Space Case (28 page)

Meanwhile, around us in the staging area, the Moonies were all going nuts. Lars Sjoberg was his standard jerkwad self, yelling at everyone within earshot about the alarm, as though this were merely another instance of bad service at MBA, like a hotel wake-up call that had come too early. Daphne was devastated by how her precious robot had been used for evil—and severely damaged in the process. Some people, like Chang and Dr. Kim, were trying to make sense of what had happened, while others, like Roddy, were panicking and wanting to know if the alarm meant we had to evacuate the base. Even Dr. Howard was displaying emotion for the first time since he'd arrived. Once Kira returned through the air lock safely, he threw his arms around her and began sobbing. The only people who remained silent were Mr. Grisan, who was figuring out how to shut the alarm
off, and Zan Perfonic, who hung back by the wall, studying everyone carefully and taking everything in.

Eventually, I got the chance to tell my story: how I'd gone out to retrieve Dr. Holtz's phone and been attacked, but the attacker had fled before I could see who it was, and the phone was now a total loss.

Chang took the phone from me and examined it closely. “Maybe not,” he said. “Mind if I try to salvage something?”

I wasn't sure I could trust Chang, but no one else volunteered to help. I glanced at Zan and she nodded that she thought it was okay, so I handed over the evidence. Chang promised to stay within sight and went to work on it at the computer station in the control room.

Meanwhile Nina finally settled on one thing to be angry at: me. “Do you have any idea how much damage your reckless behavior has caused?” she demanded. “Millions of dollars for sure. Maybe billions!”

Mom placed herself between Nina and me, anger flaring in her eyes. “Dashiell's behavior didn't cause any of this! Whoever was controlling that robot did. So why don't you stop chewing him out and try to find whoever just tried to kill him?”

“Because for all I know, your son made the whole thing up!” Nina shot back.

“Oh, right,” I said. “Kira and I decided to play with the
robot arm, destroyed it by accident, and then went outside to fake our own deaths to cover it up.”

“I wouldn't put it past you,” Nina snarled at me.

“Oh, for heaven's sake!” Dr. Howard yelled. “Give it a rest, Nina!”

His words caught everyone by surprise, because few of us had even heard Dr. Howard speak, let alone raise his voice. Every last Moonie stopped what they were doing and turned his way.

He was standing beside Kira now, still clutching her tightly, glaring at Nina. “We all know you're afraid of a scandal here, but there is now irrefutable evidence that there is a killer on the loose at this base! So stop pretending that Dr. Holtz's death might have been an accident and face the facts!”

It turns out, the second best way to cause chaos on a moon base is to reveal that one of the residents is a killer.

Everyone who had finally calmed down now went nuts again. Moonies ran off to lock themselves in their rooms, or demanded Nina explain why she'd covered up the crime, or pointed accusing fingers at who they thought had done it.

“I'll bet it was Lars!” Roddy announced, and half the other Moonies quickly agreed with him.

“This is an outrage!” Lars shouted. “I am sick and tired of being treated like a common criminal!”

“This sounds like a job for
Squirrel Force 
!” Violet announced.

“Silence!” Nina roared. And when everyone kept talking, she added, “The next person I hear a peep out of gets thrown out the air lock!”

Everyone shut up.

“I have never covered anything up about Dr. Holtz's death,” Nina informed us. “Until now, all evidence has indicated that he died due to reckless behavior and personal error. And as of this moment there is still no evidence that indicates otherwise. However, the Gibsons and Dr. Howard are correct. Someone on this base has caused some serious damage to our robotic arm and some of our facilities, most likely while Dashiell and Kira were on the lunar surface. Now, I intend to find whoever did this—and if their motives were, in fact, to bring harm to Dashiell and Kira, then I will see to it that they are prosecuted for what they have done. However, until that point, we are going to have order on this base! There will not be a witch hunt! So, for everyone's safety, I'm sending you all back to your rooms right now until further notice.”

“You mean you're grounding us all?” Lars asked indignantly.

“I'm
ordering
you,” Nina growled. “As is my right as base commander, per the bylaws of Moon Base Alpha, section seventy-eight, subheading A. Anyone who sees fit to violate
that order will be locked in the medical bay with Dr. Holtz's corpse and held there until I see fit. Is that understood?”

Everyone nodded obediently and started back to their rooms.

As my parents reluctantly turned away, Chang whispered from the control room, “Not so fast.”

He'd only wanted my family, the Howards, and Nina to hear. We all looked that way.

“I found something,” he said. “It's not much, and it's in bad shape, but I'm guessing it's what Dr. Holtz wanted us to see.”

Mom called to Dr. Brahmaputra-Marquez, “Ilina, can you take Violet back to your room for a bit?”

“Sure,” she replied.

“Are we having a slumber party?” Violet asked, thrilled.

“Just for a little bit.” Mom kissed Violet on the head and handed her off. Then she and Dad led me toward the control room. The Howards fell in beside us.

“Hold on now,” Nina said. “I'm okay with the parents, but I don't think Dashiell and Kira need to be a part of this.”

“I think they became a part of this when they nearly died getting the phone,” Dad told her. “And frankly, I'm not about to let them out of my sight again with a killer on the loose. So why don't you just remove that stick from your rear end and let them see what they found?”

Nina steamed, but she didn't say another word.

As we filed into the control room, I caught sight of Zan, hanging back behind the other Moonies as they headed to their residences. She gave me a reassuring wink and, behind everyone's back, followed us to the control room. No one noticed her as she stopped outside the door, watching the proceedings inside.

Instead everyone was focused on Chang and the computer. He'd jury-rigged some wires to connect the phone to it.

“This phone is trashed,” he told us. “We're talking terminally ill. The ports are wrecked, the wireless is blown, and most of the files bit it out there on the moon. However, between the computer and me we've managed to salvage something. Given our time constraints, with there possibly being a killer on the loose and all, I only focused on the most recent items stored, figuring those would be the most relevant. Turns out, Holtz recorded a video only thirty minutes before he went out the air lock.”

A murmur of excitement rippled through the room.

“Well?” Nina demanded. “Show it to us.”

“I'm about to,” Chang told her. “But it's pretty corrupted. I tried to clean it up as much as possible, but it's still in lousy shape. Or at least the bit I've seen was. I didn't want to watch it all without you.”

“Duly noted,” Nina said. “Now run it.”

“All right,” Chang sighed. “You've been warned. Computer, play the footage.”

“It would be my pleasure,” the base computer replied.

A video sprang to life on the monitor before us. Only it didn't look much like a video at all. It looked like a great sea of static with an occasional image flashing for a split second. Not that any of the images seemed to matter. The few we could see were blurry or partially blocked, as though Dr. Holtz might have had the phone hidden somewhere—or perhaps cupped in the palm of his hand.

“I can't make out any of this,” Nina griped.

“Doesn't matter,” Chang told her. “What's important is the audio. I think Dr. Holtz only wanted us to hear this, not see it.”

“Well, the audio's garbage too,” Nina muttered.

She was right. What we could hear pitched back and forth between garbled speech and a loud static buzz that sounded like a nest of giant hornets.

“Give it a moment,” Chang told her. “It gets clearer.”

No sooner had he said this than the audio improved. Slightly. The voices were still terribly distorted, so it was impossible to recognize the speakers, but at least we could finally understand them.

It began in midsentence. We'd missed the beginning of the conversation.

“. . . thought I might be seeing you this morning,” someone said.

“That's Dr. Holtz,” Chang told us.

“Oh?” the other person asked. “And why's that?” Their distorted voice was several octaves too low. It made me think of what a rock might sound like if it were trying to speak.

“Who is that?” Mom asked.

Chang could only shrug in response.

“You might have fooled everyone else,” Dr. Holtz said on the video, “but not me. I figured out what you were really here for shortly after we all got to the moon.”

“And what might that be?” the other person asked coyly. With the distortion I couldn't even tell if it was a man or a woman.

“To keep an eye on us all,” Dr. Holtz said. “Not for NASA, though I suspect they were forced to give their approval. My money's on the military.”

The other person laughed mockingly. “Dr. Holtz, I think you're being a bit paranoid.”

“Really? You've obviously been watching
me
. Why else would you be talking to me at five o'clock this morning?”

There was a brief pause. Then the other person said, “Touché.”

“So what's the purpose of this visit?” Dr. Holtz asked.

“It seems you've discovered something important.”

“Yes. Did you eavesdrop on my conversation in the bathroom this morning?”

The other person ignored the question. “What is it that's so amazing?”

Dr. Holtz hesitated for a moment, unsure whether to answer, but then his enthusiasm got the better of him. Even with his voice distorted, I could tell how excited he was. The news he'd been keeping inside just burst out.

“I've identified an alien life form,” he said.

I gasped in astonishment. Practically everyone else in the control room did too. My parents' faces lit up with excitement.

Even the other person on the tape seemed caught by surprise. It was quite a while before they spoke again. “Confirmed?”

“Of course,” Dr. Holtz replied. “Many times over. The evidence is concrete.”

“Are we talking about microscopic life here? Unicellular? Some kind of bacteria or something?”

“No.” Dr. Holtz's voice brimmed with excitement. “A complex life form. An
intelligent
life form. In fact, a life form far more intelligent than we are!”

Another wave of elation rippled through the control room. I was almost as amped on adrenaline from Dr. Holtz's news as I had been while fighting for my life.

The only person who didn't seem excited was the other person on the video. Their voice barely modulated, as though Dr. Holtz had just told them something routine, such as “I like bagels.”

“How many of these extremely intelligent life forms have you encountered?” they asked.

“Only one.”

“And have they made contact with any humans besides you?”

“Not that I'm aware of.”

“Why you?”

“I don't know,” Dr. Holtz said.

There was another pause. “I think you do,” said the other person. “Don't lie to me, Ronald. This is extremely important.”

“I know it's extremely important!” Dr. Holtz exclaimed. “It might be the most important event in all human history! Actual contact with intelligent life from another planet!”

“What other planet?”

Dr. Holtz didn't answer right away. Something about his visitor seemed to have put him on guard. “You'll find out soon enough, when everyone else does. I'm going to announce my findings to the base—and to NASA—this morning.”

“No,” the other person said menacingly. “You won't.”

Beside me Kira shivered. Her eyes were wide with fear.

Dr. Holtz was taken aback too. “What are you talking about?”

“Your announcement isn't going to happen. The people of the world aren't prepared for something like this.”

“Of course they are!” Dr. Holtz's voice sounded different now. I couldn't tell if he was angry or worried, though I would have bet on worried. “People have been hoping for a moment like this as long as there have been people!”

“No. They've been dreading it. Humans have never been prepared to meet the unfamiliar. Throughout our history, every time two cultures have encountered each other, it has resulted in war rather than peace. That's the root of all human conflict, thousands of years of bloodshed: us versus them. And that's just when people meet other people: people who are exactly like they are, save for the color of their skin or the language they speak or the god they worship. Can you imagine what would happen if humans learned that there really are other intelligent life forms out there? Ones who are smarter than us? Who know how to come to earth? There'd be a worldwide panic.”

“I don't think that's true at all,” Dr. Holtz replied. “I think the people of earth will be thrilled to hear the news.”

“That's not a risk I'm willing to take,” the other voice told him. With the distortion it sounded extremely ominous.

“Well, it's not your decision,” Dr. Holtz said defiantly.
“It's mine. I'm revealing that I've made contact today—and there's nothing you can do to stop me.”

“Oh, there is, Dr. Holtz,” the other person said. “Believe me, there is. I have a lot of people at my disposal down on earth. And at this very moment a team of them is positioned outside your daughter's home.”