Space Case: Chapters 11–15

“What are you writing?” I asked, trying to change the subject.
It worked. “A eulogy for Dr. Holtz,” Mom said. “Nina wants to have a ceremony for him tomorrow, and she asked me to speak.”

“He was distracted a lot. Kind of spaced out. And then he’d be manic. Incredibly happy. Unnaturally so.”

“It’s possible,” Mom replied, “if he was really suffering from some sort of mental breakdown. There’s a lot of precedent with this. A scientist believes they’re on the verge of something huge: figuring out some famous unsolved math problem, or developing a new physical theory. They fill up notebooks with ideas and formulas and it all looks very convincing. But when other scientists come in and look everything over...they find it’s all just nonsense.”

I considered telling my parents about the footage I’d seen of Dr. Holtz in the air lock—and the cryptic message he’d left. I was tired of keeping it all a secret.

If this were a military base on earth, the government would probably send a whole team of people in to find out exactly what happened. But that’s just not feasible here.

Could his euphoria that night in the bathroom have been the result of mental illness?

“Dash, there’s an extremely good chance that Dr. Holtz died by accident, rather than murder. And there’s an even better chance that this text was sent by a dumb lout like Patton Sjoberg.”

Her forces amassed in Venezuela instantly attacked mine. Salvos of cannon fire blasted my men to virtual bits.

Back on earth I might have balked at the idea of playing games with my parents night after night.

Muscles that would normally be worked by moderate exercise—such as walking, lifting objects, or even simply sitting upright—may begin to atrophy on the lunar surface from disuse. If this is allowed to continue unchecked, you might return to earth to find your muscles have weakened to the point where you can't even stand up!

Only this time it wasn’t due to the litany of things that normally prevented me from sleeping: claustrophobia, the rancid air mattress, space food making me sick.

In the distance Vernal Falls plunged down a sheer rock face into a cloud of mist.

A new sound arose from the woods to the side: an eerie guttural croak that made me shiver.

It’s a new module I designed for the Head-to-Head.

Now I spun to find three dozen toothbrush-size teeth ready to clamp down on my head, a strand of drool ominously dangling from them.

Holtz wrote a whole report detailing why Marquez was bad at his job. Marquez was livid. And definitely embarrassed. Then when NASA okayed him to come here, he figured that vindicated him.

“Up till yesterday, I thought everyone liked him. And then I started hearing that people didn’t. It’s pretty surprising.” This was an understatement. In truth I found the number of potential killers Dr. Holtz was racking up to be extremely disturbing.

We emerged into a clearing near Yosemite Falls—only we could barely see the cataract because there was a tyrannosaurus standing in front of it.

He stood in the doorway of the gym, scowling, wearing pajamas, slippers, and a fluffy robe emblazoned with an MBA logo.

“They all lied to us, including your precious Dr. Holtz. The man was a quack! A fool who knew nothing except how to shill for NASA.”

He sidestepped deftly.

Sometime between his conversation in the bathroom and the time he went out the air lock. Something important transpired in those two and a half hours.

I sat on an InflatiCube, daunted.

“They said he’d been acting strange lately. And talking to himself. They think he might have gone out the air lock because he was paranoid or schizophrenic or something. They even think his big discovery might not be real, like a figment of his imagination.”

“Dr. Holtz might have seemed a bit erratic lately, but I’m sure your parents are wrong. He wasn’t crazy. I spoke to him very recently and he seemed as sane as could be—”

“He’s very wealthy and powerful. I suppose that back on earth he might be able to keep from being arrested. For instance, he could move to a country where the US couldn’t extradite him. If he’s even guilty. We don’t really have any proof of that.”

Dr. Marquez usually met patients in the medical bay, but Dr. Holtz’s body was still in there, and everyone figured that having a corpse around wasn’t conducive to a good therapy session.

Although MBA is equipped so that all lunarnauts have multiple ways of communicating with one another—e-mail, phone, ComLink, etc.—sometimes the best way to disseminate information is still the good, old-fashioned group meeting.

Dr. Howard was slumped against the wall, unconscious, his tongue lolling out of his open mouth.

It seemed disrespectful to talk during the memorial—but listening to Nina one more minute was going to put me to sleep, and that wasn’t particularly reverent either.

Roddy sauntered back to where Kira and I were standing.

“Hey, there,” he whispered, in what he probably thought was a suave tone.

“So let’s go somewhere else.” Roddy waggled his eyebrows suggestively, completely unaware that Kira was annoyed with him.

Kira wormed away from him and sidled up to me.

Nina's so boring she could lull a Restless Venusian Flugleworm to sleep.