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professional around to help cushion the emotional blow.”
    â€œThanks, that’d be very helpful,” Mom said, although I wasn’t sure if she meant it. When you live in an enclosed space with only twenty-two other people, you can’t ever really afford to offend anyone.
    I went to the drink station, poured myself a cup of reclaimed water, and headed to the rec room. Although it would have been faster to go past the moon-base gym, I looped around the long way instead. In truth, MBA isn’tthat big—it’s only about the size of a soccer pitch—so the long way wasn’t really all that long. But more important, it took me past the main air lock.
    MBA has a simple design. It consists of two octagons, one large and one small. The large octagon is the residential area: The apartments, gym, kitchen, and communal bathrooms line the outer wall, with the control center, greenhouse, and rec room in the center. The small octagon is the science pod, where experiments in biology, chemistry, geology, and astrophysics are conducted. The science pod is attached to the northwest corner of the main building; from above, MBA looks like a large stop sign with a smaller one growing on it like a tumor.
    My route first took me between the science pod and the control center. Almost every adult on the base works in one or the other, so on most days they would have been hives of activity. Today both were almost empty. Only Dr. Janke, one of the biologists, was in the science pod, absently fiddling with one of his experiments. He didn’t appear to be working so much as trying to distract himself from Dr. Holtz’s death.
    Nina was the only one in the control center. She was using the ComLink and had her back to me. Mission Control in Houston was on the SlimScreen. A dozen men and women had gathered to talk to her, all with very grave expressions on their faces. I considered trying to eavesdrop, but Nina turnedmy way and gave me a hard stare that was basically an order to keep on moving, so that was exactly what I did.
    I passed the maintenance room and the operations center for the base robots, crossed through the staging area where all the space suits were stored, and finally came to the air lock. The whole journey had taken twenty-six seconds.
    The air lock is one of the rare spots at MBA with a window. Technically there are two windows, as the air lock has two doors: an inner door and an outer door, with a four-foot safety chamber between them. The view through the windows is narrow and obstructed, but then the area outside the air lock isn’t much to look at anyhow.
    Since there is no atmosphere on the moon, the only thing that ever alters the landscape is us—and humans rarely alter a landscape for the better. What was once a pristine, white blanket of moon dust has now been trampled by a million footprints and flattened by the treads of the moon rovers, which are housed in a garage near MBA. It’s like when a fresh, beautiful snowfall gets ruined by boot prints and tire tracks—only instead of eventually melting away, it just stays in that ugly, polluted state forever.
    On the ruined lunar surface it was impossible to pick out Dr. Holtz’s footprints or pinpoint where he’d collapsed and died. All I knew was, without his space suit on right he couldn’t have gone far. There is no oxygen outside. The farthestI can get holding my breath is about fifty feet. (I’ve tested this indoors on multiple occasions, just in case of trouble.)
    There were still some traces of moon dust on the staging-area floor. At breakfast I’d learned who had recovered Dr. Holtz’s body: Daphne Merritt, our base roboticist, and Garth Grisan, who is in charge of maintenance. Normally, for sanitation reasons, there were extreme precautions to prevent tracking moon dust into the base, but it had probably been hard to follow them all when one of the three people coming back inside was dead.
    Despite