Space Cat-astrophe Read online

  “I VIRTUALLY blasted you, Mark, in a simulation. We both want to win, and we are both willing to play hard to do it,” she said.

  “So what happened to the you-two-go-for-the-Evil-Emperor-of-the-Week thing? I’m not interested.” I did my best Geeky Girl impersonation as I threw her own words back at her.

  “We’re not fighting for some stupid crown now. We are fighting to go into space, and I really, really, really want that,” she said.

  “OK, first, crowns aren’t stupid,” I said.

  Igor grunted to agree.

  “And second, we all want that.”

  “Then it’s good we’re on the same team this time then, isn’t it?” Geeky Girl said, and cracked a smile.

  “OK, we’ll do this together. And look. I just brought in our secret weapon,” I said as I rolled up my pants leg and Fang jumped down. Instantly Boris flew out of the helmet and the two animals faced off.

  “We don’t have time for this now,” Geeky Girl told off Fang and Boris. “We find out what the challenge is and we’ll only have half an hour to complete it or we fail.” She looked Fang right in her big green eyes. “And I’m going into space!” Fang stared hard for a moment, then swished her tail at Boris and started to wash her paws like that was her intention all along, not to start an epic budgie battle at all.

  I looked around. “Hey, maybe we should keep the pets hidden anyway, just in case there are cameras in here.”

  “I already did a sweep before I let Boris fly out,” Geeky Girl said. “I brought some basic bug-sweeping devices with me in my backpack. You never know when you’ll need to know if you’re being watched.”

  “You are really paranoid, but it works,” I said.

  Phillipe’s voice came over the loudspeaker in the room. “Welcome to your team challenge. Your task for zee next thirty minutes is to create a method of propulsion for a space vessel using only zee materials zat you find in this room.”

  There was a sheet covering a bunch of items on a large table in front of us. Igor pulled back the sheet and threw it on the floor. There were fans, engine parts, motor parts, cogs, wheels, all kinds of things, and some tools.

  “So we need to make a rocket or a booster or something to power a spaceship,” I said.

  “It has to be a method of propulsion, so something that moves a ship through space,” Geeky Girl said.

  “Is there anything that you could use to make a moon pogo stick?” I asked.

  Igor shook his head, then he picked up some engine parts and started putting them together.

  “That would work great, Igor,” Geeky Girl said, “but we don’t have any fuel to run an engine.”

  “OK, let’s think. What else can we use for power?”

  “Electricity?” I said. Then I looked around the room and saw that there were no plug sockets and no batteries either.

  “OK, what about hydropower?” Geeky Girl said.

  “No water,” I answered.

  Then Igor picked up a fan and started blowing on it. “Urgh?”

  “Wind power is a good idea, but I don’t think we have enough to power a rocket,” I said.

  “But Igor might be on the right track. I saw this NASA program about solar sails being used in space. The solar winds push the sails. Maybe we could make something like that?” Geeky Girl said.

  “Shame we don’t have anything on the table to make a sail,” I said.

  Then Igor picked up the sheet that had been covering the stuff from the table off the floor. “Urgh?”

  “OK, but we can’t just wait for a solar wind to push us. There isn’t any in here. So we have to have something more dynamic,” Geeky Girl said.

  “You want it to be a more exciting sail, then paint a big super sail logo on it or something, but I don’t think that will help,” I said.

  “I mean it has to do more on its own. It can’t be pushed by something. It has to actively move,” Geeky Girl said.

  We spent the next twenty minutes or so building two sails and engineering them to pivot and move with all the stuff from the table.

  “It still won’t move on its own, though,” I said, and sat down next to Fang. But I accidentally sat on her tail, which caused her to jump up and land right by the helmet that Boris was nesting in. Boris flapped up into the air but caught the helmet strap with her leg as she took off. The helmet then slammed into my head as she flew up to get out of Fang’s reach, and that’s when Geeky Girl shouted, “Eureka!” at the same time I shouted, “Owwwwwwwch!”

  She was doing that bouncing thing again like before. “Wings!!!”

  9

  “We need dynamic solar WINGS, not just sails,” Geeky Girl said. “The wings will give enough uplift to continue the momentum in space, and they will be powerful enough to carry something too.”

  “Like Boris carrying the helmet!” I said.

  “Urgh!!” said Igor.

  We looked at the clock. Five minutes.

  We dove into the pile of stuff and came up with anything we could use to attach the sails (which we bent and folded to look like Boris’s wings) to a pod that we constructed around the helmet. When the mechanism was wound up, the wings would flap and the helmet would be lifted off the ground. We bolted and screwed everything into place just as the buzzer sounded and the door opened.

  No time to test it. We just had to cross our fingers and hope for the best.

  All the kids came out of their rooms. Fang climbed back up my pants leg and Boris fluttered back into the helmet to hide.

  We walked out with Igor gently holding our Dynamic Solar Wing, whatever it was.

  Sanj, Bob and Diablo strode out of their room with a very neat motorized handheld rocket.

  The trumpet kid and the drum kid came out of their room looking scared. They carried a pile of stuff that looked vaguely like a rocket, but it also looked like it had already fallen apart several times. They were followed by the Goth girl, who just looked really, really mad.

  And the other team of young evil scientists came out with lots of space junk taped onto one kid on their team. They called it a “motor robot rocket suit,” but it just looked like a kid with lots of space junk taped to his flight suit.

  As we were getting ready to show our stuff to Trevor, Geeky Girl leaned over and whispered, “You know how I had some sweeping equipment to pick up bugs?” I nodded. “Well. I’m picking up a sound device coming from Sanj.”

  I looked over at Sanj. He was adjusting something on his ear. Just like he did back in the flight simulator. “I thought that Dustin gave him something when he left,” I whispered back to Geeky Girl. “I think he must have given Sanj a secret speaker that he’s using to communicate with Sanj from the outside. There’s no way Sanj could have flown like that on his own.”

  “Dustin could be helping him?” Geeky Girl said. “We have to tell on him. Then they’ll be disqualified, and we’ll be closer to getting into space,” she said, and started to walk toward Trevor.

  “Not so fast.” I stopped her. “If they know Sanj has been cheating, then they’ll search us all just to be sure, and they’ll find a certain budgie and kitten.”

  She huffed, “You’re right. So we have to let them get away with it?”

  “For now,” I said. “We just have to get to the next assessment. We can do this. We make a good team. Maybe Neil will see that and send all three of us on the mission to SSSH.”

  “Vhy are you shhhing me? I vasn’t saying anything,” Trevor shouted at us. “Right, let’s see how you did.”

  Trevor the Tech-in-ator walked down the line of kids, looking at all our projects. “Phillipe vas supposed to judge this assessment as vell, but he must have had to step out during the challenge.”

  He went up to Sanj’s team first.

  “Can you demonstrate how this vorks?” Trevor said.

  “Sure,” Bob said, and then looked at Diablo.

  “Yeah,” Diablo said, and then looked at Sanj.

  “Of course.” Sanj smiled smugly. �
��All you have to do is flick the switch here and the onboard kinetic motion motor powers up. It requires exactly thirty seconds to achieve maximum RPM before you simply launch the hand rocket manually from an elevated surface.” He paused. “You throw it from a height.” He paused again and looked over at Igor. Sanj walked up to Igor, and said, “May I?”

  “Urgh.” Igor nodded.

  Sanj then climbed up, stood on Igor’s shoulders, and threw the rocket up. It whizzed around the room for a few minutes, and we all had to duck for cover until it ran out of power.

  Sanj looked over at Trevor once the rocket was safely on the ground. “So, is that a pass then?”

  Trevor nodded and moved on to the motor robot rocket suit next. “You can begin your demonstration,” he said.

  The three kids on the team all looked at one another and nodded. The smallest of the kids was wearing this robot stuff, including a silver helmet. He had panels with buttons and screens on his chest and what looked like big hair dryers on his feet. He took a deep breath, and the other kids flicked some switches and turned some dials on the suit. First, it started to make a noise like you would expect giant hair dryers attached to someone’s feet to make. Then it started to make a noise like giant hair dryers attached to someone’s feet would make … if they were about to explode.

  The kid in the suit started shaking and shouted, “Turn it off!!!” right before the hair dryers shot him up into the ceiling. Lucky for him we were in an inflatable dome, so he just bounced off. The kids and Trevor had to tackle him and turn the hair dryers off.

  “Fail!” Trevor said, and walked on to the trumpet kid’s team.

  “So, we made a power pack powered by the reverberation of sound from our instruments,” the trumpet kid started to say.

  Their project looked like what would happen if you put a trumpet, a drum kit and a bicycle into a transporter and pressed “mix,” and even worse, it looked like it was being held together with … well, with nothing, really. As soon as they started talking, bits started slowing falling off the rocket.

  “Yeah, but the problem was that the same sound waves that made the ship move also shook it apart like a little drumming, trumpeting earthquake!” the Goth girl said, stomping her foot and sending a pile of spaceship debris crashing to the floor.

  “Fail again!” said Trevor, walking past them. Then he looked at us. “This better be good.”

  “We have made a really cool and totally original ‘Dynamo wing solar thing,’” I said. As I spoke Fang was still clinging to my tube sock on my leg. I could feel her wriggling under the leg of the space suit. When she got fidgety that usually meant one thing and one thing only. Scratching.

  Geeky Girl stepped in front of me with Igor holding the machine. “I call it a ‘Winged Onboard Oscillating Solar Sail Hybrid’ or ‘WOOSSH’ for short. Names are very important, you know.”

  I tried to casually readjust my sock while Geeky Girl spoke.

  Neil Strongarm walked down the corridor at that moment. “I agree. Names are so important,” he said. “But does it work?”

  Igor wound up the mechanism, and we set it on the ground. Geeky Girl adjusted the wings, and then stepped back. “You see, in Earth’s gravity it will fly, but in the vacuum of space the momentum of the wings will carry the ship much farther than a fossil-fuel explosion could. It should be a more economic and environmentally friendly way to travel in space,” she started to say until I elbowed her in the ribs. “But obviously that is just an accidental side effect, because I wouldn’t care about that, because I am of course … evil.” She smiled at Neil Strongarm, and did a pretty passable “Mwhaa-haa-haa-haa.” Then she flipped the on switch and the WOOSSH began to wobble, then flap, and then it took off. It worked!!! I think we were just as surprised as Neil Strongarm.

  It took Igor and me a couple minutes to catch the thing and turn it off. All the while, Fang’s claws had sheared through my sock, and she was digging into my leg to hang on. My teeth clenched and I tried to breathe through the pain. After we caught the WOOSSH, Trevor spoke to us.

  “So, two teams go through and two teams have failed. You know vhere to go now.”

  The losing teams headed down the corridor Neil Strongarm had just come from. It was only six of us now.

  “I’m mixing up your teams again,” Trevor said. “Diablo, you are vith Geeky Girl. Bob, you are vith Igor, and Mark, you are vith…”

  “Sanj?” I said, and slumped down onto the floor by some boxes. At the mention of Sanj’s name, Fang slid down and crawled out of my pants leg. She ducked behind one of the boxes and glared across the room at Sanj.

  10

  Neil Strongarm spoke up. “You might be working with people you don’t like. You might be working with people you don’t trust. Good. You’ll be in space someday soon—if you’re lucky—and you’ll have no one to rely on but yourselves. Be your own team. There is no I in team, and there is no I in space travel, but there is an I in survival. Get me?”

  Neil lost me somewhere around the spelling thing. I didn’t get it.

  “Look out for yourself and your mission at all costs,” Neil continued. “You are the finalists in this exercise. I need some minions, I mean, apprentices to be the brightest and the best. The evilest and the most intelligent, truly proactive evil interns, really, for my next mission.” Neil walked among us, the final six, as he gave this speech. I could feel Geeky Girl doing her bouncing thing again as he walked past her. “The winners will be at my side as I journey into the great unknown.” He paused. “That could be you … but only if you win.”

  “I will win, Mr. Strongarm!” Geeky Girl shouted.

  “I think you just might.” He nodded at her, and then walked off. “You have a break now to get some space food, and then get started on the next task. Stay in this dome area until you are called to go into your work zones. Anyone caught out of bounds will be disqualified. Understand?”

  Trevor brought out lots of packets of rehydrated space food like the astronauts would eat on the space station. “Better get used to this,” he said. “I’m going to go look for Kirsty and Phillipe. They must be dealing vith something vith the other campers. Don’t go out of bounds. I’ll be back.”

  We all nodded. I didn’t realize how space competition can make you so hungry. I downed three packets of space beef stew and rice and some space ice cream before I went over to speak to Sanj.

  “Delighted to be working with you, Mark,” he said.

  “Really?” I said as I slumped into the chair next to him. “Because I thought you already had a partner for the last couple assessments.” I pulled the earpiece from his ear. “Dustin?” I whispered into the earpiece.

  “Well, I had some help, yes. Dustin was very helpful accessing the optimal flight path simulation on the NASA database, and looking up the engineering spec for the hand rocket was especially useful, but something’s wrong.”

  “Of course, something is wrong—you cheated,” I said.

  “No, not that. I mean, Dustin stopped giving me information. I haven’t heard from him since the last exercise. That was not the plan, and Dustin is very good at sticking to the plan. Unlike you,” he said.

  “So, what do you mean? You think he got found out? Or he just stopped?” I said.

  “Well, if he was found out, then I wouldn’t still be here, would I?” Sanj said. Which was true. “And where are Phillipe and Kirsty? Something is up. But I don’t care about all that as much as I care about winning, so the two of us have to trust each other to try to win.”

  “I don’t trust you,” I said, getting up. “But I do want to win, so I’ll give you one chance. I’ll just hold on to this earpiece, so if I find out you are lying to me, I can turn you in as a cheat.”

  I left Sanj sitting on his own near Bob and Diablo and walked over to Geeky Girl and Igor, who were sitting by the boxes where Fang was hiding. There was a pile of space-food packets nearly as tall as Geeky Girl next to Igor. “Did you try the beef stew?” I said to Igor.
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  “Urgh!!!” He nodded.

  “So, I found out from Sanj that he definitely had help from Dustin for the other tasks, but he says that Dustin stopped talking to him,” I said.

  “What, Dustin finally got sick of him too?” Geeky Girl said.

  “No, he thinks there’s something up. Dustin stopped communicating. Kirsty and Phillipe are missing. Maybe something is going on?” I said.

  “Sanj is just trying to distract you from whatever his plan is to win,” Geeky Girl said, but then paused. “Or maybe now that you’re both on the same team, you are trying to distract me and Igor. Yeah, nice try, but I am going to focus on winning this contest and going into space. You can’t trick me that easily,” she said, and walked off, carrying her helmet with Boris inside.

  I sat down next to Igor. “I’m not trying to trick you,” I said. “Or Geeky Girl. I don’t trust Sanj either, but I don’t think he’s making this up. Something is going on. Do you want to help me find out what it is?”

  Igor nodded and pointed to the corridor that we weren’t supposed to go down.

  “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking too,” I said.

  We needed a distraction. Fortunately, I happened to have a very hungry and very bored little furry distraction hiding behind the box we were sitting on.

  I drummed lightly on the box with my fingers, and Fang rubbed her head up against my hand. “Fang? Do you want to try the space beef stew?”

  Fang purred and licked her sharp, pointy teeth.

  Igor picked up Fang, along with a bunch of the empty space-food wrappers, and carried her over to the trash can, which was right behind where Bob and Diablo were sitting.

  Diablo had poured his space stew into a bowl and set it down on the floor by his chair. “Hey, man, keep an eye on my food,” he said to Bob. “I’m gonna go wash my hands. That Sanj kid said we gotta be really careful with space germs and stuff.”