And at the thought of Laika’s loneliness, Lucy began to sob.
Lucy’s dad put his arms around her and gave her a hug. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Dad?” Lucy asked. “Do you think she’ll come back?”
Lucy’s dad looked at her. He did not know what to say. “I’ll have to think about it,” he said, because although he wasn’t very practical, he was good at thinking about things.
“And then?” asked Lucy.
“And then,” said Lucy’s dad, “we’ll just have to see.”
So Lucy wiped her eyes and went back to the telescope and continued to look at the stars. Lucy’s dad turned to go. “If you need us,” he said, “we’ll be downstairs.”
“Thanks,” Lucy whispered.
“Don’t stay up too late, Lucy.”
“I won’t,” she said.
Her dad left the room and closed the door behind him.
Lucy continued searching the sky for Laika; but it is a difficult thing to find a small, solitary floating dog among the winking stars and the here, there, and everywhereness of space. She looked and looked and looked until her eyes got tired with looking. Then she turned away from the window.
The roaring and shuddering began to subside to a quiet background hum, but Laika still felt very, very heavy, as if she were made not out of bits and pieces of dog, but instead out of bits and pieces of lead, or something else very heavy. She moved her paws from her eyes and looked around, without raising her head.
“Acceleration will continue until further notice,” said Lucy’s voice out of nowhere in particular. Laika’s ears pricked up to hear Lucy’s voice, but when she looked around, she could not see her. STRANGE, she thought.
Then the spaceship turned a little, and out of the window Laika could see the beautiful blue-and-green face of Earth, with its seas and its mountains and its grasslands and its cities that spread across the planet’s dark side in a spiderweb of light. The planet was so strange and so beautiful that Laika, although she did not know what she was looking at, stared at it in doggy amazement.
BALL? she thought. BALL? Then she looked around to see if she could see Lucy, because Lucy was good at throwing balls, and Laika was good at catching them, and throwing and catching balls was so much fun for both of them that they could happily spend an entire evening doing just this and nothing else.
So Laika looked at the ball, and she thought, BALL? and then she barked out loud several times to see whether Lucy would appear and say to her, “Here, girl!” and pluck the blue-and-green ball from where it was hanging in the blackness of space and throw it for her to play fetch.
What Laika couldn’t know was that this was not just an ordinary little ball, but instead it was an unimaginably enormous planet, one that no dog could ever get its jaws around, let alone fetch. And she couldn’t know that somewhere down there, on this miraculous ball, was her old home. She couldn’t know that somewhere down there was the house that she had shared with Lucy and Lucy’s mom and Lucy’s dad, and the garden where she used to like sniffing around, the river down by the warehouses where Lucy used to take her for walks, and all the comforting and exciting smells. And, most of all, she couldn’t know—because space is hard even for humans to think about, let alone dogs—that somewhere down on that beautiful blue-and-green ball was Lucy, looking and looking and looking through her telescope, then hugging her dad and sobbing, and murmuring Laika’s name over and over, afraid that she might never see her dog again.
Lucy went to bed late. And if she didn’t cry herself to sleep, it was only because she had cried as much as she could cry for one evening. She lay there in the dark, her curtains still open, the cold stars winking at her, and she thought of Laika and her farness, and how she might never see her dog again, and she felt sadder than she could ever remember feeling.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. It should have been Lucy and Laika together—girl and dog, dog and girl—bold adventurers voyaging to the stars, with only each other for company. Then, when their adventures were over, they would have come back to tell everybody about the wonderful things that they had seen: the planets and the nebulae and the black holes (not that you can see black holes, because they are so very black that you can only sort of see around them, rather than actually seeing the holes themselves), and white dwarfs and red dwarfs and all those other kinds of stars with strange names, and asteroids and meteoroids and comets with long tails that stretched hundreds of thousands of miles across space.
But now Lucy was stuck on Earth, and Laika was far gone, heading upward and upward into the here, there, and everywhereness of space, and Prototype I was gone, too, so there was no way of following her, and Lucy didn’t really think she’d have much chance of her parents letting her build Prototype II, given what Prototype I had done to the garden.
Lucy lay looking at the stars for a long time, and at last she fell asleep.
—
That night, Lucy had sad and jumbled dreams. When she woke the following morning, the Laika-lessness of her life seemed even more sad and desolate than it had the night before. She went down to breakfast and didn’t feel like toast or cereal. She just sat there at the table, swinging her legs in a kind of upset way, and her mom and dad didn’t know what to do with her.
After breakfast Lucy’s dad told her that he was going to the park for what he called his philosophical perambulations, which meant, more or less, that he was going to the park to walk around and to think about stuff. And because on that particular morning, there were a lot of things to think about—about where Laika was; about the here, there, and everywhereness of space; about what do to about the charred garden; about whether anything would ever grow there again; and above all about how to console his daughter, who was clearly so very sad that she didn’t want toast or cereal—and because these were all such big things to think about, and because Lucy looked like she could use some company, he said, “Would you like to come with me? We could perambulate together.”
Lucy smiled a sad smile. “OK, Dad,” she said.
So Lucy and her dad went to the park together, and they perambulated in silence. They perambulated along the paths that led through the trees. They perambulated around the duck pond three times in the clockwise direction and three times in the counterclockwise direction. They perambulated to the playground with its swings and slides and merry-go-rounds. And eventually they perambulated their way to the park café, where for a short while they stopped their perambulations and sat down, and Lucy’s dad ordered a coffee and asked Lucy what she wanted, and Lucy shrugged and ordered a cup of hot chocolate.
As they waited for their drinks to arrive, they looked across the park at the dogs and the squirrels and the trees. Normally, Lucy’s dad would have thought quite hard about these things. He often thought about squirrels. He was not sure why, but he found squirrels really rather good to think about. But today he didn’t feel like thinking about squirrels. He had other things to think about. He was, as they say, preoccupied.
The waiter arrived with the drinks and put them on the table. Lucy’s dad took out some money and paid him. Lucy looked at her cup of hot chocolate and carefully rotated the cup on its saucer a few times, but without spilling any of the hot chocolate.
“Dad?” she said.
“Mmm?” he said.
“Dad, I miss Laika.”
Her dad thought about this for quite a long while. Then he said, “I know. I do too. She was a good dog.”
That is all they said, because they were having such deep and difficult thoughts that they couldn’t quite find the right words to say anything more.
Lucy and her dad finished their drinks in silence. Then, hand in hand, they went home.
Laika was puzzled. She was puzzled by the fact that when she barked and barked at the ball, Lucy didn’t appear. She was puzzled by the strange heaviness of her paws, her snout, her ears, her everything. And even if she didn’t know that Lucy was already far away down there, while
she was far away up here—because she had no idea that down there was in fact down there, and that up here was up here—and even if she didn’t know that she was already thousands upon thousands of miles from home, she did know this: Things had all of a sudden become very strange. Things smelled funny. The heaviness that made her feel as if she were no longer made of bits of dog was not right. And even if Lucy’s voice was here, it was weird that Lucy wasn’t. Putting all these things together in her mind, Laika was anxious, her poor little doggy heart unhappy and ill at ease. She started to whimper again.
Laika whimpered for a long time. She did not know how long exactly, because dogs do not know about time in the way that their owners know about time. When dog owners meet in the street, they talk about what is going to happen next week, or what they saw on television last night, or what has changed since the last time they met, or what their opinions are on the fall of the Roman Empire, or whether they think that in the future people will have special helicopters that they can strap to their backs. And while they talk about all these things, their dogs sniff at each other, and say hello to each other, and don’t really think very much at all about past and present and future.
Of course, dogs have some sense of time. Anybody who has owned a dog will know that a dog has very strict ideas about when it should be given its breakfast, or when it should be given its dinner; and anybody who has been about to take a dog on a walk will know that the dog understands that any moment now it will be going on a walk. In fact, if we were to list the kinds of things that human beings think about time, the list could include some of the following questions:
Is it time for dinner?
Are we going for a walk now?
Do you want to go to the movies tonight?
Do you remember what it was like when you were young?
Do you know what year the king of Spain set his trousers on fire?
How much time do we have left until we have to go?
What is time, anyway?
Do the future and the past exist?
Do we really have the time to ask all these stupid questions?
But if you could ask a dog to think of some questions about time, then the main questions would be things like these:
IS IT MEALTIME?
IS LUCY GOING TO GIVE ME A TREAT?
IS IT TIME TO GO FOR A WALK?
No dog has ever asked what year the king of Spain set his trousers on fire. No dog has ever sat and pondered the question of whether the future and the past exist. And perhaps that is why when you go for a walk in the park, you can sometimes look at dogs and their owners and notice that the dogs look very happy, while their owners look terribly worried: because the dog owners are worrying about yesterday and tomorrow and all the things that might happen, or that have happened, while the dogs are just sniffing around, being dogs.
So Laika, although she was already thousands of miles from home and was zooming ever farther off into space, wasn’t thinking, WHEN WILL I GET BACK TO LUCY? or WHAT WILL HAPPEN TOMORROW? or WHY DIDN’T I GO BACK INTO THE HOUSE, INSTEAD OF SNIFFING AROUND PROTOTYPE I? It was not that she didn’t care about Lucy. It was not that she was confident that tomorrow would look after itself. It was only that she was a dog, and these are not the kinds of things that dogs think about.
In fact, what Laika was really thinking was something like this:
ERRERRRNG…ERRERRRNG…ERRERRRNG…
And because she was thinking these things out loud, she made funny little noises that sounded more or less like this: “Errerrrrng…errerrrrng…errerrrrng…”
And all the while she was thinking ERRERRRNG…ERRERRRNG…ERRERRRNG…and was making strange little “Errerrrrng…errerrrrng…errerrrrng…” noises, she was hoping that the terrible things that were happening to her would stop very soon.
And whether it was soon or not, it is very hard to say; but at last the heaviness began to lift, and Laika found that she could move her legs.
“Woo-hoo!” said Lucy’s voice out of nowhere. “Reaching cruising speed.”
Laika looked about her. Again she couldn’t see Lucy. She barked once, the friendly bark she gave when Lucy came home from school, but there was no reply.
Lights were flashing on the console in front of her. Laika started to feel lighter.
And lighter…
And lighter…
The next evening, Lucy sat down with a pen and paper, and started to do some sums. If Lucy was a bit like her dad in the way that she liked to have big thoughts and big dreams, she was also a bit like her mom in the way that she was really very practical and sensible. So Lucy started to do sums and calculations, to try and work out where Laika and Prototype I may have gotten to.
It was difficult, though. It is hard to tell the trajectory of a spaceship when you have a dog at the controls, inquisitively pressing all kinds of buttons with its nose, and generally making things a bit more complicated. If Lucy had been in the rocket, she would have known how to get it back down to Earth. But even for a dog, Laika wasn’t very clever, so Lucy didn’t think that the chances of Laika finding her own way home were very great.
Nevertheless, Lucy did her best. She did sums and calculations, and when she got tired, she put down her pen and went to look through the telescope. Where are you, Laika? she thought. How can I get you back?
It was like looking for a needle in a haystack, she thought. Or it was like looking for a needle in a thousand thousand thousand haystacks. In the middle of the night. While wearing dark glasses.
But still, Lucy looked and looked, scanning the sky with its stars and planets and comets, hoping that she might spot Prototype I, with its logo that linked two letter Ls. She looked until she could no longer keep her eyes open. Then at last she went to bed.
I’m going to keep on looking, Lucy thought as she lay in bed. Then she said out loud, “Laika, I’m going to keep on looking.” It was a firm decision. And it made her feel a little better. Then she turned on her side and went to sleep.
So every night after that, when she had finished her dinner, Lucy went up to her room. She took out her notebooks and her library books and her pens and pencils and her pocket calculator. She set up her telescope. And then she set to work. Sometimes she did sums and calculations. Sometimes she read books. Sometimes she just sat and thought about things. And sometimes she looked through her telescope, even though she never saw anything other than stars and planets and the here, there, and everywhereness of space.
As time went on, a number of things started to happen. Grass eventually started to grow back in the place where Prototype I had burned holes in the lawn. Everyone, more or less, got used to the fact that Laika was no longer around, although they were still very sad indeed. And Lucy’s mom started to get worried by the way her daughter was spending her evenings looking through her telescope, doing calculations, and looking lost in thought. “Lucy, love,” she said one evening, “you know that Laika is probably not coming back.”
“I know,” said Lucy. After all, Lucy was a really rather sensible kind of person. She wasn’t the kind of person that you can easily fool. The kind of person that you can easily fool isn’t the kind of person that can build a spacecraft in her back garden out of bits and pieces she has found lying around, and can do such a good job of building it that it blasts off into deep space, carrying a solitary dog. So Lucy knew her mom was right, that there was almost no chance of Laika returning. “I know,” she said. “But I’m going to keep on looking.”
Lucy’s mom folded her arms. “You’re not planning on building another rocket, are you?” she asked.
Lucy grinned. “Of course not,” she said, because she wasn’t. “Even if I did, I wouldn’t know where to find Laika. There’s just so much space for a dog to get lost in.”
“Then why are you spending your evenings in your room? It’s not good for you, you know.”
Lucy thought for a while. Then she smiled. “It’s OK, Mom,” she said. “I’m fine. But I have to keep looking a
nd thinking and doing my sums and calculations. I owe it to Laika.”
And although Lucy’s mom didn’t really understand what Lucy meant, she could see that this was important to her. “You know,” Lucy’s mom said, “Laika was such a good dog.”
“I know,” said Lucy.
“Let me know if you ever need to talk.”
“Thanks, Mom,” said Lucy. “I will.”
How strange it all was! First, after blasting off, Laika had felt really, really heavy, much heavier than any dog on Earth, much heavier, even, than the time that she had broken into the cupboard and eaten up all the dog biscuits, and Lucy had found her lying on her back on the kitchen floor, her belly full of them. But now, instead of going back to feeling normal, she started to feel unusually light. In fact, she felt so light that she started to float. Her ears became like strange, floppy wings on either side of her head, undulating a little as she moved. Her paws became detached from the desk. And all at once she drifted up, so that she was suspended in the middle of the spaceship, with nothing underneath her and nothing above her, and nothing to either side other than empty space.
“Enjoy the flight!” said Lucy’s voice from out of some place that was hard to pinpoint.
Laika barked again. Why could she hear Lucy’s voice but not see her? What was going on?
Laika was not at all sure that she was enjoying this strange, new floaty sensation. And because she was a floppy kind of dog, with ears that flopped and a tail that flopped and fur that flopped and jowls that flopped, her floppiness became floatiness instead, so that all of a sudden she had ears that floated, and a tail that floated, and fur that started to undulate with floaty kinds of waves, and jowls that floated and wobbled to either side of her face, where before they used to hang down. Laika let out a surprised yelp and floated up to the ceiling.
Lucy and the Rocket Dog Page 3
