Lunar Colony (6 page)

As she pressed the ignition, she said, “Of course, finding me won’t be so easy if the locator device is hidden.”

As Glen passed through the doors to the astronaut living quarters, he breathed a sigh of relief.

Maybe it’s not Earth,
he thought,
but at least I’m back on the ground
. Looking down the long hallway that lay before him, he said aloud, “Okay, Salerno, where are you?”

Glen began walking. He listened carefully for any signs of activity but only heard the echo of his own footsteps. Turning a corner at the end of the corridor, Glen found himself in a large room filled with empty tables, microwave ovens, and refrigerators.

“This must be where the astronauts eat,” he said. “But where did everyone go?”

“They went home.” It was Slayton, coming in through Glen’s headset. “A couple years ago,
this room would have been filled with astronauts grabbing some grub after a long day of research. With the budget cuts, though, they all got sent home. That is, all but Salerno.”

Glen stood in the cafeteria, trying to imagine what it would have been like to see it filled with astronauts. He couldn’t help but think about how lonely it would feel to be the only person living here.

“Mr. Slayton, I don’t see Salerno.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” said the flight director. “She’s a rail, barely took the time to eat anything. Always too busy with her work, she said.”

“Then where do you think she might be?” Glen asked.

“Check the barracks,” Slayton replied. “If you’re lucky, you might catch her taking a nap, though I doubt it. She didn’t sleep much, either.”

Two more halls branched out from the cafeteria. The one to Glen’s right had a sign that read
VEHICLE BAY
. The other, to Glen’s left, pointed the way to the barracks.

Okay,
Glen thought,
I guess this is the way.

Glen walked slowly down the corridor, feeling
very on edge about being in the abandoned facility. If he heard so much as a pin drop, he might have jumped out of his skin. Halfway down the hall, Glen saw a door marked
GYMNASIUM.
He knew that Slayton had told him to check the barracks, but Glen’s curiosity got the better of him.

“I wonder what’s in here,” he said as he opened the door. Entering, he found an enormous room filled with basketball hoops, trampolines, climbing ropes, and other equipment. It was a lot like the gym at his middle school back on Earth, but so much better.

“Look at this place!” he exclaimed. “No wonder Salerno doesn’t want to come home.” Glen picked up a basketball from the floor and shot a few baskets. Since he was still wearing his space suit, it didn’t take long to work up a sweat.

Glen spotted something on the wall, which he assumed was a thermostat.
It’s getting a little hot in here,
he thought.
I’d better turn the temperature down.
Flipping the switch to the left, Glen immediately felt his feet leave the floor.

“Whoa!” Glen shouted, surprised to find himself floating in the air. “What the heck is this thing?” He swam through the air until he hovered near the wall device. Looking at it more closely this time, he saw that it said
GRAVITRON.
“Cool! This thing must control the room’s gravity.”

Glen kicked away from the wall and flew toward the basketball hoop on the far side of the gymnasium. Jamming the ball into the basket, he shouted, “Slam dunk! Two points for Glen Johns!” He pushed off the rim, somersaulting through the air. “This is so cool!”

For several minutes he played, feeling freer and having more fun than he had in a very long time. In fact, he was experiencing the type of joy he hadn’t felt since he was a—

“Kid!” shouted Slayton. “You’ve got a job to do. Now, enough fooling around like you’re on the playground, and find that missing astronaut!”

“Yes, sir,” said Glen. He floated back to the Gravitron and reset it to normal gravity. As Glen’s feet touched the ground, he felt a little silly for playing around like a child. He hadn’t exactly acted like a thirteen-year-old who had an important job to do. Still, as he left the gymnasium, he couldn’t help but wish he’d had just a little more time to play.

Glen shut the gym’s door behind him and continued down the hall until he reached the barracks.

“Hello? Commander Salerno? Is anyone here?” Glen asked. Hearing no reply, he walked past row after row of empty bunk beds. With the departure of the astronauts, they had all been stripped of their linens. Glen spotted one, however, that still had a pillow and blankets.

So, this must be where Salerno sleeps,
Glen thought. The bed was not made but, instead, was covered by a heap of blankets. “I guess if no one was around to tell me to make my bed, I wouldn’t bother with it either,” Glen said, turning away. Then he noticed something—the corner of an object sticking out from beneath the pillow. Pulling it out, Glen saw that it was a notebook. He flipped
through the pages but couldn’t figure out what most of the drawings and scribblings meant. Most puzzling was the question scrawled over and over throughout the book:
Where is Number Four?

“I don’t know what any of this means or what Number Four is, but I’ll bet this notebook will come in handy,” Glen said as he stuck it into the pocket of his spacesuit.

Near Salerno’s bunk was something else of interest, a workstation covered in papers and empty cans of Astrofizz cola.

“Sheesh, what a mess,” Glen said. “Not making your bed is one thing, but living like a pig is another.” Among the hundreds of papers that littered the desk were more drawings, maps, and calculations. The same question—
Where is Number Four?
—was written on many of these papers and even scratched into the desk.

Hmm . . . ,
Glen thought,
Salerno seems obsessed with finding this Number Four. But what is it?
As he pondered this question, he ran his fingers up and down one of the many stacks of papers and accidentally caused it to topple over. The papers
fluttered to the ground, revealing a computer monitor.

“Hello, what’s this?” Glen said as he saw what was on the screen. It was an e-mail, the one Salerno had read before fleeing the living quarters. Glen read through it carefully, especially the mention of “little green men,” hoping it would give him a clue to where she might have gone. When he was done, he closed his eyes and thought deeply, trying to put the pieces of the mystery together.

“Okay, so Salerno is so obsessed with finding this Number Four thing that she disobeys McNabb, the space program director, who’s telling her to shut this place down and go home. He gets mad and says he’s sending someone to come get her. I guess that would be me.” Glen laughed. Before coming to the moon, the most responsibility he’d ever had was taking care of his neighbor’s dog for a weekend, yet here he was now, astronaut-hunting. “So, she knew someone was coming, which explains why she ditched this place. But what’s this about ‘little green men’? That means aliens, right?”

Glen frowned. Did Salerno actually believe in aliens? And did she really think that finding Number Four would lead her to them? It all just seemed so crazy. Maybe, though, that’s what happens when you live on the moon by yourself for a long enough time. Eventually you start to believe in things that aren’t possible. But, then again, she had so many notes, so many maps and drawings. It was obvious she’d done a lot of research.
Could
it be possible that she was onto something?

Glen tried to shake this thought from his head, fearing that he was already starting to lose his own marbles. But he did have to wonder just what kind of person he was dealing with.

“Well, one thing’s for certain,” Glen said, getting up to leave the barracks. “Salerno’s not here in the living quarters, which means she could be anywhere on the moon.” Remembering a sign he’d seen earlier, he said, “Luckily, I think I know where I can find a car.”

Glen opened the door to the vehicle bay, hoping he’d find something he could drive on the moon’s surface.

“If I’m lucky, maybe there’s a jet pack somewhere around here,” he said as he scanned the vehicle bay. The garage wasn’t very orderly. There were tools lying all over the place and heaps of spare parts strewn about. But then Glen saw what he was looking for, a lunar rover.

“It may not be a jet pack, but this should make it a lot easier to find Salerno,” he said, thinking that it was a lot like the dune buggy he and his dad had once driven on the beach. Then, seeing an empty parking spot nearby, he added, “And it looks like I’ll need it to even the odds. Salerno must have one, too!”

Glen tried pulling open the bay door, but
it wouldn’t budge.
Maybe there’s something in the rover that will do the trick,
he thought. Climbing behind the wheel, he looked over the dashboard and found a button marked
DOOR.
“Aha!” he said as he pressed it. But to Glen’s disappointment and frustration, the door didn’t move. Instead, a message appeared on the dashboard console’s screen. It said
D
OOR
A
CCESS
D
ENIED
. S
YSTEM
O
VERRIDE
R
EQUIRED
.

“Darn it!” Glen said as he got out of the rover. He paced the vehicle bay, wondering why everything had to be so difficult. “It’s not enough that I flew a spaceship to the moon? Now I have to figure out how to override the system just to open some dumb door? What does that even mean?”

As he stormed around the garage, he noticed a piece of machinery that didn’t look quite like the others. In fact, it looked more like—

“A robot,” Glen said aloud. He walked closer, thinking that its drooped head made it look like it was sleeping. “I wonder if this thing works,” Glen said. He couldn’t find an
ON
button, and nothing happened when he banged on the robot’s
head. But something caught his attention: a wire hanging from the back of the machine. “Hey,” he said, “it looks like someone unplugged it. I wonder what will happen if I plug it in here—”

As Glen inserted the end of the wire into an empty port, the machine came to life. Its large eyes became illuminated and its head rotated wildly in every direction.

“N
o
, C
OMMANDER
S
ALERNO
!” said the frantic robot. “T
HIS IS AGAINST PROTOCOL
!”

“Hey there,” said Glen, surprised by the robot’s sudden movements. “Just settle down. I’m not Commander Salerno, but I need to know where she is.”

The robot looked at Glen and seemed to come back to reality, like someone who’d just woken up from a bad dream.