“What on Earth did you think you were doing?!”
Eric was so angry that, for a moment, George wished he were still on the roller-coaster comet, heading straight for the heart of the Sun.
“Actually, we weren’t on the Earth,” murmured Annie, who was struggling out of her suit.
“I heard that!” George hadn’t thought Eric could get any angrier than he already was, but now he looked so furious, George thought he might explode. He half expected to see great jets of steam burst out of his ears, just like the ones on the comet.
“Go to your room, Annie,” ordered Eric. “I’ll talk to you later.”
“But Da-ddy . . . ,” Annie began. But even she fell silent under Eric’s glare. She pulled off her heavy space boots, wriggled out of her suit, and shot out of the door like a streak of blond lightning. “Bye, George,” she muttered as she ran past him.
“As for you . . . ,” said Eric in such a menacing tone that George’s blood ran cold. But then he realized Eric wasn’t talking to him. He was looming over Cosmos, casting threatening looks at the computer screen.
“Master,” said Cosmos mechanically, “I am just a humble machine. I can only obey the commands I am given.”
“Ridiculous!” cried Eric wildly. “You are the world’s most powerful computer! You let two children travel into outer space by themselves. If I hadn’t come home when I did, who knows what might have happened? You could have—you should have—stopped them!”
“Oh dear, I think I am about to crash,” replied Cosmos, and his screen suddenly went blank.
Eric clutched his head in his hands and staggered around the room for a minute. “I can’t believe this,” he said, as though to himself. “Terrible, terrible!” He groaned loudly. “What a disaster!”
“I’m very sorry,” said George timidly.
Eric whipped around and stared at him. “I trusted you, George,” he said. “I would never have showed you Cosmos if I’d thought that the minute my back was turned, you would sneak through the doorway into outer space like that. And taking a younger child with you! You have no idea how dangerous it is out there.”
George wanted to shout that this was so unfair! It wasn’t his fault—it was Annie who had pushed them both through the doorway into outer space, not him. But he kept quiet. Annie, he figured, was in enough trouble already without him making it worse.
“There are things in outer space you can’t even imagine,” continued Eric. “Extraordinary, fascinating, enormous, amazing things. But dangerous. So dangerous. I was going to tell you all about them, but now . . .” He shook his head. “I’m going to take you home.” And then Eric said a terrible thing. “I need to have a word with your parents.”
As George found out afterward, Eric had more than just one word with his parents. In fact, he had quite a few, enough to make them feel very disappointed in their son. They were very hurt that despite all their good intentions about bringing up George to love nature and hate technology, he’d been caught red-handed at Eric’s house playing with a computer. A valuable and delicate one no less; one that wasn’t for kids to touch. Worse, George had invented some kind of game (Eric had become somewhat vague at this point), which he’d persuaded Annie to join in, and this game had been very dangerous and very silly. As a result, the two children were both grounded and not allowed to play together for a whole month.
“Good!” said George when his dad told him what his punishment would be. At that moment he never wanted to see Annie again. She’d got him into so much trouble already, and yet George had been the one to take all the blame.
“And,” added George’s dad, who was looking very angry and bristly today with his big, bushy beard and his itchy, hairy homemade shirt, “Eric has promised me he will keep his computer locked up so neither of you will be able to get near it.”
“No-o-o!” yelled George. “He can’t do that!”
“Oh yes he can,” said George’s dad very severely. “And he will.”
“But Cosmos will get lonely all by himself!” said George, too upset to realize what he was saying.
“George,” said his dad, looking worried, “you do understand that this is a computer and not a living being we’re talking about? Computers can’t get lonely—they don’t have feelings.”
“But this one does!” shouted George.
“Oh dear,” sighed his dad. “If this is the effect that technology has on you, you see how right we are to keep you away from it.”
George ground his teeth in frustration at the way adults twisted everything to make it sound like they were always right, and then dragged his feet up the stairs to his room. The world suddenly seemed a much more boring place.
• • •
George knew he was going to miss Cosmos, but what he didn’t expect was that he would miss Annie too. At first he was pleased to be banned from seeing her—it was good to have a punishment that stopped him from doing something he didn’t want to do anyway. But after a while he found himself looking for the flash of her golden hair. He told himself he was just bored. He was grounded, so he couldn’t go and see any of his other friends, and there wasn’t much for him to do at home that was any fun—his mom wanted him to weave a rug for his bedroom, and his dad attempted to get him interested in his homemade electricity generator. George tried to be enthusiastic, but he felt rather flat.
The only bright star in his life was that he’d seen a poster at school advertising a science-presentation competition. The first prize was a computer! George desperately wanted to win. He spent ages trying to write a really good talk about the wonders of the Universe and drawing pictures of the planets he’d seen on the comet ride. But no matter how hard he tried, he just couldn’t seem to get the words right. Everything sounded wrong. Eventually he gave up in frustration and resigned himself to a boring life forever and ever.
• • •
But then at last something interesting happened. One gray autumn afternoon at the end of October—the slowest and dullest month he had ever lived through—George was loafing around in the backyard when he noticed something unusual. Through a small round hole in the fence he saw something very blue. He went over to it and pressed his eye socket to the fence. From the other side he heard a squeak.
“George!” said a familiar voice. He was eye to eye with Annie.
“We’re not supposed to be talking to each other,” he whispered through the fence.
“I know!” she said. “But I’m so bored.”
“You’re bored! But you’ve got Cosmos!”
“No, I haven’t,” said Annie. “My dad has locked him up so I can’t play with him anymore.” She sniffed. “I’m not even allowed to go trick-or-treating for Halloween this evening.”
“I’ve got such a pretty witch’s costume too,” said Annie sadly.
“My mom’s making pumpkin pie right now,” George told her glumly. “I bet it’ll be horrible. And when she’s finished, I’ll have to go and eat a slice of it in the kitchen.”
“Pumpkin pie!” said Annie longingly. “That sounds really good. Can I have your slice if you don’t want it?”
“Yeah, but you’re not allowed in my kitchen, are you? After what happened . . . last time we played together.”
“I’m really sorry,” said Annie. “About the comet ride and the asteroids and the jets of gas and my dad getting angry with you. And everything. I didn’t mean it.”
George didn’t reply. He’d thought of so many angry things to say to Annie, but now that he was nearly face-to-face with her, he didn’t feel like saying any of them.
“Oh dear.” Annie sniffed.
From the other side of the fence, George thought he heard the noise of crying. “Annie?” he called quietly. “Annie?”
Brrreeeewwwhhh! George heard a sound like someone furiously blowing their nose.
He ran down the length of the fence. His dad had started to mend the hole where Freddy had broken through into Next Door, but he’d got distracted halfway through and had forgotten to finish the job. There was still a little gap, maybe large enough for a small person to squeeze through.
“Annie!” George poked his head through the space. He could see her on the other side now, wiping her nose on her sleeve and rubbing her eyes. Wearing normal clothes, she no longer looked like a strange fairy child or a visitor from outer space. She just looked like a lonely little girl. Suddenly George felt really sorry for her. “Come on!” he said. “Climb through! We can hide together in Freddy’s sty.”
“But I thought you hated me!” said Annie, scampering down to the hole in the fence. “Because of—”
“Oh, that!” said George carelessly, as though he’d never given it a moment’s thought. “When I was a little kid, I would have minded,” he said grandly. “But I don’t now.”
“Oh,” said Annie, whose face was blurred by tears. “So, can we be friends?”
“Only if you climb through the fence,” teased George.
“But what about your dad?” asked Annie doubtfully. “Won’t he be angry again?”
“He’s gone out,” said George. “He won’t be back for hours.” In fact, that morning George had been pretty glad to be grounded. Sometimes on Saturdays his dad took George with him when he went on global-warming protest marches. When he was younger, George had loved the marches—he’d thought that walking through the center of town carrying a sign and shouting slogans was great. The eco-warriors were fun and sometimes they would give George piggyback rides or mugs of steaming homemade soup. But now that George was older, he found going on marches a bit embarrassing. So when his dad had sternly told him that morning that, as part of his ongoing punishment, he would have to miss that day’s protest march and stay at home, George pretended to be sad so as not to hurt his dad’s feelings. But secretly he had breathed a sigh of relief.
“Come on, Annie, jump through,” he said.
The pigsty wasn’t the warmest or the most comfortable place to sit, but it was the one best hidden from angry grown-up eyes. George thought Annie might protest at the smell of pig—which wasn’t as strong as people tended to think—but she just wrinkled her nose and then snuggled down in some straw in the corner. Freddy was asleep, his warm breath coming out in little piggy snores as he dozed, his big head resting on his hooves.
“So, no more adventures?” George asked Annie, settling down next to her.
“Not likely,” said Annie, scuffing her sneakers against the pigsty wall. “Dad says I can’t go into outer space again until I’m really old, like twenty-three or something.”
“Twenty-three? But that’s ancient!”
“I know,” sighed Annie. “It’s forever away. But at least he didn’t tell my mom. She would have been really angry. I promised her I’d look after Dad and stop him from doing anything silly.”
“Where is your mom anyway?” asked George.
“My mom,” said Annie, tilting her head in a way he had come to recognize, “is dancing Swan Lake with the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow.”
In his sleep, Freddy gave a loud snort.
“No, she isn’t,” said George. “Even Freddy knows that’s not true.”
“Oh, all right,” agreed Annie. “She’s taking care of Granny, who isn’t very well.”
“Then why didn’t you say so?”
“Because it’s much more interesting to say something else. But it was true about outer space, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was,” said George. “And it was amazing. But . . .” He paused.
“What?” said Annie, who was braiding Freddy’s straw.
“Why does your dad go there? I mean, why does he have Cosmos? What’s he for?”
“Because he’s trying to find a new planet in the Universe.”
“What sort of new planet?” asked George.
“A special one. One where people could live. Y’know, in case the Earth gets too hot.”
“Wow! Has he found one?”
“Not yet,” said Annie. “But he keeps looking and looking, everywhere across all the galaxies in the Universe. He can’t stop until he finds one.”
“That’s amazing. I wish I had a computer that could take me across the whole Universe. Actually, I wish I had a computer at all.”
“You don’t have a computer?” Annie sounded surprised. “Why not?”
“I’m saving up for one. But it’s going to take years and years and years.”
“That’s not much good, is it?”
“So,” said George, “I’m entering a science competition, and the first prize is a computer, a really huge one!”
“What competition?”
“It’s a science presentation. You have to give a talk. And the person who gives the best one wins the computer. Lots of schools are taking part.”
“Oh, I know!” said Annie, sounding excited. “I’m going to it with my school—it’s next week, isn’t it? I’m staying at Granny’s all next week, but I’ll see you at the competition.”
“Are you entering?” George asked, suddenly worried that Annie, with her interesting life, scientific know-how, and vivid imagination, would pull off a presentation that made his own sound about as exciting as cold rice pudding.
“No, of course not!” said Annie. “I don’t want to win a stupid computer. If it was some ballet shoes, then that would be different . . . What are you going to talk about?”
“Well,” said George shyly, “I’ve been trying to write something about the Solar System. But I don’t think it’s very good. I don’t know very much about it.”
“Yes, you do!” said Annie. “You know lots more than anyone else at school does. You’ve actually seen parts of the Solar System, like Saturn, Jupiter, asteroids, and even the Earth from outer space!”
“But what if I’ve got it all wrong?”
“Why don’t you get Dad to check it for you?” suggested Annie.
“He’s so mad at me,” said George sadly. “He won’t want to help me.”
“I’ll ask him this evening,” said Annie firmly. “And then you can come by after school on Monday and talk to him.”
At that moment there was a gentle tap on the roof. The two children both froze as the door to the pigsty swung open.
“Hello?” said a nice voice.
“It’s my mom!” George mouthed silently to Annie.
“Oh no!” she mouthed back.
“Trick or treat?” said George’s mom.
“Treat?” said George hopefully. Annie nodded.
“Treat for two?”
“Yes, please,” replied George. “For me and, um, Freddy, that is.”
“Freddy’s a funny name for a girl,” said George’s mom.
“Oh, please, George’s mom!” Annie burst out. She couldn’t stay silent any longer. “Don’t let George get into more trouble! It isn’t his fault!”
“Don’t worry,” said George’s mom in the kind of voice that they both knew meant she was smiling. “I think it’s silly that you can’t play together. I’ve brought you both a snack—some nice broccoli muffins and a slice of pumpkin pie!”
With a squeak of delight, Annie fell on the plateful of lumpy, funny-shaped muffins. “Thank you!” she mumbled through a mouthful of muffin. “These are delicious!”
