6 FRUITLESS SEARCHING

6 FRUITLESS SEARCHING Lunar day 217 Midmorning On a normal day at MBA, most of the adults worked from breakfast to dinner, and sometimes after that as well. There wasn't much else for them to do. Weekends didn't really exist in space. The scientists would have been at their stations in the science pod, while Nina and Daphne Merritt would have been in their offices. Dr. Marquez conducted his surveys of our mental states—or at least tried to —in the medical bay. Since our doctor was dead and our maintenance man was on trial, we were short both positions. Reinforcements were scheduled to arrive on the next rocket in a month. In the

meantime, Chang "Hi-Tech" Kowalski, our chief geochemist and resident genius, was doing everything he could to keep us healthy and the base functioning. The only adults who didn't work were the Sjobergs, who usually hung out in their suite, doing their best to avoid everyone else. It had been three days since anyone had seen them. We had no idea what they were doing, but we didn't really care; we were happy to not have to deal with them. During the time that I'd been battling Capulets with Roddy, however, things had changed. Instead of working, everyone was now frantically combing Moon Base Alpha for Nina. The place was a hive of activity. Since MBA was only the size of a soccer field, there weren't many places Nina could have been, but they were being searched over and over again anyhow. It was ridiculous, but then, so was the idea that Nina wasn't in the base anymore. "You've checked her quarters?" I asked, as Dad and I walked out of the rec room. "A dozen times and counting." Dad pointed up to Nina's residence. The door was open and Moonies were shuttling in and out. "Her door wasn't locked?" Roddy asked, tailing behind us.

"Er... it was," Dad said. "But Chang kicked it in." Now that he mentioned this, I could see that the doorjamb was splintered where the lock had torn out of it. "We were worried," Dad explained. "She wasn't anywhere else on the base or answering her phone. We thought maybe she'd had a stroke or something and collapsed in her room." We entered the staging area and nearly slammed into Daphne Merritt and Jennifer Kim. Besides Violet, Daphne was the most chipper and effusive person at MBA. Even now, in the midst of crisis, she was upbeat and smiling. Dr. Kim, a seismic geologist, was almost the opposite: reserved and extremely quiet. She actually spoke a normal amount, but always did so in a very meek way, as though she were slightly embarrassed about what she had to say. "We checked the women's room," Daphne reported to Dad. "And?" Dad asked. "She's not in there," Dr. Kim said apologetically, as if this were somehow her fault. "You're sure?" Roddy pressed.

"We both have PhDs," Daphne teased. "We know how to check a bathroom. We're going to give the gym another look." With that, she led Dr. Kim around the corner. Dad sighed, looking even more worried than before. "This just doesn't make sense," he said, more to himself than to me. "If Nina isn't here, could she have left the base?" I asked. "She didn't," Dad told me. "Her space suit is still here." He pointed to the space suit storage area. The door to Nina's locker hung open, revealing her suit, helmet, boots, and gloves, right where they should have been. Given that there was no oxygen on the surface of the moon, she wouldn't have gotten very far outside without them—only a few feet at most. "Maybe she went out anyhow," Roddy said. "You know, like she got space madness and lost her mind and left in her regular clothes and croaked." "I don't think that happened," Dad said, but then told me, "Although your mother and Chang went out to make sure." I glanced toward the air lock. Through the windows, I could see my mother and Chang in their space suits, returning to base. I couldn't tell who was

who, because they had the reflective visors down in their helmets to protect them against the sun's heat. I asked, "If Nina went out the air lock, there'd be a record of it, wouldn't there? There's some sort of electronic log, right?" "Right," Dad agreed. "And there wasn't any record of the air lock opening last night. But Chang thought maybe Nina had the ability to override it." "Why?" I asked. Roddy laughed knowingly. "Don't be such a dork, Dash. NASA has a buttload of secrets, and Nina's their main gatekeeper." Dad narrowed his eyes at Roddy. He looked like he wanted to smack the smile right off Roddy's face for insulting me. I saw Mom and Chang enter the air lock's pressurization chamber and shut the outer door behind them. There was a loud whoosh as the air inside the chamber repressurized from the moon's atmosphere to MBA's. Mom and Chang popped their helmets off, but didn't open the inner air-lock door right away. Before coming into the base, they needed to remove the moon dust from their suits. Moon dust is very different from earth dust. Earth dust is mostly decaying matter. Moon dust is mostly

very tiny shards of glass created in the heat of meteorite impacts—and it sticks to everything. If any got inside the base, it would be extremely difficult to get back out again. Cleaning it off the suits involved two hoses: one that fired air at high pressure to knock the dust off, and a high-powered vacuum to suck it up. It was obvious that Mom and Chang hadn't found Nina: They weren't carrying a dead body and they looked concerned, rather than saddened. But the rest of us gathered around the air lock anyhow. There was an intercom built into the door that we could talk through. Mom flipped it on and reported, "There's no sign of her out there." "Any luck in here?" Chang asked. Normally, he sported a spiky Mohawk, but it had been squashed flat by his space helmet, making it look like a small mammal that had died on his head. "None," Dad replied. Dr. Brahmaputra-Marquez came through the staging area. Somehow, she'd ended up chaperoning all three of the youngest children at MBA. Violet, Inez, and Kamoze were skipping along after her, apparently thinking of Nina's disappearance as a game. "Nina!" they called, as though she were