Lunar day 189
Evening
The way I figured it, Dr. Holtz had sent the robot out to hide his phone somewhere around panel 36B in Solar Array 2. After all, the robot was dispatched shortly before Dr. Holtz stepped through the air lock. Who else besides him (except whoever had forced him to go outside) would have been awake at that time? And it was the perfect place to hide something. If Dr. Holtz’s killer suspected he’d hidden evidence somewhere, they’d most likely search the base—but not outside it. When I explained my theory to Kira later, she admitted that not only did it make sense, but she’d been thinking the same thing.
There was only one problem: Getting the phone wouldn’t be easy.
The surface of the moon is deadly. Therefore Kira and I—as well as every other kid on base—were banned from going out onto it.
Despite this, Kira was still eager to go. “It was amazing out there yesterday,” she told me. This was an hour after we’d confronted Daphne. The memorial was over; everyone else’s speech about Dr. Holtz had been much shorter than Nina’s. (Mom’s had been the most touching by far.) Now Kira and I were huddled in a corner of the staging area while most everyone else mingled in the rec room. Kira asked, “Didn’t you think it was incredible when you were on the surface?”
“Of course,” I replied, although the truth was, since it had been six months since I’d trudged from the rocket to the air lock, my memory of it had faded greatly. After all, the walk had only taken a few minutes and there had been lots of distractions.
“So let’s go,” Kira said. “It won’t take more than ten minutes to get to the solar array.”
“This isn’t like sneaking behind the scenes at the art museum or the zoo,” I warned. “This is dangerous.”
“Not if we’re careful. It’s perfectly safe out there with our suits on.”
“Dr. Holtz just died out there with his suit on.”
“Because someone forced him to go out with it on wrong. Someone who’s still on the loose here in the base, because the evidence against them is out there.” Kira pointed out the air lock in the direction of Solar Array 2.
“That’s only a guess,” I said.
“Well, it’s a good guess.” Kira gave me a frustrated stare. “I can’t believe you’re trying to weasel out of this. I thought you were going stir-crazy in this place.”
“I am.”
“So? Think how awesome it would be to get outside again, even for just a few minutes. There’s no good reason we’re not allowed out there. It’s just a stupid rule that ought to be broken.”
“It’s not stupid,” I protested. “And if we break it, we’re going to get caught. We’ll end up in big trouble.”
“Not if we find Dr. Holtz’s phone,” Kira argued. “We’ll be heroes.”
I sighed and looked out through the air lock window. Kira was right. I did want to go out there again. And I didn’t want to wait another two years and six months until my return rocket home to do it. But it was far more dangerous than Kira seemed to understand. Or she was far more reckless than I’d realized.
“There might be another way to get the phone,” I said.
“You mean like sending a robot?” Kira asked.
“No. I don’t know how to do that, and we can’t ask Daphne to help.” I looked down the hall, to where Daphne was standing with my parents and Chang.
Daphne had already revealed her secret to everyone. As she’d promised, she’d told Nina right after the memorial, and word had spread quickly. Nina wasn’t happy, of course, and told Daphne there’d be some punishment, but everyone else seemed okay about it. After all, Daphne was probably the most-liked adult on the base. The fact that she’d owned up to her mistake and seemed genuinely ashamed only seemed to make everyone like her even more. My father and Chang were teasing her about it at the moment, humming the James Bond theme and calling her Special Agent Merritt.
Kira asked, “So what’s the other option, then?”
“We get an adult to do it.”
Kira looked annoyed. “Who? Your parents?”
“No,” I said. “They wouldn’t break the rules like that. And besides, they still think Dr. Holtz was crazy.”
“Then who? We can’t ask my dad. He’d get lost out there and we’d never see him again.”
“I can’t tell you.” I knew Zan was the right person to approach about this. She was an adult and she was determined to find out who’d killed Dr. Holtz. She’d be thrilled to hear I’d learned where the phone was hidden—and she probably had all the security clearance she needed to go out onto the lunar surface. But she’d also made it extremely clear I couldn’t tell anyone about our collaboration, no matter how much I wanted to.
“What are you talking about?” Kira demanded. “Don’t you trust me?”
“Of course.”
“Then why can’t you tell me who you’re going to?”
“I just can’t,” I said.
Kira gave me a long, hot stare. “Fine. Whatever. But if this secret friend of yours says no, then we go, okay?”
“They won’t say no.”
“But if they do . . . we go. Tonight, after everyone’s gone to sleep. There’s no time to waste. Whoever killed Dr. Holtz is going to find out about the robot soon enough.”
“Sure,” I said. “We’ll go tonight.”
“You promise?” Kira stuck out her hand.
I shook it. “I promise.” I fully meant it. I just didn’t think I’d have to.
* * *
I never got to talk to Zan Perfonic. I saw her. The first time, she was standing with a bunch of scientists after the memorial service. The second time, she was at dinner in the mess with the other temps. And both times she saw me, too. After the memorial, I signaled that I desperately needed to talk to her. She mouthed, Not now, so I backed off, expecting her to come around sooner or later, but she didn’t.
So when we were in the mess, I decided to be a little more direct. I started across the room toward her, intending to approach her directly. When Zan saw me coming, though, she reacted with such alarm that I stopped dead. Behind the backs of everyone at her table, she shook her head wildly, panic in her eyes.
I signaled again that we needed to talk.
I know, Zan mouthed. I’m sorry.
I started to signal that this was really, really urgent, but all the temps at her table were staring at me now like I was nuts. So I backed down and headed off to get dinner, hoping now that Zan knew I was desperate to talk to her, she’d come find me.
But that didn’t happen.
This was incredibly frustrating. I’d found our biggest lead so far—and Zan couldn’t make the time to hear it? I understood that we needed to keep our alliance a secret, but it seemed that secrecy was now jeopardizing the entire purpose of our investigation.
I spent an hour trying to chill inside my residence after dinner, figuring Zan would swing by, and after that I went out and combed the base in search of her. I found everyone I didn’t want to see—Nina, Dr. Marquez, the entire Sjoberg clan—but not Zan. After a dozen loops of the base, I had no choice but to conclude that she didn’t want to be found.
I couldn’t wait for her anymore. Kira was right about there being no time to waste. If we had figured out that Dr. Holtz had sent the robot to the solar array, his killer would probably figure it out soon as well. And when they did, they’d go right for the evidence.
I sent Kira a text: We’re on for tonight.
She responded within seconds. 1 am.
I reluctantly returned to my room and spent the rest of the evening trying to act normal around my family, hoping Zan would decide to throw caution to the wind and show up at our door. I talked to Riley in Hawaii for a bit, pretending everything was fine, then finally got around to making my video log about Dr. Holtz. I wasn’t that pleased with it—it was kind of dull, just saying that Dr. Holtz was a nice man and that I’d miss him—but Mom and Dad both said it was perfect. I turned in when everyone else did, acting like I was tired when I was actually buzzing on adrenaline. I tried to read in bed but couldn’t concentrate.
Zan never showed.
* * *
I slipped out of my residence at one a.m. on the nose. Kira was already in the staging area, pacing like a lion in the zoo. She brightened when she saw me. “I was worried you were gonna chicken out,” she whispered.
“I’m right on time,” I told her.
She started to say something else, but I put a finger to my lips. The moon base was deathly silent at night. Even our softest whispers carried.
Kira nodded understanding and opened the storage unit where the kids’ space suits were kept.
The suits had been custom-made for us solely so we could get from the rocket to the moon base and back. Each had cost millions of dollars for about twenty minutes of use. Or at least NASA hoped we’d only use them for twenty minutes—because the only other reason for them would be an emergency that required us to evacuate MBA. Which is why the suit storage unit isn’t locked. (No one has ever told me what we’re expected to do on the surface of the moon after all our air runs out. It seems to me that if something really went wrong at MBA, suiting up and evacuating to the lunar surface would only postpone our deaths. But maybe NASA figures that, at the very least, we’d be happy to go outside.)
MBA has mandatory practice emergency drills once a month to keep our evacuation routine well rehearsed. Due to this, I knew how to get my suit on quickly. Even faster than Kira, who’d worn hers just the day before. In the early days of space travel, astronauts had to wear multiple layers of insulation, so suiting up could take several minutes. Nowadays the suit itself is perfectly insulated, which means the person inside is much less constricted. I pulled on the outer shell, stepped into my boots, clamped my helmet, and pulled on my gloves in less than two minutes. Since we wouldn’t be gone that long, I opted not to wear the astronaut diaper, which was designed so that anyone who has to be on the lunar surface for a good stretch of time won’t have to return to the base to use the bathroom. Then I sealed all the connections and checked them again. And again. And again. Then I had Kira do it for me.
I had no intention of being the second person in history to die on the moon.
I inspected Kira and found she was suited properly as well.
Since my suit had barely been worn, it still smelled like a new car on the inside. I flipped on the fan vent so the glass of my helmet wouldn’t fog up. Given our position at the pole, the sun was still out even now, so we both lowered the reflective visors; without them, in the sun’s direct heat, undimmed by any sort of atmosphere, our heads would cook like potatoes in an oven. There were radios inside the helmets, so we could now talk to each other without the whole base hearing us.
“Testing, testing,” Kira said. It sounded like she was right next to me, speaking directly into my ear. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes,” I replied. “Can you hear me?”
“Perfectly. Let’s go!” Kira clapped her hands in anticipation.
We headed for the air lock. Normally, a security door is controlled by a thumb or retina sensor so only certain people can open it. However, neither of those work very well when you’re wearing space gloves and helmets, so this one has a large keypad instead. As kids, we weren’t supposed to know the six-digit code that would open the air lock, but my parents had taught it to me months before, figuring I might need it in case of an emergency—and that they could trust me not to do anything stupid like head outside without their permission.
In truth, I figured that while heading onto the lunar surface was reckless, it wasn’t insanely risky. Solar Array 2 wasn’t far from the air lock, and I wasn’t going solo. If all went well, Kira and I would only be outside ten minutes, if that.
I tapped in the code. The inner door of the air lock slid open.
Kira and I stepped inside and entered the same code on another keypad. The inner door slid closed.
There was a whoosh as the air lock repressurized to match the atmosphere of the lunar surface.
I looked to Kira. Even though she’d been outside only the day before, she was bouncing up and down on her toes in anticipation. While I couldn’t see her face behind the reflective visor, she didn’t seem to have the slightest bit of concern about what we were doing. I couldn’t help thinking of Riley’s dog back on earth, pacing at her kitchen door, barely able to wait to get out in the yard.
Kira turned to me impatiently. “C’mon. What are we waiting for?”
I entered the code again on the keypad for the outer door.
It slid open.
Kira immediately bounded onto the lunar surface.
I followed her.
For some reason, I’d been thinking that after being cooped up inside for six months, it would physically feel strange to be outside. But it didn’t. The suit increased my weight, so I didn’t bound as far with each step, but other than that I felt exactly the same as I had inside the moon base.
But mentally it felt very different. Like I was an inmate paroled from jail. Or a zoo animal released into the wild. A sense of euphoria quickly came over me.
Kira was certainly experiencing it too, behaving even more enthusiastically. With the added weight of her suit, she seemed more comfortable in low gravity and quickly bounded ahead of me, springing as high as she could with each step, whooping with joy. “This is so awesome!” she cried. “Can you believe it? We’re on the moon!”
I took a few more steps. With each one, a puff of white moon dust exploded below my boot. It was like walking across a massive plain of pancake mix.
Since there was no atmosphere outside, there was no sound from the surface, no crunch of my boots in the dust, though I probably wouldn’t have heard it anyhow, given Kira’s thrilled exclamations ringing in my helmet.
Several well-trod paths snaked through the moon dust from the air lock. The one we wanted veered right, then branched into two others. One of these went directly to the large white dome of the moon-rover garage, while ours continued straight, threading the gap between MBA and the garage, then banked left to circumvent the science pod.
As I took the turn, the robot arm came into view. I’d never seen it up close before. It was an impressive piece of machinery: an intricate combination of gleaming metal, pistons, and wires. Each of the three sections of the arm was more than three stories tall. They were connected with enormous ball-and-socket joints and folded up vertically, like the pincer of a massive praying mantis. The arm was attached to the lunar surface with a swivel, which allowed it to rotate 360 degrees and reach anything between the launchpad and the air lock. The hand was high above me, all four fingers and both thumbs clenched together in a gigantic fist.
“Dash? What are you doing?”
Kira’s words caught me by surprise. I spun to find her well ahead of me, looking back my way.
“Sorry,” I said. “I got distracted.”
“I’ll say,” Kira teased. “Hey, check this out!” With that she leaped ahead, covering twenty feet with one bound. Then she crash-landed, tumbling onto her back. But she didn’t seem to care. Instead she lay there, giggling, and made the lunar version of a snow angel.
Her enthusiasm was infectious. Even though our mission was serious, there was no reason I couldn’t enjoy myself a bit. I cocked my legs and launched myself forward. The ground dropped away below me and I sailed well past the robot arm, almost to the end of the science pod, and landed in a great cloud of moon dust.
“There you go!” Kira cheered. “Wow. You practically went into orbit!” With that she got back to her feet and bounded off again.
I followed her. Springing across the lunar surface was more fun than I’d had in months. Exploring a real place was far better than any simulation the computers could cook up. Above us the stars gleamed, and the Milky Way was a gorgeous slash across the ink-dark sky. The earth shone brightly in the middle of it, a beautiful blue jewel. I found a patch of moon dust that had somehow remained pristine and, unable to resist, planted my feet right in it, making myself the first human to ever set foot on that spot.
The fun was short-lived, however. We were covering so much ground with each leap that we quickly reached Solar Array 2. Since it’s on the western side of MBA, where there are no windows, I had never seen it before. It was startlingly large, a field of solar panels taking up significantly more space than the base itself. Each panel was five feet square, perched atop a tall metal post from which it could be angled directly at the sun. Currently, the panels were all were tilted southwest, sucking up so much solar energy that I could feel the heat from them as we came close.
“Daphne said the robot traveled to panel thirty-six-B,” Kira said. “Any idea where that is?”
I looked over the array. There were more than a thousand panels. Thankfully, they were arranged in an orderly fashion, in perfectly spaced rows, like plants on a farm. I bounded to the closest support post. There was a number etched into the side: 29A. 28A was to my right; 30A was to my left.
“This way,” I said, heading left, where the row of panels continued toward the edge of the blast wall that surrounded the launch pad. I returned to walking normally now, not wanting to accidentally bounce up into the solar panels and fricassee myself.
As expected, 36A was six panels down from 30A. And one row in sat 36B.
I glanced at the moon dust at the base of its post. It had been trampled by hundreds of footsteps over the months of installation and maintenance, but a more recent nonhuman track—two sets of treads—sliced across all the boot prints. “Look,” I told Kira.
“Dr. Holtz’s robot,” she said. Even with her reflective visor down I could tell she was smiling.
“Looks like we’re in the right place.” I circled the post, looking for where the robot had set the phone.
Only the phone wasn’t there.
“I don’t see anything.” Kira now sounded concerned.
“Maybe it blew away,” I said.
“A whole phone? How? There’s no wind here, brainiac.”
“I know. But maybe when the rocket landed, the blast blew it somewhere.”
Kira’s helmet shifted back and forth as she shook her head. “No way. The blast wall is built to prevent that. Otherwise the rockets would blow moon dust all over the solar panels and mess them up.”
I frowned, not feeling quite so super any more. We’d been so sure Dr. Holtz had sent the robot out, but now I wondered if we’d made a mistake. I scanned the area around post 36B, hoping to find some sign that we hadn’t.
“Dash,” Kira said. “There’s something I have to tell you. Before we came out here tonight, I had a lot of time to kill. So I figured I’d search the computer files a little bit more.”
My gaze fell on the tracks of the robot in the dust. Something struck me as significant about them. Although I knew Kira was trying to tell me something important, I couldn’t help but focus on the tracks too.
“I decided to look for the footage from the bathroom the night you overheard Dr. Holtz in there,” Kira went on. “Not to see you on the toilet or anything, I promise. Since the phone log had been erased, I was thinking that maybe if I could watch Dr. Holtz on the call, I could get some idea who he was talking to.”
The tracks were from a small robot, I realized. That ruled out the maintenance ones, which tended to be quite large, as they often had to move heavy machinery. It was probably a small probe, which the scientists used more often. Mostly to take geologic samples.
Which meant it was built to dig.
I dropped to my knees and began brushing moon dust away from the base of the post for panel 36B.
Kira stopped talking. She dropped to her knees and started digging as well.
“Never mind,” she said. “It might not be important.”
I brushed aside another scoop of dust, and something gleamed in the hole. I plunged my hand inside. It was hard to grasp anything with the gloves, but I finally managed to do it.
A small, clear plastic bag had been buried in the hole. The kind of bag the scientists use to keep sterile samples in.
Dr. Holtz’s phone was inside it.
“You found it!” Kira cheered. “All right!” She raised her hand for a celebratory high five.
I gave it to her, but even though I’d found the phone, I didn’t feel nearly as thrilled as I should have.
Kira’s voice had sounded far more relieved than excited. Like there was something she knew that I didn’t.
“What did you find on the computer?” I asked.
“Nothing.” Kira stood up and started walking. “Forget I mentioned it. We need to get back to the base.”
I stood too, but I didn’t follow her. “Tell me.”
Kira turned back. “No. I shouldn’t have even brought it up. I was rushing to look through stuff, so maybe I misunderstood what I saw.”
“Which was . . . ?”
Kira motioned for me to follow her. “Come on. We’ve been out too long as it is.”
I stayed put. “What did you see, Kira?”
She sighed heavily. In the speaker of my helmet it sounded like a hurricane in my ears. “Okay, I’ll tell you, but you have to realize I might not be right about this. I wasn’t even sure if I should mention it or not until I had time to go over everything again, but then we got here and it looked like Dr. Holtz hadn’t hidden his phone here after all, so I started to think that, maybe, he was cracking up a bit.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Because I found the footage from the bathroom.” Kira came back toward me. “The footage of Dr. Holtz’s conversation. The reason we couldn’t find any record of his phone call in the logs was that he didn’t make a phone call.”
“That’s not possible,” I said. “I heard him.”
“You heard him talking to someone,” Kira corrected. “But he wasn’t using his phone. I saw him.”
“You mean someone else was in the bathroom with us?”
“No. I could see the entire room in the footage. There wasn’t anyone else there.”
I stared at Kira, wishing I could see her face rather than just a reflection of myself in her visor. “So he was just talking to himself? Like a crazy person?”
Kira’s helmet nodded up and down.
I wanted to defend Dr. Holtz, to tell Kira that she certainly had to be wrong—but before I could, I spotted something in her visor’s reflection.
Something else was moving on the lunar surface behind me. And it was moving fast.
“Look out!” I screamed, then dove. I slammed into Kira, knocking her flat.
A second later the massive hand of the robot arm crashed to the ground where we had just been. It came in with such speed that it sliced clean through the support post of solar panel 36A and landed hard enough to make the ground shake. The panel toppled and shattered, strewing glass all over the lunar surface.
“What was that?” Kira gasped. “A malfunction?”
“No,” I told her. “Someone’s trying to kill us!”
As if to prove me right, the robot arm reared up again, preparing for another attack.