Free George's Cosmic Treasure Hunt by Lucy Hawking

wormed their way into George’s brain because he had a strange dream. He dreamed he was in the commander’s seat on the shuttle, responsible forflying the huge great spacecraft into space. It felt like being strapped to the top of an enormous rocket and sent up into the heavens. As they flew into the darkness of space, he thought he saw stars flashing at him through the shuttle window. In the darkness outside, they suddenly looked very bright and very close. One of them seemed to be zooming toward him, shining a bright light directly into his face, so close and so brilliant that—
    He woke up with a start and found himself in an unfamiliar bed with someone shining a light in his face.
    â€œGeorge!” the figure hissed. “George! Get up! It’s an emergency!”
    It was Annie in her pajamas.
    â€œBleeeuurgh!” exclaimed George, shielding his eyes from the light as she threw back his duvet and grabbed him by the arm.
    â€œDownstairs,” she said. “And super quietly. It’s our only chance to escape Emmett! Come on!”
    George blundered after her, his mind still reeling from his strange dream about flying the space shuttle. He tiptoed down the stairs to the kitchen, where Annie opened the door and led him out onto the veranda. She shone her flashlight on a piece of paper.
    The piece of paper had drawings all over it. It looked like this:

    â€œThis is it?” said George, blinking. “This is the alien message? They sent it to you on a piece of school notebook paper?”
    â€œNo, twit,” Annie told him. “Of course they didn’t. I got this through Cosmos! I copied it from his screen.”
    â€œCosmos?” George exclaimed. “But he doesn’t work.”
    â€œI know!” said Annie. “But I didn’t finish the story.”
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    After Homer had landed on Mars, the robot was supposed to start doing all sorts of things, like taking readings of the Martian weather, looking for water in the soil samples and other signs that there might be some form of bacterial life on Mars.
    But he wouldn’t do any of them. The robot seemed to have gone crazy. He refused to respond to any signals from Earth; he just drove around in circles or threw scoopfuls of mud into the air.

    Even though he wasn’t replying to their signals, Homer continued sending messages, which turned out to be pictures of his tires and other useless information. FromEarth, they could see the robot—but only sometimes—via the monitoring satellite that orbited Mars and sent back pictures. Once, Annie said, her dad had been watching Homer and he’d picked up something really odd on the satellite pictures. He said that if he hadn’t known better, he would have sworn that Homer was waving his robotic arm at him. It was almost like Homer was trying to attract his attention.

    Eric, Annie said, was getting really stressed out by all this. Lots of people wanted to know what Homer had found on Mars and what he was doing up there. But so far they had nothing to show except a robot behaving in a very silly fashion.
    It was putting the Global Space Agency in an awkward position. Homer was an extremely expensive robot, and it took many people to build, launch, and operate him. He was an important part of the new space program, since he was meant to blaze the trail for human beings to go out and live on a different planet. So the fact that he didn’t seem to work properly meant that those who weren’t in favor of the space program orsending astronauts far out into space could argue that this was all a big waste of time.
    Homer’s bad behavior also meant that Eric wasn’t getting the information he was hoping for about possible life on Mars. It was breaking his heart to see his robot mess around on the red planet. Day by day he looked sadder and sadder. If Homer didn’t start cooperating soon, the mission would be abandoned and the robot would become