The Green Book

by Jill Paton Walsh

  Jason’s mother and Pattie’s father spoke together.

  “It is Pattie, by a few days,” said Father. “Well, Pattie, where are we?”

  “We are at Shine, on the first day,” said Pattie, solemnly.

  “Good girl,” said the Guide. “This place, then, is Shine. And now we must all work, and fast, for we do not know how long the days are here, or what dangers there may be.” And he began to hand out jobs to each one in turn.

  So people went back to the ship to unload the land truck, fill it with tents and food and sleeping bags, and bring them to the shore. Malcolm went to complete his tests for water. A work party was formed to unload the land hopper and put it together. The land hopper would glide or fly just above the ground, and let us explore quickly, and then it would run out of fuel and be of no more use. And the Guide had two men standing with guns ready, one each side of the camping ground, in case of wild beasts, or enemies.

  “In science fiction, bullets go right through things and they come right on anyway, roaring, urrrrrr!” said Jason. “And we’re in science fiction now, aren’t we, so what good are guns?”

  “We are in Shine,” said Pattie. “And no monsters will come.” Jason hadn’t talked to her much on the flight; he was much shorter than she, and he thought she was older. But now he had found that, although she was taller, she was younger, and he got friendlier.

  There was no job for either, so they watched Joe setting up a tally stick. It was a huge plastic post with rows and rows of holes in it, and black pegs to move in the holes.

  “What’s it for, Joe?” they asked.

  “It’s a calendar,” said Joe. “We have to count the days here, or we’ll lose track. All the things on the ship will run down and stop working—clocks, calculators, everything. So this thing just keeps a count—you move one hole for each day. You move the peg, and you remember when you are.”

  “A tree of days,” said Pattie.

  The grownups brought a stove from the ship, and a can of fuel, and set it up to cook supper on the beach, for the sand was soft and easy to sit and walk on, unlike the gray glass grass. A ring of tents went up around the stove. Malcolm decided that the little stream and the huge lake were both good water, fit to drink—and after the stale recycled water we had been drinking for so long, how fresh and clean and cool the lake water tasted! Everyone laughed again, and passed the cups from hand to hand, exclaiming.

  The Guide said they must set a guard over the camp all night. “Any kind of living thing, harmless or savage, may be here,” he said. The wilderness seemed so beautiful and so still it was hard to believe that, but they chose five of the men to take turns on watch.

  And only just in time, for soon after the watch was chosen, the night came upon us. A curtain of deep lilac light swept across the lake, obscuring the sight of the mountain, and sinking almost at once to a deepening purple, then inky darkness. It got dark much quicker than it would have done on Earth—in less than half an hour. The darkness was complete for a moment or two; and then as our eyes got used to it, it was pierced by hundreds of bright and unknown stars—nameless constellations shining overhead. People began to spread their bedding in the tents, and to settle to sleep, and as they did so, a gust of air shook the tent walls, and there was a sighing sound of wind in the woods, and a lapping of water on the shore close by, unseen in the dark. And then the air was quite still again, and it began to rain, heavily and steadily, though the stars were still bright and clear above. When Pattie fell asleep, she could hear Father and Malcolm talking together in low voices at the other end of the tent.

  “There must be no dust at all in this atmosphere,” said Malcolm. “That would scatter light and delay the dark. No wonder it feels so invigorating to breathe.”

  Father took his turn on watch, but nothing stirred all night, he said. The rain stopped in an hour or so, and not so much as a gust of air moved anywhere around. At the sudden return of daylight, all was well.

  The next day the land hopper was fitted out. It was a small craft that could carry four men and a scanning viewer to make tapes for the computer in the spaceship. It could hover about forty feet up and glide over water and dry land. It was going to explore the whole planet, looking above all for any sign of life, any possible enemy creature. It had a navigation program built in, sensitive to the planet’s own gravity. A lot of people wanted to go on the trip, and the Guide had to choose the crew like a raffle, pulling names out of a bag. Father stayed. The people who stayed would have to look for materials to build houses. Tents would not do forever.

  Of course, we went first to the woods, to cut down trees. A party of grownups went, carrying saws and axes, and the children went with them to watch. The light in the wood was all ruby-red and crimson where the sun struck down through the red leaves overhead. The trees wouldn’t be cut down. The saw blades were blunted as soon as they cut through the soft gray bark. The trees were far harder than wood on Earth. Arthur suggested trying a hacksaw, and that did better, bringing out of the cut in the tree trunk a fine silver dust like metal filings. The work went very slowly and was very boring to watch; after they had been working an hour, the cut was only an inch or so deep.

  Father began walking around the wood, looking for twigs on the ground. When he found some, he broke them and held the broken ends to the light. He showed Arthur and Joe what he saw.

  “Look, this stuff has a different structure from wood. It’s made of lots of little rods joined together. It’s very hard to saw, but I guess it will be easy to split.”

  “I hope you’re right,” said Arthur. “It will take ten years to build a single house if we have to saw planks and it takes as long as this!”

  “And how long would it take to plane and shape wood for window frames and furniture?” asked Jason’s father.

  “Children, go and gather up as many of these twigs as you can carry, and take them down to the beach,” Father said. “We don’t even know if this wood will burn yet, and if it doesn’t burn, we will have to find something else for fuel.” So the men took turns at the hacksaw, and the children gathered twigs all morning.

  Father was right about the splitting. The tree trunk that had taken so long to cut through across the grain split easily and straight along its length when wedges were banged in at one end with a hammer.

  “We could use them just like this,” said Arthur. “Round sections outward, flat edges in, like log cabins.”

  “As for windows,” said Father, “I doubt if we’ll need them”—for the sunlight was striking through the pale stuff of the split log as though it were frosted glass. A little more trial and error showed that nails were useless. Even the best ones turned their points at once on the tree trunk, but it was very easy to drill, and screws would hold well in it.

  Meanwhile, on the beach, Joe set light to the pile of twigs the children had carried from the wood, and discovered at once that the trees would burn. The twigs caught fire easily and blazed brilliantly with a bright blue flame, so hot and fast-burning that the fire had to be dampened with sand before the meal could be cooked on it. “We shall need to be careful making huts out of this,” said Malcolm. “We shall need stone chimneys and hearths, I think.”

  When we had eaten, and brewed a can of coffee on the fierce little bonfire, we quenched it with water, and then the children found in the ashes curious shiny lumps of molten stuff, too hot to hold, and streaked in green and blue and orange, which had formed on the sand where the fire had blazed. A conference was going on among the grownups. Cutting trees was going to be a terrible labor, and would soon blunt all the blades we had. They had tried axes instead of saws, but though the axes would split the tree easily, they just bounced off the side of the trunks.

  Father looked thoughtfully at the fused lumps in the dead fire. “What if we tried fire?” he asked. “Perhaps heat would soften the stuff.”

  “We’d have to be very careful,” said Malcolm. “It does burn very easily, and we don’t want to start a fores
t fire.”

  So when they had eaten, the work party returned to the forest edge, and looked for a tree standing apart from its neighbors. A can of fuel was fetched from the supplies, and poured slowly and carefully in a ring around the foot of the tree. The grownups brought buckets of sand from the lake shore, to muffle the fire if it got out of hand. Then they lit the ring of kindling around the base of the tree. The flames roared up the tree, burning the bark off very fast, to the very top, and running along the branches to their tips. At the bottom, where the trunk was ringed with fire, a soft red glow began to show on the bare translucent trunk. Then, using the longest saw blade they had, so that they could stand back clear of the fire, the men began to saw through the red-hot band of the tree trunk—and the wood cut like butter, smoothly and easily. The tree toppled and fell, crashing through the outermost branches of neighboring trees, and thudding on the ground in a shower of torn twigs and leaves. Everyone cheered and shouted.

  “Right,” said the Guide. “That’s how. Now who? Who volunteers to fell the trees for huts? Who volunteers to find isolated trees? We shall need many of them.”

  Pattie expected Father to volunteer, since he had found how to do it, but he didn’t. He went back to Shine with the Guide and began to help plan where the huts would be, and what they would be like. Joe joined the logging party. Pattie and Jason volunteered to find trees. There were a lot of scattered single trees of great size standing among the rocks where the wood petered out at the edge of the lake. Running around finding them was fun.

  The huts were lovely when they were made. They were fluted because the round side of the split trunks faced outward. They were shiny silver-gray, and the light shone softly through the walls, so they needed no windows at all. The roofs were made of thin slices of wood—it split so easily these were simple to make, and seemed more likely to last than thatch. It made the roofs look like lizard skin, with overlapping scales. Each hut had a tall chimney made of big rough stones fixed with lots of cement. The cement had come on the spaceship, but the sand to mix it had come from the lake shore, and gave it a soft pink tinge. By day a pale gray shadowy light filled the huts, falling through roof and walls, and at night the fires in each hut made bright red flickering patterns over the walls, and you could see the warm glow through the cabin sides from one hut to another. The work went forward steadily, from dawn to dusk, managing a hut each day, by working in gangs—one splitting trees, another building chimneys, another putting up walls and roof. They made one hut for each family, and a big hut in the middle of the site for a meetinghouse. Each hut had a vegetable plot beside it, and behind Shine, on the wide plain that lay between the lake and the spacecraft’s landing place, they began to mark out fields.

  They made a chicken run, and a rabbit run, putting the hutches from the spaceship at one end, and wire netting on poles to make the enclosures. Every day, the chickens were to be fed on corn and millet from a big supply sack; but the rabbits were given not quite enough of their food, to encourage them to eat the strange grass on the new ground.

  Chapter 3

  With so much going on, it was only the children, only the smallest colonists, who could run around and play, and wander while everyone else was working. So it was Pattie and Jason who found Boulder Valley.

  It was by getting lost that they found it. They had walked together along the lake shore, finding little pink transparent pebbles at the water’s edge, and watching jellyfish. The lake had swarms of jellyfish in it, very bright green jellyfish, which bobbed around, and oozed themselves into funny shapes to wriggle along. Pattie and Jason walked a long way on the beach, and when they got tired, swam in the lake. Then they began to walk back to Shine, and it seemed they had been on the way back for some time and they still couldn’t see the village huts.

  “Let’s take a shortcut,” said Jason. “If we go over that hump of land there, it should get us home a shorter way.”

  Pattie followed him. But when they climbed the hump of land that jutted out from the hills toward the lake, and looked over, they found they were not looking down at Shine but down into a strange new valley.

  It was a scooped-out shape, gently sloping and curved. They ran down the slope into the valley. It was like standing in the bottom of a bowl, or nearly like that, except that one edge of the bowl was missing, and through the break in the rim of hill the lake could be seen. There were a few scrubby bushes with bright crystalline blue flowers on them, and a lot of brown boulders scattered around all over the lower slopes and the valley floor.

  When Pattie and Jason called to each other, their voices seemed very loud and clear, as though the hillside was talking back at them in their own voices.

  When they crossed the bowl of the new valley and climbed up to the top of its far side, they found themselves where they had expected to be before, on one of the ridges that bounded the plain of Shine, and in sight of home.

  Pattie took Father and Sarah and Joe to see the valley a few days later, when the Guide ruled a rest day.

  “A natural amphitheater,” Father said. “Perhaps we should have made our village here.”

  “Oh no, Father,” said Sarah. “Think of having to shift all these rocks!”

  “I like the rocks,” said Pattie. “They’re fun to climb up and jump off!” And she showed them, by climbing up the nearest one.

  “It’s odd,” said Joe. “I wonder why they’re all rounded like that?”

  “Glacial boulders?” wondered Father. “But why all here, and none on the plain?”

  “Well, thank goodness for that,” said Joe. “Sarah’s right. It would be terrible work if we had to clear them to plow.”

  Sarah was sitting on one now, chanting to herself, and listening to the sound of her voice ringing around the bowl of hillside. “I’m the King of the Castle, get down, you dirty rascal…”

  “Can’t you think of anything better to say than that?” demanded Father. And he began to say, very loud and clear, “I wandered lonely as a cloud,/That floats on high o’er vales and hills,/ When all at once I saw a crowd,/ A host of golden daffodils.” Then he stopped and shook his head. “I can’t remember any more.”

  Then Pattie said, “What’s a cloud, Father? What’s a daffodil?” and then wished she hadn’t, because it made Father look suddenly sad.

  “Don’t you even remember clouds, Pattie?” he asked, and took her hand in his for the walk home.

  When she could get Sarah by herself, Pattie asked about clouds. Sarah said they were big white bolsters in the sky that made it rain. But on the new planet there weren’t any things in the sky, and every night as darkness fell, a downfall of rain came close after it, very heavy and sudden, so that you fell asleep with the sound of it on the roof; and by midnight it had stopped, and the mornings dawned bright and clear, with beads of moisture on every branch and leaf.

  “You can’t have rain without clouds,” Sarah said. “What comes here must be a kind of dew. Dewfall. I like it better. Rain used to spoil the days at home.”

  The day after the trip with Father to see Boulder Valley, the land hopper finished orbiting and came back. The explorers were very impressed with the village. And they had found out a lot. They went up to the spacecraft right away, to put the tapes they had made during their flight through the computer. The computer would be able to manage just this last task, then the battery cells would be used up and there would be no more super science from the Earth to help them.

  When the tapes were processed, all the people met in the big hut that had been made for gatherings. The Guide told us the news.

  “We are on quite a small planet,” he told us all. “More like the moon than the Earth. We are orbiting a bright sun, but we are orbiting much more evenly than the Earth; there will be less difference between one season and another here. Such small difference as there is suggests that it is spring now, and time to plant. As you all know, there is seed enough for one sowing, and a small reserve. The soil here seems fertile, though, as you also a
ll know, the plant life here is crystalline and might act on our digestive systems like ground glass, so we can only eat what we can grow from Earth seeds. It seems there is no life in the waters of this planet except algae and suchlike, and the jellyfish we have all seen. Tomorrow, therefore, we must catch some and see if they can be cooked and eaten, unpalatable though they look.”

  Cries of “Ugh!” from the children were scolded quiet when he said this.

  “As for land life, of a kind which might compete with us, or threaten us, or give us animals for farming, the tapes show no signs of any such life over the greater part of the land surface. However, Peter, our expert, will tell you about this.”

  Peter was a tall, bearded man. The children knew him because his choice of luxury had been the funny little chess set that let you play the game with another person instead of with the computer, and he had played with them sometimes on the journey.

  “There’s just a slight oddity in the record,” said Peter. “Signs of biorhythms, very slow ones, somewhere on the lake shore, near here. I’m baffled. There are two possibilities. One is that the computer is not operating perfectly. It is supposed to discount biorhythms which we produce ourselves, and so tell us about any other form of life; perhaps it isn’t screening us out perfectly. The other possibility is that something here produces an effect like a biorhythm—though, as I say, an extraordinarily slow one. The effect is only hereabouts, and it’s a bit of a coincidence if it’s nothing to do with our presence here. And nobody has seen anything except the jellyfish, so I think we can safely assume that there is in fact no animal life on this planet. We have the land to ourselves.”

  The grownups were still talking in the meetinghouse, making plans for plowing and sowing, stockpiling timber, and sharing out food rations to last till harvest, when Pattie fell asleep in her chair, dreaming of eating jellyfish and being sick. Sarah picked her up and carried her across in the open under the stars, to put her in her bunk in their own hut.