Lucy and the Rocket Dog Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Will Buckingham

  Cover art and interior illustrations copyright © 2017 by Monica Arnaldo

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

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  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Buckingham, Will, author. | Arnaldo, Monica, illustrator.

  Title: Lucy and the rocket dog / by Will Buckingham ; illustrations by Monica Arnaldo.

  Description: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, [2017] | Summary: Budding scientist

  Lucy builds a rocket ship and accidentally sends her beloved dog, Laika, into space.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016018144 (print) | LCCN 2016056702 (ebook) | ISBN 978-0-399-55432-2 (trade) | ISBN 978-0-399-55433-9 (lib. bdg.) | ISBN 978-0-399-55434-6 (ebook)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Dogs—Fiction. | Space ships—Fiction. | Space and time—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.B8799 Lu 2017 (print) | LCC PZ7.B8799 (ebook) | DDC

  [Fic]—dc23]

  Ebook ISBN 9780399554346

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: Lucy and Laika

  Chapter 2: Laika

  Chapter 3: Lucy

  Chapter 4: Laika

  Chapter 5: Lucy

  Chapter 6: Laika

  Chapter 7: Lucy

  Chapter 8: Laika

  Chapter 9: Lucy

  Chapter 10: Laika

  Chapter 11: Lucy

  Chapter 12: Laika

  Chapter 13: Lucy

  Chapter 14: Laika

  Chapter 15: Lucy

  Chapter 16: Laika

  Chapter 17: Lucy

  Chapter 18: Laika

  Chapter 19: Lucy

  Chapter 20: Laika

  Chapter 21: Lucy

  Chapter 22: Laika

  Chapter 23: Lucy

  Chapter 24: Laika

  Chapter 25: Lucy

  Chapter 26: Laika

  Chapter 27: Lucy

  Chapter 28: Laika

  Chapter 29: Lucy

  Chapter 30: Laika

  Chapter 31: Lucy

  Chapter 32: Lucy and Laika

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  For India and Liberty

  Lucy was outside in the backyard, hammering as hard as she could, when her mom called her in for dinner. It was six o’clock on a November evening, and the sky was already dark. While Lucy worked, her dog, Laika, sniffed around the yard in a friendly way. Overhead, tens of hundreds of thousands of stars winked and winked again.

  “Lucy!” shouted Lucy’s mom.

  Bang, bang, bang, went Lucy. Laika went on sniffing. The stars went on winking.

  “Lucy, come in now!”

  Bang, bang, bang.

  It was not clear whether Lucy had not heard or whether she was not listening. Sometimes, when you are concentrating very hard on something, you sort of half hear and half don’t hear, or you hear but you don’t realize you hear; and when people later ask you, “Weren’t you listening?” you don’t know what to say because the answer is no and yes at the same time.

  “Your dinner is getting cold!”

  Bang, bang, BANG! Lucy sat back on the grass, which was a little damp and cold, and looked at her handiwork. Then she looked down at her clothes. They were covered in grease. She looked up to the sky at the half-moon and the tens of hundreds of thousands of stars; and when she saw the stars winking at her, she winked back. Just once, for all of them, because to wink at tens of hundreds of thousands of stars in turn would take a very, very long time.

  Lucy heard the kitchen door close, and she felt her stomach rumble. “Laika! Here, girl!” she called.

  The dog stopped her friendly sniffing and came over to sit next to Lucy. Lucy put her arm around Laika and gave her a hug. Laika was a big, untidy, huggable dog, more friendly than clever. Lucy could feel the dog’s warmth against her side. Laika licked Lucy on the ear in a friendly but not very clever way.

  Lucy looked up into the sky in search of shooting stars. She knew that the best way to see shooting stars was not to try very hard, not to stare into the darkness, but to relax and to let the darkness stare back at you, to let the stars all wink at you, and to hope—but not to hope too hard—that out of the corner of your eye you might see something flash across the darkness. A meteor, that was the proper term. Lucy loved that word. A piece of another world falling to Earth.

  I love space, thought Lucy as she looked up into the sky, hugging Laika to her side. I love its bigness, and I love its here, there, and everywhereness, and I love its going-on-forever-in-every-direction-ness.

  And then she thought, One day, when I am older, I will go and explore the bigness and the here, there, and everywhereness, and the going-on-forever-in-every-direction-ness of space. As she thought this, she looked proudly at Prototype I, standing gleaming in the moonlight.

  Prototype I was Lucy’s very own spaceship. It had taken her most of the autumn to build. And because Lucy did not have very much money, she had built it out of all kinds of things that she had found lying around. It is amazing what people will leave lying around. Tin cans and pieces of string and packing crates and rivets and bits of old engine and oxygen cylinders and pieces of rubber tubing and circuit boards and old computers and flowerpots. It had taken her months, but now it was almost finished.

  It wouldn’t fly, of course. She was fairly certain that it wouldn’t fly. But it was only Prototype I. If it didn’t fly, she would build Prototype II, then Prototype III, then Prototype IV, then Prototype V, all the way up to Prototype Whatever. Lucy liked to write down numbers in the Roman style—I, II, III, IV, V…whatever, instead of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5…whatever—even though she said them in the normal fashion. It was a complicated way of writing numbers, and meant that the Romans never got very good at math, but Lucy liked those old-fashioned Roman numbers because they looked grand and important.

  Prototype I was a bit ramshackle, but Lucy found it beautiful in the same way that she found Laika—who was also a bit ramshackle—beautiful. Its nose pointed up to the heavens, its sides were made of shiny metal, and Lucy had painted her logo on the side. The logo looked like two letter Ls together, one for “Lucy” and one for “Laika,” surrounded by planets and moons. A flight of small steps led up to the door, which Lucy had painted yellow. She had salvaged the door handle from when her mom replaced their bathroom door.

  “What do you think of Prototype I, Laika?” Lucy asked.

  “Woof! Woof!” Laika replied, and leaned a little into Lucy.

  “Do you think she will fly?” For some reason, spaceships are always girls, so you call them “she.” Lucy wasn’t sure why they were girls, but that was the way things were.

  “Woof! Woof!” said Laika.

  Lucy thought that Laika probably didn’t think very much about very much. She gave the dog a squeeze and loo
ked out into the bigness and the here, there, and everywhereness of space. Then out of the corner of her eye, Lucy saw something streaking across the heavens. She turned her head, but it was already gone. A meteor, a shooting star, a piece of another world falling to Earth.

  “Woof! Woof! Woof!” Laika said, and Lucy knew she had seen it, too.

  Then she heard another voice. “Lucy! Your dinner is getting cold. Come in now!” It was her mom, standing in the kitchen door. Lucy glanced around. The kitchen looked warm and friendly and strangely far-off.

  “Coming, Mom,” Lucy called, and got to her feet. She looked down at her dog. “Come on, Laika,” she said, and she turned toward the house.

  Laika stood up, but she did not follow Lucy. Instead she continued her friendly sniffing around the garden. Lucy shrugged and went inside for her dinner. Laika stayed in the garden.

  Prototype I stood alone in the moonlight, ramshackle but somehow magnificent. Laika went and sniffed at the spacecraft. It smelled funny. It smelled of oil and metal and hard work and hope.

  The stars in the heavens went on winking. Tens of hundreds of thousands of stars, each one of them winking at Laika and at Prototype I and at the house where Lucy was sitting down in front of a dinner that was already cold.

  Laika went over to the spaceship, wagging her tail, and then put her nose to the metal, very carefully, and sniffed at it. Everything smelled better at night, when it was dark and the smells were bigger and rounder and when there was nothing much else to think about. Most humans would not think that Prototype I smelled of anything at all. They might look at it and think, My goodness, a rocket! or they might think, I wonder who built that, or they might read the logo and say to themselves, “I wonder what that means. I wonder who L and L are.” But they wouldn’t think to do what Laika did, and put their noses to the spacecraft so that they might come to know it better. In fact, any human who did this might be considered to be a little bit strange.

  Fortunately, however, Laika was not a human but a dog; and as a dog, she could sniff at Prototype I without worrying about what other people—or other dogs—might think. She sniffed long and hard, and she smelled metal and grease and the grass that Prototype I was resting on, and the passing scent of a cat that had gone by an hour or so ago and seen Prototype I and marked it with its scent in the way that cats do. She smelled the distant traffic, and the smell of Lucy’s dinner that was already cold, and the smell of at least three other dogs—all of whom Laika knew well—who lived nearby. She smelled vague traces of memory and wisps of hope.

  Overhead, the stars winked. But they didn’t smell of anything at all, and so Laika did not pay them much attention. She walked around the rocket several times. It rested on three feet, roughly riveted together, and she sniffed each of the feet in turn, because nothing smells exactly the same as everything else when you are a dog. That is one thing that is great about being a dog, something that those of us who are non-dogs will never know or understand.

  Then Laika sat down in front of Prototype I and tried to think. But thinking wasn’t something she was very good at, and so although she was trying to think really quite hard, the thoughts didn’t quite come, and so she was mostly just sitting, with the occasional thought popping into her head now and then. Some of the thoughts popped into her head so briefly that she didn’t even notice them. Thoughts didn’t smell of much either, and so it was hard to take as much interest in them as in other, smellier things, things like trees and cats and humans and—best of all—other dogs. But she tried as hard as she could, and after a few moments, one particular thought started to take shape in her head, a thought that went something like this:

  I WONDER WHAT IS INSIDE.

  Of course, we can’t know exactly what the thought was that Laika had, because Laika was a dog, and because we are not dogs—or I am not a dog, and if you are reading this, it is very unlikely that you are a dog either—it is hard for us to have thoughts that are dog thoughts, instead of human thoughts. But if it had been possible to read her thoughts, and to write them down on the page, then they would have looked something like this:

  I WONDER WHAT IS INSIDE.

  Laika sniffed carefully at the steps that led up to the yellow door. Then she put one paw on the first step and sniffed the second, and when she was sure it smelled good, she put a paw on the second step and sniffed the third. Everything seemed to be in order, so Laika put a paw on the third step and sniffed the yellow door.

  The door smelled yellow.

  How can a door smell yellow? Maybe you have to be a dog to know for certain, but that was how the door smelled. It smelled yellow. Laika licked it with her long, doggy tongue, and it tasted the same as it smelled: yellow.

  Laika nudged at the door with her nose, and the door swung open. She climbed the steps in that clumsy way that dogs have when they are trying to go upstairs. Stairs are really designed for things that have only two legs and not four, and so it is hard to climb the stairs if you are a dog and to look graceful when you do. But Laika—big, untidy, huggable Laika—was a dog who couldn’t very easily look graceful doing anything at all. So she climbed the steps in a clumsy kind of way and stepped into Prototype I.

  The door swung closed with a click!

  It was dark for a second, then there was a humming sound and a few small lights flickered on, but not enough to drive out the darkness. Laika looked around and sniffed the air. She had never seen or smelled the inside of Prototype I before, but it smelled of warmth and of Lucy, of rugs and cushions and comfiness. On the ceiling, which was not very high at all, perhaps only as high as Lucy could stand, there were some of those stars that you can stick on your bedroom ceiling and that glow in the night with a greenish kind of glow. Unlike real stars, they did not wink. They just hovered there in the darkness. Laika could just about make out in the darkness a thing a bit like a desk, and in front of the desk a row of buttons and knobs and dials, and behind the desk a comfy chair, and beside the chair a dog basket, where she recognized—by smell instead of by sight—one of her dog blankets, and also a small bed just big enough for Lucy, but unslept in, and a little cupboard in which (although Laika did not know it) there were lots of cans of peaches and beans and other things that you might need on a long space voyage, and side by side two empty dog bowls, above which were two funnels, and a bookshelf containing some good books, because you need good books for long journeys, and also a window looking out over the garden, a kind of porthole, and a big screen like a television screen, which was gray and quiet and did not look as if it was switched on.

  A thought flitted through Laika’s brain, and perhaps the thought was something like this:

  MAYBE I SHOULD GO AND FETCH LUCY.

  But when she turned around and nudged at the door, she found it was locked.

  Laika whimpered. It felt funny to be locked in that strange little room on her own. She wondered if she was even allowed to be there. Perhaps Lucy would be angry with her for going where she shouldn’t go, and doing things she shouldn’t do.

  She turned around three times, nose to tail, nose to tail, nose to tail. Then she whimpered again and tried to think another thought:

  …

  No thoughts came, so Laika jumped up on the chair in front of the desk and put her nose to the TV screen. She sometimes did this in the house when she wanted to get Lucy’s attention. Lucy would then shout, “Laiiiikaaaa!” and pretend to be angry, and pull Laika away from the TV, and drag the dog back to the sofa, and put her arms around Laika’s neck, and they would lie together on the sofa watching TV, which was exactly the point, and exactly why Laika did it.

  But this time Lucy did not shout. Laika’s nose left a wet streak on the TV screen, but Lucy did not appear.

  Laika felt confused. Again she tried to think some thoughts:

  …

  And again no thoughts came.

  Then Laika sniffed at the buttons and the knobs.

  As she was sniffing, she pressed one button a little too hard
and the lights came on. The greenish stars on the ceiling disappeared. The room started to throb, very gently. The TV screen hummed a little and flickered, but without a picture.

  Laika sniffed the buttons. She put up her paw and patted one of the smallest buttons.

  A voice—Lucy’s voice—said, “Security lock deactivated.” Laika had no idea what this meant, but she recognized Lucy’s voice and barked twice.

  “Woof! Woof!”

  There was no sign of Lucy. If Laika had been a human being, now she would have frowned; but instead she did whatever it is that dogs do instead of frowning. It was a more inside kind of frown thing than an outside kind of frown thing.

  “Woof! Woof!” she said.

  “Awaiting instructions,” said Lucy’s voice. Her voice seemed to come from all around. Laika could not see where.

  So Laika put out her paw again and placed it on the biggest button, and after a moment’s indecision she pressed down on the button.

  “Ten,” said Lucy from out of nowhere.

  “Woof!” said Laika.

  “Nine,” Lucy replied.

  “Woof! Woof!”

  “Eight.”

  “Woof! Woof! Woof!”

  “Seven.”

  Laika looked around and started to tremble. This was strange. Nothing like it had ever happened to her before. “Owww!” she said.

  “Six.”

  “Owww! Woof! Woof!” said Laika. And if you could translate this into human language, it might mean, Lucy! Lucy! Where are you?

  “Five.”

  “Oooowwwww!”