“I think most of us have been too busy with the day-to-day business of survival to look at the sky,” said Victor.
“Of course,” said Mom, smiling thinly.
“There are odd signs on the surface, too,” said Hiroki, pushing up his glasses. “The trees of this planet, despite their size, only have one growth ring, as if they are only a single year old.”
“So?” said Victor. “We’ve already established that this planet’s year is much longer than on Earth. What does any of this have to do with us?”
“A lot, it turns out,” said Mom. “The data was so odd that I had a look with the high-altitude survey balloon and…” Her face fell as she activated the animation. It showed the planet moving around the sun, and as it got closer in its elliptical orbit, we could see this strange dark circle warping the shape of the star. “There’s a black hole off the shoulder of this star. Its position and gravitational effect have warped this planet’s orbit such that at its periapsis—”
“I’m sorry, its what?” said Victor.
“Periapsis is the closest point of a planet’s orbit to its star,” I said.
“That’s right, Will.” Mom smiled at me, except her eyes were also welling up. “Because of the black hole, when we reach that point, we’ll be so close to the star that it will burn all life right off the surface.”
“Nothing will survive,” said Hiroki.
Victor rubbed his son’s shoulder. “You’re sure about this?”
“All the models check out,” said Mom.
“How long do we have?”
“There’s still some question of timing,” said Hiroki. “Months, we think. But it could be less. Maybe only weeks.”
“Well, that is indeed ominous,” said Victor, “but other than scaring us further, it does nothing to change our primary plan to leave this place as quickly as possible and return to the Resolute. Perhaps this will put a spring in our collective step.”
“True, but it means we don’t have another option…” Mom paused, choking up.
“Why do I feel like there’s more bad news coming?” asked Don.
Mom nodded and glanced at the ceiling. “We’ve also been running the numbers, and…” Her eyes flashed to me and Judy, and she turned away, patting Hiroki’s shoulder.
“With the number of available Jupiter craft that we have,” Hiroki continued, “there is not enough room to get everyone off the planet.”
“How is that possible?” said Victor. “We could fit dozens of people on any one of these ships if we wanted.”
“Space-wise, yes, but each person adds weight, and the amount of fuel we have on each Jupiter, even with the extra stores you just recovered, is barely enough to get each craft off world with minimum crew.”
“How short are we?”
A tragic smile crossed Mom’s face. “One,” she said. “One more Jupiter would’ve been enough to do it. The numbers are so close, but it just won’t work.”
A pit opened up in my stomach. Our Jupiter, lost in the ice—
No, it’s not! Memories flooded my mind, of our Jupiter safely by the lakeside, of Dad, of Penny—
But it wasn’t true. They weren’t here, our ship was gone, and without it, there was no escape.
CHAPTER
So, if I’m hearing you correctly,” said Victor, “you’re saying that crashing your ship up in that glacier has doomed us all.”
“Hey!” Judy shouted. “It wasn’t our fault! The ship was on autopilot and damaged. There was nothing we could have done!”
“So you say,” said Victor.
“Yeah, we do!” Judy pointed at him. “You have a lot of nerve—”
“Judy!” Mom snapped. “That’s enough. Arguing won’t help us right now.” Her eyes narrowed at Victor. “Neither will placing blame.”
As I listened, it felt like my brain was splitting in two. I pictured our Jupiter tumbling out of sight into that crevasse, while at the same time I remembered Dad flying it out through the falling ice. Both things seemed real, even though that was impossible!
“Will?”
I blinked and found that I’d stumbled into Judy. My head ached, and there were spots of light in my vision.
“Sorry,” I said as she put her arm around me.
“Wait, wait, wait, hold on a second,” Don was saying. “We just risked our lives bringing back that whole tank of fuel, and you’re saying it doesn’t matter?”
“It will help,” said Mom, “but even if we spread it among the Jupiters we have, we can’t make the numbers work. At least, not yet. Hiroki and I have been running simulations on how to shed weight: what supplies and systems we can dump so that we can accommodate everyone and escape this planet’s gravity.…”
“That sounds like there’s a but,” said Don.
Mom shrugged. “Even if we find a model that works, it’s going to barely work.”
“And you’re sure there are no other options?” said Victor.
“If we can contact the Resolute, they may have a Jupiter left that’s in working order, and if they can send it down to us, that would do it. If not…”
“If not…” Victor echoed. “What are you implying: that we’re going to have to draw straws?”
“That would absolutely be the last option,” said Mom.
“But you’re saying we might,” said Don.
Murmurs rushed around the room, people shaking their heads and rubbing one another’s shoulders supportively.
“Obviously, we’ll keep doing more tests,” said Mom. “As many as it takes.”
My chest tightened, like I could barely breathe. “This isn’t right,” I said.
Judy put her arm around me. “No kidding,” she said quietly.
“No,” I said, “I mean, really. This can’t be right.…”
“So that’s it, then,” said Victor. “And what are we supposed to do in the meantime while you’re running numbers?”
“You can do an inventory of each of your ships and weigh everything that can be left behind,” said Mom. “We also still need to double-check the thrusters and launch systems. We don’t know what damage may have been caused when we evacuated the Resolute. That way we’re ready if—when—we find a solution.”
Victor put an arm around Vijay, the other around his wife. “Well, if that’s everything, we’ll be leaving.” He turned them toward the door.
“I could use your help,” said Mom. “Running the models.”
“I need to get my family to safety before nightfall,” said Victor. “We got the fuel. We did our part.” They walked out.
“Such a courageous leader,” said Don, watching him go.
Mom sighed. “Thanks for coming, everyone. We’ll get back to it. And if anyone comes up with another way to contact the Resolute, we’re all ears.”
“We’ll tell her about the doorway in the morning,” said Judy. “Right now we should see if she needs our help—”
But I stepped away, fighting another wave of dizziness. “I think I need some air.”
Judy looked at me with that concerned face again. “Don’t go far,” she said. “I want to run some more tests on you after I check in with Mom.”
I nodded and walked calmly out of the room, but by the time I was at the hatch I was nearly running. I jumped down the steps two at a time and sprinted away from the ship.
The sun had set, and the sky had turned to pale lavender. There were deep shadows beneath the trees and the camp lights had come on. I stopped at the perimeter they made and sat on a large rock, my heavy breaths making clouds. The lake glittered in moonlight, the ice caps on the distant mountains sparkling. This place looked so much like Earth… and yet it wasn’t, and now we might die here.
More dizziness washed over me, and I had that sensation of having two memories at once. I had this vision of hiking through the woods with Penny and Judy and the Robot, on our way to the cave, a memory that never was. When would these weird thoughts stop happening? Or had the doorway messed me up per
manently?
I rested my elbows on my knees, my chin in my hands as I stared at the ground. Feeling upset wasn’t doing me any good. I needed to stop thinking about how I wished things were and deal with how they really were. I could help Mom run the numbers, analyze the Jupiters’ systems, and work the problem.…
In a minute. I didn’t feel quite ready yet. I bent down and scooped up a handful of the flat rocks scattered around my feet and hurled one into the dark shadows of the trees, listening as it cracked against an unseen trunk. I threw another, then another.…
But then I paused. A low sound had reached my ears, almost like distant thunder. There was a screech, and a flock of something lifted from the trees by the lake. I turned and scanned the dim horizon, but I didn’t see any storm clouds.
Actually, it sounded more like—
“Victor!” Footsteps slammed down the stairs. I spun to see Mom hurtling outside, shouting into her communicator. “What are you doing? Answer me!”
“Heat signatures!” Judy shouted from the hatch, sprinting after Mom.
“What’s going on?” I called.
“Fire up the chariot!” said Mom.
“We won’t get there in time!”
“Judy, just do it! If we don’t stop him…”
She didn’t need to finish. Judy sprinted across the camp and wrenched open the chariot door.
“Wait, I’m coming with you!” Don raced out of the Jupiter, following Judy.
“Victor!” Mom shouted again. “Please don’t do this!”
“Mom, what is it?” I called.
“Victor’s powering up his Jupiter. He must have loaded the spare fuel. I can’t believe him!”
“He’s leaving?” I said in disbelief.
“He’s trying,” said Mom. “Victor! Please listen to me: We haven’t run diagnostics on your ship to be sure all the systems are ready for a takeoff.”
“I’m sorry, Maureen,” Victor finally replied. “We’ll send help as soon as we reach the Resolute. I’ve weighed the scenarios you proposed and decided this is the best way; I’m certain of it. Someone needs to get off this planet to get us help. It’s my call.”
“Oh, come on—”
The chariot peeled out and promptly skidded to a halt beside Mom.
“Will, stay here!” she called, jumping in. “Go!”
The chariot kicked up a cloud of dust and tore off down the trail toward Victor’s camp, its lights weaving through the trees.
I sat back down, stunned. The rumbling continued, getting steadily higher in pitch. I felt it in the rock and the ground.
And now a brilliant light ignited in the distance. It grew like a dome, illuminating a tower of smoke, and the circular light pattern of Victor’s Jupiter rose into the sky. It hovered above the smoke, then eased forward, accelerating. It flew out across the lake, making an arc upward, the angle getting steeper, and steeper still, until it was shooting vertically into the sky, a streak of light against the twilight, burning toward the stars—
BAM! A flash, a fireball. I shielded my eyes.
When I looked up again, I saw glowing embers raining down. From here they looked almost gentle, some snuffing out in the lake, some making blooms of fire in the forest, but I knew what they really were: flaming pieces of spaceship.
Victor. His family… Oh no.
And along with them, the extra fuel and our only chance of escape. This couldn’t be happening! I scanned the sky, looking for any sign of a ship still flying higher. Maybe they’d just lost a booster or something.…
“Will,” Mom said quietly over the communicator.
“Mom,” I said, fighting back tears.
“You saw the crash.”
“I did, but—was it the whole ship? Or—”
“It was.” Mom was silent for a minute. “We—um, we’re going to go check the wreckage for survivors. They may have been able to evacuate.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t know how long it will take.”
“I know.”
I sat there, stunned and crying at the same time.
Quiet seemed to press all around me. I felt so lonely, like I was the last person in the universe. The glow from the crash debris dimmed. The sky was almost dark now. A cold breeze rushed down from the mountains. I wished I was out there with Mom and Judy, but then again I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see what they might find. Instead, I pictured my room back home, felt the warmth of our house, us all together, and I wanted more than anything to be there again.…
I got out my video recorder and tapped the most recent video from this afternoon, when I’d taken Judy back to the cave.
I am about to officially activate the doorway. It felt like forever ago. I watched as my fingers appeared on the screen and pressed into that liquid-like surface, and then the stars rippled and blurred until I saw my old room again.
No way, Penny said off-camera.
That’s impossible, Judy added.
I’m glad you guys can see it, too, I said. I was wondering if maybe I’d been losing my mind.
If you are, then we are, too, said Penny—
Wait a minute.
I paused the recording, slid the navigation bar back a few seconds, and played it again.
No way.
That was Penny’s voice. But it couldn’t be—
If you are, then we are, too. That was definitely her!
And all of a sudden I could picture it, standing there in the cave, making my video with Penny and Judy behind me, and then…
And then…
Penny had gone through the portal! And come back with candy!
But no, she didn’t! Because if she’d really been there with us, then that meant Dad had been here, too, but there was no trail to our Jupiter, and Mom had just said that we’d lost that ship, and I knew that Penny and Dad were still on Earth. So how could her voice be in this video?
Unless…
I returned to the recorder menu and scrolled back through my videos to one from yesterday, inside the Jupiter. I pressed PLAY. It was a video of me trying to teach the Robot to make a thumbs-up sign.
Like this, I was saying to him—
But wait! The Robot wasn’t even here yesterday! And then the camera moved and Penny walked by. She gave a side-eye to my thumbs-up and to the Robot. Dork, she said.
I stopped the video. Scrolled to another, fingers shaking. How was this possible? She’d been here. The Robot had been here. And then:
Will. There was Dad, in a video from two days ago. He was bent and peering into a compartment in the Jupiter. Stop recording and get me a thermal wrench, he said.
Dad, too! And that wasn’t Hiroki’s Jupiter. It was ours!
I had to stop and ask myself: Was I going insane? Was I really seeing this, or had my brain gotten even more scrambled by the doorway than I thought? How could this be real—
But then I realized I’d had the camera with me, in my pocket, when I’d gone through the doorway. I came back with weird memories, and it came back with these videos. And that could only mean one thing: All these things had really happened. I hadn’t been imagining them or making them up.
But that still left a big question: happened when?
And then I remembered that there was a third thing that had gone through the portal: Penny.
I closed my eyes and focused and found that memory: pictured Penny coming back through the portal, dumping an armful of candy on the floor that she stole. If she was there in my head and on the videos, it could only mean one thing.
“We changed the future,” I said out loud. Changed it by altering the past. Or… Penny did. When she went through the portal and took the candy, the version of her back on Earth got blamed for it, leading to the situation we were in now!
The realization hit me like an asteroid. Oh man, Judy had been right about the dangers! But she didn’t seem to remember this at all. That must have been because unlike me and my camera, she had never actually gone through the doorway. For her,
that other past that I remembered had basically never happened.
But if this was really true, how could we change it back? I had to think.… To keep the Penny back on Earth from getting in trouble, I would need to stop the Penny from here from stealing the candy. How was I going to do that? Actually, it was obvious: I would have to go back to the same day that Penny had gone to and intercept her. Undo the shoplifting, and everything should go back to the way it used to be.
“Okay,” I said, getting to my feet, “we can do this.” I smiled. Part of it was relief: I wasn’t crazy! But it was also because I could fix this! I wanted to go back to the cave right now—
There was a snapping sound out in the darkness, almost as if the forest had heard my thoughts and wanted to remind me that going now would be a bad idea. There were mothasaurs and who-knew-what-else that we hadn’t run into yet, and I didn’t even have the Robot.
If you’re out there, I thought, I need you. I didn’t know if the Robot could hear me, wherever he was, or if he’d even want to help me after Mom had made me send him away. It sure would be nice to have him along when we went to the cave, though.
But either way, once I showed Mom and Judy these videos, they would definitely want to come with me. Maybe even Hiroki, too. Especially after what had happened to Victor and his family—they’d definitely agree that this was a risk worth taking. And it would be wise for me to wait for them, not just because daytime was safer, but also so we could really think this through.
“We’re going to be okay.” Saying those words made me feel the best I had all day, so good I had to shout it. “We’re going to be okay!” My voice echoed across the lake.
Another snap in the bushes, louder this time. Closer.
“Okay, fine, I get it,” I said, still smiling. It was time to head back inside and wait for Mom and Judy to get back.
I turned toward the ship—
And froze. I peered at the ground, and then flashed the light from my communicator.
Lost in Space Page 7
