Life on Mars (24 page)

In case you were wondering, it is 1,365.84 miles from Liberty, Missouri, to Las Vegas, Nevada. That's twenty hours of driving. Or, in my case, twenty hours of sitting between the two most annoying sisters on Earth and wishing a UFO tractor beam would suck me right through the roof of the car.

When they weren't busy whining about the radio station, they were fighting over earbuds. They complained that it was too hot, and then when Mom put on the air conditioner, they griped that they were freezing. Cassi practiced her cheers for 947 hours straight, and Vega's phone beeped with text messages more often than I blinked. They both bellowed that my legs were touching theirs and that my breath smelled like something died in my mouth and that my atlas was getting in their way.

Comet sat in the row of seats behind us and, every ten seconds or so, licked the back of my head. My hair was plastered
to my scalp with dog drool. Which made Cassi and Vega complain even more.

Behind Comet were our suitcases and a box filled with clanking broken pieces of Huey.

I passed the time by memorizing the years that Halley's Comet passed through our solar system, going all the way back to 1066, and trying to imagine what it would look like from the top of Olympus Mons, the sixteen-mile-high volcano on Mars.

I also passed time by flipping the pages of the atlas Priya gave me, keeping track of the towns we passed.

That was what I'd been doing when I saw it.

After an eternity, we'd finally crossed over into Nevada and I was able to flip to the final page of our journey. The brush and dirt, and even the hazy mountains off in the distance, had gotten boring, so I followed I-15 with my finger, tracing how far we had left to go. We were just outside of Moapa; not far now. My eyes wandered past Vegas and up the page a bit, and my finger stopped.

“Lovell Canyon,” I whispered. Excitement jolted through me. “Lovell Canyon! Lovely cannons!” I shouted, and Cassi, who'd been dozing, jerked awake.

“Ready! Okay! We've got spirit yes we d …,” she muttered before falling back to sleep.

I ignored her. “That's it! That's what Cash meant!”

Mom twisted around in her seat to see what was going on. “What's the problem?” she asked.

I pointed to the atlas, turning it so Mom could see it. “Not lovely cannons! Lovell Canyon! It's a place outside of Las Vegas.”

Mom squinted at the map. “What about it?”

“Don't you see? He wasn't talking about some sort of war. I knew it!”

“Who?” Mom asked, looking thoroughly confused at this point.

“Cash! He was telling me where to take Huey!”

Mars was in opposition in April the next year. Which gave me eight months to prepare. I spent most of those months saving up my money to buy new parts to replace the unfixable ones on Huey. But I also spent lots of time sprucing up the broken parts, including painting him navy blue, with stars and planets, really making him look the part. After all, if Huey and I were going to discover life on another planet someday, we had to be camera ready for when the press came after us.

I also painted across one side:

In Memory of CASH: Contacting Aliens in the Solar System through Huey

Technically, that would be CASSH. Or CAITSSTH.

… Yeah, I was never going to get any good at acronyms.

It turned out my house in Las Vegas was kind of cool. It had a red tile roof and a stone wall around the yard. It was way
bigger than our old house and had a pool right down the street. But mostly it just seemed like a house in a neighborhood, just like in Liberty. It made me feel like I hadn't really moved all that far away and that people were basically the same no matter where you went.

And the best part? Right outside my bedroom window was a little slope of roof, one just the perfect size for stargazing. Or for changing the course of human history through scientific discovery. However you want to look at it.

I liked my new school and right away made two new friends. Their names were Toby and Tan, and they both lived right down the street from me. We met on the first day of school, on the bus, and it turned out we all had PE and lunch together. Toby was into video games and Tan constantly had his nose smudged up against the pages of a book. Neither of them was interested at all in space, and neither of them fell a lot or wore clanky bracelets, but that didn't really matter. I liked them anyway.

Dad, however, did get interested in space again. Turned out that working for the new company meant he spent a lot less nighttime hours at work. Instead, he came home and we'd climb out onto the red tiles together, sitting side by side, sharing popcorn or chips or sometimes pastrami sandwiches in Cash's honor. Dad bought two pairs of binoculars—one for each of us. They weren't quite as cool as Cash's but somehow that seemed right. And I would tell him about the things I learned from Cash.

“Hey, Dad, have you ever heard of Gliese five eighty-one?”

“Nope.”

“It's a star, and it's got this huge exoplanet, and there was a radio signal and this professor says …”

Mom and Priya's mom video called each other on the computer every day. And Mom stopped baking raisiny things.

Vega found a new boyfriend right away. His name was Vincent, and he was skinny and wore really tight black jeans with big, clomping boots. His favorite word was “yo” and he liked to use it in pretty much every sentence, like, “What's up, Arty, yo? School was a beast today, yo. Tomorrow's the weekend, yo.” Vega was head over heels in love with the guy (yo), but I liked to think of him as the Virus (yo), and secretly he made me miss Mitchell a little bit.

Cassi found a new cheer squad, and it seemed like every girl on it was named Adrian. But Cassi's best friend Adrian thought I was cute and giggled a lot when I was around, and said it was “neato” how “like, smart and stuff” I was about “you know, those, like, space thingamabobby things.” She drove me crazy when she was around, but at least Cassi started to hate space a little less, and sometimes she would even join Dad and me out on the rooftop, smacking her cinnamon gum and claiming every five seconds she saw a UFO.

“Did you guys see that?”

“It was an airplane.”

“But it had lights and they were flashing!”

“Because it was an airplane.”

“And it was moving across this way. Actually moving!”

“Because that's how airplanes get to the airport. Which is, by the way, the same direction the plane was moving.”

“I'm telling you, it was a UFO.”

“Next thing you know, Cassi, you'll be claiming zombies are real.”

Aunt Sarin visited once, and brought baby Castor with her. He was googly-eyed and drooly, and he grabbed my finger and squeezed it just like Cassi used to do when she was a baby. Once, when Mom and Aunt Sarin were gabbing in the kitchen, I tiptoed into the living room with a gift for Castor.

“Hey, little star,” I said, crouching so I was eye level with him in his baby swing. He smiled and cooed. “I have something for you.” I held up Chase's old Mickey Mouse binoculars. Castor reached out with clumsy hands and grabbed at them. Once he got hold of them, he immediately stuck them in his mouth. “These binoculars are all yours. But they aren't just any binoculars. They're part of a very intricate piece of space-communication machinery. I expect you to take good care of them, okay? And when you're old enough, I'll show you an even better telescope.” He gurgled and laughed. Chase's binoculars would be in good hands with Castor. Cash probably would have liked to see baby Castor gumming up those awful binoculars.

Speaking of Cash.

Sarah called a few days after we arrived in Vegas to tell me he had died.

“Don't you worry, I was right there with him all the way up until the end,” she said.

I'd never had to talk about someone dying before and I wasn't sure what I was supposed to say. I tried to think of what Dad would say. “Did he, um, suffer?”

“No, he went very peacefully.”

“Good, good,” I said in my Dad-impersonation voice.

“The funeral was very nice, Arty. You should have seen it. Beautiful flowers, beautiful music. Your little friends both came. I can't remember their names. Red-haired boy, and a girl wearing lots of bracelets.”

“Tripp and Priya?”

“Yes! That's it, Tripp and Priya. They said they didn't know Cash, but they knew you would want them there. They were such nice kids.”

My chest felt warm. “Yeah, they're pretty cool,” I said. “The best friends ever.”

“Oh, and that reminds me. Some of Cash's old buddies from NASA were there. One came all the way up from Florida. I hadn't seen old Herb in years.”

“Wait. Herbert Swanschbaum? He came?”

“Yes, and oh, did he have some stories to tell about Cash. Really fun ones. Herb was so broken up about Cash's death. He told me Cash was the best friend he ever had. Said he was so jealous of my brother.”

“Herbert was jealous of Cash?”

“Sure was. Herb said most of the guys wanted to be an
astronaut for the status. They were out to be heroes. But Cash wanted to be an astronaut because he loved space and couldn't think of anywhere else he'd rather be. He didn't care about being anybody's hero. He was in it for the love.”

I couldn't help but think that somehow Cash had ended up a little bit of a hero anyway. At least to one kid who just wanted to believe in life on Mars. I wished I had gotten the chance to tell him that, and I hoped that he knew it anyway.

That night, I told Cassi and Dad I wanted to look at the stars alone.

Fall came and went, and so did Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas. I missed Missouri snowstorms and sledding down Killer Hill with Aunt Sarin. But soon it was spring. Which meant spring break was coming, along with Tripp and Priya, but first it meant that Mars was in opposition and a shiny repainted Huey was up and ready to roll.

Dad and I packed sleeping bags and jackets, just in case it got cold. We took water bottles and sodas and Mom made us a tub of cookies. We rolled Huey into the back of the SUV and took off for Lovell Canyon, which was perfect for seeing the sky. Even better than up on the hill behind the woods.

It took us a long time to find a spot where it would be just the two of us, and then to park, unload, and set up Huey. But in some ways it was the best time of my life, laughing and sharing stories with Dad, the excitement of firing up new
and improved Huey for the first time since Cash died. Now that Dad didn't work in an observatory anymore, he seemed to like space a lot better. He told me that was because his hobby and his job were two separate things again.

We rolled out our sleeping bags and hung our binoculars around our necks.

“You ready?” Dad asked as I poised over the on/off switch on the spotlight.

And suddenly I was nervous. Something about the air felt … charged somehow. Like something big could happen, and if I wasn't paying attention, I would miss it. I had never done this without Cash, and I wasn't sure what kind of feelings would come up when I pushed that button. I swallowed, licked my lips, nodded. “Yeah. I'm ready.”

“Go for it,” Dad said, turning and training his binoculars in the direction of Mars.

I reached down and flipped the switch.

Four dots. Another dot. Dot-dash-dot-dot, twice. Three dashes.

HELLO

I put my binoculars to my eyes and squinted around the bat butt until the black edges went away and all I was looking at was the distant red planet. Dad and I were still as statues, barely breathing.

And then Dad gasped. “Did you see that? Did you see, Arty?”

I held my breath, afraid to blink. I had seen it. A brief flash
of light blinking over the planet. “Was that …?” I started, but then it happened again. And again. And again. Dots and dashes.

“What does that mean, do you think?” Dad asked, lowering his binoculars. I lowered mine as well, the fountain burbling happily beneath my eyelids again.