“It’s time to get to work,” Pufferfish said. “There are three astronauts aboard this station, and the last thing they want to see is a bunch of kids goofing off outside the window. As you know, the station has a ruptured oxygen tank. Unfortunately, the onboard computers have gone screwy and can’t pinpoint its location. Even worse, all the tanks are linked, so soon they will all be empty. Our job is to find the damaged tank and fix it before they run out of air inside. There are tanks all over the station. Let’s split up and find it.”
“Hopefully before my lunch is cold!” Flinch said.
Wheezer closed her eyes and concentrated. A quick squeeze and the inhalers were blasters again, sending her flying farther into space like a rocket. She angled toward the far side of the station, marveling at its construction: a series of interconnected pieces that looked like a LEGO set assembled by an alien toddler.
As she neared her section, she immediately spotted a seeping milky gas drifting out of a white tank mounted on the outside of the hull. She pushed a button on the chest plate of her space suit and a cable fired a magnetic tether. It connected to the station’s metallic skin and stuck tight. Another button on the chest plate reeled in the slack and soon she was less than a foot from the damage.
“I found our broken tank. It has a big, jagged hole. Not clear what caused it,” Matilda said.
Gluestick responded. “Could be anything—pieces of old satellite, rockets, stray meteorites, even a golf ball. There’s a lot of junk floating around up here.”
“Give me half an hour and I’ll have it fixed.”
“Don’t waste a second,” Gluestick said. “That’s all the oxygen we have left in our suits. Do you need any help?”
She felt a tap on her shoulder and turned to find Gluestick standing behind her. “How did you get here?”
“I walked,” he said, pointing to his feet.
“Are you worried about me, Gluestick?” she said.
“Um, I just didn’t see anything, uh, in my section and, ah, I just …”
Wheezer smiled. She had a little crush on her teammate. It was nice to see he might feel the same way.
“Activate welding goggles,” she said, and a pair of black lenses dropped down from her space helmet. She closed her eyes and concentrated on her hands. There was a soft click in the inhaler and a hot, blue flame ignited at the tip. Through the blackness of her welding goggles she could see its faint flickering, and she went to work on the gaping hole in the air tanks. “This fix is only temporary. These tanks will tear just as easily if something else crashes into them. Perhaps they should build some kind of protective shell.”
“I’ve been talking with NASA all day about it,” Gluestick said. “We have technology they won’t have for decades. I think it’s time we shared.”
As Matilda worked, Gluestick kept her company talking about his fascination with space. It was nice to have a conversation with Duncan. Most of their usual interaction involved spy work and filing reports.
All too soon, the tank was sealed. “All done,” Matilda said as a little red light flashed on her helmet. “Uh-oh. What’s that?”
“That’s our oxygen supply,” Gluestick said. “Time to go inside, Wheezer.”
“All right, all right. Keep your space suit on,” Matilda said, but before she could unclasp her tether, she was struck from behind and flung forward. She slammed hard into Gluestick, causing the boy to hit his head on the side of the ship and knocking him unconscious. A meteoroid about the size of an orange floated nearby. Wheezer was surprised that such a small thing could hit so hard. Just then another one flew by and slammed into the ship. She turned to see where it had come from only to spy a small wave of sharp space rocks heading right for them. The station would never survive such an onslaught. She’d be lucky if she could save Gluestick.
“Uh, I’ve got a problem out here,” Matilda said.
“Wheezer, you’d better get back in here,” Pufferfish cried. “You and Gluestick only have a couple minutes of air left!”
“I’m a little busy,” she said as she aimed her inhalers at a fast-approaching rock. She pulled the trigger. There was burst of light, then an explosion, and in the blink of an eye the meteoroid was vaporized—one down and a hundred to go. Unfortunately, the rebound force of the blast slammed her and Gluestick into the ship. It hurt, but she had no time to fully recover.
“Gluestick, wake up!” she cried, but got no response. More of the rocks were approaching fast.
She had to stop them, but there was only one way, and it was likely suicide. Without a second thought, Wheezer bravely released her tether and attached it to Gluestick’s suit. He was safe. She pressed the plunger on her inhalers and swerved into the path of the approaching meteoroids.
“Bring it,” she said, and with another squeeze she flew headfirst into the avalanche, zigzagging between rocks and zapping them one by one as she sailed past. When she broke through the other side of the rock shower, she used her inhalers to spin around and fly back in. She knew she would only get one more shot at saving the station and she had to make it count. So she closed her eyes to concentrate—a nearly impossible task considering the blaring alarm going off in her ears and the dizziness she was feeling from the lack of oxygen. Somehow she managed to will all the nanobytes in her blood to give her inhalers a full charge of energy. The scientists at the Playground had warned her to never bring the nanobytes to their fullest charge. They said the blast could kill her. But what else could she do? Gluestick was in trouble, and so were the astronauts. She had to save everyone, even if that meant dying herself. So with her hands glowing like two tiny suns, she took aim at the remaining rocks and pushed the plungers on her inhalers. The explosion sent her spinning wildly off course, end over end away from the ship … and that’s when her air ran out.
Heathcliff Hodges was not insane. All you had to do was ask him. Sure, he was angry and irrational and had attacked several of the guards at the Arlington Hospital for the Criminally Insane, but anyone would react that way if they had to sit in group therapy three hours a day learning how to hug. Every day he and a collection of insane misfits talked about their feelings. It was driving him bonkers.
“I almost destroyed the world,” Dr. Trouble cried, tears streaming out of the eyeholes of the huge black mask he refused to take off his head. It had big antler-like appendages that were incredibly distracting. They were also prone to poking the other patients in the eyes. “I mean, I was this close! If I could have just gotten my mystic pyramid to line up correctly with the path of the sun I would have fried the entire Earth like an egg!”
“You’ll get another chance,” Ragdoll said, patting him on the shoulder. She was annoyingly supportive of the other patients in group therapy, which baffled Heathcliff. Ragdoll had built a machine that turned an entire town into paper dolls. Where was her compassion when half the population of Athens, Georgia, was flattened like a pancake?
“No, I won’t!” Dr. Trouble cried. “The sun only aligns in that precise manner every one thousand years. I blew it!”
“You could always clone yourself,” said Scanner. His high-tech suit worked like a photocopier, producing unlimited and perfect copies of him. He had used his duplicates to rob banks from Arlington to Dallas. Seemed like a great plan to Heathcliff; unfortunately, the fool had run out of toner during a heist. “Make a copy of yourself and pack it away for a thousand years. That’s what I’d do.”
Dr. Dozer smiled at the group. “Those are all good ideas, but let me remind you that they are also against the law. Does anyone have any legal ideas that might make Dr. Trouble feel better?”