Infinity Base Read online

  Mom sighed and put her arm around me. “No, you’re not stupid. But your father wouldn’t want you to give up, either. We can’t trust Dani. But, Gillian, I do trust you.”

  I looked up at her.

  “And I know that together we can think of a way out of here.”

  Dani emerged from her bedroom freshly washed. Her hair was done in a severe braid tucked down the back of her utility suit. “Where are the others?”

  “In your office fixing a zipper pull.”

  Dani blinked. “Glad they’re making themselves useful.” She picked up the photo album from the couch cushions, where I’d left it. “Have you been researching my background, Gillian? You really are your father’s daughter, aren’t you?”

  At least one of us was. I clenched my jaw. “What else did you want me to do?”

  She examined the page I was on. “I remember this. It was one of our first test launches. We were all so excited.”

  “Who is that boy?” I asked, pointing at the dark-haired one doing a cartwheel on the launch pad.

  “Believe it or not, that’s Anton.”

  Anton Everett, the VP of Guidant. Anton Everett, killer of bees. I studied the skinny kid. He didn’t look evil. He looked like someone I might see at school. Like someone I might even have been friends with. “I didn’t realize he was so . . . young.”

  “He’s five years older than me.” She touched the photo gently for a second, then straightened. “I told you we grew up together.”

  Yeah, but hearing it and seeing them as kids were two entirely different things. I’d met Anton the day before yesterday, at that fancy dinner with Elana where he’d told us the world was ending and maybe the Shepherds had the right idea. If Anton was that devout a Shepherd, I doubted that he would be too thrilled with Dani tricking them all and hiding us. She really was giving up everything to help us escape.

  “He’s so brilliant,” Dani said, as if lost in thought. “I’ve never met anyone like him, inside the Shepherds or outside. Unreal.”

  Mom was still watching Dani. “Your ex?”

  “So obvious?” Dani said with a snort. She closed the album and tossed it aside. “Anton is obsessed with the end of the world. You can hardly have children with a man who thinks the human race is about to go extinct.”

  “No,” Mom said. “The constant threat of disaster can make it difficult to raise a family.”

  I was sure she was talking about Dad now. Except we’d gone far beyond the threat of disaster this time.

  The others emerged from Dani’s office. Savannah and Eric took in our expressions and looked sufficiently worried. Howard toyed with his shiny new zipper pull. At least he wasn’t chewing on it.

  “How’s your zipper, Howard?”

  “Fine,” he replied, as if the Shepherds hadn’t just shot his brother into space. “The old one is broken, though.” He held it up.

  Dani leaned forward to take a look, then, unbelievably, started laughing.

  She must have really gone around the bend this time. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “It’s my father. He’s so full of himself. His stupid riddles and his stupid codes. My mother used to say everything was a game to him. She was right. I just can’t believe I never noticed it before.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I told you about my mother. She was a mathematician and a computer scientist.” Dani retrieved the album and opened it to a page with a faded photograph of people in dorky-looking seventies clothes and hair. It was a lot of white guys and then Dani’s mother—dark skin, bright eyes, hair done in a bouffant.

  Savannah pointed out Dr. Underberg in the crowd. He looked so young, with broad shoulders and salt-and-pepper hair. “Is that where they fell in love?” she asked dreamily.

  “More important, it’s where Underberg got the idea to recruit her into the Shepherds,” Dani replied. “We don’t care about your race or your gender or your nationality.”

  “Yeah, Shepherds will lie to anyone,” I said.

  Dani ignored me. “She worked at NASA during the Apollo missions, just like Underberg. It kind of sucked for her back then. She was only twenty, and smarter than half the engineers on the projects. A perfect target for Shepherd recruitment. The falling in love or whatever . . . that happened later.”

  “Didn’t your dad think the world was coming to an end, too?” I asked.

  “Yes, but he’s an optimist. He thinks we can save it. Omega City was meant to save us. And his version of Infinity Base was pure optimism. He thought the Shepherds’ duty was to lead humanity to the stars.”

  Well, that sounded better than lying to them and then forcing them there, like the Shepherds did now.

  She turned to another page in the album, this one showing her parents at some kind of cocktail party. They were seated together at a table, Dr. Underberg in a tuxedo, his hair much grayer, and Dani’s mom beside him in a shimmery dress. Metallic streamers cascaded behind them, and there were shiny foil stars exploding out of a vase in the foreground of the shot. They were looking at the camera with uncertain smiles on their faces, as if caught unexpectedly during an intimate moment. “This is the only picture I have of the two of them. Not even the Shepherds knew they were together . . . until I was born, of course.” She frowned, then shook it off. “See those things on the table?”

  We all peered closer at the little figures scattered around the surface of the table. “What is it,” I asked, “confetti?”

  “They look like . . .” Savannah squinted. “Hexagons.”

  “Close,” said Dani. “They’re flexagons.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “They’re a mathematical puzzle,” Dani said. “One of my mom’s favorites. Have you heard of Möbius strips?”

  “No,” Eric, Howard, and I said.

  “Yes,” said Savannah. We all looked at her. “It’s a strip of paper with only one side,” she explained.

  “Every piece of paper has two sides,” Howard stated.

  Dani leaned back. “Want to show them? There’s some tape in my desk.”

  Savannah headed off, then returned with a notebook and a roll of Scotch tape. She pulled out a piece of paper, then tore it into a long ribbonlike strip, which she taped into a loop with a single twist in the middle. “This is a Möbius strip. It has only one side.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Eric argued. “It has an inside and an outside.”

  “Wrong.” Savannah handed it to him. “Try to color in just the outside.”

  Eric looked skeptical, but sat down at the coffee table and grabbed a pen. He started scribbling on the middle of the paper, starting at the piece of tape. He shifted the loop around as the colored-in parts got longer and longer, and when he got back to the piece of tape . . . the beginning of the scribbles weren’t there.

  “Oh. Where is it?” He frowned. “It’s on the other side now.”

  “Keep going,” said Savannah.

  By the time Eric got back to the part where he’d first started coloring in the paper, the entire Möbius strip was completely covered in his scribbles.

  Savannah folded her arms in triumph. “See? One side.”

  “Great,” said Eric, tossing the strip at her. “What does that have to do with flexathingies?”

  “Well,” said Dani, “if a Möbius strip is a shape that has fewer sides than it should, then a flexagon is the opposite, a shape that has more sides than it should.” She held up the zipper pull, flattened back out. “How many sides does this have, front and back?”

  “Two,” I said automatically.

  Savannah’s brow furrowed. She took it from Dani, letting it crumple up again into the arrowhead pyramid shape. The outside side was shiny, with the omega symbol raised like a ridge. The inside side—what had been the back side—was brushed silver. It didn’t look anything like the Möbius strip. “Two?”

  With the tip of her fingernail, Dani tugged at the peak of the pyramid, and the inside opened like a flower. Like ma
gic, she flattened the shape out again. Now the brushed silver side was on top, and the shiny, omega-stamped side was on the bottom.

  Savannah turned it over in her hand. The omega symbol was all messed up now, nothing but squiggles on the surface. “Weird,” she said. “But still two.”

  “Do it again,” Dani suggested.

  Again, Savannah collapsed the hexagon into triangles, then, like Dani, she tugged at the peak of the pyramid.

  This time what opened up was dark and grimy. I shuddered. This was what Howard had been sucking on for months.

  But Savannah didn’t look grossed out. She looked amazed. “Three!”

  “Exactly.” Dani grabbed a tissue and wiped it off. Underneath all the muck was another shiny surface, this one stamped with the crossed crooks-and-globe symbol of the Shepherds. “This is called a trihexaflexagon, because it has three sides and is shaped like a hexagon. There are lots of different kinds of hexaflexagons—some with six sides or even more. My mom loved these things.”

  “Wow,” said Savannah. She kept folding it back and forth, revealing each of the three sides in turn. Howard stared intently at the piece of metal, gripping his own in his hand. He looked like he regretted trading with Savannah.

  I touched the zipper pull on my own suit.

  Eric made a face. “Why would he put a puzzle on a zipper pull?”

  “That’s Underberg for you,” Dani said. “It’s not remotely practical, but he was always doing that. Little games and puzzles and stuff for his friends. And the people he made the utility suits for were definitely his friends.”

  “True,” I said. “That’s how we found Omega City in the first place. Only people who knew him could have figured out the riddle in his diary.”

  “And my code book,” Howard said. “We never could have figured out those codes if he hadn’t sent me that code book from outer space.”

  Dani frowned. “I’m still not certain how he did that. Or why.”

  Was she serious? “It’s so we could figure out the messages you were sending,” I argued. “So we could find out all the fishy stuff going on around here and try to stop it.”

  “Wouldn’t it have been easier to send a note saying that there was a lot of fishy stuff going on around here?” Savannah asked. “You know, before we put ourselves in all this danger?”

  “No,” Mom said, her voice tight. “That would have been helpful. But this is a game. And he played it with children.” She sounded like she had back before the divorce. We’d been hiding out from the Shepherds then, too, in a tent in the woods. And just like then, there hadn’t been a thing she could do about it.

  “Dr. Underberg clearly thinks very highly of your children, Grace,” said Dani.

  “Yeah,” Eric said, rolling his eyes. “The guy thought it would be fun to take us into outer space in his broken-down rocket. The guy who just had a rocket sitting around ready to get shot into outer space in the first place. He’s crazy. We’re lucky we’re not all melted puddles of goo at the bottom of the Omega City missile silo.”

  Dani turned to him, her eyes wide. “That’s it. That’s how we’ll get to Dr. Underberg.”

  “What?” Eric asked. “Goo?”

  “No,” she replied. “Omega City.”

  “Omega City was destroyed.”

  “But the ruins were taken over by the Shepherds. Remember, Eric?” I said. “Dad took us back to the site and they had all those barbed-wire fences up?” Dad had tried to look into the company that bought out the land where Omega City lay buried, but he’d never been able to uncover much about them. It was a Shepherd front.

  “We’ve been excavating the ruins for months,” Dani said. “That’s why I have the extra utility suit I wore, and the one I gave to you, Dr. Seagret.”

  “So if we can get to Omega City, you think you can send a message to Dr. Underberg?” I asked as a spark of hope ignited inside me.

  “I can do better than that, Gillian. If we can get to Omega City, then I can save them all.”

  6

  UFO

  AT LEAST WE DIDN’T HAVE TO GO BACK INSIDE THE PODS. I MEAN, IT didn’t feel better at the moment, sardined inside the trunk of Dani’s car with my mother, Eric, Savannah, and Howard, but I tried to look on the bright side: I was conscious, and I wasn’t trapped in the dark alone.

  “Does anyone want to sing a song?” Eric asked from near my elbow. “Play a game? I Spy?”

  “Shut up, Eric,” said Savannah from somewhere near my knee.

  “I spy with my little eye, something black.”

  “What shape is it?” Howard asked. He was up behind Eric somewhere.

  “Has to be a yes or no question,” Eric said.

  “Um . . . is it round?”

  “I can’t tell,” Eric said, cracking himself up. “I can’t see a thing.”

  “Shut up!” Savannah and I shouted.

  “Girls!” scolded Mom, down near the taillights.

  No one would hear us, with the possible exception of Dani herself.

  “Sorry,” Eric said, though he didn’t sound it. “I was just trying to find a way to pass the time that didn’t involve wondering who it was that farted.”

  “Eww!” said Savannah. “It was probably you.”

  “Probably,” admitted Eric. “So, want to play Punch Buggy?”

  “I’m going to punch you,” I said. I wiggled my arm so he could see I was capable of it. Well, not see, but tell.

  “Fine,” he grumbled. “We can lie here in silence all the way to Omega City.”

  I’d planned to spend the trip going over Dani’s plan in my head, repeating it so I knew where we were, even from inside the trunk, and could figure out if things were proceeding the way they should or if this, too, was going to turn into a massive mess.

  Once you’re all loaded in the car, it should take about ten minutes for us to drive to the edge of the resident portion of the Eureka Cove campus.

  We had to have been in the car for more than ten minutes by now, right? I’d lost count somewhere around two hundred fifty Mississippi. Didn’t she have to stop at the security gate and talk to a guard? Maybe not, given that she was a Shepherd.

  From there, we’ll head straight to the helipad. If we time it right, it should be between guard shifts. With any luck, my executive-level clearance should help me bypass the necessary authorizations for both the release of the helicopter and the logging of our flight plan.

  This was the part I was most nervous about. I didn’t think anyone would bother Dani if she was just driving in a car through Guidant. But Dani taking off in a helicopter for points unknown? People noticed helicopters. Still, she assured us it was the quickest way to Omega City.

  And we were definitely under a time crunch. We only had twenty hours before the Shepherd shuttle reached Infinity Base. We had to get to Omega City, get inside, and find a way to contact Dr. Underberg before he fell for the Shepherds’ trap.

  “That’s weird,” said Savannah a minute later.

  “What?” I asked, wriggling a bit to look in her general direction.

  “Ow, Gills. Your elbows,” said Eric.

  “Nothing,” said Sav. “I just keep playing with the hexaflexagon, and I thought for a second I felt another side. But it’s gone now.”

  “How can you tell in the dark?”

  “Well, the shiny omega side is smooth, right? And the brushed side is ridged. And the hidden side, with the Shepherd symbol, is all dirty and stuff, so it feels gritty.”

  “Let me feel.” I reached down.

  “Gills!” said Eric. “Elbows!”

  I’d show him elbows.

  Savannah carefully handed me the tiny zipper pull, and I did that squeeze-and-fold movement I’d seen her do to turn the hexaflexagon inside out, over and over. Smooth, ridged, gritty. Smooth ridged, gritty. Smooth, ridged, bumpy . . . wait. Bumpy?

  “Whoa!” I said, running my fingers over the pebbly surface. “You’re right.”

  “Dani said sometimes they
had more sides,” Howard pointed out.

  “What is it?” Eric said, crowding up on me.

  “It’s another side.”

  He jostled me again, and the zipper pull went flying out of my fingers.

  “Eric!” I felt around on the carpeted floor of the trunk. “Where is it?”

  “Did you lose it?” Savannah asked.

  “It was Eric’s fault.”

  “Was not!”

  “Eric, Gillian,” Mom warned.

  I kept patting the carpet, expecting to feel the edges of the metal.

  “Let me look,” said Howard. “I have my flashlight.” He shifted to pull it out of his cargo pocket and kneed Eric, whose head knocked into mine. Hard.

  “Ow!” we cried.

  There was another large bump, then a shuddering around us, as if we were coming to a halt. Everyone went very still, and very, very quiet.

  “Hello, Miss Alcestis,” said a voice, muffled, by the pass-through into the car. “Did you schedule the helicopter this afternoon? I don’t have anything on the log.”

  “Oh, that’s funny.” Dani’s voice. “Should be on there. Can you get it ready for departure?”

  “Sure. Go ahead and park and I’ll get her set up for you.”

  The car moved again, slowly and with loud scraping sounds, as if driving over gravel.

  “The guard will complicate matters,” she said. “I need you all to stay perfectly still until I get you, and then you need to move as fast as possible onto the helicopter.”

  “Got it,” said Howard, and his flashlight flicked on. I bit my lip. Wasn’t he even listening?

  Mom covered the light with her hand. “Not now, Howard,” she whispered.

  More silence. More waiting. I turned up the cooling setting on my suit as the air in the trunk became stuffy. We heard the guard return, and he and Dani had a short discussion about the helicopter. Her door opened and she got out. More silence. More waiting.

  Then the trunk door opened and we all squinted into the bright light. Dani stood over us, her face set in stern lines.

  “Now.”

  We all scrambled to sit up and scoot out of the trunk. My muscles ached from being cramped up so long, but I ignored them and followed my mom and Howard out of the car. Eric followed but Savannah was still inside, kneeling on the floor and feeling around for her zipper pull.