‘What? Yes, sorry, I’m ready,’ he replied. ‘<<Open! Open!>> <<Open!>>’

This time, the box flew straight out of his hands and froze several metres above him. Snapping open, just like it had done at the cottage, it filled the room with light before plunging it into darkness seconds later.

‘Yes! We did it,’ he cried, turning to congratulate the cat. ‘Hey! What are you doing over there?’

He could just make out a pair of ears poking over the edge of the platform.

‘What do you mean what am I doing over here? Honestly, I would have thought that it was obvious. I was finding a better place to study the map.’

‘Yeh, right, sure you were.’ He grinned.

‘Listen, buster, you can grin as much as you like, but as of this exact moment, I’ve just officially become a lucky charm, hero, eighth wonder of the world. Feel free to pick any or all of the above, because whatever you think, that box ain’t gonna open without me!’

Arthur rolled his eyes.

‘You’re definitely a wonder, Cat. But don’t you think that it’s really weird that it only opens if we’re together?’

‘Not really.’

‘Why not really?’

‘Because you could only talk to me, and I could talk to you and the fish. So…’

‘So?’

‘So, I’m obviously like a golden key or something.’

‘A golden key?’

<<‘Yep, cross my whiskers and hope to die, stick a mouse tail in my eye.’>>

‘But it still doesn’t explain why it only opens if we’re both here.’

‘Sure, it does.’

‘It doesn’t.’

‘Yeah, it does.’

‘Cat, it doesn’t!’

‘Suit yourself! But it does.’

‘Aaah! Well done, my boy!’ beamed the doctor, the first to emerge from the glass wall. ‘You did it!’

‘Thank you,’ said Arthur, handing the box back to him. ‘Doctor, what it shows, it’s a map isn’t it? To get to those planets with the writing next to them?’

‘We believe so, my boy, we certainly believe so.’

‘But what I don’t understand then is that even if it is a map, it’s never going to be possible to get there, is it? I mean, I read that we don’t have the technology for space travel, and that even if we did, it’d still take lifetimes to be able to get anywhere.’

The doctor smiled at him approvingly. ‘This is of course an excellent and valid question and one which deserves a serious answer. But just not at this moment, if you please,’ he replied, hearing the general coming over and turning to shake his hand.

‘Good job,’ said the general, shaking Arthur’s next.

‘Thank you.’

‘Hey! Look at you, lapping up all the glory. I haven’t heard my name being mentioned once yet,’ came a disgruntled meow.

‘Cat! Shh,’ Arthur hissed.

‘’Everything OK?’ asked the general, noticing.

‘Yes, I think he might be hungry. He always starts to moan when he’s hungry.’

‘Ah, Sky,’ the general called out, seeing his daughter standing by the door and waving for her to come and join them.

‘I think Arthur deserves a little break, so why don’t you show him around a bit, and perhaps include the courtyard too, if the weather’s nice enough. I’m afraid to say I don’t know what it’s doing outside today. In the meantime, we’ve got a few matters which we need his father to assist us with. We’ll come and join you once we’re done.’

Catching Arthur looking at him, his father smiled.

‘Go on, I’ll catch up with you in a bit,’ he said.

Wondering what they could be needing his dad for, and having made sure that it’d be OK for the cat to could go with them, Arthur followed Sky out of the lab.

Despite the fact that much of the facility was out of bounds even for Sky, one of the areas which wasn’t was a tower complex similar to the ones which he and his father had been wondering about the previous evening. Not only that, but just as they thought might be the case, Arthur entered to discover that a rocket really was in the process of being built inside it.

‘Looks like a giant oil drum if you ask me,’ commented the cat when Sky got called away to take a phone call.

‘Ha ha.Very funny.’

‘I’m serious. You humans are mad trying to go into space in one of those things. You know, right, that there’s a reason why no other species on this planet have ever tried to build something like this?’

‘Well, yeah, because none of them are smart enough and only humans have fingers.’

‘Wrong! Because none of them ever thought it reasonable to want to strap themselves into soda cans full of highly explosive fuel.’

‘Hey, you’ll never guess what,’ said Sky, rejoining them. ‘We’ve just been invited to go and watch an astronaut training session in the main pool complex. It’s really cool. They enter the pool wearing their full space suits and use the deep water to help simulate what it will be like when they need to carry out space walks for real.’

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