Through the window, they saw that the black hole was now the size of a tennis ball. “Don’t look!” cried Susan. “Cover your eyes with your hands!” The black hole became very bright and then suddenly exploded, disappearing in the most powerful explosion the Universe could withstand. Even with their eyes closed, George, Annie, and her mom could see its light.
“Hold on, Cosmos!” shouted Annie.
Cosmos gave a horrible groan and shot a green blaze of light from his screen as some white smoke rose from his circuits. “Eu-re-k—!” Cosmos started to shout, but his voice was cut off before he reached the end of the word.
The light suddenly vanished, and when George opened his eyes, he saw that the window was no longer there. Instead, the portal doorway had appeared. It burst open and the room in Dr. Reeper’s house was flooded with the fading flash of brilliant light from the explosion. Standing in the middle of the doorway was the figure of a man in a space suit. Behind him, the portal doorway opened on a quiet place in space where the black hole was no more.
Eric took off his helmet and shook himself, like a dog after a swim.
“That’s better!” he said. He looked around. “But where am I? And what happened?” A pair of eyeglasses with yellow lenses slid off his nose, and he looked at them in bemusement. “These aren’t mine!” He glanced at Cosmos, but Cosmos’s screen was blank and black smoke drifted from the keyboard.
Annie rushed forward and hugged him. “Dad!” she squealed. “You fell into a black hole! And George had to rescue you—he was so smart, Dad. He found out from the notes you left him that you could escape from the black hole, but first he had to find Cosmos—Cosmos was stolen by a horrible man who—”
“Slow down, Annie, slow down!” said Eric, who seemed rather dazed. “You mean I’ve been inside a black hole and come back again? But that’s incredible! That means I’ve got it right—that means all the work I’ve done on black holes is correct. Information that goes into a black hole is not lost forever—I know that now! That’s amazing. Now, if I can come out of—”
“Eric!” said Susan sharply.
Eric jumped. “Oh, Susan!” he said, looking rather sheepish and embarrassed. He handed over the yellow glasses. “I don’t suppose,” he said apologetically, “you have a spare pair of my glasses with you? I seem to have come out of the black hole wearing someone else’s.”
“These two have been running around all over town to try and save you,” said Susan, digging into her handbag and pulling out a pair of Eric’s usual glasses. “They’ve cut school, and George is missing the science competition he wanted to enter, all for your sake. I think the least you could do is say thank you, especially to George. He figured it all out by himself, you know—about Graham and the black hole and everything else. And don’t lose this pair!”
“Thank you, Annie,” said Eric, patting his daughter gently and putting his glasses onto his nose at their familiar crooked angle. “And thank you, George. You’ve been very brave and very smart.”
“That’s all right.” George stared at his feet. “It wasn’t me, really—it was Cosmos.”
“No, it wasn’t,” said Eric. “Cosmos couldn’t have got me back without you—otherwise I’d be here already, wouldn’t I?”
“S’pose so,” said George gruffly. “Is Cosmos all right?” The great computer was still silent and black screened.
Eric untangled himself from Annie and went over to Cosmos. “Poor old thing,” he said, unplugging the computer, folding him up, and tucking him under his arm. “I expect he needs a bit of a rest. Now, I’d better get home right away and write up my new discoveries. I must let all the other scientists know immediately that I’ve made the most astonishing—”
Susan coughed loudly and glared at him.
Eric looked at her, puzzled. “What?” he mouthed.
“George!” she mouthed back.
“Oh, of course!” said Eric out loud, striking his hand against his forehead. He turned to George. “I’m so sorry! What I meant to say was that first of all, I think we should go back to your school and see if you’re still in time to enter the science competition. Is that right?” he asked Susan, who nodded and smiled.
“But I’m not sure … ,” protested George.
“We can go through your presentation in the car,” said Eric firmly. He started clanking toward the door in his space suit. “Let’s get moving.” He looked around to find that no one was following him.
“What now?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.
“Dad!” said Annie in a disgusted tone. “You’re not going to George’s school dressed like that, are you?”
“I don’t think anyone will notice,” said Eric. “But if you insist …” He peeled off his space suit to reveal his ordinary everyday clothes below, then ruffled his hair. “And anyway, where are we? I don’t recognize this place.”
“This, Eric,” said Susan, “is Graham Reeper’s house. Graham wrote you that note to send you into outer space, and while you were there, he stole Cosmos, thinking this would mean you could never come back.”
“No!” Eric gasped. “Graham did it deliberately? He stole Cosmos?”
“I told you he’d never forgive you.”
“Oh dear,” said Eric sadly, struggling to pull off his space boot. “That is very unhappy news.”
“Um, Eric,” piped up George, “what did happen with you and Greeper? I mean, why did he want you to be eaten by a black hole? And why won’t he ever forgive you?”
“Oh, George,” said Eric, shaking off the space boot, “it’s a long story. You know that Graham and I used to work together?” He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket for his wallet. From it he took out a crumpled old photo and handed it to George. In the picture George saw two young men; standing in between them was an older man with a long white beard. Both the young men were wearing black gowns with white fur–lined hoods, and all three were laughing at the camera. The man on the right had thick dark hair and heavy-framed glasses that, even then, were sitting at a slightly strange angle.
“But that’s you!” said George, pointing at the photo. He examined the face of the other young man. It was strangely familiar. “And that looks like Greeper! But he looks really nice and friendly, not scary and weird like he is now.”
“Graham,” said Eric quietly, “was my best friend. We studied physics together at the university, the one here in this town. The man you see in the middle was our tutor—a brilliant cosmologist. He invented the concept of Cosmos, and Graham and I worked together on the early prototypes. We wanted a machine that would help us to explore outer space so that we could extend our knowledge of the Universe.
“At the beginning, Graham and I got along very well together,” Eric continued, gazing into the distance. “But after a while he became strange and cold. I started to realize he wanted Cosmos all for himself. He didn’t want to go on a quest for knowledge to benefit humanity—he wanted to use Cosmos to make himself rich and powerful by exploiting the wonders of space for his own good. You have to understand,” he added, “that in those days, Cosmos was very different. Back then he was a gigantic computer—so big he took up a whole basement. And yet he wasn’t even half as powerful as he is now. Anyway, one evening when Graham thought he was alone, I caught him. He was trying to use Cosmos for his own terrible plans. I was there and I tried to stop him and … it was … dreadful. Everything had to change after that.” Eric fell silent.
“What—after the terrible thing happened?” asked Annie.
Susan nodded. “Yes, honey,” she said. “Don’t ask your father any more questions about it. That’s enough for now.”
Back at George’s school, the pupils in the hall were getting restless and bored. Kids were shifting around in their seats, whispering and giggling as a series of nervous, solemn-faced competitors from the different schools battled to gain their attention. However, no one was more agitated or jumpy than Dr. Reeper, who was sitting in the front row with the principal and the other judges.
“Sit still, Reeper! Good heavens, man!” hissed the principal out of the side of his mouth. He was feeling very irritated with Dr. Reeper for behaving so badly in front of the teachers and principals from the other schools. So far he hadn’t bothered to listen to any of the presentations and hadn’t asked a single question. All he had done was anxiously check the order in his program and crane his neck around to look at the hallway behind him.
“I’ll just go and make sure George is up to speed with his speech,” Reeper whispered back to the principal.
“You will not!” spluttered the principal. “George will do perfectly well without you. Try and show some interest, would you? You’re letting the school down.”
The boy on stage finished his speech on dinosaur remains. “So that,” he concluded brightly to his tired audience, “is how we know that dinosaurs first walked the Earth two hundred and thirty million years ago.” The teachers dutifully clapped as he clambered down from the stage and went back to join his school group.
The principal stood up. “And now,” he said, reading from his notes, “we have our last contestant, our own George Greenby, from this very school! Can we give a big welcome to George, whose topic today is …” The principal paused and read his notes again.
“No, no, that’s correct,” said Dr. Reeper hurriedly. He stood up. “George’s talk will be on the subject of Cosmos, the world’s most amazing computer, and how he works. Hurray for George!” he cheered, but no one joined in. Then a long silence followed as everyone waited for George to appear. When he didn’t, the noise level in the room rose as the kids, sensing the prospect of a swift end to the school day, rumbled with excitement.
The principal looked at his watch. “I’ll give him two minutes,” he said to the other judges. “If he hasn’t shown up by then, he’ll be disqualified, and we’ll get on with the prizes.” Just like the pupils, the principal was thinking how nice it would be to get home early for once, so he could put up his feet with no pesky kids getting in the way.
The clock ticked but still there was no sign of George. With just seconds to go, the principal turned to the judges and was about to announce the competition closed, when a flurry of activity at the back of the hall caught his attention. A group of people seemed to have come in—two adults, one with a laptop computer under his arm; a blond girl; and a boy.
The boy ran straight up to the front of the hall and said, “Sir, am I still in time?”
“Yes, George,” said the principal, relieved that he had shown up after all. “Get yourself onto the stage. Good luck! We’re relying on you!”
George climbed onto the big school stage and stood right in the very middle.
“Hello, everyone,” he said in a thin voice. The crowds in the hall ignored him and carried on pushing and pulling and pinching each other. “Hello,” George tried again. For a moment he felt sick with nerves and very foolish, standing there by himself. But then he remembered what Eric had said to him in the car on the way there, and he felt more confident. He pulled himself up straight, threw his arms out to either side, and yelled, “Good afternoon, Alderbash School!”
The kids in the audience fell silent in surprise.
“I said,” bellowed George again, “Good afternoon, Alderbash School!”
“Good afternoon, George!” the room shouted back at him.
“Can you hear me at the back?” asked George in a loud voice. Leaning on the wall at the back of the hall, Eric gave him a thumbs-up.
“My name,” continued George, “is George Greenby. And I am here today to give a talk. The title of my talk is My Secret Key to the Universe.”
“Noooooo!” cried Dr. Reeper, jumping out of his seat. “That’s wrong!”
“Hush!” said the principal angrily.
“I’m leaving!” said Dr. Reeper in a furious temper. He tried to storm out of the hall but got halfway down the center aisle when he saw Eric standing at the back. Eric gave him a little wave, smiled, and patted Cosmos, whom he was carrying under his arm. Reeper turned a shade of light green and slunk back to his seat at the front, where he sat down quietly once more.
“You see,” George carried on, “I’ve been really lucky. I found a secret key that’s unlocked the Universe for me. Because of this secret key, I’ve been able to find out all sorts of things about the Universe around us. So I thought I’d share some of the stuff I learned with you. Because it’s all about where we came from—what made us, what made our planet, our Solar System, our Galaxy, our Universe—and it’s about our future. Where are we going? And what do we need to do to survive centuries into the future?
“I wanted to tell you about it because science is really important. Without it, we don’t understand anything, so how can we get anything right or make any good decisions? Some people think science is boring, some people think it’s dangerous—and if we don’t get interested in science and learn about it and use it properly, then maybe it is those things. But if you try and understand it, it’s fascinating, and it matters to us and to the future of our planet.”
Everyone was listening to George now. When he stopped talking, there was complete silence.
He started again. “Billions of years ago, there were clouds of gas and dust wandering in outer space. At first these clouds were very spread out and scattered, but over time, gravity helping, they started to shrink and become denser and denser …”
EARTH
Earth is the third closest planet to the Sun.
Average distance to the Sun: 93 million miles (149.6 million km)
A total of 70.8% of the surface of the Earth is covered with liquid water and the rest is divided into seven continents. These are: Asia (29.5% of the land surface of the Earth), Africa (20.5%), North America (16.5%), South America (12%), Antarctica (9%), Europe (7%), and Australia (5%). This definition of continents is mostly cultural since, for instance, no water expanse divides Asia from Europe. Geographically, there are only four continents that are not separated by water: Eurasia-Africa (57% of the land surface), Americas (28.5%), Antarctica (9%), and Australia (5%). The remaining 0.5% is made up of islands, mostly scattered within Oceania in the central and South Pacific.
A day on Earth is divided into 24 hours, but in fact it takes Earth 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds to rotate around itself. There is a 3-minute-and-56 second mismatch. Over a year this adds up to the one turn the Earth makes by going around its orbit.
An Earth-year is the time it takes for the Earth to complete one revolution around the Sun. It may vary very slightly over time, but remains about 365.25 days.
So far, the Earth is the only known planet in the Universe to harbor life.
“So what? you might think,” continued George. “What’s a cloud of dust got to do with anything? Why do we care or need to know what happened billions of years ago in outer space? Does it matter? Well, yes, it does. Because that cloud of dust is the reason we are here today.
“Now we know that stars are formed from giant clouds of gas in outer space. Some of these stars end their lives by becoming black holes that slowly, very slowly, let things escape until they vanish in a huge explosion.
“Other stars explode before they become black holes and send all the matter inside them through space. We know that all the elements we are made of were created inside the bellies of these stars that exploded a long time ago. All the people on Earth, the animals, the plants, the rocks, the air, and the oceans are made of elements forged inside stars. Whatever we might think, we are all the children of stars. It took billions and billions of years for Nature to make us out of these elements.”
George paused for a second.
“So, you see, it took an incredibly long time to make us and our planet. And our planet isn’t like any other planet in the Solar System. There are bigger ones and more impressive ones but they aren’t places you could think of as home. Like Venus, for example, which is really hot. Or Mercury, where one day lasts for fifty-nine of our Earth days. Imagine that, if
one day at school lasted fifty-nine days! That would be pretty awful.”
George paused for a moment and then continued to speak, the whole hall hanging on his every word as he described some of the wonders of the Solar System. Finally he came to what he thought was probably the most important part, at the end of his presentation.
“Our planet is amazing and it’s ours,” he summed up. “We belong to it—we’re all made of the same stuff as the planet itself. We really do need to look after it. My dad’s been saying this for years, but I’ve just felt embarrassed by him. All I could see was how different he was from other parents. But I don’t feel that way now—he’s right to say we have to stop messing up the Earth. And he’s right that we can all try just a little bit harder. I feel proud of him now for wanting to protect something as unique and beautiful as the Earth. But we all need to do it or it won’t work, and our awesome planet will be ruined.
“Of course, we can also work on finding another planet for us to live on, but it isn’t going to be easy. We know there isn’t one close to us. So if there is another Earth out there—and there might be—it’s a long, long way away. It’s exciting, trying to discover new planets and new worlds out there in the Universe. But that doesn’t mean that home isn’t the place you still want to come back to. We’ve got to make sure that in a hundred years’ time, we’ve still got an Earth to return to.
“So, you might wonder how I know all this. Well, the other thing I wanted to say to you is that you don’t need to find an actual secret key, like I did, to unlock the Universe and help the Earth. There’s one that everyone can use, if they learn how. It’s called ‘physics.’ That’s what you need to understand the Universe around you. Thank you!”
The hall burst into applause as everyone rose to his or her feet to give George a standing ovation. Wiping a tear from his eye, the principal sprang onto the stage to clap George on the back, and said, “Well done, George! Well done!” He pumped George’s arm up and down in a very vigorous handshake. George blushed. He was embarrassed by the clapping and wished it would stop.
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