
I realized I was blushing and turned away.
“It’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” Zan said quickly. “Really, you ought to be proud of these feelings. In fact, you ought to be thrilled that you have them. I am only experiencing a tiny fraction of what you experience, but this love is an amazing thing.”
“It isn’t always,” I said.