SENDER ID: UNKNOWN
MESSAGE LOCATION: EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL
‘We are going on a great cosmic journey. So listen up, Savers of Planet Earth, and prepare to meet the Universe!’
George’s best friend Annie needs help – fast. There’s trouble with the robot her scientist father has sent to Mars and Annie has discovered something strange on the super-computer, Cosmos …
Is it a message from an alien? Could there be life out there?
George and Annie must solve some cosmis clues and take part in an action-packed treasure hunt across the galaxy!
From Lucy Hawking and Professor Stephen Hawking, the most famous science genius in the world!
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
The Latest Scientific Theories!
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Epilogue
Picture Section
Acknowledgements
About the Authors
Also by Lucy and Stephen Hawking
About the Illustrator
Copyright
Note:
Some words and phrases in this book are underlined. These are links you can click to read more information. You can always find your way back to where you were in the story by clicking the link at the end of the section.
There are a number of fabulous science essays that appear within the story to give readers a fascinating real insight into some of the latest theories. These have been written by the following eminent scientists:
Why Do We Go into Space?
by Professor Stephen Hawking (writing as ‘Eric’),
Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, University of Cambridge, UK
A Voyage Across the Universe
by Professor Bernard Carr,
Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy, School of Mathematical Sciences, Queen Mary, University of London, UK
Getting in Touch with Aliens
by Dr Seth Shostak,
SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrials Institute), USA
Did Life Come from Mars?
by Dr Brandon Carter,
Laboratoire de l’Univers et de ses Théories,
Observatoire de Paris-Meudon, France
Is There Anyone Out There?
by Lord Martin Rees,
President of the Royal Society, Trinity College,
University of Cambridge, UK
How to Find a Planet in Space
by Professor Geoff Marcy,
Professor of Astronomy, University of Berkeley, California, USA; winner of the Shaw Prize for Astronomy
The Goldilocks Zone
by Professor Geoff Marcy
How to Understand the Universe
by Professor Stephen Hawking (writing as ‘Eric’)
‘T MINUS SEVEN minutes and thirty seconds,’ said a robotic voice. ‘Orbiter access arm retracted.’
George gulped and shifted his bottom in the Commander’s seat on the space shuttle. This, finally, was it. There was no getting off the spaceship now. In just a few short minutes – minutes that were ticking by far faster than the endless ones of the last class at school – he’d be leaving planet Earth behind and flying into the cosmos.
Now that the Orbiter access arm, which formed the bridge between his spacecraft and the outside world, had been taken away, George knew he’d missed his final chance to leave. This was one of the last stages before lift-off. It meant the connecting hatches were closing. And they weren’t just closing – they were being sealed. Now, even if he hammered on the hatches and begged to be let out, there would be no one on the other side to hear him. The astronauts were alone with their mighty spacecraft, with just minutes to go before take-off. There was nothing to do now but wait for the countdown to reach zero.
‘T minus six minutes and fifteen seconds. Perform APU pre-start.’ The APUs – the Auxiliary Power Units – helped to steer the shuttle during launch and landing. They were powered by three fuel cells, which had been running for hours already. But this command made the shuttle hum with life, as though the spaceship knew its moment of glory was not far off now.
‘T minus five minutes,’ said the voice. ‘Go for APU start.’
George’s stomach quivered with butterflies. Above all things in the Universe, he wanted to fly through space once more. And now here he was, on board a real spaceship with astronauts inside it, waiting on a launch pad for lift-off. It was exciting but scary at the same time. What if he got something wrong? He was in the Commander’s seat, which meant he was in charge of operating the shuttle. Next to him sat his pilot, who was there as the Commander’s back-up. ‘So, you’re all astronauts on some kind of star trek?’ he muttered to himself in a silly voice.
‘What was that, Commander?’ came a voice over George’s headset.
‘Oh, er, um …’ said George, who’d forgotten that launch control could hear every word he said. ‘Just wondering what aliens might say to us, if we run into any.’
Launch control laughed. ‘You be sure to tell them we all said hi.’
‘T minus three minutes and three seconds. Engines to start position.’
Vroom vroom, thought George to himself. The three engines and the two solid rocket boosters would provide the speed during the first few seconds of lift-off, when the shuttle would be moving at 100 miles per hour before it even cleared the launch tower. It would only take eight and a half minutes to reach a speed of 17,500 miles an hour!
‘T minus two minutes. Close visors.’ George’s fingers itched to flip a couple of the thousands of switches in front of him, just to see what would happen, but he didn’t dare. In front of him was the joystick that he, the Commander, would use to steer the shuttle once they got into space, and then to dock with the International Space Station. It was like being in charge of the steering wheel of a car, except that the joystick moved in all sorts of directions rather than just left and right. It could go backwards and forwards as well. He put one finger on the top of the joystick, just to see what that felt like. One of the electronic graphs in front of him shivered very slightly as he did so. He snatched his hand back and pretended he hadn’t touched anything.
‘T minus fifty-five seconds. Perform solid rocket booster lock out.’ The two solid rocket boosters would blast the space shuttle off the pad and up to around 230 miles above the Earth. They didn’t have an ‘off’ switch. Once they were ignited, the space shuttle was going up.
Goodbye, Earth, thought George. I’ll be back soon. He felt a twinge of sadness at leaving his beautiful planet, his friends and his family behind. In just a short time he would be orbiting over their heads when the shuttle docked with the International Space Station. He would be able to look down and see the Earth as the ISS whizzed overhead, completing a full orbit once every ninety minutes. From space, he would be able to see the outlines of continents, oceans, deserts, forests and lakes, and the lights of big cities at night. Looking up from Earth, his mum and dad and his friends, Eric, Annie and Susan, would only see him as a tiny bright dot moving fast across the sky on a clear night.
‘T minus thirty-one seconds. Ground launcher sequencer go for auto sequence.’
The astronauts wriggled slightly in their seats, wanting to get comfortable before their long journey. Inside the cockpit, it felt surprisingly small and cramped. Just getting into position for take-off had been a squeeze and George had needed the help of a space engineer to clamber into his seat. The space shuttle stood upright for lift-off, so everything in the cockpit seemed as though it had been turned on its bottom. The seat was tilted right back so that George’s feet were pointing up towards the nose of the shuttle and his spine was in line with the ground underneath.
The shuttle was in rocket mode, waiting to go vertically through the sky, clouds and atmosphere, way up into the cosmos itself.
‘T minus sixteen seconds,’ the robotic voice said very calmly. ‘Activate sound suppression water. T minus fifteen seconds.’
‘Take-off minus fifteen seconds, Commander George,’ said the pilot in the seat next to George’s. ‘The space shuttle launches in fifteen seconds and counting.’
‘Woo-hoo!’ cheered George. Yikes! he thought.
‘Woo-hoo to you too, Commander,’ replied launch control. ‘Have a good flight.’
George shivered with excitement. Every breath he took counted down towards the great launch itself.
‘T minus ten seconds. Free hydrogen burn-off system ignition. Ground launcher sequencer go for main engine start.’
This was it! It was really happening!
Looking out of the window, George could see a strip of green grass and, above it, the blue sky where birds wheeled about. Lying on his back in his astronaut’s seat, he tried to feel calm and in control.
‘T minus six seconds,’ said the announcer. ‘Main engine start.’ George felt an incredible shaking as the three main engines started, even though the shuttle wasn’t yet moving. Through his headset, he heard launch control again.
‘We are go for launch at T minus five seconds and counting. Five, four, three, two, one. You are go for launch.’
‘Yes,’ said George very calmly, although inside he was screaming. ‘We are go for launch.’
‘T minus zero. Solid rocket booster ignition.’
The shaking increased. Underneath George and the other astronauts, the two rocket boosters ignited. It was like being kicked sharply in the backside. With a huge roar, the rockets broke through the silence, propelling the space shuttle off the launch pad and up into the skies. George felt as though he had blasted off from Earth while strapped to an enormous firework. Anything could happen now – it could explode; it could veer off course and crash back to Earth or head up into the skies and spin out of control. And there would be nothing George could do about it.
Through the window, he saw the blue of the Earth’s atmosphere all around the spaceship, but he could no longer see the Earth itself – he was leaving his own planet! A few seconds after launch and the shuttle performed a roll so that the astronauts were upside down, under the big orange fuel tank!
‘A r r r g g g g h h h!’ yelled George. ‘We’re upside down! We’re flying into space the wrong way up! Help! Help!’
‘It’s OK, Commander!’ said the pilot. ‘We always do it this way.’
Two minutes after launch George felt a huge jolt which rocked the whole spacecraft.
‘What was that?’ he cried.
Out of the window, he saw first one and then the second rocket booster detach and fly away from the shuttle in a great big arc.
It was suddenly quiet now that the rocket boosters had gone; so quiet it was nearly silent inside the Orbiter. He looked through the window and wanted to fill the silence with cheering. The shuttle rolled around again so that the Orbiter was once more on top of the big orange fuel tank rather than underneath it.
After eight minutes and thirty seconds in the air – George felt like entire centuries could have passed by and he wouldn’t have noticed – the three main engines shut down and the external fuel tank detached.
‘There she goes!’ whistled his pilot, and through the window George saw the huge orange fuel tank disappear from view to burn up in the atmosphere.
Outside, they passed the boundary line where the blue of the Earthly sky turns into the black of outer space. Around them, distant stars shone. They were still climbing higher but they didn’t have much further to go before they reached their maximum height.
‘All systems are good,’ said George’s pilot, checking all the flashing lights on the panels. ‘Heading for orbit. Commander, will you take us into orbit?’
‘I will,’ said George confidently, now speaking to mission control in Texas. ‘Houston’ – he said the most famous word in the history of space travel – ‘we are go for orbit. Do you read me, Houston? This is Atlantis. We are go for orbit.’
In the darkness outside, the stars suddenly looked very bright and very close. One of them seemed to be zooming towards him, shining a bright light directly into his face, so close and so brilliant that—
He woke up with a start and found himself in an unfamiliar bed with someone flashing a torch in his face.
‘George!’ the figure hissed. ‘George! Get up! It’s an emergency!’
IT HADN’T BEEN easy to decide what to wear. ‘Come as your favourite space object,’ he’d been told by Eric Bellis, the scientist next door, who had invited George to his fancy-dress party. The problem was, George had so many favourite outer-space objects he hadn’t known which one to pick.
Should he dress up as Saturn with its rings?
Perhaps he could go as Pluto, the poor little planet that wasn’t a planet any more?
Or could he go as the darkest, most powerful force in the Universe, a black hole? He didn’t think too long or hard about that – amazing, huge and fascinating as black holes are, they didn’t really count as his favourite space objects. It would be quite hard to get fond of something that was so greedy it swallowed up anything and everything – including light – that came too close.
In the end George had his mind made up for him. He’d been looking at images of the Solar System on the internet with his dad when they came across a picture sent back from a Mars rover, one of the robots exploring the planet’s surface. It showed what looked like a person standing on the red planet. As soon as he saw the photo, George knew he wanted to go to Eric’s party as the Man from Mars. Even George’s dad, Terence, got excited when he saw it. Of course, they both knew it wasn’t really a Martian in the picture – it was just an illusion caused by a trick of the light that made a rocky outcrop look like a person. But it was exciting to imagine that we might not be alone in this vast Universe after all.
‘Dad, do you think there is anyone out there?’ asked George as they gazed at the photo. ‘Like Martians or beings in faraway galaxies? And if there are, do you think they might come and visit us?’
‘If there are,’ said his dad, ‘I expect they’re looking at us and wondering what we must be like – to have this beautiful, wonderful planet and make such a mess of it. They must think we’re really stupid.’ He shook his head sadly.
Both George’s parents were eco-warriors, on a mission to save the Earth. As part of their campaign, up until now electrical gadgets like telephones and computers had been banned from the house. But when George had won the first prize in the school science competition – his very own computer – his mum and dad didn’t have the heart to say he couldn’t keep it.
In fact, since they’d had the computer in the house, George had shown them how to use it and had even helped them put together a very snappy virtual advert featuring a huge photo of Venus. WHO WOULD WANT TO LIVE HERE? it said in big letters. Clouds of sulphuric acid, temperatures of up to 470 degrees Celsius … The seas have dried up and the atmosphere is so thick, sunlight can’t break through. This is Venus. But if we’re not careful, this could be the Earth. Would you want to live on a planet like this? George was very proud of the poster, which his parents and their friends had emailed all around the world to promote their cause.
Venus is the brightest object in the sky after the Sun and the Moon. Named after the Roman goddess of beauty, Venus has been known since prehistoric times. Ancient Greek astronomers thought it was two stars, one that shone in the morning, Phosphorus, the bringer of light; and one in the evening, Hesperus, until Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras realized they were one and the same object.
It has a very thick, toxic atmosphere, mostly made of carbon dioxide with clouds of sulphuric acid. These clouds are so dense that they trap heat, making Venus the hottest planet in the Solar System, with surface temperatures of up to 470 degrees Celsius – so hot that lead would melt there. The pressure of the atmosphere is 90 times greater than Earth’s. This means that if you stood on the surface of Venus, you would feel the same pressure as you would at the bottom of a very deep ocean on Earth.
The dense spinning clouds of Venus don’t just trap the heat. They also reflect the light of the Sun, which is why the planet shines so brightly in the night sky. Venus may have had oceans in the past, but the water was vaporized by the greenhouse effect and escaped from the planet.
Some scientists believe that the runaway ‘greenhouse’ effect on Venus is similar to conditions that might prevail on Earth if global warming isn’t checked.
Since Mariner 2 in 1962, Venus has been visited by space probes more than 20 times. The first space probe ever to land on another planet was the Soviet Venera 7 which landed on Venus in 1970; Venera 9 sent back photos of the surface – but it didn’t have long to do it: the space probe melted after just 60 minutes on the hostile planet! The US orbiter, Magellan, later used radar to send back images of the details of the surface of Venus, which had previously been hidden by the thick clouds of its atmosphere.
Venus rotates in the opposite direction from the Earth! If you could see the sun through its thick clouds, it would rise in the west and set in the east. This is called retrograde motion; the direction in which the Earth turns is called prograde.
A year on Venus takes less time than a day there! Because Venus turns so slowly, it revolves all the way around the Sun in a shorter time than it takes to rotate once on its axis.
About twice a century Venus passes between the Earth and the Sun. This is called the transit of Venus. These transits always happen in pairs eight years apart. Since the telescope was invented, transits have been observed in 1631 and 1639; 1761 and 1769; and 1874 and 1882. On 8 June 2004 astronomers saw the tiny dot of Venus crawl across the Sun; the second in this pair of early 21st-century transits will occur on 6 June 2012.
Given what he knew about Venus, George felt pretty sure that there wasn’t any life to be found on that smelly, hot planet. So he didn’t even consider going to Eric’s party dressed as a Venusian. Instead, he got his mum, Daisy, to help him with an outfit of dark orange bobbly clothes and a tall pointy hat so he looked just like the photo of the ‘Martian’ they’d found.
Wearing his costume, George now waved goodbye to his parents – who had a big evening planned, helping some eco-friends make organic treats for a party of their own – and squeezed through the gap in the fence between his garden and Eric’s. The gap had come about when George’s pet pig, Freddy (given to him by his gran), had escaped from his pigsty, barged through the fence and broken into Eric’s house via the back door. Following the trail of hoof prints that Freddy had left behind him, George had ended up meeting his new neighbours, who had only just moved into the empty house next door. This chance encounter with Eric and his family had changed George’s life for ever.
Eric had shown George his amazing computer, Cosmos, who was so clever and so powerful that he could draw doorways through which Eric, his daughter Annie, and George could walk to visit any part of the known Universe.
But space can be very dangerous, as George found out when one of their space adventures ended with Cosmos exploding from the sheer effort of mounting the rescue mission.
Since that day, Cosmos had stopped working so George hadn’t had another chance to step through the doorway and travel around the Solar System and beyond. He missed Cosmos, but at least he had Eric and Annie – he could see them any time he wanted, even if he couldn’t go on adventures into outer space with them.
George scampered up the garden path to Eric’s back door. The house was brightly lit, with chatter and music pouring out. Opening the door, he let himself into the kitchen.
He couldn’t see Annie, Eric or Annie’s mum, Susan, but there were lots of other people milling about: one grown-up immediately pushed a plate of shiny silver-iced muffins under his nose. ‘Have a meteorite!’ he said cheerfully. ‘Or perhaps I should say – have a meteoroid!’
‘Oh … um, well, thanks,’ said George, a bit startled. ‘They look delicious,’ he added, helping himself to one.
‘If I did this,’ continued the man, tipping some of the buns onto the floor, ‘then I could say, “Have a meteorite!” because then they would have hit the ground. But when I offered them to you, suspended in the air, they were – technically – still meteoroids.’ He beamed at George and then at the buns, which were lying in a pile on the floor at his feet. ‘You get the distinction – a meteoroid is a chunk of rock that flies through the air; a meteorite is what you call that piece of rock if it lands on the Earth. So now I’ve dropped them on the floor, we can call them meteorites.’
With the bun in his hand, George smiled politely, nodded and started backing away slowly.
‘Ouch!’ He heard a squeak as he trod on someone behind him.
‘Oops!’ he said, turning round.
‘It’s OK, it’s only me!’ It was Annie, dressed all in black. ‘You couldn’t have seen me anyway cos I’m invisible!’ She swiped the bun out of George’s hand and stuffed it into her mouth. ‘You only know I’m here because of the effect I have on objects around me. What does that makes me?’
‘A black hole, of course!’ said George. ‘You swallow anything that comes near you, you greedy pig.’
‘Nope!’ said Annie triumphantly. ‘I knew you’d say that but that’s wrong! I am’ – she looked very pleased with herself – ‘dark matter.’
‘What’s that?’ asked George.
‘No one knows,’ said Annie, mysteriously. ‘We can’t see it but it seems to be absolutely essential to keep galaxies from flying apart. What are you?’
‘Um, well,’ said George, ‘I’m the man from Mars – y’know, from the pictures.’
‘Oh yeah!’ said Annie. ‘You can be my Martian ancestor. That’s cool.’
Around them, the party was buzzing. Groups of the most oddly dressed grown-ups stood eating and drinking and talking at the tops of their voices. One man had come dressed as a microwave oven, another as a rocket. There was a lady wearing a badge shaped like an exploding star and a man with a mini satellite dish on his head. One scientist was bouncing around in a bright green suit, ordering people to ‘Take me to your leader’; another was blowing up an enormous balloon stamped with the words THE UNIVERSE IS INFLATING. A man dressed all in red kept standing next to people and then stepping away from them, daring them to guess what he was. Next to him was a scientist wearing lots of different-sized hula-hoop rings around his middle, each one with a different-sized ball attached to it. When he walked, his hula hoops all spun around him.
‘Annie,’ said George urgently, ‘I don’t understand any of these costumes. What have they come as?’
‘Um, well, they’ve all come as things you find in space, if you know how to look for them,’ said Annie.
‘Like what?’ asked George.
‘Well, like the man dressed in red,’ explained Annie. ‘He keeps stepping away from people, which means he’s pretending to be the redshift.’
‘The what?’
‘If a distant object in the Universe, like a galaxy, is moving away from you, its light will appear more red than otherwise. So he’s dressed in red and he is moving away from people to show them he’s come as the redshift. And the others have come as all sorts of cosmic stuff that you find out there – like microwaves and faraway planets.’
One of the most important things in the Universe is the Electromagnetic Field. It reaches everywhere; not only does it hold atoms together, but it also makes tiny parts of atoms (called electrons) bind different atoms together or create electric currents. Our everyday world is built from very large numbers of atoms stuck together by the electromagnetic field; even living things, like human beings, rely on it to exist and to function.
Jiggling an electron creates waves in the field – this is like jiggling a finger in your bath and making ripples in the water. These waves are called electromagnetic waves, and because the field is everywhere, the waves can travel far across the Universe, until stopped by other electrons that can absorb their energy. They come in many different types, but some affect the human eye, and we know these as the various colours of visible light. Other types include radio waves, microwaves, infrared, ultraviolet, X-rays and gamma rays. Electrons are jiggled all the time – by atoms that are constantly jiggling too – so there are always electromagnetic waves being produced by objects. At room temperature they are mainly infrared, but in much hotter objects the jiggling is more violent, and produces visible light.
Very hot objects in space, such as stars, produce visible light, which may travel a very long way before hitting something. When you look at a star, the light from it may have been moving serenely through space for hundreds of years. It enters your eye and, by jiggling electrons in your retina, turns into electricity, which is sent along the optic nerve to your brain; and your brain says: ‘I can see a star!’ If the star is very far away you may need a telescope to collect enough of the light for your eye to detect; or the jiggled electrons could instead create a photograph or send a signal to a computer.
The Universe is constantly expanding, inflating like a balloon. This means that distant stars and galaxies are moving away from Earth. This stretches their light as it travels through space towards us – the further it travels, the more stretched it becomes. The stretching makes visible light look redder – which is known as the redshift. Eventually, if it travelled and redshifted far enough, the light would no longer be visible, and would become first infrared and then microwave radiation (as used on Earth in microwave ovens). This is just what has happened to the incredibly powerful light produced by the Big Bang – after 13 billion years of travelling it is detectable today as microwaves coming from every direction in space. This has the grand title of Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, and is nothing less than the afterglow of the Big Bang itself.
Annie said all this matter of factly, as though it was quite normal to know this kind of information and be able to rattle it off at parties. But once again, George felt a little jealous of her. He loved science and was always reading books, looking up articles on the internet and pestering Annie’s scientist father, Eric, with questions. He wanted to be a scientist when he grew up, so he could learn everything there was to know and maybe make some amazing discovery of his own. Annie, on the other hand, was much more casual about the wonders of the Universe.
When George had first met her, she’d wanted to be a ballerina, but now she’d changed her mind and decided on being a footballer. Instead of spending her time after school in a pink and white tutu, she now charged around the back garden hammering a football past George, who was always made to stand in goal. And yet she still seemed to know far more about science than he did.
Annie’s dad, Eric, now appeared, dressed in his normal clothes and looking no different from usual.
‘Eric,’ cried George, who was bursting with questions, ‘what have you come as?’
‘Oh, me?’ Eric smiled. ‘I’m the only intelligent life form in the Universe,’ he said modestly.
‘What?’ asked George. ‘You mean you’re the only intelligent person in the whole Universe?’
Eric laughed. ‘Don’t say that too loudly round here,’ he told George, gesturing to all the other scientists. ‘Otherwise people will get very upset. I meant, I’ve come as a human being, which is the only intelligent form of life in the Universe that we know about. So far.’
‘Oh,’ said George. ‘But what about all your friends? What have they come as? And why does red light mean something is going away? I don’t understand.’
‘Well,’ said Eric kindly, ‘you’d understand if someone explained it to you.’
‘Can you explain it to me?’ pleaded George. ‘All about the Universe? Like you did with the black holes? Can you tell me about red thingies and dark matter and everything else?’
‘Oh dear,’ said Eric, sounding rather regretful. ‘George, I’d love to tell you all about the Universe, but the problem is, I’m just not sure I’ll have time before I have to … Hang on a second …’ He trailed off and gazed into the distance, the way he did when he was having an idea. He took off his glasses and polished them on his shirt, setting them on his nose at the same wonky angle as before. ‘I’ve got it!’ he cried, sounding very excited. ‘I know what we need to do! Hold on, George, I’ve got a clever plan.’
With that, he picked up a soft hammer and struck a huge brass gong, which rang out with a deep, humming chime.
‘Right, gather round, everyone,’ said Eric, waving everyone into the room. ‘Come on, come on, hurry up! I’ve got something to say.’
A ripple of excitement went through the crowd.
‘Now then,’ he went on, ‘I’ve gathered the Order of Science here today for this party—’
‘Hurray!’ cheered someone at the back.
‘And I want us to put our minds to some questions my young friend George has asked me. He wants to know all sorts of things! For a start, I’m sure he’ll want to know what your costume is!’ He pointed to the man wearing the hula hoops.
‘I’ve come to the party,’ piped up the cheerful-looking scientist, ‘as a distant planetary system where we might find another planet Earth.’
‘Annie,’ whispered George, ‘isn’t that what Doctor Reeper did? Find new planets?’
Dr Reeper was a former colleague of Eric’s who wanted to use science for his own selfish purposes. He had told Eric he’d found an exoplanet – that is, a planet in orbit around a star other than the Earth’s Sun – that might be able to support human life. But the directions he’d given Eric had been bogus – in fact, in his search for the planet, they had sent Eric dangerously close to a black hole. Dr Reeper had been trying to get rid of Eric so he could control Cosmos, Eric’s super-computer. But his evil trick hadn’t worked and Eric had returned safely from his trip inside a black hole.