4 BAD LUTEFISK

4 BAD LUTEFISK Lunar day 252 Still way too early in the morning "Lars wasn't poisoned by accident," Nina said. "Someone tried to kill him." We were in her residence, which also served as her office, facing each other across her desk. Both of us were seated on the InflatiCubes we had to use at MBA instead of chairs. Given the early hour and my exhaustion, I was struggling to sit upright on mine. Meanwhile, Nina sat ramrod straight, everything about her compulsively neat and tidy as usual. All

Moonies had been allowed to bring a few personal items from earth; it spoke volumes about Nina that she had chosen to bring an iron. I stared at her, stunned. Even though I had suspected someone had been trying to murder Lars, I had been really hoping I was wrong. The confirmation that we had a second murderer loose at MBA was extremely unnerving. I was equally surprised that Nina was sharing this information with me. I had been half expecting her to punish me for sneaking out onto the lunar surface, so this caught me completely off guard. I couldn't fathom why she was doing it, but I had other questions to ask first. "How do you know?" I asked. "Your father and Chang pumped Lars's stomach. They found cyanide among the contents of his last meal. Someone poisoned his food." "The cyanide couldn't have gotten in there by accident? Like through some kind of contamination?" Nina shook her head. "The safety of our food at this base is one of NASA's highest priorities. Given that we have no natural source of food on the moon, contamination of our food supply would obviously

be a disaster. So the agency takes extreme steps to make sure that doesn't happen. There is no way that any poison could end up in our food. Not by accident, anyway. And certainly not at the levels that your father and Chang found in Lars's stomach." "Do we have any idea if any of the rest of our food has been poisoned?" I asked, worried. "No," Nina admitted. "However, we have reason to believe that this wasn't a random act. The killer appears to have been targeting Lars specifically." "How?" "The food that was poisoned was lutefisk." "Ah," I said, understanding completely. Lars Sjoberg was the only person at MBA who ate lutefisk. The entire supply of it had been packed for him personally. Lutefisk is a traditional Scandinavian food of dried cod treated with lye for several days until it turns gelatinous. It was one of the most disgusting things I had ever tasted in my life. In the defense of the Scandinavians, let me say that I had never tasted lutefisk back on earth. Although the mere idea of jellied fish made my skin crawl, there was a chance that some people could

actually make a tasty version of it. However, I had only experienced the NASA version. I had accidentally tasted a bit from a package of space food that had been mislabeled. I had expected scrambled eggs and ended up with a mouthful of lutefisk instead. It was so vile, I nearly had to get up close and personal with the space toilet afterward. As Nina said, NASA had to go through a lot of trouble to make sure our space food would last for a long time without going bad. It was dehydrated, irradiated, thermostabilized, and ultimately reduced to cubes and pastes that bore little resemblance to actual food anymore. Even things as delicious as pizza, hamburgers, and cupcakes often wound up tasting like cardboard by the time the food engineers got through with them. Thus, lutefisk— which was probably an acquired taste on earth to begin with—ended up as a horrifying rancid sludge. It was disgusting on every level. It looked like pus, smelled like sewage, felt like a live snail on your tongue, and tasted even worse. I wasn't the only one who had a problem with it. Everyone else at MBA did as well. Even the other Sjobergs, who willingly consumed lutefisk back on earth, found the NASA version nauseating. Chang

Kowalski said it tasted like "punishment for everything you've ever done wrong in your entire life." Lars Sjoberg actually liked it. Since Lars had paid nearly a billion dollars to come to MBA as a tourist, he was allowed a few perks. One of them was that NASA would stock a few of his favorite foods. Lars loved lutefisk, so the food engineers took a crack at it—and failed miserably. Even they admitted it was disgusting, and these were the people who actually considered the chicken liver pâté they'd created to be "suitable for human consumption." (We Moonies didn't eat the pâté, although we had been using it as caulk.) The engineers had planned to incinerate the entire batch of lutefisk, but somehow Lars got ahold of it, tried some, and declared it the best thing that NASA had produced so far. NASA was shocked, but agreed to ship the vile substance up to the moon for Lars's enjoyment. Throughout the Sjobergs" time at MBA, we had all been waiting for Lars to come to his senses and realize that the space lutefisk was vomitous, but if anything, his fondness for it grew. He claimed it reminded him of his childhood. (To which my

father responded that Lars must have had the worst childhood imaginable.) Therefore, if someone wanted to poison Lars, the lutefisk was a good way to do it. Since no one else ate it, there was little chance of poisoning the wrong person by mistake. "Do you know how the killer got the poison into the food?" I asked. "Not exactly," Nina replied, "But it wouldn't have been difficult. They could have simply injected some into the package with a syringe. A hole that small would have been easy to seal up. Sticking the descriptive label over it would have done the job." That made perfect sense. All our food was sealed in metallic foil packets, and thus it all looked exactly the same. So each packet had an adhesive label to describe what was inside. "Why do we even have cyanide on the base?" I asked. "We don't," Nina stressed. "At least, we're not supposed to. Cyanide has certain industrial uses, but NASA was concerned enough about its lethality that they made sure no products at MBA contain it—or any other toxins." "You mean, they were worried that someone