Racing the Moon

by Alan Armstrong

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2012 by Alan Armstrong

  Jacket art and interior illustrations copyright © 2012 by Tim Jessell

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouse.com/kids

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89309-4

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  She was quick and quicker to learn—

  Bold and bolder to dare.…

  —Oregon legend

  (adapted from Rudyard Kipling’s Kim)

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Dedication

  1. The New Neighbor

  2. Tomato Juice

  3. Spaceman Smith

  4. The Radio Tower

  5. Looking for Aliens

  6. Hybrids

  7. Pepsi-Cola Hits the Spot

  8. Air Hart

  9. The Moon Station

  10. Smith’s Journal

  11. Boldly Stated Is Half-Done

  12. Icarus

  13. The Shoplifter

  14. Saving Chuck

  15. Stowaway

  16. The No Name

  17. Under Way

  18. Old Hands

  19. At Sea

  20. Rescue!

  21. Suspicious Characters

  22. Wallops

  23. To the Shores of Tripoli

  24. Moon Girl Rising

  25. Chuck’s Genius

  26. TJ

  Acknowledgments

  for Zora

  1

  THE NEW NEIGHBOR

  Early Sunday morning, Alex headed up the hill. The weight she was carrying was heavy on her shoulder, but she was unaware of it. “Hi, Amelia,” she called to a blue dragonfly darting by. There were grass flowers in the warm breeze, a sweet scent that was almost dizzying. Then the sharp smell of fresh asphalt from the new road hit her with the thrill of a slap.

  She stopped in front of one of the new houses. The ground around it was raw red clay. A large woman was on her knees, planting a bush. Her back was to the road.

  “Hi!” the girl called as her dog’s tail began waving in expectation.

  No response.

  She cleared her throat to get the woman’s attention.

  Nothing.

  Finally Alex hollered, “Lady! Would you like to buy some plants?”

  The dog barked, thinking it was some sort of game.

  “Huh? What?” the woman called out, almost falling over as she jerked around, her trowel flying.

  “Sorry,” Alex muttered, starting to turn away. “I’m selling plants.”

  “Oh!” the woman exclaimed, her face clearing a little. “Well, hold on,” she called in a friendlier voice as she stood up slowly like you’d fold out a pocketknife.

  The woman was tall and square-shouldered, in jeans and a dark red shirt. She had dark curly hair and strong-looking hands. Her face was long. She looked like she’d been out in the sun a lot.

  Alex was an eleven-year-old in a not-too-clean T-shirt and dirt-stained jeans. She’d just cut her hair herself for summer. The plants she was selling were in two baskets hung on the notched broomstick she carried across a shoulder like a coolie. The large brown dog wagged happily beside her.

  The woman’s face softened as she studied Alex. “Let’s see what you’ve got. I like plants, and I sure do need something around here.”

  Alex figured the woman felt bad about getting angry. She pointed to her left basket. “These are azaleas, reds and whites,” she said in a professional voice. “They’re a dime each. In this other basket there’s hollyhocks and foxgloves. They’re two for a nickel. The foxgloves’ official name is digitalis. You get heart medicine from the leaves.”

  The woman looked closely, then nodded. “Right! I’ll take ’em all if you’ll show me where they should go.”

  “Sure,” said the girl as she lifted off her carrying pole and started emptying the baskets, delighted to have made such a big sale.

  “First tell me your name,” the woman said, wiping her big hands on her jeans. “Tell me about yourself and how you got into the plants business. Tell me inside. I haven’t got my money on me. I’ve got milk, and I can give you a bomber bar I invented for the high-altitude pilots.”

  “A bomber bar? What’s that?”

  “Come on in; I’ll show you.”

  Alex hesitated. She’d been warned about going alone into a stranger’s house, but there was something intriguing about this woman. Alex imagined herself a spy, read all the spy stories in the magazines, figured she was pretty good at telling who was dangerous. She decided to risk it.

  “Can Jeep come in too?” she asked. “He won’t do anything.”

  She didn’t say so, but Jeep was her protection. If she said “Sic!” he’d attack.

  The woman understood. “OK.”

  “Got something for him?” Alex asked.

  “I reckon,” the woman said, smiling and sticking out her hand. “I’m Captain Ebbs. Call me Ebbs.” She had a nice smile.

  Alex rubbed her hand clean and shook Ebbs’s. It was rough and twice as big as hers. Ebbs didn’t paint her nails like Alex’s mother did.

  “I’m Alexis Hart,” she said. “I live down the hill, last house above the creek. You can call me Alex.”

  Ebbs’s house was a small white clapboard box like the others in the development, but inside it looked strange. The floors were bare and it was almost empty, except tacked to the walls were photographs of fighter planes, bombers, different-sized rockets, and a big balloon with a gondola underneath. In one corner there was a dark painting.

  Alex stared at the photographs, the rockets especially. They were bigger, much bigger, than the ones in her book. Ebbs was in one picture standing with some officers and a tall man in a suit. She wore a military uniform with a narrow slant hat.

  Alex’s house was filled with rugs, stuffed chairs, and little tables with photographs of old people in polished silver frames.

  “You waiting for the rest of your stuff?” she asked as Ebbs pointed her to one of the two kitchen chairs and plunked down a glass of milk and a plate with a grainy-looking brown bar on it. Ebbs shook her head. “Nope, this is it,” she said, motioning around. “I move a lot because of my work, so I can’t keep much, and anyway, things slow you down. Do you bicycle?”

  “Sure,” said Alex, taking a tentative bite of the bar, then putting it down. It tasted bitter.

  Ebbs noticed but kept talking. “I sail a small boat. You don’t want anything extra on a sailboat either. It took me a while, but now I live like I’m sailing, everything essential and shipshape. Do you like to sail?”

  “Never done it.”

  “If you want, I’ll teach you.”

  “Thanks,” said Alex. Then she asked i
n a polite voice, “Is there a Mr. Ebbs?”

  Ebbs’s eyebrows went up a little. “My older brothers,” she said. “But they don’t live here. It’s just me,” she added quietly. “No family.”

  “Oh.”

  The dog whined.

  “Right, I forgot!” Ebbs said. “Does he like cheese? I’ve got some old cheddar I can give him, but it’s pretty hard.”

  “He’ll eat anything!”

  As Ebbs sat down with a yellow chunk in her hand, the dog waved his big forward-curling tail. He was shorthaired but his tail was bushy. He came up to Ebbs slowly, stiff-legged and formal, sniffed, then took the cheese delicately and settled down to gnaw.

  “Very dignified,” Ebbs said. “What’s his name again?”

  “Jeep. He’s my brother’s dog, but he sticks with me.” Alex paused, then added, “Folks usually want to know why he’s called that.”

  Ebbs waited for her to say, but she didn’t. Alex remembered her mother warning her about “going on,” talking too much.

  “So tell me,” Ebbs demanded.

  Alex relaxed. She liked to talk, and since Ebbs had bought her out, she didn’t have to hurry on.

  “Chuck named him that because he’s the same color as his war surplus jeep,” she began. “The garbageman found him hurt by the road and left him with us. He said he was a Chesapeake Bay retriever, but he hates water and he doesn’t look like the ones in the book, so Mother says he’s a mutt. He sleeps on my bed even though he’s not supposed to. Mother says he makes my room smell like a caveman’s cave because of what he rolls in. He rolls in everything!” She didn’t tell how she pulled him close at night and buried her head in his chest, breathing in his damp warm dog scent.

  Ebbs reached out and stroked the dog’s head as he swished his tail slowly like a Chinese fan. “OK, Jeep,” she said. “I’ve spent a lot of time in jeeps, so I won’t forget your name.”

  As Jeep stretched out at her feet, Ebbs straightened up and turned to Alex. “So how did you get into the plants business?”

  “It’s my dad. We do it together. Most mornings he gets up at five, so I do too. I’m the only one because it’s so early. He says dawn’s the best part of the day.”

  “Right!” said Ebbs as she heaved up to get her purse out of the bread drawer. “What are you going to do with the money?” she asked as she counted out some coins.

  “Buy stuff for Moon Girl. That’s our rocket. We named it after this German rocket movie.”

  “No kidding!” Ebbs exclaimed. “What sort of rocket?”

  “Like the ones in your pictures only a lot smaller,” Alex said, getting up to study the picture of Ebbs standing beside the big rocket. “What do you do?”

  “I work with our space scientists,” Ebbs replied. “It’s classified, so I can’t say much, but in that one I’m with our top rocket engineer, Doctor Wernher von Braun. He’s the one in the suit. I helped get him for us. His rockets like the V-2 we’re standing beside are going to send us to the Moon.”

  “Doctor Von?” Alex asked, her eyes open wide. “The V-2 to the Moon? What do you mean, you got him?”

  “Helped,” Ebbs corrected. “He designed rockets the German Army used in the war. As it was ending, the Russians went after him for their program. We wanted him for ours. We got to him first.”

  “He worked for the German Army?” Alex asked, remembering newsreels of marching troops Sieg Heiling Hitler and the swastika. “He was the enemy?”

  Ebbs nodded. “Yes, but all he’s ever really cared about is building rockets for space travel.

  “Tell me about the rocket you’re building.”

  “We made it to shoot up on steam,” Alex said, “but when we got it going it fell over and chased us around. Then Chuck went away to school, but now he’s back so we’re going to fix it up to run on gunpowder.”

  “Gunpowder? You’ve got gunpowder?”

  “No, but we’re gonna make some. Our book’s got the Chinese formula for it. Dad’s got the sulfur we need—he uses it for killing bugs. The rest we’ll buy at the hardware store.”

  Ebbs scowled. “A lot of people have got burned, lost hands and eyes trying to make gunpowder. Is your dad in on this?”

  “No.”

  “I see,” Ebbs said slowly. “How old is your brother?”

  “Chuck’s seventeen. He can make anything,” Alex said proudly. “Mother says he’s got genius, but Dad says he’s wasting it ’cause he can’t buckle down and learn math. He was going to Tech, but he got kicked out.”

  “Uh-oh. Why?”

  “ ’Cause he mixes things up when he reads, and nobody can read anything he writes. My other brother, John, says his writing looks like what ancient people did sticking sticks into mud pads, but I can read it and so can Rosy, the guy who’s teaching us radio.”

  Alex went to another photograph, this one of a white and black balloon hung with ropes and sandbags. There were men in diving suits waving from the small gondola hanging below.

  She pointed. “Is that like the balloons they send up to check the weather?”

  “Yeah,” said Ebbs, surprised, “only it’s a lot bigger. It’s called Skyhook. I work with it—send it way up with fruit flies and seeds to see how life does exposed to solar rays.”

  “Why?” Alex asked.

  “Because I work on food for space pilots—stuff like that bomber bar you didn’t like,” Ebbs explained. “I made ’em for the crews of the bombers in the pictures over there—guys who’d be in the air six or seven hours on a run and needed something to keep their energy up so they’d be alert for the hardest part of the flight, the landing. I’ve invented other space food too.”

  Alex listened, rapt, for the next half hour as Ebbs described her concoctions and told Alex about the experiments they were doing to figure out how to keep the pilots from throwing up on liftoff and feeling nauseous in flight.

  “Chuck and I read about space in the magazines,” Alex said. “Are we going up soon?”

  “Maybe,” Ebbs replied, “but I can’t talk about it. Tell me, though—you mentioned weather balloons. What do you know about ’em?”

  “Nothing yet,” Alex replied, “but Chuck and I are going to track one, find it coming down, and get its transmitter for our rocket.”

  “Right,” Ebbs said, drawing out the word. “The same brother who makes the gunpowder—he’s into radio too?”

  “Oh yeah!” Alex exclaimed. “Saturday mornings we go down to the Radio Institute where Dad works. Rosy’s teaching us. Chuck says we’re going to build a radar dish to track Moon Girl.”

  Jeep started rattling his tags.

  “We gotta go—Sunday dinner’s at noon,” Alex said, heading to the door.

  “Come back later. Bring more plants,” Ebbs called as Alex followed Jeep out.

  “OK!”

  2

  TOMATO JUICE

  Alex nodded to herself as she hurried down the hill sniffing the bands of honeysuckle fragrance that came in gentle waves on the warm breeze. “Rockets. Space food. Wait till Chuck hears,” she muttered, quickening her step. “She said to come back.” The dog wagged and trotted on ahead.

  Chuck was Alex’s main friend. She had other friends, but when Chuck was around she skipped them because his adventures were more interesting. He liked to show off for her. She knew he was dangerous. None of the neighbors let their kids play with him. Those that did often got hurt. Chuck got hurt a lot too, but he didn’t seem to mind—it was like he wanted to go to the edge of everything.

  “Dinner in ten minutes, dear,” her mother called as Alex walked into the house. Her mother was a small, quick, straight-standing figure. The gold chain with her heart pills capsule hung around her neck. Dinner smelled good. Pot roast.

  Alex’s mother kept their home as tidy as Ebbs’s but with a lot more stuff, mostly old family things she’d brought back from Europe. She had gone to school in Germany and learned languages. Now she worked at home translating German songs. Alex liked to l
isten when her mother played the phonograph and sang the strange words.

  Before Alex could eat she had to pass John’s tests. It was part of his tutoring deal with their mother. Every Sunday noon before dinner Alex had to define and spell five vocabulary words and work some math problems from her schoolbook. She resented John’s getting paid for ordering her around, but her grades were getting better. John said he was doing it so she wouldn’t end up dumb like Chuck.

  “In the development there’s this lady named Ebbs,” Alex announced as they sat down. “She’s got pictures of airplanes and rockets all over her walls, says she makes food space pilots will eat—seaweed tubes they’ll boil up into spaghetti and smear with chemicals—if they can swallow since they’ll be eating upside down, and if their ears haven’t blown out without pressure and gravity.”

  “Easy, Alley,” Chuck said, laughing as his sister gobbled her dinner. “She’s putting you on.”

  “No!” Alex exclaimed through a mouthful. “She told me a lot about her work, and she’s got pictures. She’s in one of them, in uniform with a bunch of men standing around this big rocket they captured. She says since a gallon of water weighs five pounds they can’t take up much, so they’re gonna drink recycled made out of their pee.…”

  “Alexis! Please!” her mother said. “That’s vulgar.”

  Alex went on undaunted. “And before she started making the space pilots’ food she made energy bars for bomber pilots. She gave me one. It’s got coffee and raisins in it. She said she invented it for the long-distance pilots who’d be up in the air for hours and hours and had to stay sharp, but I had to spit it out.”

  John made a noise. Alex was delighted; she’d got to him. She was always fighting for a place in the conversation.

  “Why she’s telling you this stuff, I can’t imagine,” John said, “but if she’s for real and you ever see her again find out why we want to go up there in the first place. It’s empty! The stories we hear about looking for life? It’s a boondoggle to get money for the airplane makers!”

  “Empty?” Chuck said with a snort. “Some night pull your nose out of your books and look up!”