Galactic Adventures

by Tristan Bancks

  The day that plane exploded it felt like my life exploded, too. I’ve done a tonne of counselling, but none of it’s worked. I haven’t spoken much since the accident. I’m doing pretty badly at school, but I don’t care. I’ve had messages from Scott and Raf and Yada, but I haven’t got back to them. I don’t know why I’m like this. Nobody died in the accident. The rocket plane with Zarif and Palatnik on board was deployed seconds before the jet plane pilot and co-pilot ejected. The rocket plane landed safely and the jet with the engine fire plummeted into the desert with nobody on board.

  But the problem is that I knew what was going to happen before it happened. I knew that things weren’t right. So why didn’t I try harder to stop the launch? I should have done anything I could to stop it, laid down in front of the plane if I had to. People got hurt and burnt and could have died and I let it happen. I don’t want to speak to anyone anymore. It feels like my life is kind of over before it’s even started.

  The ‘First Kids in Space’ program was shut down while they investigated the cause of the crash. The protest movement and press haven’t stopped going on about it, saying that they knew something like this would happen. The chances of kids going to space anytime soon are now very slim.

  ‘Oh, give that to me,’ Karl says, grabbing the old lady’s blouse that I’m trying to fold. ‘Honestly, Dash, you’re going to need to snap out of it soon. I can’t go on with you like this forever.’

  Karl doesn’t have a lot of patience for the sick, the old, the young or the slow. He can deal with someone being sick for about the first day and then, after that, you’re expected to ‘wake up to yourself’. I’ve been in Zombieville for nine months and he’s over it.

  I walk out the front door of the shop, with his voice stalking me. ‘Go upstairs and get dinner on, will you? There’s some microwave pasta in the pantry. Nuke it. And don’t forget to put water in this time.’

  Outside, the city hits me in the face. It’s hot. Cars criss-cross everywhere. A truck slams its brakes and horn, then BANG! It hits a small yellow car and mashes the back of it. The owner gets out of the car and screams at the truck driver. People stop on the footpath to watch. I keep moving and press the button at the crossing on the corner. A tangle of wires hangs overhead. Glazed brown chickens hang in a shop window. A bus moans by, belching black smoke over me and others at the crossing. The button beeps. The signal flashes green. I walk and get lost in the crowd.

  This road has run right through my life. I was born in a hospital on this road a suburb away and was brought back to our apartment above the laundromat in a room overlooking the road. It’s the main route running right through the burbs – shops and car yards all the way. Twenty-five minutes to the heart of the city. I wander, looking straight ahead, not worried about where I’m going.

  My mind drifts back to Space School, those thoughts colliding with what I see around me now. My real life is the opposite of Space School. All I learn here is what I don’t want. Washing machines and traffic. Chicken shops and clutter. Semi-trailers and crime. Garbage stink and cheap jewellery stores.

  I walk.

  I walk around the corner and across a small park and up the hill. Kids squeal on jam-packed swings and slides, homeless people sleep in doorways. Houses and shops crowd all around. I slip up a side street and make it to the top of the hill. I look out toward the city. There are bridges and the harbour and big parks and bigger ideas in the way-distance. But I don’t know how I can be a part of it. I feel like I’m stuck here forever. I had my shot and it was a disaster. I don’t know that I’ll get another chance. This place has a way of getting its tentacles into you. I’ve seen it happen.

  I let mac and cheese fall from the box into an old, beaten-up Tupperware container. I twist the tap and the spout coughs slightly brown water onto the meal. I stick the bowl in the microwave.

  I watch a game show on our small portable TV as I eat dinner with Karl. He’s a noisy eater; the only person I know who slurps macaroni and cheese.

  He asks me a few questions, but I don’t say much.

  ‘You have to talk, Dash. You can’t stay silent forever,’ he says. But I can.

  I shower. I read a book in bed – a thing called My Side of the Mountain. I’ve read it a few times already. It’s good. I flick the lamp off and I try to sleep, but I haven’t had a proper night’s sleep in nine months. I twist and turn, trying to get comfortable, but it’s hot. I flick the lamp back on and grab my book again, then I look up at the plane dangling from my ceiling. I make a plan to take it down in the morning, then I flash back to lying in that field at my grandfather’s place, watching, waiting, then the blast of that plane overhead, the grass tickling my ears, and my dream of going into space. Now it just makes me feel sad, rather than inspired.

  Every day is the same. School – eyes-wide-sleeping through every lesson, bus home, staring into the dryer, getting kicked out by Karl for being useless, eating dinner from a box, reading, sleeping. Doing it all again. That’s my whole day, week, month, life. The only time I’ve been down to the basement car park since I got back home was to chuck out all my old rockets and parts.

  But, tonight, something different happens. The phone rings.

  23. Call to Action

  It’s about 9 when I hear the ring. We never get calls after 7. Actually, we never really get calls at all. I try to listen from my room for some sign of who it might be.

  I hear Karl speaking. He sounds like he’s speaking to someone he doesn’t know. I lay my book down on the bed, slide out onto the floor and tiptoe across the room. I peer out at him through a crack. He is standing in our shabby entrance hall, stubbly faced, leaning against the hall table and speaking into the walkabout phone.

  ‘Well, I’m not sure,’ he says. ‘I’d have to discuss it with Dash, but he’s been so down-in-the-dumps since all this happened. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t need this right now.’

  The psychologist, probably. But why is she calling at this time?

  Silence for a minute.

  ‘Yes, I know. Yes, I will – okay, then. Leave it with me. Okay, thank you, Madeleine. I will. Bye.’

  My heart skips three beats when I hear that name. Madeleine. I dart out of the room.

  ‘Who was that?’ I say.

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘No, who was it?’

  ‘Nobody, nosey. Go to bed.’

  ‘You said “Madeleine”. And you were talking about me. Was it Galactic Madeleine?’

  He looks at me, annoyed, like he’s about to start yelling. But I need to know.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Galactic Madeleine.’

  ‘What did she say? Why did you say, “Leave it with me”? Leave what with you?’

  ‘You don’t miss a trick, do you? Leave it with me till the morning,’ he says.

  ‘What do you mean? Tell me. She called for me, didn’t she?’

  ‘Not really. No. She called for both of us.’

  ‘Well, tell me my half.’

  ‘I have to go down and lock up,’ he says, heading up the hall towards the door. The laundry is self-serve after 6 and he locks up at 9 every night. I follow him down the hall.

  ‘You’re not coming down in your pyjamas, Dash.’

  ‘Well, just tell me.’

  He turns to me.

  ‘Please,’ I say.

  He opens the front door. ‘They’ve finished the investigation. It wasn’t human error. She says it was some freak mechanical thing. The plane manufacturer’s to blame. Madeleine and your mob are off the hook.’

  I look at him as if to say, ‘And—’

  ‘They’re flying again. Some new plane,’ he says. ‘And they want the five of you to go up,’ he says. ‘Even the kids who got sent home. The program starts again in February. They want you to go to Utopia. But there is no way that I’m going to let
you go. Look what happened to you last time.’

  He pulls the door open, says, ‘Now go to bed,’ and closes it quickly behind him. I stand there, looking at the door. I hear his footsteps clipping down the concrete stairs in amongst all the rush and groan of traffic.

  Go to bed? Is he kidding? You’re going to space. Now go to bed? I turn and walk back down the hall. Then I run and jump and I actually touch the ceiling. I usually miss it by about 5 centimetres. I’ve got the biggest smile I’ve had on my face all year. It’s mixed with memories of that explosion and the smoke and all the confusion in the control room, but this news has made me about 10 kilos lighter.

  Maybe I can make things better. I don’t even know what that means, but I do know that this is my way out. This is that second shot that kids like me don’t get.

  I lie on my bed, my head on the pillow. No covers. Too hot for covers. I shut my eyes and begin to imagine things. All these colours and shapes come in from the side of my vision, like a kaleidoscope. I actually drift away to sleep and I see clouds. Big fluffy, white clouds like mashed potato and I dive into them. I’m happy. I dream of letting off a rocket in the alley behind our place and a mini-me is inside it and it flies up and it never comes back down. I dream of The Magic Faraway Tree, a book I read when I was about seven or eight. These kids climb to the top of a tree and every few days there is a different ‘land’ up there. ‘The Land of Do-As-You-Please’ or ‘The Land of Spells’ – that kind of thing. For me, in my dream, when I climb to the topmost branch of the tree and poke my head through the cloud, I find myself pushing up through a manhole in the runway at the spaceport and there is just me and the plane and I’m not afraid at all. It’s dead quiet and sand blows gently across the tarmac into my eyes and I wipe them and climb up and walk to the plane and climb the steps, pull the door closed, sit in the cockpit, and I fly.

  24. Fly

  I feel the thrust of the machine shaking my body, pushing me through 4 Gs and up to 5. I sit, straight-faced, my jaw clenched – 6 Gs, then 7. At 8 my vision blurs at the edges and I’m really fighting to stay conscious. Then release. The pressure on my ribs, legs and face disappears and I feel like I’m falling. But I’m not.

  ‘Well done, Dash,’ says a scratchy Eastern European voice in my headset. ‘That’s higher Gs than you were pulling a year ago.’

  A minute later the centrifuge comes to a stop, the door is opened and I unclip. I step out into a white circular room in the Galactic spaceport. Heath, the spaceport worker with the grey hair and bushy moustache pats me on the back. It feels like I never left.

  Zarif, Rafaella, Yada, Scott and all their parents stand up in the viewing area behind glass, looking down at me. I can’t hear them, but I can see that they’re clapping and cheering. Then I see Karl. He’s not clapping, but he has a big smile on his face and he’s nodding. It’s one of the few times I’ve seen him really smile in years. He’s spent the past six years or so trying to be a mother and a father and run a business by himself and this is the first time I can remember him having even a day off work. It feels good to see him like this.

  It’s been two months since that call came in. He kept his ban on me going back to the spaceport, but I just acted like I was going anyway. I know how he rolls. He says no to everything and then later he says yes. And when he saw how much I changed after the phone call he had no choice but to agree. I started being able to sleep and eat and I was even talking to him again. I had something to live for.

  I didn’t want to go back to the spaceport by myself, so I pestered him to come with me. Eventually he agreed to borrow a bit of money from the bank and fly to Los Angeles with me. We hired a car and drove all the way across the desert to the spaceport in Nevada. Karl’s a lot more fun without an iron in his hand.

  You might be wondering why I wanted to go back. How could I watch a disaster like that, be so shaken up by it and then line up less than a year later to do the same thing again? I can’t answer that in words. Only my heart or something under my ribcage knows. It’s the same part of me that refused to get on the plane that day. And I’ve got to keep listening to it.

  I can choose never to do anything dangerous again and I might live till I’m 90. But I would live in bone-numbing boredom. I want life to be a rollercoaster adventure. I’ve gone from being the most ordinary kid on the planet to a guy who’s pulled 8 Gs in a centrifuge, skydived, ridden the Vomit Comet and learnt Russian. After everything that’s happened I know I’d rather risk death going after something big than never to reach for anything amazing at all.

  ‘That’s six minutes.’

  I pay no attention to Palatnik. I just keep spinning. I know I’m only expected to stay on the Vestibular Chair for five minutes, but I don’t care. I’ll stay on till they turn the lights out or kick me off. Nothing can touch me.

  ‘Nine minutes!’ he calls, but I stay on and spin round and around. This is three times as long as I lasted on my first attempt at the Death Chair. It’s a minute short of Zarif’s record, but I don’t care so much about being longest or fastest now. I just know that if I let go, if I de-focus my eyes, if I go within myself, then I can stay on forever. ‘Head down’, ‘Head up’, ‘Rip your head off’, it doesn’t matter what Palatnik throws at me. I can take it.

  ‘Seventeen minutes,’ he says. ‘Okay, that’s enough. Send him to space.’

  When I come to a standstill the kids and parents cheer. I close my eyes and wait for five full minutes for my body to adjust. Eventually I stand up. Zarif jumps into the chair. Palatnik sits, jotting notes into a clipboard folder. I walk over to him and stand next to his desk.

  ‘What?’ he says without looking up.

  ‘You really think I’m ready for space?’

  ‘No, but we got no more time to train you.’

  ‘I want to ask you something.’

  He keeps writing.

  ‘Why did you tell me at the beginning of training that I’d never make an astronaut, that I didn’t have what it takes?’

  Chuck keeps writing on his clipboard. He looks up at me.

  ‘I say that to all training astronauts.’

  ‘Why?’

  He shrugs his shoulders, turns a page and starts filling in numbers and notes on a chart. ‘It’s a test. The ones who were meant to do it, who were born to do it, go ahead and become an astronaut anyway.’

  ‘But what if they stopped because of what you said?’

  He looks up at me.

  ‘Then they were never meant to do it. It’s not my job to be your friend. It’s my job to get results. I’m the brick wall to stop those who don’t want it badly enough. Are you finished? I have work to do.’

  ‘Can I just ask you one more thing?’

  He sighs. ‘Make it quick.’

  ‘I know you don’t think we’re worthy ’cause you trained heaps harder before you went into space and stuff, but if you’d had a chance to go into space when you were a kid, would you have done it?’

  He looks annoyed and I sort of wish I hadn’t said it. I’m waiting for him to scream at me or tell me I’m useless or something. But the creases between his eyes soften a little bit and then his eyes widen. He grins and gives the biggest smile I’ve ever seen him give, apart from when he’s doing something nasty to someone.

  ‘You know I would,’ he says. ‘Now get out of here before I throw you off the program.’

  I leave and, in some sick way, I feel grateful to Chuck Palatnik.

  In my two weeks of brush-up training at the spaceport I pass the medical, the physical, the simulator and all the challenges. It’s like the time away has cemented in my mind all the things I couldn’t do before. I even remember most of my Russian. Physics still gives me sharp brain pains, but I can’t expect miracles. Every day at dawn I go up to the control room and I watch the final test flights and drills on Galactic 8, the newest mothership
that will piggyback us 18 kilometres into the sky for launch. They say it’s safer and faster than Galactic 7, but I’m pretty keen to make sure. I ask lots of questions.

  Zarif is still strong in all the challenges and he seems almost unfazed by the accident. ‘We’re not riding bikes,’ he says. ‘We’re riding planes and rockets. It’s dangerous. That’s why I’m here.’ I hate it when he says stuff like that.

  Raf’s body is stronger and she does well in the physicals. She even manages to skydive without getting upset. She says she’s inspired by the fact that I got through it. She doesn’t enjoy it, but she survives.

  Scott is still scared of his own shadow, but he’s grown taller and lost a bit of weight, and that gives him more of an edge in the physical stuff. He says that last time there was too much pressure. This time he made his own decision to come. Partly he just missed the food. I’m still trying to get him to eat those pellets of Marv’s rat poo.

  Yada is still wild and fun. She’s been doing these amazing artworks based on the sun and moon. She’s discovered Leonardo Da Vinci, which helps her with physics. I talk to her for ages about that night we got caught and we decide that maybe it was meant to happen, that if she hadn’t got caught, maybe both of us would have ended up on board the plane that blew. I still kind of like her a fair bit. I’m glad she’s coming.

  ‘No wonder they call it space.’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Yada.

  ‘I mean look at it all.’

  It’s the night before launch. The five of us are lying on the grassed roof at the back of the spaceport. The deep dark sky spreads out before us. It looks like somebody’s thrown a handful of tiny diamonds out into the blackness and they’re just hanging there forever.

  I look over the tarmac toward the rocket graveyard. Light rain falls. The wind farm fills the air with its neverending groan. It’s a sound I like, though. I missed it while I was away. And the farm has doubled in size in the past year. The field of tall white turbines stretches all the way to the mountains in the distance.