by Lucy Hawking
That boy, wrote Eric in Mabel’s book, has put Annie and George in terrible danger. I am incandescent.
“We can see that,” said Mabel. “But you are also wasting valuable time and you need to listen. And stop blaming Emmett.”
Eric really did explode this time. “Somehow he managed to repair my computer without telling me,” he ranted. “And then he let Annie and George go off across the Universe, chasing after some crank message Annie imagined she’d received through a computer, which at the time didn’t even work, from aliens who don’t exist. And now Cosmos is malfunctioning again, and we have no idea if we can ever get them back!”
Mabel had clearly heard every word. “Oh, stop it!” she snapped. “This isn’t Emmett’s fault. This is entirely the work of your daughter and my grandson. It’s got their sticky fingerprints all over it. George told me he had to come to Florida because Annie had something important she wanted him to do. And this must be it. They have gone on a mission because they believe the Earth is in danger and they need to do something about it. They received the first clue on Earth, but Emmett here tells me that when they followed it to Mars, they found another clue waiting for them. That clue sent them to Titan. They’ve just left Titan and gone to look for a planet around”—Mabel checked her notebook—“Alpha Centauri.”
“What?” said Eric. “You mean they haven’t gone out there just for fun, for messing around? You mean they’ve actually gone to one location, found a clue, and then gone farther out?”
Emmett nodded, his eyes squeezed tight shut.
“How in the name of Einstein could that happen?” asked Eric in disbelief.
“Um, I created a remote portal application when I was updating Cosmos,” whispered Emmett, finding a bit of his voice again. “I’m really sorry.”
Eric took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. “And you say they got to Mars and found another clue waiting for them?”
“Yup,” said Emmett. “It was drawn on the surface of Mars by Homer’s tires.”
Eric put his glasses back on and sprang to his feet. “Emmett”—he took the boy by his shoulders—“I’m sorry I shouted at you. I really am. But I need to reach Annie and George immediately. Can you send me out to Alpha Centauri?”
Emmett sagged a little. “I can try,” he said nervously. “But Cosmos is being a bit difficult, and I’m worried that he is using too much memory now. I don’t know what will happen if I send another person through the portal.”
But Eric had already gone to get his space suit.
Emmett plonked himself down cross-legged in front of Cosmos. Mabel stood over him. “My poor old joints won’t let me get down that far,” she said regretfully.
“Oh!” said Emmett. Immediately he got to his feet, picked up Cosmos, and balanced him on the side of the half-assembled satellite so that George’s gran could see the screen. He fetched some spare machinery parts, which he arranged as a sort of chair, so that Mabel could sit down.
“Thank you, Emmett,” she said. “That’s very considerate of you.”
“My pleasure,” he said seriously. He tried to arrange some of the shiny yellow foil as a blanket over Mabel’s knees, but she batted him away.
“Go on with you!” she said affectionately. “Get to your computer and don’t worry about this old dear.”
Nervously Emmett entered his personal password, waiting to see if Cosmos would react as badly to him as he had done to Eric. “Access granted,” said Cosmos politely. Emmett then typed in a command for locating the last portal activity, so that he could create another doorway from Earth and send Eric through it to where Annie and George had gone. But this time it wasn’t Cosmos’s attitude that worried Emmett so much. It was his ability to perform the tasks they so badly needed him to do.
“Planet…orbit…Alpha Centauri…,” said Cosmos slowly. “Seeking coordinates for last portal activity in the Alpha Centauri star system…Seeking…planet in orbit…Seeking information…Seeking last portal location…” The little hourglass appeared on Cosmos’s screen. Emmett pressed a few keys, but Cosmos did not respond. All that happened was that the little hourglass flashed a few times, as though to remind Emmett that Cosmos was busy.
I think he is running out of memory, Emmett wrote in Mabel’s notebook as they waited. He’s using so much of it at the moment to operate these portals in distant space. It’s really important we don’t ask him too many difficult questions right now.
“What do we need to know?” asked Mabel.
We need to know where Cosmos sent Annie and George. They asked him to find them a planet in the Alpha Centauri star system.
“And how do you find a planet in space…?”
* * *
THE USER’S GUIDE TO THE UNIVERSE
HOW TO FIND A PLANET IN SPACE
Planets don’t generate their own energy, leaving them very dim compared to their nuclear-powered home stars. If you use a powerful telescope to take a picture of a planet, its faint light will be lost in the glare of the star it orbits.
However, planets can be detected by the gravitational pull they exert on their star. Planets pull apples, moons, and satellites toward them with gravity, and they also pull on their home star. Just as a dog on a leash can yank its owner around, a planet can pull its home star around, with the leash being gravity.
Astronomers can watch a nearby star, especially a close one such as Alpha Centauri A or B, to see if it is being yanked around by an unseen planet. The responsive motion of a star is a telltale sign of a planet, and that motion can be detected in two ways.
Firstly, the light waves from the star are either compressed or stretched as it approaches or recedes from us on Earth (this is called the Doppler Effect).
Secondly, two telescopes acting as one can combine the light waves from a star to detect the motion of that star.
Planets as small as Earth and as large as Jupiter can be detected using these techniques.
Maybe one day you will find a planet that no one has ever spotted before! spotted before!
Geoff
* * *
Chapter 13
Eeew!” said Annie, shielding her eyes with her arm as they stepped through the portal from Titan onto the planet Cosmos had found for them in orbit around the star Alpha Centauri B. Fortunately, after a few seconds, the special glass in her space helmet visor darkened and her vision started coming back.
“Wow! It’s bright,” said George, stepping through after her. This time they thought they were better prepared than when they had landed on Mars and Titan. They had gotten out the emergency rope and the metal pegs that came with their space suits, ready to tether themselves to the surface of their new planet. But when they stepped through the doorway, they found that for once they didn’t float off. Instead, they felt much heavier than they did on Earth. They could still walk, but it was an effort to pick up each leg to move forward.
“Oof!” said Annie, dropping the rope and the pegs. “I feel like I’m being squished.” It was as though someone was pushing her toward the bleached ground.
“More gravity!” said George. “We must be on a planet similar to Earth but with a greater mass, so we feel the gravity more strongly than we would at home. But it can’t be that much greater or we’d be crushed by now.”
“I’m going to sit down,” puffed Annie. “I’m really tired.”
“No! Don’t!” said George. “You might never get up again. You shouldn’t sit down, Annie, or we’ll never get away from here.”
Annie groaned and leaned on him. She felt like a ton, and George staggered to stay upright and hold on to her at the same time.
“Annie, we’ve got to find the next clue and leave,” he said urgently. “There’s too much gravity here for us—we weren’t built to exist in conditions like these. If we were ants, we’d be okay. But we’re too big for high-gravity places. And it’s too shiny. It hurts my eyes.”
Where Mars—and certainly Titan—had been much darker than the Earth, this new
planet was blindingly bright. Even with the dark space visors protecting their eyes like superstrength sunglasses, it was still difficult to see. “Don’t look directly at the sun,” warned George. “It’s even brighter than our Sun at home.”
Not that there was much to look at. Around them stretched miles of bald rock, baking in the brilliant light beaming down on this heavy, hot planet. George gazed around anxiously, looking for some sign that would lead them to the fourth clue.
“Whass…that…over…there?” Annie, who was now leaning on him entirely, flapped an arm in one direction. Her speech had become very slow and slurred.
George shook her. “Annie! Wake up! Wake up!” The light and the weight of this weird planet seemed to be drugging her. He tried to call Cosmos or Emmett. The first time he got a busy signal, the second, a recorded message saying: “Your call is important to us. Press the pound key plus one to be put through to—” But then he was cut off.
Annie flopped onto him. She was so heavy on this planet that it was like trying to carry a baby elephant. George stood there, Annie’s head on his shoulder and his arms around her. He started to feel really scared. He imagined that in years to come, when the first interstellar travellers made the journey to this unnamed planet in orbit around one of the nearest stars to Earth, they might find the scorched remains of two human children, frazzled and boiled into fragments on the parched surface. Somewhat dazed himself, he pictured them leaping off their spaceship to claim this new planet, only to find that two kids had once made the four-light-year journey to this infernal place, only to perish under its burning star.
But just as he was giving up hope and starting to sag toward the ground, the light in the sky began to dim a little. It was changing from brilliant white to a softer yellow.
“Look, Annie!” he said, shaking her in his arms. “The sun’s going down! You’re going to be okay! Just hold on for a few minutes more. It’s moving across the sky pretty quickly—well, quicker than the Sun back home on Earth, anyway. Once it goes down, we’ll be able to cool off and find the clue.”
“Huh?” said Annie blearily. She raised her head from his shoulder and stared out behind him. “But it’s not going down! It’s coming up…. It’s really pretty,” she went on dreamily. “Bright shiny star rising in the sky…”
“Annie, it’s not going up!” said George, who thought she must be hallucinating. “Concentrate! The sun is going down, not up!” The light around them was dimming gently.
“Don’t be silly!” Annie sounded annoyed, her voice slightly stronger. George felt relieved—if she could get mad at him, then she was definitely feeling better. “I know up from down, and I tell you it’s going up!”
They moved apart by a few inches and stood staring over each other’s shoulders.
“It’s that way,” said Annie, pointing. “Up!”
“No, it’s over there!” said George. “Down!”
“Turn around,” ordered Annie.
George turned around very slowly—it wasn’t possible to move fast on the high-gravity planet—and saw she was right. There was a small bright sun in the sky behind him, rising over the rocky planet. It didn’t give the same glaring light as the sun setting on the other side of the planet, but it shone a gentle beam on them, meaning that it would not often be dark on this bright, barren planet.
“Of course! We’re in a binary star system, just like it showed us in the clue! This planet has two suns!” said George. “I’m sure I’ve read about this system on the Net. One sun is bigger than the other—that one setting must be Alpha B, the star this planet orbits. It looks bigger because we’re closer to it. And the other one must be Alpha A, the other star in the Centauri system. Alpha A is actually larger, but we’re farther away from it.”
Now that the light was growing softer, they could make out more of the landscape around them. Quite nearby they saw the lip of a huge hole in the ground.
“Let’s go and have a look in there,” said Annie.
“Because…?” questioned George.
“There isn’t anywhere else to look!” She shrugged. “And maybe there’s another clue down there. On both Mars and Titan, Cosmos sent us really close to each new clue. Have you got any better suggestions?” She seemed back to her usual difficult self.
“Nope,” said George. He tried calling Emmett again but just got the busy signal again.
“Come on,” said Annie, “but I’m not walking.” She dropped to her hands and knees and started to crawl toward the crater.
George tried to walk, but it was so difficult and slow. He felt like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, having to throw each leg forward in order to move. So he too got down on his hands and knees and followed Annie, who was now peering over the edge to see what lay at the bottom.
“There’s nothing there,” she said in disappointment, looking into the gaping empty crater formed by a collision with a comet or an asteroid.
George wriggled up beside her. “Then where will we find the next cl—?” he started to say. But he stopped. Because just then, at the very bottom of the huge crater, they saw something they definitely weren’t expecting. Faintly, but getting more solid by the second, they saw the outline of a doorway. And at the same moment as one space boot and then another stepped through it, the transmission device in George’s helmet buzzed into life.
“George!” he heard. “This is your grandmother speaking. Eric is on the way!”
Chapter 14
At the bottom of the crater, Eric stepped quickly through the portal and promptly fell flat on his face. He had prepared his telling-off speech to the kids while he was getting ready to walk through Cosmos’s doorway. But once he reached the distant planet, all he came out with was “Nrrgghh!”
“Dad!” cried Annie from the top of the crater, and burst into tears inside her space helmet. She no longer cared whether he was going to be mad at her. She just felt overjoyed to see him. She slithered over the crater’s lip and wriggled down toward him on her tummy. As Eric rolled over onto his back, Annie crashed into him and gave him a great big hug.
“Dad!” she sobbed. “It’s so nasty here! I don’t like this planet.”
Eric gave a huge sigh that Emmett and Mabel heard many millions of miles away on planet Earth, and he decided to save his speech about kids who traveled through space by themselves when they shouldn’t for another time. Instead, he hugged Annie.
George’s gran had no such reservations. “George!” she said sternly over the link from Earth. “I can’t believe you roped me into this dangerous scheme without telling me! I’m very angry that you didn’t see fit to properly inform me why you wanted to come to America….” She went on and on, and George wished he could turn down the volume, as Emmett had done with Cosmos. But then he looked into the crater and saw Eric beckoning George to come and join them.
“Sorry, Gran!” said George. “I have to go! We’ll talk later.” And he slid down the side of the enormous hole to join Eric and Annie, ending up in a group hug in space suits at the bottom of the crater on an unnamed planet orbiting Alpha B in the Alpha Centauri star system.
“I’ve got to close down the portal for a few minutes,” came Emmett’s voice. “I can’t hold the portal and do all the other things I need to with Cosmos. So don’t panic when the doorway vanishes. I’ll get it back to you right away.”
The portal doorway became translucent and started to fade away. George, Annie, and Eric lay back against the curved surface of the crater’s wall and gazed at Alpha A, moving across the clear, dark blue sky.
“So, George and Annie,” said Eric as they lay on either side of him. “Here we all are, together, once again. Lost in space, once again.” By now, the portal had completely disappeared.
“Can we go home now?” sniffed Annie. “I’ve had enough of this.”
“Soon, very soon,” said Eric calmly. “Just as soon as Emmett gets the reverse portal working again.”
“What!” exclaimed George, trying to sit up but fi
nding he didn’t have the strength left to fight gravity. He lay back down again. “You mean we can’t go back to Earth?”
“I’m afraid not,” said Eric quietly. “Cosmos is having some problems, but Emmett will sort them out. I wouldn’t have left him in charge if I weren’t sure he was the best person for the job. He’s already done things with Cosmos I couldn’t even dream of.”
“You mean you came here to find us even though you knew we might not be able to get back?” said Annie. “That we might be stuck here forever?”
“Of course I did,” said Eric. “I couldn’t leave you out here by yourselves, could I?”
“Oh, Dad!” cried Annie. “I’m so sorry! Now we’re going to be burned to a crisp on this horrible planet, and it’s all my fault!”
“Don’t be silly, Annie. This isn’t your fault, and it’s going to be okay! We’re not going to stay long enough for that to happen,” said Eric firmly. “But we do need to leave here before Alpha B rises again. Even with our space suits, it’s too hot for us on this planet because it lies too close to its star—that’s why there is no water and no life here. But we’ll go somewhere else. Somewhere nicer.”
“So Cosmos can still send us farther out?” said George hopefully. He didn’t want to see the blinding light of Alpha B ever again in his whole life.
“Yes,” said Eric, more confidently than he felt. “Sometimes we have to go far, far away in order to be able to get back. So don’t worry if it feels like we are traveling in the wrong direction. Think of it as gaining perspective.”
“How soon will Alpha B rise again?” asked George.
“I don’t know for certain,” said Eric, “but we must be gone before its dawn.”
“Where are we going?” said Annie.
“Another planet,” Eric told her. “Cosmos is looking for another planet to send us to. Emmett tells me that you have been following clues across the Universe—in a sort of cosmic treasure hunt.”
