“What do we do?” yelled George.
“Nothing,” shrieked Annie. “There’s nothing we can do! Try not to get squashed! I’ll call Cosmos to get us back.”
The comet shot through the asteroids with incredible speed. Another large rock hit the comet just in front of them, raining down smaller rocks on their space suits and helmets. Through the voice transmitter in his helmet, George heard Annie scream. But suddenly the scream went silent—the noise just stopped like a radio being switched off.
George tried to say something to Annie through the voice transmitter, but she didn’t seem to hear him. He turned to look at her. He could see she was trying to speak to him from inside the glass space helmet, but he couldn’t hear anything she said. He shouted as loudly as he could: “Annie! Get us home! Get us home!” But it was no use. He could see now that the tiny antenna on her helmet was snapped in half. That must be why he couldn’t talk to her! Did this mean she couldn’t talk to Cosmos either?
Annie was nodding like crazy and holding on to George very tightly. She was trying as hard as she could to summon Cosmos to come and get them both, but the computer wasn’t answering. As George feared, the device that linked her both to him and to Cosmos had been broken by the rocks raining down on them. They were stuck on the comet, flying through an asteroid storm, and it seemed there was no way out. George tried to call Cosmos himself, but he didn’t know how to do it or whether he even had the right equipment. He got no reply. Annie and George hung on to each other and squeezed their eyes shut.
But just as suddenly as the storm had started, it stopped again. One minute rocks were thudding down on the comet all around them, the next the comet had flown out of the other side of the storm. Looking around, George and Annie realized how very lucky they had been to escape. The rocks were forming a huge line that seemed to extend all the way through space. They were mainly large and scattered thinly along the line, except where the comet had flown through. The rocks here were much smaller but more densely packed.
However, they were still far, far from safe. Jets of gas from the comet were now shooting out everywhere. Soon one could erupt right underneath them. It was now so hazy from all the explosions that they could hardly see the sky. Just the Sun and a faint little blue dot that was slowly getting bigger.
George turned back to Annie and pointed at the blue dot ahead. She nodded and tried to spell out a word with the finger of her space glove in the air. George could only make out the first letter—E. As they got closer to it, the comet tilted slightly toward it, and George suddenly realized what Annie was trying to tell him. It was E for Earth! The tiny blue dot in front of him was the planet Earth. It was so small compared to the other planets, and so beautiful. And it was his planet and his home. He desperately wanted to be back there now, this very second. He wrote “Cosmos” in the air with his space glove. But Annie just shook her head and wrote the word “NO” with her finger.
Around them on the comet, conditions were getting worse by the second. Hundreds and hundreds of fountains of gas and dust were erupting all over it. They huddled together, two castaways in space, with no idea how to get out of the awful trouble they had landed themselves in.
At least, George thought, in a strange, dreamlike way, I’ve seen the Earth from space. And he wished he could have told everyone back home how tiny and fragile the Earth was compared to the other planets. But there was no way they could get back home now. The fog of dust and gas was now so thick that they had even lost sight of the Earth’s blue color. How could Cosmos have let them down like this?
George was just wondering if this was the last thought he’d ever have when suddenly a doorway filled with light appeared on the ground next to them. Through it came a man in a space suit, who unhooked them both from the comet and, one at a time, picked them up and threw them through the door. A split second later, Annie and then George landed with a bump on the floor of Eric’s library. The man who had grabbed them quickly followed and the doorway slammed shut behind him. Pulling off his space helmet and glaring down at George and Annie, who were sprawled on the library floor in their space suits, Eric shouted, “What on Earth did you think you were doing?!”
