Destination Unknown by Katherine Applegate Read Free Book Online Page B

something penetrating, but all he could manage was, “Huh.”

    Jobs walked back into the world of color, bent down, and stroked a single shaft of grass. Of course it was not grass. It was three inches across, a quarter-inch thick, smeared with green and blue.

    He pulled at it and it came free. He stared at the root structure with Mo’Steel leaning over his shoulder.

    “Look at that, Mo. The root structure looks normal. The dirt looks normal. Not like the dirt over in the canyon. This is like actual dirt. The roots are like actual roots. The leaf, though, no way.”

    “Tastes like grass,” Mo’Steel said.

    “You tried to eat it?”

    Mo’Steel shrugged. “Hey, we gotta eat, right? I thought maybe you could eat it. But it’s like eating what the lawn mower left behind.”

    Jobs sighed. He looked at the lost, confused, wondering, grieving gaggle of humans, all together in the Impressionist environment. They looked shabby and dull in this vivid landscape. Hard-edged, definite, almost vulgar in their detail. His brother was staring up at a sketchy tree.

    “What are we going to do?” Jobs wondered.

    Mo’Steel shook his head. “I was hoping you’d know.”

    “I am lost,” Jobs said. He took a deep breath. “No food. No water. Not much, anyway. Whoever put this all together, aliens or whatever, they got the air right. They got the roots of these plants right. But I doubt there’s real water in that river over there.”

    “Let’s go see.”

    But Jobs was too distracted to answer. “They’re playing mix and match, that’s the problem.”

    “Who is?”

    “Them. The aliens. They don’t have a context. They downloaded our data, but they don’t know what’s real and what isn’t, what’s actual and what’s just, you know, art or imagination. See, they found technical data on air quality so we have air. Or maybe it’s just the natural air of this planet. Maybe they have scientific descriptions of plants, so they got the roots right, but they don’t know what to do about the pictures and stuff.”

    Mo’Steel said, “Hey, there must have been stuff about us, right? About humans? Like what we are, what we need to eat and drink and all?”

    “I don’t know, Mo. You look in an encyclopedia under ‘humans’ you don’t exactly find a guide for the care and feeding of same. Probably says we’re omnivorous. If they access a dictionary they can figure out that means we eat anything. That may not be a good thing, depending on how these aliens interpret it.”

    Jobs looked up at the shuttle. It was stupendously out of place. The white-painted shuttle was pockmarked with a thousand micrometeorite holes. The solar sails hung limp and crumpled, like carelessly hung laundry or broken arms. The Mylar sheen was gone, the microsheeting was dull.

    Jobs and Mo’Steel had gone extra-vehicular todeploy those sails. Hanging there in orbit around Earth they’d seen the Rock slam into it. They’d seen the planet ripped apart, shattered into three big, mismatched, irregular chunks.

    Yesterday in Jobs’s mind and memory. It had happened yesterday.

    Jobs’s parents were up there in the Mayflower . Dead. Yesterday he’d seen them alive, yesterday they had walked aboard the shuttle with him and settled into those berths beside him. But that was five-hundred years ago. When had they died? Had it happened right away? Or had they survived for centuries, only to die at the last minute?

    There came a sound of raised voices from the dozen Wakers. An argument. Yago’s voice was heard most clearly.

    Jobs and Mo’Steel joined the group.

    “What’s the beef?” Jobs asked Errol in a whisper.

    He and Errol had formed a working relationship based on mutual respect. Errol was an actual rocket scientist, a fuel systems designer. An engineer. He had come aboard the Mayflower with his wife and their one child, a girl. The girl’s berth had been perforated by a micrometeorite. It had drilled a hole right through