Chasing Orion (30 page)
Authors: Kathryn Lasky
Two years after Phyllis died, Dr. Jonas Salk discovered the polio vaccine. It was a happy day when Mom took me to the pediatrician’s office to get my injection. The Korean War was almost over. Emmett had come home. He was at Purdue University. After he graduated from Purdue, he went on to work on his advanced degree in astrophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was while he was at M.I.T. that he began to pry open the treasure chest in the Square of Pegasus. Several years later, he made a startling discovery of an intense star-like source of light and radio energy. It was a very, very mysterious object. In fact it was one of the first quasars to be discovered, and it was beyond the far edge of the Milky Way galaxy. He called it Ph4-C112.
I went to college, Indiana University in Bloomington. I was a theater arts major and eventually became a set designer. Dr. and Mrs. Keller came to my graduation as they had to Emmett’s, and Mrs. Keller tried to return the box I had made with the story of Orion. But I could see she wanted to keep it. It was a link with Phyllis. So I told her to keep it, and she kissed me and said, “Phyllis always said you were an excellent builder of small worlds.”
KATHRYN LASKY
is the author of numerous fiction and nonfiction books, including
One Beetle Too Many: The Extraordinary Adventures of Charles Darwin; Sugaring Time,
a Newbery Honor book;
A Voice of Her Own: The Story of Phillis Wheatley, Slave Poet;
and
John Muir: America’s First Environmentalist.About
Chasing Orion,
she says, “When polio hit Indiana hard in the summers of 1951 and 1952, I was seven or eight years old, and I experienced an odd blend of emotions: I was simultaneously scared and bored out of my mind. One minute I would be reading the newspapers about the latest polio cases and checking myself obsessively for symptoms, and the next I’d be whining to my mother about not being allowed to go swimming. I lived to swim during those hot Indiana summers, and it was hard to imagine that I might actually die from it.” Kathryn Lasky lives in Massachusetts.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2010 by Kathryn Lasky
Cover photograph copyright © 2010 by Michael Blann/Getty
Images (girl); background images from iStockphoto
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.
First electronic edition 2012
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Lasky, Kathryn.
Chasing Orion / Kathryn Lasky. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: In 1952, When Georgie is eleven years old, her family moves to a new Indiana neighborhood where her teenaged neighbor has polio and is in an iron lung.
ISBN 978-0-7636-3982-2 (hardcover)
[1. Poliomyelitis — Fiction. 2. Neighbors — Fiction. 3. Indiana — History — 20th century — Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.L3274Cg 2010
[Fic] — dc22 2009007327
ISBN 978-0-7636-5998-1 (electronic)
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