Racing the Moon Read online

  “Boys!” their mother said firmly. “Let’s not argue about Alexis’s new friend. I think it’s nice that she’s met someone in the development, and I’m sure Mrs. Ebbs is glad to have met someone from the established part of the neighborhood—”

  “Ebbs is just Ebbs,” Alex interrupted. “Or Captain Ebbs. There’s no Mister around.”

  John rolled his eyes.

  “That’s not all,” Alex said excitedly. “She told me how to train for taking off in spaceflight.”

  She leaned back in her chair and pantomimed. “See, you put a brick on your belly like this and push down real hard and grunt—unnnnhhhh!” she bellowed as loud as she could. Jeep lurched up with a woof.

  “Alexis!” her mother scolded as Chuck laughed and her dad struggled to look serious.

  “She got it from this German rocket scientist she helped capture—that and the experiment he did to see if our brains would turn to puddings on liftoff. He got some mice and tied them up in little hammocks and turned his bicycle upside down and fitted the hammocks around the rear wheel. He started cranking the pedals as hard as he could to get the wheel spinning fast enough to stress the mice like a pilot taking off, but he hadn’t balanced them right, and one of the mice shot free and splattered against the wall and made a big mess.”

  “Alexis!” her mother exclaimed. “That’s enough.”

  “Oh, it was OK, Mother. I mean, not for the mouse, but for the experiment. Ebbs said he got a fresh mouse, balanced the wheel more carefully, and started cranking again. When he stopped and checked, the mice were all alive, so Ebbs says that proves we can stay alive getting free of gravity. The guy she helped capture is named von Braun. She says he’s gonna be the Christopher Columbus of space.”

  “A Nazi!” John snorted.

  “Sounds like you’ve met someone really interesting,” her dad said as John glowered.

  “Yeah,” said Alex. “She says she had to ride roller coasters a lot to learn what would keep the space pilots from puking in flight.”

  “Alexis!”

  “It’s tomato juice!” Alex giggled, getting up from the table to start clearing. “Tomato juice keeps you from puking.”

  3

  SPACEMAN SMITH

  It was Chuck’s turn to wash. “A rinse will do for this one,” he said, flipping a plate to John like it was one of their mother’s phonograph records.

  “Hey!” John yelped, almost losing it.

  “Drop it, it’s on you!” Chuck sang.

  The next one he spun to his sister, but it was an easier pitch.

  With John the washing was slow and exact; with Chuck it was a game.

  When they finished Alex filled her baskets and headed back up the hill. Ebbs was out in her yard.

  “Hi, Ebbs!” Alex called from a distance so she wouldn’t scare her again. “I’ve got more plants.”

  “Great.”

  As they dug and planted Ebbs kept looking up to check the clouds.

  “What are you looking for?” Alex asked.

  “It’s a habit from sailing,” Ebbs explained. “Sailors are always checking the wind and clouds to get an idea what weather’s coming. We’re gonna get rain—that’s what those wispy streaks overhead are telling us. I’ll show you in my cloud book.”

  As they finished work and were rinsing their hands in the freezing hose water, Alex asked, “Now can I go in your house and look at those rocket pictures again?”

  “Sure.”

  As Alex stood in the doorway, Ebbs went over to the photograph of the biggest rocket. “Here in this one I’m with that rocket engineer I told you about, Doctor Wernher von Braun. He says the first man to walk on the Moon is already alive: himself.”

  Alex studied the picture. “Chuck says we’re going to walk on Mars. He says if you can see it, you can get to it. You think this Von guy’s gonna go?”

  “Maybe. What do they teach you about space in school?”

  “Not much, but at home Chuck and I read about it in the science magazines Dad gets.”

  “Your dad’s an engineer?” Ebbs asked.

  “No. He’s a writer. He works in a school for teaching people how to fix radios. They do it by mail—no classrooms or anything. He writes the ads and helps Rosy write the manuals and answer the students’ letters. In trade for our mowing the lawn he’s let us use the biggest tree in the yard for our Moon Station,” she added slyly.

  “Your what?” Ebbs exclaimed.

  “Well, see,” Alex said, “in one of the magazines there was this article about a space-exploring machine that went up on a rocket and then stayed out there. Dad helped us make one like what was in the picture with climbing boards going up the tree trunk like the ladder on the rocket in the Woman in the Moon movie, only I don’t use it ’cause I can shinny up and down the escape rope faster than Chuck can climb. We crank Jeep up in a sling hoist, but he doesn’t like being up there much.”

  “What do you do for food?” Ebbs asked. “That’s my department.”

  “Apples and crackers. For cooking we rigged my magnifying glass so we can boil water, because you can’t make a fire on the moon, you know—there’s no oxygen.”

  Ebbs raised her eyebrows. “Crackers in zero gravity? Not allowed. You can’t have loose stuff like cracker crumbs floating around the cabin. Particles would gum up the controls, get up your nose.”

  “Oh.”

  Ebbs went to get Alex a bomber bar. “Give it another try. It’s gooey, so it doesn’t crumble like crackers, and the taste does take some getting used to, but it’ll give you a long burn of energy.

  “So,” Ebbs continued, “you and your brother are space explorers, right? Do you know about Captain John Smith?”

  “The Jamestown and Pocahontas guy?” Alex asked as she pretended to nibble the bar while slipping chunks to Jeep.

  “Yeah. I call him Uncle John because he’s a relation way back. That’s his portrait over there in the corner. He was a space explorer too, sailing out to the unknown in something like your Moon Station.”

  Alex walked over to look. Smith was a rough-looking man with a red beard. A long-haired boy about Alex’s age stood beside him.

  “Who’s the kid?” she asked.

  “His servant, T—that’s all I can make out of his name. In the journal the rest is too smudged to make out. How old are you?”

  “Eleven, almost twelve.”

  “Right,” Ebbs mused. “Same age as Smith’s T. At one point Smith traded him for one of Chief Powhatan’s sons. After that there’s nothing more about him in the journal.”

  “So he stayed?”

  “More likely he died. Bad water. Anyway, I want to come see your Moon Station.”

  “Sure, but it’s not all that much,” said Alex. “John calls it Moonshine.”

  “Why? What’s he interested in?”

  “Government. Running stuff. He’s the star. He wears a coat and tie to school every day because he’s president of his class. He’s fifteen. He gets prizes in Latin, so Mother pays him to tutor me.”

  “Huh,” Ebbs muttered. “Well, I’d like to see what he calls Moonshine.”

  Alex headed home down the hill. Spaceman Smith. Chuck will go for that. Smith and T are like Chuck and me. She spat as she walked to get rid of the bomber bar’s coffee taste.

  4

  THE RADIO TOWER

  Tonight was John’s turn to wash. Cleanup took a long time as Chuck juggled the pans and glasses to make John hurry up. “Come on, Alley,” Chuck said when they finished putting away. “I’ll take you for a ride.”

  He drove her and the dog over to the radio tower. “I’ve got to scale it to feel where the signal’s coming from,” he explained as he parked the jeep.

  “Me too,” Alex said. She was a good climber, fast but not as brave as Chuck—he’d tackle anything. People said he was a daredevil, crazy, no limit to what he’d try. Alex was always trying to keep up.

  “No, Alley,” Chuck said, handing her a camp stool and a blanket.
“I need you to keep watch in case someone comes.”

  “Like who? What am I supposed to say?” Aside from the tower’s red lights glowing like slow heartbeats, everything else was dark and empty.

  “I’m not expecting anybody,” Chuck replied as he pulled on a pair of work gloves, “but if someone comes, tell ’em I’m a radio inspector checking on a weak signal. Here are the keys and my wallet. Scrape me up if I fall.”

  He scaled the fence like it was nothing. The cage around the ladder was locked, so he began pitching himself up the tower’s struts like a squirrel jumping from branch to branch.

  Chuck told her he was after something to do with radar, a special new kind of radio that would let him see things coming, like enemy aircraft, killer asteroids, infiltrators, spies.

  Alex climbed trees to spy but mostly it was to imagine flying like the woman they’d read about in school, Amelia Earhart, who flew alone across the Atlantic. Alex liked it best when there was a wind; she’d hold tight to the pretend yoke in her flying tree, swaying high up like she was bucking a headwind. When there was no wind she’d sit so still in her tree perch that birds would come—jenny wrens singing busily in the understory, white-throated sparrows, cardinals, flickers, crows. Her father had taught her how to make the birds’ distress call—pssht pssht pssht—to get them to come close. “Birds are as nosy as people,” her father said. “They’ll always rush to the sound of trouble.”

  It was chilly. She wrapped herself tight in the blanket and got Jeep to snuggle up. She couldn’t make out her brother anymore.

  Twenty minutes later Chuck was swinging back down, black against the velvet sky, when Jeep began barking. A light was weaving jerkily up the alley. A policeman appeared. He fixed Jeep and Alex in the beam, then tried to catch Chuck, but wherever he aimed, Chuck had just left.

  Jeep rumbled a deep growl.

  “He’s a radio engineer doing an inspection,” Alex called, getting up.

  “You keep hold of that dog and stay put!” the policeman ordered.

  Flashing his light around, the officer yelled up at Chuck, “What the heck do you think you’re doing?”

  Chuck didn’t reply until he’d dropped lightly to the ground and scrambled back over the fence. “Couldn’t get to it. Too hot,” he panted.

  The policeman held his light on Chuck’s face. Chuck didn’t flinch or turn away. The light made his black eyes gleam.

  “Get to what?” the cop demanded.

  “Where the transmitter’s beaming the signal,” Chuck explained, wiping sweat from his face. “It’s weaker than it should be, so I was checking to see if something’s blocking it—a fried squirrel, maybe—but it’s too hot to get close enough to see.”

  “How old are you?” the policeman asked, taking out his notebook.

  “Seventeen.”

  “You could kill yourself with a stunt like that!”

  “So what?” Chuck said, not in a rude way but so honestly the officer blinked.

  “Well, it made me sick seeing you up there,” the man sputtered, “and it’s trespassing, and what do you mean dragging this girl around?”

  “I’m teaching her about radio,” Chuck replied. “I’m a student of it. She is too. As for going up there to check, I’m not scared of heights. When I was little they held me by my heels upside down from the Empire State Building in New York, so I’m immune.”

  The officer’s mouth formed an O. “Your parents did what?”

  “They’re not my real parents,” Chuck said. “I’m an orphan.”

  Alex pinched her lips together. Chuck’s face turned deep rose under his dark skin as he talked excitedly. Alex knew his stories. She figured he was trying on different lives to see what fit.

  “And this one,” the officer said, pointing at Alex. “She’s an orphan too?”

  “No. Her mother’s sick. I’m taking care of her.”

  “I’m taking you home to your dad,” the officer said.

  “Stuart’s not my dad.”

  “Who is Stuart?”

  Chuck pointed to Alex. “Her father.”

  The police car followed them home, the headlights on high bathing them in cold light.

  Alex’s dad, a strong, ruddy-cheeked man, was waiting at the door. Alex looked like him.

  “You Stuart?” the policeman asked.

  The man nodded.

  “I caught him climbing the radio tower!” the policeman said loudly, indicating Chuck. Stuart put his finger to his lips and pointed upstairs. The policeman continued in a whisper.

  “He said he was checking where the broadcast came from, but he’s just a boy so he can’t be an engineer or anything, and what’s he doing dragging this girl around?”

  Stuart frowned and nodded slowly.

  “He says he’s an orphan,” the officer went on. “He says you used to hang him by his heels from high buildings so heights don’t bother him.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Stuart said finally in a quiet voice.

  “What about the orphan and the hanging stuff?”

  “He’s our son, and I never hung him from anything,” Stuart said. “So now, officer, it’s late, and you’ve got other things to do. I appreciate your help. I’ll take it from here.”

  With that, he eased the man out.

  Chuck started talking fast as the door shut. “I wanted to see if I could feel the broadcast. Rosy says it’s like a pulse, but all I felt was heat—no pulse at all.…”

  His dad shut him up with a wave of his hand. “Tomorrow’s a school day,” he said angrily. “Alex should be in bed. Worse, you gave Mother a scare. She went up to tuck Alex in. No note or anything! I went out to the Moon Station to look for her. When I told Mother I couldn’t find her, she had an attack. Had to take a pill.”

  “Oh jeez,” Chuck said with a sigh. “I’m sorry.”

  Alex wasn’t surprised that her dad didn’t say much to the officer or to Chuck. He wasn’t a talker, but Alex could tell he was upset about Chuck’s getting caught. It wasn’t the first time, but her dad didn’t have any control over Chuck. Nobody did.

  5

  LOOKING FOR ALIENS

  Early morning a week later, Chuck came into Alex’s room bent under the heavy Signal Corps field radio strapped to his back. He was carrying a telescope.

  “Come on,” he said. “It’s almost time. At the observatory the other day the navy guy in charge told me they launch the weather balloons at dawn. Looks like a storm’s coming, so maybe we’ll catch its signal, maybe even see it.”

  He led them downstairs past their parents’ room and their mother’s workroom, Jeep following wagging hopefully.

  “Take this and look over there,” Chuck ordered, handing Alex the telescope when they got out in the yard. “Toward DC. What you’re looking for is a black rubber balloon with a basket hanging at the bottom. That’s where the weather sensors and transmitter are.”

  Chuck kept talking as he slipped the radio off his back and knelt down to work it. “The navy guy let me look at the transmitter even though it’s secret because I told him I was studying radio. It’s really small—half the size of a toaster. I even got the frequency it broadcasts at.”

  Alex aimed where Chuck had pointed. There was a steady breeze. The leaves sounded like waves. All she could see were swells of low gray clouds. “Cumulonimbus,” she muttered. She’d been looking in Ebbs’s cloud book. “Storm clouds.”

  Jeep looked up briefly, then yawned a long, wide-open moan of boredom.

  Chuck had on the headphones and was adjusting the radio’s controls. He’d just said, “No signal yet,” when there was a rumble of thunder.

  The dog started up whining and rattling his tags. He hated thunderstorms. Alex did too. She felt the down on her arms rise—a warning of electricity in the air, her father said. Chuck took off the headphones and began snapping up the radio’s cover. “Missed it. Too much static.”

  “What if the balloon gets caught in the storm?” Alex asked. “Will the light
ning blow it up?”

  Chuck shook his head. “No. It’s not grounded, so the charge will just pass through it like it does with an airplane,” he said as he hoisted the radio onto his back, “but watch out if you’re on the pot in a thunderstorm. I heard about a guy who got zapped; bolt shot right up through the toilet—water’s a ground, you know—scorched his butt.”

  “You gotta be kidding,” Alex said, but there was no reading Chuck’s face.

  “See you after school,” he said, turning away. “I’m going over to the airport to watch the flying lessons, maybe get the instructor to give me a ride once the storm passes.

  “Oh, wait,” he called as he struggled to shift the radio so he could fish some paper and a small screwdriver from his pocket. “I got this out of the latest Popular Science. The microphone they’re using at school for announcements—it still looks like this one?”

  Alex studied the picture. “I guess.”

  “Good. This is all you’ll need. After school, go to the assembly room and unscrew the microphone’s back. You’ll see two wires, a red and a black. Switch ’em like it shows in the picture, then screw the back on again.”

  “What’ll happen?” Alex demanded.

  “You’ll see tomorrow morning. Just make sure you bring back my screwdriver.”

  * * *

  As she walked to school Alex weighed Chuck’s dare. There’d been some she’d balked at, especially the stealing ones, but she was curious about the microphone. Nobody could do tricks with radios like Chuck.

  She sweated as she hung around after school until the hall was clear. She sneaked into the assembly room. Her hands trembled as she switched the wires.

  On her way home Jeep met her at the creek bridge as he always did, smiling his toothy, lips-pulled-back grin, snuffling, whimpering, snorting, his body wriggling with delight, his whole being asking Where have you been?

  She potted up some more plants. When she figured Ebbs would be home from work she and Jeep went back up the hill. The plants were just an excuse. She wanted to get some arguments to use against John.