Chapter Nine
The Meteorite
Mom looked at sharianna’s alarm clock that was still on the console in front of her.
“Well, back home it is 9:00. I think I’ll make some break-fast; I’ve got bread, eggs, and milk. Any special requests?” asked Mom.
“We could make French toast,” Sharianna concluded.
“Okay, but we don’t have any syrup. Will jelly do?”
“Sure will,” responded Dad.
“I’ll have the eggs with toast,” sighed Sharianna.
“Me too,” echoed Joseph.
“I think we’ll take a break. I’m going to try to land on that hill over there,” announced Dad.
When the robot touched down a huge cloud of dust was kicked up.
“Houston, the eagle has landed,” reported Dad, in a voice that really did sound a lot like Neil Armstrong’s declaration when Apollo 11 first landed on the moon. “With this artificial gravity and counter G-force, it is difficult to tell how hard we land,” rationalized Dad for his amateur landing.
As they went through the small corridor, Mom paused, “You know what is weird?”
“What?”
“To feel like we are walking on a flat level surface, while knowing that we are actually walking straight down, toward the surface of the moon. How do you think it works?”
Joseph was excited to explain his theory as they entered the kitchen and Mom began making breakfast.
“The ship has the ability to create artificial gravity…” began Joseph.
“Yeah, we already know that,” Sharianna interrupted. Turning to Mom, “How can you cook eggs if there is no stove?”
Sophia smiled; the investigation of the kitchen had been her personal mission. She touched a button and what looked like a cutting board slid out from under the counter. She put her hand on the stone-like material. “See, it’s cold. Watch,” she instructed, like a professional demonstrator, as she placed the clear container that looked a little like a frying pan on the surface. “See, it is still cold.” Joseph and Sharianna passed their hands over the pan. Mom waved one hand over the pan and cracked an egg with the other. “Abracadabra.” Instantly, as the egg touched the pan, it began to sizzle and cook.
Both Joseph and Sharianna were fascinated.
“I see your investigation of the kitchen was fruitful,” ob-served Dad.
“How does it work?” asked Joseph.
“I don’t know, but it does,” replied Mom.
“I want mine scrambled,” asserted Sharianna.
“Me too,” concurred Joseph.
Mom quickly cracked in several more and stirred them, adding a dash of pepper and a little milk from one of the refrigerated drawers.
“There, the best scrambled eggs I have ever made,” she bragged, as she slid them onto a plate. “And completely non-stick too!” The pan was clean as new.
“How did you learn that?” marveled Dad.
Mom held up a finger with an obvious red mark. “Acci-dentally.”
After breakfast, Thomas was drawn to the big soft comforta-ble chairs. “About your theory…” he encouraged, as he sat down, looking at Joseph.
“Well, if real gravity is pulling from any direction that is not appropriate for the orientation of the ship then the ship automatically applies an equal gravitational pull in the exact opposite direction, while maintaining the correct amount of gravitational pull in the right direction. The same goes for countering G-force.”
“Excellent reasoning and deductions. I think gravity is reduced when you sit in this chair, that’s why it is so comforta-ble,” sighed Dad, as he closed his eyes.
Percy was already occupying one of the other chairs, so Mom slipped into the third one. “I think you’re right,” she agreed, as she contentedly closed her eyes.
“Hey, how can you sleep at a time like this?” scolded Joseph.
“Yeah, we’re on a mission to find evidence of moon land-ings!” asserted Sharianna.
Percy opened a lazy eye; he was enjoying the anti-gravity chair.
“Okay, let’s try again,” conceded Dad, as he reluctantly vacated the chair of comfort.
“Let’s fly back out to space and pick the next largest plain,” suggested Joseph.
“If you lived on the moon you could always see the earth, couldn’t you?” observed Sharianna, as she gazed at the beauty of their home planet.
“I guess you’re right; the moon always faces the earth,” answered Dad, as the robot rose from the surface of the moon.
Dad slowly turned the robot back toward the moon and they looked at it in silence for a few minutes.
“Computer... scan… for any…metal… structures,” directed Joseph, imitating the commanding voice of captain Kirk.
“No, you’ve got it all wrong. You have to talk to the ship,” asserted Sharianna in mock seriousness, as she joined in the game. Looking at the moon on the view screen and mustering her most official sounding voice she commanded: “ROBO-SHIP, scan for… any metal…structures…on the sur-face…of…the moon.”
Immediately, superimposed over the moon, there appeared on the view screen over twenty small red circles.
Mom gasped incredulously, “It’s voice controlled!”
Thomas was astonished and momentarily speechless. It was inconceivable to him that the builders of the robot could possibly have known English.
Regaining control of his speech, he gasped, “It understands English? Incredible!” Dad waived his hand over the controls labeled with the strange writing and symbols. “Obviously, it’s not their first language.”
“Maybe they were studying us…” theorized Sharianna contemplatively.
“Oooo,” mocked Joseph mysteriously. Then, in a much more serious voice, he pointed to the view screen, “Let’s go down and see what it found.”
“Let’s go, maybe we can figure this out later,” agreed Dad.
“Do you think we will be able to see Neil Armstrong’s or Buzz Aldren’s foot prints where they first walked on the moon?” wondered Mom.
“Theoretically, they should still be there, unless the dust was disturbed by something like a meteorite hitting close by,” replied Dad.
“Why are so many metal structures indicated?” asked Sharianna.
“Both the United States and Russia sent quite a few missions to the moon,” explained Dad.
“Except the Russian missions were all unmanned, right?”
“Yes, I don’t think they ever landed a man on the moon,” answered Dad.
“Where should we start?” asked Mom.
“Joseph? Sharianna? What do you kids think?” queried Dad.
“Look, one of them is in the plain that we just searched,” observed Sharianna.
“I think we should start with that one,” Joseph proposed.
They were able to find it quite easily by aligning the small red dot that was always in the center of the screen with the small red circle, and the robot flew directly to it.
As they approached the site, they could see that it was some type of rover.
“Hey, what kind of writing is that?” asked Joseph, when they got close enough to see the details.
“It’s not English, so it must be Russian,” deduced Sharianna. “Did anyone else send a mission to the moon?”
“It is Russian,” confirmed Mom. “I guess they didn’t fake their moon landings.”
The next site they investigated turned out to be a crater with some metal pieces lying around.
“I think that they crashed a few rockets into the moon,” explained Dad.
“Why?” asked Joseph.
“Probably to see if it could be done. You wouldn’t want to attempt a manned mission to the moon if you couldn’t even hit it with a rocket, would you?” reasoned Mom.
“Let’s move on and find the others,” suggested Dad.
The next site they chose was in the bottom of a gigantic, ancient crater, at least ten times the size of Me
teor Crater in Arizona. As they hovered over the site they saw a long sloping trench cut across the bottom. Directly in line with the trench, a chunk of the crater’s rim was knocked out.
“Another crash site?” assumed Sharianna.
Joseph looked at Dad. “It looks like the crater where we found the robot.”
“Sure does, except it doesn’t look as big,” replied Dad.
“Drop down a little closer to the deep end of the trench,” suggested Joseph.
“I don’t see any debris,” observed Mom, “could be a meteor crater.”
“But the robot indicated it as a metal structure,” argued Joseph, his interest mounting. “Let’s dig it up!”
“What if it is another robot?” posed Sharianna energetically.
“Joseph used the hands so well capturing the asteroid, I think he should dig it up,” reasoned Mom, as she gave her seat to Joseph.
Joseph set the asteroid that was still in the robot’s hand on a large rock at the edge of the pit and using the hands of the robot like shovels he began to remove the moon rocks and dirt in the lower end of the pit.
“Look, there!” exclaimed Sharianna.
“I see it,” replied Joseph, as he carefully scraped around the edges of a rough looking sphere about four feet in diameter.
“Maybe it’s an iron meteorite,” theorized Mom.
The robot was now on its knees as Joseph reached into the hole with both hands and carefully removed the object and held it up for a closer look. It was round and bumpy, with a lot of moon dust sticking to it.
“It’s about the same color as the meteorites at the museum,” concluded Sharianna.
“Yeah, but it is a whole lot bigger!” exclaimed Joseph.
“Let’s take it home!” called out Sharianna and Joseph in unison.
“Okay, but how? It would be so easy to drop, especially when entering earth’s atmosphere,” concluded Dad.
“I have an idea.” Joseph explained his proposal: “I’ve rethought my concern about opening the doors to the cargo area. Why would the builders of the robot make it so that you couldn’t open the cargo doors in space? How likely would it be that other planets would have exactly the right atmosphere? Otherwise, you couldn’t bring anything very big home.” Joseph felt confident that his analysis was correct. Looking at Mom, he said: “Am I right, or what?”
“It makes sense. And the door from the control room to the cargo area really does look perfectly sealed,” she responded.
“It seals perfectly, like all the other doors,” added Joseph excitedly.
Sharianna added her thoughts: “That’s why the kitchen and living room retract and why they have so many compartments and drawers in there, so that nothing goes flying out when you open the doors. That’s why they put doors separating the cargo area from the rest of the ship! And, the button to open the cargo bay is right here, not in the cargo bay.” Sharianna was quite proud of her deductive abilities.
“Okay, I believe,” Dad capitulated.
Joseph moved his beanbag from the cargo bay to the lower observation area of the control room; it took up practically all the floor space of that level.
After retracting the kitchen and the living room and securing everything else in the drawers, they opened the cargo bay doors and Joseph carefully placed the object inside.
“Don’t forget my asteroid.” After a pause, Sharianna de-clared, “I want to try putting it in.”
Dad gave up his seat and Joseph gave Sharianna some pointers as she slowly picked up her asteroid and placed it in the cargo bay. Then she picked up a moon rock about the same size and put it next to her asteroid.
“You know that we won’t be able to tell anyone where we got these rocks. Don’t you?” emphasized Mom.
“Yes,” they agreed reluctantly.
“Hey, let’s take a rover home!” exclaimed Joseph.
“That would be a little harder to explain,” cautioned Mom. “I don’t think we’d better.”
“Can I fly the robot now?” asked Sharianna, who was already at the controls.
“I don’t see why not,” replied Mom.
As they continued their search for Apollo 11, they found several more crash sites and a Russian probe.
“Hey, look at that mountain – it looks like an extinct volcano – it even has a hole in the top,” observed Joseph. “Did the moon ever have any volcanic activity?”
“Yes, but not any active ones anymore,” replied Dad.
“It resembles the part of the copper mine that you can see from our house,” observed Sharianna.
“Yes, it does, a little,” concurred Mom, as they flew past the strange mountain. “But I can’t imagine there are any mines on the moon.”
“What is that shadow beyond the mountain?” asked Sharian-na.
“I don’t know,” answered Dad, in a bewildered tone.