The Challenge

• Nathan Bruce , Grade 4
• Short Story
• 2020

I was sitting peacefully on my couch eating space cheese pizza. I am the commander of Martian 6, the only spaceship which had landed on Mars, and astronauts walked on the surface of Mars. I was dreaming about going to the end of the universe when Eve interrupted my reverie and said Luke, the aliens are challenging us about a game of soccer and if we lose, they would capture our spaceship. My crew and I were ready, so we flew to Mars to play the game. The pitch was hard to play at first because we had to get adjusted to low gravity so the aliens scored 2 goals and the scores were 2-0. During the second half I scored 3 goals, Eve scored 5, and Joshua scored 6 goals, and we won! The aliens were so exhausted that they gave up. We went back to our spaceship and our cook surprised us with our favourite foods, a reward for our triumphant victory over the aliens. After lunch, I went to the station, and Eve said to me “ The reports from earth said that there was an asteroid, 1.2 miles wide, traveling out the Earth’s path and they need help”. I said to Eve that we need to help Earth but we didn’t know-how. We thought for hours but couldn’t come up with anything. It was time to sleep so we decided to think of it the next morning. The next day, Eve said that because our spaceship was made out of Tungsten, the asteroid should not cause us much damage so we can redirect our spaceship onto the asteroid’s path. That way we could hit it before it hit the earth. We thought that it was a good idea and got prepared. The very next day, we got parachutes in our astronaut suit and put our astronaut suits on. We drove our spaceship on to the asteroid and suddenly there was a loud bang. Eve said that the asteroid had hit our spaceship and caused a lot of damage. A few seconds later our spaceship broke and we got pulled into the earth’s atmosphere, luckily we had our parachutes so we landed comfortably. The people on Earth thanked us for changing the direction of the asteroid. We sought NASA’s help and they rebuild our spaceship. We were so thankful because we couldn’t go back to our planet without our spaceship. ‘‘Brother, brother wake up” said Joshua. Phew, I thought. It was all a dream. I decided to write a story about my dream. I took my space dictionary to level up my words. I named my book ‘The Challenge’