After his phone rang incessantly during their one-zoomec, or eight Earth hours, flight to Planet Archimedes, Catalina finally taught Jacob how to program the Astral Telly so that it would only ring when people he really wanted to speak to were calling. He immediately added Dexter, as well as the king and Miss Banks, and after a great deal of thought he decided to add Mick Cracken and Sarah Daisy as well.

His heart raced when he thought about adding one more person, someone he had wanted to talk to for years, but he wondered if he was being foolish. He checked to make sure that Catalina wasn’t looking, and then he quickly whispered his dad’s name to the list of approved callers. He stared at the Telly for a moment and thought about trying to call his dad to see if he was somewhere out in space. All he had to do was say “Call Dad,” but he couldn’t bring himself to do it, and an indignant feeling stirred within him instead. He was running for president. His dad would know he was in space. After not showing up or calling for years, his dad should have been the one to call and apologize.

“Are you ready?” Catalina asked.

Jacob nodded, and they stepped out onto the street on Planet Archimedes. He saw the familiar sight of scientists walking up and down the sidewalks, staring into the sky and bumping into each other since they weren’t watching where they were going. Nearly everyone was wearing the automatically focusing binoculars that Jacob had seen a guard wearing on his last trip. Apparently the guard had started a fad.

Even though they were entering the Astral History Museum during normal hours and hadn’t done anything wrong, Jacob watched the scientists warily, ready for one of them to leap out and arrest him like last time.

“Watch out!” Catalina shrieked.

Jacob stopped just as he was about to step on a mouse sunning itself on the sidewalk.

“Honestly, Jake,” she said. “You know how much they love mice here. That could have been the end of your campaign right there.”

A scientist with tape on his glasses placed a thimble of lemonade next to the lab mouse and bowed. He gave Jacob a dainty shove and said, “Watch your step, dorkus maximus.”

Jacob started to retort, but he didn’t imagine the scientist would vote for him if he said something insulting. He forced a smile instead, and said, “Thank you for your kind feedback.”

They walked into the museum and suddenly heard an earsplitting scream. “Oh my stars, it’s Princess Catalina and Jacob Wonderbar!!” a girl yelled.

A class waiting behind a velvet rope screamed and jumped up and down en masse, pointing and waving. Catalina flashed Jacob a smile and walked over to work the line, laughing, shaking hands, and signing autographs.

Jacob was too surprised to move at first, but he realized that he needed votes and should say hello. He began shaking hands and high-fiving down the line. He was so stunned that the Astral kids knew who he was and were excited to see him that he could barely talk.

“I’m voting for you!” a young boy blurted out when he shook his hand.

“Thanks,” Jacob said.

“Ugh,” a pigtailed girl grunted. Jacob noticed that she had hung back and crossed her arms while her classmates were screaming. “I’m not voting for a dirty Earther.”

Jacob stopped and stared at her, and she avoided his gaze. He was taken aback by the disgust in her voice and was about to say something when Catalina grabbed him and pulled him away from the line.

“Remember, kids,” Catalina announced. “Fashion first! We don’t just want your vote, we want you to look good while you’re voting. Ta-ta for now!”

She pulled Jacob into the next room, which was completely empty. There were some interactive exhibits on the wall and a large, detailed mosaic of Earth on the floor. “I arranged for a private viewing of the museum. You’re just lucky I’m leading this tour. Michaelus flunked Astral history three times in a row.”

“Shocker,” Jacob said.

He wanted to ask her about why the girl in line was so hostile, but an old man with white hair was waving at them. Catalina walked up to him and stuck her hand straight into his chest and then smirked at Jacob’s horrified reaction. “Hologram,” she said.

Jacob realized that the old man with the crazy white hair looked familiar.

“Albert Einstein,” she said. “Have you heard of him, or did they wipe him from Earther textbooks?”

Jacob sighed. “I’ve heard of him, yes.”

“What they probably didn’t teach you in Earther school is that Father Albert built a spaceship and used it to leave Earth behind. He was tired of the Great Earther War and how even though he was the most brilliant Earther in history, all anyone ever wanted him to do was help them build scary horrible weapons. So he grabbed some buddies and left behind a hologram of himself to teach college and keep everyone off his trail. Pretty smart move if you ask me, even if his holo had to avoid shaking people’s hands. They just thought he was scared of germs. Meanwhile, the real Albert was off flying around space, exploring planets. He was the first king.”

“Wow,” Jacob said.

“And guess what?” Catalina spread her arms wide. “I’m a direct descendent! He’s my great-great-great-great-great times a million greats grandfather!”

Jacob’s eyes went wide at this revelation, but then he chuckled. “Ah. I get it, you’re kidding. I’m not that dumb. Albert Einstein wasn’t born long enough ago to be your million-times-great-grandfather.”

Catalina winked and beckoned Jacob into the next room. “Lesson two. Time travel.”

“Time travel?!”

“Oh, Jakey,” she said, patting him on the head. “You still haven’t figured out what happened when we sent you back to Earth last time? Good thing I’m the brains behind this operation.”

Jacob thought back to when the king’s scientists put them in the box that sent them back to Earth. They had all thought they would be in a huge amount of trouble after being gone for days, but when they arrived back on Earth no time had elapsed at all and their parents weren’t surprised in the slightest to see them. They had wondered what happened but had assumed it was just a consequence of traveling such a great distance, but what actually had happened was…

“You didn’t just send us back to Earth,” he said. “You sent us back in time.”

“Such a smart boy,” she said. “We know how terribly Earther parents punish their children when they’ve gone missing. I wouldn’t have wanted you to be locked in a box and buried underground for days.”

“That’s not…”

“This way, please.”

They stepped into a dark room with a low ceiling that gave Jacob a particularly uneasy feeling.

“Father Albert predicted that Earth would be dangerous to us Astrals someday. Earthers had already spent their first hundred thousand years on the planet trying to blow each other to bits, and Father Albert said that they would eventually build horrible missiles and try to bring war to space. He knew that he and his friends wouldn’t stand a chance in a war since there were just a few Astrals at that time. How could a couple dozen scientists stand up to Earther war machines? So he built a time machine. He wanted Astrals to be ready.”

Jacob stared at a device that looked like a coffin with hundreds of cables emitting from it, which was labeled as an early time machine.

“They went back ten thousand years. They multiplied and multiplied and started other space colonies, let some Earthers they trusted join them, and developed new technologies. That’s why there are so many of us, scattered on thousands of planets all around the Milky Way galaxy. Now that we’re so developed, we’re ready for anything Earthers can bring.”

Jacob stopped by a monitor showing a black-and-white video of a group of scientists tipping over a sleeping woolly mammoth. They high-fived and danced away, terrifying a nearby caveman, who ran away in fear.

Catalina nodded at the screen. “Sometimes they went back to Earth to visit.”

They walked into another room, which had old faded posters of Earth with X’s through it and pictures of planets exploding. Jacob’s heart raced. What had poor Earth done to deserve posters showing it blown up or with a thousand missiles pointed at it?

“And that brings us to the Society for Expediting Earther Rapture. It’s a movement that thinks we should just blow the whole thing up. Get rid of the Earther threat once and for all. The SEERs have a lot of members and they are a very powerful voting bloc, so we should…”

Jacob felt his face go numb. “They want to destroy Earth?! That’s why that girl called me a ‘dirty Earther’?”

Catalina waved her hand at him. “It’s not that nice of a planet.”

“You’ve never even been there!”

The strange things that Jacob had heard Astrals say about Earth were suddenly clicking into place. Officers Bosendorfer and Erard had thought Jacob was the head of an Earther army. The scientists had thought Jacob was stealing the Dragon’s Eye to build a weapon. The king had said Astrals were scared of Earth and he had wanted to talk to Jacob to see if he was right that Earth children weren’t all bad. And if the king wasn’t in power anymore and all of the crazy Astrals could vote on whether to blow up Earth, Jacob was pretty sure he knew which way the vote would go. They didn’t take anything seriously, and Jacob suspected they might just blow up Earth on a whim if it struck them as a fun thing to do. All because they had been scared of Earth from the beginning of their history.

Catalina took Jacob’s hand and looked him in the eye. He had the sudden sense that he was reacting exactly like she wanted him to, as if she had planned this moment all along. “Listen, Jakey,” she said sweetly. “I know you’re sentimental about that polluted dustball. And that’s why I will make you a deal. When you’re elected president, you’re going to have a lot of power, including the power to say that there should still be a royal family living on Planet Royale.”

Jacob stared into her blue eyes and braced himself for her proposal. She wrung her hands in an unsuccessful attempt to look innocent.

“I’ll help you save Earth if you help me stay a princess.”