‘Yep. Just let me know if they’re not looking after you and I’ll crack some skulls,’ he says.
‘I will. See ya. Bye.’
‘Yep.’
I click the red hang-up button and Karl disappears.
6. The Bad Beginning
We stop dead in the doorway of Spirit, the spaceport restaurant, and stare. The room is a big, oval-shaped bubble, like an underwater city. The domed ceiling is high and completely made of glass, stretching down to the floor all round. There isn’t a single wall or piece of metal holding it up. It’s just like one big window. The kitchen is in the middle of the room so everybody can see the food being made. I love eating here. So much better than mac and cheese from a box at home. But, today, it’s incredible.
There are two long glass tables in front of us, piled high with food. More food than I’ve ever seen in one place before. One table is crammed with lunch things – pizza, nachos, tacos, noodles, sushi, pasta, roast chicken, salad, chips, cheeseburgers, mini hotdogs. Then there are drinks – four different kinds of juice and six different colours of soft drink in big glass dispensers. The second table is all dessert – donuts with sprinkles. There is trifle in a glass bowl the size of a small pond with layers of jelly, custard and cake. I can see little chocolate mousses in teacups, blueberry and banana pancakes with maple syrup, chocolate wafer biscuits, toffee apples, big chunks of rocky road, as well as cupcakes with white marshmallow icing. In the centre of the table stands an enormous cake in the shape of the Galactic 7 mothership. It has six cake figures in spacesuits standing in front of it. The five of us plus James Johnston in his black suit with the silver star and a white cowboy hat made of icing.
‘Well, what are you waiting for? This is a celebration!’ Madeleine says. ‘Dive in, don’t wait.’
We all run to the buffet and grab plates. Most of us go straight for the desserts. Scott loads up two plates and he elbows anyone who comes even close to him.
‘This is the last meal like this you’ll be getting for a whole month, so enjoy,’ says Madeleine. ‘Space food is far more modest.’
Once my plate is heaped and nothing more will balance on top, I steer my way to one of the windows overlooking the runway.
A couple of astronauts are sitting nearby, wearing their blue suits with mission patches on the upper arm. Lots of proper astronauts come to use the spaceport’s training facilities. They’re eating what looks like cabbage and chewy pieces of steak. Their mouths are open as they watch me hook into a giant slice of lemon meringue pie. I wave. They don’t wave back.
There’s a deep roar from outside on the runway and everybody in the restaurant turns to see. A jet-powered mothership speeds along the tarmac. A rocket plane like the one we’ll be in is strapped to its back. We watch, silently, until we see it soar into the sky.
I watch, mouth open, eyes wide. It’s like seeing one of my rocket tests at home. Only this ship is a bit bigger. And it isn’t made out of a milk container covered in foil. I imagine myself inside the rocket plane as it screams up to 18,000 metres, where it will separate from the mothership and blast into orbit. I’ve seen nine or ten launches in the week that I’ve been at the port, but I will never, ever get sick of them. Madeleine says that there are about seven planes going up every day. Most of the passengers are business people and space geeks paying $50,000 for a suborbital flight. They get six minutes of weightlessness and a view of earth’s curve before returning to the port. Most don’t get to go into orbit around earth like we will on Utopia, though. To get into orbit you need heaps of extra fuel so you can reach a speed of 27,000 kilometres an hour. Crazy.
‘Ola,’ Rafaella, the Brazilian girl, says politely. ‘May I sit here?’
‘Sure,’ I say, shuffling my chair over.
‘Hey, sports fans,’ says Scott. ‘Final five – can you believe that?’ He pulls up another table, connects it with mine and places his two overflowing plates of food on top. ‘We are, like, elite, Top Gun, The Right Stuff, Star Wars, Astronaut Freaks. We are the Golden Children. People will still know our names in, like, 30,000 years time. But who’s gonna be our Neil Armstrong?’
‘What?’ I ask.
‘Y’know. The official first kid, the one everybody remembers. There were three people on the first moon trip. Neil, Buzz Aldrin and then some other guy who stayed up in the command module. I so don’t want to be that guy.’
‘I thought you didn’t even want to go,’ I say to him as he sits.
‘I don’t, but I can’t help being born good-looking and talented and, if I gotta go, I at least wanna be the famous one.’
Scott shoves a whole waffle into his mouth, chews twice, then rams another one in. I stop eating and watch as he pushes yet another waffle in, minutes later. I think how frightening it’ll be if people still remember this guy in 30,000 years time.
‘Man, you better slow down,’ I tell him. ‘You could get lumps or have, like, a heart attack.’
‘Grumbargo,’ Scott says.
‘What?’
‘Grum-bar-go.’ His cheeks are still bulging, so I have no idea what he’s saying.
‘You’re a sick animal.’ I take another bite of pie.
He picks up a churros covered in chocolate sauce and cream and flicks the cream at me. It lands just under my eye and slops across my nose. I can’t believe he’s done it. I look up and, without thinking, stick two fingers into a pile of green jelly on my plate and throw it across at him. It lands in his hair. Yada joins us at the table, laughing at Scott and pointing. So he scoops up a spoonful of chocolate sauce and spatters it all over her front. It drips off her chin and polka-dots her top.
Yada’s mouth hangs open. She grabs a ball of ice-cream covered in nuts and strawberry topping and slams it into Scott’s face. Then she throws a doughnut at Rafaella, who screams, madly dusting cinnamon off her sleeve. I mash a soggy pancake with maple syrup into Rafaella’s face.
‘Help!’ she screams. ‘That’s disgusting.’ She scurries away to another table. She’s not laughing. She does not like mess.
‘Guys!’ Madeleine calls across the room.
But it’s too late. Dessert is firing across the table in all directions. One second I get a toffee apple to the side of the head; the next I’m hurling a marshmallow cupcake. Zarif sits at a table by himself, quietly eating chicken and salad. Yada throws a big lump of rocky road at him. It’s a good shot and hits him in the shoulder, but he pretends not to notice.
Madeleine sees how gnarly the food fight is getting. ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa!’ she calls and half-runs toward us. She’s followed by James Johnston and another guy.
Yada throws a piece of chocolate cream pie at Scott, but he ducks and it hits me in the chin and chest.
‘That’s it! No more!’ Madeleine is getting angry now.
I know I should stop, but that pie in the chest is too much. I peel off what I can and throw it back at Yada but I miss and it flies right past her. It hits the guy next to James Johnston in the face, spraying chocolate all over him.
Everything stops.
The guy is built like a barrel and is about half a metre taller than Johnston. His head is shaved and he wears an astronaut’s blue overalls with dozens of patches on the sleeves from various missions.
His face, his ears and his shoulder are spattered in chocolate and pie crust. He looks at us. We look at him. Madeleine looks from us to him and back again.
‘I am so sorry,’ she says, handing him a wad of serviettes.
James Johnston’s jaw and mouth are stiff, his eyes narrowed. ‘Children, this is Chuck Palatnik, your chief trainer at the spaceport and mission commander for your flight to Utopia.’
We stand there, looking at Palatnik. This is one of those situations when the saying ‘OMG’ comes in handy.
Palatnik breathes loudly, a rattly sound coming from somewhere
down in his throat, as he wipes the chocolate cream from his eyes. He must be over 50. Clean-shaven, straight-backed, chunky-muscled. He’s wearing a NASA cap.
‘Mr Palatnik is one of our most celebrated astronauts.’ Madeleine stares at me. ‘He’s worked in both the Russian and American programs and we’re very lucky to have him on this mission. Do you think your little welcome was appropriate?’
‘No,’ I mutter. I want to dig a giant hole in the floor, climb inside and fill it in. Instead, I offer a hand to Palatnik but I realise it has sticky chocolate pie all over it. I wipe my hand on my jeans and re-offer it. ‘I’m very sorry, sir.’
Palatnik looks at my hand.
He doesn’t shake it. He gazes at each of us and then flicks a look over to Zarif on his left. Z is standing straight, arms by his side, clean as a whistle with his sensible plate of chicken and salad. Palatnik turns and stares at me again. Madeleine and Johnston look edgy. I’m not even breathing. Scott’s left ear is filled with custard. Raf still has a bit of pancake hanging off her cheek. I can tell Yada is trying not to laugh. This makes me want to laugh. But I know I can’t. Please don’t laugh, I repeat over and over in my head. Yada’s body is trembling, trying to hold back the laughter, then she lets out a little snort. It’s only small, but that’s it for me. I laugh, too. I don’t want to laugh, but that makes me laugh even more. This is so bad. I put my hands up to my face and I breathe deeply, getting myself under control and I look right at Palatnik.
He shakes his head. ‘We’d be better off sending monkeys.’ Then, wiping his neck with a serviette, he walks out of the room.
Zarif lets out a low growl and studies the floor.
‘That was disappointing,’ Johnston says. ‘It was very difficult to convince someone of Mr Palatnik’s calibre to take up this position and that was an awful beginning from all of you.’ He stares at me.
‘Does that guy hate kids?’ Scott asks, gnawing on his thumbnail.
Johnston eyes Scott. ‘He can be touchy sometimes but, no, I wouldn’t say he hates children. He’s just—’ Johnston licks his lips. ‘He’s very good at what he does. He can cram a year’s training into one month and get you fit for space. He was commander on my first mission out of Russia eight years ago. He will come to like you. The man is a puppy dog, really.’
‘A Doberman,’ Scott whispers.
Johnston looks around the group. ‘I must go. I have meetings. I’ll see you at some point during your time here. Clean yourselves up and make sure nothing like this happens again or calls will be made to your parents.’ He heads for the door.
‘They both hate us,’ Yada says in a low voice. ‘Especially you.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Monkeys?’ says Scott. ‘How cool would it be if we could take a monkey up with us?’
Yada grins. ‘I can’t believe you gave him a pie in the face. The mission commander!’
‘That’s like some old-school clown move,’ Scott says.
‘It was meant for Yada. I can’t believe you made me laugh.’ I scoop goo out of my ear and slump into a chair, head in my hands. This was not part of the plan.
‘Eat up, everybody,’ Madeleine says without the usual spark in her voice. ‘You have an afternoon briefing and then, tomorrow, an early session in the Zero-G jet.’
7. Vomit Comet
‘Hold on!’ Palatnik screams.
The plane charges down the runway. My palms are slick with sweat and my forehead is dripping. I close my eyes and send out a prayer. I don’t mind going up in a plane. I love it. I’m not scared of heights. I just don’t like falling. Like I really don’t like falling. It’s my worst fear. My second worst fear is being on stage at school and looking down and realising that I’m naked. The bad news is that I’m about to spend two and a half hours doing a lot of falling. At least I won’t be nude, I guess.
This morning at five o’clock Chuck Palatnik burst into our room, showered, fresh and loud. He marched us out onto the ice-cold tarmac.
‘You are about to go up in a Russian IL-76 MDK jet, aka the Vomit Comet,’ he screamed over the sound of plane engines warming up. ‘It is used to train space travellers for weightlessness and it is called the Vomit Comet for a reason. The jet will climb to an altitude of 34,000 feet, about 10,000 metres, and then it will drop rapidly. As it falls from the sky you will experience 25 seconds of weightlessness.’
Zarif was excited. Yada did a little dance. Rafaella looked like she was ready to barf. Scott was whimpering. I looked at the old plane that we were about to go up in and nearly swallowed my tongue.
‘The freefall will allow you to “fly” around the plane’s cabin, just as you will on Utopia. When the jet reaches the bottom of its arc it will soar upwards again to 34,000 feet before plummeting once more. The flight will last 2½ hours and in that time you will do roughly 25 parabolas, or 25 “ups and downs”. This will not agree with the stomachs of the weak.’
The wheels leave the tarmac. I’ve hardly ever been on a plane before, let alone one with no seatbelts. And no seats. I pull down hard on my helmet strap and look around the belly of the plane. It’s high, wide and empty. There are no windows. We hold tightly to a thin railing on the wall. We sit on poo-coloured vinyl cushions that cover the floor.
Why did they have to make us do this first? I wonder if Palatnik somehow knew about my fear of falling and chose this as payback for the pie in the face.
The plane is loud, but the fear streaking through me makes everything seem quiet. It’s just the plane, fear and me. The butterflies in my stomach are so real you could catch them with a net.
‘Two minutes from first drop,’ Palatnik shouts a few minutes later.
I stare at him. I start thinking crazy. Like what if I could pin him down, tie him up, then take control of the plane and land it before the first big drop? Then I think of what Scott said last night about him, when we were brushing our teeth.
‘My mom knows him from NASA,’ he said. ‘He lost his job in the cutbacks and he was bummed out. So he took this gig ferrying kids into space. She said he feels like a total loser.’
I look across the plane at Palatnik. Zarif, sitting next to him, flashes me a confident, white-toothed grin. I try to smile, too, but it’s more of a scowl. My stomach is eating itself, while Zarif sits there looking ready, cool, focussed. The idiot. I guess he’s been up in a thousand planes with his old man and dived towards the ground millions of times.
‘I’m too young to die,’ Scott whimpers. He’s been complaining pretty solidly since wakeup. He squeals like a pig every time the plane bumps a cloud. It’s hard to believe that any of his family members have ever been outside the house, let alone into space. Scott grips the railing with two white-knuckled fists.
‘I need to go down,’ he whines. ‘Please take me down. This is a big mistake. I’m not ready. I’m not meant to be here. Please. I’ve got a stomach ache. It might be my appendix. It might explode like Houdini’s and splatter all over the plane. This is—’
‘Shaddap!’ Palatnik shouts. Scott stops whining and sucks in his bottom lip. It looks like tears might spring down his sweat-speckled face at any moment.
I’m glad that Palatnik snapped at him. All Scott’s freaking out is making me even more nervous.
Palatnik checks the time and yells, ‘Okay T minus 15 seconds till first drop!’
I clasp my hands together and my fingernails almost draw blood. I bow my head, trying to breathe deeply, but I can’t even get a lungful.
The plane soon hits the top of its arc and I can feel it start to dive.
‘Okay, everybody, ready to let go,’ screams Palatnik.
‘No!’ Scott howls, his face all red and spewing tears. ‘Please, no! Stop it. I’m not ready. I’m not ready!’
‘And . . . go!’ says Palatnik.
I hold tight to the rail, but my fee
t begin to lift into the air. There are high-pitched shrieks from all over the plane as legs float everywhere. I’m already praying for the drop to be over. My eyes are shut. I can feel us racing towards the ground and it makes me want to be sick.
Zarif jumps in the air and does a flip. Palatnik helps him spin. ‘Good, man. Good. Anybody else gonna let go?’
Yada floats out into the middle, laughing and trying to flip, but she lands hard and cracks her helmet on the wall of the plane. Palatnik shakes his head.
Scott is still sitting down, holding onto anything he can to stop himself from floating.
Palatnik claps three times to get our attention. ‘Okay, we’re about to hit bottom. Here we go. Everyone lying down.’
The plane bottoms out for a moment and soon begins climbing steeply. Our bodies shift from zero-gravity to two Gs in just a few seconds. I feel like I’ve doubled my body weight. Raf, who loves science, decides to experiment with the vomit bag by emptying her breakfast into it.
‘That was pathetic!’ Palatnik thumps the wall of the plane. ‘This time I want all of you to let go of your little safety railings and take some risks. Hug the monster! You need to learn ten times faster than real astronauts and that means you have to stop being babies. Especially you,’ he says to Scott. ‘And you.’ He turns to me. ‘What are you going to do? Spend ten days on Utopia clinging to a wall? Right now, the only one of you I’d send up is our man, Zorino, here.’
‘Zarif!’
‘What?’
‘My name’s Zarif, not Zorino.’
‘On my plane, your name’s whatever I say it is.’ A few minutes later, as the plane begins to drop, Palatnik walks across to Scott and peels his fingers off the railing.
‘No. You can’t do this. This is child abuse,’ Scott wails.
‘Working with you is adult abuse!’ Palatnik shoves him out into the middle.
Scott starts floating towards me. I panic. I’m going to get crushed against the wall of the plane, so I let go of the railing and fall on my back. Then Scott begins to drop towards me in slo-mo. I scream right into his face. He screams back into mine. Then he lands on me, so I shove him off. He floats up to the ceiling. I quickly roll out of the way as he falls to the floor again and hangs onto the rail like he’s going to marry it.
Galactic Adventures Page 3