The Jamie Drake Equation Read online

  For Chrissie, Alex and Josie

  1

  You’re supposed to start a story at the beginning, right? The thing is, knowing exactly when that is can be kind of difficult. I mean, I could start this story with how the solar system was formed about four and a half billion years ago. That was when the centre of a huge cloud of gas and dust that was spinning in space got super-hot and turned into a star, but this story really got started way before that.

  It’s all about putting things in the right order. That’s how the solar system got going, after all. Once the Sun was formed all the rest of the dust and stuff got stuck together to make all the planets and moons, and since then they’ve just kept spinning round the Sun, year after year.

  Some are a bit too close, like Venus, where it’s a scorching four hundred degrees in the shade, while others are too far out and freezing cold, like Saturn and Neptune. But out of all those planets, all those worlds, there’s only one where we know that life exists. And that’s our world – the planet Earth.

  That’s because it’s right in the middle of the Goldilocks zone. Now, this isn’t like the Phantom Zone in Superman – some kind of inter-dimensional prison where the three bears have locked up Goldilocks for crimes against porridge. The Goldilocks zone is the name for the region of space around a star where life has a chance of existing. Somewhere not too hot and not too cold, but just right. And in our solar system, Earth has got this spot all to itself.

  It’s a bit like my family, really. There’s Mum, Dad, Charlie and me, Jamie Drake. Dad’s the star in our family’s solar system because he’s an astronaut. Everyone at school knows his name and he’s been on TV loads of times talking about his latest space mission. He’s kind of like Captain Kirk crossed with Han Solo, but cooler because he’s a real person.

  To be fair, I reckon Mum’s the star too because she keeps everything running smoothly when Dad’s not around, so that just leaves Charlie and me in the Goldilocks zone.

  It used to be that I had this spot all to myself, but then four years ago Mum and Dad told me that I was going to have a baby sister. At first I wasn’t too sure, but then Mum explained that tons of people think that the perfect family has four people in it, so by adding a little sister our family was going to be just the right size, and when baby Charlotte was born I kind of had to agree.

  Our family’s solar system is now perfectly balanced. Mum + Dad = Me + Charlie.

  Now, if you move any part of the real solar system, then the whole thing goes to pieces with planets crashing into each other or flying off into the depths of space. Everything has to be in just the right place for the Earth to keep spinning safely around the Sun. So with Dad now four hundred kilometres above our heads on the International Space Station, I’m keeping a close eye on things at home in case any bits of the Drake family solar system start to wobble.

  So far, everything’s OK. In fact, Mum and Dad were arguing a lot before he blasted off into orbit and I think having this break has just made them realise how much they love each other after all. And in ten days’ time, Dad will land safely back on Earth and our family can get back to normal. It’s just a shame he’s going to miss my birthday on Friday.

  That’s the day of his spacewalk. The day the human race launches its first mission to the stars in search of alien life. I just hope he hasn’t forgotten to get me a present.

  2

  This week is Space Week in school. Every class is learning all about my dad’s mission. When I took the register back to the school office yesterday I spotted Class Three making models of the International Space Station out of tinfoil and toilet rolls, and then on the way back to my own class I bumped into this little kid who was dressed up like a baby alien. I nearly jumped out of my skin in surprise. He was wearing a homemade spacesuit, his face painted bright green with sparkly deely-boppers sticking out of his frizz of black hair.

  “I know who you are,” he said, looking up at me open-mouthed, his eyes wide with wonder. “Your dad’s a spaceman.”

  “That’s right,” I said, feeling pretty cool that my fame had spread all the way to Year One. “I’m Jamie Drake.”

  This kid starts jigging up and down with excitement, his deely-boppers bouncing around wildly. Then he asks me the question I get asked at least three times a day.

  “How does your dad do a wee in space?”

  Up on the International Space Station everything is weightless, so my dad just floats around and can even fly like a superhero. But all anyone ever wants to know is how Dad goes to the loo.

  I’m in Year Six. This means that we get to do all the serious educational stuff about my dad’s mission. This week we’re learning about alien worlds, interstellar travel and nanotechnology. Right now our teacher, Mrs Solomon, is writing our Space Week homework on the whiteboard.

  INVENT AN ALIEN

  “Is there anybody out there?” Mrs Solomon asks, turning back to face us with a grin. She points up at the sky outside our classroom window. “Do aliens exist or are we all alone in the universe?”

  Sitting next to me, Minty pokes her elbow into my ribs.

  “Course they do,” she whispers. “I’ve seen them on YouTube.”

  Minty’s real name is Araminta and she used to go to a posh private school, but then her dad got sent to prison for some big bank robbery and she ended up here at Austen Park Primary. Sometimes I think the police got the wrong member of the family and they should’ve locked Minty up instead, especially when she keeps on poking me in the ribs. I wish I didn’t have to sit next to her, but Mrs Solomon seems to think we should become friends just because we’re both the new kids at school. I don’t think so.

  Minty watches all these crazy YouTube videos made by weirdos who wear tinfoil on their heads. One showed a rubber dummy that was supposed to be an alien being sliced to pieces by these doctors dressed in spacesuits. It was so obviously a fake, but Minty swore blind that it was a real-life alien autopsy.

  “This Friday,” Mrs Solomon continues, glancing down as she taps at the laptop on her desk, “Jamie’s dad – Commander Dan Drake – is launching a mission to the stars to search for alien life. Let’s take a look at this video to find out more about his mission.”

  Next to the whiteboard, the flat-screen display flickers into life. There I see a picture of my dad dressed in his astronaut gear, flanked by the rest of the ISS crew. The butterflies in my stomach start to flutter as this frozen picture slowly dissolves to reveal an image of a strange-looking satellite shaped like a silver ball flying high above the Earth. Then an incredibly deep voice like the one that you hear on trailers for the latest blockbuster movies starts to rumble from the speakers.

  “From the launch of the first satellite in 1957, the human race has endeavoured to explore every corner of the solar system in which we live. From planetary landings to solar surveys, the knowledge we have gained has helped us to understand our unique place in the universe. Now it is time for the human race to take our next step and begin to explore our galaxy.”

  As the voice speaks, spectacular photographs fill the screen. I see the dusty red mountains of Mars stretching out under a butterscotch sky, Jupiter’s swirling storms and the ice rings of Saturn. Images of Mercury, Venus, Uranus and Neptune, each world so beautiful and strange. Then these pictures start to speed up, the planets flashing by in a blur of colours – yellow, red, brown, blue and green – before dissolving to reveal a photograph of the Sun. This looks like a blazing ball of fire, glowing red flares arcing from its surface into space.

  “Our Sun is only one star out of the two hundred billion stars that make up our galaxy, the Milky Way,” the voice announces. “Until now, the great distances between these stars has kept the possib
ility of interstellar travel out of humanity’s grasp, but with advances in microelectronics, nanotechnology and laser engineering, at last the human race can reach for the stars.”

  The screen fades to black and, for a second, I think the film is finished, but then the camera pans to reveal another satellite in orbit high above the Earth. This one looks like a flower, an array of futuristic solar panels curving to create a spiral of petals in space. At the base of this strange satellite, there’s a sleek silver module with an airlock at the far end – the HabZone module of the Lux Aeterna launch platform.

  “Led by Commander Dan Drake,” the voice continues, “the crew of the International Space Station are now making their preparations for the final phase of the Lux Aeterna mission. Construction of the orbital launch platform is now complete and on Friday the third of November at 08:00 hours GMT, Commander Drake will use the Advanced Manned Manoeuvring Unit to travel from the ISS to the higher orbit of the Lux Aeterna launch platform to perform final checks on the Light Swarm probes. Each of these nano-spacecraft is the size of a postage stamp and weighs less than a sheet of paper. When Commander Drake fires the Lux Aeterna’s one-hundred-gigawatt laser array, the sails on board the Light Swarm probes will catch this laser beam and then accelerate to more than seventy-five per cent of the speed of light.”

  Dad told me that “Lux Aeterna” is a Latin phrase that means “eternal light”, which is a pretty cool name for a giant space laser.

  On the screen a swarm of silver kites floats free from the heart of the flower. Inside the satellite’s spiral of solar panels, I see an inner ring of glowing red lights – the launch platform’s laser array. As I watch, these red lights suddenly shoot out to form a single beam, this red laser light striking the space kites and accelerating them to the stars.

  “Launched on their interstellar journey, the Light Swarm probes will travel to a star called Tau Ceti. Located one hundred and eight trillion kilometres from Earth, Tau Ceti is orbited by a system of five planets with at least one of these worlds located within the star’s ‘Goldilocks zone’, where liquid water – and life – could exist.”

  Strange new planets now fill the screen, worlds of ice and oceans, burning blue in the depths of space.

  “Travelling at 299,792 kilometres per second, it takes twelve years for the light from Tau Ceti to reach us here on Earth. At this great distance it would take a conventional spacecraft one hundred thousand years to reach this star system, but travelling at near-light speeds, the Light Swarm probes will complete their journey to Tau Ceti in approximately fifteen years. Once there, the robotic probes will use on-board cameras, sensors and communications systems to search for alien life, using the same laserpulse technology to beam their findings back to Earth, to reach us here in a further fifteen years. Thanks to the efforts of Commander Dan Drake and the ISS crew, within your lifetime the human race might finally discover the answer to the eternal question, ‘Are we alone in the universe?’”

  As the screen fades to black again, this time for good, everyone starts clapping and cheering. I can’t stop myself from blushing, knowing that they’re cheering for my dad. I feel so proud of him, but strangely I can’t help feeling a tiny bit jealous too. Everything revolves around the fact that Dad’s an astronaut – where we live, where we go on holiday, and now even my lessons in school. Sometimes I wish I didn’t have to share him with the world.

  “Are we alone in the universe?” Beaming excitedly, Mrs Solomon repeats the question. “That’s what I want you to think about, Class Six.”

  Turning back to the whiteboard, our teacher takes aim with her laser pointer to underline our homework task.

  INVENT AN ALIEN

  “Imagine the planets the Light Swarm probes might discover orbiting Tau Ceti. What strange alien creatures could they find there? For your homework, I want you to invent your own alien species. Think about the kind of world that it’s from. Does this have jungles or deserts, or might it be some kind of water world? How will this affect the type of alien you invent? Will it need tentacles instead of arms and legs like you and me? Maybe it could fly like a bird through clouds of ice and dust? Use your imagination to answer the following questions: where will this alien live, what might it eat and how could it communicate?”

  Everyone starts talking at once – the whole class bubbling with excitement about the idea of dreaming up their own alien lifeform. Minty turns to me with a quizzical look on her face.

  “So what will your dad do if he meets an alien up there?” she asks. “Has he got some kind of raygun to blast it to bits before it starts eating him? Aliens just love the taste of human flesh.”

  Feeling kind of grossed out, I quickly shake my head.

  “My dad’s not going to Tau Ceti,” I tell her, speaking slowly to make sure Minty understands, seeing as she seems to have completely missed the point of the video. “He’s just going to do a spacewalk to launch the Light Swarm probes. They’re the ones that are heading to the stars in search of alien life.”

  Minty pulls a face like I’m the stupid one.

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean that some Martian won’t fly past when your dad’s on his spacewalk and make a meat feast pizza out of him.”

  As you can see, Minty is seriously annoying.

  “My dad’s on the International Space Station,” I say. “Not the menu of some intergalactic Pizza Hut.”

  I’m just about to add that Martians don’t actually exist when our teacher claps her hands together.

  “I’m so pleased to hear you all so excited about your homework,” Mrs Solomon says, raising her voice so she can be heard over the hubbub. “And I look forward to seeing your presentations about the weird and wonderful aliens you’ve invented on Thursday. If you like, you can even dress up as your alien creation! But right now we need to practise another essential skill that all astronauts need.”

  She turns back to the whiteboard, rubbing out the homework task and writing the word “EQUATIONS” there instead.

  “It’s time to revise for your maths test tomorrow.”

  Everyone groans, including me. It’s true – you do need to be a total maths genius to make it as an astronaut. That’s why I always get my dad to help me with my maths homework. But since he went into orbit my marks have taken a bit of a nosedive. I mean, we get to chat on the phone most days and have a family video conference once a week, but I don’t want to waste this talking about sums when Dad’s floating in space.

  As Mrs Solomon hands out our revision sheets, I look down at the list of equations with a sinking feeling. I wish Dad was here to help me.

  3

  After lunch Mrs Solomon gets us to test out the theory of gravity in the gym by dropping balls from the top of the agility tables. It’s like an experiment that this old Italian guy called Galileo did when he dropped cannonballs off the Leaning Tower of Pisa. She gets us all lined up holding different types of balls: basketballs, cricket balls, tennis balls and golf balls. She says that even though you might think that the heaviest balls would fall fastest and hit the ground first, gravity accelerates them all at the same rate, so the balls all hit the ground at the same time.

  That’s the theory anyway, but then Minty pulled a ping-pong ball out of her pocket and when we dropped all the balls at the same time, Minty’s ball hit the ground after everyone else’s. Mrs Solomon said that this was because the ping-pong ball is very light so it was slowed by air resistance, but I just think that the theory of gravity doesn’t work when Minty’s around.

  Stepping out of the school gates at the end of the day, I hear the beep of a horn. Turning around, my heart sinks when I see Granddad Neil waiting to pick me up instead of Mum. He leans out of the driver’s window of his van.

  “Come on, slowcoach,” he yells. “That lollipop lady says I can’t park here.” Dressed in her luminous yellow jacket, Mrs Bagwell shouts angrily back at Granddad.

  “No, you can’t – you’re a danger to the children crossing. You shouldn’t
even be allowed on the road in that … thing!”

  Back in the 1980s, Granddad used to be the lead singer of a rock band called Death Panda, until a problem with his ears forced him to retire. He still drives his old tour van and through the windscreen I can see Charlie crammed into her car seat in the back, waving an inflatable guitar above her head. But that’s not what makes the lollipop lady tut as she glares at Granddad’s bad parking. It’s the huge mural that’s painted on the side of the van.

  This shows a cartoon of a panda riding on the back of a nuclear missile that is heading straight for the Sun. It’s a pretty eye-catching picture. This was the front cover of Death Panda’s first album, Global Warming? This Means War!

  As I reluctantly climb inside the van, the rest of my class streaming out from the school gates, I hear Aaron Johnson shout out, “Nice wheels, Jamie!” Everyone starts laughing. I duck down in the passenger seat to try and make myself invisible, but this doesn’t work as Charlie just starts bashing me on the head with the blow-up guitar. Still leaning out of the window, Granddad just raises his fist in the air, his index and little finger extended to form the sign of the horns. As he salutes the school with this heavy-metal hand gesture, I sink down further into my seat.

  “Do you want to give any of your friends a ride home?” Granddad Neil asks, flicking his long grey ponytail back as he squeezes his stomach behind the steering wheel. “There’s plenty of room.”

  Fastening my seatbelt, I quickly shake my head. Having a dad who’s an astronaut is really cool, but Granddad is a serious embarrassment.

  “No, it’s OK – I just want to go home.”

  “Right you are then.” With a shrug of his shoulders, Granddad turns the key in the ignition. “Let’s hit the road.”

  A tsunami of noise erupts from the speakers, almost drowning out the engine as it roars into life.