Mike Stellar (4 page)

“Let him go, Albert.” Mom’s voice filtered down the hallway. “Yeager is his best friend.” I heard her start walking toward us.

“He’ll be able to contact Yeager when we get to Mars,” Dad argued. His scientific personality just didn’t comprehend things like, well,
friends.

“That’s gonna be
months
, Dad!” I shouted.

Mom held up her hand to quiet our bickering. “He’ll be back in ten minutes. Right, Mike?” I gave Mom a grateful look and bolted through the backyard.

Stinky and I got there at the same time. Our secret meeting place was a small burrow hollowed out of the side of a hill behind our neighborhood. It was close but hidden, like an easy-access private clubhouse.

Stinky looked rumply in his baggy jeans and “Elvis Is Alive” T-shirt. I told him to sit down and then I just let the whole story spill out of me.

He blinked five times in a row and said, “Are you kidding me?”

“Do I look like I’m kidding you?” I held up my hands so that he could see they were shaking. I didn’t know if it was from fear or excitement, but they were jittering a mile a minute.

“Man, that is heavy news.” He picked at an old candy wrapper on the ground. “You’re leaving today?”

“Yeah,” I said, breathless. “At two p.m.”

We sat silently for a few minutes; then I looked at my watch. “I have to go, man. If I’m not back soon, my dad’s going to vaporize me.”

“Well,” Stinky said, standing up and fidgeting with his pants, “at least you don’t have to worry about your speech anymore.”

“Ha.” I kicked a rock over and watched two little bugs scurry out from under it. “I might not have to write it, but now I have to live it.”

“Shoulda picked a project on creating your own teacher-eating Preditator.”

“No doubt.”

We stood there for a few seconds, not knowing what else to say.

“Well, hey,” I said finally, “at least we still have these.” I held up my small green peapod.

“Will that work in space?”

“It’s supposed to,” I said, then deepened my voice like the commercial. “This amazing device works up to one million miles away.”

He looked skeptical.

“The moon is only 239,000 miles away, right? And we’ll be there for at least a few weeks. Then we fly back a little closer to Earth so that we can launch from Lagrange point L1. We’ll be there another week or so, I guess, and that’s, what, only 200,000 miles away?”

“Dude, how do you know all this stuff?”

“I don’t
always
watch
MonsterMetalMachines
on the vis. And, you know, I can read, too.” I slugged him in the arm. “Anyway These things should work until I actually take off for Mars. And the mission’s gonna be in preparation mode for four weeks. I mean, I guess it is. The last mission took four weeks to …” I trailed off. I
didn’t really want to get into the whole hundreds-of-people-lost-in-space-who-are-probably-dead thing.

Stinky shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “So that’s four weeks we can talk until you take off on the … long trip.”

“You make it sound like I’m going to die or something. ‘The long trip.’”

Stinky just looked at me.

I rolled my peapod between my fingers. “We’ll keep in touch, okay, Stink?”

“Cool,” he said, looking at the ground.

We stood awkwardly until Stinky one-arm hugged me and trotted off. I hightailed it back to the house.

I ran in through the back door and flew up the stairs to finish packing. I hadn’t been in my room ten seconds when Mom burst in.

“You better get downstairs and eat breakfast, Michael. We have a long day ahead of us.”

I took one last look around my room. It wasn’t a huge room, or even spectacular in any way, but I’d miss it. I sighed and jammed my hands into my pockets. My fingers brushed the peapod and some grasshrinkers I must’ve left in there the other day.
That’s one chore I won’t have to do on Mars
, I thought. But that didn’t make me feel better.
How can you live in a place with no grass?

My breath caught funny in my throat.

“C’mon, Mike,” Mom said softly “Let’s go eat.”

Nita sat gobbling up pancakes at the kitchen table downstairs. I set my box by the front door, next to two other boxes, and then nearly had a heart attack when a humongous man in what looked like a deep red waiter’s jacket tapped me on the shoulder.

“Better start eating, son. We’re leaving in ten minutes.”

I looked the stranger up and down. There was a gold name tag shimmering on his breast pocket. “‘Mr. Shugah-bert’?” I read out loud.

“The ‘t’ is silent,” he said with a big smile.

“Mr., uh, Shuga Bear? Your name is Sugar Bear?”

“It’s pronounced ‘Shoo-
gah
-bear,’ actually. I’m your mom’s executive assistant.”

“My mom’s who?”

“My assistant,” said Mom cheerily, putting her arm around me. “You’ve heard me talk about Leslie before, honey. He’s going to be accompanying us on our trip. He’ll be making sure our every need is taken care of.”

“THIS is Leslie?” I asked, shocked. “I always thought Leslie was, you know, not a dude.”

Mom maneuvered me over to the table and dropped a stack of steaming pancakes in front of me. “Eat up, so we can go.”

“Where’s your box, cheese face?” I asked Nita as I reached for the syrup.

“I don’t need a box,” she answered with a smug smile. She pulled the syrup just out of my reach.

“Why not? You starting over from scratch on Mars?” I leaned over the table and snatched the syrup from her hand.

“I’m not going to Mars.”

“Ha. Yeah, right.” I squirted syrup onto my pancakes and shoveled in a gloopy bite.

“Seriously. I’m not going. I’m gonna live with Gram instead.”

I sighed, spraying chewed-up pancake back onto my plate. I didn’t know if she made up stories for attention, or what, but Nita was almost nineteen. That was way too old to be a big fat liar.

“Mom,” I said, “could you please tell Nita to quit being such a pants-on-fire liar, and to go pack her box?”

Mom briefly looked uncomfortable. Then she squatted down and put on her big ol’ smiley smile. Yuh-oh.

“Well, the thing is, Michael …,” she started, and it felt like the pancake I had just swallowed was really a ton of firecrackers.

“Nita isn’t going with us.”

I was dumbfounded. I could only open and shut my mouth like a floundering fish.

“She, uh … she didn’t pass the security clearance.”

Finally I spat out,
“What?!”

Nita grinned at me from across the table and started humming a cheerful little tune that made me want to smash my pancakes in her face.

“Because of her association with
those people
, Nita wasn’t approved to come on the trip. She’s going to Gram’s after she drops us off at the Project,” Mom explained.

Mom was talking about Nita’s membership in Earthlings for Earth. It’s this group of people dedicated to cleaning up the environment and putting an end to off-world colonization. The EFEs don’t believe that it’s right for people on Earth to pollute our planet and then go do the same thing on other planets. They aren’t a very radical group, mostly just a lot of noisy people with colorful hair who chain themselves to rockets. So it wasn’t like Nita was some criminal mastermind. She was just my dumb sister who had dropped out of the Project Academy and was going through this dumb phase where she thought she could save the world with a bunch of other dumb people.

“Well,” I huffed, standing up so quickly my chair fell over behind me. “If Nita’s not going, I’m not going. I want to live with Gram, too.”

Just then Dad marched into the room. “All right, everyone, it’s time to go.” He handed me the book from
Mrs. H. “Thanks for letting me look at this, Mike. Better put it in your box. You don’t want to forget it!”

“But—” I said, not knowing what to complain about first. I didn’t need that stupid book on Mars.

“Oh, here, I’ll do it,” he said, and grabbed the book back. He shoved it into my box.

Mom whisked my plate off the table as if the preceding five minutes had never occurred. She took Nita’s plate and tossed it into the washer, too.

“Leslie, would you mind grabbing the boxes? Kids, follow me….” And she headed out the front door without so much as a glance behind her.

Nita and I looked at each other—she was smiling; I was breathing fire—and then Dad shoved us along. The drivedropper spat out the electri-car and the doors slid open.

I stammered, “But, I don’t want—I’m not go—”

“Oh, everything is going to be fine, honey,” Mom said, patting my arm as she gently pushed me into my seat. “Don’t you worry about a thing. Belt.”

A chorus of “belt”s filled the e.c. My mind raced and my heart careened around my chest. Why didn’t Nita pack any of her stuff to bring to Gram’s? Come to think of it, what was going to happen to all our stuff back home while we were gone? What about my simulator games and the vis recorder? How was I going to record all the
MonsterMetalMachines
episodes? There
were so many questions; it was all happening too fast. I mean, if I’d had more time to think about it, I might have been possibly, sort of, maybe
excited
about becoming a space traveler. But right now it was like everything was spinning away from me. There wasn’t time to grapple with what was happening. I felt lost and we were still in the driveway.

Mr. Shugabert leaned around from the passenger’s seat and said, “Everyone comfortable?” He didn’t wait for a response. “Excellent.” He flashed a beaming smile of what looked like hundreds of teeth. “I am so
stoked.”

The e.c. whirred to life. I took one last look at our house, at the light blue shutters I’d helped Dad paint last summer, at the unshrunken grass. And then we were off.

It didn’t take
very long to drive to the Project. That was why Mom and Dad had bought our house in the first place. It was close to their work and they could get there quickly in case of an emergency. Mom’s a mission coordinator and Dad’s a mission doctor. And when bad things started happening with the first Mars mission, it was lucky they lived so close. They practically took sleeping bags to the office. Those times really stunk.

My mind snapped back in gear as the electri-car slowed. All our seat belts popped off at the same time. The doors slid open and we stepped out in front of the Project. Mr. Shugabert got our boxes from the trunk. Mom and Dad and Nita hugged and Mom said they’d be checking in on her during the once-a-week Earth-bound communication each family was allowed. It was
like Nita was going to summer camp. I just glared at her, not really thinking about the fact that it would literally take engineering feats of spaceflight to see her again.

Finally she grabbed me, gave me a big hug, and whispered in my ear, “Watch out for anything strange.” She kissed the top of my head and said in a low voice, “Help me try to find Hubble.”

Then she got back into the electri-car. What was she talking about? How could we find Hubble? We’d already tried. He was gone, along with everyone else who had been on the
Spirit.

Nita sped off.

Mom and Dad walked to the front doors of the Project with their heads high and smiles on their faces. It was like they abandoned their firstborn child every day. Mr. Shugabert led the way, carrying our boxes. The Project’s doors slid open as he scanned his ID badge. I watched Mom and Dad walk into the building and I felt sick to my stomach.

Inside, it was killer. I momentarily forgot my sick feeling as I felt a glimmer of excitement bubble up from my toes. The control room blinked and glittered like a supernova. People ran around with handhelds and shouted into their collartalks. Huge holoboards hung on the far wall. One holoboard showed the shuttle preparing for liftoff.
Another showed SpacePort and the
Sojourner
spacecraft orbiting around the moon.

The last one had a grainy picture on it. It looked like just a blank black screen until you really stared at it. In the middle floated a seething mass. It looked kind of like the vapors you see rising from the road on a hot day. The Fold. Every now and then a shimmer of color shot around the Fold’s edges. As scary as it seemed, it looked awesome. That was our shortcut to Mars, and I still couldn’t believe our ship was going into that thing. It looked like it was just waiting to eat us and then give a yellow burp.

Then the Fold disappeared and was replaced by something huge and pink. What was it?

The picture focused.

A tongue!

The image widened and some teeth closed into a grotesque smile. The brightest blue braces I’d ever seen took up the whole screen. The camera pulled back farther, revealing the grinning face of the palest girl this side of the moon. She turned her face side to side and I could see that she was talking nonstop, but there was no sound. A few minutes later she was gone and the lurching Fold was back up on the screen.

Mr. Shugabert disappeared into an elevator with our boxes, but not without giving me an idiotic grin
first. This guy … it was like he lived his whole life in a chewing gum commercial or something.