by Melinda Metz
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
About the Author
About the Illustrator
Glossary
Discussion Questions
Writing Prompts
Space Colonization
Explore More
Copyright
Back Cover
1
“Who wants to go to Mars?” Mrs. Ramanujan asked once all the kids in S.M.A.R.T.S. — Science, Maker, and Real Technology Students — were on the field trip bus.
“Me! Me! Me! Did I say me?” Zoe Branson exclaimed. She wasn’t sure if Mrs. Ram — that was what they usually called Hubble Middle School’s fifth grade science teacher and the club’s sponsor — could hear her. The other ten kids in S.M.A.R.T.S., including Zoe’s best friends Caleb Quinn and Jaden Thompson, were shouting pretty much the same thing.
Joining S.M.A.R.T.S. was how Zoe, Caleb, and Jaden had become best friends. They’d been in classes together off and on since kindergarten. But this year, when they’d started the fifth grade, the three of them had joined the club. That’s when they’d realized they all loved science and anything science-fiction related, including comics, video games, and movies.
Mrs. Ram grinned. “I really didn’t need to ask, did I?”
Zoe grinned too. The S.M.A.R.T.S. had entered a contest for middle school science clubs and were one of four clubs that had won the chance to take part in a Mars mission simulation. Although they weren’t actually going to Mars, this simulation was the next best thing.
The Mars Commission, the company who’d come up with the contest, wanted to put a colony on Mars one day and make the red planet a place where humans could live. Their headquarters were in Oregon’s Alvord Desert, only a few hours from Hubble Middle School. The desert had some of the same environmental conditions as Mars. It was a great place to try out the habitats — the small buildings that Mars colonists would live in.
Four S.M.A.R.T.S. kids would actually be able to live in one of the habitats — habs for short — for four days. The rest of the club would be part of Mission Control, the group responsible for monitoring equipment and helping with any problems that came up. The other three clubs would each have their own habs and control centers.
As the bus pulled out of the parking lot, Mrs. Ram took an iPad out of her blue felt TARDIS purse. She was as big a nerd as the kids in the club, which made her all kinds of awesome.
“We’ll use the Pick Me app to decide who our colonists will be,” she told them. Mrs. Ram had preloaded the names of everyone in S.M.A.R.T.S. into the app and used it to select four kids at random. “Our Martians are … Goo, Samuel, Dylan, and Zoe!”
Goo — whose real name was Maya — turned around in her seat and slapped Zoe a high five. Everyone called her Goo because she could answer questions faster than Google. Dylan let out a whoop. Samuel looked like someone had switched on a light inside him.
“Big yay!” Zoe exclaimed. “But I wish you guys could be in the hab too,” she told Caleb and Jaden, who were sharing the bus’s long back seat with her.
“I’m good with it,” Jaden answered. “The control centers have some of the same equipment NASA uses.”
Caleb nodded. “Plus, we get a rover. It’s like the most awesome remote-controlled car ever.”
“Somebody needs to —” Benjamin started to yell out.
He looked at his twin, Samuel, but Samuel didn’t say anything. The twins almost always completed each other’s sentences. They were so alike that their nicknames were Thing One and Thing Two, after the Dr. Seuss characters.
Benjamin started again. “Somebody needs to —” He hesitated, waiting for Samuel to jump in. Then he finished the sentence himself. “— trade with Samuel.”
“No, they don’t,” Samuel answered.
“But we need to —” Benjamin took a breath. “— be together.”
“No, we don’t,” Samuel said, crossing his arms. “I want to be a Martian. I can be on my own.”
“You’re crazy! Mr. Leavey, tell Samuel he has to be on Mission Control with me,” Benjamin said to the Hubble Middle School librarian.
Mr. Leavey turned around in his seat. He was almost like a second sponsor for S.M.A.R.T.S., which was why he was also on the field trip. He’d helped set up a makerspace with all kinds of tools and materials in the back of the media center for the kids to work on their projects.
“It’s Samuel’s decision,” Mr. Leavey answered.
Zoe noticed that the librarian was wearing one green sock and one plaid sock. Typical Mr. Leavey. He always kept the library super neat, but he had trouble keeping himself the same way.
As the brothers argued quietly with each other, Jaden tried to remember if he’d ever seen one twin without the other. He was pretty sure he hadn’t.
“There’s no way the two of them can function apart,” Caleb whispered to his friends.
Zoe nibbled on her bottom lip. She was afraid Caleb was right. What if Samuel couldn’t handle the four days in the hab without Benjamin?
2
“I can’t believe we have to share a bus with them,” Sonja, the tallest — and feistiest — kid in S.M.A.R.T.S. burst out as the bus came to a stop in front of Edison Middle School.
The Edison science club, the Mad Scientists, was one of the other teams taking part in the Mars simulation. Since both clubs were from schools in the same town, their sponsors had decided it made sense for them to share a bus.
“They turned out to be pretty nice,” Jaden argued. “They all congratulated us after we won that unsolved mystery competition between our clubs, remember?”
“Don’t you remember that they cheated?” Sonja demanded. In the competition, both teams had been required to come up with a solution to an unsolved mystery. For S.M.A.R.T.S., part of solving the mystery had been figuring out that the Mad Scientists had tried to trick them.
“And not all of them were nice,” Caleb added as the driver got out to help the Mads load their gear into the bus’s storage compartment. “Not Barrett Snyder.”
“Barrett’s different,” Zoe said. She looked out the window at him. Barrett was eating a giant bag of Cheez Crunchies and had orange crumbs all down the front of his shirt. “He’s still mad that he didn’t get to be in S.M.A.R.T.S.”
Barrett was a former Hubble Middle School student who’d really wanted to join the S.M.A.R.T.S., but his grades hadn’t been good enough. When he’d transferred to Edison earlier in the year, he’d joined the Mad Scientists right away. It seemed like his goal was proving the Mads were superior.
“Let’s think of this as a fresh start,” Mrs. Ram suggested, overhearing their conversation.
A few moments later, Mr. Olsen, the Mad Scientists’ sponsor, led his club onto the bus. Barrett plopped down in a seat near the Things. He stuffed another handful of Crunchies into his mouth, then cracked his knuckles.
“Don’t crack your knuckles. We —” Benjamin began.
This time Samuel jumped right in, “— hate that sound!”
Barrett grinned. “What, you mean this sound?” He cracked his knuckles again, and the Things let out a howl.
“Barrett, enough,” Mr. Olsen said firmly.
“Yeah, Barrett,” Amanda, one of the Mads, said. “That’s so annoying.”
Finn, anothe
r Mads, cleared his throat. “Uh, we all wanted to say again that we’re sorry about the last competition.”
Sonja frowned, but Jaden smiled. “Thanks,” he said. Most of the other S.M.A.R.T.S. nodded.
During the ride, the Mads seemed like they were trying to be extra nice. One of the girls, Caroline, traded bad jokes with Jaden. Finn passed around a bag of homemade cookies while the two clubs talked about the Mars colony simulation. Amanda started up the license plate game, and almost everybody from both groups played.
Jaden noticed that Samuel and Benjamin didn’t join in. They kept their heads close together, talking only to each other. Barrett didn’t play, either.
“Look!” Mrs. Ram exclaimed after they’d been on the road a couple hours. “You can see the habs.”
Zoe’s heart started beating faster as the structures came into view. Each hab looked like a row of four giant marshmallows linked together by short elevated tunnels. She wished the bus could drive straight across the desert and right over to them. She wanted to explore!
“Do you think people could really live in those tiny habs for the rest of their lives?” Jaden asked.
“You sound scared,” Barrett said with a sneer. “I bet you’d be crying to get out before the simulation ended, and it’s only four days.”
“Four days would be no problem,” Jaden answered, his eyes on the habs. “But we’re talking decades for the colonists.”
“How about a bet?” Barrett asked the other Mad Scientists. “I say we’ll handle the simulation a hundred times better than S.M.A.R.T.S. The sponsors can be the judges and pick which team does the best.”
“It’s not a competition, Barrett,” Amanda reminded him. “It’s a chance to experience what it would be like to live on another planet.”
“You don’t want to go up against us, anyway,” Caleb added. “We crushed you in our last competition.”
“Oooh, them’s fightin’ words,” Caroline joked. “Now we have to do it.” Finn and some of the other Mads nodded in agreement.
Amanda shrugged. “If everyone wants to … sure.”
“We are so in!” Sonja called.
“If it’s a competition, what’s the prize?” Zoe asked. She was much more excited about living like a Mars colonist than competing, but a contest could be fun.
“We’re all makers. I say losers make the winners a trophy,” Caroline suggested.
“Then S.M.A.R.T.S. will have to make a trophy case for when we win,” Jaden joked. He turned toward Mrs. Ram, Mr. Leavey, and Mr. Olsen. “Could you be our judges? Pretty please?”
The adults looked at each other. “You’ll have to accept our decision with no arguments,” Mr. Leavey said finally.
Both teams agreed. “But the Mad Scientists better not cheat again,” Sonja added loudly.
3
“What’s going on out there?” Caleb exclaimed as the bus finally came to a stop. In front of them was the massive Mars Commission building — and a huge group of people.
The crowd rushed over to the bus. They all wore T-shirts that said Earth First and most carried signs. Jaden could make out a few: Mars: 35 million miles away. Homeless shelter: 24 miles away. Low tech = high happiness.
“I read that there were groups against the Mars Commission colony,” Mrs. Ram said. “But I wasn’t expecting anything like this.”
One of the protestors, a teenage girl with a long black braid, pounded on Zoe’s window. She waved her sign wildly. It said: Live Simply So That Others May Simply Live.
“But why are they against the colony?” Zoe asked, trying to ignore the girl.
“Money,” Mrs. Ram explained. “It would cost about six billion dollars just to get a team of four colonists on Mars. Some people think that money should be used to help those who are struggling right here on Earth.”
“Don’t they know that a lot of big scientists think the human race could die out if we don’t find a way to live on other planets?” Caleb asked, raising his voice. He had to talk loudly. Someone was banging on his window now.
The protestors began to move back, and Jaden saw it was because a tall man with a buzz cut was leading a group of security guards over to the bus. A minute later, the bus door opened with a hiss.
The kids let Jaden walk to the front of the bus first. He needed a little extra time because he had cerebral palsy, CP, and used leg braces to help him walk. CP affected people in different ways. For Jaden, it made one of his arms and one of his legs stiff and hard to move.
“Earth First, Earth First!” the protestors chanted as the kids filed off the bus and into the dry desert air.
“Welcome, welcome!” the man with the buzz cut said, using a bullhorn to be heard over the chanting. “I’m your host, Timothy Pegg, CEO of the Mars Commission. This is Kaylee Phelps.” Mr. Pegg gestured to the teenage girl next to him. “She’s going to be writing about the simulation for her science blog.”
Kaylee smiled, waving with one hand. She used the other to film the two clubs with her cell phone.
Mr. Pegg led the group past the protestors and toward the Mars Commission building. It looked like a bunch of gigantic glass building blocks of all different shapes that had been stacked into a tower. Tall glass doors slid open as they approached, and Mr. Pegg waved them inside.
“I apologize for those Earth First maniacs,” Mr. Pegg said, gesturing toward the crowd outside. “Don’t worry. They’re a little nuts, but harmless. They —”
Mr. Pegg was interrupted by another outburst from The Things.
“He’s doing —” Benjamin yelled.
“— it again!” Samuel cried. They both glared at Barrett.
Jaden noticed Kaylee was filming the twins with her cell. “He must have cracked his knuckles,” he explained to the teen blogger as Mrs. Ram calmed down the Things and Mr. Olsen whispered something to Barrett. “The twins hate that sound, and he knows it.”
“I get that,” Kaylee replied. “I hate hearing a fork scrape against a plate.” She smiled, and it was like a rainbow. Under her braces were colored tabs, a different color for each tooth.
The group followed Mr. Pegg, taking an elevator up to a conference room that took up the whole floor. The room was already filled with kids and adults.
“Here are our last two teams,” Mr. Pegg announced. “Sit, sit,” he urged the S.M.A.R.T.S. and the Mad Scientists, gesturing toward some empty white leather chairs.
Caleb, Zoe, and Jaden found seats together, and Kaylee plopped down next to them. Barrett sat down in the row behind them. He tapped Caleb on the shoulder.
“S.M.A.R.T.S. should just give up now,” he said. “Samuel doesn’t need the extra stress of a competition. You saw how he freaked out over a little knuckle cracking. Who knows how he’ll deal without Thing One.” He tilted back his head so he could empty the last of the Crunchies directly into his mouth.
“He’ll be —” Zoe began.
“What competition?“ Kaylee interrupted.
“Our teams have a friendly bet going about which team will do better in the simulation,” Jaden explained as Kaylee turned her phone on him.
A man squeezed past, taking one of the last empty seats. “Who are all these people?” Zoe asked Kaylee.
“Besides the other two winning teams — the Kelvins and the Fig Neutrons — there are reporters and people who Mr. Pegg hopes will invest in the Mars Commission,” Kaylee answered. “It costs big bucks to get a colony started and lots more to keep it going.”
“Welcome again,” Mr. Pegg said as he stepped up onto a raised platform at the front of the room. “I’m sure you’re all eager to hear the details of the simulation, so I won’t delay. We at the Mars Co—”
“There are people on Earth who need your money!” a voice shouted, cutting off Mr. Pegg.
Zoe looked back to see the girl with the black braid, the one who’d been pounding on her bus window, rushing off the elevator.
“If you don’t care about that,” the girl continued, “maybe you’ll ca
re that the Mars colony will fail. The plants he” — she pointed at Mr. Pegg — “is planning to grow will produce unsafe levels of oxygen in the habs. That could lead to spontaneous explosions.”
There were murmurs from the group. Two security guards were already striding toward the girl, but she kept yelling: “And if the colonists aren’t incinerated, they might starve. The calories from the crops aren’t enough to —”
The guards each took one of the girl’s elbows and hustled her back onto the elevator. “They aren’t enough for people to li—” Her voice was cut off as the huge doors slid shut.
“Please excuse the interruption,” Mr. Pegg said to the group. He forced a grin so huge Zoe thought she could see every tooth in his head. “The young lady clearly doesn’t have accurate information. And how could she? The Earth Firsters hardly know the Internet exists.”
A woman stood up. “I’m not sure I’m willing to invest in a project —” she began.
Mr. Pegg didn’t let her finish. “Let’s hold off on questions until you’ve had the chance to see our habitats in use by these bright kids. I’m sure you’ll all be very impressed.”
Caleb gave a soft snort. “Incineration. Starvation,” he muttered. “I thought staying in the habitats was supposed to be a fantastic prize.”
Zoe and Jaden exchanged a look. They both knew Caleb’s favorite word was DOOM. He was always expecting some catastrophe to happen.
“Caleb, don’t be so … so Caleb,” Zoe said, giving his arm a reassuring pat. “Nothing bad is going to happen.”
4
“It’s like being in a high-tech hobbit hole,” Zoe said as Mr. Pegg led her, Goo, Dylan, and Samuel through the hab several hours later. He was giving them a tour of what would be their home for the next four days.
Mr. Pegg had already shown them what was inside three of the modules — the rounded, puffy sections of the hab that had made Zoe think of marshmallows when she saw them from the bus. The bedrooms and bathroom were in one, the lab/exercise room was in another, and the common room, where they could all hang out and relax, was in the third.
