George and the Blue Moon

by Stephen Hawking

  Igor, who had been so useless to begin with, turned out to have definite strengths, one of them being his lifelong devotion to gaming. The VR challenge was easy for him, but much less so for George, whose parents still limited his screen time and refused to allow computer games in the house. His only experience of VR had been using Annie’s cardboard headset in the tree house, and brilliant though that had been, it hadn’t really qualified him for something as advanced as this. Still, George knew he could have picked up the principles quickly enough, if only he had kept his mind focused on the moonwalk and not on thoughts of Eric, Artemis and the sea life of Europa.

  Even as George moved across the surface of the Moon to collect the sample as instructed in the brief, he knew his thoughts were elsewhere. He was completely distracted. As he pretended to take part in the VR astronaut game, he tried to work it out: Did Eric come to Kosmodrome 2 that evening and have a showdown with Rika Dur over Europa? he thought. Did that cause Rika Dur to get rid of Eric in order to make sure he couldn’t find out more about Artemis? But why is Artemis such a big secret? Why can’t we all know? What’s it for? What does Rika Dur want?

  At that moment he felt a real-life very sharp kick to his shins as Igor broke him out of his reverie by giving him a hard wallop on the leg.

  “Ouch!” exclaimed the real-life George, who started hopping around from the pain, causing his lunar astronaut figure to make some very peculiar moves on the Moon. But when he looked closely, he saw why Igor had given him such a short sharp shock. He had drifted far away from the lunar landing module and had to turn around and hurry back toward the landing craft, which was preparing for takeoff. But as fast as George tried to sprint across the Moon’s surface, he found he couldn’t moonwalk fast enough. The capsule doors closed, with the Igor figure waving from inside the window as it lifted off, leaving George all alone, the only man on the Moon.

  George took his headset off and came back to the room to rejoin Igor, who looked like he might explode with rage.

  “Won we should have that!” he said angrily. “Until you asleep fell on the Moon!”

  “Sorry,” said George humbly. There was nothing else he could say.

  “We will get kicked out of the process,” said Igor, who was so angry that he got his words in the right order for a change. “And it will all be your fault.”

  George felt stung. He had grown fond of Igor and he didn’t want to be the reason his dreams of flying to Mars came to an end. He knew he’d let his training partner down—and he felt really bad about it. But George felt as though he was failing everyone around him. He was failing Igor because he wasn’t really contributing enough to the challenges, failing Annie by not being able to solve the enigma of Kosmodrome 2, and letting himself down too by underperforming every time it looked like the big chance was his.

  It was time to change, thought George determinedly. He couldn’t do anything about the past, but he could tackle the present by making a proper effort to get out into Kosmodrome 2 and find some clues that would help him and Annie unravel whatever was going on in this strangest of spaceports.

  “I mean, you lack strategic vision, you have no mental power,” bored on Igor as they trailed back to their sleeping pod. “You fail to calculate moves ahead, you don’t concentrate or play by the rules, you don’t take responsibility for your actions, and you are clearly unable to problem-solve in an uncertain environment… .”

  “I get the picture, Igor,” said George. But even through his gloom, he noticed an interesting fact. For once, they weren’t being followed by a drone. This, thought George, cheering up immediately, meant it was time to prove to himself and any others that he wasn’t merely a passenger or a waste of space. He would show everyone that he too was a useful space citizen and Earth-dweller. He would get to the bottom of what was going on both here and on Europa. The others might win the challenges but, George thought to himself, he would be the one who solved the puzzle at the heart of Kosmodrome 2 and everything connected with it.

  “I think I’ll go for a walk,” he said casually.

  “As you wish,” said Igor. But his tone had softened. Despite how annoyed he was with George, he couldn’t help but remember the times George had looked out for him or just been a friend, a true friend, the kind that Igor had never had before. Igor had also noticed that the drone that usually hovered outside their pod was missing. “If the drone returns, I will occupy it on your behalf.”

  “Spasibo,” said George gratefully, using the Russian he had learned for one of the challenges.

  “Ne za shto,” replied Igor politely, almost but not quite managing a smile.

  At least, George thought as he walked away from Igor and set out on his own path, he was unlikely to be caught by a flesh-and-blood Kosmodrome 2 worker. Like Annie, he had noticed over previous days that the numbers of human Kosmodrome 2 staff seemed to be getting fewer and fewer. At the beginning, there had been Kosmodrome 2 folk everywhere you turned. But as the days passed, there were hardly any left, only robots.

  Now, when they did the challenges, instead of the staff levels being almost the same as the number of competitors, one lone Kosmodrome 2 worker had to look out for all the junior astronauts. George had asked one of them where the other staff had gone and only received the bitter and mysterious reply, “Austerity measures.”

  George tiptoed along the corridors, wondering which way to go. Where would he be most likely to find Annie? He was just pondering this when he felt a hand—or rather a pincer—land on his shoulder. It obviously wasn’t human—through his thin blue flight suit George could feel that the thing on his shoulder was made of metal, not flesh. His heart rate shot up immediately, pounding with terror. But drawing a deep breath, he forced himself to turn around to face whoever—or whatever—was behind him.

  And whatever he was expecting—it certainly wasn’t this.

  It was a robot—toweringly tall and fashioned in the same familiar way as the robots he and Annie had seen wandering around Kosmodrome 2. It had the same block-shaped head and elongated arms and legs, attached to a cube-shaped trunk, which formed the body of the machine. Once upon a time, he and Annie had encountered this same style of robot on a mysterious invisible spaceship in orbit around the Earth! Those robots had been 3-D printed from a network of printers across the world and were sleek, shiny, and silver.

  But this robot looked like it had been cooked in a furnace! The metal was twisted and blackened, parts of its pincers had melted into weird shapes, and its head was misshapen and lopsided on the metal neck. The expression on the face was still visible though, and that was almost the most shockingly horrible part of it all. The robot was smiling.

  “Hello, George!” it said in a happy voice. “It really is simply marvelous to see you again!”

  “Brian!” said George in total astonishment. “Boltzmann Brian! The famously nice robot! Is that really you?”

  “It is,” confided Boltzmann, leaning forward and patting George on the other shoulder, an affectionate gesture that turned out to be rather painful for George, as the robot patted him quite hard with the distorted pincer of a hand.

  “What are you doing here?” said George. Boltzmann Brian was a one-in-a-trillion robot, created to be sentient and have emotions, which in him all tended toward the extremely nice end of the spectrum. His owner, evil Alioth Merak, had tired of Boltzmann quite quickly and decided never to make another nice robot again, which was why he created the rest of his robot army as aggressive, mean, and angry bots. “How did you escape the quantum spaceship? I thought it blew up in space!”

  “Oh dear, yes,” said Boltzmann. “When the ship exploded—who would have thought it—I parachuted down to Earth.”

  “You parachuted?” said George, feeling a little guilty. He had, after all, been a major factor in causing the spaceship, on which Boltzmann and the other robots had been left behind, to blow up.

  “I space-jumped, if you prefer,” said Brian. “People do, you know. Human people d
o it and survive. They jump from the edge of space down to Earth. The only difference is that I actually space-jumped from space.”

  “How did you … ?” said George, goggle-eyed with wonder. He could hardly speak.

  “I got a little charred going through the Earth’s atmosphere,” admitted Boltzmann. “As you may be able to see, although I really think it isn’t that obvious. Admittedly, my metal isn’t in peak condition. I’ve been promised an upgrade of my carapace, but so far it hasn’t materialized.” He sighed sadly.

  “But why are you here?” asked George slowly. “Boltzmann, why are you at Kosmodrome 2?”

  “Oh, that’s easy!” Boltzmann perked up, happy to be able to answer. “I’m here with my master.”

  “Your master?” said George in an accidentally high-pitched squeak. “Your … master?” He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Did you say—your master?”

  “I did!” confirmed Boltzmann happily.

  “But that’s not possible!” said George, who had turned white. Alioth Merak, Boltzmann’s master, was a very clever but very evil man who had tried to control the whole world through a display of fake kindness. It couldn’t be true, thought George in horror, that Alioth Merak was here, at Kosmodrome 2. If it was true, they were in far more trouble than he could have possibly imagined.

  Merak was the most resourceful, determined, and manipulative opponent that George and Annie had faced in all their cosmic adventures. It had never crossed George’s mind that Alioth Merak might somehow be involved in the shenanigans at Kosmodrome 2 because George had just assumed that they, like everyone else in the world, were safe from Alioth. That he was safely and securely locked up—and would stay that way forever.

  “I … thought your master was in … p-prison!” he stammered.

  “He was!” said Boltzmann, as though he could hardly believe it. “There must have been some mistake. He is such a lovely man—I mean, person.”

  George wondered briefly why the robot had corrected himself like that but he let it pass. There were more important facts to pursue. This was the grimmest and most awful news ever. George realized that they could all be in terrible danger, if Alioth Merak were on the loose once again. “Did you help him escape from jail?” said George, taking a canny guess.

  “Of course!” said Boltzmann proudly. “I am fitted with a special homing device to locate my master wherever he is. Once I fell to Earth—well, once I pulled myself together after my landing …”

  “Where did you land?” asked George.

  “In a haystack on a farm in the remote mountains of Romania,” replied Boltzmann. “It took me a while to work it out myself.”

  “How did you get here?” Despite being aghast at this news, George’s mind still boggled at what it must have looked like to see a flaming robot fall from the sky.

  “I walked,” said Brian cheerfully. “That’s the nice thing about being a robot. It’s much easier to get around.”

  “Did no one notice you?” asked George, wondering how a six-and-a-half-foot-tall robot had managed to cross all of Europe without being spotted or stopped. He felt like he was just keeping Brian talking, playing for time, while he figured out what on earth to do next.

  “I moved around by night,” said Boltzmann. “And if people did spot me, I did my impersonation of a pile of old junk and they left me alone.”

  “Like a Transformer?” said George, imagining the robot suddenly folding himself up into a piece of trash and lying beside the road.

  “Exactly,” said Boltzmann. “It worked every time.”

  “How did you cross the English Channel?” asked George. “Oh, never mind, you’ll have to tell me later. Wow, I wish you’d filmed your journey.”

  “I did,” said Boltzmann. “I can show you …”

  “Look, Brian,” said George, realizing he had no choice but to face up to the truly shattering prospect that Alioth Merak himself might be somewhere on the premises and that this could all be so much more complicated and perilous than he had thought. “When you released Alioth Merak from jail, where did he go? Where is he now?”

  “Where?” said Boltzmann, looking confused. “I thought you must know. I thought that was why you were here.”

  “Why I was here?” George murmured, wondering what the robot could possibly mean.

  “Here,” said Brian. “Alioth Merak, my creator and controller, is here. He is in charge of Kosmodrome 2. Alioth Merak is—”

  Space Diving

  When you go up into space in a spacecraft, you pass through a line which seems to divide the blue of the Earth’s atmosphere from the black of space. This is called the Karman line and it is 62 miles above the surface of the Earth. It marks the start of space!

  The Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t just suddenly stop and then you’re in space—it’s not like putting your head out of a window! No, it thins; but the Karman line marks the point where “space” officially begins.

  To do a space dive or a space jump, you jump out of a spacecraft or hot-air balloon from above the Karman line, then freefall down through space into the Earth’s atmosphere, where you eventually open a parachute to land on the ground.

  This is incredibly dangerous! Several space jumps have ended extremely badly indeed.

  Who has the record for the longest space dive?

  • 1960: The record was set by an American named Colonel Joseph Wittinger. Colonel Wittinger was part of a research project into high-altitude bailouts for pilots. He did three jumps from a helium balloon at over 19 miles above the Earth! Later, Colonel Wittinger would write that the speed he traveled at was unimaginable.

  • 1962: A Soviet colonel named Yevgeni Andreyev set a new record by freefalling further to Earth before opening his parachute than anyone had previously managed. But Joseph Wittinger still kept the record for the longest skydive as Yevgeni Andreyev leaped out of his capsule at 15.83 miles—not so high up.

  • 2012: Joseph Wittinger’s record for the longest dive and Yevgeni Andreyev’s record for the longest freefall were not broken until this century, when Felix Baumgartner broke them both in one go, jumping from 128,100 feet!

  • 2014: He didn’t have long as world champion, as a computer scientist named Alan Eustace stole his thunder by completing the highest altitude jump with the longest free fall only two years later. Eustace fell over 25 miles in just 15 minutes, his speed peaking at 822 mph. People on the ground heard the boom as he went through the sound barrier!

  A space travel company is now working on a special suit that would allow space diving from even higher altitudes!

  But these suits are not for stunts or record breaking—they are being developed as an emergency exit route for astronauts who need to bail out of their spacecraft and return to Earth in free fall.

  Truly life-saving.

  • Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain, is about 5.5 miles high.

  • An average aircraft flies at just under 6.8 miles of altitude.

  • So if you were looking out of the window of a plane, one of these spacemen could have come falling past you!

  Chapter Sixteen

  In the hospital block, Annie was still staring in horror at the boxes.

  She wondered briefly if she should try to open one of them, to check her suspicions about what lay inside. But then she decided that was a bad idea—the life support systems were probably complex and delicate and she might disturb them. Then Annie suddenly had an awful thought. There were three “people” in the largest boxes, as well as two smaller ones beside them… .

  She went up close to one of the smaller boxes and pressed her eye up to the glass. It couldn’t be—could it? No, she told herself firmly. Her mom was far away, somewhere on a musical tour. And George’s parents were having a lovely time on an organic farm with their two small children. The number—three big ones plus two very small—was just a coincidence. It must be, she told herself very sternly. Anyway, she said to herself, she’d been receiving messages all this
time from her mom, telling her about the concerts, the long plane rides, the hotels, the foreign food, and the other members of the orchestra. Just like George had been getting farming updates from the Faroe Islands, along with snippets of family news from his mom and dad. Whoever was in those boxes had nothing to do with Annie or her family—or George either. Perhaps they were, as Rika said, volunteers who had put themselves forward for medical research. Annie tried to comfort herself that this must be the case, although she didn’t feel very convinced.

  She spotted another lone box on the other side of the room, also closed and with all the machines activated. Remembering that Rika had said the boxes were ready to be loaded onto Artemis and that Artemis was poised for launch, Annie stared at the lone box. What did all this mean? They had thought “Artemis” only referred to a mechanical fishing expedition to Europa, an attempt to capture life using robots from another location in the Solar System. And then, in a flash, she remembered how they had talked about Artemis, the first time they had come across it. Artemis, she remembered, sent humans out into space to investigate whether life existed on a watery moon in the Solar System! Artemis used human explorers to investigate the presence of other life-forms, not just robots! And here were these mysterious boxes that apparently contained “volunteers,” put to sleep for long-distance space travel. Did that mean they were bound for Europa? Were they really volunteers? Would they ever come back—or would it be just the data they collected that made it back to Earth? They pretty much knew that Europa couldn’t support human life for very long—so what would happen to the “astronauts” in the boxes once they had done their tasks for Rika Dur?

  All the talk of a great space mission in 2025 was a red herring, she understood in a flash. The next major manned space mission, she thought furiously, was due to happen much sooner than 2025; sooner than almost anyone else knew. Annie had seen the spacecraft waiting on the launch pad, the one that the Kosmodrome 2 worker had accidentally referred to as Artemis in Annie’s earshot. Now she had stumbled across the silent, and no doubt unwilling, human cargo about to be loaded onto it. There was no time to lose, Annie realized.