George and the Blue Moon Read online

  Eric was standing at the stove, feverishly stirring a huge bubbling pot of something purple and gluey. Extra-loud opera music blared out from a radio, which had been left in the kitchen sink under the window. George could see, even from behind, that Eric had splashes of bright green paint on his clothes and his hands. Suddenly the music switched off and Eric wheeled around; Annie was coming into the kitchen from the back door just as George was entering from the hall. Eric, who even had paint on his glasses, smiled broadly at the two friends.

  “Dad,” said Annie, pointing. “What is that?” George just knew his friend hoped it would be a scientific experiment.

  “It’s dinner!” said Eric brightly, waving a wooden spoon around so wildly that it caused great globules of sticky mauve goo to splatter over the walls.

  Annie and George gathered by the stove and peered, with worried faces, into the cauldron.

  “You made this?” said Annie, poking it with a teaspoon. “To eat?”

  George felt a little sick. He was used to eating odd food because of his mother’s unusual cooking style—but at least his mother could actually cook, and however unusual her ingredients, her food tasted pretty good.

  “Cherry confit,” said Eric. “Made with fifty-eight spices, fish protein, kale, powdered seaweed, and vitamins. You’ll love it—it’s taken me all day. I got the recipe from a book by a former chemist who is now a cook. It’s given me lots of ideas. I shall try them out on you all summer and perhaps I’ll write my own cookbook at the end of it!”

  George and Annie exchanged looks of horror.

  “Is there anything else?” asked Annie. “To eat?”

  “No,” said her dad, looking offended. “This is a complete meal. It contains everything you need. You could survive a nuclear winter on this jam.”

  “YIKES!” mouthed Annie to George. They had both found Eric quite tricky since he had been at home full-time. When he used to dash in and out, trailing clouds of glamor as one of the world’s leading scientists, he had always been cheery and interested in them, if sometimes a bit absentminded. But now that he was home the whole time, Eric seemed very unpredictable and rather erratic. The kids never knew what would happen next—and not in a good way.

  They had tried talking to Eric about what had happened at Kosmodrome 2—and they had asked him about the mystery of Artemis and the missing Europa. But Eric didn’t want to talk about any of it. Every time they asked him a question he didn’t want to answer, he ignored them, changed the subject, and started talking about something else.

  Annie grabbed her phone. “Calling for a pizza,” she said. “Veggie for George, pepperoni for me … what about you, Dad? Dad?”

  “No need,” said Eric, turning back to the stove. “I shall be having super-jam for my dinner tonight.”

  But just as George was wondering if he should have gone with his family to the Faroe Islands after all, and Annie was debating whether she could join her mother on her concert tour, wherever Susan might be by now, two things happened …

  First of all, Ebot came home! The two friends were delighted to see the android again. He strolled through the door, right behind the pizza delivery man, looking a little ruffled but otherwise exactly like himself—which meant just like Eric only in robot form.

  “Ebot!” cried Annie, running to give him a hug

  “Gree—” Ebot started to speak, but stopped. His limbs went floppy as he collapsed in the hallway.

  “He’s run out of power,” said George, kneeling down by the robot, getting a little bit of green paint on both of them. “We need to plug him in!”

  Annie put the pizzas down on the floor, and between them they carried the android into her father’s study, now an almost empty room. Before, it had been full of books, photos, telescopes, Eric’s prizes and certificates and a huge blackboard covered in chalk squiggles. Now just a desk and a chair remained. A SWAT team from Kosmodrome 2 had arrived to reclaim any items that had been deemed “official property”—which, alarmingly, had included Cosmos the supercomputer.

  Ebot had been away at the time, sent by Annie on the “shopping trip,” so he was one of the few items that the team had failed to requisition. They hadn’t found the driverless car either because that day, fortunately, it had run out of power and Eric had to leave it in Sainsbury’s parking lot while he was stocking up on paint or spices or whatever other exotic items he imagined his wife bought when she went shopping.

  But they had taken pretty much everything else.

  The two friends laid Ebot out on the desk while George rummaged around in the drawers, hoping against hope that they still had Ebot’s power cable. To her relief, Annie found it and plugged Ebot into the wall. A dim light flickered in the android’s previously dead eyes as he started slowly to recharge.

  Suddenly, Annie gave a shout of joy. While they were waiting for Ebot to reboot, she had flicked open her messages on her smartphone.

  “Wassup?” said George.

  “We’re in, George! We made it! We’re definitely in the Mars training program!”

  “Woo-hoo!” George leaped about with joy. It was the most exciting piece of news he had ever received. “I’m going to be an astronaut! I’m going to fly in space! I’m going up in a rocket! YAY!”

  “I must text Mom … ,” muttered Annie.

  She tapped out a quick text to her mother while George realized he couldn’t let his mom and dad know because they didn’t have any form of communication on their island. He wondered if he should write them a letter with pen and ink. Or send a carrier pigeon. He missed them more than he thought he would.

  Annie finished sending her text but kept on looking at her phone, hoping for a quick reply. None came. For a moment the two friends felt a little sad that they had no one to tell—and then it hit them! They were going to be astronauts! They might end up being the first human beings to walk on the red planet!

  “What do we need to do?” asked George in great excitement. “What do we need to take? We’ve got to get ready! We’re just sitting around! We need to do things!”

  “No we don’t!” said Annie. “It says here we need to bring nothing with us.”

  “That’s good,” said George, “as all we have is some vitamin jam and a robot that doesn’t work. When does it start?”

  “Tomorrow!” said Annie. “Wow! We have to get to Kosmodrome 2 and— Oh.” Her face fell.

  “What?” asked George.

  “We need an adult to sign us in,” she said. “We can’t take part without a parent to give permission.”

  “Your dad can do that,” said George sensibly. “My mom and dad gave him that loco thingy so he could do stuff for me if he needed while they were away.”

  “Oh yeah!” said Annie, brightening. They heard a squelch in the hallway outside as Eric walked past and stepped in the pizzas. “Dad!” she called. He poked his head around the doorway of his study. “We got into space camp!”

  “Oh, good,” said Eric. There was pizza stuck to his sandals and socks, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “Can you take us there tomorrow?” asked Annie. “To Kosmodrome 2?”

  “Kosmodrome 2?” said Eric, his face darkening. “No. I cannot. And neither will you go. I won’t go there and I won’t let you either. That’s all.” He turned on his heel and walked away, shedding little strings of cheese as he went.

  “Eek, gloomy news,” said Annie, but she looked thoughtful rather than crushed—and crushed was how George felt. He couldn’t bear to be so near and yet so far—again!—from space travel.

  “What if,” Annie said, “we just pop in for the first day. And then we can come home in the evening or something so Dad won’t know …”

  “Won’t work,” said George, shaking his head as he felt the full force of the disappointment hit him. “We won’t get in if we go alone. We still need an adult to sign us in.”

  “Rats,” said Annie. “If only we had a parent-like being who wasn’t either hopeless or away …”

/>   At that moment Ebot’s rapid charging must have finished as he sat up from the desk, like a mummy rising from a tomb, and said, “Hello, friends! I have returned.”

  *

  Later that evening, the duo rendezvoused in the kitchen. Ebot was still enjoying his power charge after days of battery-draining activity. Just like his robot, Eric had also nodded off, exhausted by his jam-making activities, meaning the two friends had the place all to themselves.

  “Careful,” said Annie as George went to sit down at the kitchen table. “It’s really sticky. There’s jam everywhere.”

  Even since that afternoon, the jam seemed to have degraded into different colors—the splotches on the kitchen counter had turned a vivid blue whereas the bits on the floor were orange and the flecks on the ceiling were the color of avocado.

  “I wish your dad would go back to being a scientist,” grumbled George. “There’s only room for one crazy cook on this street and that’s my mom.”

  “Yeah, he must be able to do something,” said Annie. “I mean, there must be a real job he could do. Physicists can’t be entirely useless.”

  “He always says the Universe is just a question of plumbing,” said George. “Could he be a plumber?”

  “Hmm,” said Annie. “I think he’d be better as a DJ. Or a pop star.” They both burst out laughing.

  “Ew, I am sticking to everything,” said George. “Can we go back to the tree house?” But in true British summer style, the rain was pouring down outside in great big fat ropes of water, and the evening was cold and bleak. “Hey!” he said, pointing to the keys to his house, which were hanging on a hook. “Let’s go to my house! We might even find some food there.”

  “I’m starving!” said Annie. “Let’s go!”

  They dashed down the garden, through the bucketing rain, to the hole in the fence that divided their two gardens. They dived through and sprinted up to George’s back door. Rattling the keys, he let them both in and they stood dripping in his kitchen, the same size and shape as the one next door and yet completely and utterly different. For George, it had the familiar smell of dried herbs, baking, grated carrots, and lemon peel, with a faint tang of soil. It smelled like home. When George flicked the light switch, a comforting dim glow came from the eco bulbs, so unlike the super-bright LED lights that Eric used to illuminate his house.

  “Phew.” Annie flopped down in one of the kitchen chairs. “A normal house.”

  It was quite something, thought George, when his friend called his house normal. It really did mean that things had gone crazy next door.

  “We need a plan,” he said, rummaging through the kitchen cupboards for something edible. He came across a box with only slightly stale cookies in it. “Catch!” He threw one at Annie, who fielded it deftly.

  “Yum!” she said. “Daisy’s award-winning cookies!”

  “Better than Eric’s ‘Survive-the-Nuclear-Winter’ jam,” said George.

  “Tomorrow we’ll be at space camp!” said Annie gleefully. “Eating space rations!”

  “We will?” said George. “It says that? We have to live on space food on Earth?”

  “Of course,” said Annie. “To get us used to preparing dehydrated rations as meals.”

  “I didn’t know that about space camp,” said George, who really loved his food. “I didn’t know we’d be eating dust for—how long? How long is space camp?”

  “Um, well, that’s weird,” said Annie. “Because it doesn’t say. It says it will be over by the end of the summer but it doesn’t give a date.”

  “And we seriously take nothing with us?”

  “Nope,” said Annie. “They provide everything.”

  “And it’s really at Kosmodrome 2? The place we’re not allowed to go, even with your dad?”

  “If you don’t believe me,” said Annie, “you can read it for yourself. Why are you asking so many questions?”

  George sighed. “I really want to go to space camp and I want to go to Mars,” he said. “I really really do, more than anything. But something just doesn’t feel right.” All the tingly excitement he had felt at first when he thought a new adventure was beginning had started to turn into a queasy, icky feeling in his stomach.

  “Yeah, I know,” admitted Annie. “It’s like the things you know to be true even though you can’t see them.”

  “Like electricity,” said George, pointing at the lights.

  “And bad feelings,” said Annie. “But we have to go to space camp because it might be the most amazing thing we’ve ever done. It might work out to be totally brilliant and completely okay. And—”

  “We need to get into Kosmodrome 2 to find out what happened on Europa, and what Artemis is,” added George.

  “As far as we know, my dad got kicked out of Kosmodrome 2 when he asked about Europa and that hole in the ice. So we have to go, even if we don’t want to,” said Annie.

  “But we sort of do,” said George.

  “We definitely do!”

  “Like no way we would miss this!” George felt much better now he knew that Annie had the same thoughts as him about space camp. It helped to know he wasn’t alone in having doubts. “But we have to find out as much as we can while we’re at Kosmodrome 2.”

  “And we have to try and get my dad his job back,” said Annie. “Before he makes any more jam!”

  “Or paints any more walls,” said George, who had just noticed he had bright green paint on his hand.

  “It’s a lot to do,” said Annie. “And get to Mars at the same time.”

  “We can manage,” said George. “But one thing—we’ve got to watch out for your dad’s deputy, Rika Dur. I bet she’s somehow involved in this.”

  “I think she’s just all about rules and regulations,” said Annie doubtfully. “Like a nuisance school prefect. I expect Dad just got up her nose somehow. You know how he can be. But I don’t think she’s properly evil. Is she?”

  “I don’t know!” George replied. “But I bet we’re about to find out.”

  CONDITIONS ON MARS

  We know that Mars is now a cold desert planet with no signs of life, simple or complex, on its surface. But was it once a wet warm world where life flourished? Clues found by man-made Martian Rovers, sent out to the red planet to investigate, tell us that Mars was once a very different place.

  But could Mars become a fertile, oxygen-rich planet once more, where we could grow crops, breathe the atmosphere, and enjoy a balmy Martian summer? Could we “terraform” Mars so that its atmosphere, its climate, and its surface would be suitable for life as we recognize it?

  “Terraforming” means making enormous changes to a whole planet in order to create an environment habitable by humans, plants, and animals.

  In the case of Mars, we would need to build an atmosphere and heat the temperature of the planet.

  To heat up Mars, we would need to add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere to trap energy from the Sun—it’s almost the opposite of the problem on Earth, where we have too many greenhouses gases in the atmosphere and we want the planet to cool down a little rather than heat up!

  But does Mars have enough gravity to retain an atmosphere thick enough for us? Once, it had a magnetic field, but that decayed 4 billion years ago, meaning that Mars was stripped of most of its atmosphere, leaving it with only 1percent of the pressure of the Earth’s atmosphere. Much lower gravity, then.

  In the past, the atmospheric pressure—which means the weight of the air above you in the atmosphere—must have been higher, though, because we see what appear to be dried-up channels and lakes. Liquid water cannot exist on Mars now as it would just evaporate. To live there, we would need water—there is lots of water in the form of ice at the two poles. If we went to live on Mars, we could use this. We could also use the minerals and metals that volcanoes have brought to the surface.

  So there is lots of potential out there on the red planet, but it’s going to be a very difficult job for the first astronauts. Before they can e
ven think about the long-term task of terraforming—if that is even possible—they will have lots of work to do to survive. It would be very much like living in some kind of dome with a controlled atmosphere—going out would only be possible with a respirator!

  Those astronauts are going to need to be clever, resourceful, brave, and persistent, however, in order to build the foundations of a colony or a human habitation on Mars.

  Does that sound like you?

  LIFE ON MARS—FOR REAL?

  What does this mean for the existence of Martians?

  In the summer months, NASA scientists revealed, water flows down canyons and crater walls before drying up in the colder autumn temperatures. We don’t yet know where this water comes from—perhaps it rises up from the ground or maybe it condenses from the thin Martian atmosphere. But excitingly, this takes our journey of discovery to find life in the Solar System onward by another step.

  Where there is liquid water, scientists think we will find life!

  Our future colonies

  This discovery also means that it might be much easier to found a colony of human life on Mars! If water could be collected from a local supply, that would solve one major headache for future missions to the red planet.

  Life on Mars just got a step closer!

  Chapter Six

  “George!” A brilliant light shone over his tightly closed eyes. He felt like he was swimming up from the very bottom of the ocean, struggling toward the surface. “George,” the voice hissed again, and this time a hand shook his shoulder.

  He tried to turn over.

  “No!” whispered the voice furiously. “You have to get up! It’s time to go! Your clothes are downstairs. Let’s go!”

  Wrapping his comforter around him like a superhero cape, George staggered blearily out of his room and down the stairs. He stumbled into Eric’s study where, sure enough, his clothes lay on the only chair in the nearly empty room. Even in his sleepy state, George still got a shock when he saw how different this room was now that all Eric’s things were gone.

  He got dressed and went through to the kitchen, where Annie was already fully dressed in her combat trousers, T-shirt, and sparkly sneakers, her long blonde hair tied up in a ponytail. She looked more cheerful than George had seen her for ages.