George and the Blue Moon Page 11
George’s heart jumped. “Put it in your mouth,” he whispered back in her ear. “That way, if it goes off, the sound and light will be muffled.”
Annie pulled an “Ew” face back at him as they lay under the desk but did as he told her, unhooking her pager and popping the gobstopper-sized object into her mouth. She desperately wanted to tell George about her revelation—that she thought she had met Rika before somewhere, and she was racking her brains as to where that could be or when. But with the pager in her mouth, she couldn’t even whisper to her friend.
After a few minutes, which seemed like hours on end for Annie and George, during which they just heard random noises they couldn’t make any sense of, finally they heard Rika speak.
“Prepare the portal,” she announced very clearly. “Robots, add space weights!” Annie pinched George sharply at the word “portal.” The kind of portal they knew about was a doorway that led into space. And if the robots were putting on space weights, that must mean they were about to go into different gravitational conditions where they needed to be heavier. “Open portal.” They heard Rika’s voice give the order. But her voice wasn’t charming or as honeyed as it had been before. This time, it was a little metallic and seemed to have a screeching echo at the back of it, as though it wasn’t quite a real voice after all.
From under the desk, Annie and George both saw a brilliantly white light flash across Mission Control. They heard a clanking noise, which sounded like the three robots were slowly walking heavily forward. A blast of cold air rushed into the room, carrying a mineral-rich scent with it. And after just a couple of seconds, the light, the cold air, and the smell were gone. And then they heard tap-tapping footsteps and saw Rika’s high heels under her blue flight suit walking back the way she came. She closed the door of Mission Control behind her and was gone.
Very cautiously, Annie and George levered themselves out from under the desk, pagers still held inside their mouths. Even though they had not seen the three robots leave the room with Rika, they were now alone once more in Mission Control. The robots had seemingly vanished into thin air! And where the moving image of Europa had been, the screen was now just blank and black.
George motioned toward the computer, meaning they must try and log on, to send a message to Eric—surely it must be possible to send a message out to him, even if his messages in might not reach them—but as he did so he noticed Annie’s cheeks start to glow with a translucent red color, from her pager inside her mouth, now beeping and flashing. Annie, of course, also saw George’s face light up like Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer’s.
And they both knew what they had to do. There was no time to try and send a message to Eric or search for more information about how the robots could have seemingly disappeared from inside this room, what the mysterious portal was generated by, or whether that really had been Europa they had seen on screen.
There was only one thing to do—run!
Why do we weigh different amounts on different worlds?
• Your weight is the amount of gravitational force between you and the Earth.
• Your mass is the amount of matter, or stuff, that you contain.
Mass is measured in pounds (lbs). But isn’t weight measured in pounds too? Isn’t that confusing? Yes, it is.
Weight is commonly described in pounds (or kilograms) on Earth but it really should be given in Newtons (N). A Newton is a unit of force.
A mass of 2.2 lbs on Earth is about 10N.
When you travel across the Solar System, your mass doesn’t change. But your weight does.
When you land on a planet or moon with weaker gravity than the Earth, your weight changes although your mass stays the same.
What does this mean in practice?
If you weigh 75 pounds on Earth, here is your weight in pounds on other bodies in our solar system!
Mercury
28.2 pounds
Venus
67.5 pounds
The Moon
12.3 pounds
Mars
28.2 pounds
Jupiter
177 pounds
Saturn
79.6 pounds
Uranus
66.6 pounds
Neptune
84.2 pounds
So you could jump over really high bars with ease on the Moon or Mercury—but find it hard to even take a step over a bar on the ground on Jupiter!
Life on Mars by Kellie Geradi
Normally I enjoy sleeping late, but every year on the morning of my birthday, my eyes seem to pop right open with excitement. Last year was no different, and on the morning of February 16, I jumped out of bed. Except something was different. There were no birds chirping outside my window, no scent of my favorite breakfast wafting in from the kitchen, and I couldn’t hear the familiar sounds of my family moving around downstairs.
Then I remembered that I wasn’t at home for my birthday this year. In fact, I wasn’t even on Planet Earth! I was on Mars with six other scientists from around the world, studying what it’s like to live on another planet.
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live on another world? It’s easy to forget that Earth is not the only planet in the solar system. Seven other planets whiz around the Sun just like ours! This is lucky for us, because someday humans might need to find a new home! We haven’t always taken very good care of our planet, and one day the Earth will be overheated and unable to support us. Besides global warming, we also have to remember the dinosaurs! Those magnificent creatures ruled the planet for over 165 million years, until an asteroid struck Earth and ruined their home, driving the whole species to extinction. Today we have special software to track asteroids from far away, but if we want the human species to survive for a million years, we need to spread out and learn how to live in space.
But we can’t live just anywhere! We need to find a planet that’s not too hot and close to the Sun, like Venus or Mercury, not too cold and far away, like Uranus or Neptune, and it can’t be made of gas like Jupiter and Saturn! That leaves Mars—our rocky, red, neighboring planet.
Lots of astronauts have visited space, but except for a few short trips to the Moon, they’ve never been far from Earth. No human has ever traveled to Mars, but we’re now starting to prepare for this trip. Imagine a car ride that lasts for more than 200 days with no rest stops. That’s how long it would take a crew of astronauts to travel to Mars, 140 million miles away from Earth! When you’re that far away from home, no one can send you extra food or water, so you have to bring as much as you can with you, and learn to produce the rest yourself.
Before we send astronauts on such a big journey, we need to understand as many of the challenges they might face as possible. One way we research what life will be like on Mars is by living and working in Martian research stations right here on Earth. These special laboratories, or “habitats,” are designed to look and feel exactly like a house on Mars, with a kitchen, a bathroom, a ‘greenhab’ to grow food, a laboratory with microscopes and other science tools, and tiny bedrooms for crew members. On the morning of my 26th birthday, that’s exactly where I woke up.
Usually my birthday would be filled with phone calls from friends and hugs from family, but there are no phone calls on Mars, because the signal would take too long to reach Earth! When we want to speak to our family, we can send an e-mail over the internet, but it can still take more than 20 minutes for the message to reach them. That also means we can’t watch TV. Instead, we can store digital versions of our favorite books, movies, and television programs on a small computer, to read or watch whenever we’re bored.
There’s almost no time for boredom, though. There’s a lot to be done every day, like checking and cleaning equipment, growing crops like potatoes, cooking for the crew, recording videos for students and classrooms, and even venturing outside to collect samples of soil and rocks. Mars doesn’t have nearly as much oxygen as Earth, so you need a helmet to help you breathe whenever you go outside. When you come back,
sticky and sweaty from a long walk in a heavy space suit, you can’t even take a shower! Water is a precious resource on Mars, and we have to save as much as possible. Instead of taking showers, we clean our bodies with baby wipes!
My six crewmates must have known that I would miss my family on my birthday, because when I came out from my room, they were waiting with a handmade birthday card. Instead of “26,” the card said “13.8,” because that’s how old I would be on Mars, where years are almost twice as long as Earth years! They also cooked me a special breakfast of heart-shaped pancakes. Meals can get very boring on Mars. Because fresh food would go rotten quickly, almost all of the food is in a powdered form that you mix with water—even the meat! My favorite Martian meal is macaroni and cheese.
I thanked all of my crewmates for such a nice birthday surprise, and I realized that I’m lucky to have such great friends here. Getting along with your crew is very important, especially when you’re stuck in a small space together for a long time!
After three weeks of living and working in a Mars habitat, I know life won’t be easy for the first astronauts who travel there. I would miss all of my friends and family, my favorite foods, warm showers, and even just being able to breathe fresh air outside without a helmet on. Still, I would choose to go, and I’m lucky to have a family who encourages me to reach for the stars. We might be years away from the first flight, but I know we’ll see footprints on Mars in our lifetime. I certainly hope they’re mine!
But even if they’re not, I’ll always remember a birthday that was out of this world. Maybe you too will one day spend a birthday of yours in a Mars habitat—or even on the distant red planet itself!
Chapter Twelve
The next morning, the alarm went off incredibly early. Annie groaned and rolled over in her hammock. She felt shattered. The run back to the sleeping pod last night had been terrifying. Her pager had been flashing like crazy the whole way and she was convinced that she—or George—would get caught. But astonishingly, she made it back to the pod and let herself in to find Leonia still sound asleep and the drone camera still lying in the corridor like a dead fly.
Almost at the same time, her pager stopped beeping and flashing—clearly it must just have been some kind of exercise to see how quickly they could react to a sudden need for action. In that case, Annie thought, Leonia would have failed, for she had slept right through her pager.
Annie had flung on her space pajamas before she slipped off the watch and picked the drone up from the floor. It came back to life and whizzed around the room a few times, registering that both girls were in their hammocks, but at least one of the pair was sitting upright in bed, ready for action in response to the pager; then a familiar red light flashed and the drone flew away again. Annie held her breath for what felt like forever—but no one came to check further on them so she eventually fell asleep, figuring that somehow she and George had gotten away with it.
In the morning she still felt like she could sleep for ages. But Leonia was already up and dressed in her blue flight suit, her long hair drawn back in a sleek ponytail, doing a set of warm-up stretches in preparation for the day ahead. Annie wished she could talk to Leonia about what she and George had seen last night. But she didn’t dare. She had no idea if she could trust Leonia—perhaps the other girl would report Annie straightaway to the authorities at Kosmodrome 2 and ruin her chances of ever finding out what was happening on Europa, or why her dad had been fired. Then a thought struck her. If Leonia told the staff about Annie sneaking out, Leonia herself could be on a one-way trip home too! The other girl wouldn’t risk that… .
“What are we doing today?” she mumbled sleepily.
“How should I know?” said Leonia in surprise. “But whatever it is, we need to be at our maximum alertness. Given our performance to date, the others have marked us out—or rather marked me out—as strong contenders, which means we will face deliberate sabotage at some time in the day.”
“Oh, great!” said Annie. “Perhaps we’ll be out of here by the end of today.”
“No!” said Leonia very sharply, for the first time showing something like emotion.
Annie sat up in her hammock in surprise.
“I don’t want to go home!” said Leonia very fiercely. “Not there! Not back there. With those … people.” To her amazement, Annie saw her teammate’s silver eyes blink very rapidly as though holding back tears. But Leonia recovered her usual sangfroid quite quickly. “Hurry up,” she snapped. “You know today will be much harder than the previous days and we can’t make it worse for ourselves by being late.”
“Yes, sir!” said Annie under her breath as she slid out of her hammock, blearily rubbing her eyes as she went. She changed out of her space pajamas into her flight suit—and as she did so, the television set in their pod flickered to life without either of them touching it.
“Greetings!” said the now familiar voice of Rika Dur, but pitched rather higher than when Annie had last heard it. Annie shivered. She couldn’t imagine why she had thought Rika was so lovely. Now that her suspicions that something was afoot at Kosmodrome 2 had been confirmed—and that this something was linked to Rika and to Europa—she couldn’t for the life of her think why she had thought Rika was impressive. Rika even looked different. Her face was strangely lopsided all of a sudden, as though it was slipping down one side of her neck. It was an odd and pretty gruesome sight.
“Are you ready for Challenge Number Three?” Rika sang out, the same tinny echo that Annie had picked up in her voice the night before ringing once more.
“As ready as we’ll ever be!” said Leonia, nodding.
“Do you notice anything different about her?” Annie suddenly decided to check that she wasn’t seeing things that weren’t there.
“Um, yes!” said Leonia in surprise. “Something’s happened to her nose, right? But shush, we need to hear about the challenge.”
“Today,” said Rika through the TV set, “your challenge is mechanical. You will build and operate a Rover on the surface of Mars. You have already been to the Mars Assembly Room. The buses are waiting outside to return you to that location—that’s the place where most of you failed to comprehend the last task in front of you. I was disappointed,” said Rika, actually sounding quite angry, “that so few of you were able to divine what lay in front of you. I felt quite let down.”
“She’s in a bad mood this morning,” commented Leonia.
“I trust that today none of you will leave me as deflated as you did yesterday,” scolded Rika. “My hope is that you will all show at least a creditable effort. Otherwise I will start to wonder whether there is any hope for humanity at all.”
“Not so nice now,” agreed Annie. She still didn’t quite know if she could trust Leonia or not. “Is this how you thought it would be?” she asked tentatively. “The Mars training process?”
“Nope.” Leonia shook her head. “Not a bit of it. And not in a good way. I’m not sure I trust these prople enough to take us to Mars. It just all feels a bit too random and weird, like something’s going on behind the scenes that we don’t understand.”
Annie nodded. That was exactly how she felt too! But they had no time to talk about it further.
“Astronauts!” Rika suddenly shouted, coming much too close to the TV screen for Annie’s liking. “Go!”
*
Once Annie and Leonia had arrived, in the little shuttle buses, at the Assembly Room, they ran in to find that the mocked-up surface of Mars now had track running around the edge and through the middle. Around the edges of the room stood a pile of cardboard boxes. As all the recruits in Annie’s group trooped in, Leonia leaped forward, sharp elbows flying, and used her long muscular arms to grab one of the boxes and rush to the other side of the room, where she positioned herself behind a small red hill in order to gain a tiny amount of privacy from the other challengers. She quickly tore open the box and she and Annie dived inside to bring out the contents.
The Martian Rove
r, it turned out, came with a very minimal set of instructions—not much more than “fit widget A to sprocket J”—and a set of lightweight tools. Once they had got all the parts out of the box, Annie couldn’t help looking around the room to see if she could spot George this morning, to check that he had also made it safely back to his pod after their adventures of the night before. But she just saw a group of unfriendly faces, all clad in the same blue flight suits.
A few Kosmodrome 2 workers stood around the edge of the Mars Rover Assembly room, watching and making notes as the candidates struggled to put their machines together. The end game of the challenge was not only to construct the Rover but also to mobilize it over a track that had been modeled to look like the surface of the red planet, with craters, hills, and bumpy rocks strewn about the causeway. The Rover had to pick up a rock and place it inside its onboard oven, just as it would on Mars. It was a complicated task and the two girls lost no time in getting to grips with the many bits and pieces that they had to find a home for in order to put their machine together.
“Are you going to be any good at this?” Leonia asked Annie but her tone was light and not dismissive. “Or should I do all of this myself?”
“Actually, I will be brilliant at it, yes, thanks for asking,” said Annie cheerfully. She wasn’t really offended by Leonia—she had plenty of experience of being with people who said exactly what was on their mind without worrying about how other people felt about it. Lots of her father’s friends and students were just like this—direct, clear, and to the point. In fact, they tended to get confused if you responded on an emotional basis to what was supposed to be a factual enquiry. Such people, Annie had concluded long ago, tended not to see the shades of color that made up the life of feelings of other human beings and saw everything in black and white. “I’ll be amazing, in fact,” she added confidently. “My parents got me my first advanced Lego set when I was two—and I built it straight away! I’ll ace this.”
“Good,” said Leonia, almost smiling. “In that case, you can put the structure together and I’ll wire it up.”