The Jamie Drake Equation Page 8

  This alien intelligence was downloaded to my mobile. An extraterrestrial civilisation stored on my SD card. All their knowledge, all their wisdom, all their cleverness is now sitting next to my contacts on the home screen.

  “What do you want?” I murmur.

  “Help. BZZZ.”

  “Who are you talking to?”

  At the sound of Minty’s voice, I turn round in surprise and then nearly jump out of my skin as I see a green bug-eyed alien staring back at me.

  17

  The good news is that Minty’s not mutated into an alien lizard queen who wants to take over the world. She’s just wearing fancy dress. The bad news is that I’ve forgotten to do my homework, unlike the rest of my class who are now all dressed up like monsters out of Doctor Who.

  “So Jamie,” Mrs Solomon says, casting a disappointed look over my school uniform as I stand in front of her desk. “I can see you’ve decided not to create your own intergalactic costume, but I’d still like you to tell us all about the aliens that you’ve invented. What kind of extraterrestrial species do you think your dad’s space probes might discover?”

  Nervously, I look up to see the rest of the class staring back at me, their weird costumes making them look like escapees from an alien zoo. Aaron Johnson has got what looks like an egg whisk stuck to the middle of his forehead, while the rest of his face is painted bright blue. Lila Ali is wearing a green furry onesie with detachable alien antennae, while Jasmine Clark seems to have silver tentacles instead of hair, although I think this kind of suits her.

  In the front row, someone is wearing a super-sized papier mâché football, the whole of this fake head covered by a giant eye. And as it stares at me, along with all the rest of the eyes in the classroom, I realise I don’t have a clue what I’m going to say.

  I’m usually pretty good at getting my homework done, but with everything that’s been going on, I haven’t had the time to invent some make-believe alien. I’ve got enough problems working out what to do with this real one that’s shown up on my phone. I slip my hand into my pocket, my fingers closing round my phone as I squeeze this tight, hoping that Buzz can pull another alien mind trick to magic me out of this hole.

  But the phone stays silent. It looks like this time, I’m on my own.

  “When you’re ready, Jamie,” Mrs Solomon prompts me. “You have done your homework, haven’t you?”

  Next to my empty chair, Minty grins, her green lizard face lighting up at the sight of my embarrassment.

  There’s only one thing I can do. Tell the truth.

  “The aliens that I’ve discovered,” I start to explain, “are called the Hi’ive.” And then it all pours out of me – everything that I’ve found out, everything that Buzz has showed me. Using the picture I drew, I tell the class about their huge spiral cities filled with golden light, the air teeming with alien intelligence. I talk about the swarms of satellites they use to harness the power of the stars. I explain how the Hi’ive have lived for billions of years and how they survived.

  And when I finally stop talking, I see my teacher staring back at me, her mouth open wide. I glance around at the faces of my classmates, their alien disguises unable to hide their surprise as Minty slowly shakes her head to let me know I’ve gone too far.

  “Wow,” Mrs Solomon says when she finally remembers to speak. “I wasn’t expecting that. You’ve thought of everything, Jamie – how your alien civilisation would live, the technologies they might develop, but most importantly how they would communicate. A hive mind storing the knowledge of their entire species – living beings transformed into pure energy travelling across the galaxy at the speed of light. It’s an incredible thought.”

  But the rest of her gushing praise is swiftly cut off as the school bell rings.

  As everyone starts talking at once, our teacher claps her hands.

  “That’s not the bell for break time, Class Six,” she explains, raising her voice above the hubbub. “We’re having a special assembly today in the school hall and that’s where I want you to go now.”

  With a groan, the rest of the class start to wriggle their costumes out of their seats as they head towards the door. But as I turn to join them, Mrs Solomon calls me back.

  “Jamie, could I have a quick word?”

  At first I think she’s going to give me a hard time for not dressing up like an alien, but then I spot my maths test on the desk in front of her.

  “I know that you have struggled a little with your maths work this term,” my teacher begins, fixing me with a sympathetic smile, “but I wanted to talk to you about this test paper.”

  “I’m sorry I tried to use my calculator,” I say quickly, thinking that Mrs Solomon is going to mark me down for cheating or something.

  Mrs Solomon shakes her head.

  “It’s not that, Jamie. It’s your answer to the last question that I wanted to ask you about.” She turns over my test paper to reveal the scribbled letters, symbols and numbers that cover the page. “You see most of the class stuck to inventing simple linear equations, but you seemed to get a little carried away.”

  I look down at the scrawled equation. I don’t even remember writing this.

  “I was just messing about, Miss.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Mrs Solomon replies. “But I’ve had a friend staying with me this week who works as a Professor of Particle Physics at Lancaster University. She’s currently running a project at the Deep Mine Lab over in Clackthorpe. My friend happened to spot your test paper and said that your equation looked a lot like the Standard Model.”

  “What’s that?” I ask, starting to feel confused. I don’t know how my scruffy scribble can look like anything like a model equation.

  “The Standard Model of Particle Physics,” Mrs Solomon replies. She frowns as if trying to work out exactly what to say. “It’s a little difficult for me to explain as I’m not an expert, but according to my friend, it’s the theory that explains how the universe works.”

  I look again at the scribbled lines of letters and numbers. I didn’t know the universe came with instructions, but these look even more confusing than the ones that came with Charlie’s flatpack wardrobe, and Dad spent the whole weekend assembling that.

  “So how did you come to write this equation in your test, Jamie?” Mrs Solomon asks, her forehead wrinkling into a frown. “My friend says she only teaches this to her Masters students and didn’t think that a primary school pupil would’ve even heard of the Standard Model.”

  She’s right there, but I bet Buzz has.

  “I must have seen it somewhere,” I reply, desperately trying to think up an excuse that doesn’t include the alien on my phone. “Maybe it was in one of my dad’s books. It must have just stuck in my head.”

  “I thought that’d be it,” Mrs Solomon says, a sigh of relief washing the frown from her face. “I told my friend that your dad was Dan Drake – astronaut and all-round genius. The funny thing is you made a mistake in the equation anyway.” She points halfway down the page and following her fingertip I see the letter “G” scribbled in the margin. “My friend thought at first that you’d included gravity in the equation, but the thing is scientists haven’t worked out how to fit this into their theory of everything.”

  She looks up at me with a smile.

  “You got my friend excited for a minute, though, Jamie. She thought I had the next Albert Einstein in my class.”

  Dad says it’s gravity that keeps the International Space Station spinning round the world. Well, if Mrs Solomon’s friend is right, maybe the Hi’ive have worked out how it keeps the universe spinning too.

  “Mrs Solomon!”

  The booming sound of the headteacher’s voice makes me jump in surprise.

  “We’re all ready for you in the hall now,” Mr Hayes announces, peering round the classroom door. “So if you’d like to bring our special guest along.”

  I look around in confusion. The rest of the class have already gone. Apart f
rom me and Mrs Solomon, there’s nobody else here, unless my teacher has hidden this mystery guest inside her stock cupboard.

  “Come on, Jamie,” Mrs Solomon says. “It’s time for assembly.”

  And that’s when I realise he’s talking about me.

  18

  Sitting on the side of the stage next to Mrs Solomon and Mr Hayes, I look out at the rest of the school. The hall is packed, every class sitting crossed-legged on the floor, while the teachers huddle round the edges. It’s easy to spot my class sitting halfway down on the right. In their alien costumes, they look like a band of extraterrestrial bounty-hunters who’ve beamed down to school by mistake, marooned in a sea of royal-blue school uniforms.

  In the front row the littlest kids are bouncing up and down with excitement, pointing up at the stage as they talk among themselves. But I’m not the person they’re excited to see. He’s on the huge projector screen that has descended from the ceiling to fill most of the stage.

  I glance up at this to see my dad floating on the ISS.

  “Hello, Austen Park Primary. This is Commander Dan Drake and I’d like to welcome you all aboard the International Space Station.”

  Everyone starts clapping and cheering, their excited whoops filling the hall with noise. I didn’t know any of this was happening until I got to the school hall. Hayley Collins was waiting for me there and explained how Dad was feeling bad about missing my birthday on Friday, so they’d set up this live link as a birthday surprise.

  Raising his hands, Mr Hayes gestures for quiet.

  “So,” the head teacher says, speaking into the microphone that’s transmitting his words to the ISS, “who’s got the first question for Jamie’s dad?”

  A forest of hands shoots up across the hall.

  “Your class teachers have all got roving microphones so that Commander Drake can hear your questions. So if you’re picked to ask a question, wait until you’ve got hold of the microphone before you start to speak.”

  Mr Hayes drops his gaze on to the front row. There a little kid with black curly hair looks like he’s trying to pull his own arm out of its socket, thrusting his hand as high as it will go in his desperation to get picked.

  “Let’s start with a question from Miss Brightman’s class. Harrison, isn’t it?” As his face lights up with excitement, the boy nods his head as Miss Brightman rushes to hand him her roving microphone. “Don’t forget it’s a long way up to the International Space Station, so speak as loudly and clearly as you can.”

  Harrison wraps both his hands around the microphone, staring up in wonder at my dad on the projector screen. That’s when I realise, I recognise this little kid. It’s the baby alien boy who stopped me in the corridor on Monday morning and I instantly know what question he’s going to ask.

  “How do you go to the toilet in space?”

  Everyone starts laughing, even Mr Hayes. There’s a two-second delay and then Dad joins in too.

  “That’s a very good question, Harrison,” he says, trying to pretend he hasn’t been asked this a million times before. Dad lets go of his microphone for a second, letting this float in front of him. “As you can see, the microgravity up here can make going to the toilet a little tricky. Luckily, the toilets on the International Space Station use suction, a bit like your vacuum cleaner at home, to make sure we don’t end up with any unpleasant floaters.” Dad grabs hold of his microphone again. “But on my spacewalk tomorrow, I’ll be wearing Maximum Absorbency Underpants just in case I need a wee.”

  I sink down in my chair as everyone laughs again. Now the whole school knows that my dad will be wearing a space nappy tomorrow.

  Luckily, that’s the only question about Dad’s toilet habits as Mr Hayes fields the questions from the rest of the school.

  “What’s it like being weightless all the time?”

  “What do you eat and drink on the space station?”

  “What can you see out of the window right now?”

  And Dad answers them all, talking about how great it is to be in space and showing off some of the cool things he can do in microgravity along the way, like spinning a space somersault, drinking water droplets out of the air, and playing with the yo-yo that I bought him for Christmas.

  “Let’s take a couple of questions from Jamie’s classmates now,” Mr Hayes says, his gaze landing on the alien outpost of Class Six. “What do you want to ask, Aaron?”

  Aaron lowers his Dalek plunger as our teaching assistant, Miss Tyler, hands him a microphone.

  “What would happen if you forgot to put your spacesuit on before your spacewalk tomorrow?” he asks.

  There’s the usual two-second delay before Dad begins his reply.

  “Well,” he says, “my spacesuit is really more of a spaceship. It’s called an Extravehicular Mobility Unit – or EMU – for short. The life-support backpack gives me eight hours of oxygen and the rocket propulsion system of the Advanced Manned Manoeuvring Unit that fits over the EMU will transport me safely to the higher orbit of the Lux Aeterna launch platform. Inside my helmet there’s a communication system that lets me talk to Mission Control and a built-in video camera that lets them see exactly what I’m doing.”

  “But what would happen if you forgot to put this on?” Aaron interrupts, the egg whisk stuck to his head wobbling as he keeps a tight hold on the microphone.

  There’s a burst of static as Dad’s and Aaron’s voices overlap, which gives Miss Tyler the chance to wrestle the microphone out of Aaron’s grasp. Then Dad’s voice fills the hall again.

  “Well, space is a dangerous place. There’s cosmic radiation to contend with, the temperature can veer from 120 degrees Celsius to minus 150 degrees in the shade, and without any air to breathe in the vacuum of space, I’d probably suffocate in about fifteen seconds flat.”

  I shift uneasily in my seat, suddenly wishing I was anywhere but here.

  “Let’s have another question,” Mr Hayes says brightly. “What do you want to ask, Araminta?”

  Taking the microphone in her lizard claw, Minty fixes my dad with a bug-eyed glare.

  “Can I go on one of the Light Swarm spaceships?” she demands. “I want to meet the aliens.”

  Up on the big screen, a huge grin spreads over Dad’s face.

  “Looking at the pictures your teachers have sent me of your intergalactic outfits, I thought I’d made contact with aliens already. But I’m afraid you wouldn’t be able to hitch a ride back to your home planet on one of the Light Swarm probes.”

  Dad reaches out of shot to pick something up and when he reappears on the screen I see he’s holding what looks like a silver postage stamp in the palm of his hand. I recognise this immediately as one of the Light Swarm probes.

  “You see, these tiny spacecraft are only one centimetre long and there’s just no space for anyone to hitch a ride.” With a delicate touch, Dad slides out a tiny black chip from the heart of the probe. It looks just like any SD card that you’d find inside your phone. “This wafer-sized chip weighs less than a gram, but contains all of the probe’s cameras, its communications system and power source. When I reach the HabZone module of the Lux Aeterna launch platform tomorrow, I’ll make sure that all these chips are fitted to the Light Swarm probes before I press the button to send them on a hundred-and-eight-trillion-kilometre trip to Tau Ceti.”

  The school hall is silent now as everyone stares at this interstellar spaceship that fits into the palm of Dad’s hand.

  “Of course it’s not just my spacewalk that I’ve got marked on my calendar tomorrow,” Dad continues, placing the probe out of shot. “There’s another reason that it’s a special day.” As he reappears on the screen I can that see he’s holding a gift-wrapped box. “I think there’s just time for one final question.”

  This is my cue. Hayley has explained everything to me and she’s now standing in the wings on the other side of the stage, holding the same gift-wrapped box in her arms. As Mr Hayes hands me the microphone I know exactly what I’m suppose
d to say, the words written down on a scrap of paper just in case I forget.

  Hey Dad, it’s Jamie – what have you got me for my birthday?

  Then Dad’s going to wish me happy birthday for tomorrow and Hayley will walk out to give me my birthday present. When she saw how worried I was looking, Hayley couldn’t stop herself from telling me what’s under the wrapping paper. It’s a Lego model of the International Space Station and Lux Aeterna Launch Platform. It even comes with a minifigure of my dad in his EMU spacesuit. Hayley says it’s one of a kind. It should be the best birthday present ever, but as I look up at Dad on the projector screen I feel a sudden surge of anger.

  Is this what life is going to be like now? Sharing my dad with a roomful of strangers and getting my birthday presents second-hand? Having everyone think that Dad’s some kind of superhero when really he’s tearing our family apart?

  I grip the microphone more tightly, my knuckles whitening as I stare up at Dad’s smile.

  “Are you there, Jamie?” he asks, a slight echo on his words as they fill the school hall.

  Mr Hayes clears his throat to let my dad know that the satellite link is still working. From the other side of the stage, Hayley shoots me a worried look, her arms sagging slightly under the weight of the Lego box.

  A faint buzz from the phone in my pocket reminds me that Dad doesn’t know everything after all. There’s a lump in my throat the size of a small planet and as I fight back my tears, I know the question I’ve got to ask.

  “If it’s so great being an astronaut, why don’t you just stay up there?”

  It takes two seconds for my question to reach Dad on the ISS, so before he even has the chance to answer, I drop the microphone and run off the stage.