by Steve Cole
She led Kimmy and Ray out of the Crèche, ready to raise the roof. Could they really put the lid back on this place and save us all? It was a question I kept to myself. Elodie would no doubt snipe at me, and Big G was in no state to speculate in any case. He was looking greener than ever, his eyes half closed, and he smelled like a leak in a fart factory.
“What is it, G?” I said, struggling to get into my own spacesuit. “Is it the cold . . . or are you sick?”
“Hello,” said Big G, shivering. “Not right. Tongue not right. Hello.” He shook his head. “Not right . . .”
“Oh, dear.” Herbert sighed. “I fear this is my fault. Big G linked with me because goldfish are so smart now – but that’s only because we absorbed the GETs’ particles so quickly. I suspect my biology has begun to disagree with his biology.”
I struggled to get my head round it. “You mean you’ve kind of given his body all-over indigestion?”
“A rather simplistic summary,” said Herbert primly. “But close enough. It has, shall we say, badly upset his metabolism – and made his leap into adulthood unstable.”
“Huuugggg,” said Big G, pathetically, as I leaned in for a gentle, slightly whiffy embrace. “Mmmmm. Huuugggg.”
“So will you have to leave him, Herbert?” asked Elodie. “Go back to your bowl?”
“I . . . I don’t know.” Herbert looked troubled. “I’ve been learning so much from Big G. My powers have increased enormously! But perhaps you’re right. Perhaps I have grown big and wise enough to move on alone.”
“Who said growing up was easy, eh?” said Elodie dryly.
“Dad’s told me a hundred times that saving the world was the duty of the young.” I shook my head. “I’m not sure he meant it quite like this.” I took hold of Big G’s hand. “Come on, fella. We need everyone in the zone if we’re going to stand even the tiniest chance of doing this.”
“We need help,” Elodie agreed. “Resources. We have to find an antidote to this lullaby stink and wake up the world, quick!”
“Your plan, spaceboy . . .” Big G said quietly. “You were telling your plan . . .”
“That?” I shrugged self-consciously. “Oh . . . it’s probably stupid. I just thought that instead of trying to stop the GETs selling the Earth, what if we could put off the Ova-Many from buying it?”
Elodie stared at me, and I could almost hear the data servers in her head humming as she considered the proposal. “Turn words into weapons, you said before . . .”
“Right.” I looked straight at her. “House sales fall through all the time, don’t they? Buyers get put off by stuff. I mean – what if you found out the place you wanted to buy had really annoying—”
“Noisy neighbours!” she joined in to finish my thought. “Of course!”
“Herbert’s heard the GETs moaning about the noise we make,” I said. “And the Ova-Many babies must be really sensitive to sounds, or they wouldn’t need the lullaby stink in the air to soothe them.”
“But how can we make enough noise?” asked Elodie. “To be a noisy neighbour to Earth, we’d have to be somewhere close by in space. We’d have to be on . . .”
“THE MOON!” we said together.
I looked at her. “We could, couldn’t we? We could hyper-beam to the Moon . . . !”
Elodie shook her head. “Sound can’t travel in a vacuum – the vibrations need air to carry them. And as you might just remember, there’s no air in space.” She shivered as another freezing gust blew biting snow all about us. “Whatever noise we made on the Moon, the GETs would never hear it.”
“Ah, but the GETs do not hear things as we do!” Herbert piped up. “They translate and smell the feelings behind the words rather than the words themselves.”
“Of course!” I breathed. “That explains why the GETs were saying to me, ‘Silence!’ when I wasn’t even saying anything. And why they put up an ‘emo-shield’ thing when I was thinking how scared I was.”
“Emo?” Elodie smiled triumphantly. “That’ll be ‘emo’ as in ‘emotion’, then!”
“Yes!” I clicked my fingers – or tried to, in my thermal gloves. “Yeah, I bet that’s it! Emotions!”
“Well,” she said, “if you were anything like as scared as I was when the roof came off, we must’ve deafened that particular GET.”
“We did! Herbert said we did!” But my sudden excitement was short-lived. “Er, hang on, though . . . How far away is the Moon?”
Elodie didn’t hesitate: “About 384,400 kilometres from Earth, and over 80 million kilometres from Mars.”
I groaned. “But the GETs are orbiting out past there. They’ll never hear us, or smell us, or sense us, whatever we do.”
“Not unless we make the words louder,” said Herbert. “Amplify them in some way . . .”
“Hurry,” said Big G faintly. “Must hurry.”
“Yes, it will take time to prepare the right equipment.” Herbert cleared his fishy throat. “I believe that right now, the GET sellers are having an urgent meeting with their Ova-Many buyers. Yes . . .” He narrowed his eyes and strained – he was either trying to listen in to the alien convo, or doing a poo (I hoped it was the former as Big G was looking pretty rough already). “The Ova-Many are concerned that a human thing and an unidentified life form broke into their ship and disturbed their babies . . .”
“That’s you and me, Big G!” I spoke encouragingly, but his eyes were closed.
And suddenly, so was the roof. The wind had died and the epic wilderness vanished. A blurry sheet of nothingness hovered overhead.
“I guess Ray, Kimmy and the Sarge must’ve done it, eh?” said Elodie. “Big Blanket in position.”
“Yes, but now our contact with the GETs has been lost.” Herbert’s eyes reopened. “The Big Blanket turns energy back on itself – my probing thoughts cannot penetrate their sensory network.”
“Well, let’s hope it’s different on the Moon,” I said, placing a gloved hand on Big G’s forehead. “We’ve got to disturb those GETs again.”
Herbert nodded. “I shall tell you how we can bring this about.”
THE MOON
(Because I did say I really wanted
there to be a PART THREE, and
frankly, if we delay any longer it’s
not going to happen.)
Just six short, nerve-wracking hours later, I was standing on the Moon.
About here.
The hyper-beam had taken me from one north pole to another.
After my scary moments in space, I thought I’d probably cope OK on the Moon. But to stand on that shining grey dust, with nothing but barren wasteland and darkness all about, made me feel tiny and lost and lonely.
But, no. I couldn’t let myself think that way. Our Mission had got to work.
I fought to keep my breath steady, a regular “shush” in my ears. The helmet got fogged up if you breathed too hard, and that was no good. And I was worried that if I got any sudden shocks, I would jump in the air – which, on the Moon, with only one-sixth the gravity of Earth, could be a big mistake.
Staring out at the dark magnificence of space, I saw Earth. I know proper astronauts in decades past called it the blue marble, and that’s just what it looked like. White streaks of cloud trailed its surface, allowing only glimpses of land beneath, and a bandana of shadow hid its lower reaches from sight.
It looked fragile and solitary in the darkness.
“Know how you feel,” I muttered.
“Huh?” Elodie’s voice crackled into my helmet. She was crouched just behind me, carefully fiddling with a mess of wires, solar panels and scientific debris. “What did you say?”
“Nothing,” I said.
Back on Earth, while Sergeant Katzburger was playing army medic, checking the base for anyone injured in their sleep, Ray and Kimmy were working on a way to reverse the GETs’ stinky work by creating “wake-up” particles.
And most heroically of
all, Big G was refusing to take his illness lying down. He was taking it on a stepladder, forcing himself to fix the blown fuse on the hyper-beam – a vital escape route if the GETs returned to the base to get our little gang.
I wished I could help him. But I couldn’t really help anyone. I was only here to get myself used to being on the Moon.
“Your time to shine will come, Timothy,” said Herbert, as if reading my mind.
There he was, my goldfish – the first fish on the Moon. Reluctantly, Herbert had agreed to leave Big G’s tongue and go back to his bowl. Under his direction, Elodie, Ray and Kimmy had souped it up for space travel. They’d made it airtight, and fitted it with a heater, a water-recycling unit, a built-in radio microphone, even a glowing-effect artificial jellyfish for illumination.
And now, from this superbowl, he was bossing Elodie about in her titanically technical tasks.
We had come to this precise location – half way up a nameless mountain – because it was the crash site for two near-identical spacecraft, Ebb and Flow. These clever machines, each about the size of a washing machine, had been sent up by NASA in 2011 to map the gravitational field of the Moon. At the end of their successful mission – SPLATT! – the craft had been programmed to smack down into the lunar surface.
Big G had been around for the launch and knew what equipment the craft had been carrying. And though he might have been delirious, he reckoned we could combine their remains into a kind of celestial solar-powered sound system, specially designed to aggravate the GETs. Of course, we couldn’t play music like this was a real party – phat beats and pounding basslines would mean little to GET ears, so we just had to think about our precarious position and turn our terror into something we could use.
I have to say, standing here, so vulnerable in this vast, eerie moonscape, was giving me plenty of potential.
“Right,” said Elodie, screwing a thick red wire into a terminal on a cracked solar panel. “I’ve linked the S-band transponder antennas to the X-band beacon antennas. The emo-converters should now concentrate our thoughts and feelings, and the power boosters will fire the output straight at the Ova-Many ship.” She put down her tools. “Guys, we have ourselves a handmade emoto-audio wave-blaster.”
I gave her a short round of applause which came out pretty rubbish in thermal gauntlets.
“Have the sellers and the buyers finished their meeting?” I wondered.
Herbert spun about in his bowl. “I am not sure. Stuck in this bowl I feel rather clumsy, my powers somewhat curtailed . . .” He sighed. “As a fish in water, I feel like a fish out of water. O! What bitter irony!”
“Hold those bad thoughts,” I told him. “You can add your voice to ours.”
“Shall we get started?” Elodie asked.
“We’d better,” said Herbert.
“Right, then.” I cleared my throat. My voice sounded weird and hollow, coming back at me inside the helmet. “Testing. Testing.” My mouth was dry – I was feeling the pressure. Was I going to mess everything up?
That was as good a place to start as any. “I’m, er . . .” I swallowed. “I’m kind of scared I’m going to be rubbish.”
Herbert was studying his lunar lash-up. “Splendid. The wave-blaster picked that up. Go on.”
“Um . . . I’m scared too, actually,” said Elodie, loud and clear in my helmet receiver. “This whole situation is, like, totally scary.”
None of us spoke for a few seconds.
“Keep it going, then!” Herbert coached us. “Explore your feelings.”
“Er . . .” I sighed. “I don’t have a lot of experience of that. Dad’s never had a whole lot of time for feelings.”
“Mum neither,” said Elodie. “She’s kind of trained me never to show any. Convinced me it’s best not to get involved with anyone.”
“Dad tried to do the same with me.” I shook my head crossly. “What are our parents like? What happened to make them that way? What happened to make them want to make us this way?”
“Mum never really talked about it.” Elodie puffed out a breath. “Look, we may not get a chance to talk about this later, and at least through this visor you can’t see me blushing, so . . . Tim? I just wanted to say . . . Well, I’m sorry I was mean to you before. When you and your dad showed, when I realised who you were . . . I guess I freaked. I’m used to science and math and equations – you know, everything’s got an answer, everything’s exact. But dealing with stuff where the answer is just ‘AUUUGHHHH!’. . .”
I nodded. I had to nod my whole body like a Teletubby so she’d know. “Well, most of my life has been kind of ‘AUUUGHHHH!’, and I didn’t handle things any better.”
“I always knew I had a brother somewhere, like I knew I had a dad. But the thought of actually meeting you both after so many years – it was too much.”
“Keep going!” Herbert urged her. “The machine is working, it’s picking up your signals and transmitting them!”
“Noisy neighbours are go,” I cried.
“More like soppy neighbours.” Elodie stuck out her tongue. “Enough of that. We need to make some real noise here, eh? Get angry.”
“OK,” I said, reaching inside myself to see what I could take. “You know what makes me angry? My whole life! Whenever I’m hungry, Dad tries to give me home-grown organic cucumber. Any time of day. Sometimes he even tries to give me cucumber for pudding. Only, get this – he calls it ‘cumber of cu’.”
“Cumber of cu?” Elodie repeated, incredulous. “Truly?”
“He even writes poems about them. ‘My love is ever true / for my sweet Cumber of Cu . . .’”
“Mum’s obsession is tomatoes. I say, ‘Mum, I want chocolate!’ ‘Have a tomato,’ she says. And I’m like, ‘Mum, I don’t want a tomato, I’m totally sick of tomatoes.’ And she’s like, ‘OK, dear, better have three tomatoes so your body learns to love them.’” Suddenly Elodie yelled at the top of her lungs, “Mum, SHUT UP GOING ON ABOUT TOMATOES THE WHOLE TIME! I HATE YOUR DUMB TOMATOES!”
I laughed. “Yeah, well, get this! Dad refused to even admit I had a mother, let alone a sister. He said I’d been brought into the world by aliens.”
“No way!” Elodie sounded genuinely shaken. “He never told you a thing about us? That is so lame!”
“Totally lame, I know. Deep down, I’ve always half believed I belonged on another world.” I stared around me at the harsh, alien landscape, its blanks and blacknesses. “At least now I know that’s total rubbish.” I gazed back towards Earth. “That’s where I belong. I only hope we can actually pull this off.”
But then a squawk of static broke inside my helmet. “Moon guys, this is Earth Base,” Kimmy’s voice crackled. “Those alien ships are on the move. Both of them.”
“Flying off?” said Elodie hopefully. “We’re driving them away?” There was a tense couple of seconds’ pause.
“No,” said Kimmy. “They’re flying straight for you.”
“I was afraid of this,” Herbert cried.
“Not as afraid as me,” I assured him. “You know that saying, ‘about as popular as a fart in a spacesuit’? I’m putting it to the test. Does the emoto-audio wave-blaster pick up farts too?”
“I’m putting so much fear into it,” said Elodie, “I can’t believe it hasn’t blown a fuse.”
“Far from it,” said Herbert. “It’s not enough. Not enough!”
Flustered, I turned to Elodie. “How long do we have before the GETs and the Ova-Many get here?”
“Can’t be long.” She sounded close to tears. “Oh, Tim. I really thought this might work, but it hasn’t, has it?”
“It was my stupid plan,” I said.
“We’re not beaten yet.” Then Herbert pressed a button in his supertank. “Goldfish to Katzburger! Has Big G fixed the hyper-beam?”
“Not finished testing yet,” came her gruff crackle. “He’s probably messed it up.”
“You must use it now,” Herbe
rt commanded. “Quickly, Sergeant – bring on the big guns!”
“What big guns?” I stared at him. “Herbert, shouldn’t we hyper-beam back to Earth?”
But the red glow stealing into the lunar landscape told me the hyper-beam was in use. Moments later, the bulky form of Sergeant Katzburger appeared, with a man and a woman – all three wearing spacesuits. But the man and the woman were too big to be Ray and Kimmy, so . . . ?
Katzburger grunted. “Here you go.”
The man was swaying about, like he might collapse at any moment. “I was so tired . . . in the sick bay, then space . . . and suddenly I’m on the Moon?”
“Dad!” I squeaked in surprise. “You’re awake! You’re OK!”
“Better than OK – I’ve travelled to the Moon in no time at all and it didn’t hurt the environment one little bit!” He tried to do a dance, but it was total rubbish and he stopped almost immediately.
“Elodie! Tim!” came a female voice.
“Mum!” shouted Elodie. “It’s you!”
“Mum.” The word sounded so strange in my dry throat, no matter how many times I said it. “Mum-mum-mum-mum. Mummmm. MUMM—”
“Yeah, well, I gotta go now,” said Katzburger grimly. “Things to do. Crazy things that almost certainly won’t work out. But at least it keeps us busy while we wait for our doom, right?”
I barely noticed the red flare of the sergeant leaving. My eyes were now firmly fixed on Dad, Hannah-Anna Hongananner and Elodie.
“Eric,” said my MUM, “I don’t want to bring you down, but this Moon business has got to be a hallucination, hasn’t it?”
“I hope you’re a hallucination too,” said Dad.
Elodie looked down at Herbert. “Why did you bring them here?”
“It takes more than two people to get a party pumping!” Herbert was zipping first one way, then another. “You must go for it, together! Party hearty!”
“This is just crazy.” Elodie was looking at Dad – her dad as well as mine – and shaking her head in wonder. “I mean, perfect time and place for a reunion, eh? NOT.”
“Precisely!” Herbert cried. “Come along now, quickly! Share your pain! Confess your weaknesses! Tell your tales! Distribute the complexity of your emotions amongst the group, at once. DO IT! You may never get another chance!”