Space Case (5 page)

Dad said, “Dash, you're a smart kid. You're very mature and precocious for your age, and we love that about you. But sometimes that brain of yours works a little too hard to see patterns where there might not be any.”

“Dealing with the death of someone close to you is always difficult,” Mom added. “We all have our different mechanisms for confronting a tragedy like this—”

“I'm not making this up!” I snapped, way too loud. Everyone in the mess turned toward us, so I had to lower my voice again. “You didn't hear Dr. Holtz in the bathroom last night. If you had, you'd be just as sure as me that this wasn't an accident.”

My parents recoiled from me. My outburst had caught them by surprise—but I think it convinced them I wasn't merely having problems dealing. “Well, if this
was
a murder,” Dad said, “then you're right, some evidence ought to turn up. But if none does . . .”

“I'll drop it,” I finished.

“There's something else you should know about Dr. Holtz that's important . . . ,” Mom began, but she didn't get to finish. Dr. Timothy Marquez was approaching our table; Mom fell silent so he wouldn't overhear her.

Dr. Marquez is the Moon Base Alpha psychiatrist. NASA is very concerned about our mental health—living in an enclosed space far from earth is a good recipe for going nuts—so we all have mandatory evaluation sessions once a week. Dr. Marquez is the only Moonie who was really famous
before
being selected to come to MBA. He wrote a bestselling self-help book called
Turn That Frown Upside
Down
and appeared on tons of talk shows. Despite this, I've always found him a little weird. He has a lot of nervous tics and is a little too intense for me. He takes his job way too seriously and is always sticking his nose in everyone else's business, like he was doing right then.

“Is everything all right over here?” he asked, obviously having overheard my outburst. He had a cup of coffee and was compulsively stirring it with a spoon. Dr. Marquez rarely ever actually drinks his coffee; he simply stirs it for hours at a time.

“Yes,” Dad said dismissively. “Everything's fine.”

Dr. Marquez made a high-pitched giggle. He sounded like a monkey being tickled. “Oh, I highly doubt that. We have all just experienced a highly traumatic incident. In fact we are
still
experiencing it. So I don't think that everything is fine at all. Not for you. Not for me. Not for any of us.” Dr. Marquez sat on the InflatiCube beside me without being invited. “So tell me, how are all of you
really
holding up?”

His arrival grabbed Violet's attention. “There's no school today!” she shouted over her music. “And I'm having waffles!”

“Oh.” Dr. Marquez never seemed to know how to deal with Violet's effusive happiness. “That's nice.”

“We're doing as well as can be expected,” Mom put in. “How is your family, Timothy?”

“Oh, they've gone through the whole gamut of emotions.” Dr. Marquez picked a chunk of dehydrated fruit out of his teeth and flicked it away. “Shock, disbelief, grief, anger, you name it.” He looked to me. “Roddy's had a tough time himself. He's in the rec room right now. I'm sure he could use a friend to talk to.”

“That's a great idea,” Mom said.

“Is it really?” I asked, not so convinced.

“I think it'd be good for you to talk to someone your own age right now,” Dad said. “Besides, we still have to break the news to your sister, and it might be best if we did that on our own.” He nodded to Violet, who had returned to obliviously devouring waffles and listening to her music.

I nodded understanding and got up. Dr. Marquez didn't. “Perhaps I could be of some assistance with young Violet,” he said to my parents. “It might be nice to have a professional around to help cushion the emotional blow.”

“Thanks, that'd be very helpful,” Mom said, although I wasn't sure if she meant it. When you live in an enclosed space with only twenty-two other people, you can't ever really afford to offend anyone.

I went to the drink station, poured myself a cup of reclaimed water, and headed to the rec room. Although it would have been faster to go past the moon-base gym, I looped around the long way instead. In truth, MBA isn't
that big—it's only about the size of a soccer pitch—so the long way wasn't really all that long. But more important, it took me past the main air lock.

MBA has a simple design. It consists of two octagons, one large and one small. The large octagon is the residential area: The apartments, gym, kitchen, and communal bathrooms line the outer wall, with the control center, greenhouse, and rec room in the center. The small octagon is the science pod, where experiments in biology, chemistry, geology, and astrophysics are conducted. The science pod is attached to the northwest corner of the main building; from above, MBA looks like a large stop sign with a smaller one growing on it like a tumor.

My route first took me between the science pod and the control center. Almost every adult on the base works in one or the other, so on most days they would have been hives of activity. Today both were almost empty. Only Dr. Janke, one of the biologists, was in the science pod, absently fiddling with one of his experiments. He didn't appear to be working so much as trying to distract himself from Dr. Holtz's death.

Nina was the only one in the control center. She was using the ComLink and had her back to me. Mission Control in Houston was on the SlimScreen. A dozen men and women had gathered to talk to her, all with very grave expressions on their faces. I considered trying to eavesdrop, but Nina turned
my way and gave me a hard stare that was basically an order to keep on moving, so that was exactly what I did.

I passed the maintenance room and the operations center for the base robots, crossed through the staging area where all the space suits were stored, and finally came to the air lock. The whole journey had taken twenty-six seconds.

The air lock is one of the rare spots at MBA with a window. Technically there are two windows, as the air lock has two doors: an inner door and an outer door, with a four-foot safety chamber between them. The view through the windows is narrow and obstructed, but then the area outside the air lock isn't much to look at anyhow.

Since there is no atmosphere on the moon, the only thing that ever alters the landscape is us—and humans rarely alter a landscape for the better. What was once a pristine, white blanket of moon dust has now been trampled by a million footprints and flattened by the treads of the moon rovers, which are housed in a garage near MBA. It's like when a fresh, beautiful snowfall gets ruined by boot prints and tire tracks—only instead of eventually melting away, it just stays in that ugly, polluted state forever.

On the ruined lunar surface it was impossible to pick out Dr. Holtz's footprints or pinpoint where he'd collapsed and died. All I knew was, without his space suit on right he couldn't have gone far. There is no oxygen outside. The farthest
I can get holding my breath is about fifty feet. (I've tested this indoors on multiple occasions, just in case of trouble.)

There were still some traces of moon dust on the staging-area floor. At breakfast I'd learned who had recovered Dr. Holtz's body: Daphne Merritt, our base roboticist, and Garth Grisan, who is in charge of maintenance. Normally, for sanitation reasons, there were extreme precautions to prevent tracking moon dust into the base, but it had probably been hard to follow them all when one of the three people coming back inside was dead.

Despite being surrounded by megatons of moon dust, I'd never touched the stuff before.

I'd been out on the lunar surface myself exactly once: when passing from the rocket landing pad to MBA after arriving on the moon. It had taken ten minutes, tops. Because I'm a kid, I'd never been allowed another chance to go outside.

I knelt and dragged my fingers through the dust. It felt like slightly gritty powdered sugar. Moon dust isn't really dust; it's mostly tiny shards of a strange kind of glass formed in the extreme heat of meteor impacts. It smelled faintly of gunpowder, reminding me of fireworks.

“Did you drop something?”

I spun around to find Garth Grisan behind me. Mr. Grisan is in his late fifties, which is older than most of the
people at MBA, but running maintenance for everything on the base requires someone with a lot of knowledge and experience. He seemed nice enough, but he tended to keep to himself. Although I'd been living at the base with him for more than six months, we'd almost never spoken.

“No,” I said. “I was just . . . um . . . There's some moon dust on the floor.”

“Yeah. I'm about to take care of that.” Mr. Grisan held up a small vacuum. “With all the excitement this morning, I haven't had a chance yet.”

I suddenly felt embarrassed. “I wasn't telling you to clean it up,” I said. “I just noticed it and . . . well . . .” I trailed off, not quite sure what else to say.

Mr. Grisan smiled warmly, signaling he hadn't been offended. “It's all right, Dashiell. We're all trying to deal with Dr. Holtz in our own way.”

I nodded agreement, then thought to ask, “You went out and got him?”

Mr. Grisan's smile faded. “Yes. With Daphne.”

“Did anything seem strange about him?”

“Other than him being dead on the surface of the moon? The whole thing seemed strange. Strange and wrong.” Mr. Grisan shuddered at the memory.

“Was he . . . ?” I began, but before I could get another word out, Mr. Grisan cut me off.

“To be honest, I'd prefer to forget all about what it was like. And it's probably better for a kid like you not to know. So if you'll excuse me . . .” Mr. Grisan held up the vacuum again and pointed to the floor.

“Right,” I said. “Sorry.” I turned to leave—and caught sight of Nina in her office. She was glaring at me, apparently annoyed that I was still within range of her.

I took a last glance out the air lock, then hurried off. Behind me I heard the whine of the vacuum as Mr. Grisan sucked up the moon dust.

Like his father had told me, Rodrigo “Roddy” Marquez was in the rec room. This wasn't much of a surprise. Roddy was almost always in the rec room. That's where the best holographic interfaces are.

As usual, Roddy was seated on an InflatiCube, playing a virtual-reality game. His eyes were covered by thick black hologoggles and his hands were sheathed in sensogloves. Either he hadn't heard that Nina had ordered everyone to stay off the ComLink or—more likely—he'd decided to ignore her.

Roddy was my best friend at MBA, although that really didn't mean much: He was the only other kid my age on the moon. Back on earth we probably wouldn't have been friends at all. Roddy is a decent guy, but our interests are completely different. He's what we called a “veeyar” at my
old school, short for “virtual resident”—a kid who spends nearly all his time in the computer-generated world.

I've never spent much time in virtual reality myself. We didn't even have a holographic interface at our house. Meanwhile Roddy logged more than ten hours a day online
before
he came to the moon. For that reason he doesn't hate MBA nearly as much as I do. His life here is almost exactly the same as it was back on earth: He spends as much time as possible jacked in and never goes outdoors.

Roddy was so fixated on his game he had no idea I'd entered the room. He was jerking about wildly, arms extended, his index fingers twitching like worms on a fishhook. That meant he was probably playing a war game, blasting away with virtual guns.

I tapped him on the shoulder. “Hey, Roddy, how are you doing?”

“I'm in the middle of a raid here,” he said curtly. “Jack in if you want to talk.”

I sighed. This is one of the problems with veeyars: They find talking in the virtual world more comfortable than doing it face-to-face. Still, I didn't feel like waiting around for Roddy to finish his game; knowing him, that could have taken days.

There were plenty of hologoggles and sensogloves stored on a rack on the wall. I slipped some on, sat on
the InflatiCube beside Roddy, and jacked in to his interface. With a whoosh the dull gray walls of the rec room vanished, and I suddenly found myself in one of the most startlingly beautiful landscapes I'd ever seen. I was standing in a meadow full of wildflowers by a pristine, blindingly blue lake, with verdant forest on one side and snowcapped mountains on the other. Six separate waterfalls spilled into the lake, each more breathtaking than the last.

Roddy had no doubt combed through thousands of potential earthscapes to find one this stunning—and then selected it to wage a war in. His enemies were some sort of gelatinous pink alien creatures. Although they all had guns, they didn't appear very menacing. Roddy had probably set the game controls to a beginner level, preferring easy victory to stiff competition. The aliens had stubby little flippers instead of hands, which meant they could barely even hold their weapons, let alone fire them. Meanwhile Roddy was blowing them away with ease. Each time he hit one, it burst into a shower of pink goo, like someone had detonated a bowl of strawberry Jell-O.

Roddy had heavily modified his avatar as well. While the actual Roddy is flabby, uncoordinated, and not particularly handsome, virtual Roddy was built like an Olympic decathlete, with movie-star looks and bulging muscles. This
was common for veeyars. Several other avatars were fighting alongside Roddy, representing people back on earth who were also playing. The men all appeared equally Olympian, while all the women looked like professional swimsuit models.

I materialized right in the thick of things, at Roddy's side. Since I'd never bothered to modify my avatar, it looked exactly like me. In real life I'm three inches taller than Roddy. Here I looked like a dwarf beside him. His avatar's biceps were bigger than my head. My gun, some kind of bizarre machine gun–bazooka combo, was half the size that I was. I didn't have a clue how to fire it. But then I didn't have any desire to play pretend war anyhow.