THE DAY BEFORE WE LEFT FOR EUREKA COVE WAS HOWARD’S BIRTHDAY, and his parents invited Savannah, Eric, me, and our moms to come out with them for pizza. Even though we weren’t sure if it counted as a birthday party, Mom insisted we bring gifts. She even drove us to the mall to shop, but since the mall didn’t have a NASA store, we were sort of at a loss. We wandered up and down the aisles of the toy store, as Mom pointed out Star Wars Lego sets and astronaut ice cream.
“He’d only eat it if it’s Omega City brand,” Eric said, which was true. And, obviously, the ice cream was not.
“It’s not like there’s anything space-related that we’d know about but not him,” Savannah pointed out as we left the store empty-handed. “The only thing I can think of that Howard might want for his birthday is a ride in a real rocket ship. You know, the one he didn’t get in Omega City.”
That reminded me of our conversation the other day. After I’d talked with Howard, I’d gone home and read through the sections about us and our adventures in The Forgotten Fortress, looking for any important details Dad might have left out, but that wasn’t Dad’s style. He was the one who found out other people’s secrets, and told the whole world.
Still, it was sweet that Howard wanted to protect Dr. Underberg.
“Hey, guys?” Mom had stopped in front of a fancy stationery store. “What about a space pen?” She pointed at a sleek silver object in the window. “This says it was designed by NASA and has been used on all manned missions since 1968. You could go in on it together. They’ll even engrave his name on it.”
I had to hand it to Mom. That was a pretty good idea. The pen was silver, like a little rocket ship, and came in a box with a NASA seal and certification and everything. We debated for a while about what the engraving should say. At first, we’d all thought Howard, but Mom suggested that H. Noland or Howard Noland might look “more professional.”
“But he’s not a professional,” I said. “He’s a sixth grader.”
“I like H. Noland,” Savannah said, ignoring me. “It’s dignified.”
“Yeah,” Eric agreed. “Plus, we have to pay by the letter.”
We chose a nice block print and the man engraved the pen, and even wrapped it in pretty blue paper with a white ribbon.
As we walked out of the store, Savannah shook her head, grinning. “If you told me a year ago that I’d be spending two hours picking out a present for Howard Noland’s birthday, I would have laughed in your face.”
“Yeah, especially if I told you that it was an engraved pen, and you agreed with Eric about what the engraving should say.”
That made her stop dead in her tracks.
GENERAL TSO’S PIZZA was located in an old brick building that I’m pretty sure used to be a chain pizza place. The roof had an odd, distinctive shape barely camouflaged by the weird dragons and other designs that had been added to the exterior of the building to make it look like a pagoda. Inside, murals of Venetian canals fought with silk screens, and carved wooden Buddhas stood next to plump Italian chefs holding bottles of wine.
“Ah,” said Mom with a pained smile. “I’d forgotten how . . . unique this place is. Has the food gotten any better?”
“Nope.” Eric smiled and waved at Nate, Howard, and their mother, who were hanging out at one of the four booths lining the walls. The restaurant was empty—most people who ate the food here ordered delivery.
“Hey, guys,” said Nate as he dragged over a table to add to the end of the booth for us. We all sat down. “You know what you want?”
“I don’t,” Mom said. She opened the menu. “Has the waiter been by?”
“Waiter?” said Nate, as if he’d never before heard the word. “Yeah, they don’t have one of those. Just tell me what you want and I’ll tell the kitchen. I used to work here.”
Nate had done delivery for General Tso’s, back before his truck got wrecked during the launch of the rocket ship Knowledge. This winter, he’d made extra cash by shoveling snow and chopping wood, and this summer, he’d started mowing lawns. He said he liked it way more than delivering pizza.
“Why?” Savannah had asked a few months ago.
And Nate had replied, “Because you don’t have a lawn, Savvy,” which had made Eric laugh for about five minutes straight.
“Oh,” Mom said. “I think I’ll try the chicken fried linguini.”
“Your funeral,” said Nate. He looked at us. “The usual?”
We all nodded, and Nate headed off to the kitchen. I handed Howard our present.
“Thanks,” he said, looking at the table. He put it with a small pile of other gifts.
“Thank you for inviting us to your birthday dinner,” Mom prompted.
“Yeah, thanks,” Eric echoed dutifully.
“Thank you for coming,” Mrs. Noland responded. “We’re so glad to have some of Howard’s friends over.”
For once. She didn’t say that, but the words seemed to hang in the air until Nate came back to the table with a pitcher of lemonade and a bunch of glasses. “When is Dad getting here?”
“He has to work late tonight,” his mother explained, and poured a glass of lemonade. “Here you go, birthday boy. Should we start with the presents?” She reached for a big, oblong one. “This one’s from your father.”
It was tough for Howard to get the paper off while cornered in the booth. Inside was a baseball bat and a set of two balls, as well as a note.
“‘Dear Howie,’” Howard read, his voice flat. “‘To help you make the team next summer.’”
I looked up to catch Nate rolling his eyes. I didn’t blame him. We all knew how much Howard hated it when his father called him Howie.
“Isn’t that nice,” said Mrs. Noland, sounding almost as toneless as her son.
Not really. Howard was staring at the bat as if he’d never seen one before.
The table fell silent. Mom cleared her throat and took a long drink of her lemonade. This was officially the most awkward birthday party I’d ever been to.
“Open ours,” Savannah suggested. Howard grabbed our package and neatly unwrapped the paper.
“Oh, a space pen,” said Howard.
“Yeah,” said Eric, smiling. “We got it engraved.”
“Thanks,” Howard said. He looked at his mom. “Look, you can use this, too. H. Noland can stand for Hope.”
“That’s an awfully fancy pen,” Mrs. Noland said.
“It was invented by NASA,” Savannah said. “It can write upside down, underwater . . .”
“Wow,” said Mrs. Noland.
“NASA spent several years developing this pen in the sixties, so the astronauts could write in zero g,” Howard said. “It’s been on every manned space mission since its invention.”
Savannah and Eric beamed. “We knew you’d like it,” Savannah said.
Howard looked at the pen. “But you know what the Russian cosmonauts did?”
“What?” I asked.
“They used a pencil.”
Nate spit his lemonade across the table.
“Nathaniel!” his mother said, horrified. “And Howard, that’s not how you thank people for gifts.”
Mom was trying not to laugh.
“I’m going to go get the food,” Nate said, his eyes watering.
“I do like it,” Howard said. “There’s no such thing as a space pencil.”
“You’re welcome, Howard,” I said. That was a thank-you, for him.
Thankfully, Nate came back with a tray of food, and for a while the only thing we talked about was how to divide up the egg-roll calzones and whether sesame chicken pizza was better or worse than kung pao shrimp pizza.
Mom poked at her chicken fried linguini. She really should have known better.
“So, Dr. Seagret,” Mrs. Noland said, “Howard tells me you’re taking the kids to Idaho in the fall. We’ll be sorry to lose them. Howard has grown so close to Eric and Gillian.”
Mom stole a glance at me, and maybe it was my imagination, but she almost looked guilty. Yeah, Mom. See? You aren’t just taking us away from Dad and my best friend, you’re also leaving Howard with no one but his brother and Savannah for company.
And that was assuming Sav and Howard would still hang out once we were gone.
“You tell her, Mrs. N,” Savannah said, twirling a fork through her Caprese chow mein. “Gillian’s only been here full-time for a year, and now she’s going to leave again? That sucks.”
“Well, you’ll all just have to have as much fun as possible this weekend to make up for it,” Mom said. “They’ve got such lovely facilities at the Guidant campus. And it’s on the water, too, so you’ll be able to go swimming and water skiing and sailing. . . .” She gave Eric an encouraging smile.
“Not a lot of sailing in Idaho,” I added.
Eric kicked me under the table. “Who’s the silver one from?” he asked Howard, pointing at a rectangular present.
“I don’t know,” Howard replied. “It showed up on the doorstep without a card. We think maybe it’s from my grandparents. It looks like a book.”
“Why don’t you open it and see?” Nate asked. “By the way—spoiler alert—I also got you a book.”
“Yeah,” Howard said. “But you got me that book on the effects of long-term space flight on the body . . . didn’t you?”
Nate looked confused. “Wait, was that the one you mentioned five dozen times?”
Howard looked at his brother. Nate waited three seconds before he grinned.
“Oh,” said Howard. “You’re joking.”
“Yeah.” Nate bit off a chunk of pizza crust. “Open the other one.”
Howard pushed his plate aside and grabbed the silver gift. Inside was a large brown hardcover engraved with a simple gold title, Codes and Code Breaking. There was no author listed.
“Cool,” said Howard.
We all blinked at him. Cool? What did codes have to do with space travel? Coding, maybe, but I doubt a book that old had any cool computer stuff in it.
“I taught myself Morse code this summer,” he said. “You’d think it’s obsolete, with the improvement in communication techniques, but I’ve been thinking a lot about the SETI Institute.”
“SETI?” Savannah asked.
“The search for extraterrestrial intelligence,” I explained. “They look for aliens.”
“They study radio signals for signs of extraterrestrial communication,” Howard clarified. “But obviously, extraterrestrials aren’t going to communicate in English.”
“They aren’t going to communicate in Morse code, either,” Eric said.
“No,” said Howard. “Probably not. But the more I learn about how human languages and codes work, the more prepared I am.”
“To talk to aliens?” asked Eric. He looked at me. “This is your doing, isn’t it?”
I held up my hands in defense. I had nothing to do with Howard deciding that codes were as cool as the cosmos.
“No, to separate signal from noise. Language has patterns. If you can figure out how the patterns work, you can figure out if it’s some kind of message. That’s the first thing you learn with code. Look . . .” He flipped the cover of the book open and tapped a page. “It’s called frequency analysis. You study the repetition of certain letters or groups of letters to try to break codes.”
“Like how in English, E is the most common letter?” Savannah asked.
“Right. And if there is a word with only one letter . . .”
“It’s ‘I’ or ‘a,’” Eric finished. “Cool.”
“So who gave you this book?” Mrs. Noland asked. “It’s not from us. And I know Grandma got you a sweater.”
“Check in the front,” my mom suggested. “Maybe there’s an inscription.”
Howard turned to the front of the book. Sketched out in pencil was a square of numbers.
14 43 13 13 45 31 35 14 44
25 11 53 15 43 23 35 11 34
15 35 23 31 21 13 34 31 13
52 13 45 25 31 44 53 31 34
34 44 11 11 35 21 13 51 44
13 24 51 34 45 11 54 11 51
14 11 11 23 34 51 22 33 23
43 15 34 11 54 44 31 51 44
51 35 23 13 43 21 13 43 14
“Weird,” Eric said. “Even the inscription is in code.”
“Or someone was doing a math problem and needed paper,” Savannah said.
But I was staring at the neatly drawn rows of numbers as my slices of sesame chicken pizza turned over and over in my stomach.
Not again. How could they be looking at this writing—how could Howard be looking at it—and not see what I saw?
If those numbers were a code, I had no idea what they meant. But I did know who’d put them there.
Dr. Underberg.