One Small Step by P.B. Kerr

Author:P.B. Kerr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing
Published: 2008-10-13T04:00:00+00:00

Three…

“Are you getting enough to eat, honey?” asked my mom.

“Yeah,” I said. And told her about the muesli.

“Well, that sounds nice and healthy,” she said.

“Healthy, yes,” I said. Bragg’s file was open on the table in front of me. “Nice, no. Fortunately, we’re allowed a kind of private food store we keep in a box. It’s called a tuck box. You know, like Friar Tuck in Robin Hood. If I get hungry, I just help myself from that.”

“I know what a tuck box is,” she said. “What’s the weather like over there?”

I looked out of the window. The sun was shining and the temperature was in the seventies. It was a typical Floridian day.

“Cold,” I said. “Yesterday we had to play field hockey in the snow.”

“Did you remember to pack your warm coat?”

“Are you kidding? I wear it all the time. We have to take a walk before breakfast. They’re very big on walks and fresh air here.”

“It all sounds very healthy. What are the other boys like?”

“They’re okay, I suppose. Most of them are from really rich families. Three boys in my class have dads who own Rolls-Royces.”

“That’s nice. Have you met him? Prince Charles?”

“No,” I said. “But I see him around sometimes. Everyone says he’s okay. For a prince.”

“I never got that clipping,” she said. “From the Houston Chronicle. About you and Kit going to Gordonstoun.”

“No?” I said. “I have one here. I’ll mail it. Only it might take a little while. The mail here is kind of slow. Everything is kind of slow here.”

“Maybe so,” she said. “But this is an amazingly clear telephone line. Normally a transatlantic call sounds like you’re speaking to someone in a submarine.”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I never made this kind of call before.”

“The school doesn’t mind you making a transatlantic call?”

“It’s part of the bursary,” I said. “That’s what they call it here when they give you a scholarship.”

“I know what a bursary is, Scott,” she said.

“It includes all kinds of stuff. Free food, free clothes, free travel, free phone calls, you name it, Mom.”

“Maybe you should call more often.”

“We’re allowed one phone call a week,” I said. “That’s the rule.”

“So what are you learning about in school?” she asked.

I hadn’t actually discussed this with Agent Bragg. Both of us had kind of assumed that children in schools learned the same sort of things the world over. But now that she’d asked, I thought it seemed unlikely that this would be the case. From the little I’d read about them, the Scots seemed like a remarkably clever race having invented the television, the telephone, penicillin, the pneumatic tire, the telegraph, the steam engine, the refrigerator, hypodermic syringes, and anesthetics. And it hardly seemed probable that a Scottish school would bother teaching anything much except science and engineering. Which just happened to be what I’d been studying in my NASA classes at the MSC in Clear Lake. So I decided to tell her that.

“I’ve been learning about astronomy,” I said. “And

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