Lucy and the Rocket Dog

by Will Buckingham

  She sniffed the ceiling, nudging it with her nose. The nudge, although only very gentle, sent her floating off to one side of Prototype I. There she put a paw to the wall and pushed, very gently, and soon she went floating back across to the other side of Prototype I, where her backside collided with the television screen.

  Laika had a thought.

  THIS IS STRANGE.

  Or perhaps it wasn’t a thought. Perhaps it was an unease down in her bones and her sinews and her guts. But whether it was a thought or not, there was a kind of strangeness to being Laika at that moment, floating there in Prototype I, and the strangeness only increased when a voice crackled out from the loudspeakers. Again, it was Lucy’s voice.

  “Crew alert! Crew alert! It’s breakfast time, everyone!”

  The word “breakfast” was one of the words that Laika recognized. Lucy had, in the past, done friendly experiments on Laika and concluded that she knew several words and phrases. Things like “No!” “Good girl!” “Breakfast!” “Walk!” and “Bad girl!”—and, of course, “Laika.” Laika, in other words, knew how to understand more words in human language than most humans know how to understand in dog language.

  “Breakfast” was one of the words that she knew. Whenever anybody said “breakfast,” Laika had a clear and unmistakable thought.

  BREAKFAST.

  So Laika started to look around excitedly, because breakfast was so exciting that even floating in midair couldn’t dampen her enthusiasm.

  Then there was a crunching noise, and from the funnel above the dog bowl on the left came dog biscuits; but instead of rattling into the bowl as they normally would, they formed a small brown cloud, a dog-biscuit cloud, and the cloud floated and dispersed throughout Prototype I, so that in a few moments there were dog biscuits everywhere, floating, here and there, and Laika, who was very hungry and who was floating too, opened her mouth, trying to catch now one, now another. She managed to snap at a small cluster of dog biscuits as they floated past her nose. Another few biscuits she missed. She bobbed toward the edge of the cabin and put a gentle paw on the wall. This sent her in the other direction, right into the middle of a dog-biscuit swarm. She opened her mouth and caught them the way big fish catch little fish while swimming in the sea. They tasted the same as normal, nonfloating dog biscuits, but it was a strange sensation just opening your mouth and letting them sail in.

  Laika was starting to feel a little thirsty from all the dog biscuits when a tap popped out of a hatch above the second dog bowl and squirted out a large splash of water. But the water did not fall downward; instead it drifted like a strange kind of jellyfish, transparent and wobbly, across the spaceship. Laika managed to use her front legs to propel herself through empty space in the direction of the water. She opened her mouth, and the wobbly splotch of water floated inside. She clamped her jaws shut. It was wet just like normal water, only floatier. She swallowed hard.

  The loudspeaker crackled again. “Enjoy your breakfast,” said Lucy’s voice as Laika opened her mouth again and chomped on another five or six biscuits.

  All of this started to be quite a lot of fun, for quite a long while; but eventually Laika had eaten all the biscuits and had all she needed to drink, and there was nothing more to do but float around and wonder what to do next. So Laika floated and floated, and the lights on the control panel of Prototype I flickered on and off, and the images on the screen changed very slowly, and outside the window the stars winked, and there was nothing other than the hum of machinery, and Laika felt in her bones that she was more alone than she had ever been before. Laika thought she might like to have a nap, but it is strange sleeping when you are floating in the middle of empty space, and when she closed her eyes, she just bumped into things.

  Laika bobbed over to the window and looked out into space.

  “Owwwwowww!” she said.

  But there was nobody to hear her.

  “Owwwowwwowww!” she said.

  The stars looked back at her blankly.

  “Owwwowwwwowwww!”

  And it was then that Laika began to tremble with a terrible trembling, because everything was so very strange and so very disorienting, and because she had no idea what was happening to her. Her legs shook, her tail shuddered, her body trembled, her eyes went a bit funny, and she lost whatever reason she had (and, as she was not the cleverest of dogs, that was not very much) and went a bit loopy. Her legs started to flail around, she made odd yelping noises, and she started to bounce around the inside of Prototype I in panic, crying out, “Owwwowwwwowwww! Owwwowwwwowwww! Owwwowwwwowwww!”

  It was in the middle of all of this that Laika spotted something strange outside of the window of the spacecraft, something that looked curiously familiar. There, thousands upon thousands of miles from Earth, floating in the middle of space…

  …was a bone.

  Time passed, and although Lucy didn’t forget about Laika, she found that the sadness eased a little, and that looking through the telescope felt a little different from how it had felt before. In the first few days after Laika was gone, she had desperately looked for Prototype I among the vast darkness of space. But as days turned to weeks, and weeks to months, she found herself spending less and less time looking for the one thing that she couldn’t find out there in space—her dog, Laika—and more and more time looking at all the other things that she could find there: the stars and planets and the rings of Jupiter, the beautiful ice-crystal tails of comets, the strange craters in the moon that people once thought made shapes like faces and leaping rabbits, but that were only craters made by meteoroids crashing into the surface of the moon and leaving holes and pockmarks. And looking through the telescope became less of a sad kind of thing, and more of the kind of thing that had about it a sort of beauty, and a kind of calm.

  There are some people who look deep into the blackness of space and it makes them shudder. They think about the millions and millions of stars, and the millions and millions of planets, and the black holes that are so black that you can’t see them, and the countless galaxies, and the uncountableness of the things of the universe, and—worst of all—that great, vast sea of blackness, and they shudder. They think, How scary! or Oh dear! How sad that makes me feel! or My life seems so unimportant and miserable, because I’m so very, very small, and things are so very, very big! and they go around in a terrible gloom that makes them unfriendly, and causes them to kick stones and tin cans in a peevish fashion, and that makes them no fun to be with. But there are other people who look deep into the blackness of space and they find that, little by little, it makes them happier. They feel really rather cheerful to think that they are a part of the here, there, and everywhereness of things, to think how it is completely, gobsmackingly amazing that they are staring up at the winking stars and that the stars that are billions upon billions of miles away are winking back at them, and knowing how funny and wonderful it is that any of this is here at all, they find themselves going around with a spring in their step, that their worries are less worrying than before, and that the irritations of their lives are less irritating; and, in short, they become really rather nice people to spend time with, the kind of people you’d like to invite for tea or you’d like to meet when walking down the street.

  The more Lucy gazed into space, the more she became this second kind of person, so that the more she gazed up at the stars, the more everybody said that she was exactly like the kind of person you’d want to meet. And sometimes, because she was such an agreeable person, who talked with such enthusiasm about stars and planets and galaxies and nebulae and all those other strange and big things, people would want to talk to her. Then they would ask her, “Why do you spend so much time staring through your telescope?” In reply, she would look a little bit sad and say in a voice that was just a little bit quiet, “I do it for Laika.” And they would say, “Who is Laika?” And in reply, she would tell them about how Laika had blasted off in Prototype I. And they would say, “But surely, she will never come
back?” And Lucy would say, “Perhaps not.” Then she would smile, and everybody would think, What an agreeable person this Lucy is. She is a little odd, no doubt. Perhaps she is a little more interested by the stars and planets and the here, there, and everywhereness of space than is normal. But she is agreeable nonetheless.

  You cannot be sad forever. At least, you cannot be sad in the every-moment-hurts kind of way forever. The sadness doesn’t disappear, exactly; but instead it settles down into something different, a mixture of remembering and gratitude and regret and wondering. And this is what happened with Lucy. And so some time later—not the following year, but the year after—the grass that had been burned by the fire that came from the engines of Prototype I had grown back, and Lucy found herself one summer night lying on her back and gazing up at the winking stars, while the scent of flowers drifted on the night air. She thought about how beautiful it all was, and thought about Laika and hoped that wherever she was, she was happy and that she had enough dog biscuits to eat. And she thought about how staring at the stars made her feel closer to Laika, and then she said to herself, out loud, “Oh, Laika! The stars and planets and the here, there, and everywhereness of space are so beautiful. I don’t ever want to stop looking at them. And somewhere out there, perhaps you are too.” Then Lucy imagined Laika, wherever she was, looking into the sky. And among the winking stars and the vastness of space, she imagined a little dot looking down on Laika. And this dot was the earth, Lucy’s home. And although the distances were so unimaginably huge, this thought made Lucy feel a little bit closer to Laika.

  It was around this time that Lucy started to get good marks in school science classes. They were not just slightly good, haven’t-you-done-well marks, but really good marks. They were so good that when her science teachers saw Lucy coming into the room, they would start to sweat, just a little bit, and their lips would start to tremble, and you could almost hear them thinking, I hope Lucy doesn’t ask me any difficult questions today.

  Take, for example, Mr. Kingham. Mr. Kingham—whose first name was Wilbur, something that embarrassed him a good deal—was a nice man. He always wore those shabby brown jackets that teachers like to wear, and he had a brown briefcase and an untidy gray beard and scuffed shoes, and he smiled nervously all the time, and there was nothing at all wrong with him, except that he was not very good at science.

  No, that is not fair. Mr. Kingham was all right at science. He was good enough at science. Some of his pupils did well, and some did less well. He was not exactly bad at science; but he was a man who never looked up to the stars and thought about the here, there, and everywhereness of space, or thought, How beautiful it all is! He was a man who thought that being a scientist was just a job, like being a plumber or a prime minister or a pope. He was a man who, when he went home, didn’t read science books like Lucy did. Unlike Lucy, he didn’t go to the library every week to read impressive magazines like New Scientist or Scientific American. Instead he read detective novels, and not even particularly good ones. So every time he saw Lucy in his class, he started to shake a little in fear, because he knew that she would ask him questions. Questions like, “What would happen if you tried to go close to the speed of light?” Or questions like, “What does the inside of a black hole look like?” Or questions like…well, all kinds of questions that Lucy, who spent a lot of her time reading impressive magazines and science books and looking at the stars and thinking very, very hard, wanted to know the answers to. Because the more that she knew about these questions, the closer Laika seemed to be.

  A bone? In space?

  Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of miles from home?

  What was going on?

  Laika’s mouth started to water. She floated toward the porthole and peered out, watching the bone getting bigger and bigger and bigger. She pressed her nose to the glass and sniffed. She expected a good, meaty smell. But once again all she could smell was window.

  THIS IS STRANGE, Laika thought, not for the first time.

  Her mouth felt funny. Her eyes were telling her mouth that this was a bone, and so it should start watering. But Laika’s nose disagreed and told her mouth that it was nothing of the sort, so it should stop watering.

  Confused by the mixed messages that her mouth was getting from her nose and her eyes, Laika didn’t know what to do.

  As her nose, her eyes, and her mouth did their best to resolve their differences, Laika floated and bobbed in front of the porthole. It was all very perplexing.

  On the one hand, being a dog, Laika was inclined to trust her nose more than her eyes.

  On the other hand, the bone was getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Laika’s tongue lolled. She swallowed hard.

  Then the bone got so large that it filled the porthole with its gleaming whiteness; and Laika’s eyes told her nose to shut up, because her nose clearly didn’t know what it was talking about.

  BONE, Laika thought.

  BIG BONE!

  BIG, BIG BONE!

  “Relativity,” said Lucy to Mr. Kingham, her hand up. Her eyes were eager, and she was almost bouncing on her seat in her enthusiasm.

  Mr. Kingham sighed. “Lucy,” he said, “I really think that this is a bit difficult for the class.”

  “Not at all,” Lucy said. “The theory of relativity is relatively easy.” She grinned at the joke, even though she knew it wasn’t a very good one.

  Mr. Kingham looked at her and blinked in a despairing kind of way. Lucy would be leaving this summer for another school. And Mr. Kingham was proud in a way because she was his best-ever student. Nevertheless, he would be glad to see the back of her, because she asked all kinds of awkward questions, and that made him uncomfortable. He was the kind of teacher who thought that teachers should know all the answers and their pupils should know very little, and all the teachers then had to do was to pour answers into the heads of their pupils the way that you pour tea from a teapot into a row of cups. Except when you pour tea out of a teapot, the teapot ends up empty, but when you pour answers into somebody else’s head, they stay in your head as well.

  But the point is this: that Lucy always had lots of questions. And Mr. Kingham didn’t know how to answer these questions. This perplexed him a great deal.

  “Relativity,” Lucy said.

  “I know what you said,” Mr. Kingham replied. “But relativity is not relatively easy. It is relatively hard.”

  The joke was even less funny the second time around, when Mr. Kingham repeated it. Lucy just frowned. “It is easy,” she said. “You just have to think about it in the right way.”

  Lucy loved the theory of relativity. It was a theory that had been proposed by a man called Einstein, who lived a long time ago. Einstein was a scientist who liked pulling funny faces. Lucy admired this about him. Not enough theories were invented by people who liked pulling funny faces. Or, perhaps, not enough of the very clever people who came up with new theories dared to be photographed pulling funny faces in the way that Einstein did. And if you haven’t heard of this theory of relativity, it is perhaps because you are surrounded by people like Mr. Kingham, who think that things like the theory of relativity are very, very hard, and so they never bother to tell you about them. Which is a shame because, as Lucy said, it’s not very hard at all.

  Lucy had taught herself about the theory of relativity by reading magazines like New Scientist and Scientific American because Mr. Kingham didn’t really understand it very well. And because it was her favorite theory, she wanted to explain it to the rest of the class. Lucy was the kind of girl who had favorite theories in the same way that her classmates had favorite music or favorite TV shows.

  “Let me show you,” Lucy said to Mr. Kingham; and before he knew it, she had jumped up from her seat and was standing by the blackboard (Mr. Kingham was old-fashioned, so he insisted on using a blackboard, with proper chalk and everything).

  Lucy drew a diagram of what looked like the earth; and on the earth she drew a stick person, a stick perso
n that looked a little bit like her. Then she drew a diagram of what looked like a rocket, and put an arrow pointing to the rocket. Underneath, at the other end of the arrow that pointed to the rocket, she wrote the words “VERY FAST.” And then next to the rocket she drew something else, something that looked very like a bendy clock.

  “It’s a bendy clock,” said one of her classmates, a boy called Owen, who was the kind of boy who knew a bendy clock when he saw one.

  “Why have you drawn a bendy clock, Lucy?” asked Mr. Kingham. When he asked the question, he sounded sort of sad and a little weary.

  “Because,” said Lucy, “when you go very fast, like in a rocket or something, time goes all stretchy and squishy. That is what the theory of relativity says.”

  “Rubbish,” said Owen.

  “Oh dear,” said Mr. Kingham.

  “It’s not rubbish. It’s been proved,” said Lucy. “Hasn’t it, Mr. Kingham?”

  “Lucy, this is a bit difficult for the class,” said Mr. Kingham.

  “No it’s not. It’s easy,” said Lucy. “What it means is that if I put Owen in a rocket…” Here she drew a picture of Owen’s face looking out of the porthole of the rocket, and the whole class laughed. Owen glowered. “If I put Owen in a rocket and made him go very, very fast, and if we just stayed here, then if he went fast enough, let’s say at six hundred and sixty-nine million nine hundred and forty-six thousand miles an hour, which is ninety-nine point nine percent of the speed of light…”

  “Lucy…,” said Mr. Kingham, scribbling down the figures, “please.”

  But Lucy just went on anyway. “…and if Owen went that fast for, oh, I don’t know, let’s say one month, then by the time he got back, he would have spent only one month traveling in the spaceship, while for the rest of us…”