The Keeper. Part 1. An Invitation

‘’Everything OK?’ asked the general, noticing.

‘Yes, I think he might be hungry. He always starts to moan when he’s hungry.’

8

The Arrowhead

‘Ah, Sky,’ the general called out, seeing his daughter standing by the door and waving for her to come and join them.

‘I think Arthur deserves a little break, so why don’t you show him around a bit, and perhaps include the courtyard too, if the weather’s nice enough. I’m afraid to say I don’t know what it’s doing outside today. In the meantime, we’ve got a few matters which we need his father to assist us with. We’ll come and join you once we’re done.’

Catching Arthur looking at him, his father smiled.

‘Go on, I’ll catch up with you in a bit,’ he said.

Wondering what they could be needing his dad for, and having made sure that it’d be OK for the cat to could go with them, Arthur followed Sky out of the lab.

Despite the fact that much of the facility was out of bounds even for Sky, one of the areas which wasn’t was a tower complex similar to the ones which he and his father had been wondering about the previous evening. Not only that, but just as they thought might be the case, Arthur entered to discover that a rocket really was in the process of being built inside it.

‘Looks like a giant oil drum if you ask me,’ commented the cat when Sky got called away to take a phone call.

‘Ha ha.Very funny.’

‘I’m serious. You humans are mad trying to go into space in one of those things. You know, right, that there’s a reason why no other species on this planet have ever tried to build something like this?’

‘Well, yeah, because none of them are smart enough and only humans have fingers.’

‘Wrong! Because none of them ever thought it reasonable to want to strap themselves into soda cans full of highly explosive fuel.’

‘Hey, you’ll never guess what,’ said Sky, rejoining them. ‘We’ve just been invited to go and watch an astronaut training session in the main pool complex. It’s really cool. They enter the pool wearing their full space suits and use the deep water to help simulate what it will be like when they need to carry out space walks for real.’