George and the Big Bang (George's Secret Key, Band 3) - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Stephen Hawking was a brilliant theoretical physicist and is generally considered to have been one of the world’s greatest thinkers. He held the position of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge for thirty years and is the author of A Brief History of Time, which was an international bestseller. His other books for general readers include A Briefer History of Time, the essay collection Black Holes and Baby Universes, The Universe in a Nutshell, The Grand Design, and Black Holes: The BBC Reith Lectures, as well as the books in the George’s Secret Key series. He died in 2018.

Lucy Hawking, Stephen Hawking’s daughter, is a journalist and novelist. She is the coauthor of the George’s Secret Key series for kids, as well as the author of the adult novels Jaded and Run for Your Life. She lives in Cambridge with her son.

Garry Parsons is the award-winning illustrator of many books, including George’s Secret Key to the Universe, George’s Cosmic Treasure Hunt, George and the Big Bang, George and the Unbreakable Code, and George and the Blue Moon by Lucy and Stephen Hawking; Billy’s Bucket by Kes Gray; and What’s Cool About School by Kate Agnew. He lives in London. Visit him at GarryParsons.co.uk.

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Chapter One

Where’s the best place in the Universe for a pig to live? Annie was typing onto the keyboard of Cosmos, the supercomputer. “Cosmos will know!” she declared. “He must be able to find Freddy somewhere better than that shabby old farm.”

The farm where Freddy, the pig, now lived was actually perfectly nice—at least, all the other animals seemed happy there. Only Freddy, George’s precious pig, was miserable.

“I feel awful,” said George sadly as Cosmos, the world’s greatest supercomputer, ran through his millions and billions of files to try to answer Annie’s question about pigs. “Freddy was so angry he wouldn’t even look at me.”

“He looked at me!” said Annie hotly, glaring at the screen. “I definitely saw him send me a message with his piggy eyes. It was:HELP! GET ME OUT OF HERE!”

The day trip to visit Freddy at the farm just outside Foxbridge, the university town where George and Annie lived, had not been a success. When Annie’s mom, Susan, arrived to pick them up at the end of the afternoon, she was surprised to see George red-faced and furious and Annie on the verge of tears.

“George! Annie!” said Susan. “What is the matter with the two of you?”

“It’s Freddy!” burst out Annie, leaping into the backseat of the car. “He hates it at the farm.”

Freddy was George’s pet pig. He had been a Christmas present from George’s gran when he was a piglet. George’s parents were eco-activists, which also meant they weren’t very interested in presents. They didn’t like the way all the discarded, broken, and unwanted toys left over from Christmas built up into huge mounds of old plastic and metal, floating across the seas, choking whales and strangling seagulls, or making mountains of ugly junk on the land.

George’s gran knew that if she gave George an ordinary present, his parents would give it right back, and everyone would get upset. So if he was to keep his Christmas present, she realized she would have to think of something special—something thathelped the planet rather than destroyed it.

That’s why, one cold Christmas Eve, George found a cardboard box on the doorstep. Inside it was a little pink piglet and a note from Gran saying:Can you give this young pig a nice home? George had been thrilled. He had a Christmas present his parents had to let him keep; and, even better, he had his very own pig.

The problem with little pink piglets, however, is that they get bigger. Bigger and bigger, until they are enormous—too large for the backyard of an ordinary row house with a narrow strip of land and scattered vegetables growing between the two fences separating it from the neighboring yards. But George’s parents had kind hearts really, so Freddy, as George named the pig, had continued living in his pigsty in the backyard until he reached a gigantic size—he was now more like a baby elephant than a pig. George didn’t care how big Freddy got—he was very fond of his pig and spent long hours in the yard, chatting to him or just sitting in his huge shadow, reading books about the wonders of the cosmos.

But George’s dad, Terence, had never really liked Freddy. Freddy was too big, too piggy, too pink, and he enjoyed dancing on Terence’s carefully arranged vegetable plot, trampling his spinach and broccoli and munching thoughtlessly on his carrot tops. Last summer, before the twins were born, the whole family had been going away. Terence had been super-quick to find Freddy a place at a nearby children’s petting farm, promising George that when they all got back, the pig would be able to come home.

Only this never happened. George and his parents returned from their adventures, and George’s next-door neighbors—the scientist Eric, his wife, Susan, and their daughter, Annie—came back from living in America. Then George’s mother had twin baby girls, Juno and Hera, who cried and gurgled and smiled. And then cried some more. And every time one of them stopped crying, there would be a beautiful half-second of silence. Then the other baby would start up, wailing until George thought his brain would explode and start leaking out of his ears. His mom and dad always looked stressed and tired, and George felt bad about asking them for anything at all. So once Annie came back from America, he started slipping through the hole in the back fence more and more often, until he was practically living with his friend, her crazy family, and the world’s greatest supercomputer in the house next door.

But it was worse for Freddy, because he never made it home at all.

Once the baby girls were born, George’s dad said they had enough on their hands without a great big pig taking up most of the backyard. “Anyway,” he told George rather pompously when he protested, “Freddy is a creature of planet Earth. He doesn’t belong to you—he belongs to nature.”

But Freddy couldn’t even stay in his small, friendly petting farm, which had to close at the beginning of this summer vacation. Freddy—along with the other animals there—had been moved to a bigger place where there were unusual breeds of farm animal, and lots of visitors, especially during summer vacation. It was a bit like him and Annie moving up to middle school, George thought to himself—going somewhere much bigger. It was a bit scary.

“Nature, huh!” he snorted to himself as he remembered his dad’s comments now. Cosmos the computer was still chewing over the complicated question of the best location in the Universe for a homeless pig. “I don’t think Freddy knows he’s a creature of planet Earth—he just wants to be with us,” said George.

“He looked so sad!” said Annie. “I’m sure he was crying.”

On their trip to the farm earlier that day, George and Annie had come across Freddy lying flat on his stomach on the floor of his pig pen, legs splayed out on either side, his eyes dull and his cheeks sunken. The other pigs were trotting around, looking cheerful and healthy. The pen was spacious and airy, the farm clean, and the people that worked there friendly. But even so, Freddy seemed lost in a piggy hell of his own. George felt incredibly guilty. Summer vacation had passed and he hadn’t done anything about getting Freddy home again. It was Annie who had suggested making the trip to the farm today, badgering her mom into driving them there and picking them up again afterward.

George and Annie had asked the workers what was wrong with Freddy. They’d looked worried too. The vet had examined him: Freddy wasn’t sick, she’d said; he just seemed very unhappy, as though he was pining away. After all, he had grown up in George’s quiet backyard, and had then moved to a small farm with just a few children coming to pet him. In the new place he was surrounded by noisy, unfamiliar animals and had lots of visitors every day: It was probably a big shock. Freddy had never lived with his fellow pigs before. He was totally unused to other animals: In fact, he considered himself more as a person than a pig. He didn’t understand what he was doing on a farm where visitors hung over the edge of the pig pen to stare at him.

“Can’t we take him home?” George had asked.

The helpers looked a little perplexed. There were lots of rules...