Eric the scientist and his daughter’s friend, George, were gathered around the world’s most powerful computer, Cosmos, who sat modestly on Eric’s desk, perched unevenly on a pile of scientific journals and papers.

Annie, Eric’s daughter was peering anxiously out of the study window where leaves were frisking about in the air. ‘Are you sure it can’t fall over?’ she asked, watching the enormous transmission tower at the bottom of the garden, which was swaying slightly in the evening breeze. A little red light blinked on the top of the tower, much to the annoyance of the neighbours, who had not been thrilled when Eric and some of his students had built the tower over the course of a recent weekend.

‘Yes, yes, it’s fine,’ said Eric, not taking his eyes off Cosmos the computer. ‘It’s secured to the ground with cables so strong, you could run an elevator into space on them.’

Across the top half of the computer screen ran a long line of squiggles, showing the radio signals the transmission tower was sending into space. On the bottom half, Cosmos was displaying any incoming signals, picked up from beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. A sudden spike on the bottom half of the screen made Eric jump out of his chair with excitement. ‘We’ve got one!’ he yelled. ‘Cosmos, translate the signal!’

‘Hello?’ a voice came over the microphone. ‘Who is broadcasting on our frequency?’

‘Hello!’ replied George. ‘This is ground control in Foxbridge, England! My name is George. Can you identify yourself? Are you an intelligent extra terrestrial life form?’

‘Greetings,’ said the deep voice. ‘This is the International Space Station, Commander Frank speaking to you from 200 miles above the planet Earth. I am a human life form, possibly intelligent., I’m not always sure.’

 Annie squeaked and ran over to the others. ‘Hello Commander Frank!’ she said. ‘What can you see from the spacecraft?’

‘Well,’ replied Commander Frank. ‘From above the Earth, we can watch the swirling clouds of the Earth’s atmosphere, we can see the oceans, the deserts, the forests and the cities of our home planet.’

‘How come we can talk to you?’ demanded Annie. ‘I thought sound didn’t travel in space?’

‘My voice is transmitted to you through radio waves which can travel long distances,’ replied Commander Frank. ‘Radio waves are part of the electromagnetic spectrum and can journey far across our universe.’

‘Commander Frank, this is Eric Bellis, scientist and radio ham,’ said Eric proudly. ‘Thank you for picking up our signal and responding.’

‘No problem,’ said Commander Frank. ‘I must sign off now and go eat a packet of rehydrated dinner.’

‘Do you sleep like a bat?’ asked George eagerly. He very much wanted to be an astronaut when he grew up. ‘Hanging upside down?’

‘I do,’ confirmed Commander Frank. ‘Enjoy your travels across the universe.’

‘Good luck in space!’ said Annie. And the signal was gone.

‘Where shall we send a signal now?’ said George. ‘Can we send a message to the Moon?’

‘We could,’ said Eric. ‘Bounce a message off the Moon, if you like.’

‘Can we go to the Moon and have you send a signal to us?’ said Annie eagerly. Annie and George had travelled around space before, thanks to her father’s amazing computer Cosmos who could open up doorways through which you could walk to visit any part of the known of universe.

‘The Moon’s a bit boring,’ grumbled George.

‘Only if you’ve actually been there,’ said Annie sharply. George and her father had once taken a trip to the Moon without her, a fact she never let them forget.

‘Let’s see if we can tune into something happening further out in space,’ said Eric hastily, not wanting to restart the ‘It’s not fair, you didn’t take me to the Moon’ conversation with Annie for the trillionth time.

Eric twiddled around with some commands on Cosmos keyboard. For a few moments, there was silence in the study as Eric worked, broken only by the sound of the front door bell. Distantly, they heard Annie’s Mum, Susan, open the door, followed by the noise of feet tramping into the front hall. They heard murmured voices but ignored them, so intent were the three of them in staring at Cosmos’ screen for signs of life out there in the universe.

‘Eureka!’ cried Eric just as a gentle tap on the study door signalled that Annie’s Mum was standing on the other side. ‘We have contact!’ Cosmos screen was buzzing with activity now, lines charging across it in crazy spiralling patterns.

‘What is it?’ said George, mesmerised by the sight.

‘Have we found them?’ gasped Annie. ‘Have we found the aliens?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Eric, madly pounding the keyboard now. ‘Cosmos, decode the signal for us.’

‘A-hem,’ Susan had come into the study and was standing behind them. ‘Eric.’

‘Just a cheese sandwich for me!’ said Eric frantically, holding one hand up in the air. ‘We’re in the middle of descrambling a distant cosmic message, we can’t come to the table right now.’

‘I’m not taking food orders like a waitress,’ said Susan patiently. ‘I’ve come to tell you that the neighbours are here. They’re making a complaint about your tower.’

‘The nit-wits!’ said Eric in exasperation. ‘We’re on the brink of making a massive scientific discovery here! Ask them to come back later.’

Susan just glared at the back of his tweed jacket. Eric felt the heat of her glare and turned around, looking a little sheepish.

‘I mean, please could you ask them to come back later?’ he said rather abashed.

‘I’ll make them some tea,’ she said tartly and turned on her heel.

Meanwhile, Cosmos had been making sense of the signal.

‘Transmission report,’ said the little computer, sounding very self satisfied.

‘Who is it? Where is it from?’ said George.

‘Or rather WHAT is it from?’ replied Cosmos. ‘Fortunately for you, I am the world’s most intelligent and powerful computer – a lesser being than myself would not have been able to work so quickly or accurately to provide you with these startling results.’

‘Oh get on with it!’ groaned Eric, who often wished he had been able to create a super computer without a personality.

Instead of answering with words, Cosmos shot out twin beams of light and drew a rectangle above Eric’s desk so it looked like a small cinema screen. Annie and George knew this meant Cosmos was showing them a window on the universe, through which they could witness great cosmic events.

On the other side of the window, in the far distant blackness of space, they could see two bright yellow spheres, rapidly circling each other. Each sphere shot out a beam on either side, like a lighthouse, as it twirled around its companion.

‘Any guesses?’ said Eric, who was beaming from ear to ear. ‘Correct answer gets a trip to the Moon?’

‘I know! I know!’ said Annie jumping up and down. ‘Pick me! Me!’

‘George?’ said Eric quietly. George shook his head. He’d never seen anything like this before. The two glowing spheres, like old-fashioned lamps, seemed to be getting closer to each other.

‘They’re pulsars!’ said Annie proudly. ‘They’re fragments of stars who reached the end of their lives and died but weren’t massive enough to become black holes. So instead, they have a liquid core made up of neutrons and they send out a beam of x rays.’

‘Gold star to Miss Bellis,’ said Eric, nodding proudly. ‘And as we have two pulsars here, does anyone want to guess, for a bonus point, what that would be called?’

‘Does that make them binary pulsars?’ asked George shyly. He remembered a trip he and Annie had once made to a distant, brilliantly hot planet, which orbited two stars, meaning it had two sunrises and two sunsets. He had found out later that this was known as a binary system.

‘Perfect! My clever students,’ said Eric happily. ‘And what, my genius friends, do you predict will happen next?’

‘They’re getting too close to each other!’ cried Annie. The two spheres seemed to be falling towards each other as they span round faster and faster. ‘They’re going to crash!’ Just as she spoke, the two pulsars seemed to merge with each other, in a blinding flash of light, after which they vanished entirely into the blackness of space.

‘What was that!’ cried George. ‘Where have they gone?’

‘Think about it,’ said Eric. ‘How could two pulsars disappear as they collide?’

‘They made a black hole?’ said George carefully.

‘They did,’ said Eric. ‘Two binary pulsars got pulled together by gravity and formed a black hole. I once showed you how a star is born – and now you have seen the formation of a black hole. Don’t say I never take you anywhere interesting or fun…’

At that moment, a pounding on the study door announced that the neighbours had got bored of waiting.

‘Professor Bellis,’ the next-door neighbour from two houses down burst through, looking very agitated and waving a bright yellow official notice.

‘Oh er, hello,’ said Eric mildly. ‘What seems to be the problem?”

 ‘Adelaide Bunworthy here,’ boomed the neighbour, slapping the yellow notice down on Eric’s desk so that all the papers and tea cups jingled nervously. ‘I have here an order from the council that you remove that absurd tower immediately.’

‘Ah, Adelaide…’

‘Ms Bunworthy to you,’ sniffed the neighbour.

‘Ms Bunworthy,’ Eric corrected himself. He stood up and stretched himself, giving her the full benefit of his most charming smile. ‘You have arrived just at the moment of a great and marvellous scientific discovery! So timely is your interruption that when I write a paper on this phenomenon, I will be delighted to name it ‘The Bunworthy Effect’ in honour of this auspicious moment.’

‘Oh!’ Adelaide Bunworthy looked startled –,simpered and patted her hair.

‘In fact, dear Ms Bunworthy,’ continued Eric smoothly.

‘Oh please - call me Adelaide…’ Eric ushered the fawning neighbour out of his study, pocketing the council notice as he went. Annie and George were left with Cosmos in his study to play and replay many hundreds of times the footage clever Cosmos had captured of two pulsars colliding to form a black hole.

‘Can we put this on Youtube?’ said Annie longingly. ‘Can we?...’

Copyright Lucy Hawking, all rights reserved