George and the Ship of Time

by Lucy Hawking

  “Human history has become, more and more, a race between education and catastrophe.”

  —H. G. Wells

  With very special thanks to Sue Cook, the George series nonfiction editor

  THE LATEST SCIENTIFIC IDEAS!

  As you read the story and see the sort of future George discovers, you will come across lots of fabulous scientific knowledge and ideas—everything from time dilation to machine learning! To expand this, at the end of the story is a collection of essays written by respected experts that will really help bring some of these ideas to life. It’s your future: read about it, think about it—and enjoy it! It is likely to be a truly exciting world.

  Time Travel and the Mystery of the Moving Clocks

  by Professor Peter McOwan, Professor of Public Engagement with Science, Queen Mary University, London, UK

  Climate Change—and What We Can Do About It

  by Lord Nicholas Stern, Professor of Economics and Government at the London School of Economics, President of the British Academy, UK

  The Future of Food

  by Dr. Marco Springmann, Senior Researcher on Environmental Sustainability and Public Health, Nuffield Department of Population Health and Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food, University of Oxford, UK

  Plagues, Pandemics, and Planetary Health

  by Dr. Mary Dobson, St John’s College, University of Cambridge, UK

  War in Fifty Years

  by Dr. Jill S. Russell, Lecturer at University College London, UK

  The Future of Politics Is . . . You!

  by Andy Taylor, Political and Legislative Consultant, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts

  Cities of the Future

  by Beth West, Head of Development for London at Landsec, the UK’s largest property company

  Artificial Intelligence

  by Dr. Demis Hassabis, Co-founder and CEO, DeepMind, UK

  Robot Ethics

  by Dr. Kate Darling,

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

  The Internet: Privacy, Identity, and Information

  by Dave King,

  Online Risk Adviser and Founder, Digitalis

  PROLOGUE

  “Message buffered!” The communication system crackled into life. “Doppler correction implemented.”

  Until now, the inside of the spaceship Artemis had been eerily silent. But then a human voice broke through. A very angry human voice.

  “George! This is your mother!” it squeaked over the loudspeaker. She sounded absolutely furious.

  “Oops!” said Boltzmann Brian, George’s outsize robot, his only companion on this enormous spaceship. “Shall I say hi to your mom? She must be missing us!”

  “No!” George floated back to the front of the ship. He had boarded the Artemis on Earth, little knowing that it would take him and Boltzmann on quite such a wild ride. It was as though they had jumped onto the back of an untamed stallion that had cosmically galloped away with them. “Well, actually,” he added, pausing out of range of the receiver so his extremely peeved mother wouldn’t be able to hear him, “I don’t suppose you’d like to tell her this was your idea?”

  He looked pleadingly at the battered old robot. A high-altitude space jump sometime previously had led to Boltzmann’s head and body being charred by the heat of reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. This always reminded George that his own human body had no chance of survival outside the ship.

  “But it was not my idea,” said Boltzmann, sounding puzzled. “I do not think our current predicament will be solved by my attempting to fabricate reality to your mother.” Robot Boltzmann had made great progress in mastering human emotions, but still hadn’t got the hang of that most basic of human habits—lying.

  Anyway, George realized that it was pointless to tell tall stories to his mother back on Earth. No matter how they got there, he and Boltzmann were stuck on a speeding spacecraft, heading in a direction away from Earth . . . and they didn’t know how to get home. He picked up the microphone.

  “Mom!” he said.

  “George!” The tinny voice sounded torn between rage and joy. If it was possible to weep and laugh at the same time, it sounded as though his mother was doing both. “George!”

  “Hello, Mom,” said George.

  “George?” continued his mother. “Where are you? And don’t just say, ‘I’m in space!’ I know that, thank you very much, George Greenby. George? George!”

  “Hello! Hello, Mom!” said George. Suddenly he realized that his mother couldn’t actually hear him. Because of the time delay for delivery of messages across space, his mother was talking to him but unable to pick up his replies, which were still traveling toward her across the vastness of space. In fact, his mother could have broadcast her message hours or even days before and no longer be poised to receive his replies. George’s heart sank. It was too weird to be talking to his mother and yet not be talking to her at the same time.

  “George Greenby!” she carried on. “What did you think you were doing, speeding off on that wretched spaceship and giving us all the fright of our lives?” The line broke up into static and George just heard a hum and a fizz.

  “I didn’t realize!” he bleated pointlessly into the receiver, knowing his mother couldn’t hear him. “It wasn’t meant to be like this!”

  At the time, spontaneously hijacking the spaceship Artemis had seemed brilliantly adventurous. But it also felt as though it had a built-in ending. Immediately after launch, he and Boltzmann would gain control of the spaceship, putting it into orbit around the Earth. After a few circuits of their home planet, they would decelerate out of orbit and return home. And, even if his parents were so angry with him that he was grounded for the rest of his life, it would still have been worth it to experience space flight in a real spacecraft.

  But this was not the way it happened. The Artemis, it turned out, moved to a music all its own. It seemed to come with a pre-plotted course and didn’t respond to any attempts to change it. Instead, it had exited the Earth’s atmosphere like a cannonball. The gray face of the Moon had flashed past as the Earth receded into the distance, fading rapidly to just a point of light in the dark, one dot among thousands.

  Now they were tearing through space, bright lights of stars flashing past the windows. The control panel of the ship had resisted all Boltzmann’s attempts to take over. The two of them were as powerless as the cargo of green lettuces they had found installed in a special growing segment of the ship. Just as the space salad slowly grew, so they would have to wait until the Artemis revealed the purpose of this voyage. Were they going to Mars, which George had thought was the original destination for the spaceship? To Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, as he had then been told it had been programmed to visit? That would be a much longer trip. Right now, it didn’t seem like they were going anywhere except into the darkness, faster and faster.

  “Hello, George’s mom!” Boltzmann shouted into the receiver. “We’re having a great time! But don’t worry—the ship is fitted with the most amazing inertial dampers so there’s no danger of us being crushed in a massive acceleration or deceleration! If that’s what’s been worrying you . . .”

  George hoped Boltzmann’s message would get lost in space. It wasn’t quite what he thought his mom wanted to hear.

  Suddenly she came back loud and clear.

  “Eric,” she said, “is trying to turn your ship around. But he says it may be a very long time before you get back. He thinks the Artemis wasn’t programmed to go to Europa or Mars at all. You’re going—”

  “Where?” cried George. “Where are we going?”

  “Fizz buzzle swizzie tum,” said his mother as the message broke up. “Crackle . . . c
rackle . . . boom . . . hiss.”

  “Mom!” cried George, who wanted nothing more at that moment than to be at home in his bedroom in his ordinary house on his normal, boring street with his little sisters, while his mom was in the kitchen and his dad was out in the garden, chopping up wood to power the family’s home-made generator.

  This vision of home was suddenly so clear that it was like being there for real. George saw himself walk in from the garden, and sniff the air. His mother was baking some of her famous broccoli muffins, his sisters were building and knocking down towers made out of cherry-wood bricks while the steady thwack of his father’s axe drifted in from outside. It was home. It was where he belonged.

  “Boom!” went the amplifier. George’s mother was gone and he was back here, in this sterile space environment with its stale air and dehydrated packet food, and only a robot for a friend. The space food tasted okay—it came in lots of different flavors such as “bacon sandwich” or “chocolate milk shake.” The ship’s recycling facility did a great job of keeping water circulating too, so George was unlikely to run out of food or drink. Even the robot wasn’t bad company—but none of it was like being back at home with his family, his best friend, Annie, next door, ready for another adventure. Only this time George had set out on his adventure and left her behind.

  His mom was gone, the connection broken. George realized that his last hope—that Eric Bellis, his friend Annie’s dad and the superstar scientist and former head of Kosmodrome 2 (the spaceport from which they had launched near his home in Foxbridge), would be able to grasp control of Artemis, the runaway spaceship, and bring them back—had disappeared. They were still hurtling through space. But where were they going? He slumped over the useless controls, microphone in his hand. The receiver continued to pick up noises—a crackle, a boom, and a strange, high-pitched whistling sound that meant nothing to George.

  “Cheer up!” Boltzmann poked him with a long robot finger. “Look what I found!”

  George raised his head, looking bleary.

  “Raspberry ripple!” chuckled the robot, brandishing a packet mix in George’s face. “A new flavor! Now tell me you’re not excited! Is it dinner time?”

  *

  The strangest thing about being in the spaceship was that, as they voyaged on, they had no real idea of the passage of time. George’s watch seemed to have stopped. Boltzmann’s timekeeping function had strangely malfunctioned, the control panels gave them no clues, and they had no sunrise or sunset to mark out their days.

  They slept and woke as they felt like it. George tucked himself into a relatively comfy pod to doze when he needed to, while Boltzmann lounged around, making use of the ship’s solar electricity supply whenever he needed to charge up. They passed the time by chatting, with Boltzmann taking copious notes on what it meant to be a humanoid rather than a robotic life form. After a while George noticed that Boltzmann was copying his gestures! It was oddly like having a robot mirror.

  Days passed like this—or at least George assumed that they were days. He had no real idea how long it had been before another familiar voice broke through, all the way from Earth.

  “George!” the voice cried. “George!” It was his best friend, Annie. After George and Annie had journeyed to the icy moon of Europa to defeat the most evil man on Earth, Alioth Merak, they had returned to Earth just in time to rescue a bunch of kids who were trapped inside a stationary Artemis on the launchpad. Merak’s plan had been to isolate the cleverest kids on the planet and send them out on a secret space mission to find life in the Solar System on his behalf. But George and Annie had intervened just in time and saved them, although in the process they had accidentally atomized Merak during a quantum teleport. He had disintegrated in transit and would never be reassembled.

  Unfortunately Merak had designed and built the spaceship Artemis himself, in great secrecy, and only he knew how to operate it. When Merak vanished, there was literally no one on Earth who knew how the ship worked. And, as George had now discovered, even mega-brain Eric—Annie’s dad—hadn’t been able to divert the Artemis from its true destination, whatever and wherever that was.

  “Annie!” yelled George, floating over to the comms portal as fast as he could. He was now super-skilled at moving around in microgravity and could do all sorts of interesting flips and somersaults.

  “George!” Annie was speaking very fast. “I don’t know if you’re even still out there, or if you can hear me, but please get in contact if you can. There’s big trouble.”

  “I want to!” said George. “But I don’t know how to get home! No one does! And what do you mean, if I’m even still out here? Help me, Annie.”

  “Everything has changed,” said Annie, her voice suddenly coming over the communication channel as clear as a bell. In some ways she sounded just the same, yet in others she sounded different somehow: more grown up, more self-assured. She also sounded scared. “Everything’s gone wrong,” she said. “The world—it’s turned upside down, George. It’s all ruined. We couldn’t stop it. George, are you out there? I need you! Eric needs you.”

  George’s blood ran cold. Hearing the voice of his friend, relayed across endless miles of empty space between them, asking for his help when he had no way of giving it or replying in real time, was heartbreaking. Next to him, Boltzmann had frozen too, as though like George the robot was experiencing deep, heartfelt pain at the awful news.

  “What about Eric?” asked George. But he was aware that Annie couldn’t hear him at that moment. He knew that he was just shouting across space, as she was, like putting a message in a bottle and sending it out to sea in the hope that someone would find it and answer.

  “No!” cried Boltzmann, very emotionally for a robot. “Not Eric!”

  “Shush!” said George. “I need to hear what Annie’s saying.”

  “Eric’s disappeared,” Annie’s voice continued, much lower, but answering his question almost as though she could hear him. “He did something, George. And they caught him. Someone betrayed him. He was trying to stop them, but now he’s disappeared. We don’t know where he is. We’re very afraid . . .” She sounded breathless now, as though she might be running.

  “Who are they?” said George. He knew his questions were irrelevant, but even so he couldn’t stop himself from asking.

  The only answer from the other end was a scream, which resounded around the large and mostly empty spacecraft, bouncing off the walls time and time again.

  “Annie! Annie!” he shouted into the receiver.

  But it was dead and unresponsive. George ran to the window, as though somehow he expected to be able to see Annie floating out there in space. But the only view was of the vast, unfurling cosmos, full of bright stars and strange, celestial objects and huge rocks twirling past in an endless light show.

  He felt a chill creep down his back. Annie’s message had been a last, desperate call for help and she might not even know that he had heard her.

  Boltzmann and George looked at each other in silence, robot to boy, mechanical eye to human eye.

  “You feel it too, don’t you, Boltz?” said George. “Something has gone really wrong on Earth.”

  The robot nodded. “I sense your distress at your dislocation from your home environment,” he replied. “While not an organic part of your planet in the same way that you are, I too am beginning to feel we have gone far enough. I believe we have accomplished your dream of space flight and it is definitely time to start back.”

  “Where is this ship even going?” said George. “Did Alioth never tell you?”

  Boltzmann shook his head. “My master was a man of many secrets,” he said, floating over to the control panel to begin another sustained attack on the systems governing the flight of the Artemis. “And many games. If he told you the destination of this craft was Europa, then you can be sure that is the one place the Artemis will never go.”

  “And how long have we been up here? Why aren’t there any clocks?” said George.
There wasn’t much he could do to help while Boltzmann flicked switches and inputted commands. “Why is there no time up here?”

  “There is always time,” said Boltzmann. “And it always goes forward. But we just do not know by how much, or how fast we are moving. Although the inertial dampers on his ship have made me suspicious as to the speed at which we are traveling . . .”

  “We have to get home, Boltz,” said George decisively. “It doesn’t matter what it takes! They need us.”

  Boltzmann made another vain attempt to hack into the system and wrest control away from whatever invisible force was directing the ship. Outside, they saw the brilliant rainbow of lights as stars flashed past. George paused for a moment, lost in wonder at the thought that he might be the only human being who had ever been this far from Earth! But would he ever get home to tell the tale—and, when he did, what would he find?

  Boltzmann wiped his forehead after the exertion of trying to change the ship’s course. George almost laughed to himself—robots don’t sweat, so he had no need to wipe moisture out of his eyes, but he had picked up the gesture from humans and rather enjoyed doing it as a signal that he was working hard.

  But then, just as Boltzmann had given up once again, the ship itself decided to speak to them.

  “Apex of outward journey achieved,” it announced, causing both George and Boltzmann to jump out of their skins.

  “What’s happening now?” George cried. But he didn’t really need to ask. The huge spaceship, which had been determinedly charging through the darkness of space, almost came to a halt, and then, finally, it started to turn.

  “Boltz!” said George. He didn’t dare to say it. “Are we . . . ?”

  “I think so!” said the robot, grinning from ear to charred metal ear.

  “We are!” said George, space-leaping over to the robot and giving him a massive hug. “We’re turning around! We’re going—”

  “Home,” said a chilling voice, blasting out of the communication portal. George and Boltzmann froze in mid-hug. “Do not leave your homes,” the voice continued, sharp and distinct. In the background they heard a wailing sound as though a multitude of sirens were blaring.