Zarif turns at the end of his second lap. I’m three or four seconds down now and he’s still pulling away. I’m desperate to make up the distance, but it’s not going to happen with only 25 metres to go. Rafaella is all over me now. I look back as I come up for air and see Yada a length behind. They’re all good swimmers, except for Scott. He’s still paddling down the pool towards me on his second lap.
I can feel the burn in my legs as I push off the wall this time. I’ve started out too fast, trying to stay level with Zarif, and my muscles are going to jelly already. My goggles are fogged. I try to focus on the black line at the bottom of the pool, but now, when I turn to the side for air I can’t see Zarif at all. I can see Rafaella, looking right at me, though. I dig hard, pushing through the burn, trying to keep my breathing steady. Rafaella steams past me and Yada is just half a length behind. I can’t believe this. I started out so well. I touch the wall at the end of the swim a split-second ahead of Yada, a length behind Rafaella, and about ten seconds behind Z.
I slip my goggles back from my face and start treading water, doing big circles with my legs and arms, the way Mum taught me when I was four or five at the pool near our house.
Yada’s long black hair is all over her face and she’s spitting water and saliva down her chin as she treads water. Believe it or not, she still looks pretty awesome. Her goggles are fogged up. She peels the dripping strands of hair off her eyes and cheeks, tucks them into her swimming cap. She wipes the spit off her chin.
Back down the pool Scott is starting his third lap, splashing along like a demented octopus. Palatnik is shouting stuff at him from the side of the pool: ‘Head down. We want a shallow, fast kick. Heels just breaking the surface. Keep your legs together!’
Zarif stares right through me as I tread water. I stare back. I’m not going to be put off by him today. Our eyes stay locked. I’m aching on the inside, but I’m not about to let it show. Not to him. I just keep kicking. Zarif’s gaze seems to push me down into the water, but kicking harder, I push back. I get an image in my head of Utopia orbiting earth, 300 kilometres above our heads. I think about what it’ll be like on board, floating through narrow tunnels filled with scientific equipment. And instead of treading water we’ll be treading air. These thoughts keep me afloat, like some kind of mental lifebuoy.
A minute later Scott touches the wall at the end of his third lap and rips his gogs off. The rubber straps have carved deep lines in his chubby red face. His freckles seem darker. He’s gasping for breath.
‘Let’s go. You have a six-mile run immediately following this. A full lap of the spaceport fence,’ Palatnik says, looking down on us from the side of the pool. He’s wearing his blue overalls. I wonder if he sleeps in those things. He shakes some tablets out of a jar, throws them back into his mouth and swallows them dry.
‘How far’s that in kilometres?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Google it. Ten?’
I groan. Long-distance running’s not my thing. I get bored just watching the ground go by, listening to my breath. I’m always wishing for it to be over. I like to sprint.
‘When do we have breakfast?’ Scott is panting like a dog.
Palatnik looks at him darkly. ‘You ask that again and you’ll be having breakfast for supper. You look like you could skip a few meals, anyway.’
Scott is too knackered to be offended.
For a while, nobody says anything.
In the flight suit it’s hard to get good knee and elbow movement. That means it takes a bunch more energy to kick and paddle. I’m trying too hard. I slow down and pace myself. I look longingly at the dark blue tiles that run around the edge of the pool. I want so badly to reach out and touch them. Just for a second. Just a little break. Would that hurt anyone? I look up to see if Palatnik’s watching.
‘You touch the edge, you fail,’ he says, reading my mind.
I’m six minutes in and losing the feeling in my arms and legs. The pool is slightly heated, but still cold. He probably had it turned down a few degrees overnight as a special treat for us. My head dips under a bit every now and then. Water splishes in and out of my ears. It sounds like I’m in an underwater cave. I’m swallowing water, but I charge on. Zarif’s long limbs keep his head well above the waterline. He looks like he could read a book while he’s doing this.
‘Are you okay?’ he asks with a hint of a smile.
I pretend not to hear. He’s not actually asking if I’m okay. He’s trying to psych me out. My sneakers feel like solid blocks of concrete, dragging me down. Every kick sends pain shooting through my thighs. It’s hard to keep a straight face. If Z is faking how easy he’s finding this, then he’s doing a really good job.
At the nine-minute mark, Scott heaves himself out of the pool and slides up onto the tiles like a big fur seal. He flips over onto his back, his belly heaving up and down. I so wish I was him, but he’s failed the challenge. Palatnik drops a towel on his face. The others are still going strong. My ears are totally under and I’m looking up at the ceiling to keep my mouth and nose above water. My limbs are hardly moving and the suit is the only thing keeping me afloat. I swallow a mouthful, cough hard and water washes over my face and up my nose. It burns my nostrils and the back of my throat. I’m wondering if I can make it. There’s no way I’m going to touch the side of the pool, so my only other option is to drown. I don’t care so much about winning any more. I just want to survive.
‘How long?’ I yell, swallowing more water.
‘Zarif, you’re done. Get dry, get changed and go across the hall and out the exit door, where you’ll begin your run,’ Palatnik says. ‘I’ll catch up to you.’
Zarif paddles for the ladder. This means I have about ten seconds left. Z kicks my knee as he swims past. My head goes under and I swallow a lot this time. I flap hard with my hands, trying to poke my head out of the water, but I’m coughing my guts up. Palatnik is watching me from the pool edge, but he doesn’t look worried. He has his hands on his hips as he watches me go down again. I’m looking at him from under the surface of the water. I have no other choice. I stretch out a hand, numb with cold, to grab the blue-tiled pool edge.
‘Rafaella, you’re done,’ says Palatnik.
Two more seconds.
11. Kid
My feet smack against hard-packed sand. The cold desert morning stings the skin on my face. I dig through air, trying to chase Zarif and Rafaella down, but they’re much better runners than I am. Yada is jogging beside me. The spaceport’s tall barbed wire fence flicks by to my right. The ground is pocked and sandy, with tufts of spindly desert grass. It’s still only 5.39. The sky is waking, but the sun hasn’t peeked over the horizon.
We’ve been running for fifteen minutes and my legs are screaming from the swim. I held out for the two seconds after Rafaella left the pool and Palatnik said my name quietly just as my fingers, blue from cold, touched the edge of the pool. I was saved from a fail. When I reached the top of the ladder he threw a towel in my face and snapped out directions for the run.
I look straight ahead. The way Zarif is running, I figure he must do ten kilometres every morning. He’s just ahead of Rafaella and about 500 metres ahead of me. I wonder if he’s one of those African runners who train in the mountains in the thin air. Is that in Kenya or Nigeria? Or maybe he’s an alien. Some kind of robotic cyborg guy, who feels no pain.
‘Oh, stitch!’ Scott shouts. He’s been dragging himself along behind us. ‘Oh, this is a bad one. It feels like a rabbit’s eating my gall bladder.’
I laugh and turn around, running backwards. ‘Do you even know what a gall bladder is?’
‘Did you put your rat down my throat in the night?’ he howls. ‘It’s trying to dig its way out through my stomach.’ Then he falls to the ground, rolls out flat and stares up at the orangey-blue sky.
‘You okay?’ I yell out to
Scott.
‘I don’t even want to go into space!’ he screams at the sky. ‘I want to go to bed!’
‘UP!’ It’s Palatnik, running back towards us at top speed. ‘Let’s GO.’
‘No!’ Scott lies there and screams.
‘You don’t get up, you’ll be going back to your wee-stained bed with the Mickey Mouse sheets in Kissimmee, Florida, you little scab. Let’s MOVE!’
He bends down, grabs one of Scott’s arms and peels him off the ground.
‘RUN!’
Scott takes off, sprinting towards us, clutching his side.
Laughing, I turn around and keep running. I watch Yada for a bit. The sun touches her face. Her hair is still wet, tied back in a ponytail. She looks happy.
‘What are you looking at?’ she says, without even glancing across at me.
‘Nothing.’ I’m embarrassed.
‘Whatever you say.’
I like her accent. She speaks really good English (she calls it Youtubelish), but with a bit of a Thai twist. We jog along for a couple of minutes without saying anything. A flock of black birds takes off from the top of the fence as we go by. There’s a kind of desert rat at some point, too, and I think of Marv, snuggled up in my capsule with his pyjamas on. (Marv doesn’t actually have pyjamas, but it’d be cool if he did.)
Then we hear, ‘How old are you guys?’ as Palatnik zooms up behind us. ‘Not gonna let a 59-year-old man beatcha, are you?’
We try to keep up, but he still pulls away. ‘I’ve come here to chew bubble gum and kick butt,’ he shouts. ‘And I’m all out of gum.’
He pulls steadily ahead.
‘He’s insane!’ I wheeze.
‘Needs another chocolate pie in the face,’ says Yada.
We’re jogging out beside the runway now. The spaceport buildings are way behind us and the ground is dead flat, reaching across the tarmac to the desert. The mountains in the distance look like a pile of gigantic boulders with a light brown blanket dropped over them. It’s a long run ahead to the end of the runway and then back to the spaceport building, where we began.
I can feel pain roaring through my body. I listen to the rhythm of my breath: hooeehoo hooeehoo hooeehoo hooeehoo.
Zarif has pulled even further ahead.
‘C’mon,’ I say to Yada.
So we run flat out for a few hundred metres. She’s fast. I really have to floor it to stay with her. Her style is pretty hectic – all arms and legs everywhere – but that doesn’t seem to slow her down.
‘All right,’ I say, my voice hoarse, lungs empty, and we drop it back a gear.
‘That was good,’ she says.
‘Yeah.’ I lie.
Up ahead now there’s a big green shed and next to it a smaller white concrete building – the spaceport recycling and sewage plants. I’ve seen them before in the distance, from the departure lounge. But then further on, behind the recycling shed I can see a fenced-in area with a bunch of old parts inside. It looks a bit like a junkyard. It’s at the very end of the runway, on the right. Dozens of giant wind turbines that create the spaceport’s power loom over it. As we come closer I can see what looks like the fuselage of an orange plane in there. Then there’s a burnt-out rocket-booster lying on its side: it’s huge, four times as long as my body, at least. It has an Irish and an American flag on the side. There are plane wheels and an old cockpit with smashed windows. There are burnt wings and rusted rocket nose cones. I want to get inside there and play with this stuff. For someone who’s been building rockets and spacecraft for years, this is like a fun park. I could build my own rocket plane out of this stuff. Forget matchsticks and orange juice bottles.
‘Where do you think it’s all from?’ I ask Yada.
She grunts like she doesn’t know.
‘Test planes?’ I say.
‘I guess the tests didn’t go so well.’ She shrugs. ‘Should we be worried?’
We’re only about 50 metres away when I see something move inside the fenced area. I look harder between the tail of a plane and some sheets of rusty steel leaning against the fence.
It moves again. It’s a kid. A little guy.
‘D’you see that?’ I say to Yada.
‘What?’
‘That kid in there.’
‘Where?’
He’s wearing black shorts and a brown shirt. He jumps down from a giant chunk of white twisted metal. He walks around the cone and under the wing of an old plane. It’s the kid I saw last night in the hall. I swear it is. I want to stop. I look way up ahead and Palatnik isn’t watching. We’re passing the junkyard and I slow down to a walk.
‘What are you doing?’ Yada calls out as she pushes ahead.
‘I want to see who he is.’
‘Who?’
‘I’ll catch up,’ I say and she keeps running.
I walk in towards the fence, scanning the area for the kid. There is a warning sign saying that the area is monitored by security. I shield my eyes from the sun and look all around. I can’t see any cameras.
I catch a glimpse of him walking between two tall metal canisters and I call out, ‘Hey!’ But he doesn’t hear me. I can see his feet under a wing and then his head over the edge of a white cylinder of some kind. I look around again to see if I’m being watched, but the desert and runway are flat, still, empty. Zarif and Palatnik are halfway back to the spaceport building now. Just specks in the distance.
The fence is a couple of metres high. I walk along, looking for a gate. My fingers flick across the rough wire. My little finger catches on a jagged bit of metal and I pull it away. It bleeds. I stick it in my mouth to stop the blood flow. Then I see him again. He’s sitting in a landing module with the side ripped off. I stand and watch. The kid has a freckled kind of screwed-up face on a small head. He’s little all over. Compact. And he’s just sitting there, chewing on a long piece of grass. For a second I feel like I know him almost.
‘Hey!’ I shout.
He looks up and does a double-take. He jumps to his feet and takes off to the right, behind the old orange plane. I run along the fence line, trying to keep him in my sights.
‘Hey, come back! It’s all right.’
I make it to the other end of the plane, but there’s no kid. I run another 20 metres or so, but I can’t see anything.
‘Hey!’ I yell. ‘Hello!’ Then I wait for a long time, but there’s no movement.
Eventually I look around behind me, back to the port, and I remember that I’m in the middle of a race. I can see Scott a long way back. Yada’s way up ahead. I’m in fourth place. I take off and I run as fast as my spindly chopstick legs will carry me. I look back at the junkyard a few times, but everything is still. Who is that dude? How did he get inside the fence? Maybe he’s James Johnston’s grandson or something? All these questions fly through my head as I speed back to the spaceport, hoping like anything that my stop-off hasn’t cost me my place in space.
12. Best Friends I Ever Had
A blinking light drifts slowly across the night sky.
‘Is that it there?’ I ask, pointing.
‘No!’ Raf says for the seventh time. She’s getting annoyed now. ‘That’s a plane.’ She grabs my arm and points my finger further to the right. ‘There!’
‘Oh, yeah,’ I say. ‘I think I got it. Just coming towards those four tiny stars in a row?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where?’ says Yada. ‘Where?’
Yada, Scott, Rafaella and I are lying down, side by side on the sloping grass roof at the back of the spaceport. It reminds me of lying in the field in front of my grandpa’s place in Woomera.
Raf has printed something off the web that shows when Utopia can be seen with the naked eye from anywhere on earth. Zarif is supposed to be joining us, but he hasn’t showed yet.
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‘I can’t see it at all,’ Yada says.
‘Look, just there.’ I try to point her finger in the right direction. ‘See the light. Blip-blip-blip. On, off, on, off, on, off.’
‘Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah,’ she says. ‘I got it, I got it.’
‘I still can’t see nothin’,’ says Scott.
‘I’ll show you.’ Raf gets up and goes round to the other side of him.
This is supposed to be a farewell party for Scott. When he got back from the run this morning, an hour after I did, Palatnik told him he was going home. Just like that. I think Scott was actually happy. But this afternoon, his gramps and mum flew in from Florida for a meeting with James Johnston and Palatnik, to try to change their minds. Palatnik told them that there was no way Scott was going to become an astronaut or even a space tourist anytime soon. Scott said he was way-harsh about it. Now Scott’s all packed up. He leaves in fifteen minutes.
‘Just there,’ Raf says. ‘See?’
‘No.’
We all lie there quietly for a minute or two, watching that distant light float across the sky. I don’t know what to stay to Scott – whether to be happy for him, or totally annoyed that we’re not all going together.
I gaze up at the Milky Way, a thick creamy band of stars and dust streaking across the sky. ‘It’s one of billions of galaxies in the universe,’ Raf says. If there are billions of galaxies I’m betting on there being life out there somewhere and I want to go and find it. Maybe they’ve worked things out better than we have. My eye flicks across to a super-bright star, maybe a planet, not so far from the moon.
‘Is that Venus?’ I ask Raf.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Second rock from the sun. About the same size as earth. Ninety-six per cent carbon dioxide and 860° F or 460° C. The surface is half a billion years old.’
‘Wow!’ I say.
A meteor streaks across the sky to the north of us.
Galactic Adventures Page 5