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‘This can’t be home,’ said George. ‘There must be some mistake …’

When George finds a way to escape the spacecraft Artemis, where he has been trapped, he is overjoyed. Surely now he can return to Earth.

But when George touches down, he knows immediately that something is wrong. There’s a barren wasteland where his home town used to be, intelligent robots roam the streets, and no one will talk to George about the Earth that he used to know. With the help of an unexpected new friend, can George find out what – or who – is behind this terrible new world, before it’s too late?

About the Author

LUCY HAWKING is the lead author on the George series of five books, explaining science to a young audience through storytelling. A former journalist, Lucy has also written two comic novels for adults. Thanks to her work on the George series, Lucy has won several prizes including the Sapio Award for Popularizing Science 2008 and the UNSW Medal for Science Communication in 2015, and has been awarded an honorary doctorate of science by QMU London.

RHCP Digital is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

Also by Lucy Hawking

As you read the story and see the sort of future George discovers, you will come across lots of fabulous scientific knowledge and ideas – everything from time dilation to machine learning! To expand this, at the end of the story is a collection of essays written by respected experts that will really help bring some of these ideas to life. It’s your future: read about it, think about it – and enjoy it! It is likely to be a truly exciting world.

‘Human history has become, more and more, a race between education and catastrophe.’

H. G. Wells

Missing Image

With very special thanks to Sue Cook, the George series non-fiction editor

‘Message buffered!’ The communication system crackled into life. ‘Doppler correction implemented.’

Until now, the inside of the spaceship Artemis had been eerily silent. But then a human voice broke through. A very angry human voice.

‘George! This is your mother!’ it squeaked over the tannoy. She sounded absolutely furious.

‘Oops!’ said Boltzmann Brian, George’s outsize robot, his only companion on this enormous spaceship. ‘Shall I say hi to your mum? She must be missing us!’

‘No!’ George floated back to the front of the ship. He had boarded the Artemis on Earth, little knowing that it would take him and Boltzmann on quite such a wild ride. It was as though they had jumped onto the back of an untamed stallion that had cosmically galloped away with them. ‘Well, actually,’ he added, pausing out of range of the receiver so his extremely peeved mother wouldn’t be able to hear him, ‘I don’t suppose you’d like to tell her this was your idea?’

He looked pleadingly at the battered old robot. A high-altitude space jump some time previously had led to Boltzmann’s head and body being charred by the heat of re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. This always reminded George that his own human body had no chance of survival outside the ship.

‘But it was not my idea,’ said Boltzmann, sounding puzzled. ‘I do not think our current predicament will be solved by my attempting to fabricate reality to your mother.’ Robot Boltzmann had made great progress in mastering human emotions, but still hadn’t got the hang of that most basic of human habits – lying.

Anyway, George realized that it was pointless to tell tall stories to his mother back on Earth. No matter how they got there, he and Boltzmann were stuck on a speeding spacecraft, heading in a direction away from Earth … and they didn’t know how to get home. He picked up the microphone.

‘George!’ The tinny voice sounded torn between rage and joy. If it was possible to weep and laugh at the same time, it sounded as though his mother was doing both. ‘George!’

‘George?’ continued his mother. ‘Where are you? And don’t just say, “I’m in space!” I know that, thank you very much, George Greenby. George? George!’

‘Hello! Hello, Mum!’ said George. Suddenly he realized that his mother couldn’t actually hear him. Because of the time delay for delivery of messages across space, his mother was talking to him but unable to pick up his replies, which were still travelling towards her across the vastness of space. In fact, his mother could have broadcast her message hours or even days before and no longer be poised to receive his replies. George’s heart sank. It was too weird to be talking to his mother and yet not be talking to her at the same time.

‘George Greenby!’ she carried on. ‘What did you think you were doing, speeding off on that wretched spaceship and giving us all the fright of our lives?’ The line broke up into static and George just heard a hum and a fizz.

‘I didn’t realize!’ he bleated pointlessly into the receiver, knowing his mother couldn’t hear him. ‘It wasn’t meant to be like this!’

At the time, spontaneously hijacking the spaceship Artemis had seemed brilliantly adventurous. But it also felt as though it had a built-in ending. Immediately after launch, he and Boltzmann would gain control of the spaceship, putting it into orbit around the Earth. After a few circuits of their home planet, they would decelerate out of orbit and return home. And, even if his parents were so angry with him that he was grounded for the rest of his life, it would still have been worth it to experience space flight in a real spacecraft.

But this was not the way it happened. The Artemis, it turned out, moved to a music all its own. It seemed to come with a pre-plotted course and didn’t respond to any attempts to change it. Instead, it had exited the Earth’s atmosphere like a cannonball. The grey face of the Moon had flashed past as the Earth receded into the distance, fading rapidly to just a point of light in the dark, one dot among thousands.

Now they were tearing through space, bright lights of stars flashing past the windows. The control panel of the ship had resisted all Boltzmann’s attempts to take over. The two of them were as powerless as the cargo of green lettuces they had found installed in a special growing segment of the ship. Just as the space salad slowly grew, so they would have to wait until the Artemis revealed the purpose of this voyage. Were they going to Mars, which George had thought was the original destination for the spaceship? To Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, as he had then been told it had been programmed to visit? That would be a much longer trip. Right now, it didn’t seem like they were going anywhere except into the darkness, faster and faster.

‘Hello, George’s mum!’ Boltzmann shouted into the receiver. ‘We’re having a great time! But don’t worry – the ship is fitted with the most amazing inertial dampers so there’s no danger of us being crushed in a massive acceleration or deceleration! If that’s what’s been worrying you …’

George hoped Boltzmann’s message would get lost in space. It wasn’t quite what he thought his mum wanted to hear.

‘Eric,’ she said, ‘is trying to turn your ship round. But he says it may be a very long time before you get back. He thinks the Artemis wasn’t programmed to go to Europa or Mars at all. You’re going—’

‘Fizz buzzle swizzie tum,’ said his mother as the message broke up. ‘Crackle … crackle … boom … hiss.’

‘Mum!’ cried George, who wanted nothing more at that moment than to be at home in his bedroom in his ordinary house on his normal, boring street with his little sisters, while his mum was in the kitchen and his dad was out in the garden, chopping up wood to power the family’s homemade generator.

This vision of home was suddenly so clear that it was like being there for real. George saw himself walk in from the garden, and sniff the air. His mother was baking some of her famous broccoli muffins, his sisters were building and knocking down towers made out of cherry-wood bricks while the steady thwack of his father’s axe drifted in from outside. It was home. It was where he belonged.

‘Boom!’ went the amplifier. George’s mother was gone and he was back here, in this sterile space environment with its stale air and dehydrated packet food, and only a robot for a friend. The space food tasted OK – it came in lots of different flavours such as ‘bacon sandwich’ or ‘chocolate milkshake’. The ship’s recycling facility did a great job of keeping water circulating too, so George was unlikely to run out of food or drink. Even the robot wasn’t bad company – but none of it was like being back at home with his family, his best friend, Annie, next door, ready for another adventure. Only this time George had set out on his adventure and left her behind.

His mum was gone, the connection broken. George realized that his last hope – that Eric Bellis, his friend Annie’s dad and the superstar scientist and former head of Kosmodrome 2 (the spaceport from where they had launched near his home in Foxbridge), would be able to grasp control of Artemis, the runaway spaceship, and bring them back – had disappeared. They were still hurtling through space. But where were they going? He slumped over the useless controls, microphone in his hand. The receiver continued to pick up noises – a crackle, a boom and a strange, high-pitched whistling sound that meant nothing to George.

‘Cheer up!’ Boltzmann poked him with a long robot finger. ‘Look what I found!’

‘Raspberry ripple!’ chuckled the robot, brandishing a packet mix in George’s face. ‘A new flavour! Now tell me you’re not excited! Is it dinner time?’

The strangest thing about being in the spaceship was that, as they voyaged on, they had no real idea of the passage of time. George’s watch seemed to have stopped. Boltzmann’s timekeeping function had strangely malfunctioned, the control panels gave them no clues, and they had no sunrise or sunset to mark out their days.

They slept and woke as they felt like it. George tucked himself into a relatively comfy pod to doze when he needed to, while Boltzmann lounged around, making use of the ship’s solar electricity supply whenever he needed to charge up. They passed the time by chatting, with Boltzmann taking copious notes on what it meant to be a humanoid rather than a robotic life form. After a while George noticed that Boltzmann was copying his gestures! It was oddly like having a robot mirror.

Days passed like this – or at least George assumed that they were days. He had no real idea how long it had been before another familiar voice broke through, all the way from Earth.

‘George!’ the voice cried. ‘George!’ It was his best friend, Annie. After George and Annie had journeyed to the icy moon of Europa to defeat the most evil man on Earth, Alioth Merak, they had returned to Earth just in time to rescue a bunch of kids who were trapped inside a stationary Artemis on the launch pad. Merak’s plan had been to isolate the cleverest kids on the planet and send them out on a secret space mission to find life in the solar system on his behalf. But George and Annie had intervened just in time and saved them, although in the process they had accidentally atomized Merak during a quantum teleport. He had disintegrated in transit and would never be reassembled.

Unfortunately Merak had designed and built the spaceship Artemis himself, in great secrecy, and only he knew how to operate it. When Merak vanished, there was literally no one on Earth who knew how the ship worked. And, as George had now discovered, even mega-brain Eric – Annie’s dad – hadn’t been able to divert the Artemis from its true destination, whatever and wherever that was.

‘Annie!’ yelled George, floating over to the comms portal as fast as he could. He was now super-skilled at moving around in microgravity and could do all sorts of interesting flips and somersaults.

‘George!’ Annie was speaking very fast. ‘I don’t know if you’re even still out there, or if you can hear me, but please get in contact if you can. There’s big trouble.’

‘I want to!’ said George. ‘But I don’t know how to get home! No one does! And what you do mean, if I’m even still out here? Help me, Annie.’

‘Everything has changed,’ said Annie, her voice suddenly coming over the communication channel as clear as a bell. In some ways she sounded just the same, yet in others she sounded different somehow: more grown up, more self-assured. She also sounded scared. ‘Everything’s gone wrong,’ she said. ‘The world – it’s turned upside down, George. It’s all ruined. We couldn’t stop it. George, are you out there? I need you! Eric needs you.’

George’s blood ran cold. Hearing the voice of his friend, relayed across endless miles of empty space between them, asking for his help when he had no way of giving it or replying in real time, was heart-breaking. Next to him, Boltzmann had frozen too, as though like George the robot was experiencing deep, heartfelt pain at the awful news.

‘What about Eric?’ asked George. But he was aware that Annie couldn’t hear him at that moment. He knew that he was just shouting across space, as she was, like putting a message in a bottle and sending it out to sea in the hope that someone would find it and answer.

‘Eric’s disappeared,’ Annie’s voice continued, much lower, but answering his question almost as though she could hear him. ‘He did something, George. And they caught him. Someone betrayed him. He was trying to stop them, but now he’s disappeared. We don’t know where he is. We’re very afraid …’ She sounded breathless now, as though she might be running.

‘Who are they?’ said George. He knew his questions were irrelevant, but even so he couldn’t stop himself from asking.

The only answer from the other end was a scream, which resounded around the large and mostly empty spacecraft, bouncing off the walls time and time again.

But it was dead and unresponsive. George ran to the window, as though somehow he expected to be able to see Annie floating out there in space. But the only view was of the huge unfurling cosmos, full of bright stars and strange celestial objects and huge rocks twirling past in an endless light show.

He felt a chill creep down his back. Annie’s message had been a last, desperate call for help and she might not even know that he had heard her.

Boltzmann and George looked at each other in silence, robot to boy, mechanical eye to human eye.

‘You feel it too, don’t you, Boltz?’ said George. ‘Something has gone really wrong on Earth.’

The robot nodded. ‘I sense your distress at your dislocation from your home environment,’ he replied. ‘While not an organic part of your planet in the same way that you are, I too am beginning to feel we have gone far enough. I believe we have accomplished your dream of space flight and it is definitely time to start back.’

‘Where is this ship even going?’ said George. ‘Did Alioth never tell you?’

Boltzmann shook his head. ‘My master was a man of many secrets,’ he said, floating over to the control panel to begin another sustained attack on the systems governing the flight of the Artemis. ‘And many games. If he told you the destination of this craft was Europa, then you can be sure that is the one place the Artemis will never go.’

‘And how long have we been up here? Why aren’t there any clocks?’ said George. There wasn’t much he could do to help while Boltzmann flicked switches and inputted commands. ‘Why is there no time up here?’

‘There is always time,’ said Boltzmann. ‘And it always goes forward. But we just do not know by how much, or how fast we are moving. Although the inertial dampers on his ship have made me suspicious as to the speed at which we are travelling …’

‘We have to get home, Boltz,’ said George decisively. ‘It doesn’t matter what it takes! They need us.’

Boltzmann made another vain attempt to hack into the system and wrest control away from whatever invisible force was directing the ship. Outside, they saw the brilliant rainbow of lights as stars flashed past. George paused for a moment, lost in wonder at the thought that he might be the only human being who had ever been this far from Earth! But would he ever get home to tell the tale – and, when he did, what would he find?

Boltzmann wiped his forehead after the exertion of trying to change the ship’s course. George almost laughed to himself – robots don’t sweat, so he had no need to wipe moisture out of his eyes, but he had picked up the gesture from humans and rather enjoyed doing it as a signal that he was working hard.

But then, just as Boltzmann had given up once again, the ship itself decided to speak to them.

‘Apex of outward journey achieved,’ it announced, causing both George and Boltzmann to jump out of their skins.

‘What’s happening now?’ George cried. But he didn’t really need to ask. The huge spaceship, which had been determinedly charging through the darkness of space, almost came to a halt, and then, finally, it started to turn.

‘We are!’ said George, space-leaping over to the robot and giving him a massive hug. ‘We’re turning round! We’re going—’

‘Home,’ said a chilling voice, blasting out of the communication portal. George and Boltzmann froze in mid-hug. ‘Do not leave your homes,’ the voice continued, sharp and distinct. In the background they heard a wailing sound as though a multitude of sirens were blaring.

‘Citizens of Planet Earth!’ continued the broadcast. ‘Do not panic. Remain in your homes. Do not resist. This is not a drill. Repeat. This is not a drill.’ As the voice rapped out its orders, George and Boltzmann heard another sound like a huge violent explosion, large enough to shatter the surface of the Earth and send a vast gas cloud mushrooming through the Earth’s atmosphere and into space.

The spaceship landed on its backside with a huge crunch. It wobbled precariously for several minutes but managed not to topple over. Instead, it was wedged into the rocky ground at an angle like a spacey version of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Clouds of dust billowed around it. It would have been quite a sight – if someone had been there to see it. Around the ship, for miles and miles, stretched bleached, sandy ground, as empty as a lunar desert under a blistering milky sky.

Inside the ship, the two astronauts stayed strapped in their seats as the rocking motion juddered to a halt.

‘Don’t be silly,’ said George. ‘You’re a robot, you don’t know how to feel sick.’

‘Yes I do,’ protested Boltzmann. During his time in space with George, he had started to believe that he was not just an intelligent robot but a sentient one too. ‘I have feelings!’

George, who preferred facts to feelings anyway, didn’t want to discuss Boltzmann’s feelings at that moment. ‘Is landing complete?’

‘Thank you, Boltzmann,’ murmured George. ‘Interesting landing technique.’

‘I think so,’ said the robot, looking around. ‘But it’s hard to be entirely sure.’

‘What if it isn’t?’ asked George. ‘What if you’ve landed us on the wrong planet?’ As soon as he said it, he realized his mistake. On their long journey, Boltzmann had become more and more human in his reactions. Any hint of criticism made him very tetchy.

‘Look, I’ve done my best!’ cried the robot. ‘After all, it’s because of you that we went into space in the first place.’

‘Yes, yes, I know,’ sighed George. ‘And thank you for coming on the journey with me. I couldn’t have flown this spacecraft by myself.’

‘Oh shucks!’ said Boltzmann, more happily. ‘I’ve never been allowed to spend so much time with a human before. It’s been most educational. As a robot, I never dreamed …’ He paused. ‘Robots don’t dream,’ he corrected himself. ‘I never thought that I would get the chance to have a human friend. And there is no other human I would have chosen. You are the best of your species, astronaut George.’

Unexpectedly George felt a lump in his throat. ‘Aw, Boltz!’ he said. ‘You’ve been the best of robots. No, actually’ – he cleared his throat – ‘the best of friends, robot or human.’

Boltzmann smiled, then reached over with his metal pincer hands and undid George’s straps.

‘Yes!’ said the robot. ‘I don’t know about you but I’m ready to stretch my legs!’

‘Aren’t we a bit high up off the ground? Will my bones break if I jump out?’

‘Fortunately,’ said Boltzmann, peering out of the window, ‘by landing the ship upright – a clever manoeuvre, even if I say so myself – I seem to have crushed the bottom half and we’re much lower down than we should be. So your bones should be able to withstand the descent.’

On the day of the launch, they had boarded the huge spacecraft through an umbilical tower, which had raised them up to the entry point. As George peered out of the window, he could see that Boltzmann was correct. It was still quite a way down to the surface of this planet – Earth? – but it was jumpable, just about, although the windows must have got really dirty during landing as he couldn’t see much of a view – only a sort of flat whiteness.

‘Where have we landed?’ George checked the control panel of the spaceship to try and gain some clues as to where they were.

But the spaceship had come home to die. Once an adventurer that had charged beyond the edges of the solar system itself, now the Artemis was no more than scrap metal, blank screens and pointless switches.

‘None of my devices are connecting either,’ said Boltzmann. ‘I don’t understand why. I hope this is Earth. I don’t feel emotionally prepared to greet a new planet right now.’

‘Well!’ said George. ‘There’s a more practical problem. If this isn’t Earth, I might not be able to breathe the atmosphere …’

‘I’ll go first,’ said Boltzmann in a noble voice, ‘and test the conditions. I may be gone some time …’

‘Thanks,’ muttered George, who wasn’t in the slightest bit worried about Boltzmann stepping out of the ship. Testing the conditions was in no way as dangerous for a robot as it was for a human being. He peered out of the window again. Where on Earth – literally – were they?

‘Are you excited?’ asked Boltzmann as he busied himself around the exit hatch.

‘Yes!’ said George. ‘I want to see my mum and dad. And Annie! And find out what’s been going on. What was that weird message she sent us? I hope they’ve managed to fix everything by now … and I’m hungry! I’d like some real food …’

‘Personally,’ said the robot, ‘or robotically, I can’t wait to catch up with my robot brethren on Earth and share my insights into the human condition. I think they will be fascinated to hear—’

‘Yup!’ said George, cutting off Boltzmann’s musings, which he had heard quite a few times on the space journey. ‘Well, come on then. Let’s get out of this spaceship before it switches itself off and we’re stuck in here for ever.’

‘Ta-dah!’ said the robot as the hatch swung open, giving them a panoramic view of the world beyond – except the visibility was so bad they couldn’t really see anything at all. Air blew in, carrying sticky sand and sooty particles that stuck to them.

‘Bleugh!’ said Boltzmann, trying to brush the tiny flakes off his metal carapace. ‘I don’t remember Earth being this dirty. But good news! You can breathe the air – I’ve run a test and its composition is just about safe for you.’

‘What do you mean just about safe?’ said George, coughing as he took off his helmet. The air tasted nasty and had a gritty feel to it.

‘The carbon-dioxide content seems very high,’ said the robot dubiously. ‘Higher than I remember. Way less oxygen and far more greenhouse gases. But I think you’ll survive for at least a few minutes.’

George spluttered a few times as he stuck his head out of the hatch and looked around. He realized that the windows of the spaceship hadn’t been dirty – there was simply nothing to see except a blank, featureless desert stretching for miles in all directions, broken only by knobbly, stunted trees. Flinging one leg out of the side of the spacecraft, he prepared to throw himself down onto the surface.

For as long as he could remember, he had dreamed of the moment he climbed out of a spaceship and took a step on a new planet. This felt like his dream had turned into a nightmare – a near crash-landing somewhere on Earth. At least, he hoped it was Earth. But it was a remote and bleak spot and there was no one to greet them, nor any signs of home.

George shinned down to the ground, his spacesuit easily gripping the outside of the spacecraft, which was gluey from the thick air in this strange location where they had landed. Boltzmann followed, plonking his huge metallic feet down on the sandy earth, which was strewn with small rocks. George swayed as he tried to steady himself, the impact of gravity weighing very heavily on him.

‘Look!’ said Boltzmann, pointing at his feet. ‘We’re standing in a river bed!’

‘We are?’ said George, examining the cracked surface for clues. ‘But where’s the water?’

‘What a sad place,’ said George, puffing out his cheeks. ‘Why did the Artemis come here? What made it choose this spot?’

‘It definitely wanted to land here,’ said the robot. ‘It chose the journey and the destination – we’ve just been passengers all along. My master must have programmed it this way.’

‘Why would he do that?’ said George. ‘Why would he program the Artemis to fly through space only to return to this dump? There’s nothing here!’

They stood together and surveyed the scene, the boy in his spacesuit and the huge blackened robot gazing out across the empty land.

The space rations had just lasted until they landed. Now, as the sun beat down on this dry desert, George realized he needed to find water soon.

But, as they were both staring at the heat haze in the distance, they failed to notice something approaching from behind. Before they knew it, a group of tiny robots making faint clicking noises streamed right past them, tearing towards their spaceship. As soon as the mini bots reached the ship, they started to dismantle it, pulling it to pieces with remarkable efficiency and speed.

‘Hey!’ shouted George. ‘That’s my ship!’ But the tiny bots paid no attention. They couldn’t have been less interested. Entirely focused on destroying the spacecraft, the bots removed the ship’s Artemis nameplate and broke it up into pieces.

‘Let me try,’ said Boltzmann confidently. ‘They’ll want to talk to me.’ He strode over to the tiny robots and started addressing them. They gathered round, answering back – and it seemed as though they were laughing at him! Soon the little bots turned back to the ship, cutting it into segments and carrying each piece away like a column of ants. Boltzmann walked heavily back to George, who was now feeling a horrible combination of travel sickness, gravity sickness, Earth sickness, home sickness and air sickness.

‘I don’t know,’ admitted the robot. ‘At first, I didn’t understand anything they said – but they thought I was hilarious! I worked out that they were calling me “V minus one point zero”.’

‘V minus one point zero?’ repeated George hazily. ‘You were the most advanced robot on Earth when we took off.’ He felt very uneasy and a bit nauseous. ‘Did they tell you where we are?’

‘What do you mean?’ asked George, who was now leaning on Boltzmann as he was finding it hard to stand. He felt so heavy after all his time floating about in space. It wasn’t a good feeling – if he could have gone straight back to space at that moment, he would have.

‘Here’s the very not ha-ha bit,’ said Boltzmann. ‘The coordinates for this place tally with our point of departure – we are close to the launch pad from which we blasted off.’

‘What?’ said George. His head was spinning. ‘I’m standing in a dried-up river bed in the middle of a desert and you’re telling me that it has the coordinates for Kosmodrome 2? But that was in the middle of the countryside, not that far from Foxbridge itself!’

At that moment, a particularly vicious gust of wind sent a flurry of soot into their faces.

‘The bots must have got it wrong,’ said George, spitting out some of the larger fragments that had blown into his mouth. ‘This can’t be my home.’

‘I am afraid it is,’ said Boltzmann. ‘I think the Artemis has brought us home. Over there’ – he pointed at the bald desert – ‘is where Foxbridge should be.’

George opened his eyes to find himself lying on the hard, dusty desert floor with Boltzmann leaning over him, his face anxious and worried.

‘You’re awake!’ said the robot joyously. ‘Mother of all boards, I thought you had fallen into a coma!’

George struggled to sit up. He was dazed – by the bright sunshine, the endless, timeless journey, the near crash-landing, and by this bizarre news. What did it mean that this place had the coordinates for the countryside around Foxbridge, his home? What had happened here to change it from peaceful green fields to this uninhabited desert? Why was it now called Eden? The only things he could see were the hi-tech mini bots devouring his battered spaceship at top speed – and a landscape so empty it looked as though it had been scrubbed clean of all signs of life.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said, reaching out a hand to Boltzmann to steady himself. He felt a rising tide of panic rush upwards through his spinal cord and into his brain.

‘It is rather difficult to process,’ said Boltzmann uneasily. ‘The world seems to have moved on much faster than we expected during the brief time of our voyage. I am surprised those bots find me so amusingly outdated.’

With remarkable efficiency, the scavenger bots had almost finished dismantling the whole spacecraft. Pieces of it were disappearing across the desert, carried by streams of the tiny robots, merrily clicking as they went.

George stared at them. ‘They’ve nearly taken away all our ship! I left my lucky space patch on it!’

‘I think that’s gone for ever now,’ said Boltzmann. ‘The Artemis is finished.’

‘What for?’ said Boltzmann sensibly. ‘We have explored space. Now it’s time to make sense of home.’

‘This can’t be home,’ said George. He felt completely baffled and overwhelmed. ‘It just can’t be. There must be some mistake.’ He thought back to the messages they had received on the ship. Had there been some kind of global wipeout while they’d briefly been in space? How could that possibly have happened? What did it all mean? Surely there was some kind of explanation for all this, and soon he’d be back with his family and Annie, having a good laugh about how wrong he’d got it all.

‘Where?’ said George, who couldn’t see anywhere to aim for. Boltzmann was right in one way, he thought. Exploring space now seemed quite straightforward in comparison to coming home!

‘We need to find water and shelter – for you. And our only hope is to follow the bots before we lose sight of them. Jump up on my back!’

George tried to obey – but it was hot, he was tired and he was wearing a cumbersome spacesuit with an oxygen tank on his back. Eventually Boltzmann managed to lift him up. He threw him over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift and started to run.

‘Ow! Ow!’ cried George. ‘This is worse than re-entry.’ Hanging over Boltzmann’s shoulder, he was being jiggled and bumped horribly as the robot flew forward with great long strides. But Boltzmann paid no attention. All his focus was on keeping the scavenger bots in vision range as the sunshine beat down on them.

But, even from upside down, George could see that they were running through a desolate place with no signs of life at all. ‘Why is there nobody here?’ he called out to Boltzmann. ‘Where are all the roads and houses and farms? And the people?’

‘I don’t know,’ said the robot. ‘Something must have happened here and driven out—’

He stopped so suddenly that George slammed into his metal back. ‘Ouch!’ complained George. ‘That hurt!’

‘Shush!’ said Boltzmann. ‘Bots ahead. And I don’t like the look of them!’

George craned his head round and saw larger, curved black robots ahead, scuttling sideways across the desert like scarab beetles. They seemed to be heading back in the direction George and Boltzmann had come from, towards the spot where the spaceship had been.

‘What are they doing?’ asked George. If he hadn’t already been hanging upside down, his hair would have been standing on end at the sight of these threatening bots, speeding with purpose across the desert.

‘Don’t know,’ said the robot. ‘At a guess, I’d say they’re guarding this place. Looks like some kind of robot patrol.’

‘From what?’ asked George, shakily getting to his feet. Why would this empty desert need guarding?

In the distance the patrol bots shimmered in the heat haze as they raced across the dust.

‘They must have picked up our landing,’ said Boltzmann quietly. ‘And they’re going to investigate.’

‘Will they find anything?’ asked George, shivering a little despite the heat.

‘Not much,’ said Boltzmann. ‘The scavengers have probably taken away all traces of the Artemis by now.’

Hanging over Boltzmann’s shoulder, George started to feel very sick. He’d been living without gravity in the spacecraft; now, being back in Earth’s gravity, moving at speed on Boltzmann’s shoulder – as well as being home but not recognizing anything – was a brain-bending, stomach-churning experience. He couldn’t figure it out at all, so his mind just had to settle down to the rhythm of Boltzmann’s pounding footsteps.

But, just as George had almost got used to it, Boltzmann twisted his great robot head 180 degrees round on his metal shoulders and looked behind him. And then he sped up, still looking backwards.

‘They’ve spotted us,’ said Boltzmann. ‘The patrol. And they’re gaining on us.’

Boltzmann was going faster and faster now, George bobbing up and down over his shoulder with each long stride, dust bursting up from the dry ground.

‘Can you spot anywhere to go?’ said George. All he could see was more empty ground stretching as far as the horizon.

‘Nope,’ said Boltzmann, whose eyes were still on the patrol bots behind him. ‘They are getting closer.’

George lifted his head and pointed. ‘But what’s that? Look! Over here!’A dust cloud was crossing the desert, indicating that something or someone was travelling at speed straight for them.

‘My head is stuck!’ Boltzmann sounded as close to panic as a robot ever gets as he realized that he couldn’t wind his head back round to face forward. ‘I can’t see where you are pointing.’

About the Book

About the Author

Contents

Also by Lucy Hawking