A creaking noise revealed that someone was walking down the stairs,
that lead to the cellar of the royal castle. A saluting guard that nervously did her
best to make a perfect salute as the creaking sound passed her,
revealed that the creaks was caused by a very distinguished looking
creature. The sound changed as the distinguished looking creature
walked through the cellar corridor and to the cell that contained two
aliens from an other planet.
After unlocking the cell door the distinguished looking creature said
with almost perfect English, but with a tone that sounded almost like
a low quality talking computer:
"I must help aliens to escape!
I will carry aliens, and protect aliens with my life!"
Olivia smiled and said:
"Great Queenie! Your highness are doing just fine. Now, carry us to a
space-craft!"
The hypnotized queen gently, well gently compared to how people on
Bleep normally handled things, picked up the two fragile humans, and
walked through a secret chamber that only the queen and a
handful
others knew of. While they were carried, Olivia whispered to Jesper:
"Well, what did you think of my surprise?"
"Your surprise??", Jesper said without understanding much.
"Yeah, hypnotizing the queen to rescue us!"
"Oh, she is hypnotized? Is it therefore she suddenly talks so strange,
and doesn't look at me like she is going to eat me anymore?"
"Yap!"
"In that case I love your surprise."
The queen managed, helped by the beginning dusk and her knowledge of
the guard schedule, to
smuggle her expensive load pass all the guards around the castle, and
all the way to a deserted space-craft close to the place
were Jesper had landed 7 hours ago.
There was a machine that seemed possible to make flying.
At the same time as Olivia and Jesper were helped onboard the machine,
Beetjoo, who was out walking to forget all the bad things he done to
Jesper, noticed them.
Beetjoo now saw a chance to help his friend, so he yelled:
"Jesper! What is a 'Blurp'?!!"
Jesper, heard Beetjoo, and his facial expression changed, as he first
looked at the fuel tanks then thoughtfully at the moon, murmuring for
himself:
"Since the moon hasn't changed position on the sky, it's obviously
in a geostationary position. On the assumption that the mean density
on Bleep and Earth is similar, and that the gravity differs by a factor
of three,
I get that Bleepic mass. Hmmm.... The rotation of the planet is
trivial to determine by looking at the difference in the shadows,
now and when I arrived. Hmmm.....
So, then I have the geo-stationary rotation time, and the mass of the
planet it orbits,
this gives me the distance to the moon.
The angular extension on the sky then tells me the radius of the moon
and a good indication of the escape velocity of the moon. Hmm."
Jesper calculated in his head the numerical value of the escape
velocity on the Bleepic moon and said:
"The thermal velocity of the gas around the moon must be
significantly lower than the escape velocity. That was very
interesting!"
Olivia, who had listen to Jesper, felt as confused as a termite in a
yo-yo, and screamed hysterically:
"What are you talking about!! Why are you acting so different!"
"Sorry, my charming lady, but I have just realized that the fuel in
the tanks is not enough to take us to earth, but probably enough to
take us to the moon, around Bleep. I just had to calculate if there
should be an atmosphere around the moon or not.
It is about 81.7 % chance that there is enough air around the moon
for us to survive there.."
Oliva didn't comment Jesper, instead she just stared at him.
Jesper then crawled into the machine, and took
a three seconds long look
at the instruments, and said:
"It should be a piece of cake for me to fly this simple machine."
Jesper's first short analysis of the situation proved
to be absolutely correct. Without any problem whatsoever,
he flew the space-craft away from Bleep, and all the way to
the nearby moon. There he managed to land at the edge of
something that reminded of a jungle. When the machine stood on
the ground, they realized the the gravity was even less than
on Earth. Jesper examined the surroundings, by looking out through
the little window, and said thoughtfully:
"Well, even if the vegetation in certain aspects differs from
the flora we find on Earth, important similarities still exist.
For instance, I would be highly surprised if the plants here
don't get their energy through photo synthesis, which produce oxygen
for us to bread. Let's go out!"
Oliva stared at Jesper, but not with the hungry look the she normally
had. She still couldn't put her finger on it, but something about
Jesper was strange. He seemed so different. Was it because his voice
was a bit hoarse due to his cold, or the fact that he was a couple of
centimeters shorter after being compressed by the Bleepic gravity, or
was it something else. One thing was clear; she loved the old Jesper
much more that this one, who was a bit of a boor. As she pondered,
Jesper opened the door and they climbed out. As he took his first
steps on the ground, he took a deep breath and said"
"What did I....", then he suddenly stopped.
The reason why
he had interrupted his proclamation, was that his voice suddenly had
started to sound like the voice of a relative to Donald Duck.
Olivia couldn't hold back a giggle when she heard Jesper, but
when she noticed that she sounded like a giggling smurf she
suddenly stopped. Jesper said, still with a very funny voice:
"Oh! The atmosphere seems to contain helium which is
a very light atom, thus
we get a very high sound velocity here. The wave-length of the
sound waves is of course fixed,
given by the anatomy of our throat, thus the dispersion
relation for sound waves tells us that the frequency
of our spoken sounds should increase quite a lot.
That's why I sound like this.
However, helium is a noble gas and will not harm
us. Let's go looking for food. I am starving!"
They walked away from the space-craft and into the the thick jungle.
All around them they saw animals that looked so strange, that if I
described them, you probably would not believe me, and that
would be sad, because then you might start to questioning other
things in this story, and think that they are exaggerations or just
plain fiction. Since I don't want to risk that, I relinquish from
describing the animals. The animals didn't seem to be afraid of
the new visitors. Oliva, looked at the animals, and said:
"Even if I really would love to have a juicy steak, we can't kill
anyone of these cute creatures."
"I agree.", Jesper nodded, "we'll have to find some fruit or berries
to eat."
"But, how will we know what to eat, and what not to eat."
"We can let the animals help us."
Just as Jesper had finished his sentence, a group of small hairy
creatures came walking. Their hair were very well-groomed, and it almost
looked like they came directly from a barber shop. One of the
hairy creatures noticed some red berries, and started to
jump up and down as it made strange noises. All the other hairy things
came running, and they all started to eat the red berries.
"Look there!", Jesper whispered, "there is our next meal!"
Jesper and Olivia found a lot of the red berries. They picked and
ate them, until the hunger had disappeared. Unfortunately neither the
hyper intelligent Jesper or the psychic Olivia had understood what the
hairy creature had said. Because, then they would have heard that
the message that the hairy creature gave to his hairy pals was 'Look
vomit-berries! Finally, we can get some help to throw
up some hair-balls!'
After the berries had gone down (and up from)
the stomaches of Jesper and Olivia something peculiar started to
happen. All the strange creatures suddenly begun to disappear,
like they expected danger. Instead other creatures, that slightly
reminded of owls, came flying.
"Strange. It looks like the animals are preparing for night.
But it is just noon here.", Jesper said and looked up to the sky.
On the cloudless sky Jesper noticed that the sun just started
to go into eclipse. Jesper had to think for two full seconds before
the situation become crystal clear to him. He decided to let
all the humans, that is Olivia, know what he had realized:
"Of course. The plane of the moon around Bleep, is parallel to
the ecliptic plane, and since the moon seems to have fixed rotation,
there is a total eclipse of the sun every day around noon, for
about one hour."
He looked at the sky and measured the angular size of Bleep, and
corrected himself:
"For 73 minutes I should say."
Listening to an extremely intellectual Donald Duck impersonator
appeared
to Olivia to be somewhat of a clash of stiles,
but she didn't comment on
anything that Jesper said anymore. She felt like she was just
a stupid witch, that didn't understand things that
Jesper thought was obvious. She sat down at a tree in the dark.
72.5 minutes later the sun was visible again, and Olivia and Jesper
started to look for food again. They had just laid eyes on some
blue banana shaped fruits, when the sky become dark again, this time
for just one second. Then a thud near them made the ground vibrate.
When they looked in the direction of the thud, they noticed a
totally exhausted dragon, who had made a terrible landing.