License to Thrill (5 page)

“What's your IQ?” Coke asked the aliens.

“Using your primitive method of measuring intelligence,” said Moe, “our scores would be in the range of 650.”

No longer fearful, Coke and Pep were fascinated by these strange, super-intelligent creatures from another world. What a unique opportunity to answer some of the questions mankind had been pondering for centuries. There were so many things to ask. So many things to know. How was the universe created? What is the purpose of life? But the most important question, of course, came first.

“Where are you from?” Pep asked.

“We are from the planet Kayaanga,” Moe replied.

The twins were sitting among the aliens. Coke's knees were mere inches from those of Curly, but he had no fear. Just the opposite, really. He and his sister had obviously been abducted by these aliens who were in a position to do anything they wanted, and yet a sense of calm had come over both of the twins. They knew they were experiencing something that few—maybe nobody—in our world had ever witnessed. They would have some story to tell when they got home. That is, if they ever made it home.

It was quiet. Pep held her brother's hand.

“Well, it has been really great hanging out with you guys,” Coke said, stretching as he got to his feet. “But we need to be heading back—”

“We have come to your planet for a reason,” Moe said.

“Huh?” Pep asked. “I beg your pardon?”

A low rumbling sound could be heard below them.

“What's that?” Coke asked, sitting back down quickly. “What's happening?”

“Oh, it's nothing to worry about,” said Moe. “We are about to flumphus, I mean blast off.”

“Blast off?” Pep asked, squeezing her brother's hand tightly. “Where are we going?”

“You'll find out.”

T
he rumbling from below was accompanied by a loud humming noise, as if a billion cats were purring into microphones and the sound was being pumped out of speakers positioned all around. Gentle vibrations washed over Coke and Pep. They could feel the hair on their arms standing on end.

“This is a joke, right?” asked Coke.

“I suggest you strap into the seats over there, and quickly,” warned Moe.

“But we have to
leave
!” Pep shouted. “Our parents are waiting for us back at the motel!”

“Too late for that now,” Moe informed them. He and the other two aliens went off to busy themselves in preparation for liftoff.

If you've ever watched old videos of the Apollo missions or the space shuttles rising up off the launch pad, it looks like everything is moving in slow motion. It takes an incredible amount of fuel—and a lot of time—to escape the grip of the earth's gravity.

But this was not like that at all. Using an advanced propulsion technology that human rocket scientists can only dream about, the spaceship seemed to lift almost effortlessly off the ground and rise to treetop level. If the nation's sophisticated defense systems detected an unidentified flying object, nothing was done about it. No jets were scrambled. The president was not informed. Nobody in the area of Roswell, New Mexico, noticed anything unusual in the night sky.

In seconds, the ship was gliding on a straight vertical path, pushing the earth's atmosphere out of its way like it was strolling through a beaded curtain.

Of course, the effect on the human body was not so smooth. Newton's laws saw to that. As the ship went from zero to 17,500 miles per hour in less than four minutes, Coke and Pep felt themselves being pushed hard against the floor. Coke looked down to see the
flesh on his legs pulling against the bones. If he could have seen the soft tissue of his cheeks flapping, he would have laughed.

“We must be pulling four g's,” Coke groaned to nobody in particular.

It was five, actually.

The twins felt pressure across their chests as the ship punched its way through the troposphere. They felt heavy. It was like they had doubled their weight instantly.

There were two seats that looked like dentist chairs in the corner, and a large window in front of them. The twins struggled to crawl over to the chairs and strap themselves in.

“Look!” Coke said, pointing out the window.

Earth was falling away before their eyes. Coke, of course, remembered learning about the layers of the atmosphere in school. At seven and a half miles up, the troposphere ends and the stratosphere begins. At twenty-one miles, the stratosphere ends and the mesosphere begins. At around forty-nine miles, they reached the thermosphere.

Coke almost expected to see lines dividing the layers of air, the way they do in textbook graphs. But the real world was not so obvious. There were no borders separating each layer of the atmosphere. It just got
progressively darker. By the time they reached the exosphere, outer space was inky black.

The thing that struck Coke and Pep was how everything looked so
clear
. The stars didn't look like faraway, sparkly dots. They were so much brighter, like planets. They didn't twinkle; they glowed. There was no atmosphere to cloud one's vision.

“We're . . . astronauts,” Pep said, marveling at the view of the earth from above.

“It's . . . beautiful,” Coke said, gazing at the enormous blue marble with white swirling around it.

“So much water!” Pep said.

Her brother pointed out that the white swirls were clouds, ice, and snow. They could see the larger rivers, continents, and the lights of big cities. The earth
seemed to get smaller as they rocketed away from it.

“Where's the equator?” Pep asked.

“The equator is an imaginary line, you dope,” Coke said, without taking his eyes from the window. “It's not like there's a giant rubber band around the middle of the planet.”

Pep gasped for a moment when she suddenly realized they would need helmets and spacesuits to survive the airless world of outer space. But there were no helmets or spacesuits within sight. Since they had not dropped dead yet, the twins came to the logical conclusion that the aliens were capable of breathing oxygen just like we do, and had been pumping it into the ship.

“Where do you think they're taking us?” Pep asked.

“To their home planet, I guess.”

Pep's eyes felt watery and a single tear rolled down her cheek. She wiped it away with her sleeve. It was extremely possible that she would never see
her
home planet again.

“What do you think Mom and Dad are doing right now?” she asked.

“Sleeping,” her brother replied. “Or maybe worrying about us.”

“That's what I'm doing too,” Pep replied.

“By now, they probably realize that we didn't come
back to the motel room,” Coke said, after thinking it over more analytically. “After they look around and don't find us, they'll call the police and report us missing. The cops will show up with dogs to search the woods. That's what they do when kids disappear.”

“But they won't find us,” Pep said, wiping away another tear.

“They'll look all over,” Coke said quietly. “After thirty days, the police don't call it a search and rescue mission anymore. It's a recovery mission. They figure they're not going to find anybody alive at that point. Then they start searching for bodies.”

“They won't find bodies, either,” Pep said. “They won't find
anything
. We will have just vanished into thin air.”

“I wonder if
all
the kids who have vanished without a trace were abducted by aliens,” Coke said. “That would explain a lot. Maybe they're
all
being held captive on this alien planet, Kayaanga. Maybe we'll meet them.”

Pep wasn't thinking about other kids. She was thinking about herself, her brother, and her parents.

“I know we argue with them and make fun of Mom and Dad all the time,” Pep said, sniffling, “but I really love them.”

“Me too,” Coke replied.

By this time, the earth had dropped away and the
ship turned so Coke and Pep couldn't see it anymore. All they could see was the blackness of space. The ship had stopped accelerating and was moving at a steady speed, so it seemed like it wasn't moving at all. The twins felt no pressure on their bodies. The aliens were off in another room.

“Y'know, we were better off before,” Pep told her brother. “We were better off when all we had to worry about was Dr. Warsaw, Mrs. Higgins, and those stupid bowler dudes trying to kill us. At least we were on our own planet. At least we could
do
something. We could run. We could fight back. We can't do
anything
here. We're trapped.”

“If we ever get out of this thing,” Coke told his sister, “I promise I'll never complain about anything ever again.”

“We're not going to get out of this,” Pep said with a sigh. “We'll never come home.”

It was true, they both realized. They would never see their parents, friends, teachers, or California ever again. They would never learn how to drive, or go to high school and college and experience all the other things kids experience as teenagers. They would never get married or have children of their own. Their lives were over, and there was nothing they could do about it.

Pep rested her head on her brother's shoulder and closed her eyes.

“I feel light-headed,” she said.

“Me too,” Coke replied.

At that moment, both twins opened their eyes wide as they came to the realization that they had escaped the gravitational pull of Earth. It wasn't that they were light-headed. Like any other object in outer space, they were
weightless
.

Coke unbuckled his seat belt. A grin spread across his face as his body slowly floated up off the seat. Pep unbuckled her seat belt as well. At first she was tentative, holding her arms unsteadily outstretched in an attempt to balance and keep herself upright. But soon she realized that it didn't matter if she was upside down, right side up, or sideways. In a matter of minutes, she was ping-ponging off the walls, floor, and ceiling alongside her brother.

“Woo-hoo!” Coke yelled. “I'm flying!”

For a brief moment, the twins forgot that they would never see their friends or family again. Weightlessness was irresistibly fun.

“Is this cool, or what?” Coke cackled as he bumped into Pep with a tangle of arms and legs. “Woo-hoo!”

“This must be what it's like to be a bird!” Pep said with a giggle.

They were having such a good time that neither of them noticed that their alien hosts—Moe, Larry, and Curly—had entered the room once again.

“I'd suggest you strap yourselves in,” said Moe.

Coke and Pep pushed off the ceiling and wall in order to fly over toward the seats. It took a little maneuvering to turn their bodies around and put on their seat belts.

“Where are you taking us?” Coke demanded. “What are you going to do with us? We have the right to know.”

“Yeah,” Pep said, trying to sound as authoritative as her brother.

“Isn't it obvious?” asked Moe, pointing to the window.

Coke and Pep turned their heads and saw something they had seen thousands of times before, but never so large or so bright . . .

The moon.

A
s the ship closed in, the moon just about filled the window. Its surface was silvery with millions of craters of all sizes, and dark and light patches of gray and brown. There were no other colors, but it was a beautiful thing nevertheless. Coke's and Pep's jaws dropped open as they gazed in wonder.

Decades ago, it took the Apollo astronauts about three days to travel 239,000 miles to the moon. In 2006, the NASA Pluto probe took a little over eight hours to get there. Onboard the alien spacecraft, Coke
and Pep had made the trip in twenty-four minutes.

The moon may look like a perfect sphere from our vantage point, but it's not. As the ship got closer, the twins could see huge mountains and valleys.