172 Hours on the Moon (20 page)

All she wanted was to sleep. She wanted to sleep and wake up somewhere totally different. Anywhere would be fine with her.
Even if it was the middle of the desert somewhere in Mexico, without food or water, with a psychopathic mass murderer on her
heels. Even if she had to crawl to safety on bloody knees through the wasteland, surrounded by snakes and coyotes. Anything
would be better than sitting shut up in here with no possibilities.

The only thing Caitlin had to look forward to as she sat, half slumped over the desk in the communications room, was that
the pills would let her avoid the worst of the fear.

After Coleman had left the base in his hopeless attempt to find Nadolski and Antoine, she had paced through DARLAH’s corridors
to keep her anxieties at bay. She ended up in the
infirmary without thinking about it, and the large medicine chest with the bloodred cross on it had practically smiled at
her, as if it were trying to say,
It’s just fine; you don’t need to be feeling this way
. She opened it and found everything from penicillin to adrenaline injectors, morphine, Valium, and a bunch of other analgesics
and anesthetics, along with the usual first-aid equipment.

The room she was in was relatively large. The infirmary was part of module four and designed to accommodate several patients
at the same time. In the middle of the room there were four tables, which were meant to serve both as hospital beds and autopsy
tables. The walls were covered with cabinets that followed the almost oval shape of the room. It almost seemed to have been
taken right out of an old sci-fi movie. Where she found herself in the role of scream queen right before the decisive scene.

What was all of this for? All the surgical blades, the microscopes, the plastic lab coats, the rubber boots? The drill, the
hammer, and that awful set of rib shears?

What in the world did NASA think was going to happen to the people it sent up here?

And why were so many of the large cupboards locked, with no keys to be found anywhere?

This base, she decided, held many secrets that she would never find out the answers to. Didn’t want to, really. The answers
would surely terrify her. And now, she just wanted peace.

Caitlin grabbed a box of pills and an ampule of morphine, and clutched them in her hands. She felt guilty immediately.

I’ll lose control if I take these
.

What control? You lost that a long time ago
.

I can’t take this anymore
.

You have to stay awake and alert, Caitlin
.

Awake for what? It’s not like anyone’s going to come rescue us, are they?

You’re responsible for those teenagers!

But I can’t do anything for them. I’m just like them. I want to go home
.

If you take these, you’ll ruin whatever last chance you have of getting back home again
.

What chance? There is no chance, is there? Not anymore
.

Her frantic, quarrelsome thoughts had triggered a raging headache.
That does it
. She put the pills and the ampule in her jacket pocket and returned to the communications room.

Caitlin knew she should look for Mia and Midori, but just the thought of those two kids together somewhere in the base depressed
her. They shouldn’t be here. They should be back on Earth with their friends and families, not here in this godforsaken place.
In a way, though, she was kind of envious of them; they were the same age, and they had each other. And she was totally on
her own, without anyone to lean on.

She went back to module one with heavy footsteps.

Caitlin sat down in the one chair in front of the wall of radio transmitters and communications equipment. The countless small
bulbs and screens that would normally have been lit were all dark and silent. She knew there was no point, but she still couldn’t
help herself and tried switching on all the equipment. And as expected, nothing happened. She collapsed in the chair, hiding
her head in her hands, dejected.

What are you doing here, Caitlin?

She tried running back through her memories to figure out where all this had started.

She had been eighteen that summer, on vacation in Mexico with her boyfriend George, who was six years older than she was.
They had spent the night on the beach, lying awake and staring up at the sky. There wasn’t a cloud to be seen, and the absence
of lights made it possible to see an overwhelming number of stars. Occasionally they saw a shooting star streak over their
heads.

“Make a wish,” George murmured.

“What was that?” Caitlin asked.

“Do you know what shooting stars really are?”

“Meteors.”

George nodded and sat up, propped up on his elbows. “Yes, partially correct. But they’re mostly space debris. You know, space
capsules, satellites, all kinds of shit we’ve sent up there over the ages. There are cameras, pliers, and wrenches orbiting
Earth right now. That’s why it’s hard to send up rockets these days. Because of all that debris.”

“You’re kidding, right? I mean, there’s plenty of room up there if it’s just wrenches and video cameras we’re talking about.”

“Well, that wrench is whipping around at a speed of seventeen thousand miles per hour. That’s almost five miles per second.
And it wouldn’t be so cool if you ran right into that at seventeen thousand miles per hour, would it? And it’s not like there’s
only one of them either. There’re hundreds of things floating around aimlessly, in unknown orbits, so it’s impossible to know
for sure where they are. It’s madness, Caitlin.”

Many years later, after Caitlin had become an astronaut and started working for NASA and was preparing for the moon mission,
she got to see a survey by the European Space Agency, ESA, of all the human-made objects orbiting Earth.

George had been right. There really were
a lot
of them. Too many. But he’d also been wrong. Because the number of satellites and wrenches and whatever it all was wasn’t
in the hundreds. It was in the thousands. There were twenty-two hundred satellites alone, supplying Earth’s inhabitants with
TV signals, GPS navigation, and so forth. And maybe that had been the beginning of her interest in space, which would last
her whole life.

She thought about it often, that conversation they had had that night. If it hadn’t been for that, she might never have become
an astronaut, but something totally different instead. A doctor, maybe. Or an architect.

Suddenly one of the radios crackled. In a flash Caitlin was yanked out of her daydream back to reality.

The radio works!

The radio works!

She sat there frozen, listening to the crackling and the white noise. A small red light on the device had switched itself
on. The receiver had power. She had no idea how that could be, but that wasn’t bothering her right now. The most important
thing was that it was working.
She could contact Earth!

Joy and eagerness made her hands tremble uncontrollably.
Okay, careful now, careful now …

She reached out with her right arm and gently but deliberately turned the search dial. The crackling stopped instantly,
and for a second she was terrified that she’d ruined something. But then, after she turned the dial halfway around, it was
there again, clearer now. There were voices. She heard voices.

Without wasting a second, she grabbed the microphone and set the radio to the emergency frequency.

“Houston, this is DARLAH 2, we have a problem!”

She waited a few seconds for a response, but none came.

She tried again. “Houston, Houston, this is DARLAH 2, we have a problem! We lost power at the base, and
Demeter
is damaged. Houston, do you read? This is Caitlin Hall from DARLAH 2. Hello?”

Nothing.

She switched frequencies and repeated the message to the receiver in Houston. But that one, too, was completely silent. She
feverishly tried all the frequencies and settings. Every once in a while the original crackling would reoccur, sometimes with
indistinct voices in the background, other times just white noise. Giving up, she sank back in the chair. And right then the
voices became totally clear through the noise. It was coming from a news channel. She thought she recognized the broadcaster’s
voice.

“… NASA has been deflecting vehement accusations that the agency isn’t moving quickly enough to enact a plan to undertake
a rescue mission for the five astronauts and three teenagers stranded on the moon. The president of the United States is also
facing heavy criticism for his call for a minute of silence to pay respects to the members of the moon mission. Speculation
that the agency is withholding information is sparking rampant rumors that officials may indeed have evidence that there were
no survivors. …”

“No!
No!
” Caitlin screamed at the radio, frantically slapping the machine. “Don’t give up now, we’re still here, we’re still alive,
are you
listening
?” The news broadcast was cut short, and the speakers emitted an infernal piercing, grating sound for a few seconds before
abruptly going silent for good.

She pushed her chair back, leapt to her feet, and started kicking the radio. “I can’t
take
any more!” she shrieked, tears running down her face. Sparks were shooting out of the air vents, and the reeking smell of
smoke started seeping into the room.

Without thinking, her trembling hands found the pills and the morphine ampule in her jacket pocket. She pushed out two pills
and swallowed them without water.

For one last second she considered what she should do, if there were any good alternatives. But there weren’t. With a decisive
motion, she broke the tip of the ampule and stuck the needle into her thigh, through her pants, and squeezed.

The morphine started working in seconds. A heavy warmth spread through her body and wrapped her in a soft, thick blanket of
gentle, carefree indifference.

They’d been waiting for it to happen. But when it finally did, it still came as a total surprise.

The emergency power cut off.

Midori and Mia were in the kitchen when the reddish light they’d almost gotten used to over the last day finally disappeared.
It was gone in a second, replaced by complete, utter darkness.

Midori had found flashlights in the storeroom a couple hours before and had set them on the table in front of them as they
waited for the darkness. The light was much weaker than they had expected, though. In order to move safely from place to place
they were forced to aim their flickering beams at the same point. The long, featureless corridors they had finally become
accustomed to suddenly felt unfamiliar and labyrinthine and endless. But they continued on into it, though they weren’t sure
why.

With every step, Mia felt how much she missed Antoine, her friends, her hometown, her brother, Sander, even her parents. But
she forced those thoughts to the back of her mind, hiding them away as best she could.

Mia and Midori didn’t say much, and neither of them mentioned that they were walking around aimlessly, with no plan. It was
best not to discuss it. Just keep walking, keep moving. Feel like at least you’re doing
something
to keep yourself alive.

Because it would be time to sit down soon enough. And when they did, it would be for the last time.

They discovered Caitlin in the living room. She was sleeping on one of the sofas in there. Midori went over to her and made
sure she was breathing. They let her be and proceeded back into the corridors again.

Mia suggested that they head for the computer room. That had previously been off-limits, but now that they were the only two
left, there was no reason to abide by that rule. The hatch that had kept the room sealed off was now open, and they walked
right in with no problem.

Mia looked around the octagonal room and her concerns were confirmed. All the equipment probably dated back to the early seventies.
The main computer was located in the middle of the room. A chair was attached to the floor in front of it, and the walls and
ceiling were covered with video screens and hundreds of small lights and buttons that at one time, Mia thought, would have
lit up as brilliantly as an amusement park. She plopped down into the chair and groaned.

“We never had a chance with this equipment, Midori.” She
thumped her hand against the computer a couple of times. The machine emitted a quiet, electrical
pfffsst
sound, and a light quickly glimmered across the screen before it went blank again. “This is the most outrageous thing I’ve
ever seen in my whole life. What were they thinking? No one seriously had any objections? They actually thought this antique
computer would keep working without any trouble for a hundred years? It’s so unfair!” She thrust her foot out, kicking the
machine harder this time. Again the computer made a sound and lit up.

But this time the light remained.

“Midori, look,” Mia exclaimed, astonished. “There’s still life in this thing!”

Two words glowed white against the black screen.

SYSTEM ACTIVATED

“Mia, what are you doing? Leave it alone.”

“Don’t you understand? I got it to turn on! All of DARLAH is out of power, but the main computer is still active. How do you
explain that?”

Midori didn’t have anything to say.

“There must be something else making it run,” Mia said. “Its own power supply, somewhere or other.”

“See if you can get anything out of it.”

“What should I write?”

“I don’t know. Hmm. … well, why not try to find out about the power? How can we get the power back on?”

“Okay, wait a sec.” Mia leaned forward over the keyboard and typed.

POWER STATUS?

She hit
enter
, and a second later the response appeared.

MAIN POWER MANUALLY SHUT OFF
EMERGENCY POWER FAILED
AT 23:41 MTLT

Oh, shit
. She felt the dread settling in her chest, and a wave of nausea rushed through her.

“Midori … the power didn’t go out by itself. Someone shut it off.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Well, look at this. It says right here. In black and white.”

MANUALLY

The word glowed at them, almost scornfully.
Manually
. There was no misunderstanding that. Someone, or something, had been in here and programmed the power to shut off.

Mia leaned over the keyboard again.

TURN POWER ON

And the response appeared just as quickly as the first.

NEGATIVE
PRIORITY DP7 0271DE
ALL PERSONNEL ABANDON AREA

“What do you think it means, Mia?”

“It means the computer doesn’t want to turn the power back on. Or else … it
can’t
.”

“What do you think Priority DP7 0271DE is?”

Mia waited before she answered. “I don’t know. Whatever it is … I guess it means that we’re on our own now.”

Midori shook her head, as if she couldn’t let herself comprehend the message. She changed the subject. “Ask how we can get
out of here. Evacuation, rescue, whatever. Do it!”

Mia typed.

SHOW EVACUATION PLAN

She hit
enter
, but nothing happened. They waited. The computer began to emit a low humming noise, as if it were about to overheat. The
screen flashed with static, but no words appeared. The humming turned into a buzzing so loud that it forced the girls to plug
their ears. The vibrations rapidly intensified. The unit rattled, and their heads pounded until the sound abruptly came to
a stop, and the computer went black.

After almost twenty seconds of silence, the answer appeared.

THERE IS NO ESCAPE

Again the screen went black for a second before more text appeared.

OXYGEN SUPPORT WILL
FAIL IN 224 MINUTES

“Who the hell is writing that?” Midori screamed in frustration, pushing Mia out of the way. She hammered out her question
on the keyboard.

WHO IS THIS??

The answer was immediate.

“That doesn’t make any sense. Try again, Midori.”

WHO IS THIS?

New characters appeared on the screen.

THIS IS 6EQUJ5

Mia was going to rephrase her question in the hope of getting a clearer answer, but a new sentence appeared on the screen
before she had a chance to type. A sentence that scared Mia more than anything:

DERE KOMMER IKKE TIL Å OVERLEVE

Instinctively she jumped back from the screen, as if the words themselves were going to attack her.

“What language is that?” Midori asked, looking at the letters.

“That’s … that’s Norwegian. It means …” She looked gravely at Midori. “It means ‘
You’re not going to survive
.’ ” Midori gasped, and Mia shook her head in disbelief. “How does it know I speak Norwegian?”

The words remained for a few seconds before they were replaced by something else.

Midori pointed at the screen.

“Japanese! Oh my God, it knows who we are.”

That very second, the screen died. Midori kicked it a few times to bring it back, but now it was as if it had never worked
at all. They kept at it for ten or fifteen minutes, searched the room high and low without finding anything that could get
it working again. But the computer in DARLAH 2 had had its say.

The girls left the computer room with an uncomfortable feeling that someone was keeping an eye on them in the darkness. Midori
grabbed Mia’s hand, and they moved step-by-step through the base.

“Where do we go now?” Midori asked.

“Away from here,” Mia whispered, pulling her along decisively.

Midori was in tears. “There’s nowhere to go. You know that.”

“Yes, there is,” Mia said, not sure she even knew what she was saying. “Come on. It’s not far.”

“What’s not far?” Midori sniffled. “Where are we going?”

“Just stick close to me, okay?”

“Okay.”

They entered a corridor neither of them had ever been in before. The air was different. Organic somehow. Mia was sure she
recognized the scent of plants, dirt. “What is this?” she whispered.

Midori and Mia aimed the beams from their flashlights at the floor. Green plants were growing in front of them. Tomatoes.
Cabbage. Grass. All of it completely overgrown and with an odor of rot.

“We’re in the greenhouse. Outside the oxygen generator.”

“Couldn’t we just stay in here for a little while?” Midori complained, scarcely audible. “I don’t want to walk anymore. I
can’t.”

They stopped, listened. Nothing. Mia bent over and picked two tomatoes. She gave one to Midori.

“Here, eat this.”

“What is it?”

“A tomato. Eat it now.”

They bit into the tomatoes. And both spit their mouthfuls back out at the same time.

“Ew,” Midori said. “That tastes old. Metallic.”

Mia let the light from her flashlight fall on their tomatoes. A gray worm wriggled through big holes in the tomato’s skin.

“Yuck!” Midori shrieked, tossing away her tomato. It hit the wall with a soft, wet
thump
. She could hear the rotten juice dripping from the wall.

“Midori? Is that you?”

The voice came from the corridor. It repeated the question a couple of times before Mia and Midori left the greenhouse and
stepped back out into the corridor. In the weak light from their flashlights they recognized him right away.

It was Coleman. Midori heaved a sigh of relief.
He wasn’t dead!
Caitlin had been wrong. And if Coleman was alive, maybe …

Mia’s spirits soared for a precious moment.

“
Coleman!
” she cried. “Thank God you’re here!” He nodded but didn’t seem to know quite what to say. “We thought you went out to look
for Nadolski and Antoine?” Mia prompted.

“I did,” he said quietly as he approached. “I didn’t find them.”

Mia’s heart was crushed by the news as Coleman continued. “Their wheel tracks stopped three and a half miles from here, but
neither they nor the rovers were anywhere to be seen. So I turned around. I got back right before the emergency power cut
off. Since then I’ve been fumbling around in the dark looking for you guys.” He put a hand on Mia’s head and stroked her hair.
She didn’t know if she liked that. “And now here you are,” he added.

Midori didn’t believe him. “But why did you come back at all? Why didn’t you just keep going to DARLAH 1?”

“By myself? Without you two? No, Midori, I’m responsible for everyone who’s left. Did you forget that?”

He was acting weird, that was for sure. Had Coleman been helping himself to supplies from the infirmary, too? Or had he just
lost his mind? Hard to tell. Mia wasn’t sure she could trust him, but decided to take the chance. After all, it was the only
one she had.

“We discovered something,” she said.

“Really? What?” He seemed curious but detached.

“In the computer room,” Mia said.

“I thought I forbade you to go in there.” Coleman was stern.

Mia shrugged. “It’s not like that really matters anymore, does it?”

Coleman nodded slowly. “Still, you shouldn’t have done that.”

“We activated the computer. After the emergency power went off.”

“That’s impossible,” Coleman said right away. “The computer room is directly connected to the power generator and the emergency
power.”

“Well, apparently not,” Midori commented drily. “Anyway, it told us a few things.”

“Like?”

“You mean you don’t know?” Mia wasn’t sure anymore if she could completely trust him. “I thought you knew everything about
this base.”

“So did I, but that was before computers started working without any power supply.” Coleman felt his already considerable
amount of anxiety growing.

“It told us about priority DP7 0271DE.”

Coleman furrowed his brow. That wasn’t one of the codes he was trained to recognize. None of the base’s codes contained letters,
he was sure of that.