Cosmic (16 page)

When you look at the moon from Earth, it looks a bit smudgy. I mean, you know the smudges are mountains and so on but really they just look like blotches. But from where I’m sitting, you can see they’re mad, spiky storybook mountains. The surface is white as paper and the shadows are sharp and definite. It’s like looking at the map of an imaginary realm in a Warcraft manual. Massive mountains, deep valleys, empty plains. All it needs is a few trolls and dragons and a big fancy compass.

“What?” yelled Florida. “What is the moon doing there?”

I said calmly, “Oh, you know—orbiting the Earth, affecting the tides, stuff like that.” It’s important for a parent to stay calm in all eventualities.

Inside my head, my panicky twelve-year-old voice was screaming, “It’s pulling us nearer and nearer. It’s pulling us
into orbit. That’s what it’s doing. We’re going to be left circling the moon forever. What are you going to do?”

The truth is, I had been hoping that when I got into the
Dandelion
, there would be some brakes and a steering wheel and I’d be able to stop us, change direction—maybe do an intergalactic three-point turn—and drive us home. But there didn’t seem to be any controls at all.

Florida shrugged and said, “I suppose we’ll just have to take a free-return trajectory round the moon to bring us back.”

I said, “Sorry?”

She said, “You know, like on
Apollo 13
?”

Calm Dad Voice (out loud):
“Yeah. Exactly. That’s exactly my plan. What you just said.”

Scared Little-Boy Voice (inside):
“What did she say? Is she saying there’s a way out of this?”

Florida plonked herself down on one of the bench seats and growled, “I hate it when this happens. When you think you’re nearly home and then the bus goes off on some…what’s it called?”

“Trajectory?”

“No, you know, when you catch the 81, it comes right up to the overpass and you think, I’m nearly home, and then it goes off
under
the overpass, round the island and all the way up to the 24-hour Tesco before it comes back to where
it was when you were nearly home.”

“Oh yeah.”

She crossed her arms and stared out of the window. She really did look like she was sitting on the number 81. I sat down next to her and said, “Yeah. Trajectories, eh—don’t you hate them? How do they work…exactly?”

And then she told me the whole story of
Apollo 13
. Which is this:
Apollo 13
was on its way to the moon when one of its oxygen tanks blew up. The crew climbed into the little tiny landing module and used it as a kind of life raft. Then they flew right round the back of the moon so that the moon’s gravity would give them a bit of extra speed and—by burning their remaining engine at the right time—broke their orbit and made it home to Earth.

Obviously that’s a summary. In Florida’s version there was a lot about whether thirteen really is an unlucky number and which Hollywood actors played the astronauts in the film version—Kevin Bacon and Tom Hanks, by the way—and who those actors are married to now.

While she was talking the others must’ve noticed the open hatch in the floor of the command module. One by one they floated down into the
Dandelion
. The first one in was Hasan, who didn’t seem to notice the moon at all. He spread himself out on one of the bench seats saying, “It’s
much more comfortable down here.”

Samson Two stared out of the window with his mouth open until Florida said sarcastically, “Yes, it’s the moon. We’ve got to go right round the back of it. Can you believe it?”

“The moon? But…no one said anything about the moon.”

“It’s a diversion,” said Florida. “An unscheduled diversion.”

“But…the moon? It’s so far away.”

“Not anymore,” said Florida.

The real problem was Max. It wasn’t the moon that bothered him; it was the
Dandelion
. “Our mission was to decouple this module, to put it in orbit. We must do it now.”

I explained that we couldn’t do it right this minute because we had a problem.

“Not to release it means we’ve failed. Failure is not an option.”

“We haven’t failed. We just haven’t succeeded—yet. We’ll press the green button when we can.”

“But Dr. Drax said—”

“Dr. Drax didn’t know.”

“She knows more than you do. I am now going to press the green button,” he said.

I ran after him. Weightless running isn’t exactly speedy. It felt like one of those dreams where you’re trying to get away from mad dogs but your feet are sort of stuck to the floor. In the end I sort of toppled forward into an involuntary somersault, just caught him with my foot and sent him spinning back toward the seats.

I grabbed the hatch myself and said, “Listen, we’ve got a plan and it’s a plan about…” What was it about? “Florida is going to tell you what it’s about.”

Delegation, see. Very important with teenagers.

“I haven’t got any plan,” said Florida.

Delegation and affirmation.

“You’ve got a brilliant plan, Florida. About trajectories, remember?”

“Oh. The free-return trajectory,” said Florida. “Like on
Apollo 13
. You must remember
Apollo 13
?”

“The brilliant failure,” said Samson Two. “The lunar mission that was supposedly abandoned because of a faulty oxygen tank.” I didn’t notice him saying “supposedly” at the time, but I certainly noticed it ten minutes later.

She explained the whole thing to them about going round the back of the moon until we were facing the right way, and she pointed out that it was going to be easy for us. It was going to be a ride, in fact. “On
Apollo 13
, all they had was this tiny module and it was really cramped and
there wasn’t enough oxygen or power. We’ve got this whole solar-powered
Dandelion
and it’s got plenty of room and loads of food. So…it’s a picnic really. By comparison. The
Dandelion
is meant for space travel but not reentry. The command module is meant for reentry but not really for space travel. So we use the
Dandelion
to get us back to Earth orbit. Then we all go back into the command module and use that to get back to Earth. Understand?”

Everyone said yes. What was there not to understand? But Max said, “Yes, I understand. And now I am going to press the green button.”

“What?! Have you been listening to anything we’ve been saying?”

“Yes, but I listened to Dr. Drax more.”

“Anyway, you can’t press the button,” said Hasan, “because it’s my turn.”

And the two of them hurled themselves toward the hatch.

I shouted, “No one is pressing the green button! We’ll all be killed.”

Samson Two said, “Of course we won’t be killed. You don’t believe we’re really in space, surely?”

Everyone stopped and stared at him.

“Of course we are not really in space. This is a trick Dr. Drax has played on us. If we open the door, we will find
that we are in the middle of Infinity Park, same as always. In fact, I am going to open it now.”

He kicked his feet on the back of the seat and floated off toward the airlock.

I was going to go after him when I realized I had to go after Max too. My brain tried to choose between being shot out of a spaceship and accelerating to death, or being set adrift for ever and ever in a space ice-cream van.

In that horrible moment I realized that the real danger wasn’t the infinite vacuum of space, or the six million possible flaws in the rocket. The real danger was the children.

Max was upset because he’s very fixated on success. To him, being halfway to the moon in an ice-cream van meant we were failures. He thought that if we jettisoned the
Dandelion
we’d be winners again.

As for Samson Two, he was upset because he’d totally flipped out.

Which is understandable. If I didn’t have to look after the others, I’d flip out too.

All I had to do to sort Max out was show him that getting ourselves home in one piece after all the problems we’d had would be an even greater achievement than just doing what Dr. Drax had told us to. So I said to him, “You know, Max, after all our problems, getting home in one piece will be an even greater achievement than just doing everything that Dr. Drax said.”

He said, “All our problems are Hasan’s fault.”

“No,” said Hasan, “they’re all your fault.”

“You pressed the wrong button. Now I’m going to press the right one.”

“I didn’t press any button: you did.”

“No,
I
didn’t press any button. You did.”

I said, “I’m the DADDY and I DECIDE who presses the buttons. And I have decided that whoever WINS my game presses it. WHEN I SAY SO.”

“Wins?” said Max, suddenly interested. Like I said, every monster has its soft zone. Winning is Max’s. “What game?”

Hmmm. Yes. What game?

It turns out that Hasan had a board game in his PiP. “This game,” he said, “taught me to love money. And that’s why I love it.” The game was Monopoly. There really is no getting
away from it. I suppose that’s why it’s called Monopoly.

Low-gravity Monopoly is better than the Monopoly you play round the kitchen table, in that it lasts only a few minutes. If you’ve got a magnetic travel set—like Hasan’s—the pieces will stay on the board. And if you carefully keep hold of the money, that’s okay too. The problem is the dice. You can throw the dice, but they won’t actually land. They just drift off in random directions, dipping and swooping like genetically modified sugar cubes. And they never stop spinning.

The endless spinning really interested Samson Two. “Fascinating,” he said. “There must be some way to harness the energy these dice create by spinning like this.” Then, just in case I was starting to feel a bit relaxed, he added, “I wonder how Dr. Drax has achieved this effect. It really does feel as though we are weightless. You could almost believe you were really in space.”

We did try throwing the dice on to a loop of Scotch tape that we stuck to one of the seats, but it didn’t really work, and during the arguments about whether it was a six or not I spotted Max heading back to the command module.

I shouted, “What about rock, paper, scissors?”

None of them—except Florida—had ever played that. They were completely interested in it for about twenty
minutes. The first ten minutes were taken up discussing
why
paper beats rock and whether anyone would ever really try to use scissors to cut a rock. I had a round with Max in which he played dynamite and I played scissors. Then in the next round, he played paper and I played scissors again. Scissors wins.

He said, “You played scissors last time and I destroyed them with my dynamite. How can you still have scissors when I destroyed your scissors?”

“Well, they’re not destroyed forever. Just until the next round.”

This game was obviously too abstract for Max. He went very red and started yelling, “This is madness. One of them must be destroyed or how can there be a winner? You can only have a winner if something is DESTROYED!”

When he shouted “destroyed” like that I nearly panicked. But I didn’t. I just said, “Hide-and-seek, anyone?”

Weightless hide-and-seek sounds like a good idea, but it was a bigger mistake than rock, paper, scissors. Weightless hide-and-seek was what nearly killed us all.

I was it. I counted very loudly to forty while they all went and hid. For that forty seconds I sat back on one of the window seats and looked out at the moon. Then I shouted, “Coming, ready or not!”

I could actually hear Samson Two moving about under one of the chairs. It would’ve been a great hiding place, except for the weightlessness, which kept making him float up and bang his head. So I caught him and we both went looking for the others.

I could feel that Max was watching me. I looked up and glimpsed him holding on to the ceiling with his fingers, looking down at us, hoping that we hadn’t seen him. I decided to let him stay there so that he could win, since winning was such a big deal for him.

I moved to the front of the
Dandelion
, between the front seat and the window, which is where I used to sit on the top deck of the bus to school. I noticed there was a bigger-than-you-really-needed space between the two front seats and a kind of groove in one of the floor panels. I gave it a tug and it rolled sideways. Florida was looking straight up at me, with this big grin on her face, saying, “Come and see….”

I swung myself down there, and Samson Two followed me. Florida had found the driving cab of the
Dandelion
! Everything was there—a driver’s seat with a proper steering wheel, even wing mirrors—so that you could see the solar sails properly. The view was a bit rubbish because the command module was still stuck on the front of it. But that only made it feel more like an ordinary car—a car stuck behind
a big truck or something. A car that I could drive. I looked at Florida and she nodded at me. She’d read my mind.

“Except you’re a rubbish driver,” said Florida.

“Yeah, but it’ll be easy up here. There’s hardly any traffic.”

“This is so disappointing,” said Samson Two. “Doesn’t feel a bit like a spaceship. It’s just made from old bits of bus.”

I couldn’t help but sit down and try the seat. Florida said, “Be careful. We really need a manual. You never know—one of those things”—she waved a hand at the control panel—“might be the ejector button or something.”

I looked up. There, just above the driver’s seat, was one of those sun visors that you pull down, just like in a car. Dad keeps his manual, his road maps and his insurance on the back of his, fastened with an elastic band. I pulled it down. A sightseer’s map of the moon, some insurance documents and…a manual. With a troubleshooting section, a “getting started” page, a diagram of the instrument panel and…