Spaced Out Read online

  “I don’t think you’re ready to see me as I really exist. For the time being, it’s much better if I appear to you in human form.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s far easier for you to relate to something that appears similar to you than something that appears alien.”

  “You don’t know that for sure.”

  “It seems logical to assume as much.”

  “Now you sound like Mr. Spock.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind.” If Zan had an issue with Wookiees looking too human, she’d probably flip out when she learned about Vulcans.

  “I sense frustration in you,” Zan said.

  “Yes.” There was no point in denying it. One of the side effects of Zan communicating directly with my mind was that she could read my emotions as well as I could. Better, sometimes.

  “Why?”

  “When you first approached me about being your human contact, you said it was extremely important,” I reminded Zan. “More important than I could possibly understand. But you haven’t told me why yet. You haven’t told me anything. Not one thing about you or your family or your planet. While I’ve told you plenty. I’ve answered all your questions, and you’ve had a million of them.”

  “Dashiell, when we began this relationship, I warned you it wouldn’t be easy. . . .”

  “You can’t tell me what we’re doing here? Or why our contact is so important?”

  “Certainly you must realize how significant contact is between humans and an alien species for the first time.”

  “Yes, but there’s more to it than that, isn’t there? What’s so important about it that I couldn’t possibly understand?”

  “If I told you, you wouldn’t understand it.”

  “See?” I snapped. “Answers like that are why I’m frustrated! Can’t you at least try to tell me?”

  “I don’t have authorization for that yet.”

  “Is the earth in some kind of danger?” I asked.

  Zan didn’t answer. But something changed in her. I couldn’t tell what, exactly; it was almost as though her image had distorted for a fraction of a second. I got the idea that I’d caught her by surprise.

  “I’m right, aren’t I?” I demanded. “The earth is in danger.”

  “No,” Zan told me. “It’s not that dire.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not,” Zan said, but I had the distinct feeling that she was. Or at least hiding something from me.

  “What is going on here?” I asked.

  Before Zan could respond, voices echoed in the hall outside the rec room. Someone was coming our way.

  I suddenly realized that, in my frustration, I’d forgotten to not speak out loud to Zan.

  I always tried to keep all our conversations inside my head, but that took a great deal of focus and concentration. When Zan appeared to me, it didn’t feel like she was only an image being projected into my mind. She seemed as real as any person on the base, and over my twelve years of life, I’d learned that when you speak to someone, you use your mouth, not just your brain. It was a tough habit to break. Often, I thought I was keeping quiet, only to realize in midsentence that I wasn’t.

  Zan’s eyes flicked toward the door. “We can’t discuss this now. I have to go.”

  “No,” I said. “Wait. . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” Zan told me, then vanished.

  A second later, Patton and Lily Sjoberg stormed into the room. Patton and Lily were the biggest bullies at Moon Base Alpha. They were twins, aged sixteen, and at that moment, they were very angry and obviously looking for trouble.

  Unfortunately, they’d found me instead.

  Excerpt from The Official Residents’ Guide to Moon Base Alpha, “Appendix A: Potential Health and Safety Hazards,” © 2040 by National Aeronautics and Space Administration:

  YOUR FELLOW LUNARNAUTS

  Sadly, the most likely cause of pain or injury at MBA is one our engineers can do nothing about: your fellow humans. Statistically, you are much more likely to get hurt by another person than by any equipment malfunction or random disaster. While all lunarnauts were selected in part for their amiability, agreeability, and skill at getting along with others, living with other humans in an enclosed space over an extended period of time has the potential to lead to disagreements, arguments, and even physical violence. Therefore, all lunarnauts are encouraged to work extra hard at resolving interpersonal conflicts—should they arise—as calmly and peacefully as possible. For help with any conflicts that cannot be resolved in this way, lunarnauts are advised to seek the aid of the moon-base commander for mediation. The base psychiatrist is also available for aid in these matters.

  It is in everyone’s interest to not allow disagreements to escalate to the point of violence, as not only you and your opponent could be injured, but innocent bystanders as well. So please, do your best to be good citizens at MBA and try to get along with everyone. It won’t merely be good for your physical health—it will do wonders for your mental health as well!

  SELF-DEFENSE WITH PLUMBING

  Lunar day 216

  Too late to get help

  There were a lot of things I didn’t like about living on the moon, but the Sjobergs were the worst by far. And to be more horrible than a space toilet is really saying something. Patton and Lily had come to Moon Base Alpha with their parents, Lars and Sonja, as the first lunar tourists. The whole family was filthy rich and staggeringly mean. They had forked out more than half a billion dollars to visit MBA, and when the whole experience turned out to be far below their expectations, they had taken out their anger on everyone else. They were desperate to go back to earth—and we were all desperate for them to go back as well—but it wasn’t that easy. Travel to and from the moon was locked into an inflexible schedule, and the Sjobergs didn’t have seats assigned on a rocket for another three months—if everything went smoothly. Which it probably wouldn’t. Rockets to the moon got delayed all the time; even someone as rich and powerful as Lars Sjoberg couldn’t control that. In the meantime, the Sjobergs were doing their best to make everyone else miserable. Only Cesar Marquez, a Moonie teenager who Lily had a crush on, escaped their wrath. For everyone else, any encounter with them was toxic.

  On that night, Patton and Lily seemed to be in a worse mood than usual. Something had really ticked them off.

  “Who were you just talking to?” Patton demanded.

  “No one,” I said.

  “Don’t lie to us,” Lily snarled. “We heard you, you little jerk.”

  The Sjobergs were practically the first purely Caucasian family I’d ever met in my life; back on earth—and at MBA—almost everyone was a blend of ethnicities. I’d heard there were people who actually thought the Sjobergs were quite attractive, and that Lily was particularly exotic and beautiful, with her long blond hair and her fair white complexion. I always found her hideous, though. Maybe because I couldn’t help but see the ugliness beneath her skin.

  “I meant I wasn’t talking to anyone here,” I corrected quickly. “I was on a ComLink with my friend Riley back on earth.”

  “No, you weren’t, turdface.” Patton moved toward me menacingly. He was a big kid who spent most of his time at MBA in the gym making his muscles even bigger. “You were talking to Roddy, weren’t you?”

  That would have been Rodrigo Marquez, Cesar’s younger brother and the only other boy on the moon my age. Since Lily liked Cesar and Cesar didn’t like Roddy, Roddy had become Patton and Lily’s favorite target at Moon Base Alpha. Often it was unwarranted, but sometimes Roddy actually did things to deserve it. He could be such an obnoxious know-it-all that there were times when I wanted to punch him.

  “I haven’t seen Roddy tonight,” I told them.

  “We saw him come this way,” Lily said. She stayed by her brother’s side as they moved in on me, blocking my escape route.

  “That doesn’t mean he came in here,” I pointed out.

  “Where else
could he have gone?” Lily demanded.

  “His residence,” I suggested. “Or the gym. Or the medical bay . . .”

  “I’m gonna send you to the medical bay if you don’t tell me the truth,” Patton snarled. “Where’s Roddy? What were you two talking about?”

  “Nothing!” I exclaimed. “Why are you so upset with Roddy?”

  “Just tell us where he is!” Patton lunged across the room, apparently ready to pound the answer out of me.

  I was ready for him, though. With Patton, I was always ready for a sneak attack. I ducked under his arm and scrambled for the door.

  Patton and Lily both roared with rage and came after me.

  I tried to get away from them quickly, but that was hard to do on the moon. The gravity here is only one-sixth of earth’s, so you can’t run. Instead you just bob along slowly. Each step launches you as high as if you’ve bounced on a trampoline. Luckily, Patton and Lily had the same issues and couldn’t go any faster than I did.

  It wasn’t like there were many places to run to anyhow. Moon Base Alpha isn’t very big. The rec room sits in the center of it, along with the greenhouse and the control rooms, looped by a single circular hallway. On the exterior walls are the gymnasium, mess hall, bathrooms, science pod, air lock, medical bay, and two floors of residences. That’s it.

  I bounded out of the rec room into the hall facing the residences, hoping to find some adults who could tell Patton and Lily to back off. The hall was two stories tall, with only a metal catwalk to access the upper residences, so I could see every door. Unfortunately, all of them were closed; there wasn’t an adult anywhere. Quite possibly, everyone else was already asleep. So I veered toward the science pod. If any Moonies were up late, they’d be there, working.

  Patton and Lily stayed on my heels. We raced through the air-lock staging area, then past the control rooms. Just as I reached the science pod, Patton body-slammed me.

  On earth, we would have thudded to the ground. On the moon, we flew. Patton’s force sent both of us sailing into the men’s bathroom door, which sprang open, and we crashed onto the floor inside. We might have tumbled all the way to the far wall if we hadn’t slammed into the first toilet stall, which halted our progress quickly and painfully. Patton ended up on top of me. He pressed his arm against my neck, choking me, fury in his eyes. “Tell me what you and Roddy saw,” he growled.

  By this point, I was quite sure that telling the truth wasn’t going to work out for me. Patton was obviously looking for an excuse to hurt someone, and I wasn’t about to give it to him. However, fighting wasn’t an option either. Patton was much stronger than me and he already had the upper hand. So I did the only other thing I could think of.

  Except for the toilets themselves, the toilet stalls at Moon Base Alpha look exactly like ones you’d see in any public bathroom on earth; the walls don’t go all the way to the floor, which meant that my head was disturbingly close to the toilet. Lunar toilets are horrible things. Since we have very little water, they don’t flush. Instead they’re more like vacuum cleaners for your private parts, designed to suck every last bit of poop and pee away from you. The poop goes into the composter, while our urine heads right into the purifying tank, after which it’s recycled into the water supply. (Yet another ordeal of space travel that doesn’t occur in Star Wars.) The men’s toilets all have a suction hose for pee attached, with a wide, clear funnel at one end for you to do your business in. NASA’s official name for it was “Splashproof Urine Receptacle,” but we all called it “the Urinator.”

  The Urinator was dangling only a few inches away from me. I snaked it under the stall wall, slammed it into Patton’s face, and turned the suction on.

  Patton’s head was wide and fleshy enough to make a perfect seal for the funnel, which promptly locked onto his face. Through the clear plastic, I could see his eyes go wide in terror. Air was flowing in the Urinator, so Patton wasn’t going to suffocate—but having the receptacle for everyone’s pee clamped over his mouth seemed terrifying enough for him. He released his grip on me and tried desperately to yank the Urinator off, but it held fast. He tried to scream for help, but his lips got sucked toward the urine hose and flapped wildly, preventing him from making any noise but guttural squeals.

  Unfortunately, I was still pinned beneath him. Patton was sitting on my chest as he writhed around with the Urinator.

  Lily burst into the bathroom and gasped in horror at the sight of her brother. Then she glared at me. “What are you doing to him?”

  “It’s self-defense!” I argued.

  “You get that thing off him right now!” Lily screamed. “Get it off or I will kill you!” She started toward me, her fingernails extended like claws.

  “Stop right there!” I warned, smashing the Urinator funnel further into Patton’s face. “Or I’ll suck his face right off!”

  It was a bluff. The Urinator didn’t have nearly enough power to remove Patton’s face, but I was pretty sure Patton and Lily didn’t know that. Patton and Lily didn’t know much, period.

  Lily froze in her tracks, while Patton gave a blubbery yelp of fear. He waved desperately at Lily, signaling her to back off.

  “Okay,” she told me, worried. “I’m not going to hurt you. Leave his face where it is.”

  “I won’t suck it off unless you make me.” I wriggled out from under Patton and stood, keeping the Urinator pressed firmly against his face the whole time. Patton stayed on his knees, staring at me fearfully with his bugged-out eyes, afraid to move.

  “Let’s get a few things straight,” I said. “I didn’t start this. You did. I was minding my own business in the rec room when you showed up. I don’t know what Roddy did to get you so worked up, but I had nothing to do with it and I haven’t even seen him since dinner.”

  “We thought we heard you talking to him,” Lily said weakly.

  “Well, I wasn’t. And if you two had listened to me instead of attacking me, then Patton wouldn’t be French-kissing the Urinator right now. Understand?”

  Lily nodded. So did Patton.

  I looked Patton in the eye through the plastic funnel. “So do I have your word you won’t try to beat me up if I turn this off?”

  Patton nodded again.

  “I don’t mean just right now,” I added. “I mean you won’t try to beat me up tomorrow, too—and the next day and the next and so on. You’re not going to retaliate for this, right?”

  Patton hesitated a moment before answering.

  I shoved the Urinator into his face a little harder. His lips flapped like willow branches in a hurricane. “Give me your word, Patton.”

  Patton nodded once more, desperation in his googly eyes.

  “Okay,” I said, then turned off the Urinator and popped the funnel off Patton’s face.

  I was ready to run. I figured there was a decent chance Patton would immediately go back on his word and try to cream me. Instead he was so disgusted from having his face in the Urinator, he ran screaming for the shower. To conserve water, we were only supposed to shower once a week, if that, but Patton completely ignored the rules. He also didn’t bother to take his clothes off. He just ran in, cranked on the water (which was really only a trickle, given how precious a resource it was), and scoured his face with it. Lily forgot about me too for the moment. She hovered around the shower, asking Patton, “Are you all right? You didn’t swallow any pee, did you?”

  While they were distracted, I quickly headed for home. I was quite sure the Sjoberg twins weren’t done with me, but for the time being, I’d be safe in my family’s residence.

  And besides, given my conversation with Zan about the fate of the earth, I had bigger things to worry about than the Sjobergs.

  Excerpt from The Official Residents’ Guide to Moon Base Alpha, “Appendix A: Potential Health and Safety Hazards,” © 2040 by National Aeronautics and Space Administration

  TOILETS

  The toilets at Moon Base Alpha are not like the ones you are used to on earth. To coun
teract the lack of water and minimal gravity, the space toilets use suction instead. Please exercise extreme caution around the suction hoses and vacuum bowl, as they can cause harm to any body parts caught in them accidentally. In addition, do not dispose of any garbage down the toilets other than human waste, as this could cause blockages that could then lead to burst pipes, ruptured tubes, or even explosions of fecal matter—which are not only dangerous, but unsanitary as well.

  THE SPACE TOILET INCIDENT INVESTIGATION

  Lunar day 216

  Well after bedtime

  Given where our conversation had left off, I was desperate to get back in touch with Zan and find out what danger lay in store for the earth. But I had no way to contact her. Zan only appeared to me when she wanted to and that was that. There was nothing I could do but wait for her to show up again.

  In the meantime, the Sjobergs reported me to the moon-base commander.

  That was Nina Stack, who was as tough and straitlaced as any person I’d ever met. Nina had come to NASA from the military and she still acted like she was in it. Behind her back, all the kids called her “Nina the Machina,” because she had the same range of emotions as a kitchen appliance: none.

  She knocked on the door of our residence while my parents and I were getting ready for bed. Violet was already snoring in her sleep pod. We had set our wall-size SlimScreen to project a nighttime view of Hapuna Beach in Hawaii. We were from near there, on the Big Island, and it always made us feel like we were back home, rather than stuck in a tiny outpost on a barren rock floating in space.

  Nina didn’t even say hello when Mom opened the door. That type of normal human interaction was alien to her. Instead she said, “I need to speak to Dashiell in my quarters.”

  I had already informed my parents of everything that had happened that night. Everything that didn’t involve Zan, at least. “Dash should not get in trouble for this,” Mom told Nina. “He was protecting himself from Patton Sjoberg.”