License to Thrill (6 page)

“Approaching the Sea of Clouds,” said Moe. “Steady as you go.”

Curly and Larry busied themselves with the controls, which they carried in their clawlike hands. Coke and Pep couldn't tear their eyes away from the window.

“Only a few human beings have walked on the surface,” Pep mused out loud.

“Twelve,” Coke replied.

“How do you know that?”

“Doesn't everybody know that?” Coke asked, then reeled them off. “Armstrong, Aldrin, Conrad, Bean, Shepard, Mitchell, Irwin, Scott, Duke, Young, Schmitt, and Cernan.”

“What possible reason did you have to memorize those names?” Pep asked.

“I didn't
try
to memorize them,” Coke replied. “It just happened.”

The ship was slowing down. The twins could feel the weightlessness wearing off. Through the window, they could see the surface more clearly now. Some of the craters had debris around the circles that fanned
out in a pattern like rays of sunlight. Something must have hit the moon
hard
to create those. Coke informed his sister that one crater, called Clavius, was 146 miles wide.

“Prepare for landing,” Moe announced.

“Why are they taking us
here
?” Pep whispered to her brother.

“Beats me.”

As the ship descended to the surface, Coke spotted something familiar off in the distance—a lunar module that was used by our astronauts back in the 1970s. It had four “legs” and was partly covered with gold foil that stood out from all the black and white. It looked a little bit like a spider. There was other equipment strewn near the lunar module, and an American flag sticking in the surface of the moon.

“Look!” Coke said, pointing out the window. “It's the stuff left behind by one of the Apollo missions.”

The ship touched down with a gentle
clunk
and the engine vibrations suddenly stopped. For a moment, all was silent.

“Flog slab,” the aliens began to chant. “Flog slab. Flog slab.”

“Oh no,” Pep groaned. “Not with the
flog slab
again.”

“
Flog slab
means ‘golf balls,' remember?” Coke reminded her.

“So what?” Pep said. “What do golf balls have to do with the moon?”

Coke knew exactly what golf balls had to do with the moon. He had watched a TV documentary about it when he was in first grade.

It was all because of Alan Shepard, who was the first American in space, back in 1961. A decade later, in February of 1971, he became the fifth human being to walk on the moon, as a member of Apollo 14. When the mission was nearly complete, Shepard took two golf balls he had hidden in his space suit and dropped them on the surface. He had brought along a collapsible golf club—a six iron, to be specific. He thought it would be fun to whack golf balls on the moon.

Don't believe me? Look it up. That's why they invented the internet.

“Alan Shepard was the first and only interplanetary golfer,” Coke told his sister.

“He was also the first and only interplanetary
litterbug
,” Moe said. “What he did was disgraceful.”

“It was just a couple of golf balls,” Coke told Moe. “What's the big deal?”

“Do you think the universe is your toobleshmoot? Your garbage can?” asked Moe.

“Hey, don't look at
me
,” Coke said. “I didn't litter on the moon.”

“Wait a minute,” Pep interrupted. “Are you saying that you came all the way here to pick up a couple of golf balls that Alan Shepard left on the moon back in 1971?”

“No,” Moe told her. “I am saying that we came all the way here for
you two
to pick up the golf balls that Alan Shepard left on the moon back in 1971.”

“You gotta be kidding me,” Coke said, laughing.

“Sweegling in space is a serious offense!” Moe said. “I mean, littering.”

“But we'll
die
if we go out there!” Pep said, clinging to her brother.

That was certainly true. Aside from the fact that there's no air to breathe on the moon, the temperature during the day can reach 250 degrees. At night, it gets down to 290 degrees below zero. Nobody could survive that.

Curly and Larry came into the room with two bulky suits and helmets, not unlike the ones the Apollo astronauts had worn.

“Put these on,” Moe instructed the twins. “They will regulate your temperature and supply oxygen so
you can breathe.”

“And if we refuse?” Coke said.

“We throw you out there
without
the suits, and you die instantly,” Moe said matter-of-factly. “It is entirely your choice.”

The twins put on the suits.

As she pulled the helmet over her head, Pep was reminded of the day this whole crazy adventure had started. It was high on the cliffs just north of San Francisco. She and Coke had been walking home from school when they'd realized they were being followed by those bowler dudes in golf carts. A woman named Mya had come out of nowhere and given each of them a wingsuit to put on. They'd resisted at first, until a bowler dude had pulled out a blowgun and shot Mya in the neck with a poisoned dart. The twins had put on the wingsuits and jumped off the cliff. The suits saved their lives. Hopefully, these new suits would do it again.

“Okay,” said Moe. “Into the decompression chamber.”

The twins were led to a sealed room that separated the inside of the ship from the outside.

“Do you think we're going to die out there?” Pep asked. Coke heard her speak through a speaker system in his helmet.

“We'll know soon enough,” he replied, trying to
hide his nervousness.

“Open the exterior exit,” said Moe's voice.

A door slid open in front of them. Instinctively, the twins took a deep breath of air, as if it would be their last. It wasn't. They could breathe normally. They were looking out on the moon. In the distance, they could see rocks as big as houses.

“Be careful,” Moe's voice spoke in their helmets. “You will not be weightless, but you will weigh a lot less than you did on Earth. An object that weighs 100 pounds on your planet weighs about 17 pounds on the moon.”

Coke turned around so he could climb down the ladder backward. There were seven steps. He took them one at a time, very slowly and tentatively. After the last step, he lowered his right foot to the surface of the moon.

“That's one small step for a kid—” he started to say.

“Oh, shut up!” Pep shouted. “Let's just find the stupid golf balls and get
out
of here!”

Coke put his other foot on the surface and stepped aside so his sister could follow him down the ladder.

“Can you believe this?” Coke gushed. “We're on the moon! You're the first female on the freaking
moon
!”

“Retrieve the golf balls, please,” Moe's voice said in Coke's helmet.

It took a few minutes for Coke and Pep to get used to walking on the moon. The surface, they discovered, was a fine dust, sort of like the ash that's left over after charcoal briquettes have burned out. Their boots left footprints whenever they were lifted up.

“Going to hunt for golf balls,” Coke said.

Pep followed as he bounded away from the ship, taking increasingly larger hops as he became more comfortable in lunar gravity. There was no concern about wind or bad weather, because there was no air. There was also no sound. Sound needs air to travel. All the twins could hear was the sound inside their helmets.

“You know what I don't like about this place?” Coke asked as they hopped around searching for golf balls.

“What?” his sister asked.

“It has no atmosphere,” he replied, and then erupted into cackling laughter.

“I can't believe you're cracking jokes,” Pep said. “Did it occur to you that all these craters were caused by meteorites? How do we know another one isn't going to come down any second and flatten us?”

“Because the last big meteorite shower took place three billion years ago,” Coke told her. “So you can relax.”

Pep stopped for a moment to look up at the sky. It
was pitch-black, of course, and millions of stars from other galaxies were shining brightly. The earth sat on one side of the horizon, the sun on the other. Up until that moment, it had never occurred to her that the moon and the sun appeared to be about the same size in the sky. In fact, that's only because the sun is four hundred times farther away than the moon. The sun is
huge
, and the moon is only 2,160 miles across—shorter than the drive they took cross-country.

“I found one!” Coke suddenly shouted.

Pep rushed over to see the golf ball, halfway buried in moon dust. Coke picked it up, being careful not to topple over in the bulky suit. A few minutes later, Pep found the other golf ball about thirty yards away. She gave it to her brother to hold.

“Okay, let's get out of here before we run out of air,” Pep said.

They hopped and bounded back to the ship, taking time to stop and kick up a little moon dust along the way. When he reached the bottom of the ladder, Coke stepped aside so his sister could climb up first. He took one more long look around at the surface of the moon. This was something he wanted to remember for the rest of his life. Then he followed Pep back up the ladder and into the spaceship.

The exterior door slid shut behind them
automatically. A few seconds later the door in front of them opened. Moe, Larry, and Curly were standing there.

“Here are the dumb golf balls,” Coke said, handing them over. “On behalf of Alan Shepard and all Earthlings, we apologize for littering.”

“Apology accepted,” Moe said. “See that you don't do it again.”

I know what you're thinking, dear reader. You're thinking that this story is
totally
preposterous. There's no way Coke and Pep could have been abducted by aliens and taken to the moon to retrieve Alan Shepard's golf balls. That simply could never happen in real life.

Well, let me tell you something. If you had lived back in the 18th century and somebody told you there would eventually be cars and telephones and radio and TV and motion pictures, you would have said it was totally preposterous.

If you had lived in the 19th century and somebody told you there would eventually be airplanes and personal computers and video games and satellites, you would have said it was totally preposterous.

Even at the end of the 20th century, when your parents were children, if somebody had told them that
eventually there would be the internet and pocket-size telephones that could access virtually all the world's information in seconds, they would have said it was totally preposterous.

And yet, all those totally preposterous things happened. So who's to say it's preposterous for beings from another planet to come visit us on Earth and take us for a ride to the moon to retrieve Alan Shepard's golf balls?

Amazing things are going to happen in the 21st century, too, and the best part is that you're going to be lucky enough to witness them.

Safely back inside the ship, Coke and Pep removed the spacesuits that had kept them alive on the surface of the moon. The ship blasted off smoothly once again, and the ride back to Earth was uneventful. The twins were still so excited about what they had seen and done, the time went by quickly.

Soon the blue marble with white swirls that is planet Earth was visible. Home sweet home.

It was evening. As the ship got closer to the ground, Coke and Pep could see lights out the window. It was unclear where they were landing. For all they knew, they were in a different city, or a different country.
But at least they were home, on their own planet. That was the important thing. They could always find their way back to their parents somehow.

The ship touched down with a slight bump, and the door opened once again. Moe, Larry, and Curly walked the twins to the exit. With all they had been through, Coke and Pep expected that there might be some kind of a formal farewell. They figured that the aliens might even extend a hand of friendship or (ugh) want to give them a hug.

But none of that happened.

“You may go,” Moe said unceremoniously. “And remember, no sweegling. I mean, littering.”

“L
et's blow this pop stand!” Coke shouted as he and Pep scrambled down the ladder of the spaceship, jumping off the last few steps and tumbling to the grass. Pep got on her hands and knees and kissed the ground. It felt so good to be home.

“I can't believe we made it back,” Pep said, giggling uncontrollably. “I thought it was all over for us.”

Seconds later, the spaceship lifted off, kicking up a swirl of dust in the air. The twins shielded their faces and watched as the ship took off and disappeared as quietly as it had arrived. In seconds, it was gone.

“Wow,” Coke said. “Did that really happen, or did I just have some weird alien abduction dream?”