George's Cosmic Treasure Hunt (21 page)

Emmett came back over the transmitter, sounding panicked. “I don't think you
have
more time,” he said urgently. “Cosmos has detected a giant dust storm, which is spreading very fast toward you! We have to get you out of there before you get lost in it! Cosmos says he may not be able to find you in a dust storm—oh!” He broke off abruptly.

“Emmett, what is it?” Annie and George had just seen the huge dust clouds in the far distance, rolling over the empty ground toward them.

“Cosmos is stalled!” Emmett said in despair. “He says:
Reverse portal not available at this moment due to an urgent system update.
Until he's finished updating, he can't bring you back! He can only send you farther out!”

“Em, get us out of here!” shouted Annie, not caring how much noise she made now. “Send us somewhere! Anywhere! But out of this storm! I can't hold on much longer!”

The wind was blowing the surface dust up around them. Homer was already covered in it, his shiny solar arrays blanked out. George and Annie could only just see each other as the torrent swirled around them. Annie was still hanging on
to Homer's leg, with George floating out behind her, buffeted by the terrible winds. He wrapped both hands tightly around one of Annie's arms. But they both knew that, at any second, they could be blown away from each other and lost forever on Mars.

“The moons of Saturn!” yelled George into his voice transmitter. “If you can't bring us back, send us farther out! Send us to the next clue!”

Through the gritty cloud, which was growing thicker by the second, they saw the faint outline of a doorway standing right next to them. As it became more solid-looking, George let go of Annie with one arm and grabbed the door frame. Swiveling around, he braced his feet against it, still holding tightly on to Annie, who was in turn still attached to Homer.

“Open the door!” he bellowed to Emmett on Earth. “Annie! When I count down, I'm going to throw you through it! Let go of Homer!”

“I can't!” screamed Annie. “I can't let go!”

George realized she was frozen with fear that she might be blown away if she released her hold on Homer.

“You have to!” he shouted back. “I can't pull you
and
Homer through the doorway! I'm not strong enough!”

The door swung open very fast. Behind it they could see a mysterious orange swirl.

“On my count, Annie, let go!” said George. “Five, four, three, two,
one
.” He tried to hurl her through the door but she was still clinging to Homer. “Close your eyes,” he shouted, “and imagine Earth. I'll be right behind you, Annie. I'm coming with you. Try again—you can do this. Five! Four! Three! Two!
ONE!
”

Annie let go of Homer's leg and catapulted through the doorway. George flung himself after her, swinging around the door frame and into another world—one he had never even dreamed of.

The doorway shut behind him as the dust cloud swallowed the whole of Mars, sweeping Homer's message and Annie and George's footprints off the surface and covering the little robot in a blanket of reddish dust. All that was left was the tiny red light on Homer's camera, winking away as he took photos of the Martian storm and sent them back to Annie's dad, so many millions of miles away on friendly planet Earth.

F
ar away from the Global Space Agency headquarters, but really very close in terms of space distances, Daisy, George's mom, had just watched the sun rise over the Pacific Ocean. The sapphire night sky had changed to a light azure wash as the brilliant stars faded from view and the mist rose from the crystal-clear water. Daisy had been watching the sky all night.

As the Sun had set the day before, she had seen Mercury and Venus hang just over the horizon, disappearing as the Moon rose in the east. The night darkened, and a million brilliant stars peppered the sky. Among them were Alpha and Beta Centauri, bright stars that both pointed the way to the Southern Cross, the great constellation that is visible only in the Southern Hemisphere. Daisy had lain back on the sands and looked into the heavens. Above her were the constellations Libra and Scorpius, with the beautiful star and heart of Scorpius, Antares, shining down on her.

As she gazed at the stars, she thought of George at the space-shuttle launch and imagined his excitement at seeing a real spacecraft lift off into the skies above. Little did she realize, as she sat on the beach and looked upward, that George himself was somewhere out there in the Solar System, traveling between Mars and his next destination on the cosmic treasure hunt!

It was just as well that poor Daisy had no idea her son was, at that moment, lost in space, because George's dad, Terence, was currently lost on Earth, which was why she was sitting on the sand, waiting for the boat he'd taken to reappear. Terence and Daisy had gone to Tuvalu, a group of islands in the Pacific, a beautiful paradise lapped by a gentle blue sea. The sands were white, the palm trees waved, and enormous butterflies and exotic birds fluttered among the thick vegetation.

But they hadn't gone there for a vacation. They had joined a group of their eco-warrior friends who were on a mission to chart the changes affecting these islands, islets, and atolls.

The seas that looked so friendly, warm, and inviting were actually rising, threatening to swallow up some of the tinier islands and leave no trace of life. Soon, all the people might lose their homes as the sea level got higher and higher. The ocean was rising because of a combination of melting land ice in the Antarctic, Greenland, and the glaciers, coupled with the thermal expansion of seawater. As water warms up, it takes up more space,
which all adds up to more water and less land. Some of the islands and atolls were so low-lying that any change to the sea level became obvious very quickly, as homes were flooded and beaches disappeared; the main runway in the capital city was now unusable for much of the year because it was often underwater.

The people could at least leave—even though they didn't want to lose their homes and their lives on those wonderful islands. But all the birds, butterflies, and moths that had become used to that climate and that environment really didn't have anywhere else to go.

The Pacific Islanders had been trying to tell the rest of the world what was happening to them. They'd been to big conferences and made lots of noise about how their homes might not exist in a few years' time if global warming continued to make the sea rise at the same rate. Some people argued that the changes the Tuvaluans were experiencing were just part of a normal cycle of weather patterns that caused big storms to wash over the islands and drown them in monster tides. But others were convinced that what they saw was a sign
of something more sinister that couldn't be explained away so easily.

In a sense, the fact that Tuvalu seemed to be sinking was nothing new. The five atolls that made up the Tuvalu group had been sinking into the sea for a very long time. The famous explorer and naturalist Charles Darwin had sailed across the Pacific in 1835 and come up with an explanation for how atolls, which from above look like flat rings of sand surrounding a lagoon, had formed. New islands were created in tropical waters due to volcanic activity. Over millions of years, coral—organisms that live in warm shallow water—built up along the shoreline of these new volcanic islands as they sank back into the sea. Eventually the volcanic island would disappear altogether, but the coral would carry on growing up to the surface and above the water, forming reefs and beaches.

However, this process had taken place over a very long time—maybe as much as thirty million years. It was the past ten years and the next five that were giving the Tuvaluans serious cause for concern, and it was these rapid recent changes that they wanted to record.

In order to do this, George's dad and a couple of others had left the main atoll by boat to explore the islands. But they hadn't come back when they were expected. They had taken maps for their journey but no GPS system or cell phone. They had said they would navigate by the stars, just as another explorer, Captain
Cook, had done all those years ago when he had sailed across the Southern Seas to record the transit of Venus across the Sun.

Unfortunately for Terence, they had got very lost and had not managed to find their way back to Tuvalu, where Daisy was now horribly worried about them. The other eco-activists had tried sending out boats to find them, but they had come back with no sighting. Daisy and the others were growing frantic with worry. Surely Terence and his friends didn't have enough fresh water on the boat to last long, and by day the sun shines very brightly over the South Pacific. During that long night, Daisy had made a call to Florida to ask for help….

 

In another part of the Solar System, as George pushed himself through the doorway from Mars into the swirling dark orange world beyond, he heard Annie scream: “It's all wet!'

George landed behind her on what looked like a sloping patch of frozen ground. He wobbled as he landed and reached back to grab hold of the door frame to steady himself. Annie, who George had thrown through the doorway, seemed to fly slowly through the air, landing just next to a channel of dark liquid that flowed into an enormous black lake. For a second it looked like she might topple over and fall into the black stream. But instead, she bent her knees, whirled her arms, and took off, bounding gracefully over the dark river.

George hung on to the door frame. The actual doorway back to Mars had closed behind him, but the portal was still there, shimmering slightly in the dim light. He tested the
ground with one space boot. It looked like it was made of solid ice. He tried to chip a bit off with his heel, but it was as solid as granite. George looked around for something else to hold on to once the portal disappeared, but couldn't reach the rocks behind him and the slope in front was ice all the way down to the mysterious dark river.

“Whatever you do, don't fall in!” called Annie from the other side of the fast-moving liquid. “We don't know what's in it!”

“Where are we?” called George, looking around. The skies above were very low and heavy, full of streaky orange and black clouds. The light was dim, as though it came from some far distant star across many millions of miles of space, and the clouds were so dense that the light struggled to reach the surface of this strange world. “What is this place?”

“I don't know,” replied Annie. “It feels like Earth before life began. You don't think Cosmos has sent us back in time by mistake, do you? Maybe he's transported us back to the beginning, to see what it was like before anything happened.”

While the wind appeared to be blowing gently, in reality it packed a big punch, and George had to hang on to the portal doorway.

“George, this is ground control”—he heard Emmett's voice, sounding very serious—“Cosmos can't hold the portal doorway in place for much longer. He needs to
shut down that application, otherwise he might start malfunctioning.”

“Annie, what do I do?” asked George, who was suddenly terrified of tumbling into the stream and getting swept into the lake.

“You'll have to jump,” said Annie. “Like I did!” She was now standing on what looked like a tiny, icy beach on the other side of the channel, where it met the shore of the lake. “It's flat here so you can land safely.” Beyond the little beach a craggy cliff face overhung the mysterious black lake, its peaks outlined against the glowing tiger-skin sky, like a row of gigantic needles.