"I understand. Thank you for trying," Richard Blanton said into the phone. "You have a good day, too, Mr. President."

Freddie was astonished at the lengths the billionaire was able to go to try and get Dr. Smith released from Yerba, although the scientist would also face jail time in the US. Kidnapping is a serious offense. Unfortunately, even with Mr. Blanton's extensive connections, it was a no-go.

"The President even tried to call the Chancellor of Yerba personally, but the Chancellor refused his call," Blanton informed the group. "The State Department said to give the little dictator a couple of weeks to cool off, then we might be able to get Yerba to extradite Smith."

"Carly and Sam don't have a few weeks!" Spencer exclaimed.

"Sorry, but their hands are tied," Blanton replied. "It looks like we're going to have to figure out and undo whatever Smith did ourselves. Freddie, why don't you and Miss Pensky go to Dr. Smith's office and see if you can find out what he did."

So it was that the computer nerd and his new girlfriend were searching through Dr. Smith's files trying to figure out his scheme. They quickly ran into an issue. The guidance system itself was tens of thousands of lines of poorly documented source code. The hack that Smith used to strand the girls in space could have been staring them in the face, but like the proverbial needle in the haystack, it was impossible to find.

"Arrgh! What we really need is administrative access to the ship's computer. Then we could see what's running, and what was uploaded before takeoff," Freddie lamented.

Quinn gestured to an industrial laptop case sitting in the corner. "There's the laptop they used on the suborbital flights. Now if only we had a TID cable several hundred miles long…"

"That's it!" Freddie exclaimed.

"Freddie," Quinn chastised, "even if we had a cable that long, you know the signal drops out after 30 feet or so."

"No," Freddie explained, "the robot! If we hook this laptop up to the console instead of mine, and we have Carly unplug the TID cable from the camera and plug it into the terminal, we should be able to stream our signal the same way we streamed the video feed for the show."

Quinn leaned over and kissed Freddie full on the lips. "That's brilliant!" she exclaimed. "Freddie Benson, you are a man after my own heart."

"Kinda thought I already had that," Freddie smirked.

"I kind of thought so, too," Quinn replied, with a flirty lilt to her voice. As Freddie started to draw her in for another kiss, though, she pushed him away. "Later! Let's go save your friends, first!"

The young couple ran down the hallway to the control room, Freddie carrying the heavy case. As they came flying through the doors of the room, Spencer and Mr. Blanton turned to look at them. "Did you find anything?" the billionaire asked.

Quinn walked over to the two men while Freddie went to his station with the laptop. "Smith doesn't seem to believe in documenting code, and his programming methodology is something else. It would take us years to decipher that mess." Noting Spencer's sad expression, she continued, "But, we have an idea that might get us administrative access to the computer from here. If we can get in, we should be able to undo whatever he did."

"You're the experts," Blanton answered. "Whatever you think is best."

Knowing that the whole control room was watching, Freddie put Carly and Sam on speaker. Both girls were in the common room, Sam eating the last of the frozen meals while Carly munched dejectedly on a celery stick. Sam might be able to eat through anything, but the brunette tended to stop eating when she got depressed. Carly wanted to take a really long shower, but wiping yourself down with antibacterial wipes just wasn't the same.

"Carly, Sam, we might have a way to get you down." Both girls looked over at the camera on the sound of Freddie's voice. This was the best news he'd given them, especially after Spencer had told them that Dr. Smith was in jail and couldn't release control. "We need you to break out the R2 unit again. We're going to try to use the robot to get administrative access to DAN."

Fifteen minutes later, the girls were huddled over the terminal in Cabin Two, with the cable from the robot plugged into the port on the terminal. Freddie and Quinn were huddled over the laptop now sitting at Freddie's station, which was plugged in there. Carly and Sam were still wearing their pressure suits, and they had once again donned their helmets so that they could talk privately.

"You're sure DAN doesn't know what we're up to?" Sam asked.

Quinn answered, "DAN can't see the transmissions from the ground to the robot, but he can see what you're doing in the cabin. He shouldn't object, though. No one even considered this scenario when they were programming his security."

"Good," Sam replied.

"Okay, so you should be able to see the same thing on your screen that we see here. Let's see what processes are running." Freddie typed a few commands and a list of programs appeared on both screens.

"What the heck is that?" Quinn asked, pointing out a specific program, LOSTINSPACE.

"I think that's our bug. Not a very clever name," Freddie answered.

"It doesn't have to be," Quinn pointed out, "no one should be able to see it once the ship is in space."

Freddie typed a command: Kill Process LOSTINSPACE. He was about to press enter when Quinn noticed something worrisome, "Look, it's taken life support as a subprocess."

"What's that mean?" Carly asked. She didn't like the sound of that.

She was right, as Freddie explained, "That means if we kill the process, which should release control, your life support also goes out." He pulled his hands away from the keyboard, command still visible on the screen.

"Okay, let's not do that!" Carly exclaimed, very worried.

Freddie wasn't so sure. He looked to Quinn, "If life support goes out, how much air is in the ship? How long can they go?"

"About 30 minutes," the young intern replied.

"And how long does re-entry take," Sam asked, picking up on Freddie's train of thought.

"About 30 minutes," Quinn sighed. "That's cutting it really close."

"Okay, what are our other options?" Freddie asked, dropping the idea.

"We could issue the 'reboot' command, force a reboot of DAN," Quinn answered.

"Okay, that's good," Freddie replied. "How long does it take DAN to reboot?"

"About five minutes," she answered, "but all ship's systems would be down during the reboot. Communications, life support, navigation, everything!"

"And depending on how Smith wrote the program, it might just load again on startup," Freddie mused. "Then we'd be back where we started."

"Another thing to consider," his girlfriend added, "DAN's never been rebooted in space before. If Smith's trojan damaged the operating system, he might not come up at all, and without the secure access, there would be nothing we can do about it from here."

Undaunted, Freddie continued brainstorming, "Any other options?"

Despite their best efforts, neither techie could come up with anything else. "We don't have to decide right now," Quinn pointed out. "They still have 3 days' worth of air and water."

"Yeah, but we're down to the powdered food," Sam pointed out. "It's worse than the stuff Freddie's mom cooks."

"Oh, you'll live," her girlfriend chastised. "I hope," Carly added under her breath.

Freddie had heard, "Don't worry, Carly, we're going to get you down. It'll be –"

He was cut off by the sound of DAN's voice from the speakers, "Unauthorized intrusion detected! Shutting down all external communications."

Suddenly, all of the screens in the control room went black. "Carly! Carly!" Freddie screamed into his headset.

There was no response from the ship.