George and the Blue Moon

by Stephen Hawking

  Annie tried to smile back at them, but they returned blank looks or whispered to each other. “Stand firm,” Annie told herself. “You’ve been through this before! And you survived last time. Don’t let it get to you.” She stuck her nose up in the air, determined to ignore the others. But that didn’t mean she was enjoying it or that she wanted this to continue.

  Leonia didn’t look despondent at all—her catlike eyes glinted with the reflection of the red light, giving her an otherworldly look. She held up one palm for Annie to slap.

  “Well done, partner,” she whispered. “And now there are only twenty-two of us left.”

  WHAT IS NEUTRAL BUOYANCY?

  Ever wondered why astronauts famously say, “Houston, we have a problem”? That’s because Mission Control for NASA-manned space missions is based in Houston, Texas. The people astronauts talk to from space are in Houston, Texas, at the Johnson Space Center. Nearby you can also find most of the training facilities for US astronauts. And lots of astronauts and their families live in this area so they can get to work (on Earth) easily. It’s not at all unusual at schools around the Johnson Space Center to have students whose parents are in space!

  The Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, or NBL, is near the Johnson Space Center. It’s a place where astronauts can train for their work in space. From the outside, the NBL looks like a huge warehouse, but inside is a massive shimmering blue swimming pool. Sunk into that pool is a mock-up of the spacecraft the astronauts in training need to prepare to work on. They might be mending the spacecraft or building an extra part of the International Space Station. It depends on the job that particular astronaut has to learn for when he or she gets out into space.

  The reason the astronauts practice these tasks in water is because it allows them to feel what it will be like to work in microgravity when they are in space. The NBL helps to train astronauts for when they go on an EVA—extra-vehicular activity, or spacewalk. A space walk takes the astronaut outside of their spacecraft, in a space suit. Tethered to the spacecraft for safety, the astronaut has only hours to complete an important job.

  In specially modified suits, the astronauts are lowered into the pool on a platform by a crane. Once they are in the water, divers help them to move around. It isn’t exactly like being in space—water isn’t quite the same as being outside the space station! But still—practice makes perfect!

  And on a space mission, nothing can be left to chance… .

  Chapter Eleven

  The next evening, Annie sat in her sleeping pod inside Kosmodrome 2, waiting for Leonia to drop off to sleep so she could sneak out and meet up with George. While she waited, she thought back over her time so far at space camp. At first, she knew, she and George had come partly because they wanted to, but also because they felt they had to. They were on the trail of several mysteries, all of which pointed to this place.

  After a couple of days, however, space camp had started to be real fun, when they were all messing around together, learning about space travel and Mars. The program was residential, because lots of the kids came from far away, some even from other countries. For the first week, the girls had slept in one big dormitory and the boys in another. It had been a laugh—even though the would-be astronauts knew that not all of them could make it to Mars, the atmosphere had been upbeat and jolly. The offhand attitude of some of the others at the induction meeting at Mission Control had changed into a feeling that they were all in it together! Evenings were chatty and friendly, though everyone was usually so tired after their long days of astronaut preparation that they tended to drop off to sleep almost immediately.

  The trainees had also been receiving supportive messages from their family and friends—not directly, as none of them were allowed to have their phones or tablets with them. But there was a message relay every morning and evening, when messages, printed out on long thin strips of paper, were handed out by Kosmodrome 2 staff. Although Annie received nothing from Eric—she and George suspected his messages were being blocked by the Kosmodrome 2 staff—she got several from her mom, happily describing locations and concerts in far-flung parts of the world. Even George received letters from his parents, telling him they were very busy tilling the soil and living off the land but that they missed him. One evening Annie even got a message that must have come from Ebot as it was a cryptic sentence. She started to try and work out if it meant something, but it had arrived at the end of an especially exhausting day of fitness training so she had fallen asleep in her space pajamas, slip of paper in her hand, before she had had any insight into what it might mean. When she woke in the morning, the piece of paper was scrunched in her fist, so she tucked it into the pocket of her flight suit, meaning to decode it later, and had then completely forgotten about it.

  And then suddenly, just as Annie thought that she and George must have gotten it wrong—there was nothing spooky about Kosmodrome 2 and no actual mystery linked to her father’s swift exit—everything started to seem weird once more.

  At the same time as they had moved on to the Challenges section of the process, they had been split into their pairs and made to take up residence in smaller “pod” units. After the neutral buoyancy challenge Annie had been dismayed to find she couldn’t go back to the dormitory and was shown to a small white circular room containing two hammocks and not much else, with Leonia in tow. But after the surprisingly hostile reaction from the other kids immediately after she and Leonia won that first challenge, Annie really felt quite glad not to be going to the dormitory. Instead, she was rather relieved to be sharing the pod with the one person, Leonia, who wouldn’t hold their joint triumph against her.

  But now here she was, in the pod for two, waiting to creep out and find her best friend, George, to see if he was having the same thoughts as her—that they had been right. There was something peculiar about Kosmodrome 2. Annie couldn’t put her finger on it—just like she couldn’t say why seeing Rika Dur in person had given her such an odd feeling. But she had learned from past experience that if her senses and intuition told her something wasn’t right, then it probably wasn’t.

  It had been a long day, she thought, as her stomach rumbled after a meal of rehydrated spaghetti bolognese and a dusty ice-cream sandwich with dried apple rings. She would love to fall asleep, but she knew she mustn’t! She wanted to talk to George, so she pinched herself and made herself remember the events of that day to stop her eyes from closing into deep sleep.

  *

  The second challenge, which they had done that morning, had involved a baffling task: at first it looked as though the kids were simply expected to pick up litter from a rocky landscape. They’d been taken across Kosmodrome 2 by bus. On the way, Annie had looked out and seen, in a distant part of the campus, what looked like a huge spaceship on a launch pad. She’d asked one of the Kosmodrome 2 staff what the ship was there for, where it was heading to, but the staff member had quickly gotten on his two-way radio and advised the other bus to take a different route to the Mars Assembly Room. Annie thought she heard him say, “Go via the perimeter so you don’t pass Artemis,” but she wasn’t sure.

  Their bus had suddenly veered off in such a way that the spaceship was hidden from view and Annie couldn’t catch sight of it again.

  The Mars Assembly building turned out to house a mock-up of the surface of Mars—without the low gravity, of course. The surface gravity on Mars is only 38 percent of the gravity on Earth, not quite as low as on the Moon, where a space colonist could easily float up into the air if they moved too quickly!

  In front of the kids lay a reddish brown, hilly landscape with a pink skyscape projected in the background, showing the Martian sunrise behind a massive volcanic mountain range. Again, a couple of the same silent and oddly menacing robots stood about, seemingly inert but ready to spring into action if challenged. Surprisingly, the ground at their feet seemed to be strewn with bits of plastic. In the distance they could see a couple of Martian Landers, the kind of capsule in which the astronau
ts would descend to the surface of Mars from the orbiting ship that had brought them from Earth.

  The kids were given no instructions at all, just told to “Start!”

  Leonia had chewed her lip thoughtfully while looking at the trash-covered scenery in front of them.

  But Annie’s brain had gotten there first. “Ooh!” She gave a start. “I know what this challenge is!” she whispered to Leonia. The drones fluttered around them, clearly trying to record their activities, which was like being pestered at a picnic by wasps. “Nuisance things!” said Annie, batting one away with her hand. It came straight back at her, enraged, but Leonia held her arm so that her wrist faced the drone. To Annie’s amazement, the drone dropped out of the air to the floor and seemed to give up entirely.

  “Anti-drone wristwatch,” murmured Leonia.

  “Why do you even have that?” asked Annie.

  “My parents try to monitor my activities with drones while they are at work,” replied Leonia calmly. “So I had to invent something to counteract them.”

  “Wow!” said Annie. For a few seconds, she was too flabbergasted to speak as her mind turned over the possibilities of what this meant in reality. What it really meant was that not only did Leonia have a rotten childhood, but also that they lost valuable time in the second challenge—time which allowed another duo to sneak ahead of them.

  George and Igor! On another bit of Mars, just behind a hill, so out of sight and sound of Annie, George had had exactly the same thought as her. Igor had been gazing at the garbage in dismay. “Surely they not mean we are to gather trash?” he said, sounding disappointed. “Is this a challenge about recycling? Perhaps to make energy to fuel our trip back to Earth?”

  “Yes!” said George, delighted that he had a bolt of inspiration about why there was much garbage hanging around on Mars. “Listen, Igor,” he said. “I need you to make your way over to the Mars Lander without alerting the others, and go inside.”

  “For what purpose?” said Igor, looking perplexed but willing.

  George bent closer to Igor’s ear and whispered.

  “Aha!” said Igor happily. “I hope very much your assumption is correct! I go now!”

  Idly, as though heading in no particular direction, Igor ambled away, while George stealthily started to collect items of debris from the surface of the simulated planet. Watching Igor meander away, no one would have any idea that his destination was the Mars Lander. Jauntily, the small boy took such a winding route toward the spacecraft that none could have suspected his aim was so true. As he approached the steps leading into the small craft, he darted like a hummingbird up them and slammed the door behind him.

  Everyone else in the challenge—apart from Annie and Leonia, who were also starting to pick up the plastic—was still standing around, arguing with their partner over the meaning of this particular challenge. But they were all too late, including Annie and Leonia. Like George, Annie had understood that the plastic represented the items, food packaging and so on, that would be discarded by the astronauts during their proposed nine-month flight to Mars.

  But unlike George, child of uber-recyclers Terence and Daisy, Annie hadn’t quite made the next leap. Sending Igor to the Mars Lander had been George’s particular stroke of brilliance, as he had found in the Lander all the parts he needed to construct a 3-D printer, which would be used to recycle the plastic into the foundations of the habitation that the Mars astronauts would need to build as soon as they touched down on the surface of Mars.

  Igor, with his advanced technical and engineering skills, had done a very creditable job of assembling a 3-D printer before anyone else had time to storm into the Lander and demand that he hand over the equipment.

  As the same brain-achingly loud noise as the day before blared, to announce that another challenge had been won, Annie used the cover to shuffle over and talk to George while Igor climbed back out of the Lander. They had already been told that it was against the rules to have any discussions with a person other than your teammate during a challenge; a rule that at the time had struck Annie as odd and unnecessarily unfriendly. After all, they were supposed to show people skills of cooperation. Even so, she didn’t want to risk being jettisoned now, just when things were starting to get interesting. And she was safe, for she and Leonia had done enough in the challenge to stay. Two kids who hadn’t managed to pick up a single piece of rubbish would be leaving.

  “Meet me later,” Annie managed to murmur to George. “By Mission Control.”

  He nodded and they parted before any of the remaining drones had time to capture their interaction. Everyone else was watching the tearful exit of the two who had just been told they had failed the challenge and would now be escorted out of the space camp… .

  *

  Checking that Leonia was asleep, Annie slipped on her teammate’s anti-drone wristwatch, which lay on the floor by her hammock. The doors weren’t locked—they didn’t need to be, since candidates’ cell-like pods each had a drone hovering outside. If anyone crept out, as one homesick candidate had last night, the drone immediately alerted Security, who came, in robot form, and took the candidate away, along with their unfortunate partner. Disqualification, they had learned, was instant for this type of rule-breaking. They had been gathered together that morning and told, very solemnly, that one of their number had been “eliminated” due to nighttime rule-breaking, and warned that the same would happen to anyone else who tried it. And their partner had to take responsibility for their teammate’s actions, just as it would be if they were on the surface of a distant planet!

  Annie knew she had to be careful. She popped her pager in her pocket—they never went anywhere without them—then opened the pod door. The second a drone flew toward her, she turned the watch toward it, just as she had seen Leonia do earlier. It made no difference—the drone still flew toward her. In a panic, Annie pushed all the buttons she could find on the side of the watch; one of them must have activated, as the drone fell to the ground and lay there, inert and unmoving. In the distance Annie thought she heard the sound of a child crying. It was a mournful and sad noise, as though some poor kid was sobbing his heart out. Torn, Annie wondered if she should go and see, but she didn’t know how long she could be out of her pod before her monitoring drone woke up and noticed she had gone. She resolved to meet George first and then try to find and comfort the child.

  Creeping up to Mission Control, she spotted another figure in the gloomily lit entrance. Kosmodrome 2 had seemed so busy and vibrant when they first arrived—and now, just days later, it seemed emptier and emptier, almost like a ghost facility instead of the beating heart of international space travel. From the size and shape of the form, she could see the figure was George.

  “Did you lose your drone?” she whispered hastily.

  He nodded and smiled. “It’s playing chess with Igor,” he replied.

  Annie scrunched her face into a “What?” expression, but George just grinned and she knew he was teasing her.

  “Can you hear that?” she whispered, straining her ears for the sound of the child crying. But it must have stopped as she only heard silence.

  George beckoned to her to follow. “I’ve got something to show you!” he said. He took Annie to a spur corridor that led away from the central well of Mission Control. It looked like a row of offices. One of them had Annie’s dad’s name—crossed out—on the door!

  “Dad’s office!” said Annie, a lump coming to her throat.

  George softly turned the door handle but it didn’t give. “Locked!” he whispered. “Let’s go into Mission Control itself.” They went back down the short corridor into the entrance hall and stole through the big doors into the back of the room, which now seemed completely deserted. The robotic missions displayed on the screens continued, but no one seemed to mind or be monitoring their progress. The robots in space streamed back their data to an uncaring, empty Mission Control, abandoned apart from George and Annie—two junior recruits who couldn’t
help but take a moment to gaze upward at the screens.

  “LOOK!” Annie said soundlessly to George, pointing to the screen that had been blank when they first visited Mission Control. George’s jaw dropped as he followed her finger. It was exactly the same view they had seen through Cosmos’s portal: the same greenish white ice marked with ridges and squiggles, the same black sky scattered with brilliant diamond-like stars. In the distance they could see a vast stripy gas planet, which told them that this indeed was a moon of Jupiter. But the greatest clue of all was the same round circle in the ice that they had seen that day; the day before all their adventures had begun in earnest.

  “Europa!” said George silently. “It has to be! Back online!”

  “And,” mouthed Annie, “someone’s there!”

  George strained his eyes to look at the grainy picture on the screen and saw that his friend was right. Dark shapes were moving around on the surface of this Europa-like moon. They seemed grouped close to the hole in the ice and it looked as though they were taking samples of fluid out of the ice hole. One of the robots even had what looked like a large net and another, a harpoon—as though they were ice fishermen, waiting for their prey to swim into the icy trap below!

  “Artemis,” breathed Annie into George’s ear. “The hunters—and they’re on Europa!”

  At that moment, they heard a noise. George grabbed Annie and pulled her backward under the desk with him—and just in time, as it turned out. From their vantage point on the floor, they saw three pairs of robotic legs clank past, following a pair of human legs in a blue flight suit and high heels.

  “Rika!” whispered Annie to George. Suddenly they both felt genuinely scared. “What if our pagers go off?”