George's Cosmic Treasure Hunt Read Free

224.7 Earth days
    Venus passes between the Earth and the Sun about twice a century. This is called the transit of Venus. These transits always happen in pairs eight years apart. Since the telescope was invented, transits have been observed in 1631 and 1639; 1761 and 1769; and 1874 and 1882. On June 8, 2004, astronomers saw the tiny dot of Venus crawl across the Sun; the second in this pair of early twenty-first-century transits will occur on June 6, 2012.
    Venus spins on its axis once every 243 Earth days.
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    Given what he knew about Venus, George felt pretty sure that there wasn’t any life to be found on that smelly, hot planet. He didn’t even consider going to Eric’s party dressed as a Venusian. Instead, he got his mom, Daisy, to help him with an outfit of dark-orange bobbly knitted clothes and a tall pointy hat so he looked just like the photo of the “Martian” they’d found.
    Wearing his costume, George waved good-bye to his parents—who had a big evening planned helping some eco-friends make organic treats for a party of their own—and squeezed through the gap in the fence between his garden and Eric’s. The gap had come about when George’s pet pig (given to him by his gran), Freddy, had escaped from his pigsty, barged through the fence, and broken into Eric’s house via the back door. Following the trail of hoofprints that Freddy had left behind him, George had ended up meeting his new neighbors, who had only just moved into the empty house next door. This chance encounter with Eric and his family had changed George’s life forever.

    Eric had shown George his amazing computer, Cosmos, who was so smart and so powerful that he could draw doorways through which Eric; his daughter, Annie; and George could walk, to visit any part of the known Universe.
    But space can be very dangerous, as George found out when one of their space adventures ended with Cosmos exploding from the sheer effort of mounting the rescue mission.
    Since Cosmos had stopped working, George hadn’t had another chance to step through the doorway and travel around the Solar System and beyond. He missed Cosmos, but at least he had Eric and Annie. He could see them anytime he wanted, even if he couldn’t go on adventures into outer space with them.
    George scampered up the garden path to Eric’s back door. The house was brightly lit, with chatter and musicpouring out. Opening the door, George let himself into the kitchen.
    He couldn’t see Annie, Eric, or Annie’s mom, Susan, but there were lots of other people milling about: one grown-up immediately pushed a plate of shiny silver-iced muffins under his nose. “Have a meteorite!” he said cheerfully. “Or perhaps I should say, have a meteoroid!”
    â€œOh…um, well, thanks,” said George, a bit startled. “They look delicious,” he added, helping himself to one.

    â€œIf I did this,” continued the man, tipping some of the muffins onto the floor, “then I could say, ‘Have a meteorite!’ because then they would have hit the ground. But when I offered them to you, suspended in the air, they were—technically—still meteoroids.” He beamed at George and then at the muffins that were lying in a pile on the floor. “You get the distinction—a meteoroid is a chunk of rock that flies through the air; a meteor ite is what you call that piece of rock if it lands on the Earth. So now I’ve dropped them on the floor, we can call them meteorites.”
    With the muffin in his hand, George smiled politely, nodded, and started backing away slowly.
    â€œOuch!” He heard a squeak as he trod on someone behind him.
    â€œOops!” he said, turning around.
    â€œIt’s okay, it’s only me!” It was Annie, dressed all in black. “You couldn’t have seen me, anyway, because I’m invisible!” She swiped the muffin out of George’s hand and