by Erin Teagan
He peered out the window. “Look at that!”
Through the window we watched a beach chair flipping down the lawn. The rain picked up fast, turning into a complete and total downpour. It sounded like a waterfall hitting the metal roof of the hangar. And then out of the fog came Buzz, like an Olympic sprinter, racing in so fast that he almost collided with the door when we opened it for him.
He was drenched, a puddle of rainwater spreading around his feet. “Made it,” he said, out of breath. His teeth chattered.
We walked over to our meeting table, with a giant view of the storm coming across the bay. Claire was already there, sitting at the end.
Marcus jumped up. “Got caught in the storm, huh?” He ran to get Buzz a towel, and then we all sat down, ready to get our mission roles.
Ella and I crossed our fingers under the table. We wanted to be on the dive team together, of course, but even with Claire being disqualified and Buzz opting out, there was still one kid too many who wanted to go. Dominic, Thomas, Ella, and I looked at one another.
“May the best man get chosen,” Dominic said.
“Or woman, thank you very much,” I added.
The boys rolled their eyes.
Sarah stood up. “You have all worked hard this week and we’re proud of your accomplishments. Ella and Buzz have printed an all-purpose tool on the 3-D printer—”
“And a ton of sporks!” Buzz added.
“Thomas and Dominic have built an effective rover, making changes after running it in the underwater astronaut trainer so that it will be ready for Cetus.”
Dominic and Thomas high-fived.
“And from what I’ve seen,” Sarah said, “there are several hydroponic butter lettuce sprouts that Luci and Claire will be ready to harvest tomorrow for the dive team to take onto Cetus.”
I glanced at Claire and for a minisecond we made eye contact. Our hydroponics project had turned out to be a success, which was kind of sad when I thought about it since I couldn’t say the same about our partnership.
Marcus made a drumroll on the table and through the giant windows behind him, we saw a towel flapping across the grassy area and getting stuck in a gnarled tree branch.
“Reminder,” Sarah said, holding up a finger, and Marcus stopped drum rolling. “We are all on the same team. No job is more important than another. We could not do this mission without every single person completing their role.”
“Good point, Sarah,” Marcus said, returning to his drumroll.
I grabbed Ella’s hand. I couldn’t help it. My face was getting hot with the suspense. What if I didn’t make it? What if I wasn’t good enough? And then my stomach clenched. What if all this hard work—not to mention an almost near-death experience—was for nothing?
“The mission control team will be … Dominic, Buzz, and Claire and …”
Did that mean—
“… the dive team will be Luci, Thomas, and Ella.”
Ella and I jumped up, squealing and fist-bumping with Thomas. We sat back down when we saw Dominic banging his head against the table in disappointment. We told him it was okay and reminded him that he was still an important member of our team.
But I couldn’t believe that I had made it! I was going to Cetus!
When everyone broke to work on their projects, I decided not to start right away and instead snagged the seat in front of the computer and called my parents.
“I made the dive team!” I said when they picked up, leaping out of my chair.
“And me too!” Ella said, leaning into the picture from her spot at the 3-D printer.
Dad clapped and so did Mom, sitting down with a squirmy baby Izzy.
“We’re so proud of you, Luci. We knew you could do it!”
It was really happening. I was going to Cetus, the underwater habitat where real astronauts trained before a mission.
And then I noticed something on my little sister’s wrist. “Why is Izzy wearing a hospital bracelet?”
She was picking at it, trying to pull it off and shrieking with frustration.
Mom and Dad looked at each other. “We have news, Luci. We just got back from the hospital and Izzy’s surgery was rescheduled for tomorrow.”
“There was a cancellation, so we jumped on it,” Dad added. “It’s better not to wait any longer. Everything is going to be fine.” He held Izzy’s hand for a minute to keep her from tugging on the bracelet.
There was a squeeze in my stomach. “Oh no. Starting tomorrow morning, I’m going to be on Cetus for twenty-four hours. How will I know if she’s okay?”
The storm was raging outside now and I peered over my shoulder, hoping Sarah or Marcus wouldn’t make me get off the computer in all the thunder and lightning. Ella was there, though, looking at me with a worried expression.
“Luci, you let us worry about Izzy,” Mom said. “Your job is to be at camp. Have fun with the other kids and do well on Cetus.”
Ella sat down next to me on the bench, hugging me.
“She’ll be in surgery for a few hours and as soon as we hear anything, we’ll call the camp and leave a message, okay?” Dad said.
“Izzy, where’s Penguin?” I said, but she was too distracted, flopping out of Dad’s arms. “Izzy?” Did she even know I was here?
“Luci, we have everything handled here at home,” Mom said.
“But Mom—” And then with a crash of lightning, the lights flickered and went out, and the entire hangar was thrown into complete darkness.
I was disconnected from my family.
We left for Cetus early in the morning, the sun barely even up, the Aviation and Rocket Science kids still sleeping in their cabins. It was too early to call home one more time. What if Izzy needed me? How would I know if she was okay?
The boat ride to the dive location was bumpy. Ella and Thomas were giddy, trying to get ready while the boat was moving. We needed to wear wet suits in the ocean, so there was a lot of pulling and grunting and getting feet stuck in the wrong places as they struggled to get into their gear.
I decided to wait to put on my suit until we reached calmer waters. Instead, I closed my eyes as we rode out to the dive site, letting the humid air, still a bit cool in the morning, calm me. And it must’ve worked, because by the time we anchored, I felt a little less worried about things at home, and a lot more excited to be on this mission. I pulled on my wet suit and joined Ella and Thomas in the back of the boat, expecting to see some sign of Cetus under the water. But all I saw was dark ocean.
Sarah and Pirate Pete splashed into the water first. “Ready?” Sarah called up to us. “This is what we’ve been training for.”
Pete gave us the thumbs-down and we climbed in, the water feeling cool even with my wet suit. We descended slowly into the deep green murky water and when we were about halfway down, Cetus came into view. Ella pointed to make sure Thomas and I saw it, but there was no missing the underwater beast.
We followed Sarah around the habitat, which was covered in sea grasses waving in the current, and mussels, oysters, and barnacles stuck to the walls. We swam between Cetus’s giant pole-legs dug deep into the sand and then through the complicated pipe structure for EVAs that was bigger and wider than the one in the pool back at camp. I reached out and held one of the pipes. How many astronauts were here before me, performing practice EVAs on this same structure?
There was old equipment on the sandy floor, manmade reefs, homes for crabs and fish and maybe lobsters too. And then we followed Sarah to a platform right under the belly of Cetus. When we stood up, we were surprised to find ourselves in an air pocket.
“Moon pool,” Sarah said.
Thomas popped his regulator out of his mouth, looking around. “What … I mean … how is this possible?”
“Physics.” Sarah smiled. “Science is cool.”
Pete nodded. “Yup.”
I breathed in the salty air that was also a bit stinky, and Ella and I grinned at each other. We walked up a ladder and into the underwa
ter habitat. Someone had already brought our bags and equipment onto Cetus, and we changed out of wet suits into dry clothes behind little curtains.
Thomas finished changing first and we heard him call to us, “Wow, this looks like the real International Space Station. This is so cool! You guys! You’ve got to see this.”
We followed his voice into the next room and stood there for a minute, taking it all in. There was a small table pushed against the wall with booth seats next to a porthole window looking out to the sea. The walls were lined with gauges and dials and cabinets in all different sizes. There was a small sink, an even smaller refrigerator, and a computer station with a microphone to communicate with mission control. Ella disappeared into the other room for a minute and rushed back with a handful of sporks that she had 3-D-printed with Buzz. “Where should I put these?”
“Take some time to look around,” Pete said. “Find where everything is and where things go. This would be a good time for you to set up your projects.”
The hydroponic garden was in the back of the habitat by the bunkhouse, where there were three triple-stacked bunk beds set into the wall. Mini bunk beds. Practically the smallest, skinniest beds I had ever seen. “Do you guys fit on those?” I said to the counselors.
Pete and Sarah laughed. “Barely.”
I pulled my butter lettuce seeds and harvested plants from the cool box, gathered my supplies and brought everything over to a bench. Then, just like Claire and I did on land, I planted the seeds into four plant pillows. I added 100 mL of water to each, set them in the garden tray, and turned on the UV lights. Red and blue and green washed over the white walls.
“Cool,” Thomas said, passing me as he brought his bag to one of the beds. Each bed had its own curtain for privacy. “Have a preference?”
I smiled. It felt nice to get a choice of bunk beds this time. “Nope,” I replied.
After Ella finished setting up the kitchen with her 3-D-printed utensils, Sarah and Marcus told us it was time for EVAs. Thomas rolled out of his bed holding the logbook, where all the astronauts and other visitors had written messages and notes about their time on board Cetus.
He pointed to the open book in his lap. “This guy said there’s a friendly stingray they named Monty that likes to sleep on the top of Cetus,” Thomas said, pointing to the log entry. “They said he’ll swim right up to you when you’re working.”
“Do stingrays have teeth?” I asked, not sure I wanted to swim with a stingray, friendly or not.
“Of course they do,” Ella said. “They’re related to sharks.” And then she saw the look on my face, and added, “But, I mean, they’re really small.”
Going back into the water meant getting dressed back into our wet suits, which was challenging since they were still wet. I almost punched myself in the face trying to push my elbow into the right place. And Ella’s suit got stuck below her knee, and Sarah had to help her tug it up. By the time we were dressed, Ella and I were both sweaty and disgruntled.
As soon as we dropped into the moon pool, though, our feelings of discomfort melted away. It was time to get to work.
“You ready?” I asked, feeling a bit nervous because the last time I did this EVA was in the pool and, well, we all knew what happened then.
Ella nodded, putting her mask in place and expelling leftover water from her regulator.
“Ready, partner,” she said.
And, like scuba diving experts, we swam out into the ocean with our sampling containers. We started under Cetus, at the manmade reef constructed from old concrete blocks, where an eel slid out of a hole and nearly scared us half to death. But, being the professional astronaut-scuba-divers we were, we didn’t even get any water in our masks.
I took the first set of samples, uncapping my plastic test tubes and sliding them along the ocean floor one by one, filling each with sand before re-capping them.
Ella took the second set of samples by the EVA structure. The entire time, I kept one eye peeled for Monty, the so-called friendly stingray, but except for a few fish and the surprise-attack eel, we didn’t see many ocean creatures. But also I made sure always to keep Ella in sight. She was my partner, after all.
If I could have talked underwater, I would have told Ella that I hoped someday we’d be partners on a real space walk, but I couldn’t so I gave her an A-OK sign and she gave me one back.
Thomas’s robot buzzed by as we were getting our last samples by one of Cetus’s giant leg posts. He was running his robo-ops with his remote control from inside the habitat, watching through the porthole by the table, just like he was operating the robot arm on the International Space Station.
When we finished, Ella and I signaled a thumbs-up at the same time and kicked back to the moon pool with our samples. I felt proud of myself. My nerves had been for nothing. And maybe when I got back inside Sarah and Pete would tell me that mission control had a message for me from my parents, and that the message was “everything is okay.”
When we got back inside, we peeled out of our suits and changed into our dry clothes once again. Then we joined everyone at the table where Thomas was still running his rover.
“Congratulations on a successful EVA,” Sarah told us. “You did an amazing job.”
We smiled and Ella and I hugged, accidentally bumping heads. But even with all the good feelings of a job well done, my mind was moving from Cetus, back to Earth, or at least to the shore, and to Izzy.
“Did you hear from my parents?” I asked the counselors. “Is there any news about Izzy?” Everyone was on high alert for me after I told them about Isadora and her moved-up surgery.
“Not yet,” Pete said.
“Sorry, Luci.” Ella patted me on the back.
“Good news is Sarah is halfway finished making dinner,” Pete said, rubbing his stomach. “You guys are in for a treat—we’re having real space food. The kind astronauts actually eat on the International Space Station.”
“That’s so cool!” said Ella.
I nodded. “So, what are we having?” I asked, licking my lips.
Pete grinned, “We’ll begin with a fine appetizer of rehydrated shrimp cocktail—”
Ella and I looked at each other dubiously and wrinkled our noses.
“—served on a bed of fresh butter lettuce thanks to our hydroponics experts,” Pete continued, bowing in front of me, “followed by Chicken Fiesta, and a sweet dessert of fruit cobbler. Served hot for your enjoyment.”
“Is Chicken Fiesta like chicken surprise where you’re really not sure if it’s chicken or not?” Ella asked. “And that’s the surprise?”
Sarah laughed. “Nope. Chicken Fiesta is actually quite tasty. It’s flavorful and pretty spicy.”
“It has to be,” Pirate Pete added. “Being in space can affect an astronaut’s taste buds. So, they’re always asking for more spices.”
“Done!” Thomas announced, holding up his remote control. “I’m bringing our rover in.”
Sarah and Pete clapped. “Good job on a successful robotics operation. That’s two-for-two for Team Cetus.”
Through the porthole, I could see the little robot zooming around the ocean floor, tipping this way and that with the water current.
“Did it get darker out there?” I asked.
Ella looked at her watch. “It’s around sunset, so, probably yes, right?”
“Yep,” Pete said. “When the sun goes down, it gets darker in the ocean too. At night, when you climb into your bunks and look out the porthole windows, it will feel like you’re one hundred feet under instead of thirty.”
I shuddered. That was not the kind of feeling I wanted. I looked around. “And you’re sure the storm didn’t damage our air supply, right?” I was starting to feel a little sick. Maybe we were low on air and didn’t even know it. And then we’d all just pass out and—
“Air gauge.” Pirate Pete tapped a meter on the wall. “Full, see?”
And then everyone looked at me for a second and I hoped they didn’t
see that I was sweating a little bit and maybe my heart was beating dangerously fast for a healthy twelve-year-old and—
“It’s going to be a while longer till dinner’s ready,” said Pirate Pete. “Want to ride the bike first, Luci?”
“What?” I wiped my forehead.
He pointed to the exercise bike that he was unfolding in the bunk area. “Everyone has to ride for five minutes,” he explained. “If we were on a real ISS mission, you’d have to ride for two hours and forty-five minutes to keep your muscle mass. And if we were on Mars, NASA thinks it would be even longer.”
“Oh. Sure,” I said. “I can ride first, I guess.”
I pulled my damp hair into a ponytail and walked back to the bunk area to get my sneakers out of my bag. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were trapped down here. I took deep breaths, trying to calm down. I could swim back to the boat if it got to be too much. Right?
Everyone was busy. Ella was helping Pirate Pete set the table, and Sarah was working with Thomas to pull in his robot from the moon pool. They all looked so calm, as if being inside a little tin can at the bottom of an ocean with all this water on top of us was no big deal.
“Maybe we can ask mission control if they heard from my family?” I said.
Pete looked up from putting napkins on the table. “We’ll try when you get off the bike. They’re taking their dinner break right now. Pizza in mission control. One of the perks of staying on land.”
Ella held up a packet of shrimp that were suctioned to the plastic wrapper. “Who needs pizza when you can eat these?”
I managed a smile and started pedaling, hoping to get this over with as soon as possible so that we could call up to mission control. The bike was loud in the small space, and it didn’t do anything to distract me from the growing panic in my gut. What if there was an emergency and I couldn’t get out of here in time?
Thomas came in from the wet room, holding up his robot, and Pete slid the trap door to the moon pool closed, latching it tight. Nothing was coming in and nothing was going out.
I pedaled faster.
What if the door rusted shut overnight or the water above us crushed Cetus like a soda can? My heart was loud and thumping hard, making my skin feel tingly and my brain foggy. Was I having a heart attack?
