Free Nightmare at the Book Fair by Dan Gutman Page A

window, the moon was huge . It was whitish gray, with millions of craters all over the place. Some looked like volcanoes, while others looked like meteors had crashed into them. We were getting close.
    Neil, Buzz, and Mike were bustling about, doing chores and experiments. They helped me out of the sleeping bag and gave me some cream of chicken soup to eat.
    “You guys don’t have any funnel cake, do you?” I asked.
    “No, why?” Buzz replied.
    “Just wondering. Say, what if you’re on the moon and a meteor hits you?” I asked Neil.
    “I guess we would become a crater,” he replied.
    Mostly, I kept out of their way. There wasn’t much for me to do, and the three of them were busy. I didn’t want to interfere. But I wondered what they had in mind for me once they got to the moon. I knew that Mike was going to stay in the command module orbiting the moon while Neil and Buzz went to the surface in a smaller part of the ship called the lunar excursion module or LEM. But what about me?
    Gradually, I began to notice that something felt different. My body felt heavier. Maybe I had eaten too much. But then the stuff that was floating around the cabin started settling to the floor.
    “It’s the moon’s gravity,” Buzz told me. “It’s starting to pull us in.”
    I didn’t even know the moon had gravity.
    We were 38,000 miles away, Mike announced. I could sense that the three of them were getting excited. Our velocity had increased to 5,512 feet per second. But I had no sense of speed. It’s not like when you’re in a car and you see trees and houses and street signs whizzing past. There was nothing outside.
    I spent a lot of time looking out the window at the moon. It was sometimes gray and sometimes brown, depending on how the sun’s rays were striking it.
    Neil, Buzz, and Mike went over and strapped themselves into their seats, with serious looks on their faces.
    “Prepare for engine burn,” Neil said.
    They had told me they would have to fire the main rockets to slow the ship down so it would be captured by the moon’s gravity. Like everything else, it had to be done at the exactly correct moment.
    “If the engine doesn’t fire for some reason, we’ll loop around the moon and come back to earth,” Buzz said.
    “What if you fire it too long?” I asked.
    “We crash into the moon,” he replied.
    It was really tense for a few minutes, and then I felt the thrust of the engine jolting us into orbit around the moon. There was a general sense of relief in the cabin. Things must have gone according to plan.
    We would be out of touch with Mission Control for thirty-three minutes as we swung around because the radio signals could not bend around the moon.
    “ Apollo 11 , this is Houston,” the radio crackled, as soon as we popped out the other side. “How do you read? Could you repeat your burn status-report?”
    “Reading you loud and clear, Houston,” Neil said. “It was like…perfect.”

    We woke up the next morning, Sunday, July 20—to a lunar sunrise. First there was a thin white haze over the horizon, and then the sun blasted into view. It was a sight I’ll never forget. We ate breakfast (freeze-dried eggs, yum!), and Neil opened a closet and took out a bulky white space suit. It was the kind with the big helmet I had seen in pictures.
    “It’s time,” he said to Buzz.
    Neil and Buzz each climbed into their suits, and Mike helped them with the latches, oxygen hoses, and life-support backpacks.
    “Good luck,” I said, a little disappointed that I wouldn’t be joining them.
    “Good luck, nothing,” Neil said. “Trip, you’re coming with us.”
    “You mean it?!” I asked.
    “We might need your help down there,” Buzz said.
    They had a third suit as a backup, and Mike helped me into it. It was a little big on me, but not too bad. Once I was all zipped up, Mike wrapped his arms around the three of us. He didn’t say a word, but I knew what he meant when I looked into his eyes. If