“Is it okay to have another muffin?” Benny whispered to Jessie the next morning at breakfast.
“Here, take mine,” Jessie told him.
“How come you’re not hungry?” Henry asked his sister.
Jessie yawned. “I’m more tired than hungry. I had the worst time falling asleep last night. First I was too hot, then it was too light in the room, then I thought I heard an alarm.”
Just as Jessie said this, Mr. Diggs walked into the kitchen. “You must have heard a car alarm. They go off at all hours for no reason in a big city like this.”
Mrs. Diggs came back from the pantry with more food for the children. “Pete left a message on the phone machine that everything was quiet all night.”
At this, Jessie looked up. “Was he sure? I saw lights in the windows of the dinosaur room last night, right after I heard that alarm sound. Maybe it was Pete.”
Mr. Diggs came around with more orange juice for everyone. “Oh, I doubt it. Pete spends the night on the other side of the museum at the control desk. We have remote cameras so he can keep an eye on the whole museum from there.”
“But I saw a shadow in the dinosaur room, just like the ones we saw when Pete first showed us the Tyrannosaurus last night,” Jessie explained. “Somebody was in there!”
Mrs. Diggs shook her head and smiled. “Well, with an old building like this you get all kinds of reflections from the traffic, lights, and such.”
The children finished breakfast quickly. They couldn’t wait to get started.
“Guess what?” Benny asked his sisters and brother. “Mr. Diggs is going to give me a real sorting box for my rocks and real museum signs — little ones — so I can label my collection.”
“And I’m going to give Soo Lee a display box for her bird’s nest,” Mrs. Diggs told the children.
“And guess what else?” Soo Lee asked in an excited voice. “Benny and I are going to make a museum in the boxcar in Grandfather’s backyard when we get home! Mr. Diggs said Pete will give us real museum tickets to use when people come to our museum!”
Mr. Diggs laughed. “Well, first you have to come to our museum to get some ideas. Let’s go!”
That morning the museum was flooded with daylight. The five Aldens looked everywhere at once. In one hall, they passed a giant Viking boat with the longest oars the children had ever seen. A couple of rooms away, a giant whale hung from the ceiling, and fingers of light made it seem as if everything were underwater.
“First stop, the planetarium,” Mr. Diggs told the excited children. “Eve Skyler, our director, needs a lot of help there.”
Mrs. Diggs met everyone at the planetarium entrance. “I forgot to mention that this is a big surprise for Eve,” she said in a low voice. “She’s been so upset with all the confusion around here. And who can blame her? All this dust and nails and banging, and with most of our staff busy with Dino World, she’s had to cancel a number of sky shows.”
Mr. Diggs unlocked the door, and everyone stepped inside.
“Oooo!” the Aldens gasped as they stepped into the darkened room.
The only light came from hundreds of stars sprinkled across the ceiling. They could hear a woman’s deep voice talking from somewhere in the room.
“And over in the West is Venus,” the voice was saying.
The children tried to see who was speaking, but it was much too dark.
“What on earth?” Mr. Diggs said.
“Or what in heaven?” Jessie said.
Benny asked, “How did it get to be nighttime? And how come we’re outside all of a sudden?”
“It does feel exactly as if we’re outside.” Violet whispered. “Listen, there are crickets!”
Violet was right. The sound of crickets filled the air just as if the children were in their own backyard looking at the stars.
“It’s magic,” Violet whispered. “Like someone turned the morning into night and opened the roof to show us the stars.”
“Look.” Henry pointed to the lower part of the curved ceiling. “The moon is rising in the East.”
“It’s just a movie of stars and the moon,” Henry explained. “And the person who was talking is just a recording, and so were the crickets.”
Mr. Diggs, who had been searching for the light switch inside the planetarium, called out, “Now get ready, children. I’ll make it daytime again. One … two … three!”
With that, the light went on, and the sky, the stars, and the moon all disappeared. The Aldens found themselves standing in a room that looked like a round movie theater with rows of seats arranged in circles.
And in one of those seats was Pete Lawlor!
“Pete!” Mr. Diggs cried. “What are you doing here? I thought you were off your shift by now. And why was the sky show running?”
Pete seemed surprised to see everyone standing there. “Uh … yeah. Dr. Skyler left a message and … well I thought I heard something suspicious in here when I was coming off my shift, and so I … I thought I’d better check it out. Then I figured, what if someone got at all this expensive equipment in here, so I decided to try it out.”
“Well, goodness, Pete, that’s why we have a camera security system, so you don’t have to be everywhere at once,” Mrs. Diggs said, “And where’s Nosey?”
Pete shifted from one foot to the other. “I left him with the morning guard, the way I usually do when I sign off. I’d best be going.”
With that, Pete rushed by the Aldens without so much as a hello. When everyone went inside, they found Pete’s hat on one of the seats along with his flashlight.
Mr. Diggs sighed and shook his head. “That young man is going to leave the museum unlocked one of these days or damage something valuable, and then where will we be, Emma? I’m almost tempted to let him go, but we’ve never had a guard here who loved the museum so much. Imagine, running the sky show at this hour just to check the equipment!”
“What is this machine anyway?” Benny asked. “Why is it full of holes?”
“It’s a special kind of projector, Benny. When the light goes through all those little holes, it makes stars on the ceiling,” Mrs. Diggs explained.
Benny, who liked any kind of machine, took a closer look. When he did, he heard a sharp voice.
“Don’t touch that, little boy! Leave it alone!”
Everyone whirled around to see who was shouting at Benny. Up in a windowed office overlooking the planetarium stood a woman with short, straight, brown hair. She was shaking her finger at everyone below.
“Eve, my goodness!” Mr. Diggs called up. “It’s Emma and me, and we’ve brought our guests. Please come down to meet them.”
A minute or two later, the woman joined everyone. “I’m sorry, Archie. You know the planetarium doesn’t open until ten, even to school groups,” she said. She looked at the Aldens as if they were trespassing. “In any case, we can’t open today with all the confusion.”
“We realize that, Eve,” Mr. Diggs said. “Pete mentioned you’d left a message at the security desk. Not that Pete was any kind of help in here watching the sky show just now.”
The woman’s eyebrows shot up. “Watching the sky show? Today? Why of all things! That’s no help at all. I simply called the security desk to ask them for the hundredth time to fix the lock. The people keep wandering in here with their lunches and their coffee cups and their … and now this school group you brought in. It’s just too much.”
“Now, now, Eve,” Mrs. Diggs said, patting the woman’s shoulder. “That’s why we’re here. This isn’t a school group. It’s the Alden family, and they’ve come to help us out. Children, this is our planetarium director, Dr. Eve Skyler.”
Henry, who was standing closest to Dr. Skyler, smiled and put out his hand, but the woman didn’t seem to notice.
“I’m sure I don’t need children underfoot with everything I have to do,” Dr. Skyler said. “Just look around. There are buckets of paint the painters just left here. Don’t even ask me how they got into my planetarium in the first place! They leave their lunch bags and soda cans lying around. Everything is in a mess.”
Jessie spoke up. “But we’re not regular visitors, Dr. Skyler. We could clean up the planetarium in no time so that you could keep running your sky shows. That’s why we came.”
Again, the woman ignored Jessie and the other Aldens. Instead, she turned her attention to Mr. and Mrs. Diggs.
“Emma, if you and Archie think I can’t run the planetarium, then you should just tell me, and I’ll resign immediately.”
“There, there, Eve,” Mrs. Diggs said in a soothing voice. “We want you to do what you do best, which is to teach everyone about the stars and the sky. And you can’t do it with all this rubble and noise.”
Mr. Diggs signaled for the children. “We’ve brought five pairs of helping hands here to move the construction materials out of here and do a cleanup. They’ve worked in museums and old houses, so they know how to be careful around valuable things, I promise you. This will free up your time to get the sky shows up and running tomorrow.”
Dr. Skyler didn’t agree. “Tomorrow! That isn’t possible even if we had five adult workers here, let alone these children!”
Jessie spoke up. “Just try us and see how we do.”
With several pairs of eyes on her, Dr. Skyler nodded. “All right, but mind you, you’ll have to be careful around the projector. Don’t go stirring up any dust near there. The cleaning things are through that door. And put everything back in the same place it came from.”
“We know,” Henry led the other children toward the storage room.
“Boy, she sure doesn’t want us around,” Benny said.
“She will when we make this place spic-and-span,” Henry said. He handed out work gloves, trash bags, and dust cloths to everyone.
As the children got themselves organized for a big cleaning job, they couldn’t help thinking about Pete, too.
“It sure seemed strange that he was just sitting in the planetarium watching a movie so early in the morning, don’t you think, Jessie?” Henry asked.
“Maybe he’s absentminded,” Jessie answered. “He doesn’t seem too organized.”
“Not like us!” Benny said proudly as he whizzed around pushing a big broom in circles.
“Well, you children look like a regular cleaning team,” Mrs. Diggs said when the Aldens came back into the planetarium with all the cleaning gear. “I know you’ll do a wonderful job.”
Mr. Diggs had a stack of posters in his hand. “If you finish up here this morning, you can take these Dino World posters and put them up around the area this afternoon. It’s about our big opening next week.”
Before the children could even get a look at the posters, Dr. Skyler stepped between them and Mr. Diggs. “If they’re going to help me out, Archie, they won’t have time for putting up posters. I’m afraid those will have to wait.” With that, Dr. Skyler shooed Mr. and Mrs. Diggs out the door so the Aldens could get down to work.
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