Spaced Out

by Stuart Gibbs

  Nina’s eyes opened in surprise. “How did you know?”

  “Cesar and Patton broke it,” I explained. “They were wearing them to play football at night and broke a bunch of the visors.”

  Even in her exhausted state, Nina’s eyes flashed with anger. “Those morons. I almost died because of them.”

  “A lot of us almost died because of them,” Chang said pointedly. “While looking for you.”

  Nina bit her lip. It was as close as she’d ever come to appearing embarrassed. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. . . . If it hadn’t been for the helmet, everything would have been fine. But I didn’t notice the visor was damaged until I was over here.”

  “You were heading to the rocks with armalcolite?” I asked.

  Nina’s eyes flicked to me, surprised. Then she nodded. “Yes. And then the crack appeared and my suit computer said the situation was critical. I only had a minute or two. There wasn’t enough time to get back to the main air lock, but I knew the pod here was still operational. Or I hoped it was. It wasn’t until I got in here that I realized all the communications gear had been removed. The radio in Lily’s helmet couldn’t get any reception down here and I didn’t have my watch. So there was no way to contact you back in the base.”

  “So you tried yelling through the floor,” I said.

  “Yes. I yelled for hours, until I was hoarse. Violet was the only one who heard me. I asked her to get help, but she must not have passed my message along.”

  “She did,” Chang said. “But we didn’t realize what she was talking about.”

  Nina sighed tiredly. Admitting to all her mistakes appeared to have drained her. “I didn’t have the strength to keep shouting. The oxygen system in here wasn’t working properly. I had to conserve my breath. And my strength.”

  “Good thing you did,” Chang told her. “The carbon dioxide level in here is toxic.”

  Nina’s eyes began to flutter closed. “Now what do we do?”

  “Wait for you to get your strength back,” Chang answered. “I’ll fix your helmet and then we’ll get you back to base.”

  “I mean, what do we do about me?” Nina asked. “What I did is a criminal offense. I should be court-martialed.”

  “That’s NASA’s call.” Chang shot me a conspiratorial glance. “And NASA won’t know what happened up here unless we tell them.”

  “You have to tell them,” Nina said. “As acting commander, it’s your job.”

  “I’m not acting commander anymore,” Chang replied. “You’re alive.”

  “I don’t deserve my position. . . .”

  “Everybody makes mistakes,” Chang said.

  Nina sighed again, but seemed too tired to argue the point. Her eyelids slid closed and she drifted back to sleep again, snoring softly.

  As she did, something occurred to me. Chang was right that everyone made mistakes, but Nina made them less than most people. In fact, besides getting stranded on the moon, I couldn’t think of any mistake Nina had ever made before. And frankly, Cesar, Patton, and Lily were the ones who’d really screwed up: They’d broken the helmet; Nina simply hadn’t noticed. Nina was cold and robotic and she could be a real jerk, but there was always a reason for everything she did. At heart, she was doing her best to run a moon base, which wasn’t easy. Given all the things that could go wrong and all the people she had to deal with, she did an amazing job most of the time. Most people probably would have screwed up one thing after another, but Nina hadn’t.

  So if anyone had ever wanted to catch Nina doing something wrong, they would have had to wait a very long time.

  Unless they tricked her into it.

  Chang was watching Nina, making sure she was all right. Then he returned his attention to repairing Lily’s helmet.

  “How long have you known you were the temporary second in command?” I asked.

  “About four weeks, I guess. NASA made the decision shortly after Dr. Holtz died.”

  “And you didn’t tell anyone at the base?”

  “No. Like I said, Nina figured it was better to keep things quiet until NASA made it official.”

  “So you’ve never talked about it since?”

  “No.”

  “Where were you when she told you the news?”

  “The control room.” Chang looked at me curiously. “What’s all this have to do with anything?”

  “Nothing,” I said, though it was a lie. In fact, what Chang had told me was extremely important.

  I had a very good idea who Charlie 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

  OTHER HAZARDS

  This list is not intended to be comprehensive. There may be other potential hazards to life and limb that have been overlooked. It is quite likely that, even at a lunar outpost such as MBA, most injuries will not be caused by meteoroids or rocket explosions, but by the same innocuous things that cause injury on earth: tripping over objects carelessly left on the ground, banging one’s head on a cabinet door, slipping and falling in the shower, etc. While the medical bay is equipped to handle these types of injuries, it is certainly better to simply try to avoid them in the first place. So please exercise caution at all times.

  SECRET IDENTITY

  Lunar day 217

  Dinner time

  It was an hour before Chang felt Nina had recovered enough to get her back to the base. During that time, Chang left me with her briefly to go to the surface and call everyone else on his radio. He announced that we’d found Nina and that all search parties could return to base, then came back down to the pod and repaired Nina’s helmet. Nina slept the whole time. When we finally woke her back up, she seemed to have completely recovered her strength. I had expected that we’d have to help her return to the base, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She suited up and walked back all by herself.

  By the time we returned, all the other adults were back from the search. Everyone was gathered in the staging area and cheered Nina’s arrival as we came through the air lock.

  “Welcome home!” they all whooped.

  “Congratulations on not being dead!” Roddy said.

  “This calls for a celebration!” Dr. Marquez exclaimed.

  “No,” Nina said sharply. “There’s no need for that. I haven’t done anything worth celebrating. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a great amount of work to catch up on.” With that, she slipped through the crowd and headed up the stairs toward her residence.

  “Work?” Mom asked. “Nina, if anything, you need time to recover.”

  “And you should eat something,” Daphne added. “I whipped up a special welcome-back dinner for you! I rehydrated all of your favorite foods!”

  “That was a waste of resources,” Nina told her. “I had plenty of emergency rations in the pod. Now, I’m retiring to my quarters for the night—and I’d recommend that the rest of you do the same. Due to today’s events, I assume that many of you have fallen behind on your projects, so tomorrow we’re all going to have a great deal of work to catch up on. Good night.” With that, she slipped into her residence and shut the door behind her.

  “Boy,” Kira said, “talk about your party poopers.”

  “Yeah,” Violet agreed. “She really pooped this party good.”

  “She’s upset that we’re behind schedule?” Dr. Alvarez muttered. “We’re behind schedule because of her!”

  “Maybe we should have just left her out there,” someone muttered, though I didn’t see who it was.

  With the celebration dead, everyone began to drift back to their rooms. It had been a long, stressful day, and Nina was right that tomorrow would be busy too. I was pretty sure I was going to have extra schoolwork to catch up on.

  I was still hungry, though. I hadn’t eaten any emergency rations. In fact, I hadn’t eaten much of anything since breakfast. So I took some of the food Daphne had rehyd
rated for Nina and scarfed it down in the mess hall. It tasted like damp cardboard, but for once, I didn’t care. Mom sat with me, while Dad hustled Violet off to bed.

  “Nina didn’t even thank everyone for helping look for her,” I said, once I’d polished off my dinner.

  “I think she was embarrassed by all the attention,” Mom told me. “And by the fact that she had to be rescued at all. By a twelve-year-old boy, no less.”

  “I guess,” I agreed.

  “Ready for bed?” Mom asked. “You must be exhausted.”

  “Actually, I feel grimy,” I told her. “Do you think I could have a shower tonight?”

  “Yeah, I think you’ve earned yourself a shower.” Mom proudly tousled my hair, then grabbed my dirty plates. “I’ll take care of these. See you back in the room.”

  That’s life on the moon. The biggest reward you can get is a shower.

  It wasn’t even a good shower. It was merely standing under a trickle of lukewarm water. But I wasn’t really sticking around to shower anyhow.

  “Charlie” was still near the mess as well.

  I cleaned myself off anyhow. It might have been lame compared to an earth shower, but it was better than nothing.

  Then I toweled off, dressed, brushed my teeth, checked to make sure no one was inside the control room or the mess hall—and headed into the greenhouse.

  I wasn’t supposed to go into the greenhouse without permission. No kids were. But I figured it would be all right because Dr. Goldstein was in there.

  She was leaning against a table full of potted seedlings, staring at her ruined tomato plants. She wasn’t crying anymore, but she still seemed kind of sad. There was a faraway look in her eyes, and she didn’t even hear me come in.

  “Dr. Goldstein?” I asked.

  She turned, noticed me for the first time, and started in surprise. I wondered if I looked that way every time Zan appeared to me. Then she forced a smile onto her face.

  “Hello, Dashiell,” she said. “What brings you in here?”

  “Are you Charlie?” I asked.

  Her smile faded. Then she seemed to realize this was a mistake and tried to cover. She didn’t do a very good job of it. It took her a few moments to figure out what the right response might be. She finally put on her best blank look and said, “What are you talking about?”

  I’d already seen enough to know I was right, though. “I won’t tell anyone,” I said. “I only want to know why you did it.”

  Dr. Goldstein simply stared at me now, seeming unsure what to do.

  “Was it to get Nina demoted?” I asked. “So that Chang would become the base commander?”

  Dr. Goldstein’s eyes widened in surprise. She seemed to forget all about faking innocence. Or maybe she was tired from hiding what she’d done and ready to own up to it. “How did you ever figure that out?”

  “Well, Chang and Nina said they were the only ones who knew that Chang was the temporary second in command. They never discussed it with anyone else, and the only place they ever talked about it was in the control room. But when I was in the control room earlier today, I realized you can hear anything in this greenhouse through the wall. So I figured if you’re in here, you can probably hear everything in the control room, too. And you’re in here all the time, while no one else is supposed to be.”

  Dr. Goldstein looked at me curiously. “And that was all the evidence you had?”

  “No. I also know you had some problems with Nina. She was riding you pretty hard about how the greenhouse wasn’t working. So I figured, maybe you wanted to get her out of power. . . .”

  “I wasn’t trying to kill her,” Dr. Goldstein said quickly. “I was only trying to get her in trouble with NASA so she’d be demoted.”

  “I know,” I told her. “Stealing moon rocks is a serious crime. Chang said it wouldn’t be that hard to create a fake alias like Charlie. In fact, he said practically anyone here could do it if they put their mind to it. I checked your bio at dinner. Before you switched to horticulture, you were a computer science major.”

  Dr. Goldstein turned away from me, and it seemed she might start crying again. “You’re right about everything. I really didn’t think Nina would accept, but I figured it was still worth a try. There’d been a rumor she needed money. . . .”

  “Her mother is sick,” I said. “And something went wrong with the insurance.”

  “Oh my.” Dr. Goldstein put her hand to her mouth, looking horrified. “I had no idea. I thought she’d made a bad investment or something. Her mother . . . ? Oh, what have I done?” Tears started to flow down her cheeks. “I didn’t think anyone would get hurt. It seemed so simple. The first time she went out to get the rocks, I watched her to see how she’d do it, and she was only gone fifteen minutes. Last night, I figured it’d be the same, only when she came back in, I’d pretend like I was passing by and catch her in the act. Then I’d report her to NASA. But she didn’t come back and I . . . I didn’t know what to do. . . .” Dr. Goldstein put her face in her hands and broke down, sobbing.

  That was the other piece of evidence I’d had against her. The crying. Dr. Goldstein had been distraught all day. I had assumed it was about her plants at first, but in retrospect, it seemed like an awfully extreme reaction, even after her precious tomatoes had been devoured by the Sjobergs. Instead Dr. Goldstein had been acting like she was really devastated about something—like putting someone’s life in danger, maybe. And most importantly, she’d been upset that morning, before anyone else had discovered Nina was missing. The way I figured, she’d known something had gone wrong and was very upset that she’d caused it, but didn’t know what to do without revealing her involvement. Thus all the tears. Only it didn’t seem like the best time to bring all that up.

  Instead I said, “It wasn’t your fault. Cesar and Patton are the ones who broke the helmets. . . .”

  “But I made her go out there,” Dr. Goldstein cried.

  “No, you didn’t. She went by herself.”

  “Because I promised her money. Money I wasn’t ever going to deliver. Money she needed for her sick mother. And then, when I realized something was wrong, I didn’t alert anyone because I didn’t want to get in trouble.” Dr. Goldstein pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and blew her nose loudly. “Oh, I’m such a horrible person!”

  I hadn’t expected this to happen, so I wasn’t quite sure what to do, except to say, “No, you’re not.”

  “If I’d only busted her the first time she went out, this never would have happened,” Dr. Goldstein sobbed.

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Because I thought Nina might be able to talk her way out of it. She’d claim she was gathering rocks for scientific reasons or something. But if I could prove she’d done it twice . . . show that she’d already stashed some moon rocks in her room . . . then the evidence would be stacked against her.” Dr. Goldstein blew her nose again and started blubbering into her hankie.

  “Oh.” I didn’t know what else to say. I’d never had an adult cry like this in front of me before.

  Dr. Goldstein seemed to be getting embarrassed about it herself. She did her best to control her crying and looked at me with red-rimmed eyes. “I know, I’m a wreck,” she admitted. “I’ve been a wreck all day. Nina isn’t the only one who nearly died because of what I did. You and Kira nearly got killed looking for her. And so many other people ended up in danger. I never expected things to spiral out of control like this. If I had, I never would have done it.”

  “I know.”

  “I’d just had it with Nina. She didn’t seem to have any idea how hard this all was.” Dr. Goldstein waved an arm around the greenhouse. “She acted like growing plants on the moon should have been easy. Like all I’d have to do was stick them in the dirt and water them. But it’s not easy at all. In fact, it was far more difficult than anyone had realized, and I was doing my best, but she was still treating me like I was a failure. Like the plants weren’t growing because I was slacking off. A
nd even when I did finally get some things to grow, that still wasn’t good enough for her.” The sadness had vanished and anger now flared in Dr. Goldstein’s eyes. “She kept riding me and riding me. Insulting my intelligence. Implying it had been a mistake to bring me up here. And I thought, Chang had to be a better leader than her. Plus, he’s a scientist like me. He’d understand what I was going through. That things don’t always work out the way everyone predicts they will. I tried to find another way to get rid of Nina. I filed complaints with her superiors. And you know what happened?”

  “They ignored them?” I guessed.

  “Worse. They chastised me for insubordination, rather than getting on Nina’s case. And then they told Nina about it and she got upset and started treating me even worse. So I’d had it. I figured something had to be done. So I created Charlie and reached out to Nina and she actually accepted. At first, it worked out better than I could have imagined. And then . . . it didn’t. I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, and I meant it. Even though Dr. Goldstein was right—my life had been put in danger because of her—I didn’t feel angry at her. In fact, I understood exactly why she’d done the things she’d done. Frankly, I had my own issues with Nina and wouldn’t have minded Chang running MBA instead. And everything that had gone wrong that day hadn’t really been solely Dr. Goldstein’s fault. Cesar Marquez and the Sjobergs had also been responsible.

  Now the anger faded from Dr. Goldstein’s eyes and a kind of resolve set in. Like she had made an important decision. “Thank you for coming to me this way, Dashiell. For giving me the chance to explain myself, rather than going right to Nina or Chang. It was very . . . helpful.”

  “Sure.”

  “I think I’m going to have to turn myself in, though. Admit to NASA what I’ve done and suffer the consequences.”

  “I think Nina’s going to do the same thing,” I said.

  Dr. Goldstein nodded. “Sounds like Nina. Always following the rules.”

  “Well,” I said. “Not always.”

  Dr. Goldstein laughed, then seemed surprised she’d done it. “It’s not like NASA can fire me anyway,” she said. “There’s no other horticulturalist for a quarter million miles.” She started toward the door, then paused by one of the denuded strawberry plants. “Those lousy Sjobergs,” she muttered. “As if this day hadn’t been terrible enough.”