Si in Space (15 page)
Authors: John Luke Robertson
YOU MAKE JOHN LUKE STAY BEHIND
so he can avoid things like, um,
dying
. Unfortunately, you don’t realize the mistake he’s about to make.
It’s funny, the simple decisions in life.
He brought some microwavable popcorn. Mistake number one.
He decides to heat it up in a machine that
resembles
a microwave but really is for heating up stone found on alien soil. Mistake number two.
By the time you and Commander Noble hear from the crew, they’re evacuating the ship.
The ship that is now broken in half.
“How’d this happen?” Commander Noble demands.
“It smells like burnt popcorn,” you say, confused.
You finally locate John Luke, and he admits what he did.
A rescue ship will be sent. Of course, it’s gonna take a while. A
really long
while.
You can’t believe it.
Perhaps you’ll find life on this planet that can help you out. Perhaps you’ll find the source of the distress signal.
“I’m hungry,” John Luke says.
Perhaps you should have let him come along after all.
Don’t you just
love
the word
perhaps
, Jack?
THE END
YOU PRESS THE BUTTON
as hard as you can. The blinking lights stop. So does the countdown. You expect something to happen, but nothing does.
The five astronauts are still in their seats, unmoving.
A door you didn't notice before opens in the wall.
It's Commander Noble. He's walking on the floor. And he's not wearing his space suit anymore, but he still has his headset on.
“Hey, can I take this thing off?” you ask through your mouthpiece.
“Yes. Your whole suit, in fact. The shuttle's artificial gravity and oxygen are calibrated now.” He helps you unsnap your helmet.
“What happened? The blinking lights. The alarm.”
“I can explain. Let's get the rest of this off you first.”
It's easier to hold a beaver than it is to take off your stinkin' space suit. Finally you're free, and you need to wiggle around a little.
“Settle down, Silas,” Commander Noble says, pulling you forward to get you focused. “We have important things to deal with.”
“Like what?”
“Like the fact that we're three months away from Earth.”
“Three months?”
“Yeah. The fail-safe plan worked. It just
Â
âlook, let's attend to the crew and we'll all convene and figure out what to do. How's our youngest astronaut ever to fly into space?”
“Listen, Jack. John Luke's fine and sleeping like a baby, but you mean to tell me we were sleeping for three months? How could we live like that?”
“The space suits are able to put us into cybersleep.”
“Say what?” you ask. “Cybersleep?”
“Believe it, Si. Technology at its finest.” Commander Noble slaps you gently on the back. “Come on
Â
âhelp me with the astronauts. There's a way to get them out of their sleep. I'll show you how.”
He first leads you to the bridge, where Parkhurst is in a deep coma. You expect him to press some buttons on the space suit somewhere or maybe undo a few latches, but instead Noble
simply knocks on the helmet four times with his knuckles. Then he puts his palm on the top.
“The vibration and the heat of your hand send a signal to the suit's core to wake up the person,” the commander says.
“Looks cool to me.”
Soon everybody is in the galley, gathered around an oval table in the center of the room. The commander has brought out food for everybody, but only a couple of the astronauts are eating. Most everybody looks pretty weary.
“Here's what I know,” Commander Noble says. He's the only one standing. “During the ascent, one of the five surge engines failed in flight. The ship corrected itself, but the information it received was off. It was reading that we were well into space, so it started a shutdown thrive.”
“What's all that mean? Shutdown jive?”
“Thrive,”
Commander Noble says. “It's for deep-space travel.”
“How
deep
we talkin'?”
“Deep,” Noble says.
“The ship thought we were going to bed,” Pilot Parkhurst says.
“Going to bed?”
“Yeah. Nighty-night. So it was, like, tucking us in. Consider it like that.”
“By knocking us out for three months?” you ask.
The rest of the crew doesn't look too excited about that either. John Luke appears to have just stepped out of his room on a Saturday morning with his bedhead.
Bedhead with a mullet. Not a good thing, John Luke. Not good at all.
“Better than going boom, right?” Franco, the warrant officer, says as he takes a bite of cereal.
Noble produces a set of reports and puts them on the table. “We've addressed the issue in our coordinates and can head back to Earth.”
“Don't tell us we have to go back to sleep right away,” Parkhurst says, scratching his curly hair.
“No.” Commander Noble hasn't smiled for a while. Maybe that's what you gotta do to be a commander. Know when to put away the smile.
“Science Officer Jones reported some findings from her computer,” Noble says. “Ashley, do you want to share those?”
The tall woman smiles and stands, taking up a stack of papers. She seems more composed than the others. “Of course. I noticed these right away when I logged on after waking up. At the moment, we're very near Mars. There are two bits of data that stood out to me. First off, we're close to the small Martian moon Phobos, and our sensors are detecting some kind of life-form on it. The good news is that we can take a landing shuttle to the surface of Phobos and see what the life-form happens to be, should we choose to do so.”
This is crazy, Jack. A Martian moon.
“The bad news is there's a faint distress signal coming from Phobos as well.”
“Distress signal? So what are the options?” you ask.
The commander frowns. “For distress signals this far out in space . . . there are no options. We have to postpone our return home and attempt to help.”
“Sir,” Jada Long says in a monotone, “technically this falls within the majority shareholders' jurisdiction, and Si represents the duck people, who have 51Â percent.”
“The duck people?” you laugh. “Hey, we ain't no
Planet of the Apes
or anything. Well, I can't speak for Willie, of course.”
“I apologize,” Jada says. “The Duck Commander franchise.”
“Well, we ain't got no golden arches and don't supersize, do we?”
Jada doesn't even smile, though most everybody else does. The commander doesn't either, but that's no surprise.
“So, Silas . . . I guess it's up to you,” Commander Noble says. “How would you like to proceed?”
Do you head to Phobos to investigate the life-form and the distress signal?
Go here
.
Do you choose to travel home and go straight back to cybersleep?
Go here
.
WHEN YOU AWAKEN,
you’re sitting in a shop that has various kinds of hunting gear for sale. There are camo pants and jackets and knives and spears. It’s a primitive sort of shop, but you assume it’s a small, independent one.
Wait a minute. What happened?
A monkey walks past the chair you’re sitting in. He notices you’re awake and stops.
“Uncle Si! Hey, man. Sorry I never introduced myself. I’m Scrumbles. This is my store! Isn’t it awesome?”
The monkey is talking to you. He’s talking in plain English.
Clearly you’ve lost your mind, Jack.
“Where am I?”
“You’re on our planet, Icarus. I wanted to be careful with you
—I couldn’t think of a better mascot to have for our store.”
“Mascot?”
“Sure! Look
—we printed up flyers for the grand
reopening
.”
You look at the piece of paper he gives you.
New and Improved Beef Eaters Store Coming Soon!
Meet our new mascot, Uncle Si! From the Duck Commander family. On display daily at our human farm.
Also, we have a new batch of meat that just came in from Earth. Good prices. Will barter!
You start to feel a little dizzy.
“You okay, Uncle Si?”
“Am I okay?”
You’re really lost for words.
You don’t have any.
“Why did you say you wanted to be ‘careful’ with me?” you ask Scrumbles.
“Oh, well, things got a little out of hand on Earth. But, hey
—nobody wants to hear war stories, do they?”
You almost say you do, but you can’t.
This is your life now. As a human mascot.
This really and truly is . . .
THE END