George's Secret Key to the Universe Page 12

  “Oh, hello! George! Yes, I can see you. Stop shouting now, you’re hurting my ears. I’m coming straight toward you from your left.”

  George looked to his left and there it was, a little asteroid, gently traveling through space. Sitting on it was Eric, holding in each hand a rope attached to spikes he had planted in the rock. He looked very relaxed.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Come back!” cried George, trying to sound urgent without shouting. “It’s Greeper who sent you the letter! It’s my fault! I spoke to him about Cosmos!”

  “George,” replied Eric firmly, “right now I’m working, so we’ll have to talk about this later. You definitely shouldn’t have mentioned Cosmos to anyone. Close the portal, George, and go home!”

  “You don’t understand!” said George. “Greeper is horrible! I know him, he’s my teacher! It must be a trap! Come back now! Please! This morning he asked me if you had disappeared!”

  “That’s enough! And stop being silly! Look around—there’s nothing dangerous at all,” said Eric impatiently. “Now go home and forget about Cosmos. I’m not sure I should have shown you my computer after all.”

  George looked over at Eric’s rock. In a few seconds it was going to be close enough for him to jump onto it. He took a few steps back into the library, paused for a second, and then ran toward the doorway, leaping through it as far toward the rock as he could.

  “Holy planet!” he heard Eric say. “George! Grab my hand!”

  As George flew through space, he just managed to hold on to Eric’s hand. Eric hauled him onto the rock, sitting him down beside him. Behind them, the doorway back into Eric’s library vanished.

  “George, are you crazy?! If I hadn’t caught your hand, you could have been lost in space forever!” said Eric, sounding furious all over again.

  “But—,” said George.

  “Silence! I’m sending you back! Now!”

  “No!” shouted George. “Listen to me! This is really important.”

  “What is?” said Eric, suddenly aware that there was something very wrong in George’s voice.

  “What is it, George?”

  “You have to come back with me!” babbled George. “I’m really, really sorry, and it’s all my fault, but I told my teacher from school about Cosmos—I told Doctor Reeper and then he sent you the letter about the planet!” Before Eric could say anything, George rushed on, “And this morning he asked me if you’d disappeared! He did! It’s true! It’s a trick, Eric! He’s out to get you!”

  “Greeper … Reeper! … I see!” said Eric. “So the letter is from Graham! He found me again.”

  “Graham?” asked George, astonished.

  “Yes, Graham Reeper,” Eric replied calmly. “We used to call him Grim.”

  “You know him?” George gasped with shock underneath his space helmet.

  “Yes, I do. A long, long time ago we used to work together. But we had an argument that led to an awful accident. Reeper got very badly burned, and after that he went off on his own. We stopped him being a member of the order in the end because we were so worried about what he might do. But do you know what he sent me in that letter?”

  “Yeah,” said George, remembering how Eric left without saying good-bye. “Just another planet.”

  “Just another planet? George, you must be joking! The planet Graham told me about is one where humans could live! I’ve been looking for such a place for ages, and there it is!” Pointing toward two little dots in front of him—one big and bright, the other smaller and less bright—Eric added, “It’s right there! The big bright dot there is a star, and the smaller dot is the planet we’re heading for. It doesn’t actually shine on its own—it just reflects the light of its star, like the Moon reflects the light of the Sun at night.”

  “But Greeper is horrible!” objected George, who really couldn’t understand why Eric and Cosmos always had to be in lecturing mode in times of danger. “He would never have given you the coordinates of that planet just like that! There must be a trick.”

  “Oh, come on, George,” said Eric. “You know that I can get Cosmos to open up the portal to take us home again any time I want. We’re quite safe. It’s true that your teacher and I had our differences in the past, but I expect he’s decided to put it behind him and join in the efforts we’re making to explore and understand the Universe. And I have installed new antennae on our helmets. We can now communicate with Cosmos even if they get damaged.”

  “Why didn’t you ask Cosmos to just send you there directly? Let’s do just that—let’s get back to your library.”

  “Aha!” said Eric. “We can’t do that. Cosmos doesn’t know what lies ahead of us, and that’s my job—to go where computers cannot. After I’ve been somewhere new, then we can use Cosmos to go there again, like you just did to find me here. But the first trip I always need to do myself.”

  “Are you sure it’s safe?” asked George.

  “Positive,” said Eric confidently.

  George and Eric fell silent for a few moments, and George started to feel a bit better. He managed to stop thinking about Greeper and look around him to see where he was. In all his eagerness to warn Eric, he had quite forgotten he was on a rock in outer space!

  To be fair to Eric, everything around them seemed calm. They could see clearly in all directions, and the star with its planet was growing bigger and bigger as their rock approached it.

  But then something started to go wrong with the path of the rock. Just as George’s comet had changed direction when it flew past the giant planets and the Earth, their rock seemed to be switching course. But this time there didn’t seem to be any planets around them. The rock was now heading in a completely different direction, away from the distant planet Eric so much wanted to see.

  “What’s going on?” George asked Eric.

  “I’m not sure!” replied Eric. “Look around and let me know if you see any place in the sky where there is no star! And Cosmos, open the portal, just in case.”

  Cosmos didn’t seem to have heard Eric’s request since no portal appeared nearby.

  George and Eric looked in the direction the rock was heading. Everywhere, all around them, were stars—except for an area on their right, where there was a small patch of sky containing no stars, which was becoming larger and larger all the time.

  “Over there!” George said to Eric, pointing toward the growing dark patch. The stars around it were moving in a very strange way, as if space itself were being distorted by it.

  “Oh, no!” shouted Eric. “Cosmos, open the portal now! Now!”

  But no portal appeared.

  “What is it?” asked George, who was becoming scared.

  The dark area now covered more than half the space they were looking at, and all the stars they could see outside it were moving erratically, even though they were far behind it.

  “Cosmos!” shouted Eric once more.

  “Trying … ,” Cosmos replied in a very faint voice, but nothing happened.

  George’s mind was starting to spin! In front of them, the dark area was becoming enormous. All the space around George and Eric was warped, and some dark patches started to appear to their left and right. George could no longer tell up from down or right from left. All he knew for sure was that the dark patch was getting bigger and bigger, from all sides, as if it wanted to eat them up.

  “Cosmos! Hurrrrryyyy!” Eric yelled.

  A very faint doorway started to appear in front of them. Eric grabbed George by the belt of his space suit and threw him toward it. As he flew through, George saw Eric trying to reach it too. He was shouting something, but his voice was distorted and it was hard to make sense of it.

  Just before landing on Eric’s library floor, just before the portal door shut and the view of outer space disappeared, George saw the dark patch engulf Eric entirely. It was only then that he understood what Eric had been saying.

  “Find my new book!” Eric had shouted. “Find my
book on black holes!”

  George fell back through the door and landed on the floor with a heavy thump. This time the journey back from outer space to Eric’s library had seemed to suck all the breath out of him, and he had to lie on the floor for a few seconds, panting, before he could get up. When he staggered to his feet, he hoped he would see Eric hurtling through the doorway behind him. But instead, all he saw was the outline of the door, which had become faint and wavy. It seemed to be fading into nothing. He yelled out, “Eric!” but got no reply. A millisecond later, the door vanished entirely.

  “Cosmos!” shouted George, undoing his glass space helmet. “Quick! Cosmos, we have to get—”

  But as he turned around to face the mighty computer, he had his second great shock. Where Cosmos should have been, there was just a spaghetti tangle of colored wires and an empty space. Looking wildly around the room, George saw that the library door was ajar. He ran through it and into the hallway, to find the front door wide open and the cold night air blowing in. With no time to take off his space suit, he dashed into the street, where he could make out the shapes of four boys running along the road. One of them was carrying a bulky backpack with a few wires sticking out of the top of it. George hurried after them as fast as he could in his heavy suit. As he stumbled along, familiar voices drifted back to him on the wind.

  “Be careful with that!” George heard Ringo shout.

  “Beep! Beep!” came a noise from the backpack. “Unlawful action! Unauthorized command!”

  “When’s it going to shut up?” shouted Tank, who was carrying the backpack. “How come it can speak when it isn’t even plugged in?”

  “Help! Help!” came the mechanical voice from the backpack. “I am being kidnapped! I am the world’s most amazing computer! You cannot do this to me! Alarm! Alarm!”

  “It’ll run out of batteries soon,” said Whippet.

  “Unhand me, you villains!” said the voice inside the backpack. “This bouncing around is bad for my circuits.”

  “I’m not carrying it any farther!” said Tank, coming to a sudden halt. George immediately stopped in his tracks.

  “Someone else can take over,” he heard Tank say.

  “All right,” said Ringo in a menacing voice. “Give it to me. Listen up, little computer. You will shut up for the rest of the journey or I will take you to pieces bit by bit until you are just a big pile of microchips.”

  “Eek!” said the computer.

  “Do you understand?” said Ringo in fierce tones.

  “Of course I understand,” said the computer snootily. “I am Cosmos, the world’s most amazing computer. I am programmed to understand concepts so complex that your brain would explode if you were even to—”

  “I said,” snarled Ringo, opening the top of the backpack and speaking down into it, “shut up! Which part of those two words don’t you get, you moron?”

  “I am a peaceful computer,” replied Cosmos in a small voice. “I am not used to threats or violence.”

  “Then be quiet,” replied Ringo, “and we won’t threaten you.”

  “Where are you taking me?” whispered Cosmos.

  “To your new home,” said Ringo, shouldering the backpack. “C’mon, gang, let’s get there.” The boys set off at a run once more.

  George staggered after them as fast as he could, but he was unable to keep up. After a few more minutes, he lost them in the foggy, dark night. There was no point in running any farther—he couldn’t tell which way they had gone. But even so, he felt sure he knew who had asked Ringo and his friends to break in and steal Cosmos. And knowing that was the first step to finding the super computer again.

  As Ringo and the boys ran off into the night, George turned and walked back to Eric’s house, where the front door was still wide open. He went in and headed straight for Eric’s library. Eric had told him to look for the book—but which book? The library was full of books—they stretched from floor to ceiling on the shelves. George picked out a large, heavy volume and looked at the cover. Euclidean Quantum Gravity, it said on the front. He flicked through the pages. He tried to read a little:

  … because the retarded time coordinate goes to infinity on the event horizon, the surfaces of constant phase of the solution will pile up near the event horizon.

  It was hopeless. He had no idea what any of it meant. He tried another book, this one called Unified String Theories. He read a line from it: The equation for a conformal …

  His brain hurt as he tried to make out what it meant. In the end he decided it meant he hadn’t yet found the right book. He carried on looking around the library. Find the book, Eric had said. Find my new book. George stood in the middle of the library and thought very hard. With no Cosmos, no Eric, and no Annie, it seemed terribly empty in that house. The only link George had to them now was a pink space suit, some tangled wires and these huge piles of science books.

  Suddenly, he missed them all so terribly that he felt a sort of pain in his heart: he realized that if he didn’t do something, he might never see any of them again. Cosmos had been stolen, Eric was fighting with a black hole, and Annie would certainly never want to speak to him again if she thought George had anything to do with her dad getting lost forever in outer space. He had to think of something.

  He concentrated very hard. He thought of Eric and tried to imagine him with his new book in his hand—to picture the front cover so that he could remember what the book had been called. Where would he have put it? Suddenly George knew.

  He ran into the kitchen and looked next to the teapot. Sure enough, there, covered in tea stains and rings where hot mugs had been rested on top of it, was a brand-new book called Black Holes, which, George now realized, was actually written by Eric himself! There was a sticker on it that read, in what must be Annie’s handwriting: Freddy the pig’s favorite book! with a little cartoon drawing of Freddy next to the words. That’s it! thought George. This must be the new book Eric was so happy to find when Freddy stormed through the house! This must be the one.

  There was just one more thing he needed from Eric’s house—it was another book, a large one with lots and lots of pages. He grabbed it from beside the telephone, stripped off Annie’s pink space suit, and, shoving the two books into his school bag, rushed back to his own house, closing Eric’s front door carefully behind him as he went.

  • • •

  That evening George scarfed down his supper very quickly and then shot upstairs to his room, claiming he had lots of homework to do. First of all he got the very big book out of his bag. On the front it said, TELEPHONE DIRECTORY. As his parents didn’t have a phone, George had thought it was unlikely they would have the phone book, which was why he had borrowed Eric’s. He searched through the alphabetical lists under R. Using his finger to go down the long column of names, he came to REEPER, DR. G., 42 FOREST WAY. George knew Forest Way—it was the road that led out of town, to the woods where his parents took him in autumn to gather mushrooms and blackberries. He figured he couldn’t go there tonight—it was too late and his parents would never let him out at this time. And anyway, he still had work to do with the Black Holes book. First thing in the morning, though, he’d go to Dr. Reeper’s house on his way to school. By then he hoped he would have a plan.

  He put down the phone book and got Eric’s Black Holes book out of his bag, desperately hoping it would hold the information he needed to rescue Eric. Every time he thought about Eric—which was about once every three minutes—he felt awful. He imagined him alone and frightened in outer space, not knowing how to get back, with a black hole trying to drag him into its dark belly.

  George opened the book and read the first sentence of page one. We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars, he read. It was a quote from the famous Irish writer Oscar Wilde. George felt it was written specially for him: he was indeed in the gutter, and he knew for sure that some people were looking at the stars. So he kept on reading, but that first sentence was the only on
e he understood. Next he read: In 1916 Karl Schwarzschild found the first ever analytic black hole solution to Einstein’s equation …

  Aarrgghh! he groaned to himself. The book was in a foreign language again! Why had Eric told him to look for this book? He didn’t understand it at all. And Eric had written it! Yet every time Eric had told him about science, he had made it sound so simple, so easy to understand. George felt his eyes tearing up. He’d failed them: Cosmos, Annie, and Eric. He lay down on his bed with the book in his hand as hot tears ran down his cheeks. There was a knock at the door, and his mom came in.

  “Georgie,” she said, “you look very pale, honey. Are you feeling ill?”

  “No, Mom,” he said sadly. “I’m just finding my homework really difficult.”

  “Well, I’m not surprised!” His mom had picked up the Black Holes book, which had fallen out of George’s hand and onto the floor. She looked through it. “It’s a very difficult textbook for professional researchers! Honestly, I’m going to write to the school and tell them this is ridiculous.” As she spoke, a few pages fluttered out from the back of the book.

  “Oh dear,” said George’s mom, collecting them up, “I’m dropping your notes.”

  “They’re not—” Mine, George was about to say when he stopped himself. At the top of one of the pages, George read, My Difficult Book Made Simple for Annie and George.

  “Thanks, Mom,” he said quickly, grabbing the pages from her. “I think you’ve just found the part I need. I’ll be fine now.”

  “Are you sure?” said his mom, looking very surprised.

  “Yes, Mom.” George nodded furiously. “Mom, you’re a star. Thank you.”

  “A star?” said his mom, smiling. “That’s a nice thing to say, George.”

  “No, really,” said George earnestly, thinking of Eric telling him that they were all the children of stars. “You are.”

  “And don’t you work too hard, my little star,” George’s mom told him, kissing him on the forehead. George was smiling now so she went off downstairs to put another batch of lentil cakes in the oven, feeling a lot happier about him.