7 Liftoff

Chapter 7 LIFTOFF The rumbling from below was accompanied by a loud humming noise, as if a billion cats were purring into microphones and the sound was being pumped out of speakers positioned all around. Gentle vibrations washed over Coke and Pep. They could feel the hair on their arms standing on end. "This is a joke, right?" asked Coke. "I suggest you strap into the seats over there, and quickly," warned Moe. "But we have to leave!" Pep shouted. "Our parents are waiting for us back at the motel!" "Too late for that now," Moe informed them. He and the other two aliens went off to busy themselves in preparation for liftoff. If you've ever watched old videos of the Apollo missions or the space shuttles rising up

off the launch pad, it looks like everything is moving in slow motion. It takes an incredible amount of fuel—and a lot of time—to escape the grip of the earth's gravity. But this was not like that at all. Using an advanced propulsion technology that human rocket scientists can only dream about, the spaceship seemed to lift almost effortlessly off the ground and rise to treetop level. If the nation's sophisticated defense systems detected an unidentified flying object, nothing was done about it. No jets were scrambled. The president was not informed. Nobody in the area of Roswell, New Mexico, noticed anything unusual in the night sky. In seconds, the ship was gliding on a straight vertical path, pushing the earth's atmosphere out of its way like it was strolling through a beaded curtain. Of course, the effect on the human body was not so smooth. Newton's laws saw to that. As the ship went from zero to 17,500 miles per

hour in less than four minutes, Coke and Pep felt themselves being pushed hard against the floor. Coke looked down to see the flesh on his legs pulling against the bones. If he could have seen the soft tissue of his cheeks flapping, he would have laughed. "We must be pulling four g's," Coke groaned to nobody in particular. It was five, actually. The twins felt pressure across their chests as the ship punched its way through the troposphere. They felt heavy. It was like they had doubled their weight instantly. There were two seats that looked like dentist chairs in the corner, and a large window in front of them. The twins struggled to crawl over to the chairs and strap themselves in. "Look!" Coke said, pointing out the window. Earth was falling away before their eyes. Coke, of course, remembered learning about the layers of the atmosphere in school. At seven and a half miles up, the troposphere ends and the

stratosphere begins. At twenty-one miles, the stratosphere ends and the mesosphere begins. At around forty-nine miles, they reached the thermosphere. Coke almost expected to see lines dividing the layers of air, the way they do in textbook graphs. But the real world was not so obvious. There were no borders separating each layer of the atmosphere. It just got progressively darker. By the time they reached the exosphere, outer space was inky black. The thing that struck Coke and Pep was how everything looked so clear. The stars didn't look like faraway, sparkly dots. They were so much brighter, like planets. They didn't twinkle; they glowed. There was no atmosphere to cloud one's vision. "We're astronauts," Pep said, marveling at the view of the earth from above. "It's beautiful," Coke said, gazing at the enormous blue marble with white swirling around it.

"So much water!" Pep said. Her brother pointed out that the white swirls were clouds, ice, and snow. They could see the larger rivers, continents, and the lights of big cities. The earth seemed to get smaller as they rocketed away from it. "Where's the equator?" Pep asked. "The equator is an imaginary line, you dope," Coke said, without taking his eyes from the window. "It's not like there's a giant rubber band around the middle of the planet." Pep gasped for a moment when she suddenly realized they would need helmets and spacesuits to survive the airless world of outer space. But there were no helmets or spacesuits within sight.

Since they had not dropped dead yet, the twins came to the logical conclusion that the aliens were capable of breathing oxygen just like we do, and had been pumping it into the ship. "Where do you think they're taking us?" Pep asked. "To their home planet, I guess." Pep's eyes felt watery and a single tear rolled down her cheek. She wiped it away with her sleeve. It was extremely possible that she would never see her home planet again. "What do you think Mom and Dad are doing right now?" she asked. "Sleeping," her brother replied. "Or maybe worrying about us." "That's what I'm doing too," Pep replied. "By now, they probably realize that we didn't come back to the motel room," Coke said, after thinking it over more analytically. "After they look around and don't find us, they'll call the police and report us missing. The cops will show up with dogs to search the woods. That's