License to Thrill

by Dan Gutman

  “What do you think Mom and Dad are doing right now?” she asked.

  “Sleeping,” her brother replied. “Or maybe worrying about us.”

  “That’s what I’m doing too,” Pep replied.

  “By now, they probably realize that we didn’t come back to the motel room,” Coke said, after thinking it over more analytically. “After they look around and don’t find us, they’ll call the police and report us missing. The cops will show up with dogs to search the woods. That’s what they do when kids disappear.”

  “But they won’t find us,” Pep said, wiping away another tear.

  “They’ll look all over,” Coke said quietly. “After thirty days, the police don’t call it a search and rescue mission anymore. It’s a recovery mission. They figure they’re not going to find anybody alive at that point. Then they start searching for bodies.”

  “They won’t find bodies, either,” Pep said. “They won’t find anything. We will have just vanished into thin air.”

  “I wonder if all the kids who have vanished without a trace were abducted by aliens,” Coke said. “That would explain a lot. Maybe they’re all being held captive on this alien planet, Kayaanga. Maybe we’ll meet them.”

  Pep wasn’t thinking about other kids. She was thinking about herself, her brother, and her parents.

  “I know we argue with them and make fun of Mom and Dad all the time,” Pep said, sniffling, “but I really love them.”

  “Me too,” Coke replied.

  By this time, the earth had dropped away and the ship turned so Coke and Pep couldn’t see it anymore. All they could see was the blackness of space. The ship had stopped accelerating and was moving at a steady speed, so it seemed like it wasn’t moving at all. The twins felt no pressure on their bodies. The aliens were off in another room.

  “Y’know, we were better off before,” Pep told her brother. “We were better off when all we had to worry about was Dr. Warsaw, Mrs. Higgins, and those stupid bowler dudes trying to kill us. At least we were on our own planet. At least we could do something. We could run. We could fight back. We can’t do anything here. We’re trapped.”

  “If we ever get out of this thing,” Coke told his sister, “I promise I’ll never complain about anything ever again.”

  “We’re not going to get out of this,” Pep said with a sigh. “We’ll never come home.”

  It was true, they both realized. They would never see their parents, friends, teachers, or California ever again. They would never learn how to drive, or go to high school and college and experience all the other things kids experience as teenagers. They would never get married or have children of their own. Their lives were over, and there was nothing they could do about it.

  Pep rested her head on her brother’s shoulder and closed her eyes.

  “I feel light-headed,” she said.

  “Me too,” Coke replied.

  At that moment, both twins opened their eyes wide as they came to the realization that they had escaped the gravitational pull of Earth. It wasn’t that they were light-headed. Like any other object in outer space, they were weightless.

  Coke unbuckled his seat belt. A grin spread across his face as his body slowly floated up off the seat. Pep unbuckled her seat belt as well. At first she was tentative, holding her arms unsteadily outstretched in an attempt to balance and keep herself upright. But soon she realized that it didn’t matter if she was upside down, right side up, or sideways. In a matter of minutes, she was ping-ponging off the walls, floor, and ceiling alongside her brother.

  “Woo-hoo!” Coke yelled. “I’m flying!”

  For a brief moment, the twins forgot that they would never see their friends or family again. Weightlessness was irresistibly fun.

  “Is this cool, or what?” Coke cackled as he bumped into Pep with a tangle of arms and legs. “Woo-hoo!”

  “This must be what it’s like to be a bird!” Pep said with a giggle.

  They were having such a good time that neither of them noticed that their alien hosts—Moe, Larry, and Curly—had entered the room once again.

  “I’d suggest you strap yourselves in,” said Moe.

  Coke and Pep pushed off the ceiling and wall in order to fly over toward the seats. It took a little maneuvering to turn their bodies around and put on their seat belts.

  “Where are you taking us?” Coke demanded. “What are you going to do with us? We have the right to know.”

  “Yeah,” Pep said, trying to sound as authoritative as her brother.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” asked Moe, pointing to the window.

  Coke and Pep turned their heads and saw something they had seen thousands of times before, but never so large or so bright . . .

  The moon.

  Chapter 8

  SWEEGLING IN SPACE

  As the ship closed in, the moon just about filled the window. Its surface was silvery with millions of craters of all sizes, and dark and light patches of gray and brown. There were no other colors, but it was a beautiful thing nevertheless. Coke’s and Pep’s jaws dropped open as they gazed in wonder.

  Decades ago, it took the Apollo astronauts about three days to travel 239,000 miles to the moon. In 2006, the NASA Pluto probe took a little over eight hours to get there. Onboard the alien spacecraft, Coke and Pep had made the trip in twenty-four minutes.

  The moon may look like a perfect sphere from our vantage point, but it’s not. As the ship got closer, the twins could see huge mountains and valleys.

  “Approaching the Sea of Clouds,” said Moe. “Steady as you go.”

  Curly and Larry busied themselves with the controls, which they carried in their clawlike hands. Coke and Pep couldn’t tear their eyes away from the window.

  “Only a few human beings have walked on the surface,” Pep mused out loud.

  “Twelve,” Coke replied.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Doesn’t everybody know that?” Coke asked, then reeled them off. “Armstrong, Aldrin, Conrad, Bean, Shepard, Mitchell, Irwin, Scott, Duke, Young, Schmitt, and Cernan.”

  “What possible reason did you have to memorize those names?” Pep asked.

  “I didn’t try to memorize them,” Coke replied. “It just happened.”

  The ship was slowing down. The twins could feel the weightlessness wearing off. Through the window, they could see the surface more clearly now. Some of the craters had debris around the circles that fanned out in a pattern like rays of sunlight. Something must have hit the moon hard to create those. Coke informed his sister that one crater, called Clavius, was 146 miles wide.

  “Prepare for landing,” Moe announced.

  “Why are they taking us here?” Pep whispered to her brother.

  “Beats me.”

  As the ship descended to the surface, Coke spotted something familiar off in the distance—a lunar module that was used by our astronauts back in the 1970s. It had four “legs” and was partly covered with gold foil that stood out from all the black and white. It looked a little bit like a spider. There was other equipment strewn near the lunar module, and an American flag sticking in the surface of the moon.

  “Look!” Coke said, pointing out the window. “It’s the stuff left behind by one of the Apollo missions.”

  The ship touched down with a gentle clunk and the engine vibrations suddenly stopped. For a moment, all was silent.

  “Flog slab,” the aliens began to chant. “Flog slab. Flog slab.”

  “Oh no,” Pep groaned. “Not with the flog slab again.”

  “Flog slab means ‘golf balls,’ remember?” Coke reminded her.

  “So what?” Pep said. “What do golf balls have to do with the moon?”

  Coke knew exactly what golf balls had to do with the moon. He had watched a TV documentary about it when he was in first grade.

  It was all because of Alan Shepard, who was the first American in space, back in 1961. A decade later, in February of 1971, he became the fifth human being to walk on
the moon, as a member of Apollo 14. When the mission was nearly complete, Shepard took two golf balls he had hidden in his space suit and dropped them on the surface. He had brought along a collapsible golf club—a six iron, to be specific. He thought it would be fun to whack golf balls on the moon.

  Don’t believe me? Look it up. That’s why they invented the internet.

  “Alan Shepard was the first and only interplanetary golfer,” Coke told his sister.

  “He was also the first and only interplanetary litterbug,” Moe said. “What he did was disgraceful.”

  “It was just a couple of golf balls,” Coke told Moe. “What’s the big deal?”

  “Do you think the universe is your toobleshmoot? Your garbage can?” asked Moe.

  “Hey, don’t look at me,” Coke said. “I didn’t litter on the moon.”

  “Wait a minute,” Pep interrupted. “Are you saying that you came all the way here to pick up a couple of golf balls that Alan Shepard left on the moon back in 1971?”

  “No,” Moe told her. “I am saying that we came all the way here for you two to pick up the golf balls that Alan Shepard left on the moon back in 1971.”

  “You gotta be kidding me,” Coke said, laughing.

  “Sweegling in space is a serious offense!” Moe said. “I mean, littering.”

  “But we’ll die if we go out there!” Pep said, clinging to her brother.

  That was certainly true. Aside from the fact that there’s no air to breathe on the moon, the temperature during the day can reach 250 degrees. At night, it gets down to 290 degrees below zero. Nobody could survive that.

  Curly and Larry came into the room with two bulky suits and helmets, not unlike the ones the Apollo astronauts had worn.

  “Put these on,” Moe instructed the twins. “They will regulate your temperature and supply oxygen so you can breathe.”

  “And if we refuse?” Coke said.

  “We throw you out there without the suits, and you die instantly,” Moe said matter-of-factly. “It is entirely your choice.”

  The twins put on the suits.

  As she pulled the helmet over her head, Pep was reminded of the day this whole crazy adventure had started. It was high on the cliffs just north of San Francisco. She and Coke had been walking home from school when they’d realized they were being followed by those bowler dudes in golf carts. A woman named Mya had come out of nowhere and given each of them a wingsuit to put on. They’d resisted at first, until a bowler dude had pulled out a blowgun and shot Mya in the neck with a poisoned dart. The twins had put on the wingsuits and jumped off the cliff. The suits saved their lives. Hopefully, these new suits would do it again.

  “Okay,” said Moe. “Into the decompression chamber.”

  The twins were led to a sealed room that separated the inside of the ship from the outside.

  “Do you think we’re going to die out there?” Pep asked. Coke heard her speak through a speaker system in his helmet.

  “We’ll know soon enough,” he replied, trying to hide his nervousness.

  “Open the exterior exit,” said Moe’s voice.

  A door slid open in front of them. Instinctively, the twins took a deep breath of air, as if it would be their last. It wasn’t. They could breathe normally. They were looking out on the moon. In the distance, they could see rocks as big as houses.

  “Be careful,” Moe’s voice spoke in their helmets. “You will not be weightless, but you will weigh a lot less than you did on Earth. An object that weighs 100 pounds on your planet weighs about 17 pounds on the moon.”

  Coke turned around so he could climb down the ladder backward. There were seven steps. He took them one at a time, very slowly and tentatively. After the last step, he lowered his right foot to the surface of the moon.

  “That’s one small step for a kid—” he started to say.

  “Oh, shut up!” Pep shouted. “Let’s just find the stupid golf balls and get out of here!”

  Coke put his other foot on the surface and stepped aside so his sister could follow him down the ladder.

  “Can you believe this?” Coke gushed. “We’re on the moon! You’re the first female on the freaking moon!”

  “Retrieve the golf balls, please,” Moe’s voice said in Coke’s helmet.

  It took a few minutes for Coke and Pep to get used to walking on the moon. The surface, they discovered, was a fine dust, sort of like the ash that’s left over after charcoal briquettes have burned out. Their boots left footprints whenever they were lifted up.

  “Going to hunt for golf balls,” Coke said.

  Pep followed as he bounded away from the ship, taking increasingly larger hops as he became more comfortable in lunar gravity. There was no concern about wind or bad weather, because there was no air. There was also no sound. Sound needs air to travel. All the twins could hear was the sound inside their helmets.

  “You know what I don’t like about this place?” Coke asked as they hopped around searching for golf balls.

  “What?” his sister asked.

  “It has no atmosphere,” he replied, and then erupted into cackling laughter.

  “I can’t believe you’re cracking jokes,” Pep said. “Did it occur to you that all these craters were caused by meteorites? How do we know another one isn’t going to come down any second and flatten us?”

  “Because the last big meteorite shower took place three billion years ago,” Coke told her. “So you can relax.”

  Pep stopped for a moment to look up at the sky. It was pitch-black, of course, and millions of stars from other galaxies were shining brightly. The earth sat on one side of the horizon, the sun on the other. Up until that moment, it had never occurred to her that the moon and the sun appeared to be about the same size in the sky. In fact, that’s only because the sun is four hundred times farther away than the moon. The sun is huge, and the moon is only 2,160 miles across—shorter than the drive they took cross-country.

  “I found one!” Coke suddenly shouted.

  Pep rushed over to see the golf ball, halfway buried in moon dust. Coke picked it up, being careful not to topple over in the bulky suit. A few minutes later, Pep found the other golf ball about thirty yards away. She gave it to her brother to hold.

  “Okay, let’s get out of here before we run out of air,” Pep said.

  They hopped and bounded back to the ship, taking time to stop and kick up a little moon dust along the way. When he reached the bottom of the ladder, Coke stepped aside so his sister could climb up first. He took one more long look around at the surface of the moon. This was something he wanted to remember for the rest of his life. Then he followed Pep back up the ladder and into the spaceship.

  The exterior door slid shut behind them automatically. A few seconds later the door in front of them opened. Moe, Larry, and Curly were standing there.

  “Here are the dumb golf balls,” Coke said, handing them over. “On behalf of Alan Shepard and all Earthlings, we apologize for littering.”

  “Apology accepted,” Moe said. “See that you don’t do it again.”

  I know what you’re thinking, dear reader. You’re thinking that this story is totally preposterous. There’s no way Coke and Pep could have been abducted by aliens and taken to the moon to retrieve Alan Shepard’s golf balls. That simply could never happen in real life.

  Well, let me tell you something. If you had lived back in the 18th century and somebody told you there would eventually be cars and telephones and radio and TV and motion pictures, you would have said it was totally preposterous.

  If you had lived in the 19th century and somebody told you there would eventually be airplanes and personal computers and video games and satellites, you would have said it was totally preposterous.

  Even at the end of the 20th century, when your parents were children, if somebody had told them that eventually there would be the internet and pocket-size telephones that could access virtually all the world’s information in seconds, they would have said it
was totally preposterous.

  And yet, all those totally preposterous things happened. So who’s to say it’s preposterous for beings from another planet to come visit us on Earth and take us for a ride to the moon to retrieve Alan Shepard’s golf balls?

  Amazing things are going to happen in the 21st century, too, and the best part is that you’re going to be lucky enough to witness them.

  Safely back inside the ship, Coke and Pep removed the spacesuits that had kept them alive on the surface of the moon. The ship blasted off smoothly once again, and the ride back to Earth was uneventful. The twins were still so excited about what they had seen and done, the time went by quickly.

  Soon the blue marble with white swirls that is planet Earth was visible. Home sweet home.

  It was evening. As the ship got closer to the ground, Coke and Pep could see lights out the window. It was unclear where they were landing. For all they knew, they were in a different city, or a different country. But at least they were home, on their own planet. That was the important thing. They could always find their way back to their parents somehow.

  The ship touched down with a slight bump, and the door opened once again. Moe, Larry, and Curly walked the twins to the exit. With all they had been through, Coke and Pep expected that there might be some kind of a formal farewell. They figured that the aliens might even extend a hand of friendship or (ugh) want to give them a hug.

  But none of that happened.

  “You may go,” Moe said unceremoniously. “And remember, no sweegling. I mean, littering.”

  Chapter 9

  HOME SWEET HOME

  “Let’s blow this pop stand!” Coke shouted as he and Pep scrambled down the ladder of the spaceship, jumping off the last few steps and tumbling to the grass. Pep got on her hands and knees and kissed the ground. It felt so good to be home.

  “I can’t believe we made it back,” Pep said, giggling uncontrollably. “I thought it was all over for us.”