The dog who had come to meet her then hopped into a little harness. It started to press some buttons on a control panel with its big, hairy paw. Laika had no idea what it was doing, but she felt happy and at home and as if she had friends. So she found a nice, comfortable corner where there was a big, soft cushion. She sat down and sighed.
The cushion smelled a bit funny; everything smelled a bit funny in this strange, new world, but it was at least as comfortable as anything that Laika was used to. She curled up contentedly and snuggled down into the cushion.
Outside the window the stars streaked past.
Eight years after her first visit, Lucy returned to the Observatory on the Hill.
It was a beautiful, peaceful night. She could hear the hum of night insects and could see the stars scattered overhead. She climbed the steps, her bag slung over her shoulder, and she looked up to the sky. Then she let out a big sigh. “Well, Lucy,” she said to herself. “This is it. A new job!”
Then Lucy knocked on the door.
The door opened, and inside stood the director. He was grinning. “Lucy,” he said, putting out his hand. “Come on in. Welcome. Please, call me Jim. You remember this place, of course? We’re so pleased that you’ve come to work for us.”
The director, or Jim, as Lucy now called him, showed her to her new office. It was a comfortable, cluttered kind of office, with one of those chairs that spin around and have wheels, so that—if nobody is looking—you can send yourself scooting and spinning across the room. On Lucy’s desk there was a computer and a big pile of paper ready for her, and a nice box of chocolates to welcome her. Next to the computer was a bulletin board. Lucy smiled.
“I’ll go and make a cup of tea,” Jim said. “You probably need some time to settle in.”
Lucy sat down on the chair and gave it a 360-degree spin, just to test it out. It was a good chair for spinning. Then she reached into her bag and took out an envelope. Inside the envelope was a photograph. It was a picture of her, her mom and dad, and Laika. They were on the beach, and their hair was blowing in the wind. Lucy’s dad had asked a passerby to take the photo. It was the summer before Laika disappeared into the here, there, and everywhereness of space, when Prototype I was still at the planning stage. They were on holiday at the beach. They were all happy. Laika was positively jumping with joy. Lucy smiled to see the photograph. It had faded slightly. It looked as if all this had happened a long, long time ago.
Lucy took the photograph, and she pinned it up on the bulletin board. “Well, Laika,” she said, as much to herself as anything, “here I am! My first proper job!”
At that moment Jim the director came back with a mug of tea. He handed it to Lucy and sat down opposite her. He glanced at the photo of Lucy, her mom and dad, and Laika, and he said, “What an old photo! Was that your dog?”
“Yes,” Lucy said. “Her name was Laika.”
Lucy reached out and clasped her hands around the mug of hot tea. The warmth was comforting.
Seeing that Lucy needed more time to settle in, Jim left her alone.
—
Lucy looked at the photo pinned above the desk. In the photo Laika was leaping into the air, her ears floppy and her tongue lolling out. They must have been playing at throwing sticks, because Laika had that slightly mad THROW THE STICK look to her. Lucy was grinning.
She remembered the day that the photo had been taken. They were on their summer holiday—Lucy, her mom and dad, and Laika. It had been a good day and a good holiday. On that holiday Lucy had spent a lot of the time drawing up plans for Prototype I. She wrote everything down in a blue notebook, and didn’t let anybody see what she was doing, because she didn’t want her mom and dad interrupting her when she was trying to think very hard about things.
It’s a complicated business designing spaceships. You have to know about all kinds of things. You have to know what to build the spaceship out of, and what to use as fuel, and you have to be able to do lots of math so that you can point the spaceship in the right direction, and you have to be good with computers, and you need to think hard about what kind of chairs to have, because they need to be comfy enough to sit in for a long time, but not so comfy that you fall asleep and your spaceship crashes. And Lucy took all of this very seriously indeed, because she was the kind of person who thought that if you were going to design a spaceship, you might as well make a good job of it.
Sometimes, in the evening after a day on the beach, when her mom saw her scribbling in the notebook, her mom asked her, “Lucy, love, what are you doing?”
“Oh, nothing,” Lucy replied.
Or else her dad said, “You look like you are concentrating very hard. What are you up to?”
And Lucy rolled her eyes and said, “Dad, I’m thinking.”
Then her dad smiled, because he found it annoying to be interrupted when he was thinking as well, and he said, “Sorry,” and he tiptoed out of the room.
It was only when she got home from her holiday, when she was sure about her plans, that Lucy announced to her parents she was designing a spaceship, and that now that her designs were complete, she wanted to build it. She announced this over dinner, just as they were beginning to tuck into their dessert, and for a few seconds there was a terrible silence.
“Oh,” her mom said at last.
“Hmmm…,” said her dad.
“A spaceship?” her mom asked.
“A real one? Full-sized?” her dad added.
Lucy went a little bit red. It is always hard to tell other people about things that really matter to you, because you never know if they will matter as much to the people you are talking to. “A real one,” she said. “So I can go exploring the universe with Laika.”
“Oh,” said her mom.
“Hmmm…,” her dad repeated.
They both looked thoughtful. Then her dad got a dreamy look on his face, his eyes glazing over, and her mom stood up and went to the cupboard. Her mom returned with a big toolbox. She opened it up. It was full of wrenches and hammers and soldering irons, and bits of wire and other useful things. “Will any of this help?” her mom asked. “Just let me know what you need, and I’ll do my best to give you a hand.”
Then her dad shook himself and smiled at her. “This is a very interesting project,” he said. “A very interesting project. I’m afraid that, unlike your mom, I can’t give you any practical help. But it looks to me that you’ll need to do a whole lot of thinking as well. So if you ever want to come perambulating with me, we can think about things together.”
Lucy smiled at her mom and dad. “Thanks,” she said. “I’ll let you know.”
Laika had just gotten settled when the dog who had met her turned and woofed at her.
“Whuff,” it said. “Wuff, fwhuff, awuff.”
If Laika had been able to understand every single word that the space dog was saying, she would have known that it was telling her, “Friend, we are about to enter a wormhole.” But because she couldn’t understand very much, being a not very intelligent dog, she just understood the first bit: “Friend.”
FRIEND, she thought, and wagged her tail. “Woof,” she said enthusiastically. “Woof! Woof!”
“Whuff!” the dog replied, which in space-dog language means “friend.”
Then, before Laika could reply, the ship lurched and shuddered and there was a strange, unsettling, high-pitched noise that made Laika shudder.
Then the ship fell into the wormhole.
—
“A what-hole?” you might ask.
And if you asked this, you would not be alone. Because this is precisely the question that Owen asked Lucy one day when they were still at school. They had been walking to school together and talking about wormholes. Lucy had been reading about wormholes in New Scientist, and she was trying to tell Owen about them. Owen was looking as if he didn’t quite get it.
They arrived at school and went straight into Mr. Kingham’s science lesson. They were studying forces or something like th
at. Lucy found it too easy. Owen found it a little difficult. After the lesson Lucy and Owen were sitting on a bench in the schoolyard, swinging their legs, and talking about this and that and the other.
“I still don’t get it,” said Owen.
“Don’t get what?” Lucy asked.
“Wormholes? In space?” he asked Lucy.
“Yes,” said Lucy patiently.
“Made by real space worms?”
“Er, no,” said Lucy. “Not made by actual worms.”
“Oh,” said Owen. He looked disappointed. Then he took out his notebook and showed Lucy a picture. “Look,” he said. “I drew this in our science class.”
It was a picture of a space worm. The space worm was long and bobbly and had big, terrifying eyes and sharp teeth, and it was a very good drawing indeed. The space worm was about to gobble up a planet. The planet had rings like Saturn. Underneath, Owen had written the words “Space Worm.”
All of this was of course very interesting, but it didn’t have anything to do with wormholes. “Wormholes have nothing to do with worms,” Lucy explained patiently. “The worms are a metaphor.”
Owen looked puzzled and a little disappointed. “A what?” he asked.
“Oh, never mind,” said Lucy. “The point is, this is just a way of speaking. It’s not about actual worms. They’re called wormholes because they are sort of holes that you can use to worm your way from one bit of space to another.”
Owen had no idea what Lucy was talking about. He was still thinking about space worms, and imagining their sharp teeth, and wondering whether they were big enough to eat planets and moons and things. Nevertheless, Lucy did her best to explain it. And it was actually pretty interesting. Because the thing about space travel is that even if you go very, very fast—close to the speed of light, which is something like 186,000 miles per second—it will take you more than four years to get to the nearest star. But this is where wormholes come in. Wormholes are like shortcuts in space that can get you from here to there, but without going through any of the places in between. This is handy, as Lucy explained, because if you can get from here to there without going through any of the places in between, then you can keep from wasting quite a lot of precious time.
Owen still looked puzzled, so Lucy took a piece of paper out of her bag. “I’ll show you,” she said. “Imagine that all of space is this sheet of paper.”
“OK,” said Owen. He sounded a little bit suspicious, as if Lucy were about to pull a trick on him.
Then Lucy drew two dots on the paper, one at each side. She marked the first dot “A” and the second dot “B.” “Here’s a question. What is the quickest way of getting from A to B?”
Owen frowned.
“Draw it on the paper,” said Lucy. She handed Owen a pen.
Very carefully, Owen drew a straight line from A to B.
“Wrong!” shouted Lucy with a big grin on her face.
“What do you mean, ‘wrong’?” Owen protested.
Lucy picked up the paper and looped it so that A and B were almost touching. “That’s the quickest way.”
“That’s cheating,” said Owen.
“No it’s not. That’s how it works!” Lucy said. And she had such a serious look in her eye that Owen didn’t dare argue. “I know it looks a little bit cheaty, but that’s what a wormhole is. If you imagine that this paper is all of space, then if you can find a loop in space like this, you can go from A to B, even if they are billions and billions of miles apart, as quickly as you can get to shops. You just pop into the wormhole at one end, and you pop out billions and billions of miles away.”
Owen nodded slowly. Then he looked strangely thoughtful and stared off into the distance for a few moments.
“What are you thinking about?” Lucy asked him.
“I’m wondering whether they have teeth,” Owen said.
“Whether what have teeth?” Lucy asked.
“The space worms.”
Lucy sighed. Owen was nice, but he was hard to talk to sometimes.
—
Somewhere, far off in the distance, was a giant, bone-shaped spaceship hanging in the middle of the blackness of space. And if you were looking at the scene, one moment you would see the bone-shaped spaceship, all gleaming and white. And the very next moment you would see it pop out of existence as if it had entirely disappeared.
Then you would rub your eyes and think, How very strange! And unless you knew about wormholes and things like that, you would tell yourself that you were probably imagining things.
But it would be even stranger if you were at the other end of the wormhole. Because one moment you would be looking at a bit of space and there would be nothing at all there; and the next moment there would be a giant, gleaming bone floating in the middle of space where, just now, there was nothing. And if you saw this, and of course if you didn’t know about wormholes, you would probably think that you were going mad, because things don’t just appear like that.
But sometimes they do.
Because that is exactly what happened.
One evening Lucy was sitting in the observatory. It was late and almost everybody had gone home. There was only the whirr and hum of the machinery and the soft purr of Ptolemy, the observatory cat, who was fast asleep on top of a particularly warm bit of equipment. Ptolemy was a stray. Lucy had found him outside a couple of years before, mewling to be let in, and so they had decided to adopt him. He didn’t really do much—mostly he slept—but Lucy liked having him around.
Lucy tidied up the papers on her desk and rubbed her eyes. It was late and she was tired. Ptolemy purred softly in his sleep. Lucy looked at him and felt just a little bit jealous that she, too, wasn’t already asleep. Then, just as Lucy was getting ready to go home, she heard a knock at the door. She spun her chair around and shouted, “Come in!”
The door opened and in came Jim, the director. He was out of breath from climbing up the steps, and he had a letter in his hand.
“Hello,” said Lucy. “Are you looking for me?”
“Lucy,” said Jim, “I’m glad I caught you. A letter arrived this morning. Special delivery. I was so very busy that I completely forgot to give it to you.”
“Oh,” said Lucy. “Where is it from?”
“Sweden,” Jim said.
“Sweden? I don’t know anybody in Sweden….” Lucy looked puzzled. She pushed back her chair and got to her feet. Jim handed her the letter.
“What is it?” she asked. “A birthday card? It’s not even my birthday for a few weeks, but you never know….”
She looked at the letter. It looked quite official and important. It didn’t look much like a birthday card.
“I think you should open it,” said Jim. His mustache was quivering a little.
Lucy opened up the letter and started to read.
“Dear Lucy,” it said. “We are delighted to inform you that, due to your contributions to astronomy and to the understanding of the here, there, and everywhereness of space, the committee for the Nobel Prize in Physics has decided to present you with an award….”
The letter was friendly but rather formal. Lucy read it through several times. Then she folded it up and put it back in the envelope. Jim was looking at her with eager eyes.
“I think I’ve won the Nobel Prize,” Lucy told him.
Jim beamed. Then he chuckled and did a strange little dance. Lucy had never seen Jim dance before, and it made her laugh.
Jim ended his dance with a low bow and then grinned at Lucy. “Lucy,” he said, “this is the best news I have had in years. I’m delighted. Not surprised, of course, but I’m delighted nevertheless. You should go home and celebrate.”
Lucy felt like she was in shock. “I think I’ll give my mom and dad a ring,” she said.
“OK. Well, I’m off,” said Jim. “Remember to lock up when you leave. And well done again.”
“Thanks,” said Lucy.
She watched Jim leave, then she took her phone from her bag a
nd dialed her mom and dad’s number. “Hello,” her mom said at the other end.
“Hello,” said Lucy. “It’s Lucy.”
“I know,” said her mom. “Hello. Are you OK?” Her mom thought that Lucy’s voice sounded a little strange, and this made her anxious.
“I’m fine, Mom. I’m just calling you to tell you I won a prize.”
“You won a what?” Lucy’s mom’s hearing wasn’t what it used to be.
“A prize,” Lucy yelled.
“Oh, a prize,” her mom said. “That’s nice. What was it? A box of chocolates? A bottle of wine?”
“Er, no,” said Lucy. “It’s the Nobel Prize.”
“The what?” her mom asked.
“The Nobel Prize,” Lucy repeated, louder this time.
At the other end of the line there was silence. Then her mom let out a huge, excited “Whooooop!” Lucy could hear her dad’s voice in the background, saying to her mom, “Good gracious! What are you whooping for?”
“She’s won the Nobel Prize,” her mom yelled.
“The what prize?” Lucy’s dad’s hearing was not very good anymore either.
“The NO. BEL. PRIZE!” her mom shouted.
For a moment there was silence at the other end of the line. Then Lucy heard her dad’s voice in the background. “The NO. BEL. PRIZE?” he asked.
Lucy and the Rocket Dog Page 6