Passport to the Milky Way

01 prologue

x x x x x

Kari slowly became aware that warm cement was scraping against her left cheek uncomfortably. She rolled over, in order to get more comfortable, but ended up in an even worse position; her nose being smushed and her nostrils filled with the dry acrid smell of the ground.

She blinked in confusion. Why did her pillow smell like sidewalk?

Realization came back to her; she was lying near the edge of the pool on the sun-baked terrace. It now appeared to be late afternoon. The sun was gentle and soft, making her movement unusually lethargic and slow. Kari rubbed sleep from her drowsy eyes and yawned.

“Eh, what’s goin' on?” She twisted around to examine her fatigued form spread out over the ground, frowning slightly.

I must have fallen asleep again. How long has it been?

Her waterproof Timex watch glowed up at her in vivid blue highlighter-bright numbers.

They are so slow, she thought. It’s already been half-an-hour! Hadn’t mom said that she would have been done in less than fifteen minutes?

She glanced back at the door leading out onto the pool terrace. The glass seemed almost hazy and blurred as she stared at it through wary eyes over the length of glowing cement. Apparently no one was coming.

It both confused and vexed her. How could someone possibly take so long doing something as genuinely boring as cleaning a neighbor’s attic? It escaped all common sense.

. . . Besides, it wasn't like Joey enjoyed cleaning. His room was ten times messier than her own, and though Kari admitted to liking things orderly, she was by no means considered to be a 'neat freak.'

“Why—” Kari began mumbling to herself.

BANG! The hazy glass door slammed open with a hollow thud and consequent rattle as a figure ducked under it and whirred past in a blurred motion— much too quick for Kari’s dreary eyes to catch.

“Kari!” A voice said. There was something about this voice, and as Kari knew much too well, that it’s high-pitched child tones were meant to sound exhilarated and obviously excited. She wasn’t surprised, considering that it was most often over the most trivial and common things.

“Look what I found!”

“What?” Kari said, glancing away from placid green pool water and at the boy, unmistakably sounding only mildly interested.

“Look what I found upstairs.” The boy dropped a pile of miscellaneous gadgets onto the ground with a clatter. “See?! It’s awesome, right? A new yo-yo— but look at the beads inside, see? It’s so cool; watch how they spin when I do this with the string— oh, and these marbles. I love the orange-ish colored one with the spirally-thing in it—”

“Oh, I really don’t need to see these, Joey.” Kari interrupted. “I’m glad that you’ve found new toys, and no offense, but I really don’t—”

“Yes, you do.” Joey insisted. “You’ll find these more interesting, definitely.”

The plastic mini-harmonica and the little pealing notebook were smacked onto the warm cement. The sudden impact caused one of the marbles already sitting there to roll off in a circular direction.

“It still works.” Joey exclaimed excitedly, picking up the plastic harmonica, pressing his lips against the wrong side, and blowing into it.

Kari ignored the irregular ear-splitting tooting. Something else —something much more intriguing than a chipped resin harmonica— had caught her eye.

“What's this, though?” She mumbled, lifting the small pealing green notebook up carefully, holding it cautiously between four fingers and scanning it through analyzing gray eyes.

“A passport.” Joey dropped the harmonica. "You know, for traveling."

“Oh, right,” She flipped it open, and let the pages shuffle under her thumb. She barely glimpsed at them. “It’s really old, see, even the first page— the most important one, the profile page with your name and picture— it's missing. This is useless. You can look at my real passport upstairs, if you want to.”

“Nah. You haven’t been to as many places: Not nearly as cool.”

“Yeah, well, almost all of my friends haven't been outside of the country once. Some haven't even left Florida! But I’ve been to Italy and France twice. When I’m older, I’ll go more places than this person has!”

“No you won’t.”

“Nuh-uh, I’m pretty sure that someday I will. Unlike you, I never feel homesick. I love traveling, it’s so much fun—”

“You won’t. I said so. This person has been everywhere.”

“Not everywhere. Let me see— give it back.”

Kari flipped to the first used page in the pealing green passport. It suddenly occurred to her that it had many more pages than her own passport upstairs did. Instead of seventeen labeled pages, this book had to have at least forty. But it hadn’t seemed any thicker or heavier than usual when she’d first picked it up, and it still didn’t.

“Oh.” She gasped. This person had quite literally been everywhere. Stamps glittered all over the first page. The stamps were squeezed onto the sheet, piled on top of each other, overlapping, in every direction. There wasn’t enough blank room to fit the pad of her pinky finger.

“How can this even be possible?” She mused. “To have traveled so many places, in one lifetime. It’s ridiculous! I bet this is a phony, Joey, or a sort of stupid hoax. Maybe you can buy stuff like this at Epcot Disney World or something. I bet you could.”

“But it has the official U.S. seal on the front. And the stamps for Mexico, Italy, and France match the ones in your passport,” said Joey. “And there's the glittery part inside the cover.”

“Yeah, the stamps do match, but . . .” She ran her fingers down the rugged torn paper ends. “I don’t get it . . . because if this really is official . . .”

“It is . . .” Joey insisted and looked away to roll the orange swirly marble between his palms.

“Joseph! Karilyn!” A voice called out, sounding both warm but demanding. “Come inside. Kari, hurry up. Make your brother bring his toys inside before he loses them.”

“Huh— yeah, mom!” Kari echoed absentmindedly, not bothering to look up from the passport. “Joey, this is probably just a sham or fake or whatever.” She sounded very final.

“No. The stamps match, so it’s real. It is.”

“It is not, it's really not," said Kari.

There was something about the way she demanded the phrase that made Joey look up at her, confused. She suddenly she sounded frantic and panicked. A shocked ring of marble white surrounded her wide gray eyes and she was slightly gaping at the open book. Her younger brother frowned at this expression.

“Lemme see.”

“It says . . .” Kari passed him the passport, speaking in a sudden rapid breathless manner. “Look, can you read that?”

“Yeah . . . um . . . it says . . . ‘Tranquility Base, USSR Luna Voyager, the Moon.’” Joey paused. He was only in the fourth grade, and he was much better with numbers than words, and he often misread things. Huh? “Wha—”

“Go on, look here, and the next one—”

“'Mt. Olympus, Mars.' Uneden— unident—'unidentified site, Mercury.'” Joey frowned. “Huh? Does this mean the planet, Mars? I thought people only traveled to the Moon. Or maybe, oh, I don’t get it—”

“Joey.” Kari said. Her voice was shrill but unmoved and even. She sounded eerily calm as she stared down at the seemingly real arrangement of otherworldly stamps in the fantastical passport.

“People have never been to Mercury. Or Venus. Or Mars. So how can they get possibly stamps from such places? Even if people had been to Mars, they wouldn't come back with stamps! They look real . . .” She hesitated. “Joey, you really still think that this isn't a joke? That it must be real? That it has real stamps? That it’s a passport that belonged to someone, someone who has been all over the solar system— impossible!”

“It’s a passport.” Joey affirmed her. “But not to the Solar System. Lookee here— Milky Way, (Spiral Galaxy Type AB), Local Group— It’s a passport to the Milky Way.”

“The Milky Way . . .” Kari repeated. She looked down and noticed that her own hands were trembling and that her fingers had curled tightly around the passport, almost protectively. Her thumb dug into her palm, but she hardly noticed the nail that was pressing sharply into the flesh.

It looked and felt real. The book itself appeared real, and the stamps seemed real. Her senses told her that it was.

But that didn’t make any sense. How could it? Her mind just couldn't comprehend, no matter what he sense told her. Could it be possible that the human race really was capable of traveling light-years away, and that it had been done, multiple times— all the way across the Milky Way?

No, Kari was sure that it wasn’t. It couldn't be!

But . . . what if, just what if, it was?

And their mother called them in for lunch in the background, and not for the first time; her voice was beginning to sound rather irritated and sharp. Despite that, neither Kari nor Joey would immediately respond.

x x x x x

To Be Continued...

Authors Note:
Obviously this'll get more interesting when the fate of the world is in peril and the kids get lost in space. Anyway, thanks for reading, please review! I'll update soon because most of the story has already been written and just needs to be fine-tuned and editted, (totally rewritten, actually, but I know what I'm rewriting so it's easy) before it's uploaded.