by Dan Gutman
“I was joking!” she protested.
“DO YOU THINK MURDER IS A JOKE, MISS DURKIN?”
She pulled a handkerchief out of her pocket and dabbed her eyes with it. Three or four of them were crying by now, including Mrs. Sylvia Miller, the widow of Principal Miller. And she just happened to be the next person I wanted to question.
“How long were you and Principal Miller married?” I asked her gently.
“Twenty years,” she said, sobbing.
“That’s a long time,” I said. “Was it a good marriage?”
“Yes. Are you suggesting that I murdered my husband?” asked Mrs. Miller.
“I didn’t say that,” I told her. “I’m just curious why, on the night of April 17, you were seen on surveillance video at the Acropolis Diner playing footsie under the table with…Officer Joseph Bolton!”
Everybody around the table gasped. All heads turned to look at Officer Bolton.
“Don’t drag me into this, Snark!” he shouted, pointing a finger at my face. “My relationship with Mrs. Miller is purely professional.”
“Oh yeah?” I said. “Tell me this, Officer Bolton. How did you know the stun gun was in Trip Dinkleman’s backpack? There was no metal detector at the school. The only way you could have known the stun gun was there was if you put it there yourself!”
“That’s a lie!” Officer Bolton hollered.
“Admit it, you put the stun gun in the backpack to frame Dinkleman!” I said, getting out of my seat to confront him. “Yes, and you made sure to pull it out of that backpack personally so there would be a reason for your fingerprints being on it! And you zapped Miller so you and his wife would be free to get married! Admit it!”
“It’s true! It’s true!” Sylvia Miller shouted, before breaking down in tears. “We killed Horace! I can’t take the guilt any longer!”
“Case closed,” I said.
Wow! Mr. Snark put on an awesome performance. When it was all over, he shook my hand and everybody came over to hug me. Well, everyone except for Mrs. Miller and Officer Joseph Bolton, who were taken away by the police.
“How can I ever thank you?” I asked James Snark.
“Don’t thank me, kid,” he said, handing me an envelope. “I’m just doing my job.”
I opened the envelope. It was Snark’s bill. I looked down at the bottom for the total. There was a zero. And another zero. And another zero. And another zero. I felt as if I was going to pass out.
Intermission 1
Reference
Find the Secret Hidden Message!
A
ad-o-les-cent Growing to adulthood, youthful. A person in the period of adolescence.
B
boy A male child, from birth to full growth. A young man. A son. Sometimes found at a book fair.
C
cap-tive A prisoner. A person who is enslaved or dominated. Made or held prisoner. Kept in confinement.
I may possibly be in a…
co-ma A state of prolonged unconsciousness, including a lack of response to stimuli, from which it is impossible to rouse a person.
Or maybe I’m just having a…
D
dream A succession of images, thoughts, or emotions passing through the mind during sleep. An involuntary vision occurring to a person when awake.
I dreamed I was…
E
eat-ing The act of taking food into the mouth and swallowing it for nourishment. Chewing and swallowing.
F
fun-nel cake Deliciously sweet specialty food, originally associated with the Pennsylvania Dutch region, that is popular at ballparks, fairs, and festivals.
G
get To go after, take hold of, and bring (something) for oneself or another. To cause or cause to become, to do, to move. To communicate or establish communication with over a distance.
H
help To save, rescue. To relieve someone in need, sickness, pain, or distress. To give aid, to be of service or advantage. To assist, as during a time of need.
I
I The nominative singular pronoun used by a speaker or writer in referring to himself or herself. Used to denote the narrator of a literary work written in the first person singular.
J
just Exactly or precisely. Only or merely. Simply.
K
keep To continue in a given position, state, course, or action. To maintain in condition or order.
L
liv-ing Having life, being alive. Active or thriving, vigorous, strong. The act or condition of a person or a thing that lives.
M
my The nominative singular possessive pronoun, used by a speaker in referring to himself or herself.
N
night-mare A terrifying dream producing feelings of extreme fear and anxiety. A monster or evil spirit believed to oppress persons during sleep.
O
o-ver and o-ver Many times, repeatedly.
P
please Used as a polite addition to requests, commands, etc. If you would be so obliging, kindly. The magic word.
Q
quick-ly With speed, rapidly, very soon.
R
res-cue To free from confinement or danger.
S
sleep-ing The suspension of voluntary bodily functions and the natural suspension, complete or partial, of consciousness. Unawake.
stu-dent A person formally engaged in learning.
T
ter-ri-fied Filled with terror or alarm, made greatly afraid.
trapped Caught unaware by a mechanical device, stratagem, or trick. Forced into an unpleasant or confining situation from which it is difficult to escape.
By…
U
u-biq-ui-tous Existing or being everywhere, especially at the same time.
ug-ly Very unattractive or displeasing in appearance.
un-bal-anced Mentally disordered, disturbed, or deranged.
un-bear-a-ble Unendurable, intolerable.
un-friend-ly Not kind, unsympathetic, aloof, hostile, antagonistic.
u-nique Having no like or equal, incomparable, not typical, unusual.
un-pleas-ant Displeasing, disagreeable, offensive.
un-pre-dict-a-ble Variable, uncertain, erratic.
un-re-lent-ing Not easing or slackening, as in intensity, speed, or vigor.
un-sta-ble Liable to change or fluctuate quickly, marked by emotional instability.
un-u-su-al Not usual or ordinary, uncommon.
V
vi-cious Immoral or evil, depraved, spiteful, malicious, savage, ferocious, unruly, fierce.
vi-o-lent Acting with uncontrolled destructive force.
W
weird-os Odd, eccentric, or abnormal people.
X
XOXOXOXOX Hugs and kisses.
Y
yours tru-ly Closing of letter, term of endearment.
Z
ZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzz
Chapter 8
Historical Fiction
Houston, We Have a Problem
ZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzz.
I opened my eyes. I was staring out a small triangular window. There was a planet out there. It looked like a big blue marble floating in the blackness of outer space. Hmmm, that was odd.
I turned around. There were three guys staring at me. Two of them had blond hair. I screamed.
“Who are you?!” I yelled.
“Who are you?” all three of them yelled right back. One of them rushed to grab a microphone.
“Houston, we have a problem!” the guy with dark hair shouted.
“My name is Trip Dinkleman,” I told them. “I was at this book fair, and I just wanted to get to lacrosse tryouts, and something fell on my head, and—”
“No time for that!” snapped the dark-haired one. It said COLLINS on the blue uniform he was wearing. “How did you get in here?”
“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “A couple of minutes ago I was fighting crime with these strange s
uperheroes. And then I was accused of murdering my principal. Weird things keep happening to me.”
“This is Mission Control in Houston,” said a voice from a speaker. “What is the problem, Columbia? Over.”
The three of them looked at each other. Collins turned off the microphone.
“Do you have any idea where you are, kid?” asked one of the two blond guys. It said ALDRIN on his uniform.
I looked around. It was a room about the size of a minivan with five very small windows and stuff all over the place. There was an instrument panel with hundreds of knobs and switches. I looked out the window at the planet again.
“On a spaceship?” I guessed.
“This is Apollo 11,” said the other blond guy. He had a patch on his uniform that said ARMSTRONG. “We’re on our way to the moon.”
“Repeat,” said the voice in the speaker. “What is the problem, Columbia? Over.”
“I’m sorry!” I told the three guys. “I didn’t mean for this to happen. I just want to go home.”
“Kids don’t just appear out of nowhere,” Aldrin said.
“If Houston finds out about this, they’ll abort the mission,” Collins told the others.
“Aborting at this point would be just as risky as continuing the mission,” Aldrin said.
“We’ve trained our whole lives for this,” said Armstrong. “We’re not turning back now because some kid stowed away on our ship. We might as well make the best of it.”
All three agreed.
“Not one word of this to anyone,” Armstrong told me, locking eyes with mine. “You understand?”
“Anything you say,” I replied.
Collins turned the mic back on.
“No problem, Houston,” he said. “It was a false alarm.”
I knew the name Neil Armstrong. Everybody knows that Neil Armstrong was the first person to set foot on the moon. It’s one of those things you just know, like the fact that George Washington was the first president and Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb. But here I was, two feet away from the man.
The other two guys I didn’t know. But Aldrin told me to call him Buzz, Collins told me to call him Mike, and Armstrong told me to call him Neil. He seemed to be the one in charge. He looked like the kind of guy who couldn’t be rattled by anything.
Once we had gotten over the initial shock of seeing each other, they told me it was July 16, 1969. With the help of seven and a half million pounds of thrust, they had already lifted off from Cape Kennedy in Florida. Several stages of their Saturn 5 rocket had been burned off to get them into orbit around the earth.
In order to break away from the earth’s gravity, a spaceship has to be moving 24,000 miles an hour, Neil explained to me. They fired their engines to do that just before I showed up. From that point, it’s almost 240,000 miles to the moon.
Don’t ask me how I ended up in a spaceship going to the moon. Don’t ask me how I ended up in 1969. I have no idea. And I wasn’t about to tell them I was from the twenty-first century. They’d think I was crazy.
I looked at the earth through the triangular window again. It was slightly smaller than it was the first time. We were moving away from it. I could see the huge blue oceans. Swirling white clouds covered much of the planet, which made it hard to pick out specific countries or continents. I thought I could see the outline of Florida, but I wasn’t sure. It was a beautiful sight.
Out the window on the other side of the ship, I could see the the moon. It had never occurred to me how complicated it might be to send a spaceship there. But Buzz made it clearer.
“You ever play football, Trip?” he asked.
“Yeah, sure,” I said, recalling my brief Super Bowl experience.
“Then you know what it’s like to complete a pass,” he said. “The quarterback doesn’t throw the ball to the receiver. He throws it to where the receiver is going to be at a certain point in time. That’s what we’re trying to do with the moon.”
Buzz explained that what they were trying to do was even harder than completing a pass. Because not only were they trying to hit a moving target, but the earth spins and revolves around the sun, and the moon spins and revolves around the earth. Plus, the moon is only about a quarter of the size of the earth. So the timing of everything has to be perfect.
An incomplete pass would mean three guys were going to die. Well, three guys and me, now.
As Buzz was talking, I felt a strange sensation. It was almost as if I was losing weight. And I was. The farther we got from the earth, the less we were affected by the earth’s gravity. And then, quite suddenly, I felt myself float off the floor.
We were weightless. The four of us lifted up simultaneously, and even though the three of them had all experienced weightlessness before, smiles spread across their faces. It was irresistible, like tasting ice cream for the first time.
There wasn’t a lot of room in there. I bumped into Neil and Neil bumped into Mike, sending him floating off to the other end of the ship. I pushed off the wall and tucked my legs in so I could spin around and do a somersault in the air. There was no up or down anymore. You just keep turning until you bump into something.
I could have fooled around like that for hours, but the others had work to do. They began to check all the equipment and systems, conduct scientific experiments, and they even made a short TV show so the people back home on earth could see what they were up to. They were careful to keep me out of it, of course. There would be a lot of explaining to do if some kid showed up in the pictures. It was cool watching them work while weightless, floating the tools and equipment back and forth.
Outside the little windows, space was getting darker and darker as we got farther from the earth’s atmosphere. It was blacker than any black I had ever seen.
“Commence barbecue roll,” Neil ordered.
“What’s that?” I asked.
Mike told me that the heat from the sun could fry the fuel tanks and cause a nasty explosion if we stayed in one position. So they did a barbecue roll—a slow roll that heated all sides of the ship evenly. It was kind of like a chicken roasting in a rotisserie oven.
“This is making me hungry,” Mike said. “What do you say we eat?”
Buzz opened up a door and pulled out some aluminum bags, which floated across the cabin. He grabbed one and also grabbed a scissors to cut the tip of the bag off. Then he took a thing off the wall that looked like a little water gun.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“A water gun,” Mike said. It was a hot water gun, to be more specific. Mike pulled the trigger and squirted some water into the bag. A half an ounce for each squeeze. All the food had to be in a bag because if you just put it on a plate or in a cup, the food would float away. They told me that they carried just a little water on the ship, but they also had a fuel cell that took hydrogen and oxygen and combined them to produce water.
“What are you making?” I asked.
“Corn chowder,” Buzz said.
“Here,” he said, handing me the bag. “Try it.”
I put the tip of the bag to my lips and suddenly panicked.
“What if the food gets caught in my throat?” I asked. “Doesn’t it need gravity to push it down?”
They all laughed, so I figured there was nothing to worry about. I squeezed the bag and the corn chowder squirted into my mouth. Not bad! I swallowed it easily and passed the bag around to the others.
I read the labels on the other bags that were floating around the cabin. Chicken salad. Applesauce. Shrimp cocktail. Sugar cookies. Orange drink. We were going to have a feast!
“Slow down, cowboy!” Neil said. “This has got to last us six days.”
Oh. Well, it wasn’t exactly a feast, but it was just as good as most of my school lunches, I’ll say that much.
I had no idea what time it was, and you couldn’t tell by looking out the window, that was for sure. Outside, it was night all the time. Anyway, I was sleepy, and I wasn’t the only one. The others sh
aded the windows, dimmed the lights, and pulled out three sleeping bags. Neil was nice enough to let me use his, and he tied one end to a pole so I wouldn’t float all over the place and bump into things.
I was tired, but too excited to sleep, I guess. Even if this whole thing was a hallucination, I was hallucinating about going to the moon! It was way better than hallucinating that you’re in a haunted house or trapped in a dictionary.
While we lay there with the lights out, they told me a little bit about themselves. Neil and Buzz were Navy fighter pilots. Between the two of them, they had flown 144 combat missions in the Korean War. Mike was an air force test pilot. When the space program began, a bunch of those guys joined up. The three of them were the lucky ones who were chosen to go to the moon.
“I still remember President Kennedy’s exact words in May of 1961,” Neil said. “‘I believe this nation should commit itself to achieve the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.’”
“And here we are,” said Buzz, “five months early.”
Before the Apollo program, they told me, NASA had the Mercury and Gemini programs. In Mercury, astronauts orbited the earth and got the hang of living and working in space. In Gemini, they practiced docking two ships together. In Apollo, astronauts went all the way to the moon and orbited it. Finally, they were ready to attempt a landing.
The interesting thing is that the whole time, the Russians were racing to do the same thing. In fact, just two weeks before Neil, Buzz, and Mike lifted off, the Russians launched an unmanned ship they hoped to land on the moon and bring back some moon rocks before we did.
“Why is being first so important?” I asked. “Who cares who gets there first?”
“It’s symbolic,” Neil said. “Whoever gets to the moon first essentially wins the Cold War.”
I didn’t tell them what I had learned in social studies—that we were going to win The Cold War. The Soviet Union was going to collapse in 1991. Who knows? Maybe the fact that we got to the moon first was one of the reasons the Soviet Union collapsed.