Lunar Colony by Patrick Kinney Read Free Book Online

of medical equipment used to poke and prod, he realized that hospitals on the moon were just as bad.
    Man, this place gives me the creeps,
Glen thought.
I wanna get out of here.
He considered just giving up and searching somewhere else, but he knew he couldn’t do that, not if he hoped to ever make it home. So, Glen took a deep breath and continued his search.
    He was passing by a door marked RESEARCH AND EXPERIMENTATION , when he noticed a beeping noise coming from within the room. He slowlyopened the door and peered inside. The beeping was definitely coming from somewhere nearby, but Glen’s attention was drawn to something else. There, in front of a large mirror, was a contraption made of two discs situated on top of a base.
    “Cool,” Glen said, “it’s a gyroscope trainer. Astronauts strap themselves inside of these things to learn how to tolerate space travel.” Glen knew that his body had already been through a lot for one day, but he couldn’t resist trying it out. He strapped himself in and pressed the ON button. Immediately, the gyroscope started spinning every which way.
    The world around Glen was a blur, but as he spun, he saw something that shocked him. For only a split second, it looked like he could see through the large mirror, and there, in a room on the other side, was a woman!
    Glen didn’t know if the gyroscope was distorting his vision, but he frantically reached for the OFF button, until, at last, the spinning stopped.
    He came to a halt and, after unstrapping himself, jumped down. Unfortunately for Glen, his body wasn’tdone spinning, and his rubbery legs gave way beneath him. Crawling across the floor, he looked up and saw that the room was whirling above him. But the mirror looked normal.

    Still a little dizzy, he managed to pull himself to his feet and put his face to the glass. Again, nothing seemed strange. It was just a mirror, not a window into a room. And he certainly didn’t see a woman.
    “Hello?” he said, tapping on the mirror. “Is someone there?” Noone answered, but he did hear something else. The beeping noise was definitely coming from the other side of the glass.
    Leaving the Research and Experimentation room, Glen turned left down the hall, where almost immediately he found another door, this one marked RESEARCH OBSERVATION .
    Entering, he saw several chairs facing a large window that looked out upon the gyroscope in the room he’d just left. Glen was so astonished that he barely noticed that the beeping was now very loud.
    “Oh my gosh,” he said. “It’s a two-way mirror! The researchers must use this room to observe the experiments without being seen.” Then, overcome with an eerie feeling, he said, “There really was a woman here a minute ago. And that could only be one person!”
    Glen popped his head out into the hall and looked up and down the corridor. He knew, though, that Salerno must be long gone by now. He sat down in one of the chairs in the observation room and shook his head in disbelief over how close he’d been to her.
    “Shoot!” he said, once again feeling frustrated. “If only I’d come into this room first, I would have caught her. Right now I could be bringing her back home.”
    Glen was upset by his bad luck, but the longer he sat, the more irritated he got by the beeping sound.
    “What is that noise?” he said, getting up. He couldn’t tell exactly where it was coming from, but it was really getting on his nerves. “Be quiet!” he said, kicking the wall. Then, to Glen’s surprise, his kick caused something to fall from the ceiling vent. It hit the ground with a thud.
    Hey, what is that?
Glen wondered, bending down for a closer look. It was a mechanical instrument, about the size of a brick. A wire stuck out of one end, and an arrow blinked red in time with the beeps that had bothered Glen so much. Picking it up and finding that it was surprisingly heavy, Glen realized what he’d found.
    “It’s the locator device,” he said.