My Life as an Afterthought Astronaut Read online

  My Life As an

  Afterthought Astronaut

  Tommy Nelson® Books by Bill Myers

  Series

  SECRET AGENT DINGLEDORF

  . . . and his trusty dog, SPLAT

  The Case of the . . .

  Giggling Geeks • Chewable Worms

  • Flying Toenails • Drooling Dinosaurs •

  Hiccupping Ears • Yodeling Turtles

  The Incredible Worlds of Wally McDoogle

  My Life As . . .

  a Smashed Burrito with Extra Hot Sauce • Alien Monster Bait

  • a Broken Bungee Cord • Crocodile Junk Food •

  Dinosaur Dental Floss • a Torpedo Test Target

  • a Human Hockey Puck • an Afterthought Astronaut •

  Reindeer Road Kill • a Toasted Time Traveler

  • Polluted Pond Scum • a Bigfoot Breath Mint •

  a Blundering Ballerina • a Screaming Skydiver

  • a Human Hairball • a Walrus Whoopee Cushion •

  a Computer Cockroach (Mixed-Up Millennium Bug)

  • a Beat-Up Basketball Backboard • a Cowboy Cowpie •

  Invisible Intestines with Intense Indigestion

  • a Skysurfing Skateboarder • a Tarantula Toe Tickler •

  a Prickly Porcupine from Pluto • a Splatted-Flat Quarterback

  • a Belching Baboon . . . with Bad Breath •

  The Portal • The Experiment • The Whirlwind • The Tablet

  Picture Book

  Baseball for Breakfast

  www.Billmyers.com

  the incredible worlds of

  Wally McDoogle

  BILL MYERS

  MY LIFE AS AN AFTERTHOUGHT ASTRONAUT

  Copyright © 1995 by Bill Myers.

  Cover illustration by Jeff Mangiat.

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the publisher, with the exception of brief quotations in reviews.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

  Thomas Nelson, Inc., titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected].

  Scripture quotations in this book are from the International Children’s Bible®, New Century Version®, © 1986, 1988, 1999 by Tommy Nelson®, a Division of Thomas Nelson, Inc. All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Myers, Bill, 1953–

  My life as an afterthought astronaut / Bill Myers ; illustrations by Jeff Mangiat.

  p. cm.— (The incredible worlds of Wally McDoogle ; #8)

  Summary: When accident-prone Wally McDoogle finds himself part of a space shuttle mission, he learns a lesson about the importance of obeying the rules.

  ISBN: 978-0-8499-3602-9 (trade paper)

  [1. Space shuttles—Fiction. 2. Christian life—Fiction. 3. Humorous stories.] I. Title. II. Series: Myers, Bill, 1953– .

  Incredible worlds of Wally McDoogle ; #8.

  PZ7.M98234Myt 1995

  [Fic]—dc20

  94-45373

  CIP

  AC

  Printed in the United States of America

  08 09 10 11 12 QW 31 30 29 28 27

  To Bill Greig III, Linda Holland, Christy Weir,

  Kyle Duncan, and Mark Maddox, who

  encouraged me to “launch” this series.

  “Whoever obeys the commands protects his life.

  Whoever is careless in what he does will die.”

  —Proverbs 19:16

  Contents

  1. Just for Starters

  2. A Little Sleepover

  3. Up, Up, and Away . . .

  4. Another Day, Another Catastrophe

  5. Sweat Dreams

  6. Batter Up!

  7. Rescue

  8. Recovery

  9. Homeward Bound . . . Maybe

  10. Wrapping Up

  Chapter 1

  Just for Starters

  Just ’cause I didn’t follow the rules doesn’t make it my fault that the space shuttle almost crashed.

  Well, okay, maybe that was sort of my fault.

  But not the part when Pilot O’Brien was spacewalking and I accidentally knocked him halfway to Jupiter, or when I wound up in a spacesuit and nearly became the first human satellite to orbit the Earth; you can’t blame that on me.

  Well, okay, maybe that was sort of my fault, too.

  But it wasn’t my fault that Wall Street sold me a root beer. And when you get right down to it, that was really how the whole mess began. . . .

  We were touring the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It was one of those family vacation things Dad always dreams up. Last year he dragged us to a bunch of old battlefields where a bunch of old battles took place. Wonderful. Almost as exciting as watching grass grow. The year before that, we took the Great Caves of America tour. Not bad, if you happened to have brought along plenty of comic books and a flashlight to read them by.

  This year my older brothers, Burt and Brock, dreamed up some great excuses not to go. Burt said he wanted to attend Hula Dancing School. (He thought being the only guy student in a class with three hundred beautiful babes might be kind of interesting. Go figure.) And Brock, never the smarter of the two, decided on Dental Floss Camp—something about all those free dental f loss samples he’d been getting. (I told you he wasn’t so bright.)

  At any rate, that left two openings—one for my best friend Wall Street, who wants to make her first million by age fifteen, and the other one for my other best friend Opera, the human eating machine.

  We had done the usual Florida touristy things. We went to Epcot Center and sweated . . . Disney World and sweated . . . the beach and sweated . . . Universal Studios and sweated, and so on. Same crowds, same sweat. And then, just when we figured we’d sweated all the sweat we could ever sweat, Dad remembered the Kennedy Space Sauna . . . er, I mean, Center.

  We were bushed. There is something about three best friends vacationing together that means getting to bed around 4:30 A.M. each day and waking up about 4:33 A.M. Not a bad deal if you don’t mind sleepwalking through the day.

  In between catnaps, I remember the Space Center being pretty cool. In fact, they were getting ready to launch the new space shuttle, the Encounter, so there were lots of people running around looking important. But nobody was looking more important than our tour guide, Ms. Durkelbuster.

  “Don’t touch this, don’t touch that, stay in line, lower your voices, don’t speak to anyone unless they speak to you.” The poor lady obviously wanted to be in charge of something, and since there were no openings for Supreme World Dictator, I guess she had to settle for being our tour guide.

  “Standing before you is the Launch Control Center,” she shouted through a bullhorn.

  We looked up at the giant four-story building that towered above us. Luckily there was a strong breeze, so we weren’t excreting our normal quota of sweat. Lucky for us, unlucky for Ms. Durkelbuster. I guess when you use half a can of hair spray to plaster down every hair, you don’t appreciate Mother Nature’s little experiments with hair styling. As a neat freak, the poor woman was constantly readjusting her hair, while all the time making sure we stood perfectly silent, in a perfect semicircle, while she recited her perfectly memorized speech: “There are four separate firing rooms within this structure. At this moment ninety-four skilled scientists are in these rooms observing every detail of the countdown.”

  Another gust of wind hit and messed up another one of her ultravarnished hairs. She quickly pulled it d
own and bent it back into place. “Before we enter the firing rooms, it is imperative that you leave all food and beverages outside. There are hundreds of computers as well as sensitive electrical equipment within those walls. One misplaced crumb or spilled beverage could jeopardize the entire mission.”

  As we entered the building (in perfect single file, of course), everyone obeyed the rules and dumped their stuff in the outside trash. Everyone but me. I was dying of thirst. And since I’d bought a root beer from Wall Street at a price just under the cost of the entire space program (I told you she knows how to make a buck), I figured smuggling the can inside for a drink couldn’t hurt.

  That was my first mistake. My second mistake was trying to hide the can. As we headed up the stairs, I stuffed it into my shorts pocket. A good idea, except this particular pair of shorts didn’t have pockets (a detail I might have remembered if I hadn’t been sleepwalking). The can fell to the ground and bounced halfway down the flight of steps.

  K-LINK, K-LANK, K-RUNK, K-LUNK!

  Fortunately, Ms. Durkelbuster was too busy rearranging her plasticized bangs to notice. I ran down the steps and grabbed the can. It was a little dented from all the excitement, but it was still in pretty good shape . . . at least on the outside. I had no idea what all that bouncing had done on the inside.

  Ms. Durkelbuster opened the door, and we stepped into a room just slightly bigger than Cleveland. The place had more monitors than a video arcade. Everyone was wearing headsets and looking very official. But not as official as Ms. Durkelbuster, who seemed to swell with every word: “Welcome one and all to NASA’s Launch Control.”

  At the front of the room was a huge glass window. Through it you could see the Encounter, which was waiting for tomorrow morning’s liftoff. As everyone oohed and aahed and took pictures, I thought I’d take a drink.

  While Ms. Durkelbuster continued rambling on about tomorrow’s mission and the tons of electronic junk that would do the tons of electronic stuff, I carefully reached for the can’s aluminum tab. I lifted it as gently as a bomb expert defusing a bomb.

  Unfortunately, this bomb went off.

  All that stair bouncing had definitely taken its toll. When I popped the top, foam shot through the opening. And we’re not talking a little fizz here. We’re talking a major look out!-it’s-Old-Faithful, root-beer geyser!

  People screamed and leaped aside. So did I. Unfortunately, I leaped aside right into a fire alarm box on the wall. No problem, except the part where I accidentally broke the little glass rod, which accidentally set off the alarm, which sent even more people scurrying.

  But not Ms. Durkelbuster. Having been trained for every emergency, she grabbed a fire extinguisher and shouted, “Step aside! I’m a professional! I will handle this!”

  “There’s nothing to handle!” I yelled over the alarm. “It’s just this can of—”

  But Ms. Durkelbuster had no time for facts. She was too busy trying to be a hero. A fire alarm was sounding, and her training clearly stated that fire alarms called for fire extinguishers. She pointed the nozzle at me and—

  “You don’t understand,” I shouted “It’s just my root—”

  WHOOSH . . .

  I was suddenly covered in three feet of foam.

  That was the good news. The bad news was, when the powerful stream of foam hit the can, it knocked it out of my hand, smashing my little gusher bomb against the wall, where it ricocheted right back at her, spraying the sticky brew all over her.

  “AUGH!” she screamed. “My hair, my hair!”

  But we weren’t done yet. Oh no. After all, we are talking about Wally If-It-Can-Go-Wrong-Count-On-It-Going-Wrong McDoogle. Like a bad slow-motion dream, the can sailed over her head toward a nearby computer console (spewing its satisfying refreshment in all directions). It finally crashed into the terminal and poured out the rest of its contents.

  It was quite a sight. There were more sparks than on the Fourth of July. And as the security guards grabbed me and the dripping Ms. Durkelbuster, I began to suspect it was not going to be one of my better days.

  Forty-five minutes later I was sitting by myself outside the Launch Control Center. Ms. Durkelbuster was busy cleaning out her locker and buying a newspaper, so she could go through the Help Wanted section. Before we parted, I suggested she look into becoming a hair stylist. She suggested I stay out of her way before she broke my face.

  Dad was almost as mad. He made it clear that just because I broke the rules was no reason for the rest of the family to suffer. I could sit outside the building and think about my behavior until the tour was over.

  That was fine with me. It would give me a chance to catch a few Zs, tune up my tan, and, of course, sweat. I had thought of starting a new superhero story on Ol’ Betsy, the laptop computer that I always carry around, but I was just too tired.

  I closed my eyes and was just dropping into a nice state of unconsciousness when I heard them: another tour group coming out of the building. I opened my eyes. They were about the size of my group, but instead of the little tags that had “Visitor” printed on them, these guys all had cool badges that had “V.I.P.” (Very Important People) printed on them. The badges were cool, but not as cool as what their tour guide was saying: “Now, you must understand what we’re about to do is very unusual. Going up and visiting the shuttle this close to launch is never permitted.”

  My ears perked up. Had I heard right? Were these people actually going to visit the shuttle? I leaned forward to listen as they filed past me toward a special bus with the same V.I.P. letters plastered on the front.

  The guide continued. “But since you’re all friends and relatives of the Senator, and since he is such a great supporter of the space program, we have permission to take a quick peek and break the rules just this once.”

  I had my answer. Without thinking (one of my better skills), I leaped from the bench, grabbed Ol’ Betsy, and joined the end of the line. No way would they notice one more kid. No way was I going to miss seeing the shuttle. And if they were going to “break the rules just this once,” no way could they not count me in.

  Unfortunately, I’d soon wish they had counted me out.

  Chapter 2

  A Little Sleepover

  As the bus headed for the launch site, the new tour guide, who was about 3002 percent nicer than Ms. Durkelbuster, rattled off a few hundred dos and don’ts. Little things, like not lighting up a cigarette around the seven gazillion gallons of rocket fuel unless you enjoyed being vaporized in a gazillionth of a second. Or, when we arrived at the shuttle, not to reach inside and press any buttons, especially those labeled “Launch.”

  She also joked about the tour having twenty-seven people in it and that she expected to count twenty-seven heads when we were all done, just in case anyone had sudden cravings to become a stowaway.

  Of course, everyone chuckled. So did I. Not over the joke, but over the knowledge that the group no longer had twenty-seven people, but twenty-eight.

  We climbed out of the bus and squeezed into an elevator that rose slower than Mom drives when there’s a police car behind her. There wasn’t much to see. Just the usual cables, metal framework, pipes, and billion-dollar rocket engines.

  “The two smaller rockets on each side have solid fuel in them,” our guide explained. “During liftoff they are the first to be jettisoned and will parachute 150 miles off of the coast, where a ship will recover them and bring them back for reuse. The large orange tank you see in the middle is mostly liquid oxygen and hydrogen. It will be jettisoned a little later and will burn up in the atmosphere.”

  Suddenly, a hand shot up so fast that I thought someone had to go to the bathroom. In reality it was just one of those show-offs (I guess every group has to have one) who was trying to impress us all with his staggering knowledge. “Actually,” he said, “the precise time of External Tank Separation is at 8 minutes and 54 seconds into the f light, is it not?”

  Our tour leader forced a smile. “Yes, that’s corre
ct.”

  Show-off looked around, beaming at us. No one bothered to beam back.

  Finally, the elevator jolted to a stop. Before us was a narrow steel bridge that led to the shuttle. Everyone stared in hushed awe.

  “Okay,” our guide said, “before we head down that ramp there are a couple more things you should know. First, you must not touch the spacecraft. In fact, it’s prohibited for anyone to come within three feet of the vehicle.”

  Before anybody could complain or Show-off could convert the three feet into metric units, the guide continued. “However, I have asked one of the technicians to open the hatch for us, so you’ll at least be able to see the mid-deck where the crew will carry out many of their experiments. You’ll also be able to see the ladder that leads up to the flight deck where the pilot and commander fly the shuttle.”

  Everybody was impressed. Everybody except Show-off. “There are actually three levels to the crew’s compartment. You mentioned only two.”

  “Well, yes,” our guide answered, having a harder time finding her smile. “Technically, there are three. There is also a lower deck that can be reached by removing some floor panels of the mid-deck. It’s basically a storage area and the location of the life support systems.”

  Mr. Know-It-All grinned as if he’d be able to sleep better knowing the oversight had been cleared up.

  Our guide continued. “I will have to ask you to please remove everything from your shirt pockets—pencils, papers, anything that could fall out.”

  I glanced into my pocket and saw nothing but the remains of the last dinner my little sister cooked—cremated cauliflower. It’s a known fact that if you don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings, shirt pockets are a great place to hide their attempts at cooking. I quickly dumped the rock-hard pebbles out of my pocket.

  But our guide wasn’t through yet. “Also any rings, watches, or eyeglasses should be removed.”

  Uh-oh. Without my glasses I couldn’t see the broad side of a barn door. Come to think of it, I couldn’t see the barn, either. But if I raised my hand and protested, I’d draw attention to myself—a definite no-no if you’re trying to blend in with the crowd.