The Last Notebook of Leonardo (11 page)

“Um, Dad,” I said, “how exactly did Leonardo get
his
nuclear fuel?”

“He mined it, of course. What do you think? When he saw glowing rocks, that's what gave him the idea of building a spaceship. Genius, I tell you. But it'll take us months to mine enough, even if we can find the right place to dig. And we'd need a permit.”

“What about glow-in-the-dark clocks?” I said.

“I have one of those,” Noma said. “You're of course welcome to use it.”

“Glow in the dark . . . glow in the. . . .” Dad paused and thought for a moment. “If we get enough of them,” he said, “and scrape off the radium into the fuel tank, it would work, of course. But we'd need a darn lot of them.”

Since we couldn't think of any other solution, we decided that Noma and I would drive through the nearby towns and buy all the glow-in-the-dark clocks we could find. Dad would stay behind with the spaceship. Noma said that he aught to concentrate on fine-tuning the mechanism. But the real reason was to avoid a stir if he showed up in town. It was simpler to leave him behind. Besides, I don't think he enjoyed riding in a car. It was too cramped for him.

For the next few days, Noma and I drove through Ipskunk, which was about a two-hundred-house town, and Grand Skid, which was a small city, and Uppington, and Skaggton, and about a dozen other towns. Every time we passed a likely store, I would jump out and investigate. Noma preferred to sit in the car resting her knees. We found out, of course, that any regular store that sold clocks didn't have any glow-in-the-dark models with radium. All they had were plug-in digital clocks. Only antique stores and auction houses had the clocks that we wanted. Sometimes I would find eleven or twelve in one store, and
sometimes just one. Luckily they weren't expensive. At the end of each day we'd come home with the back seat of the car clattering with old clocks. Then in the evening we would pry open the front of each clock and scrape the glowing green stuff into a cup, and Dad would pour the cup into the fuel tank, which was a steel gas tank from a tractor. After about three days Dad said that we had enough. He stuck a twig into the fuel tank to see how full it was, and when he was satisfied he screwed the cover back on. He said that a little bit of nuclear fuel would get us a long way, and since we were only going to the moon and hopefully back again, we didn't need a full tank. We were ready to launch.

It was the last day of December, and Noma suggested that we wait until midnight. Our launch would be our New Year's celebration. We would be like a firecracker shooting up into the air. I hoped we wouldn't explode.

Toward the moon.

We climbed through the hatch into the interior. It was surprisingly comfortable. Dad had put an old car seat in the wagon, and up front, for the driver, a reclining chair with a footrest. It was a big wagon, so we had a lot of room, even with Dad in there with us. We had a Styrofoam ice chest packed with cold chicken and egg salad. Under the seat we had a few sacks of potatoes for Dad, and we had some gallon jugs of water for all of us. We had a lot of other stuff in a trunk strapped on the roof, such as Dad's two boxes of papers and a stack of books and some extra clothes, but we couldn't get to the trunk without going outside the ship, which didn't seem likely in space. Maybe it would be possible once we reached the moon. According to Dad, space was very cold, but he had insulated the spaceship with the arctic survival quilt, and so we should be okay. Leonardo
had suggested goose feathers, but probably our way was better.

We sat down and buckled ourselves in. Dad closed the hatch, and all the nighttime sounds of creaking trees and hooting night birds stopped suddenly. We were sealed in. I looked out the window at Noma's tiny slate-roofed house in the moonlight. Snow was falling softly through the still air, piling up on the roof and the front steps. The night looked peaceful.

Dad sat in the driver's seat surrounded by about thirty levers and handles and knobs. I hoped he knew which was which. “Here goes,” he said, and yanked down on a leather strap. I gritted my teeth and waited for the blast to shoot us up in the air, but nothing happened.

“Um, Dad,” I said, “are you sure there's enough fuel?”

“Of course there is,” he said. “It's working beautifully.”

I looked out the window and realized that we had already left the ground. Leonardo's design didn't involve rocket engines blasting us off the Earth. It was more sophisticated. We rose up gently above Noma's house, through the falling snow, and soon reached the cloud cover. It looked like a giant gray amoeba looming over us, glowing from the moon behind it. We plunged into it and when we came out on top,
we were in the clearest, brightest, starriest night I had ever seen.

“There's the moon,” Dad said, pointing out the front window. “Somebody hold the map and make sure I'm driving the right way.” He handed back a drawing of the moon with an X at our destination. All the moon's craters and pocks and streaks were neatly drawn on the map.

Dad took hold of the controls with his hands and feet and drove straight at the moon. It was a beautiful smooth ride, not like a bumpy car ride over a country road, and certainly nothing like the jerking, stop-and-go movement of a New York taxi. The Earth sped away behind us and the moon loomed bigger and bigger.

“I do wish I had brought a pack of cards,” Noma said.

We said nothing for a long time after that. We were too busy looking out the window at the stars.

We had left at midnight, past my usual bedtime, and I fell asleep about an hour later. When I woke up we were still driving. The moon looked bigger. Dad said I had slept for about five hours and it was morning now. We ate breakfast, and then Noma took out a mystery novel, settled in one corner of the seat with her feet up on the ice chest, and read by the light of the moon. I wished I had thought to
bring a book. I had nothing to do but look out the window, and although a spread of stars is an amazing thing, it was pretty much all the same. A long trip does get dull.

“Are we there yet, Dad?” I said.

“Oh stop it,” he said. “Not for a while.”

“What's the moon like? Is it hot? Should I have brought my shorts?”

“I suppose it's hot in the sun and cold in the shade. But it's nothing like you ever learned about in school. I can tell you that.”

“I never learned anything about it in school,” I said.

“That's not a surprise,” he said. “I don't know what they teach you there. How to stick your brain in a blender. If it was up to me. . . .”

I sensed another lecture on imagination coming at me, and I tried to head it off. “Tell me about the moon, Dad.”

“ The moon?” he said. “There's things the government doesn't want anyone to know. I saw some of the moon files when I was working for Spork. About forty years ago, when NASA was trying to land people on the moon, the first thing they did was to send an unmanned lander. Not too many people know about that lander. It came down picture perfect, and sat on its eight feet, and started filming. But it didn't
last more than two minutes. A tentacle whipped out from behind a rock, smacked into the camera lens, and Bam! Crack! Static. Nothing more. That was it. They never got any more photos from that lander. They never found it again.”

“Come on, Dad,” I said. “There wasn't any tentacle on the moon.”

“How do
you
know?” he said. “You never believe me, and then I turn out to be right. I'm telling you Jem, it was a tentacle.”

“ What color was it?”

“You're testing me,” Dad said. “The photos were black and white, so I don't know what color it was. But we'd better be careful up there. We'd better be ready to take off quick, if we see anything we don't understand. And we better not get too near any big rocks if we don't know what's hiding behind them.”

“Dad,” I said, “every animal I know of that has a tentacle lives in the ocean. So how many oceans are on the moon?”

“Clever,” Dad said. “But data trumps cleverness. I saw the film, and I saw the tentacle. I hope we don't get smacked by that thing, but if we do, you'll see it for yourself.”

After lunch, Noma and I played hangman and tictac-toe on the back of the moon map. She beat me almost every time. She wanted to draw out a chessboard
and use little scraps of paper for the pieces, but I got the idea that she would beat me at that too, so I said I was tired, and took a nap. When I woke up, it was time for dinner and we handed out the cold chicken and raw potatoes.

After dinner, Dad tied down the controls, which he said was Leonardo's version of cruise control, and stretched out on the reclining chair. “Everybody get a good sleep,” he said. “ We should get there tomorrow morning.”

When I opened my eyes, I panicked. We must have slept a long time without any regular daylight to wake us. Nobody had thought to set an alarm clock, and now the moon was gigantic, looming in front of us. “Dad!” I shouted. “Wake up! We're gonna crash!”

“Huh?” he said, sitting up suddenly. “I won't! You can't make me, Spork! I quit!”

“Dad, hurry up,” I shouted. “Look at the moon!”

Then he woke up all the way. “Oh right,” he said, chuckling. “Don't worry. We have a few hours yet. But thanks. We'd better start paying attention if we want to land at the right spot.”

For the next three hours we all three stared at the map and stared at the moon, and pointed this way and that, and argued over exactly the right direction, and Dad slowed down the ship considerably so that we could have time to maneuver. Leonardo had
specified a flat spot in the middle of a gigantic crater. We lowered our spaceship down into the crater, and all we could see was the blinding white sand of the walls rising up around us. Leonardo had suggested holding up a sheet of smoked glass at this stage of the journey, but Dad handed around sunglasses instead. We set down and I could hear the sand and gravel crunching under the wheels of the wagon.

“Now,” Dad said, “let's drive around. Keep your eyes peeled for any sign of Leon.”

The open plain was so bright that I had trouble seeing clearly even with my sunglasses. After we had driven around for a while, I thought I spotted something nearby in the sand. “Are those rocks, Dad, or what? They look kind of regularly spaced.”

Dad drove up closer and we could see that it wasn't rocks. It was a row of indentations in the sand. They looked like footprints.

“Are they tentacle prints?” Dad said anxiously. “Noma, can you recognize animal tracks?”

Noma stared at the prints, squinting out of her old eyes, and then shook her head and said, “How strange. They look just like bear prints. The foot is elongated and ends in a set of claws.”

“Wow!” Dad said. “I'd be surprised to find a bear walking around on the moon. But I've been surprised before. Bears are migratory, but I don't see how one
could migrate right off the Earth. What if it's a man, and he forgot to clip his toenails? Let's say Leonardo lived up here for two or three years, and forgot to bring a nail clipper with him.”

“Dad,” I said, “that's ridiculous. He would have invented a nail clipper out of a rock.”

“Not necessarily,” Dad said. “Maybe he was too busy. I think we're looking at the last footprints of Leonardo, preserved for five hundred years because there's no weather up here to wipe them out.”

“But,” I said, “how did he walk across the sand without dying from the lack of atmosphere?”

“He could have been holding his breath,” Dad said. “He got so bored sitting in his spaceship, looking at the moonscape through a window, year after year, that he finally climbed out to walk around. He held his breath as long as he could, and we'll find his mummified body at the end of the trail.”