They both jumped through onto a patch of lunar ground, and found themselves in the polar region of Earth’s friendly little satellite.
“Whoa!” said George as he stepped onto the Moon itself. “This is amazing!” For a moment he forgot that he’d escaped terrible danger on Enceladus only to be denied passage back to Earth by a computer that had suddenly developed a bad attitude and a control fixation. Just for a few seconds, the pure pleasure of standing on the Moon overwhelmed him. He spread his arms wide and experienced the wonder of space travel and the joy of discovery.
Despite having endlessly pestered anyone who would listen about her wish to visit the Moon, Annie wasn’t quite as rapt as her friend. She was still focused on the practicalities. “Where are we now?” she radioed Cosmos.
“You are at the lunar pole, where a series of unlit craters contain water ice,” said Cosmos, still using the unpleasantly smarmy voice.
“Thank you, Cosmos,” said Annie quietly. “Even though I’ve always wanted to stand on the Moon, I have to say, this isn’t going to be my number one favorite space trip ever. And I think I’ve seen enough for my chemistry project.” She scuffed the ground with her boot, and dusty, icy fragments drifted upward. “I now know without a doubt that there is water in space, and I have plenty to write about. Which means that you can take us home! Please,” she added, knowing that Cosmos—at least in his former incarnation—appreciated politeness.
“In ten minutes,” said the computer, now in a tinny, mechanical voice. “Nine minutes fifty-nine, nine minutes fifty-eight …”
“What are we going to do for ten minutes?” George wondered. He knew it didn’t sound like a long time, but when you were trapped in space and unable to get home, even a few seconds could start to feel like millennia.
“Override him so we get home faster!” Annie sounded panicky. “Wait! Look behind you!”
George wheeled round and gasped. Just moments before the dusty lunar landscape had been totally empty, but now he saw what looked like a small car perched on a distant outcrop, outlined against the black sky in the faint glow of light that touched the ridges of the Moon mountains.
“It’s a lunar exploration rover!” exclaimed Annie. “It must have been left behind by a mission to the Moon. But why is it moving? And WHO is driving it?” She sounded nearly hysterical now.
George was rooted to the spot, his mouth wide open inside his space helmet. “It’s okay,” he tried to reassure her. “They must be miles away. If Cosmos sets up the portal, we can get out of here before they reach us. It’ll take them forever to drive around all those craters without crashing into one.”
But he hadn’t anticipated what came next. The doors of the rover opened, and two large, sleek robots jumped out; they immediately headed toward the two friends, covering the ground with long, purposeful strides.
Back on Earth, Cosmos didn’t seem bothered. “Eight minutes thirty,” he was still intoning. “Eight minutes twenty-nine.”
“Hurry up, Cosmos!” shouted Annie.
The robots were advancing quickly; they were silver with very long legs and arms attached to a short but powerful-looking body. Their heads were square, and even from a distance, there was something menacing about the expressions on their robotic features. As they moved, their arms swung in time with their strong legs. They didn’t look like the sort of robots that anyone wanted to meet when they were out for a walk on the Moon. On and on they marched, shattering soft moon rocks under their boots as they did so.
But Cosmos just casually replied: “Eight minutes twenty-eight … eight minutes twenty-seven … ”
“He’s ignoring us!” cried Annie in frustration. “I think he wants those robots to get us!”
“I don’t know what they are,” said George, “but I don’t like this. Annie, can you think of another way to get us out of here?”
“No, I— Hang on, I’ve got an idea! Ebot!” Using the special glasses, Annie tried to summon the android. “Rats!” Inside her space helmet, she was frantically swiveling her eyes and wiggling her eyebrows, trying to activate the eye-gaze technology that alerted Ebot and got him operational. She managed to change to his field of vision, but he seemed to have gone back to sleep.
“Why isn’t this working better?” she cried in frustration. “It was easy before!”
“Eight minutes and two seconds,” said Cosmos unhelpfully.
George realized that, given the speed with which the robots were now approaching, they would easily reach them before Cosmos had opened the return space portal. If Cosmos opened it at all. There was, he reasoned, nowhere left to run, so only one option remained. He would have to stand and fight. George drew himself up to his full height and prepared to face down the robots.
Having made his decision, George felt surprisingly calm. If this was his time to show courage, he figured, then that was what he would do. He would stand here until they arrived, and then he would take them on in boy-to-robot combat. He was ready.
Behind him, Annie was still attempting to contact Ebot. In front of him, one of the robots slipped as it tried to bound over a massive hole in the ground, crashing into the crater. But the other one kept going, arms outstretched. It was still a long way away, but every stride brought it closer.
A second later, however, Annie managed to wriggle her eyebrows and get control of Ebot: she sparked him into action. Using the command menus on the glasses, which Eric had had customized to include a long list of useful commands, she managed to make Ebot stand up in Eric’s study and walk over to Cosmos. But once he reached the computer, Annie found that she had run out of options. She couldn’t persuade him to do anything else. She had a terrestrial android standing in front of a sulky, unhelpful computer, but no way of connecting the two pieces of technology.
“I don’t know what to do!” she said to George in despair. “I don’t know how to work Ebot’s hands!”
“I do!” George had the haptic gloves on under his space gloves. He waved a hand in front of his face while Annie watched through Ebot’s eyes, as the android copied the movement. “Do you know how to override Cosmos?” he asked Annie, casting a fearful glance at the robot, which was advancing inexorably.
“Not really,” she admitted. “But if you try pressing a random combination of keys, it might be enough to jolt Cosmos out of the auto-function he seems stuck in now.”
“I’ll try it,” said George. He wriggled his fingers as though tapping a computer keyboard. “It would help if I could see what I was doing.”
“I can’t take off my helmet to give you the glasses!” said Annie. “My head would explode if I did that!”
However, she could see the scene in her father’s study. And she could see that George and Ebot’s combined efforts with Cosmos’s keyboard had come to nothing. Ebot’s fingers had just skimmed across the surface without having any impact.
“Try again,” Annie instructed. “Go more slowly! Pretend you are pressing one key at a time, but keep them down.”
Holding his hands in midair in front of his chest, George moved each finger and thumb with deliberation.
As he did so, 225,000 miles away on Earth, Ebot depressed a series of Cosmos’s keys.
In the distance, the strange robot continued to advance, using the low gravity of the Moon to help it cover the ground.
Meanwhile this time, amazingly, it seemed as though George and Ebot’s random movements on the keyboard were having an effect. “Time lock canceled,” announced Cosmos, still speaking in his mechanical tinny voice but at least saying something they wanted to hear. “Portal command has been reinstated.”
“Whoa!” said Annie as a familiar shape started to materialize in front of them. “It’s the portal! We did it, George! We’re going to get out of here just in time!”
They glanced round at the approaching robot; they had just enough time for the portal to stabilize and let them through before it reached them.
Annie hugged George in triumph, but as she did so,
over his shoulder, she noticed something and yelped in horror, “Ohmigod! There’s a red light on the back of your space suit. The robot’s got you in its sights!”
Suddenly the robot sped up. “It’s locked on to you!” she shrieked. “If it tries to shoot you, it can’t miss!”
Closer and closer the robot came; now they could see that instead of hands, it had huge pincers at the end of its arms, one of which it was aiming straight at George, as though it could fire something from it. They could see the set expression of anger and determination that its robot features had been forged into. They could see how the ground shook each time a heavy robot foot slammed down onto it. Meanwhile the portal doorway gradually solidified out of beams of light.
Just as the robot was stretching toward George, the portal door swung back; through it they saw Eric’s study, Earth—and safety.
“George!” screamed Annie, shoving him ahead of her before the robot could grab him. She tumbled after him, doing a forward roll through the door, which started to close behind her as the robot attempted to barge its way through.
As George turned and caught a last glimpse of the robot’s ugly, menacing face before the door swung shut, he noticed something they hadn’t seen before. Emblazoned on the side of the robot’s face were three letters: IAM. Not only that … as they passed through the doorway, George heard a strange robotic voice through the voice transmitters in his space helmet:
“QED, Professor Bellis. QED.” And then the door on space closed, leaving the robot on the other side of it.
PICTURE FILES • SATURN AND ITS MOONS
Saturn • NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Enceladus • NASA/Science Photo Library
ENCELADUS
Enceladus Hubble • NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Enceladus showing ice fountains. • Mark Garlick / Science Photo Library
Its surface. • NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
Two sides of the moon ?? • NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University
JUPITER
Jupiter with Ganymede. © NG Images / Alamy
Great Red Spot • NASA/Science Photo Library
COMETS
Comet ISON • NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Sunspot © Greg Piepol (Sungazer.net)
Northern Lights around Earth. • NASA
SPACE STATIONS
Space Oddity • NASA
Expedition 35 Crew members. • NASA
The two friends lay on the floor, panting with the sheer terror and excitement of their expedition. Finally they managed to drag themselves up, not only out of breath but also readjusting to Earth’s gravitational pull, so much stronger than that of the Moon. Each time they returned to Earth from space, they experienced the shock of coming back to the Earth’s gravity; yet each time they forgot about it until it happened.
“Well, I think we found out all we needed to know about water in space, don’t you?” said Annie as she wriggled out of her space suit. She was trying to sound normal, but once she had taken off her helmet, George saw that her blue eyes were wide and staring.
She went straight over to Cosmos, opened up a new file, and started to type: WRATE.
“That was superscary!” said George. “Annie … just before the door closed, I heard a voice say ‘QED, Professor Bellis!’ What does that even mean?”
“Um, it means something like ‘That is proved,’ doesn’t it?” she told him. “I think I’ve heard Dad say it. But why would a robot on the Moon say that to you? It doesn’t make sense. None of this makes sense.”
But suddenly they both had the same thought: their eyes swiveled toward Cosmos, who sat innocently on Eric’s desk, as though nothing in his universe had changed since the days when they were such great friends.
George was paranoid. Was the computer actually listening to their conversation? Was it safe to talk in front of him? They both went very quiet. It was hard to believe that Cosmos had tried to … George couldn’t even begin to think what he might have been trying to do to them. Surely it wasn’t possible? But reviewing the evidence, he reflected that not only had Cosmos deposited them on top of an erupting cryovolcano, he had then transferred them to a location on the Moon governed by aggressive robots who seemed to bitterly resent intruders.
“What now?” he asked cautiously.
Cosmos supplied the answer. “Don’t you want to write up your research notes about water in space?” he suggested to Annie. “Your project is time-sensitive, after all.” It still wasn’t his old voice; it was now silky smooth again, but somehow rather threatening. On the screen, he changed Annie’s WRATE to WATER.
“Yes, of course I do,” said Annie rather faintly. She looked like she couldn’t decide between continuing with her beloved project and running from the room screaming.
George was astonished that they were talking about a school project so soon after nearly being poached in volcanic water on a moon of Saturn. It was hard to adjust to life back on Earth in Eric’s office, chatting away with Cosmos as though everything was normal.
“Affirmative,” agreed Cosmos. Ebot had gone back to sitting quietly in the corner, looking like an abandoned giant doll.
Annie and George exchanged baffled looks.
“We’d better do what Cosmos says,” whispered Annie. “It might give us an idea about what’s going on with him.”
She started to talk, and as she did so, Cosmos wrote her words out on the screen. “Water,” she said, “is a molecule made up of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. It is made when—” She stopped. “How is water made?” she asked.
“It’s made by stars, isn’t it?” said George. “Is that right, Cosmos?”
If he started up some kind of conversation with the supercomputer, they might be able to work out what had happened to the Cosmos they knew and loved. It was like the scene in a horror movie where the kids try to pacify a dangerous lunatic in order to buy time and come up with some kind of rescue plan.
“Yes,” agreed Cosmos, who sounded slightly more friendly now that they had him on his own specialist topic: the universe and everything in it. “Most of the water in the universe is made during the formation of stars, where high pressures and temperatures in the surrounding cloud force hydrogen and oxygen atoms together. Water makes up seventy-one percent of the surface of Earth; there is so much water that we never have to make any ourselves, but no one is exactly sure how it got to be here.”
Suddenly George had an idea. He wasn’t entirely sure if it would work, but he figured it was worth a try. If Annie could keep Cosmos occupied, he might be able to run a check on the computer’s systems, see what had happened to him and find out whether he could make a repair. George wasn’t as IT-gifted as their friend Emmett, who had come to stay one summer, but he had learned a lot from Emmett and from IT lessons. It was worth a shot. Rooting around, he managed to find a piece of scrap paper and a pen that sort of worked. He scribbled a message and showed it to Annie:
Keep him talking! And give me your phone.
“Erm, Cosmos … ,” said Annie gamely, slipping her phone to George. “Why is water so important?”
“Ah—water,” replied Cosmos enthusiastically, “is one of the most important molecules of all, as far as you humans are concerned, because life as we know it would not be possible without it. Around sixty percent of the body is made up of water, and people cannot survive more than a few days without it. This is because a lot of the chemistry that happens in the body needs water in order to work. Plants also need water to grow.”
“Yes, that’s right.” Annie was at her most charming. “A good point, Cosmos, our clever friend.” While the computer had been talking, George had discreetly plugged a backup hard drive into the laptop and was now connecting Annie’s phone to the Bellises’ home wireless network—trying to log in to Cosmos remotely and search his system for signs of a problem. He motioned for Annie to keep the compu
ter talking, in the hope that this would distract him from noticing what George was up to.
“Cosmos, what is the link between water and life?” asked Annie, gazing at the screen with rapt attention.
“I’m glad you asked,” replied the computer. Very fortunately, Cosmos seemed so intent on his explanation that he didn’t react to what George was doing. “In fact, water is so important to life that people looking for life on other planets first check for evidence of the existence of water. If there is no water, it is almost certain that there will be no life there. The chemistry to make the building blocks of life happens in, and uses, water; without water, the molecules of life cannot easily be made.”
“Thank you.” Annie looked over at George, hoping he might have been successful by now. But just as she did so, there was a commotion in the hallway. Suddenly the two of them realized that it was already evening! Neither of them could have said how long they had spent in space, but the day on Earth seemed to have finished while they had been out exploring.
“Why is the car outside full of comforters and bottled water?” Eric asked.
“I have some news,” they heard Susan reply. Her voice was rather more high-pitched than usual, as though she didn’t believe the words she was saying herself. “You’ll be so excited, I know… . My family is coming to stay.”
“Your … family?” Eric’s disbelief was clear even through the walls. “How many of your family?”
“Well … all of them.” Susan broke into hysterical laughter. “They got those free flights on the Internet, and now they’re all on their way here from Australia!”
“Oh no, you are kidding!” cried Eric in horror. “Your whole family! What have I done to deserve this?”
As they talked, the pair of them burst into the study, where Annie and George sat meekly in front of Cosmos, her chemistry project displayed on the screen.
George and the Unbreakable Code Page 9
