Life on Mars (18 page)

We talked a bit more about design, and I started to get really excited, like maybe this could really happen for me after all. Maybe, after all this time, my dream would turn into a reality. I, Arcturus Betelgeuse Chambers, Armpit of the Central One, would prove that there is other life out there.

A few days later, I awoke to the sound of Vega crying.

I followed the noise down the hall and into her room, squinting and scratching the morning away. “What's going on?” I asked.

She was hunched over in her bed, a dome of sadness, her face buried in her hands, a journal spread out on the bed in front of her. Across the pages of the journal, she had scrawled broken hearts with “Vega” in one side of the heart and “Mitchell” in the other. She'd also doodled “Mrs. Mitchell Bacturn” several times across the page.

“His last name is really Bacteria?” I asked, almost laughing.

“Bacturn, you idiot, get out,” she said. “And stop reading my private thoughts.”

Still. Close enough to be funny. Bacteria/Bacturn. Perfect.

“Sorry,” I said, edging for the door. “I was just coming in
because you were crying and I wanted to see what was wrong.”

Her face crumpled again. “Everything is wrong. Mom is packing today,” she said.

I tipped my nose up. The smell of cardboard was in the air, and if I listened carefully I could hear the sound of packing paper being wadded and packing tape being stretched.

This was it.

They'd found their adorable Vegas house. Dad had fixed everything wrong with our crummy old house and painted up the ruddy parts of it. Mom had cleaned all the closets. It was only a matter of time now.

“How long until we leave?” I asked. I was really wondering,
How long do I have to contact Mars with Cash?

“I didn't ask. A week or so probably. Which means my life is over.” She leaned back into her mattress and started sobbing even more.

I walked to her and awkwardly put my hand on her back. I patted it a few times, feeling weird about comforting my sister in her pajamas. I did kind of feel sorry for her. The Bacteria was just a half a step up above amoeba on the intellectual scale, but he seemed like an okay guy sometimes. And she seemed to be really in love.

After a few minutes, I slunk back to my room and locked the door. Maybe if I just stayed locked in here, they could never pack it and we would never have to go anywhere. I could stage a sit-in!

But then who would build CICM on the hill with Cash? And who would flash Morse code at the Martian yeti? This seemed like no answer at all.

That night, Cash and I brought a whole wheelbarrow full of stuff to the hill. Cash had already toted up the giant floodlight and a huge battery that looked like it could power half of Liberty. He'd also brought some mirrors and a huge telescope almost as good as the one in Dad's observatory.

We hardly looked at the sky at all, we were so intent on building what I'd begun to think of as Giant CICM. Which, by the way, was only adding another consonant to the name, thus making it no better to have on a T-shirt than the original name.

“Hey, Cash,” I said, wrapping duct tape around the corners of two mirrors. “Do you think my friends Priya and Tripp could come up here to see this some night?”

Cash grunted, which was usually his unhappy noise. But come to think of it, grunting was also his happy noise. And his thinking noise. And his hungry noise. “This isn't a playground,” he said. “I'm not a nanny.”

“I know, I know,” I said. “And I'll explain to them that they can't come up here unless we're here and we've invited them. It's just … they've known about CICM since I started it with Cassi three years ago, and I think they'd really like it up here. They're my friends. I don't have a lot of time left with them.”

It was the last part that seemed to get his attention.
I thought I saw his eyes soften at the words “don't have a lot of time left.”

He went back to his positioning of the mirrors and grunted again.

“I suppose as long as they don't touch anything,” he said.

I grinned. “Great! Thanks, Cash!”

We put the final touches on Giant-CICM and looked at each other, our hands on our hips.

“Well …,” Cash said, studying our work.

“We should try it out,” I said, but neither of us made a move. I think we were both afraid that it wouldn't work and that all of our hard work would have been for nothing.

Finally, Cash leaned forward and flipped the switch. The light bloomed into life and caught the mirrors, which amplified it so far it turned into a pinpoint too small for either of us to see. Cash leaned over the telescope and trained the light at a particular spot.

“Got her,” he said. “Got Mars.”

We both crossed our arms over our chests proudly, the intensity and excitement over having achieved our goal too big for words. I felt excitement building up in my throat. I wanted to scream and holler, gallop in circles spanking myself, throw a hat in the air, flail on the ground and scoot myself in victorious circles. But that is the kind of celebrating you do only when you're alone in your bedroom. Otherwise people think you've been out in the sun too long and have gone all wonky on them.

Instead, I leaned toward the switch and started flipping. Four dots. One dot. Dot-dash-dot-dot, twice. Three dashes.

HELLO

Cash and I both stood, neither of us breathing, and then he bent toward the telescope at the same time I lifted the binoculars to my eyes.

Nothing.

I flipped the switch again. Four dots. One dot. Dot-dash-dot-dot, twice. Three dashes.

Again, nothing.

So I flashed the code again. And again. For an hour we stayed after it, and for an hour we got nothing back. Mars was a distant red glimmer and that was all.

“We should probably call it a night,” Cash said, after a while. “Try again tomorrow.”

I tried not to feel dejected, and even though I didn't want to give up—what if the moment we turned our backs, the aliens started flashing back their planet's history for us, in Morse code?—I knew he was right. We overturned a wooden box to cover the device and started packing our things away.

“It needs a name, don't you think?” Cash said as he gently placed the binoculars back into its box.

“I've been calling it CICM,” I said. “For Clandestine Interplanetary Communication Module.”

“That's a terrible name,” Cash said. “You can't put that on a T-shirt.”

We loaded the rest of our things into the wheelbarrow,
and I pushed it down the hill and toward the tree line again. “I can't think of anything better,” I said.

We walked through the woods, the wheelbarrow getting heavier with every step.

And then, just as we stepped out of the woods into his backyard, Cash stopped and took the wheelbarrow from me. “Huey,” he said.

“Huh?” Thinking he might have been going old-person bonkers like my grandpa Muliphein did when he suddenly thought you could take the Macy's escalator to a pizza place on the outer ring of Saturn, I pointed to my chest, Tarzan-style. “No, Arty,” I said, enunciating slowly.

Cash rolled his eyes and cuffed the back of my head. “I know who you are, kid. I was talking about the doohickey on the hill. We should name him Huey.”

I blinked. “Huey. What does that stand for?”

“Well, it doesn't have to stand for anything. It's just a name.”

“And that name is Huey.”

He shrugged. “Why not?”

Why not? I thought interplanetary devices were supposed to be named something inspirational, something exciting, something important. Like Odyssey, Discovery, Spirit, Curiosity. Not
Huey
.

But I kind of liked it.

“Sure, why not?” I said. “Huey, it is.”

“Okay, before we go in, there are a few rules you have to follow.” I stood at the edge of the woods facing Tripp and Priya. “No running or jumping or wrestling or throwing your shoes or dive-bombing or sword fighting with sticks or anything else that might involve throwing things into the air. No loud talking. No singing songs about burps. Or singing songs in burp language. You have to act normal around Huey. Cash won't put up with any …” I reached for the right words, but realized the best word was, “anything. Cash won't put up with anything. Got it?”

Priya nodded and Tripp saluted me.

“You sure this is safe?” Priya asked, her hands buried in the sleeping bag she'd brought along. She eyeballed the darkness surrounding us.

“Aha!” Tripp yelled pointing in her face. “Who's not so sure about the zombie thing now, huh?”

Priya swiped at his finger and he whipped it away and right into a tree trunk. He sucked on it. “I am totally sure we are not going to be attacked by zombies, Tripp. I'm more worried that you're going to tear down the whole forest on top of us. Watch where you're—”

But it was too late. Tripp, walking backward and nursing his finger, tripped over a tree root. But to our surprise, he didn't fall. Instead, he pivoted on one toe, stretched his arms to the side, did a graceful leap, and landed, his heels together, his hands clasped at his left hip.

“Did that really just happen?” I asked.

“What was that?” Priya asked at exactly the same time.

Tripp looked sheepish. “What?”

“You didn't fall,” Priya said. “Something is up. First you're riding a bike, and now you're leaping over tree stumps and not falling?”

“And standing funny,” I added.

“Nothing is up. I just got lucky,” Tripp said, and almost to prove his point, he turned and walked face-first into a poison ivy plant that was growing up the side of the tree.

“No problem, guys,” he said brightly. “I've fallen into poison ivy so many times, the doctor says I'm immune to it now.”

Priya and I exchanged skeptical glances. “Come on,” I said, “we're almost there.”

Cash was already there waiting for us. I could see the flashing spotlight before we were even all the way out of the woods.

“Don't touch anything,” I reminded Tripp as we hiked to the top of the hill. But Tripp was busy saying, “Whoooa,” the same way I had said it when I first came to the hill. Even Priya seemed to be mesmerized. She clutched her sleeping bag under one arm and trotted to the top of the hill, gazing skyward.

“It's so beautiful up here, Arty,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said proudly, as if I (1) had made space beautiful myself, and (2) had discovered the hill, neither of which I'd actually done.

We spread out Priya's sleeping bag, and Cash enthralled them both by letting them peer through the telescope at the various constellations and nebulae he pointed out. We sat on our blankets and talked about Huey, about his purpose and our plans to be the first astronauts (yes, I knew I was lumping myself in with an actual astronaut, but I was sort of in the moment) to discover life on Mars.

After a while, we turned off Huey to lie on our backs across the blankets. Just looking, just talking, just telling star stories and pointing to things nobody else could follow.

“The moon is so huge from up here,” Priya said. “It almost feels like you can reach up and touch it.” She held her hands straight up into the sky, her bracelets clanking to her elbow. “Our science teacher told us that the moon was once part of Earth. She said it was knocked off in a crash. Weird to think we're looking at more Earth up there.”

“I've heard that,” I said, pulling myself up on an elbow so I was facing her. “Some scientists think another planet
smacked into us and fused together with us, and the stuff that was knocked off in the impact gathered together to become the moon. They say the rocks on the moon have identical oxygen levels as we do here. They called it the um … the um …”

“The giant impact theory,” Cash intoned.

“The giant impact theory,” we all repeated at the same time.