The Many Worlds of Albie Bright Read online

  “Of course,” she replies with the faintest flutter of her eyelid. “Well, as you can hear, everyone is busy working on getting their experiments ready for the science fair next week, but you’ve still got time to start on your own project, Albie. Why don’t you take a look at what Victoria and some of the others are doing? It might give you some ideas.”

  So while I head off to see why Victoria Barnes is making a mountain out of mashed potato, Miss Benjamin rushes to the back of the class to stop Wesley MacNamara from re-creating the big bang with the help of his compass.

  Victoria Barnes is the most popular girl in our school. I know this because that’s what she told me when I started at Clackthorpe Primary six months ago. “I’m the most popular girl in school. Your dad is on TV. We should be friends.” Our “friendship” lasted until first period, when Victoria realized that Dad didn’t have any celebrity friends on speed dial and I told her that the only way she’d get on his TV show was if he could film her falling into a supernova.

  A supernova is a supergiant star that explodes in space. Imagine the biggest firework display you’ve ever seen and then multiply it by a trillion. That’s what a supernova looks like. I didn’t mean to annoy Victoria by saying this. I just got a bit mixed up when she said she wanted to be a big star on TV.

  I watch as Victoria plasters another layer of slop over the slopes of her mountain. Her long blond hair is tied back in a ponytail, and the tip of her tongue is sticking out from the corner of her mouth as she concentrates.

  “Why are you making a mountain out of mashed potato?” I ask her.

  She looks up at me with a scowl.

  “It’s not mashed potato, lamebrain. It’s papier-mâché.” She plasters on the last of the gloopy mixture around a large round hole at the top of the mountain. “This is Mount Vesuvius.”

  Victoria knows my name is Albie, but by the end of my first day at school, she’d convinced most of Class 6 that it was really L.B. and told them they had to guess what the initials stood for. Lamebrain was her favorite suggestion, and she’s made sure that it’s stuck. I just ignore it now. Like Mum always told me, there are much worse things than someone calling you names.

  Victoria takes a step back to inspect her creation. I can see now that what I thought was a mountain of mashed potato is actually strips of plain paper smothered in glue and molded into a peak. At the bottom of the slope, there’s a row of Lego houses guarded by Lego Roman soldiers and plastic farm animals. Victoria points her brush at this Lego brick town.

  “This is Pompeii. I borrowed the Lego soldiers from my little brother’s bedroom, and the toy cows and sheep come from Earlyears. Miss Benjamin says it’s one of the best science projects she’s ever seen. Your dad had better choose me as the winner next week.”

  I don’t want to set Victoria off again, so I decide not to mention that Dad probably won’t be judging the science fair after all. Instead I ask why her mountain has a hole in it.

  “It’s not a mountain, lamebrain. It’s a volcano. Mount Vesuvius erupted nearly two thousand years ago. When it blew its top, it buried the town of Pompeii under a layer of volcanic rocks and ash. Nobody could escape the deadly lava flow, and thousands of people were buried alive or burnt to a crisp.” Victoria’s eyes glitter as she describes the destruction. “And when I pour vinegar and baking soda into the crater of my volcano, then—KABLOOM! It’s fireworks time.”

  I look down at one of the toy soldiers, his tiny spear pointing toward a plastic cow twice his size. I imagine Victoria’s volcano burying his house under a tidal wave of bubbling lava.

  “Why didn’t the people try to escape?”

  “Nobody knew that Vesuvius was going to erupt,” Victoria replies smugly. “One minute they were sitting in the sun eating pizza, the next—KABLOOM! Total wipeout.”

  Mum used to tell me that I worry about things too much. Global warming, asteroids hitting Earth, whether her experiments would create a black hole that would destroy the known universe. If I’d lived in Pompeii, you wouldn’t have caught me hanging around eating a hot and spicy pizza.

  “Miss Benjamin told us about your mum,” Victoria says. “She said we had to be extra nice to you when you came back to school.”

  Victoria’s definition of being “extra nice” obviously doesn’t include not calling me lamebrain, but it’s what she says next that gives me a surprise.

  “So do you want to come to my birthday party on Friday? It starts at seven o’clock in the village hall. There’s going to be a DJ, a photo booth, a dance competition—I’m so going to win that—and tons of cool people. And my mum said I should invite you too, to cheer you up.”

  On a scale of completely miserable to totally cheered up, the thought of going to Victoria’s birthday party scores pretty low. I don’t like having my picture taken, and I can’t dance to save my life. But Dad said we had to start getting things back to normal, so maybe I should give Victoria a second chance.

  “Thanks,” I tell her. “I’ll ask my dad if I can come.”

  Victoria picks up another soldier and turns back toward her volcano. “Don’t forget to bring me a present,” she calls out over her shoulder.

  “Did Victoria Barnes just invite you to her birthday party?” I hear Kiran whistle in surprise from the desk behind me. “Wow, I’ve seen everything now.”

  Kiran Ahmed is my best friend in Class 6. In fact, he’s probably my only friend in Class 6. It’s tricky trying to make friends when you start a new school in the middle of Year 6. Everyone else has known each other for the past six and a half years—they’ve learned their times tables and played football on the playground together, and they all remember when Wesley MacNamara carried out the Great Stick Insect Massacre in Year 2. Everyone’s got all the friends they need, and nobody was going to waste any time making me feel welcome. Apart from Kiran, that is.

  At first I thought he only wanted to be my friend because my dad was on TV—just like Victoria—but then I found out that Kiran is obsessed with space. He says he’s going to be the first man to set foot on Mars, but if he can’t make it that far, he’ll settle for being the first British Asian astronaut instead. He’s taking scuba-diving lessons at the swimming pool to practice being weightless, and he knows the name of every moon in the solar system.

  “Check it out,” he says, dangling Buzz Lightyear from his mini parachute. “I’m sending this bad boy to infinity and beyond!”

  Tied to the corner of Kiran’s desk is a helium balloon in the shape of a My Little Pony. The end of the string holding it down is looped around Buzz Lightyear’s utility belt.

  “With a My Little Pony balloon?”

  Kiran shakes his head. “I’ve got more than just one balloon. My dad bought a bunch off eBay—only nine ninety-nine plus postage and packing for a hundred balloons. He got them for my little sister’s birthday party, but she’s into Spider-Man now, so he gave them to me instead. Miss Benjamin is storing the rest in the stock cupboard until the day of the science fair. You’ve seen that film Up? Well, I’m going to use these helium balloons to send Buzz Lightyear into space. The first action figure to make it into orbit.”

  If Kiran can put Buzz Lightyear into space powered only by a flock of My Little Pony balloons, he’s bound to win first prize at the science fair. There’s just one problem with his plan to launch the first action-figure astronaut.

  “The space shuttle Discovery took a Buzz Lightyear into orbit back in 2008,” I tell him. “My dad showed a video of the toy Buzz floating around on the International Space Station when he did a countdown of the top five weirdest astronauts on his TV show. Buzz came in third behind a jellyfish and a Russian space dog called Laika.”

  Unfortunately, Kiran doesn’t take this news very well. He bangs his Buzz Lightyear down on the desk, and Buzz’s flight wings snap open as his voice box squawks, “To infinity…and beyond!”

  “Not if you’ve already been there before,” Kiran snaps at Buzz. “I want to be the first. There’s got
to be something special I can send into space. Something that’s never been done before.”

  “How about a Lego spaceman?” I suggest, glancing back at Victoria’s volcano. Maybe Kiran’s balloons can airlift the Lego people of Pompeii to safety before Mount Vesuvius blows its top.

  Kiran shakes his head.

  “Nah, two Canadian kids sent a Lego man into space back in 2012. I saw their video on YouTube. That’s what gave me the idea for the balloons.” He starts to unhook the string from Buzz’s utility belt. “Are you doing a project for the science fair? You can always help me out with mine if you haven’t got time to do your own. You know—because of your mum.”

  The only science I’m interested in at the moment is quantum physics. But before I can explain this to Kiran, a loud shriek comes from the back of the classroom.

  “Miss!” Lucy Webster shouts out. “Wesley let Mr. Sniffles out of his cage!”

  Mr. Sniffles is the class hamster. Squeals and shouts follow his escape route across the desks, a furry brown streak weaving between test tubes and pots of Play-Doh as Miss Benjamin battles to make herself heard.

  “Quiet! QUIET! QUIET!”

  Snatching up Mr. Sniffles before he launches himself through an open window, Miss Benjamin turns to look at us. Her face is a volcanic shade of red and her left eye is twitching into overdrive.

  “Class Six, this behavior is completely unacceptable! I will not allow such chaos in my room! If you can’t work on your science fair experiments without disturbing the rest of the school, then you’ll have to do a science test in silence instead.”

  Everybody groans.

  “Quiet!” Miss Benjamin shouts again. Striding to the back of the classroom, she puts Mr. Sniffles safely back into his cage.

  “I didn’t mean to let him out, miss.” Wesley MacNamara holds up a plastic tray filled with tiny green leaves. “I just thought he might like a nibble of my cress.”

  Miss Benjamin ignores Wesley, her left eye still twitching out an SOS.

  “Now, everyone, pack away your experiments and get your pens and pencils out instead. Quiet! I don’t want to hear another sound out of any of you until the bell rings for break time.”

  Brilliant. My first day back at school and I’ve got to take a science test. And unless all the questions are about quantum physics, this isn’t going to help me find my mum.

  Then I remember that Miss Benjamin has already given me the excuse I need to get out of this test. While the rest of the class grumbles as they pack up their experiments, I put my hand up.

  “Miss, can I take some time out, please? I’d like to go to the library.”

  “You’re looking for a book about what?”

  Mrs. Forest peers at me over her glasses, her library stamp hovering over a pile of Horrible Histories.

  “Quantum physics, miss. It’s for my science project.”

  Mrs. Forest doesn’t like to call herself a librarian. She says she’s a book doctor who can prescribe the right book to anybody. The last book she gave me was called Danny the Champion of the World, and it was all about this boy called Danny who lives in an RV with his dad. His dad spends most of his time inventing all kinds of cool things like kites, go-karts, and fire balloons to make up for Danny’s mum being dead. To be honest, I stopped reading it after a few chapters because it just reminded me how rubbish my own dad is. Everyone thinks it’s really cool to have a TV-star dad who knows how the universe works, but I’d swap him any day for an ordinary dad who knows how to fly a kite.

  In our last library lesson, Mrs. Forest told Class 6 she had books that could take us anywhere. Brand-new countries, unforgettable places, fantastic lands. That was when Wesley MacNamara put his hand up to tell her she was getting books mixed up with Ryanair. Everyone else laughed, but right now I just hope she can find me a book that will take me to a parallel universe.

  Mrs. Forest puts her book stamper down and leads me to the nonfiction section, hidden away around the corner. Peering at the middle shelf, she frowns as she flicks through a row of books with blue stickers on their spines.

  “All the science books are here, Albie, but I don’t think you’ll find any books about quantum physics. It’s not on the key stage two curriculum, you see. Couldn’t you ask your dad instead? He probably knows more about science than all the authors I’ve got here put together.”

  “He’s too busy with his work,” I quickly reply. “I just want a book to help me with the basics.”

  “Aha.” Mrs. Forest pulls a book from the middle of the shelf. “It looks like your dad might be able to help after all.”

  As she hands me the book, I look down to see my dad’s face staring back at me from the cover. Ben Bright’s Guide to the Universe: From Asteroids to X-ray Stars and Everything in Between. After his TV series was such a big hit, Dad was asked to write this tie-in book for kids, and he locked himself away in his office to get it finished. It was the last summer we’d had together as a family before everything went wrong, and he’d just wasted it.

  At the time Mum had tried to make me feel better.

  “He wants you to be proud of him, Albie. He’s writing this book for you.”

  I didn’t believe her then, but now I hope she was right.

  Sitting down in the reading corner, I turn straightaway to the index. Asteroids, atoms, the big bang, black holes, cone radiation, dark matter, Einstein, and loads more words that I don’t even understand. But halfway down the page, I find the entry I’m looking for: Quantum physics: 108–109.

  I flip back to page 108, and this is the first thing I read:

  If you think you understand quantum physics, then you don’t understand quantum physics.

  Great way to start an explanation, Dad.

  Quantum physics is seriously weird science. It tries to explain the strange ways that atoms and particles behave. You see, inside the teeny-tiny quantum world, an atom or particle can be in more than one place at the same time and even be in two different states at once! According to quantum physics, everything is possible until you take a look.

  I scratch my head. Dad has lost me already. How can something be in two different places or even be two different things at exactly the same time? It doesn’t make any sense.

  To give my brain a break, I take a look instead at the cartoon in the middle of the page. This shows what looks like a zombie cat trapped inside a box with a hammer hanging above a bottle of poison, a Geiger counter, and a glowing radioactive lump. The text underneath starts to explain this creepy image.

  To show the strange effects of quantum physics, a scientist called Erwin Schrödinger invented an experiment. A cat is put inside a box with a lump of radioactive uranium that has a 50 percent chance of decaying. This means that at any moment, there is a 50 percent chance of a radioactive particle being emitted. If the Geiger counter detects a radioactive particle, it will trigger the hammer and smash open the bottle of poison. This will kill the cat. However, quantum physics says that until the box is opened and we take a look, the particle will be in both possible states—decayed and undecayed—simultaneously. This means the cat inside the box is dead and alive at the same time!

  I shake my head as I try to make sense of this crazy experiment by the worst pet owner ever. How can a cat be dead and alive at exactly the same time? But before I can read the rest of the explanation, Wesley MacNamara whips the book out of my hands, crash landing next to me on the sofa.

  “All right, lamebrain.” He looks down at the cartoon in Dad’s book. “Is this what you want to do for your science project? There’s no way Miss Benjamin will let you create a radioactive zombie cat. She wouldn’t even let me dissect a duck-billed platypus.” Wesley’s left eye starts to twitch in an exaggerated wink as he does his best Miss Benjamin impression. “ ‘They’re a protected species, Wesley, and I will not have you cutting up cuddly Australian creatures in my classroom.’ ”

  Wesley growls, “They’re furry freaks is what they are. Flippers like an otter, tai
l like a beaver, and an electricity-detecting beak like a mutant duck. I reckon they’re actually weird-looking aliens who have come to invade our planet. That’s why she doesn’t want me chopping one up, in case I find out the truth.”

  This isn’t actually the craziest thing I’ve ever heard Wesley say. When I started at Clackthorpe Primary, he told me that all the teachers there were shape-shifting extraterrestrial reptiles who drank the blood of pupils to stay alive. When Miss Benjamin overheard this, she told Wesley that if she were a shape-shifting extraterrestrial reptile, she definitely wouldn’t be working as an NQT. Then she said that if she heard him say that again, he’d be spending the rest of the week in detention. Wesley kept pretty quiet about bloodsucking alien teachers after that.

  “What are you doing for your science project, then?” I ask him, trying to change the subject.

  Wesley scowls. “She’s got me growing cress in a cupboard—again. It’s the same project I’ve done since Year One. But this time I’ve got a plan.” He leans forward with a dangerous gleam in his eye. “When we go on our science trip tomorrow, I’m going to find out the truth about the duck-billed platypus, and you’re going to help me.”

  I don’t like the sound of this. Tomorrow Miss Benjamin is taking Class 6 on a school trip to the Clackthorpe Museum of Natural History and Mechanical Wonders. According to Kiran, this is the same school trip the class has been on for the past five years. He says it’s called a museum but that it’s really just a big house filled with loads of old junk. It used to belong to a Victorian explorer called Montague Wilkes, who left Clackthorpe to explore the world and sent everything he found back home before he died in the middle of Australia. I’ve had a look at the museum’s website, and most of the things he found seem to be stuffed animals. I even spotted what looked like a duck-billed platypus stuck in a glass jar, and I now had the horrible feeling that this was part of Wesley’s plan.

  “Er, I don’t think I’m going to be able to make it to the museum tomorrow. It was my mum’s funeral yesterday—”