Chapter 11

LIGHTBULB

Raj took his phone apart, trying to figure out a way to make it work. He held out his hands and indicated that Yuna and I should give him our phones. He took them apart too. None of them worked.

Yuna pointed to the phones and shook her head from side to side. It was clear she thought that Raj should shut down the phones to save the charge. She was right. We couldn’t afford to have the phone batteries run out of charge. The lights might be the only things we had that could save us.

After a few hours of pointing and miming at one another, the sense of seriousness grew even greater. The dust storm had been making the sky pretty dark earlier, but after the sunset, we were now in complete darkness. Thankfully, somehow our suits were still keeping us warm.

It was the longest night of my life. Morning came, and the Martian surface was slightly visible. The storm wasn’t completely over, but it was clearing. Our phones didn’t work, and the MM was dead. We had to get a plan together. The expedition might not come looking for us until the conditions were safer, and we had no food or water.

I searched frantically through my pockets, which I had done countless times already. I had nothing but rock samples I’d collected. Raj had a few small tools and some wires. Yuna reached in her pockets and pulled out a hair clip, some candies, and two tubes of green paint. I wished I’d brought something that might help save us.

Yuna pretended to squeeze the paint into her mouth and eat it. We all smiled and giggled a little. It was the first time something seemed funny since the storm.

Suddenly, an idea hit me like a Martian hurricane. The green paint! I remembered that Cozzie had told me green would stand out against the red surface. The MM was green, but it was covered with dust from the storm. For some reason, the dust didn’t seem to stick to the pod as much. There were still plenty of places where we could see out.

I motioned to Yuna that I needed to use the paint. I took it, squeezing some of the paint out of the tube and onto my hand. Then I spread it on a part of the pod that wasn’t covered by red dust. Raj and Yuna realized what I was doing and joined in. We smeared the green paint all over the spots of the pod that were still clear. I thought about going out of the pod to wipe off some of the dust, but didn’t want to risk something going wrong and putting us in even more danger.

Raj took out our phones and tried calling one more time. They still didn’t work. He powered them off to save the batteries. We waited all day, but no help came. The day seemed to drag on forever.

When darkness fell again, Raj clicked the phones back on and programmed them to blink on and off rapidly. Then he placed one up to a spot we’d smeared with green paint. He handed each of us a blinking phone and pointed to a green spot on the surface of the pod. It was a great idea. The blinking phones would light up the green portions of the pod, making it look like a giant green lightbulb. From the outside, it should be visible to anyone looking for us.

We were excited for a while and had a new sense of hope. It slowly wore off as each passing minute went by. After about an hour, my arm had grown completely numb from holding up the phone.

I wasn’t sleeping, but I wasn’t fully awake either. That’s when I heard voices outside the pod. The green paint blurred everything, but I could make out figures moving around outside. “Starr!” I heard Mom shout.

“In here! We’re in here!” I called.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Kind of.”

“Do you have your suits on?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I shouted.

“Stand back,” Professor Will warned as he cut a hole in the side of the pod with a saw.

We were saved. I had never been so thankful in all my life.

Mom hugged me tight and pulled in Raj and Yuna. “Thank goodness you’re okay. We’ve been searching everywhere for you.”

“Our phones didn’t have any signal,” I said. I was shaking and talking a mile a minute.

“It was a brilliant idea to paint the inside of the pod green and use your phones to create light,” Professor Will said. “We spotted you the moment we flew over the edge of this canyon. It’s a good thing you guys were able to communicate and work together.”

I smiled. “That’s the amazing thing,” I said. “None of our technology was working properly, but we still found a way to work together.”

When we returned to the station, everyone was thrilled that we were all right. It had been a really frightening experience, but we had survived.

We spent a few more weeks on Mars before returning home to Earth again. The mission had been a success. Mom was happy because we had collected lots of samples to take back to Earth, and she’d somehow managed to keep everyone safe.

Dad was thrilled too. He said he had enough film to make an amazing documentary about our trip to Mars.

Kathy and the professor had set up the first greenhouses on Mars. If we returned in the future, there would be plenty of food growing and ready to eat.

On the day we left, we passed by Deimos and Phobos for the last time. I thought about all of the panic and fear I had felt on Mars and wondered if these names did mean something after all. Was the planet cursed? I figured I’d never really know. After all, I had survived, and the experience had been totally out of this world!