Lunar day 217
Midmorning
On a normal day at MBA, most of the adults worked from breakfast to dinner, and sometimes after that as well. There wasn’t much else for them to do. Weekends didn’t really exist in space. The scientists would have been at their stations in the science pod, while Nina and Daphne Merritt would have been in their offices. Dr. Marquez conducted his surveys of our mental states—or at least tried to—in the medical bay. Since our doctor was dead and our maintenance man was on trial, we were short both positions. Reinforcements were scheduled to arrive on the next rocket in a month. In the meantime, Chang “Hi-Tech” Kowalski, our chief geochemist and resident genius, was doing everything he could to keep us healthy and the base functioning. The only adults who didn’t work were the Sjobergs, who usually hung out in their suite, doing their best to avoid everyone else. It had been three days since anyone had seen them. We had no idea what they were doing, but we didn’t really care; we were happy to not have to deal with them.
During the time that I’d been battling Capulets with Roddy, however, things had changed. Instead of working, everyone was now frantically combing Moon Base Alpha for Nina. The place was a hive of activity. Since MBA was only the size of a soccer field, there weren’t many places Nina could have been, but they were being searched over and over again anyhow. It was ridiculous, but then, so was the idea that Nina wasn’t in the base anymore.
“You’ve checked her quarters?” I asked, as Dad and I walked out of the rec room.
“A dozen times and counting.” Dad pointed up to Nina’s residence. The door was open and Moonies were shuttling in and out.
“Her door wasn’t locked?” Roddy asked, tailing behind us.
“Er . . . it was,” Dad said. “But Chang kicked it in.”
Now that he mentioned this, I could see that the doorjamb was splintered where the lock had torn out of it.
“We were worried,” Dad explained. “She wasn’t anywhere else on the base or answering her phone. We thought maybe she’d had a stroke or something and collapsed in her room.”
We entered the staging area and nearly slammed into Daphne Merritt and Jennifer Kim.
Besides Violet, Daphne was the most chipper and effusive person at MBA. Even now, in the midst of crisis, she was upbeat and smiling. Dr. Kim, a seismic geologist, was almost the opposite: reserved and extremely quiet. She actually spoke a normal amount, but always did so in a very meek way, as though she were slightly embarrassed about what she had to say.
“We checked the women’s room,” Daphne reported to Dad.
“And?” Dad asked.
“She’s not in there,” Dr. Kim said apologetically, as if this were somehow her fault.
“You’re sure?” Roddy pressed.
“We both have PhDs,” Daphne teased. “We know how to check a bathroom. We’re going to give the gym another look.” With that, she led Dr. Kim around the corner.
Dad sighed, looking even more worried than before. “This just doesn’t make sense,” he said, more to himself than to me.
“If Nina isn’t here, could she have left the base?” I asked.
“She didn’t,” Dad told me. “Her space suit is still here.” He pointed to the space suit storage area. The door to Nina’s locker hung open, revealing her suit, helmet, boots, and gloves, right where they should have been. Given that there was no oxygen on the surface of the moon, she wouldn’t have gotten very far outside without them—only a few feet at most.
“Maybe she went out anyhow,” Roddy said. “You know, like she got space madness and lost her mind and left in her regular clothes and croaked.”
“I don’t think that happened,” Dad said, but then told me, “Although your mother and Chang went out to make sure.”
I glanced toward the air lock. Through the windows, I could see my mother and Chang in their space suits, returning to base. I couldn’t tell who was who, because they had the reflective visors down in their helmets to protect them against the sun’s heat. I asked, “If Nina went out the air lock, there’d be a record of it, wouldn’t there? There’s some sort of electronic log, right?”
“Right,” Dad agreed. “And there wasn’t any record of the air lock opening last night. But Chang thought maybe Nina had the ability to override it.”
“Why?” I asked.
Roddy laughed knowingly. “Don’t be such a dork, Dash. NASA has a buttload of secrets, and Nina’s their main gatekeeper.”
Dad narrowed his eyes at Roddy. He looked like he wanted to smack the smile right off Roddy’s face for insulting me.
I saw Mom and Chang enter the air lock’s pressurization chamber and shut the outer door behind them. There was a loud whoosh as the air inside the chamber repressurized from the moon’s atmosphere to MBA’s. Mom and Chang popped their helmets off, but didn’t open the inner air-lock door right away. Before coming into the base, they needed to remove the moon dust from their suits. Moon dust is very different from earth dust. Earth dust is mostly decaying matter. Moon dust is mostly very tiny shards of glass created in the heat of meteorite impacts—and it sticks to everything. If any got inside the base, it would be extremely difficult to get back out again. Cleaning it off the suits involved two hoses: one that fired air at high pressure to knock the dust off, and a high-powered vacuum to suck it up.
It was obvious that Mom and Chang hadn’t found Nina: They weren’t carrying a dead body and they looked concerned, rather than saddened. But the rest of us gathered around the air lock anyhow.
There was an intercom built into the door that we could talk through. Mom flipped it on and reported, “There’s no sign of her out there.”
“Any luck in here?” Chang asked. Normally, he sported a spiky Mohawk, but it had been squashed flat by his space helmet, making it look like a small mammal that had died on his head.
“None,” Dad replied.
Dr. Brahmaputra-Marquez came through the staging area. Somehow, she’d ended up chaperoning all three of the youngest children at MBA. Violet, Inez, and Kamoze were skipping along after her, apparently thinking of Nina’s disappearance as a game. “Nina!” they called, as though she were merely hiding. “We give up! Come out, come out, wherever you are!”
Everyone else at MBA, having run out of places to look for Nina, was pouring into the staging area expectantly. Dr. Janke and Dr. Alvarez emerged from Nina’s quarters onto the catwalk. Kira and her father exited the medical bay. Dr. Marquez and Dr. Iwanyi rounded the corner from the mess hall, while Dr. Balnikov and Dr. Goldstein came from the science pod.
The Sjobergs were still nowhere to be seen. Either they didn’t care about where Nina was or they hadn’t been notified she was missing.
“Isn’t there some way to track Nina’s location?” I asked my father. “Like with a GPS chip or something?”
“In theory,” Dad told me. “There’s a chip in her space suit for exactly this sort of scenario—but it doesn’t do any good if the space suit is here. And her smartwatch is traceable as well. Only she’s not wearing it.”
“Where is it?” Roddy asked.
“Up in her quarters,” Dad replied. “She left it on her desk.”
“That’s weird,” I said. “I mean, she usually wore it, didn’t she?” As far as I knew, most people wore theirs all the time, except maybe at night or when showering.
“I never take my watch off,” Roddy volunteered.
“That doesn’t mean Nina never did,” Kira told him.
“But it’d be weird for her to go somewhere without it, wouldn’t it?” Roddy pointed out.
“Maybe,” Kira said. “I don’t really know Nina all that well.”
“Does anyone?” Dr. Goldstein asked.
Everyone within earshot looked at one another awkwardly, aware of the truth. No one at MBA was friends with Nina.
Mom and Chang emerged from the air lock, having finally cleaned the moon dust off their suits. Or at least, they’d done the best they could.
Dr. Balnikov approached Chang as he lugged his space suit to the storage area. Balnikov was a Russian astrophysicist, a big, hulking man who was surprisingly gentle. “I think we should dig up the blueprints for this base,” he suggested. “Maybe there are ducts or crawl spaces Nina could be inside.”
“Why would Nina be inside a duct or a crawl space?” Dr. Alvarez asked. He was a water-extraction specialist who’d seemed very straitlaced at first—and then turned out to have a love of practical jokes. In his allotment of personal stuff from earth, he’d brought a dozen whoopee cushions. (They’d turned out to be pointless, though, as the squeaky InflatiCubes acted like whoopee cushions anyhow.)
“I don’t know,” Dr. Balnikov admitted. “But she’s obviously not anywhere else inside MBA.”
“I don’t think the ducts are big enough to let a human inside,” Chang told them. “And I doubt there are any crawl spaces in this structure. It’d be a big waste of space.”
“It still couldn’t hurt to check, though,” Dr. Iwanyi said. He was an astronomer from Tanzania who had been raised as a Masai warrior. After Nina, he was probably the biggest stickler for the rules on the base. “We have searched all the rooms here many times over. Where else could Nina be?”
Chang considered this, then shrugged. “Good point. Let’s see if we can find some blueprints.” He placed his space suit in his storage locker.
“What about the Sjobergs’ room?” Roddy asked loudly. “Has anyone checked in there yet?”
Kira shot him a disdainful look. “What are you saying? That the Sjobergs have kidnapped Nina or something?”
“Maybe,” Roddy said. “The Sjobergs are jerks. They could be holding her hostage until we give them a spaceship back to earth or something.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Kira argued. “If the Sjobergs were holding Nina hostage, wouldn’t they let us know? That’s the whole point of hostages, isn’t it? You don’t keep them a secret.”
“Maybe they’re still working on the note,” Roddy suggested.
Kira looked at me and rolled her eyes.
All around us, the staging area was now a babble of conversation. Everyone was comparing notes about where they’d searched for Nina. Dr. Marquez was admitting that he was completely stymied, which wasn’t that surprising, as he was often completely stymied, even by things he was supposed to be an expert on, like psychiatry. Dr. Goldstein, who had finally recovered from the loss of her squash plant, looked like she was about to burst into tears again. Meanwhile, Violet and the other little kids were still chanting for Nina to come out from hiding.
Dad pulled me aside from all the chaos. “Dash, the whole reason I came to get you was that, from what we can tell, you were the last person Nina talked to before she disappeared.”
“I was?”
“No one else saw her last night—or this morning.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“No,” Dad conceded. “I’m not sure of anything. But if anyone else did see Nina before she vanished, they haven’t admitted it. Did she say or do anything strange last night?”
“Nina is always strange.”
Dad gave me a disapproving look, as though I’d spoken badly about someone who’d just died. “You know what I mean.”
“Sorry.” I thought back to my time in Nina’s room and realized something strange had happened there. “Nina got a text while she was chewing me out. I think it upset her somehow.”
“Why do you say that?”
“She reacted kind of funny after she got it.”
“How so?”
“Really distracted, I guess. Then she got rid of me as fast as she could—and I think she forgot all about me after that. I’ll bet that’s why she didn’t cut off my ComLink privileges. She was too focused on this other thing.”
“Or maybe something happened to her before she had a chance to cut off your ComLink,” Dad said thoughtfully. He signaled me to come with him, then led me through the crowd in the staging area.
Violet dropped in beside us. “Nina is really good at hide-and-seek,” she announced. “All these people can’t find her!”
I started to tell Violet that Nina was missing, not hiding, but Dad cut me off before I could get a word out.
“She is very good,” he agreed. “But don’t worry. We’ll find her.”
“She should just come out already,” Violet said. “This game is getting boring.”
“Why don’t you and Inez and Kamoze go play something else, then?” Dad suggested. “You can use the SlimScreen in the rec room if you want.”
“Ooh!” Violet gasped. “Can we play Candy Attack?”
“Sure,” Dad said.
“Candy Attack!” Violet whooped. Inez and Kamoze joined in, and the three of them scurried toward the rec room.
Dad and I reached the space suit storage area. Mom was now there, putting her suit in her locker. Everyone had their own space suit at MBA, even the kids. They were all made specially for us.
Dad snaked an arm around Mom’s waist. “How was it out there?”
“Hot,” Mom groaned.
There had been a time, right after we’d arrived at MBA, when moonwalks had been fascinating and exciting to my parents, as well as all to the other adults. After all, very few humans had ever been lucky enough to take so much as a step on the moon. Now, four months later, the thrill was gone. Everyone considered going onto the lunar surface a chore rather than an adventure.
Dad turned to Chang, who was checking his suit for any damage it might have suffered on the surface. Chang was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, allowing a great view of his tattoos. His arms and legs were covered with his favorite scientists, reimagined as action heroes. Albert Einstein was on his right bicep, wearing a cape and spandex and flying at light speed, while the great physicist Werner Heisenberg was on his left bicep, punching Adolf Hitler in the face.
“Is Nina’s watch still in her room?” Dad asked.
“It ought to be,” Chang replied. “Everyone was ordered not to disturb any of her stuff.”
“Do you have any idea what kind of security protection she might have on it?”
“Are you proposing something illegal here?” Chang asked, although he had a slight smile, as though he actually liked the idea.
“Dash says Nina got a text when they were together last night,” Dad told him. “She reacted oddly to it. Got very distracted. And then no one ever saw her again. I’m guessing there’s a good chance it’s related to all this.”
Dr. Iwanyi interrupted, having overheard them. “We can’t do anything with Nina’s watch,” he insisted. “Technically, it’s NASA property. And NASA protocol is that we can’t violate anyone’s privacy without authorization.”
“Whose authorization?” Mom asked.
“The moon-base commander’s,” Dr. Iwanyi replied.
“Nina’s the moon-base commander,” Dad pointed out. “And she’s missing.”
“Then we’d have to ask the second in command,” Dr. Iwanyi said.
“Our S-I-C was Dr. Holtz,” Dad said. “And seeing as he’s dead, we probably can’t ask him to authorize anything.”
“NASA didn’t officially name a new S-I-C?” Mom asked.
“They named a temporary one,” Chang said.
“Really?” Dr. Iwanyi asked. “Who?”
“Me,” Chang replied.
Everyone within earshot stopped talking, surprised.
“You?” Dad asked. “You’re the S-I-C? Since when?”
“Four weeks ago,” Chang answered. “Right after Dr. Holtz died.”
“Why didn’t anyone tell us?” Dr. Marquez demanded.
“Nina didn’t think we should make a big deal about it,” Chang explained. “She figured people might be upset that I was picked and not them. It never occurred to us that NASA would take so long to make an official choice for S-I-C.”
“Well,” Dad said, “sounds like it’s your decision, then. I have no idea if this text Nina got is really important or not, but so far, it’s the only lead we have.”
“Then let’s get the watch.” Chang shut his locker and headed for Nina’s room. As he shoved through the throng of Moonies gathered by the air lock, he announced, “Meanwhile, the rest of you should get back to your regular work.”
There was a general murmur of annoyance from the crowd.
“But Nina’s still missing,” Dr. Goldstein pointed out.
“I’m well aware of that,” Chang told her. “However, there’s also plenty of work that has to be done here. If I had something constructive to assign you right now, I’d do it . . . but I don’t. And tripping all over each other while we search the base for the umpteenth time isn’t going to help Nina.”
“What about finding the blueprints for the base?” Dr. Balnikov asked.
“The base computer can do that faster than any of us can,” Chang replied.
“And doesn’t someone need to inform NASA of what’s going on here?” Dr. Iwanyi asked.
“As the temporary second in command, that’s my job,” Chang said. “I’ll do it right after I find Nina’s watch.”
“I could notify NASA if you needed me to,” Dr. Brahmaputra-Marquez offered.
“I can handle it,” Chang told her. “The best way you can all help me right now is to get your own work done. You all know that if someone else was missing out there and Nina was still in charge, that’s exactly what she’d ask of you.”
There was a general muttering of agreement with this.
“Good,” Chang said. “So all of you, back to work. And kids, school is back in session.”
“Awwww,” Roddy whined.
“That’s an order!” Chang barked.
The staging area quickly cleared as everyone headed to their stations.
“I’ll let you all know if I find anything,” Chang told us, seeming to already feel bad about raising his voice. “Frankly, this whole thing’s probably a wild-goose chase anyhow. Nina’s the most competent person at this base. I wouldn’t be surprised if she shows up soon on her own.”
“Fat chance,” Roddy muttered as we headed to the rec room for class.
I didn’t bother arguing with him, because I didn’t believe Chang either. In fact, I didn’t even think Chang believed what he was saying. He was only trying to bolster everyone’s spirits.
I glanced back out the air-lock window at the surface of the moon.
It looked calm, but it was an incredibly hostile place. The lunar surface was 14.6 million square miles, bigger than North America and Europe combined—and in that entire vast expanse, Moon Base Alpha was the only safe place for humans.
So if Nina wasn’t there, where was she?