Spaced Out

by Stuart Gibbs

  I found the screwdriver I needed and brought it back to Nina’s sleep pod. Violet had now clambered up inside the pod herself to get a better view. She was curled up in the back of it, cuddling Nina’s teddy bear.

  “That’s not yours,” I told her. “It’s Nina’s.”

  “I’m only borrowing him,” Violet told me. “His name is Mister Sillypants.”

  I jammed the blade of the screwdriver into the slight gap in the crack and used it as a lever. The square panel popped out easily. I shoved it aside and Kira aimed her light inside to see what Nina had hidden there.

  “It’s just a bunch of rocks,” Violet said, sounding disappointed.

  I looked inside. The space was six inches deep and about eighteen inches square. Sure enough, there were rocks inside. There were about a hundred, most of them on the smaller side, about the size of a tangerine, although there were a few as big as a can of beans.

  Kira frowned. “Why would Nina go through so much trouble to hide a bunch of rocks?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “Let’s go find out.”

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

  ROCKETS

  Perhaps the most dangerous pieces of machinery at MBA are the rockets designed to deliver you there and bring you back home. While riding on a rocket has become hundreds of times safer in recent years, being near a rocket when it is taking off or landing is still exceptionally dangerous. This is especially the case on the moon, where the lack of atmosphere allows debris blown clear by the rockets to travel great distances at potentially deadly speeds. For this reason, no lunarnaut is to be on the surface at any time during a rocket landing or departure, including during arrivals of supply capsules and other spacecraft. Furthermore, even once the rockets have landed, lunarnauts should avoid going anywhere near the engines—which can be hot enough to melt through space suits—until said engines have had at least three hours to cool down.

  ILLEGAL CONTRABAND

  Lunar day 217

  T minus zero to Capsule Drop

  I found my parents in the common room, along with almost everyone else from MBA. They had all taken a break from searching and measuring to watch the capsule drop on the main SlimScreen. The only people who were missing were the Sjobergs, as usual.

  The capsule was separating from the delivery rocket as Kira, Violet, and I entered. A camera on the rocket showed it dropping away with the moon behind it.

  My parents were standing next to Kira’s father. Dr. Howard was watching the capsule drop with an unusual amount of focus. Normally, his mind seemed to be a hundred other places at once. But the capsule’s arrival was very important to Dr. Howard, as he was involved with the construction of Moon Base Beta. If anything went wrong, his job would become a whole lot more complicated.

  My parents looked relieved to see Violet, Kira, and me, as if they’d been worried. It occurred to me only then that this probably wasn’t the best day to suddenly go missing. Nina had already vanished; perhaps Mom and Dad thought it had happened to us, too.

  Dr. Howard didn’t even seem to notice us.

  “Where have you guys been?” Dad asked. “We were looking for you.”

  “We found something in Nina’s room,” I said, keeping my voice as low as possible. “Something important.”

  “What were you doing in Nina’s room?” Mom asked suspiciously.

  “Trying to figure out what happened to her,” Kira replied, before I could. “And I think we’ve got a clue.”

  “Really?” Dr. Howard asked absently. “That’s nice, dear.”

  On the SlimScreen, the capsule was falling away from the rocket that had delivered it at thousands of miles per hour.

  The view switched to a camera on the capsule itself, filming the surface of the moon as it came closer and closer.

  Mom and Dad had already forgotten all about the capsule. And if they’d been annoyed at us for disappearing, they seemed to have forgotten about that, too. Now they were intrigued.

  “What’d you find?” Dad asked.

  “You have to come see,” I told them.

  “It’s a bunch of rocks!” Violet exclaimed.

  Kira and I had both told her to keep this a secret—or, if she couldn’t do that, to at least whisper it. In her excitement, she had failed on both counts. Luckily, everyone else in the room was too riveted to the SlimScreen to notice.

  The retro rockets fired on the capsule, slowing its descent.

  Mom and Dad were even more intrigued after Violet’s revelation. “I think we’d better see these rocks,” Mom said, while Dad headed over to where Chang was watching the capsule drop. He whispered in Chang’s ear. Chang’s jaw immediately fell open in surprise. He forgot about the capsule drop as well and came back across the room toward us.

  Kira told her father, “I’m going back up to Nina’s room.”

  “All right,” Dr. Howard replied distantly. “Have fun.”

  On the screen, the capsule was lowering toward the lunar surface. Someone back at NASA Mission Control in Houston was reporting that all systems looked good.

  Mom, Dad, and Chang led Kira, Violet, and me out of the common room. “You guys found rocks in Nina’s room?” Chang asked. He didn’t sound angry at all. He sounded stunned.

  “Like a thousand!” Violet reported.

  “More like a hundred,” I corrected.

  Chang shared a surprised glance with my parents.

  We all started up the stairs to the upper residences.

  “What’s wrong?” Kira asked.

  Instead of answering the question, Chang asked his own. “Did you tell anyone else about these rocks?”

  “No,” Kira replied. “We only found them a few minutes ago and we came right to you.”

  We reached Nina’s residence. Chang paused at the door, then turned back to us. “You kids are aware that all the residences here are private, right?”

  “Kira made me go in!” Violet announced. “It was all her idea!”

  Kira shot Violet an annoyed look. “Thanks a lot.”

  “You’re welcome,” Violet replied. She didn’t really understand sarcasm yet.

  Chang didn’t seem very surprised that Kira had been the instigator. He didn’t seem that upset, either. “Next time you want to get into someplace up here,” he said, “come see me first.”

  “Okay,” Kira said, then led the way to the secret compartment we’d found.

  Chang grew annoyed at himself the moment he saw where it was. “I can’t believe I missed that,” he sighed. “I’m an idiot.”

  “We weren’t looking for a space that small,” Mom pointed out. “We were looking for spaces big enough to hold a person.”

  “Even so,” Chang said, then peeked into the compartment. Mom and Dad joined him. They all reacted with astonishment.

  “Those are rocks all right,” Dad said.

  “You didn’t believe us?” Kira asked.

  “It didn’t seem . . .”—Dad paused to search for the right words—“in Nina’s character.”

  “What’s going on here?” I asked.

  Chang fished one of the rocks out of the secret compartment. “This is a moon rock—” he began.

  “We know,” Violet taunted. “We’re on the moon! Duh!”

  Mom signaled Violet to be quiet.

  Chang walked back over to the door of the room, checked the hall to see if anyone was around, then closed it. “The point is, moon rocks are extremely valuable.”

  “Why?” Violet asked, ignoring Mom’s warning. “They’re everywhere. The whole moon is made of them.”

  “True,” Chang admitted. “They’re not valuable here. But on earth, they’d be worth a fortune. The total amount of lunar samples that have been brought back to earth over the years is only a few thousand pounds. And those have all been supervised by NASA.”

  Mom said, “No one o
n earth has a moon rock unless NASA has given it to them, and they’ve limited those gifts to museums and other educational or research facilities.” She took another rock out of the compartment. “If you were a private collector, no matter how rich you were, it’d be easier to get a diamond this size than a moon rock.”

  I asked, “You mean, that rock could be worth more than a giant diamond?”

  “Exactly,” Chang replied. “In fact, I can’t even say what it’d be worth, because there’s never been a moon rock for sale before. But I can guarantee you, there are people back home who’d be willing to spend whatever it takes to get one. Millions, certainly. If not tens of millions.”

  “For that?” Violet asked. “But it’s ugly!”

  She was right. None of the rocks in the secret compartment were pretty, especially compared to the rocks you could find on earth. On earth, there are all sorts of forces at work—like volcanoes and sedimentation and plate tectonics—that create hundreds of thousands of varieties of rock. But the rocks on the moon are exactly the same as they were a billion years ago. The ones in Nina’s room were simply lumps of gray stone. They were about as bland as rocks could get.

  “No rock is ugly,” Mom chastened Violet. As a geologist, she couldn’t help but defend her field of study. “They’re all beautiful in their own way.”

  “Although a collector on earth wouldn’t be interested in these for their looks,” Dad explained. “They’d want them because they’re as rare as rocks can get. And being the only person to own a moon rock has a great deal of value. But for now, the scientific community needs them all for research. Which is why possession of them has been tightly controlled. Any samples that have been collected here have been locked up in the science pod or transported back to earth under great security.”

  I was beginning to understand why my parents had been so shocked to discover the moon rocks. “So then . . . Nina wasn’t supposed to have these?”

  “No,” Mom said.

  “And she was going to smuggle them back down to earth?” Kira asked.

  The adults all shared another look, then turned back to us.

  “We can’t say that for sure until we find Nina,” Mom said cautiously.

  “But it looks like it, right?” Kira didn’t sound shocked so much as amazed to learn what Nina had been up to. “I mean, why else would they be hidden away like this? Nina the Machina wasn’t so straitlaced after all.”

  “There are other possibilities,” Mom said.

  “Like what?” Kira asked.

  “Er . . .” Mom stalled, trying to come up with one. “Perhaps NASA requested her to take some samples for reasons that we weren’t aware of.”

  “Without telling you?” I asked. “You’re the head geologist here.”

  “It’s possible,” Mom said. “NASA doesn’t have to tell me everything.”

  “Although that brings up a point,” Chang said thoughtfully. “Where did Nina get these? Are they from the samples you’ve collected?”

  “I don’t think so.” Mom picked another rock out of the secret compartment and analyzed it carefully. “Like Stephen said, our samples are locked up.”

  “Nina probably knows the combination to the safe,” Dad said.

  “Maybe,” Mom admitted. “But I spend a lot of time with those samples. If Nina had taken one, I would have noticed. Let alone this many. The only place she could have got so many would be . . .” Mom trailed off, looking out Nina’s window, at the surface of the moon. “Out there.”

  Chang’s eyes suddenly lit up. “That’s what the text she got meant!”

  We all turned to him, surprised by his outburst.

  “This Charlie person must have been in cahoots with Nina,” Chang explained. “I mean, why else send music from a fake account? There’d be no reason to hide your identity if you were doing something legal. And now that we know about the moon rocks, it’s obvious what the message was.”

  “It is?” Dad asked.

  “Think about the first song this Charlie sent,” Chang said.

  “ ‘Gimme Shelter’?” I asked, not following.

  “By the Rolling Stones,” Chang stressed. “And the second song had the number fifty in the title: ‘Fifty Miles of Elbow Room.’ ”

  “So you think this Charlie was telling Nina to get fifty stones?” Mom asked.

  “What else could it be?” Chang replied. “Nina’s collecting moon rocks on the sly. Suddenly she gets this message while she’s with Dashiell: Charlie wants fifty more stones. Nina immediately gets distracted by the mission, sends Dashiell packing, and the next thing you know, she’s gone missing.”

  “That might explain the message,” Mom conceded. “But we still don’t know what happened to Nina.”

  “She must have gone outside to get the moon rocks,” Chang said.

  “How?” Mom asked. “Her space suit is still here.”

  “Maybe she didn’t take her space suit,” Violet suggested.

  “No,” I told her. “Without a space suit, she’d die in three seconds.”

  “Are we any closer to figuring out who Charlie might be?” Dad asked. “Because if he’s in on this plan with Nina, maybe he knows how she was getting the rocks.”

  “Maybe Nina went outside without her space suit,” Violet said again.

  Everyone ignored her this time. Chang said, “I’ll have to check back in with NASA, but they probably would have alerted me if anything had come up. I’m guessing Charlie must be someone at NASA, though.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “If it was someone outside NASA, they wouldn’t be able to get their hands on the moon rocks,” Chang explained. “My guess is, Nina wasn’t going to bring the rocks back with her own things. The plan was probably to send them down sooner, on one of the cargo rockets.”

  “Why?” Kira asked.

  “A few reasons,” Chang answered. “First of all, Nina is slated to stay here for another two and a half years. That’s a long time to hoard moon rocks. Plus, NASA scrutinizes the personal belongings of everyone returning from the moon for exactly this reason.”

  “They think all of us might be smuggling moon rocks?” I asked.

  “Not necessarily rocks,” Chang said. “But anything that’s been up here has value down on earth. Even a pencil that’s been on the moon would be worth hundreds of dollars to a collector. NASA doesn’t want people looting this place for stuff to sell on eBay, so they search our belongings as a deterrent. But suppose Nina hides the rocks in some cargo that’s being returned to earth. We send plenty of stuff back with each rocket: experiments, lunar samples, garbage. . . . If this Charlie is involved in the unloading operations and knows where to find the rocks, he can get them out. Presumably, he has a line on selling them on the black market.”

  “There’s also a chance this Charlie’s a woman,” Mom pointed out. “ ‘Charlie’ can be short for ‘Charlotte.’ Or it could be a woman who picked a masculine name to hide her identity even more.”

  “Right,” Chang agreed. “So this Charlie, whether it’s a man or a woman, sells the moon rocks and then splits the proceeds with Nina. They’ve got a Swiss bank account or something like that set up, and when Nina gets back to earth, there’s a ton of cash waiting for her.”

  Mom and Dad nodded, indicating this made sense to them. It didn’t make sense to me, though. “You really think Nina would break the law like that? Nina? I’ll bet that when she was a kid, she never even colored outside the lines.”

  “It’s a great front,” Kira said. “No one would ever suspect her.”

  “I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen the rocks myself,” Dad told me. “But there they are, in a secret compartment in Nina’s room.”

  “What if the real bad guy planted them there?” I asked. “Maybe someone else was stealing moon rocks, and this message from Charlie was some kind of tip-off for Nina so she could catch the thief in action. That’s why she got distracted. And when she found the bad guy, they .
. .” I trailed off, not wanting to say the words in front of Violet.

  “Killed her?” Violet finished, guessing them anyhow.

  “Er . . . yes,” I said. “And then they stuck the rocks in Nina’s room to make it look like she was the smuggler.”

  My parents looked uneasy about this line of thought. Chang frowned, like he didn’t buy it. “Your pal Roddy came to me with a murder theory too today.”

  “He’s not our pal,” Kira said sharply. “And that was my theory, not his.”

  “Well, I’m going to tell you the same thing I told him,” Chang said. “I don’t think Nina was murdered.”

  “No one thought Dr. Holtz had been murdered either,” I countered. “And look how that turned out.”

  “And we put the person who did it on a rocket back to earth,” Chang said. “Now, the chance of there being another murderer up here is incredibly small.”

  “That doesn’t mean it’s not possible,” I told him. “A lot of people here didn’t like Nina. . . .”

  “That’s no reason to kill someone,” Mom said.

  “People kill each other for dumb reasons all the time back on earth,” Kira pointed out.

  “This base is different,” Chang told us. “Everyone here was subjected to a great series of psychological tests before coming up. If there had been any tendency toward violence in any of us, we wouldn’t have been approved.”

  “The Sjobergs didn’t have to pass any tests,” Kira said. “They’re total psychos.”

  “And maybe being up here has some kind of effect on our brains,” I said. “Something that makes us go kind of crazy and be more likely to do bad things.”

  “I suppose that’s all possible,” Dad said, sounding like he was trying to get us off the subject, “though I still think it’s far more likely that Nina was smuggling the rocks herself.”

  “Which brings us back to the same question,” Mom said. “How did she get them?”

  “Maybe she went outside without her suit,” Violet said for the third time.

  “Violet,” I said, trying not to get annoyed, “I keep telling you, she couldn’t survive without a suit.”