Free Nightmare at the Book Fair by Dan Gutman

the corn chowder squirted into my mouth. Not bad! I swallowed it easily and passed the bag around to the others.
    I read the labels on the other bags that were floating around the cabin. Chicken salad. Applesauce. Shrimp cocktail. Sugar cookies. Orange drink. We were going to have a feast!
    “Slow down, cowboy!” Neil said. “This has got to last us six days.”
    Oh. Well, it wasn’t exactly a feast, but it was just as good as most of my school lunches, I’ll say that much.
    I had no idea what time it was, and you couldn’t tell by looking out the window, that was for sure. Outside, it was night all the time. Anyway, I was sleepy, and I wasn’t the only one. The others shaded the windows, dimmed the lights, and pulled out three sleeping bags. Neil was nice enough to let me use his, and he tied one end to a pole so I wouldn’t float all over the place and bump into things.
    I was tired, but too excited to sleep, I guess. Even if this whole thing was a hallucination, I was hallucinating about going to the moon! It was way better than hallucinating that you’re in a haunted house or trapped in a dictionary.
    While we lay there with the lights out, they told me a little bit about themselves. Neil and Buzz were Navy fighter pilots. Between the two of them, they had flown 144 combat missions in the Korean War. Mike was an air force test pilot. When the space program began, a bunch of those guys joined up. The three of them were the lucky ones who were chosen to go to the moon.
    “I still remember President Kennedy’s exact words in May of 1961,” Neil said. “‘I believe this nation should commit itself to achieve the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.’”
    “And here we are,” said Buzz, “five months early.”
    Before the Apollo program, they told me, NASA had the Mercury and Gemini programs. In Mercury, astronauts orbited the earth and got the hang of living and working in space. In Gemini, they practiced docking two ships together. In Apollo, astronauts went all the way to the moon and orbited it. Finally, they were ready to attempt a landing.
    The interesting thing is that the whole time, the Russians were racing to do the same thing. In fact, just two weeks before Neil, Buzz, and Mike lifted off, the Russians launched an unmanned ship they hoped to land on the moon and bring back some moon rocks before we did.
    “Why is being first so important?” I asked. “Who cares who gets there first?”
    “It’s symbolic,” Neil said. “Whoever gets to the moon first essentially wins the Cold War.”
    I didn’t tell them what I had learned in social studies—that we were going to win The Cold War. The Soviet Union was going to collapse in 1991. Who knows? Maybe the fact that we got to the moon first was one of the reasons the Soviet Union collapsed.
    Neil, Buzz, and Mike had stopped talking. Maybe they were asleep. I was afraid that if I went to sleep, it would all be over. I would wake up in some completely different place, a completely different strange situation. For a change, I didn’t want to go home. I wanted to go to the moon.
    “Which one of you gets to step on the moon first?” I whispered, knowing the answer full well.
    “Me,” Neil said.
    “What are you going to say?” I asked. I also knew what he was going to say. Everybody knows what he said.
    “I have no idea. I haven’t even thought about it.”
    “You should say something significant,” I suggested. “The whole world will be watching.”
    “You’re right.”
    “Hey, I’ll bet if you said something like ‘eat at McDonald’s’ or ‘Drink Pepsi,’ they would pay you a million dollars.”
    Neil chuckled quietly. Then I said good night, but he didn’t answer, and I heard snoring so I guess he had gone to sleep.

    I don’t know how long I was out, but it must have been a while. When I opened my eyes and looked out the window, the earth was much smaller. Out the other