Space Case

by Stuart Gibbs

  Zan never showed.

  * * *

  I slipped out of my residence at one a.m. on the nose. Kira was already in the staging area, pacing like a lion in the zoo. She brightened when she saw me. “I was worried you were gonna chicken out,” she whispered.

  “I’m right on time,” I told her.

  She started to say something else, but I put a finger to my lips. The moon base was deathly silent at night. Even our softest whispers carried.

  Kira nodded understanding and opened the storage unit where the kids’ space suits were kept.

  The suits had been custom-made for us solely so we could get from the rocket to the moon base and back. Each had cost millions of dollars for about twenty minutes of use. Or at least NASA hoped we’d only use them for twenty minutes—because the only other reason for them would be an emergency that required us to evacuate MBA. Which is why the suit storage unit isn’t locked. (No one has ever told me what we’re expected to do on the surface of the moon after all our air runs out. It seems to me that if something really went wrong at MBA, suiting up and evacuating to the lunar surface would only postpone our deaths. But maybe NASA figures that, at the very least, we’d be happy to go outside.)

  MBA has mandatory practice emergency drills once a month to keep our evacuation routine well rehearsed. Due to this, I knew how to get my suit on quickly. Even faster than Kira, who’d worn hers just the day before. In the early days of space travel, astronauts had to wear multiple layers of insulation, so suiting up could take several minutes. Nowadays the suit itself is perfectly insulated, which means the person inside is much less constricted. I pulled on the outer shell, stepped into my boots, clamped my helmet, and pulled on my gloves in less than two minutes. Since we wouldn’t be gone that long, I opted not to wear the astronaut diaper, which was designed so that anyone who has to be on the lunar surface for a good stretch of time won’t have to return to the base to use the bathroom. Then I sealed all the connections and checked them again. And again. And again. Then I had Kira do it for me.

  I had no intention of being the second person in history to die on the moon.

  I inspected Kira and found she was suited properly as well.

  Since my suit had barely been worn, it still smelled like a new car on the inside. I flipped on the fan vent so the glass of my helmet wouldn’t fog up. Given our position at the pole, the sun was still out even now, so we both lowered the reflective visors; without them, in the sun’s direct heat, undimmed by any sort of atmosphere, our heads would cook like potatoes in an oven. There were radios inside the helmets, so we could now talk to each other without the whole base hearing us.

  “Testing, testing,” Kira said. It sounded like she was right next to me, speaking directly into my ear. “Can you hear me?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “Can you hear me?”

  “Perfectly. Let’s go!” Kira clapped her hands in anticipation.

  We headed for the air lock. Normally, a security door is controlled by a thumb or retina sensor so only certain people can open it. However, neither of those work very well when you’re wearing space gloves and helmets, so this one has a large keypad instead. As kids, we weren’t supposed to know the six-digit code that would open the air lock, but my parents had taught it to me months before, figuring I might need it in case of an emergency—and that they could trust me not to do anything stupid like head outside without their permission.

  In truth, I figured that while heading onto the lunar surface was reckless, it wasn’t insanely risky. Solar Array 2 wasn’t far from the air lock, and I wasn’t going solo. If all went well, Kira and I would only be outside ten minutes, if that.

  I tapped in the code. The inner door of the air lock slid open.

  Kira and I stepped inside and entered the same code on another keypad. The inner door slid closed.

  There was a whoosh as the air lock repressurized to match the atmosphere of the lunar surface.

  I looked to Kira. Even though she’d been outside only the day before, she was bouncing up and down on her toes in anticipation. While I couldn’t see her face behind the reflective visor, she didn’t seem to have the slightest bit of concern about what we were doing. I couldn’t help thinking of Riley’s dog back on earth, pacing at her kitchen door, barely able to wait to get out in the yard.

  Kira turned to me impatiently. “C’mon. What are we waiting for?”

  I entered the code again on the keypad for the outer door.

  It slid open.

  Kira immediately bounded onto the lunar surface.

  I followed her.

  For some reason, I’d been thinking that after being cooped up inside for six months, it would physically feel strange to be outside. But it didn’t. The suit increased my weight, so I didn’t bound as far with each step, but other than that I felt exactly the same as I had inside the moon base.

  But mentally it felt very different. Like I was an inmate paroled from jail. Or a zoo animal released into the wild. A sense of euphoria quickly came over me.

  Kira was certainly experiencing it too, behaving even more enthusiastically. With the added weight of her suit, she seemed more comfortable in low gravity and quickly bounded ahead of me, springing as high as she could with each step, whooping with joy. “This is so awesome!” she cried. “Can you believe it? We’re on the moon!”

  I took a few more steps. With each one, a puff of white moon dust exploded below my boot. It was like walking across a massive plain of pancake mix.

  Since there was no atmosphere outside, there was no sound from the surface, no crunch of my boots in the dust, though I probably wouldn’t have heard it anyhow, given Kira’s thrilled exclamations ringing in my helmet.

  Several well-trod paths snaked through the moon dust from the air lock. The one we wanted veered right, then branched into two others. One of these went directly to the large white dome of the moon-rover garage, while ours continued straight, threading the gap between MBA and the garage, then banked left to circumvent the science pod.

  As I took the turn, the robot arm came into view. I’d never seen it up close before. It was an impressive piece of machinery: an intricate combination of gleaming metal, pistons, and wires. Each of the three sections of the arm was more than three stories tall. They were connected with enormous ball-and-socket joints and folded up vertically, like the pincer of a massive praying mantis. The arm was attached to the lunar surface with a swivel, which allowed it to rotate 360 degrees and reach anything between the launchpad and the air lock. The hand was high above me, all four fingers and both thumbs clenched together in a gigantic fist.

  “Dash? What are you doing?”

  Kira’s words caught me by surprise. I spun to find her well ahead of me, looking back my way.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I got distracted.”

  “I’ll say,” Kira teased. “Hey, check this out!” With that she leaped ahead, covering twenty feet with one bound. Then she crash-landed, tumbling onto her back. But she didn’t seem to care. Instead she lay there, giggling, and made the lunar version of a snow angel.

  Her enthusiasm was infectious. Even though our mission was serious, there was no reason I couldn’t enjoy myself a bit. I cocked my legs and launched myself forward. The ground dropped away below me and I sailed well past the robot arm, almost to the end of the science pod, and landed in a great cloud of moon dust.

  “There you go!” Kira cheered. “Wow. You practically went into orbit!” With that she got back to her feet and bounded off again.

  I followed her. Springing across the lunar surface was more fun than I’d had in months. Exploring a real place was far better than any simulation the computers could cook up. Above us the stars gleamed, and the Milky Way was a gorgeous slash across the ink-dark sky. The earth shone brightly in the middle of it, a beautiful blue jewel. I found a patch of moon dust that had somehow remained pristine and, unable to resist, planted my feet right in it, making myself the first human to ever set foot on that spo
t.

  The fun was short-lived, however. We were covering so much ground with each leap that we quickly reached Solar Array 2. Since it’s on the western side of MBA, where there are no windows, I had never seen it before. It was startlingly large, a field of solar panels taking up significantly more space than the base itself. Each panel was five feet square, perched atop a tall metal post from which it could be angled directly at the sun. Currently, the panels were all were tilted southwest, sucking up so much solar energy that I could feel the heat from them as we came close.

  “Daphne said the robot traveled to panel thirty-six-B,” Kira said. “Any idea where that is?”

  I looked over the array. There were more than a thousand panels. Thankfully, they were arranged in an orderly fashion, in perfectly spaced rows, like plants on a farm. I bounded to the closest support post. There was a number etched into the side: 29A. 28A was to my right; 30A was to my left.

  “This way,” I said, heading left, where the row of panels continued toward the edge of the blast wall that surrounded the launch pad. I returned to walking normally now, not wanting to accidentally bounce up into the solar panels and fricassee myself.

  As expected, 36A was six panels down from 30A. And one row in sat 36B.

  I glanced at the moon dust at the base of its post. It had been trampled by hundreds of footsteps over the months of installation and maintenance, but a more recent nonhuman track—two sets of treads—sliced across all the boot prints. “Look,” I told Kira.

  “Dr. Holtz’s robot,” she said. Even with her reflective visor down I could tell she was smiling.

  “Looks like we’re in the right place.” I circled the post, looking for where the robot had set the phone.

  Only the phone wasn’t there.

  “I don’t see anything.” Kira now sounded concerned.

  “Maybe it blew away,” I said.

  “A whole phone? How? There’s no wind here, brainiac.”

  “I know. But maybe when the rocket landed, the blast blew it somewhere.”

  Kira’s helmet shifted back and forth as she shook her head. “No way. The blast wall is built to prevent that. Otherwise the rockets would blow moon dust all over the solar panels and mess them up.”

  I frowned, not feeling quite so super any more. We’d been so sure Dr. Holtz had sent the robot out, but now I wondered if we’d made a mistake. I scanned the area around post 36B, hoping to find some sign that we hadn’t.

  “Dash,” Kira said. “There’s something I have to tell you. Before we came out here tonight, I had a lot of time to kill. So I figured I’d search the computer files a little bit more.”

  My gaze fell on the tracks of the robot in the dust. Something struck me as significant about them. Although I knew Kira was trying to tell me something important, I couldn’t help but focus on the tracks too.

  “I decided to look for the footage from the bathroom the night you overheard Dr. Holtz in there,” Kira went on. “Not to see you on the toilet or anything, I promise. Since the phone log had been erased, I was thinking that maybe if I could watch Dr. Holtz on the call, I could get some idea who he was talking to.”

  The tracks were from a small robot, I realized. That ruled out the maintenance ones, which tended to be quite large, as they often had to move heavy machinery. It was probably a small probe, which the scientists used more often. Mostly to take geologic samples.

  Which meant it was built to dig.

  I dropped to my knees and began brushing moon dust away from the base of the post for panel 36B.

  Kira stopped talking. She dropped to her knees and started digging as well.

  “Go on,” I told her.

  “Never mind,” she said. “It might not be important.”

  I brushed aside another scoop of dust, and something gleamed in the hole. I plunged my hand inside. It was hard to grasp anything with the gloves, but I finally managed to do it.

  A small, clear plastic bag had been buried in the hole. The kind of bag the scientists use to keep sterile samples in.

  Dr. Holtz’s phone was inside it.

  “You found it!” Kira cheered. “All right!” She raised her hand for a celebratory high five.

  I gave it to her, but even though I’d found the phone, I didn’t feel nearly as thrilled as I should have.

  Kira’s voice had sounded far more relieved than excited. Like there was something she knew that I didn’t.

  “What did you find on the computer?” I asked.

  “Nothing.” Kira stood up and started walking. “Forget I mentioned it. We need to get back to the base.”

  I stood too, but I didn’t follow her. “Tell me.”

  Kira turned back. “No. I shouldn’t have even brought it up. I was rushing to look through stuff, so maybe I misunderstood what I saw.”

  “Which was . . . ?”

  Kira motioned for me to follow her. “Come on. We’ve been out too long as it is.”

  I stayed put. “What did you see, Kira?”

  She sighed heavily. In the speaker of my helmet it sounded like a hurricane in my ears. “Okay, I’ll tell you, but you have to realize I might not be right about this. I wasn’t even sure if I should mention it or not until I had time to go over everything again, but then we got here and it looked like Dr. Holtz hadn’t hidden his phone here after all, so I started to think that, maybe, he was cracking up a bit.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Because I found the footage from the bathroom.” Kira came back toward me. “The footage of Dr. Holtz’s conversation. The reason we couldn’t find any record of his phone call in the logs was that he didn’t make a phone call.”

  “That’s not possible,” I said. “I heard him.”

  “You heard him talking to someone,” Kira corrected. “But he wasn’t using his phone. I saw him.”

  “You mean someone else was in the bathroom with us?”

  “No. I could see the entire room in the footage. There wasn’t anyone else there.”

  I stared at Kira, wishing I could see her face rather than just a reflection of myself in her visor. “So he was just talking to himself? Like a crazy person?”

  Kira’s helmet nodded up and down.

  I wanted to defend Dr. Holtz, to tell Kira that she certainly had to be wrong—but before I could, I spotted something in her visor’s reflection.

  Something else was moving on the lunar surface behind me. And it was moving fast.

  “Look out!” I screamed, then dove. I slammed into Kira, knocking her flat.

  A second later the massive hand of the robot arm crashed to the ground where we had just been. It came in with such speed that it sliced clean through the support post of solar panel 36A and landed hard enough to make the ground shake. The panel toppled and shattered, strewing glass all over the lunar surface.

  “What was that?” Kira gasped. “A malfunction?”

  “No,” I told her. “Someone’s trying to kill us!”

  As if to prove me right, the robot arm reared up again, preparing for another attack.

  Excerpt from The Official Residents’ Guide to Moon Base Alpha, © 2040 by National Aeronautics and Space Administration:

  EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS

  Although every precaution has been taken to make sure that MBA is as safe as any place on earth—if not safer—given the nature of the base’s location on the moon, there is always the chance that an emergency might occur. Rest assured that MBA is equipped to withstand anything the solar system can dish out, be it a fire, solar flare, or meteor strike. However, in the unlikely event of an emergency, your safety will depend on your being prepared. So remember the three F.A.R. steps:

  1) Familiarize yourself with all emergency systems and know how to use them.

  2) Attend all monthly emergency preparedness sessions and evacuation drills.

  3) Rehearse emergency procedures on a weekly basis—if not more often!

  Familiarize. Attend. Rehearse. F.A.R. It’s easy!Ir />
  * * *

  I. Actual emergency procedures and evacuation plans may not be easy for young children. All parents need to be prepared to handle their children’s safety during emergencies.

  BAD ROBOT

  Lunar day 190

  Possibly the last minutes of my life

  “Run!” I ordered Kira.

  At the exact same moment, she yelled at me to do the same thing. Her scream echoed so loudly in my helmet that my ears rang.

  Meanwhile the robot arm was bizarrely silent as it rose above us. It was kind of like watching an action movie with the sound off—only I was in it. The arm stretched to its full hundred feet and the hand made a fist. A fist the size of a small car. Which then swung down toward us.

  Kira and I were already moving.

  In our fear we hadn’t thought to coordinate. Each of us went a different way. I bolted back the way we’d come, while Kira plunged deeper into the forest of solar panels.

  The robot fist thudded down right where we’d been, shattering several more solar panels. Glass exploded into the air and sailed far and wide in the low gravity, the shards sparkling in the sunlight as they rained down around me.

  “Where are you going?” Kira screamed at me.

  “Back to the air lock!” I yelled. “Where are you going?”

  “Where there’s cover! You’re right out in the open!”

  She was right. There was nowhere for me to hide on the route to the air lock—and the robot could reach me anywhere on the way. I’d planned on outrunning it, but I’d forgotten something very important: