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  contents

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MOON BASE ALPHA RESIDENT DIRECTORY

  1: EXTRATERRESTRIAL MOVIE NIGHT

  2: SELF-DEFENSE WITH PLUMBING

  3: THE SPACE TOILET INCIDENT INVESTIGATION

  4: MALICIOUS BLUEBERRIES

  5: STEALING JULIET

  6: FRUITLESS SEARCHING

  7: DIRE WARNING

  8: DEAD ENDS

  9: SENTIENT NANOBOTS

  10: BREAKING AND ENTERING

  11: ILLEGAL CONTRABAND

  12: SPACE JERK REBELLION

  13: DESPERATE TIMES

  14: MOONLIGHT RIDE

  15: DEATH FROM ABOVE

  16: VIDEO TRANSMISSION

  17: FRAYED NERVES

  18: HYPOTHETICAL SPACE SNAKES

  19: IMAGINARY FRIENDS

  20: BIG REVELATION

  21: RACING THE CLOCK

  22: SECRET IDENTITY

  23: THE ASTEROID

  MOON BASE MAP

  ABOUT STUART GIBBS

  For Barry, Carole, Alan, and Bobbe Patmore

  acknowledgments

  In writing the Moon Base Alpha books, I do my best to be as realistic as possible in describing the future of space travel (and yes, that even applies to the possible way alien contact might eventually happen). I continue to be indebted to my good friend, Garrett Reisman, former astronaut and current director of crew operations at SpaceX, who was always available to answer any questions I had. I’d also like to thank Dr. Angel Abbud-Madrid, director of the Center for Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines, and Joel G. Duncan, PhD, senior lecturer in the Department of Geology and Geological Engineering at the School of Mines, for their help in figuring out how construction of a moon base might proceed. My intern, Caroline Yost, did some exceptionally good research for me. And finally, I’d also like to thank my junior research team, my children, the original Dashiell and Violet, for being such good sports on my fact-finding trips, whether they be to the Kennedy Space Center to learn about spaceflight, the Griffith Observatory to learn about moon rocks, or Hawaii Volcanoes National Park to study lava tubes. I love you guys!

  Moon Base Alpha Resident Directory

  Upper floor:

  Residence 1 (base commander’s quarters and office)

  Nina Stack, moon-base commander

  Residence 2

  Harris-Gibson residence

  Dr. Rose Harris, lunar geologist

  Dr. Stephen Gibson, mining specialist

  Dashiell Gibson (12)

  Violet Gibson (6)

  Residence 3

  Dr. Maxwell Howard, lunar-engineering specialist for Moon Base Beta

  Kira Howard (12)

  Residence 4

  Brahmaputra-Marquez residence

  Dr. Ilina Brahmaputra-Marquez, astrophysicist

  Dr. Timothy Marquez, psychiatrist

  Cesar Marquez (16)

  Rodrigo Marquez (13)

  Inez Marquez (7)

  Tourist Suite

  currently occupied by the Sjoberg family:

  Lars Sjoberg, industrialist

  Sonja Sjoberg, his wife

  Patton Sjoberg (16)

  Lily Sjoberg (16)

  Residence 5 reserved for temporary base residents (female)

  Residence 6 reserved for temporary base residents (male)

  Residence 7

  Former residence of Dr. Ronald Holtz. Currently reserved for new moon-base doctor. (Note: Selection still in process; not due to arrive until Mission 8.)

  Lower floor:

  Residence 8

  Former residence of Garth Grisan. Reserved for new moon-base maintenance specialist. (Note: Selection still in process; not due to arrive until Mission 8.)

  Residence 9

  Dr. Wilbur Janke, astrobiologist

  Residence 10

  Dr. Daphne Merritt, base roboticist

  Residence 11

  Dr. Chang Kowalski, geochemist

  Residence 12

  Goldstein-Iwanyi residence

  Dr. Shari Goldstein, lunar-agriculture specialist

  Dr. Mfuzi Iwanyi, astronomer

  Kamoze Iwanyi (7)

  Residence 13

  Kim-Alvarez residence

  Dr. Jennifer Kim, seismic geologist

  Dr. Shenzu Alvarez, water-extraction specialist

  Residence 14

  Dr. Viktor Balnikov, astrophysicist

  Residence 15

  Chen-Patucket residence

  Dr. Jasmine Chen, senior engineering coordinator for Moon Base Beta

  Dr. Seth Patucket, astrobiologist

  Holly Patucket (13)

  (Note: Arrival has been pushed back until Mission 9. This residence will be used as housing for temporary base workers until then.)

  Excerpt from The Official Residents’ Guide to Moon Base Alpha, © 2040 by National Aeronautics and Space Administration:

  APPENDIX A

  POTENTIAL HEALTH AND SAFETY HAZARDS

  Although every effort has been taken to make Moon Base Alpha the safest human habitat ever built, we still urge you to be extremely careful and vigilant for your own well-being. MBA’s medical bay has been stocked with plenty of emergency supplies and the latest medical technologyI so that the doctor on staff can handle even extreme medical emergencies, but all lunarnauts should bear in mind that life on the moon is inherently dangerous and that the closest hospital is back on earth, more than 250,000 miles away. Thus, you are advised to exercise extreme caution at all times and take great care to avoid risks.

  To that end, we have compiled the following catalog of potentially dangerous areas, facilities, objects, and situations. Bear in mind this is by no means meant to be a complete list, but rather a guide to provide for better safety. There may be many other hazards at MBA not included below. Please do your best to be safe and alert to danger at all times while you are on the moon. Remember: The best way to avoid trouble is to not get into trouble in the first place!

  * * *

  I. At the time of printing. Because of the difficult nature of replacing technology on the moon, some tech may be slightly out-of-date by the time you read this.

  EXTRATERRESTRIAL MOVIE NIGHT

  Earth year 2041

  Lunar day 216

  Bedtime

  If I hadn’t made the mistake of showing Star Wars to an alien life form, I never would have ended up fighting Patton Sjoberg with the space toilet.

  But then, being friends with an alien had been one problem after another. It was far more difficult than I had ever imagined. For starters, there was no end of things I had to explain.

  Every single aspect of my life was strange and unusual to Zan Perfonic. She wanted to know the reasons for everything I did. But it turns out, there’s not much reason behind half the things we humans do.

  For example, blessing someone after they sneeze.

  One day, Zan overheard me do this for my sister, and later she asked why I’d said it.

  I had to think for a moment before admitting, “I have no idea. It’s just something we humans do. It’s supposed to be good manners.”

  “Like when you use napkins to blot partially eaten food off your faces?”

  “Kind of.”

  “What does ‘bless you’ mean?”

  “Um . . . that you want good things to happen for s
omeone. I think.”

  “So every time someone involuntarily blasts snot out of their nose, you humans tell them you want good things to happen to them?”

  “Er . . . yes.”

  “Do you say ‘bless you’ for other involuntary actions? Like when someone burps?”

  “No.”

  “Or farts?”

  “Definitely not.”

  “Why not?”

  “I guess because farting is considered rude.”

  “And yet, is also considered funny?”

  “Not by everyone.”

  “Your sister seems to think it’s funny.”

  “Well, she’s six.”

  “Your father does too. He’s not six.”

  “Good point.”

  “So why do some people find involuntary emissions of noxious gases from their rectums funny while other people find it rude?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think it has something to do with the sound?”

  It went on like that for twenty minutes, with Zan asking me to try to explain everything from whoopee cushions to “pull my finger” until I was mentally exhausted. For this reason, I’d taken to showing Zan movies whenever I could. They made life easier. I’d used them to help explain everything from dinosaurs to World War II to professional sports.

  I know I sound like a crazy person with all this talking-to-an-alien stuff. Like the kind of lunatic who stumbles through the streets babbling gibberish and wearing a tinfoil hat.

  But I’m not crazy. My name’s Dashiell Gibson and I’m a totally sane twelve-year-old boy who happens to live on the moon. You’ve probably heard of me. All of us up here are pretty famous, seeing as we’re the first families to colonize someplace that isn’t earth. There’s so much coverage of us down there, you might think you know everything about us.

  But you don’t. You only know what the government wants you to know. And a lot of that is lies. Like when you hear that Moon Base Alpha is a really amazing, incredible place? Or that we’re all getting along great up here and having the time of our lives? That’s all a big, steaming pile of garbage.

  Plus, there are things we all keep to ourselves. Like being in contact with aliens from the planet Bosco.

  Zan’s planet wasn’t really called Bosco. But I couldn’t pronounce its real name. When Zan said it in her native language, it sounded like a bunch of dolphins who’d sucked the helium out of a Macy’s balloon. It was so high-pitched it made my ears hurt. So we went with “Bosco” instead.

  No one else at MBA knew I was in contact with Zan. I was the only one who could see her. Or hear her. Or speak to her.

  There was a perfectly good reason for this: Zan wasn’t really there. You see, her species hadn’t mastered interstellar travel yet. (Not that we humans have come anywhere close to figuring it out ourselves.) Zan’s species had found a shortcut, though. They could think themselves to other places.

  I had no idea how it worked. Zan had been doing her best to explain it to me, and it always left me feeling like I was an idiot. But then, even Albert Einstein would have looked like an idiot to Zan.

  The point being, I wasn’t really seeing Zan with my eyes. Instead she was connecting directly with my mind, inserting herself into my thoughts. I didn’t even see the real Zan. Instead I saw an image of her that she wanted me to see: a beautiful, dark-haired thirty-year-old female human with startlingly blue eyes. In truth, I didn’t know what Zan really looked like, because she hadn’t shown me yet.

  Communicating with Zan wasn’t actually that difficult. She had learned English and could speak it better than half the humans I’d met. The hard part was that she insisted our friendship remain a secret. However, she had a very good reason for this:

  Zan had befriended only one human before me, Dr. Ronald Holtz, who had been the doctor at Moon Base Alpha. Dr. Holtz had wanted to reveal Zan’s existence to all humanity, but he never got the chance. Because the second person who learned about Zan was another Moonie named Garth Grisan, a whacked-out, ultra-paranoid spy for the military who believed humanity wasn’t ready to learn we’re not alone in the universe. Garth killed Dr. Holtz to keep the secret safe, but he made it look like an accident. I’d figured it out with Zan’s help, though, and Garth had been shipped back to earth to stand trial for murder.

  So Zan wasn’t in any rush to reveal her existence this time. I understood. Frankly, I was surprised she was willing to give humanity another try. And it was absolutely thrilling to get to talk to an alien.

  It just wasn’t easy.

  Maybe things wouldn’t have been so much trouble if I still lived on earth. Back there, if I wanted to spend some private time with Zan, I could simply go to my room and lock the door. But on the moon, I don’t have my own room. I share a cramped one-room residence with my parents and my little sister, Violet, and my “bedroom” is a niche built into the wall. On earth, I could go for a walk around the neighborhood. On the moon, I can’t. I’m not allowed outside, because I could die out there. On earth, there were a million places I could go to be by myself. On the moon, there are none. I have no privacy whatsoever. There are security cameras everywhere, half the base is off-limits to me, and even the bathrooms are communal.

  So, basically, the only way I could spend any serious time with Zan was late at night, after everyone else had gone to bed.

  The night I showed her Star Wars, it was well after dinnertime. Mom and Dad had already tucked Violet into bed for the night and were playing chess in our room, while all the other Moonies seemed to be settling down in their residences as well. I wasn’t trying to explain anything to Zan by showing her the movie. I had simply referenced it so much, she demanded to see it.

  It was hard to talk about life in space without talking about Star Wars. Or Star Trek. Or any other space movies. Because space travel always looked so cool in those films, when it wasn’t in real life. In the movies, you never saw anyone having trouble walking in low gravity or eating disgusting rehydrated space food or vacuuming their poop out with a space toilet. Instead, gravity was always exactly the same on every planet, the food was delicious, and no one ever even went to the bathroom. Without thinking about it, I’d referenced Star Wars over and over again, and finally Zan had said, “Are you ever going to show me this movie?” So I did. I brought her to the rec room and uploaded Star Wars: A New Hope onto the SlimScreen.

  Zan thought it was hilarious.

  She laughed hysterically the whole way through it. And laughter was something that didn’t really translate between us. Zan’s species actually had humor, which was nice, but they didn’t express it by laughing; that was a human thing. Instead they made a high-pitched whine that was shrill enough to rattle my eardrums. Plus, there was a strange side effect where Zan would lose control of her projected self and her eyeballs would swell up like beach balls. It was all very disconcerting. Finally, about halfway through, I had to pause the movie and tell her, “It’s not a comedy.”

  She stopped whining, her eyeballs shrinking back down to normal size, and said, “It’s not?”

  “No,” I told her. “It’s a science-fiction adventure movie.”

  “But all the spaceships and the weapons and everything are so ridiculous. Like the laser guns. When they shoot lasers at each other, you can see them moving through space, whereas in real life, light moves so quickly that the shot would be instantaneous. . . .”

  “Er . . . yes,” I admitted, although this had never occurred to me before. “But . . .”

  “And the ships keep jumping to warp speed, which is faster than light speed, which is simply impossible.”

  “Well, just because you haven’t figured out how to do it doesn’t mean it can’t be done.”

  “Yes, but if it is done, it certainly won’t be in spacecraft as ludicrous as the ones in this movie. Half of them seem to be using the same type of rudimentary combustion engines that you use on your rockets. They’d be lucky to break the gravity of their planets, let alone travel
dozens of light-years in a second.”

  “I suppose. . . .”

  “Plus, all the space creatures are absurd. They’re all modeled on humans with two arms and two legs, when there are thousands of other ways a body could be constructed.”

  “There are?”

  “Certainly. Look at your own planet. There are billions of species of insect and only one species of human. And yet there isn’t a single creature in the movie with an insect body structure.”

  “You mean, you’d think Star Wars would be less funny if Chewbacca looked like a giant cockroach?”

  “Well, it would certainly be more realistic. The chances of Wookiees being so structurally similar to your species is staggeringly improbable. And don’t even get me started on the fact that Luke Skystalker and Princess Leo and Ham Bolo look exactly like humans, even though they live in some galaxy far, far away.”

  “Those aren’t their names. . . .”

  “Well, you know who I mean. Honestly, the entire film is laughably earth-centric and the physics are preposterous.”

  I turned the TV off. “Obviously, showing you this was a mistake.”

  “No!” Zan cried. “It wasn’t. I’m really enjoying it. I haven’t laughed so hard in a long time.” She giggled at the thought, her eyes swelling up again.

  “Do you look like a giant cockroach?” I asked pointedly.

  Zan stopped laughing. Her eyes returned to their normal size. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because I don’t know anything about you,” I told her. “We always talk about me and earth and humanity, but never about you. I don’t even know what you really look like.”