The Green Book (4 page)

When the wheat was in the ground, a bad time began. At first the grownups were pleased with themselves. Everyone had worked hard. The harrow from the spaceship had been hauled over the furrows to cover the seeds over. The land truck had pulled it across about half the acres and then run dry. So the men had pushed it out of the way, and begun to drag the harrow themselves, in teams of six at a time. When it was all done, everyone was tired but triumphant. And then we had all to wait and see if it would grow, and if it would not, we would starve.

The first really bad thing that went wrong was all our rabbits dying. We had made them so hungry they had begun to eat the gray grass. One morning when we woke up they were all sick, lying in a heap in a corner of their hutch, with sad cloudy eyes. And by the next day they were all dead. Sarah said they died of homesickness; Father thought they might have caught some kind of virus; most people thought they had been killed by eating the crystalline plants. The chickens were all right; and they had eaten only Earth-grown grain. All the children were sad about the rabbits; Jason even cried. But it was lucky about the chickens, because we hoped to get some eggs to eat soon. The iron rations from Earth wouldn't last forever.

And, of course, once the sowing was done, there was time to think, and worry. Most families dug their vegetable patches, and planted lettuces and carrots and beans from the seed reserves. And what made the worry worse was that nothing would grow in the vegetable patches. Lettuces didn't come up at all, and carrots came black and hard as bones, and all twisted, so everyone pinned their hopes on the beans. Beans are important food. They grew nice green leaves, though after a while the leaves had mottled patches of glassy clear specks. The pods were a brownish color when they formed, and the beans themselves just didn't grow inside the pods—they were little withered specks instead of nice fat eatable seeds.

Of course, it took time to find out that the vegetables wouldn't grow; life was full of time, full of waiting. Father kept busy with his gadgets, and Malcolm with testing things to see what we could eat. He didn't find anything much. There was a kind of shellfish, and one or two bitter herbs, but nothing easy and nice. Every time a seed went wrong in a vegetable patch, people got gloomier. Everyone was worried, and everyone except Malcolm and Father was bored. Once you got used to it, life at Shine was deadly. No records, no television, no books, nothing. Once it was dark, you just sat by your fire, lit up bright green by a jellyfish, and gloomed.

Joe read nothing but Father's technology book. Even Sarah didn't want her pony book any more. Ponies were about as relevant on Shine as the natural history of little green men would have been on Earth. That left
Robinson Crusoe
. The trouble was, it all seemed rather silly. He seemed to have it easy compared to us; there was plenty to eat on his island, and when he planted things they grew, and all the time a ship might just come by and take him home, and he seemed such a stiff old bore about it all. We began to read it aloud to each other in the evenings, but we soon stopped. Yet we needed something.

For one thing, just sitting all evening like a zombie soon gets a bit much, and for another, all the things that were happening to us were just slopping around in our heads, and we needed some stories to cheer us up. Stories are tidy; they don't just slop around like happenings. Just once, Sarah said to Pattie, “Oh, Pattie, if only you…” Then she stopped herself. And it was Sarah who thought of trying to swap our two books for something someone else had brought.

Straightaway she found that three other families had brought copies of
Robinson Crusoe
. And nobody at all wanted her pony story. Various people would have swapped something for Father's technology book, only he wouldn't lend it. “That doesn't go out of my sight,” he said. “Anyone may come and read it here, but here it stays. It has to be kept safe.” Sarah made a list of books that were in the colony somewhere, to help her bargain. It was, Father said, “some lot.” He was very struck by Sarah's list. “Not one Shakespeare,” he said. “Among us all, not one.”

There was a
Grimm's Fairy Tales
, though, and one of the men we hardly knew had Homer's
Iliad
. The problem was that the owner of Grimm didn't want to borrow
Crusoe
, they already had that. In the end, Father got it for us. He traded the loan of it for help in fitting out the family's house with benches and cupboards and beds. He had to work very hard for it, too. Sarah thought it wasn't fair, and asked the Guide, but he just said we must rely on good neighborliness for such things as lending between families. There weren't any rules about that, and weren't going to be. Father worked for the Grimm because he heard Pattie asking Sarah for the story of “Cindriella and the Three Bears,” and he realized that we had forgotten the Earth stories, or muddled them up.

And the sad thing was that the
Grimm
was disappointing when we got it. Father said it wasn't the real thing, but rewritten for children. And the book hadn't been taken care of; it had coggled covers from being left out in the dewfall, and some torn pages. But when Father sat down to read it to us, one soft evening as we sat outside our hut after supper, the children gathered from the nearby houses and sat down to listen with us. Father began to read “The Three Feathers,” and very soon grownups gathered, too, and stood around listening. And as Father read on, a kind of quietness grew, a kind of strong attention, from the listening everyone was doing, as though it made the words louder and stronger if more people were listening to them. After “The Three Feathers,” we had “The Fisherman and His Wife.” And then the best of all, “The Boy Who Had to Learn Fear,” but that one had pages missing, so we were stopped in the middle without knowing how it ended. You should have seen how cross that made everyone! Some of the grownups tried to remember the story, but none of them could. Malcolm remembered another one about a girl with very long hair and a prince; the Guide remembered one about a huge, enormous beanstalk.

We all sat up very late that night; when Pattie crept away at last, they were all trying to remember
Hamlet
. Later she half woke, and heard the dewfall beginning, and the Guide's voice saying to Father at the door, “The truth is, we didn't value that stuff when we had it, when we could just pick up a book any time. And now it's all dying out of mind, and we must do without, as without so many other things.”

And Father said, “I must have read that story once, and yet I cannot remember how it ended. But we have learned fear in our own way here, I suppose. God help us if we must do without our wheat harvest.”

“You are right, brother,” said the Guide. For in the time of fear and waiting for the wheat, the grownups had all begun calling each other brother and sister.

The hard times were all in the mind, really. We still had stores from Earth for weeks. We weren't actually hungry, though we were on half-rations. But every time a carrot blackened, or a bean plant failed in someone's plot, the worry got worse. And without vegetables to grow, there wasn't work enough, so there was time to worry. The wheat looked all right; in fact, it looked lovely, covering the plain around Shine with a marvelous bright tender green. Little blades like swords stood up through the black ground, and put a green pale haze over the ground, and then grew thicker and stronger, and stood like velvet shining in the sun. A silky look was on the green acres. It certainly didn't look like anything that was native to the new planet—it looked like home, oh, it made people ill with homesickness. It made them sad, and tired and unhappy. Not the young children—it got the grownups. And the worry deepened when Bill, who was the farming expert along with Arthur, found that he could break a blade of wheat clean across, snapping it like glass between his fingers. And so fear grew with the wheat, a terrible fear that there would be no way to grow food on the new planet. And we could never go anywhere else; there was only a burnt-out spacecraft to remind us of far journeys, and of course, though nobody ever mentioned it, Earth wasn't there any more. If the wheat failed us, there was only a box of pills that would be kinder than hunger.

Probably it was because the wheat was turning to glass that Bill was so bad-tempered and horrible. He was one of the farmers, and he felt it was up to him. And day by day the wheat looked less right. It should have been milky green, solid, like leaves on Earth, and it was growing brighter and transparent, till the light struck through the stands of blades in the fields, and they shone like emeralds, and sparkled transparent and clear. There was never any wind on Shine, never a ripple across the wheat or a movement of water in the lake, and that at least was lucky, for a wind would have broken every blade of wheat clean across, it was so delicate and brittle as it grew tall.

Bill was the one who had Homer. Father wanted Homer. He said it was the best book on the planet, since so many people had chosen badly, and the
Grimm
was all torn and incomplete. And Bill wouldn't let him borrow it. Father let Bill come to our hut and read the technology book, but Bill wouldn't even let Father read his Homer without paying. And he wouldn't take any pay except food. And Father wouldn't consider paying in food. We all said we'd do without supper and not grumble if we got a good story, but Father said we were on iron rations now, and it would damage our health to have less.

It was Joe who helped. He understood things better, being older. He heard Pattie and Jason and the other little children playing counting and skipping games down on the lake shore. Pattie was singing, and Mary was skipping rope, and Jason and some other kids were turning it, when Joe came by.

Pattie chanted.

“What's that, then, sis?” said Joe. “I don't remember that from Earth.”

“Well, of course not, silly,” said Pattie. “How could you? There aren't any candy trees on Earth, are there?”

“What do you mean?” he asked. “What are candy trees?”

So the children stopped skipping and took him and showed him the candy trees. They were growing in the wood that the logs for building Shine had come from. They didn't look very different from the other trees, but they had little crimson droplets oozing here and there from the bark. If you put out a finger to touch the droplet, your finger stuck, and when you pulled it off and licked, it tasted sweet. Not just sweet, either, but delicious. Jason showed Joe how to roll up the trickles of ooze into a lovely sticky red lump like toffee to pop in your mouth.

Joe was very pleased. He ate quite a lot, and he told us not to tell anyone else for that day, and he took some wrapped in broken leaves to show Father.

That evening Father took all the sugar we had left and gave it to Bill in return for a read of his Homer. Bill gave him a two-hour read for the sugar. Father came back and told us what he had read. But it was very boring. It was all about some gods quarreling, and then about some heroes quarreling. They went to Troy, but then they argued outside the walls, and one of them wouldn't help in the battle. “I suppose I didn't get as far as the good bits,” said Father, “though I read as fast as I could. It's a very famous story.”

“What do we do about the candy trees?” asked Sarah.

“Oh, we tell the others now,” said Father. “It wouldn't be fair to keep it secret longer. I played a bit of a dirty trick on Bill over the sugar, as it is.”

Everyone was very pleased. The grownups didn't just go looking for oozy patches on the trees, as the children had done; they cut little grooves in the tree bark, and fixed up empty tin cans to catch the flow. They knew how to do this straightaway, for it seemed that there
had
been candy trees on Earth, though not in the part we had come from. “It's like maple syrup,” Malcolm said. “Good stuff, and energy food for us.”

Father explained to Pattie that it would keep them from being very hungry till the wheat could be harvested, but it hadn't the sort of goodness they needed to keep alive and well forever.

Malcolm said, “We should learn from this. There was sweet sap around us all this time, and the children found it for us. There may be other things, fruits or nuts, or berries. We should look and keep looking around the seasons.”

But the forest held no more surprise picnics, just plenty of the sweet-sapped trees. And it was just as well that we had pans of tree candy all ready, and plenty of them, because of what happened next.