A Box of Nothing Read online

  “Great!”

  Chapter 16: The Desert

  It was marvellous to be flying again, drifting on the same steady wind, not so strong as it had been by the shore but still pushing the airship on above the glittering mountain peaks. Two or three gulls were usually circling around as an escort.

  “They’re not so bad when they’re flying,” said James. “Friendly of them to come with us.”

  “Or perhaps they want to make sure we go right away,” said the Burra.

  “Do you think they know why the Dump’s gone wrong? I mean, they could have flown off exploring miles and miles.”

  “We tried to ask them. Not easy in sign language. They did not understand, in any case. We doubt if it is the sort of thing gulls think about.”

  “But we’re still going the right way? You can feel it?”

  “Oh, yes. And have you not noticed—everything is getting older?”

  James knew what the Burra meant. The shore where he’d landed was covered with the rubbish of the world he knew. Farther inland, when he’d fallen out of the airship, the hill had been made of older kinds of stuff. And then among the gulls he’d seen the stone axe, which must have been thousands of years old.

  “We think we are going back to the beginning,” said the Burra.

  “The beginning of the Dump, you mean?”

  “The beginning of everything.”

  “That’s stupid. You have to have people to make rubbish. There weren’t any people then.”

  “Oh, no. Everything becomes rubbish in the end. We sometimes wonder if people weren’t invented as an extra-quick way of making rubbish.”

  During the third night, while James was sleeping, they left the mountains. He woke and saw the huge blue wall of them already miles behind. The gulls were gone too. Below, and on both sides, and as far as he could see ahead, was desert—endless, rolling dunes, the colour of cinders, like vast sea waves, stuck. Not a tree or a bush anywhere, of course.

  They floated on all morning and it was still the same. The dunes were not like real desert because they were all exactly the same shape. You could follow one into the distance until your eyes ached and there was no change in it, no break or fork, not even a dip or hummock. You couldn’t look at them for long. Their size and sameness were not just boring, they were frightening. It was also incredibly hot, even in the shadow of the gas bag. The sunlight bounced, roasting, off the mottled grey surface below, and because the airship was moving at the same speed as the wind, there wasn’t a breeze to cool you. The Burra was too busy keeping the airship working without the computer’s help to talk much.

  The only slightly amusing thing that happened all day was that James found out the computer was interested in his box of nothing. He’d noticed that it usually gave a few extra bleeps and blinks when he came near; when he got the box out to have another try at finding out how it was supposed to open, the computer became almost excited, and only quieted down when he put the box away.

  Toward sunset it got cool enough to move around again. With the sun so low, the lines of the dunes stood out more sharply because of the shadows between them. They didn’t run in a dead straight line, but curved ever so slightly forward on both sides of the airship. Looking back at the glittering peaks, still just visible above the horizon, James got the idea that they weren’t a straight line either, but ran in an enormous curve, like the dunes. Suppose all these curves went on and on. Then they’d meet somewhere hundreds of miles ahead. They’d all be parts of enormous circles, one inside the other. And at the middle, what? It reminded James of something. He got it in the end.

  “Burra,” he said. “There’s been a splash.”

  “A splash?”

  “Like when you throw a stone in a pond. Ripples. Look.”

  “We believe you may be right. How interesting.”

  “I’ve seen pictures like this on TV, only not so big. Where a meteorite has smashed into the Earth. You get a crater and ripples.”

  “I see. So what we have to do is cross the dunes at right angles all the time, and then we must be heading toward the centre.”

  “I suppose so. It must have been jainormous, whatever it was that made the splash. A whole comet or something.”

  The dunes had become interesting all of a sudden. James knelt with his elbows on the rim of the basket and watched them gliding backward. Each circle had got to be a bit smaller than the one before, to fit inside it. They were huge right out here, so big that you could only just see that they curved at all, but if you went on they would get smaller and smaller, until …

  There ought to be a formula for working out how far it was to the middle. James tried to think about it, but Mrs. Last hadn’t taught him that kind of maths yet. He pulled the sheet of paper out of his pocket. He didn’t want to spoil his picture of the star tree so he turned it over and drew some circles on the back, inside each other like target. He stared at the paper. It was still too difficult.

  He put the paper away and looked at the dunes again. You had to have some extra measurements. Suppose you chose a place right out along one of the dunes and guessed how far away it was, and then you measured the distance it took the airship to get exactly at right angles to it …

  The trouble was choosing a place. There wasn’t anything to make one bit of a dune different from anywhere else on all the other dunes. The moment you looked away you’d lost it. At least it was better trying now than in the middle of the day. Every bump on the surface cast a long, hard shadow. There ought to be something …

  There! That line! That was different. No, it wasn’t. Hey!

  “Burra! Look! Something’s been there!”

  “Where, James?”

  “A sort of trail. Can’t you see? It goes across that dune, and the one before and the one after.”

  The Burra screwed in a long-distance eye and peered.

  “We believe you may be right,” it said. “We had better go and have a look. Not enough time to drift over before the sun goes down.”

  As it spoke the engine rattled to life, the propeller whumped, and the airship swung sideways on to the wind, nudging its way across until it was directly over the marks James had seen. By now only the topmost ridges of the dunes were still in sunlight, but the marks were there, all right—though you probably wouldn’t have noticed them at all if it hadn’t been for the shadows they cast in the sideways light. There was a shallow, scuffled trail on either side of a deeper groove that ran in a straight line over dune after dune. James and the Burra were still gazing down at the marks when the sun left the ground and the shadows vanished. For a few minutes more the airship drifted along in sunlight, and then the shadow of the world swept up and covered it.

  “I think it’s a dinosaur,” said James. “If you’re right about things getting older, I mean. The middle bit is where it drags its tail, and the outside ones are where it pushes itself along with its feet. I’d like to meet a dinosaur.”

  “The footmarks would be clearer.”

  “Several dinosaurs, then, scuffling each other’s footmarks out.”

  “Possibly. We will look again in the morning.”

  The desert stars came out, too big to be real. It was night almost at once. Soon the moon rose and James could see the dunes again, vast curves of dead grey with black valley between. It got very cold, so he let his blankets wrap themselves around him, and fell asleep without noticing. He dreamed he was escaping from a Tyrannosaurus Rex, so the next morning he wasn’t sure he wanted to meet a dinosaur, after all.

  The tracks had gone. Perhaps the creature had stopped in the night. Or else the wind had drifted the airship off course. Yes. If you looked carefully, you could see that the curve of the dunes was different on different sides of the airship because it was no longer crossing them at right angles. So they’d not just lost the tracks, they weren’t heading for the centre of the spl
ash anymore.

  “It is all right,” said the Burra. “We will adjust with our fins. It is not worth using fuel.”

  So most of the day they drifted slantwise to the wind, which meant there was a slight breeze across the basket, so it was cooler than yesterday. About the middle of the afternoon the Burra said, “Look, there are your tracks.”

  With the sun at that angle you could only just see them by the faint lines they made across the dunes ahead and behind. Directly underneath the airship they were invisible.

  “It’s funny they want to go the same way as we do,” said James.

  “It is peculiar,” said the Burra, “but it may not be funny.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We are guessing.”

  It turned out to be a good guess. Toward evening they floated over one of the valleys between the dunes, all just the same as each other, and saw that it was different. There was a dark splotch on the upward slope. The airship’s pumps started, sucking gas out of the bag so that they could drift gently lower. As it came nearer, the splotch stirred and broke apart, letting James see that it was a swarm of the horrible Dump flies feeding on something they’d found—a huge dead lizard. The flies were like vultures around a carcass on a real desert.

  “That’s what made the tracks,” said James. “It probably came here to die, like a sort of lizards’ graveyard.”

  “But the tracks go on.”

  They did, too, straight up the dune and over the ridge as though nothing had happened.

  “We think we ought to investigate,” said the Burra.

  “Do you want me to go down?”

  “Yes, please. We will take all precautions.”

  The airship lowered a couple of anchors, which burrowed into the ground like moles. A rope uncoiled and knotted itself around James’s chest and shoulders. He climbed over the side of the basket and let go. The rope took his weight without a jerk and let him gently down to the ground, but stayed in its knots, ready to yank him back up if anything went wrong.

  The ground was roasting hot, even through his shoes. It crunched like loose cinders as he walked over to the dead lizard. The flies rose with an angry buzz. Just where they had clustered thickest, at the back of the lizard’s head, there was a neat round hole. James took his box of nothing out of his pocket and placed it against the lizard’s body. His idea was that it might do the same trick as it had with the wounded gull, though he didn’t think it would work with a dead animal.

  It didn’t, not like that. The body, which had been as long as three cars, bumper to bumper, shrank in a blink. James stood looking down at the bare white bones of a lizard about a foot long. When he touched them with his foot they fell apart, as if they had been lying there for ages.

  The flies hazed to and fro, baffled by the disappearance of their meal. Several of them settled a little way off and began to feed on something else. James trudged across to look.

  On the cindery ground there was a scattering of something softer and paler grey. He picked up a few of the flakes, looked at them, smelled them. He knew what they were, only too well. They were the stuff he had been given to eat in General Weil’s camp, the stuff the soldiers had eaten too. Rat food.

  Chapter 17: The Race Is On

  “And the lizard had been shot,” said James.

  “You are sure?” said the Burra.

  “I don’t see how it could’ve been anything else. Even before I saw the rat food I knew it had been shot.”

  “Rats, then. And more than one lizard.”

  “It’s an expedition, you see. The lizards belong in the desert. Like camels. The rats use them for carrying things. When they get sick or something, the rats just shoot them and go on.”

  The Burra paused even longer than usual.

  “We think we had better start the engine,” it said.

  “What about getting back?”

  “We will have to think about that. But it is important to get there first. We don’t know why. It is just a feeling. We belong to the Dump, remember. We feel what it feels. That is how we knew it had ceased to function. Now we know we must get there before the rats.”

  “Oh, all right. Anyway it’s boring, just drifting. Let’s go.”

  The engine chuttered awake as the anchors undug themselves. Now the breeze seemed to come from dead ahead, roasting hot but better than stillness. The dunes slid by at triple speed. Though there was nothing new to see, it was exciting, and part of the excitement was knowing that if the wind did drop, or they ran out of fuel, there was absolutely no way they would ever walk all those miles back to safety across the scorching cinders. They would die in the desert, and nothing would save them.

  The sun went down and the stars came out. James slept, but the engine battered away all night, and when he woke in the morning he was quite certain he could see that the curve of the dunes was sharper than it had been the day before. The circles must still be immense, but they were getting slowly smaller as the airship drove toward their centre.

  Toward evening they came to another dead lizard. The Burra agreed there was no special point in landing, but pumped gas to skim lower over the spot. On the slope beyond the lizard, to one side of the trail, was a small white dot. As they came nearer, James saw it was balanced on a sort of stalk, like a peculiar desert flower. The airship swooped past, only a few feet away, and now he could see what it really was. The white bit was a sun helmet, the old-fashioned kind explorers used to wear. The stalk was a rifle stuck in the ground. At its foot was a narrow mound, a grave.

  But still the tracks went straight on. In the shadow-casting evening light the lizards’ footprints were clearly marked on either side of the groove where they had dragged their tails.

  “I think there’s only two left,” James said.

  “So do we. The question is, how far ahead are they?”

  “It can’t be too far. I mean, if that first one had been killed weeks ago, the flies wouldn’t have been interested in it. We must be going faster than they are now. How far do you think it is to the middle? I’ve been trying to figure out the formula. I think I can see a way, but I don’t know how the maths is supposed to work.”

  He got out his picture and showed the Burra the circles he’d drawn on the back, and the lines he’d put in. The Burra grunted. It was the sort of equation the computer could have done in a thousandth of a second, but there was no point in asking it. The Burra had to think it out. James counted ridges and helped guess distances. From time to time he heard a calculator bleeping inside the duffel bag under the Burra’s sailor shirt.

  “We have had to do a lot of guessing,” said the Burra at last. “Sometime tomorrow, we think.”

  “Have you got enough fuel?”

  “Yes, if the wind holds.”

  James slept. All night the engine muttered through his dreams. They were nightmares, mostly. One was about General Weil, wearing a sun helmet and whipping his great lizard across the dunes. He had a chain-saw strapped to his saddle because at the dead centre there grew the only tree in all this world, a marvellous star tree, and General Weil was going to cut it down and bring all the stars crashing out of the sky. He had to be stopped. James was on his bike, whizzing along, but then he was trying to force his wheels through soft sand, and then the bicycle melted away and he was plodding up a slithering dune and the flies were buzzing and muttering all around, waiting for him to die. And then he woke up. That was typical, but he had several of that kind of dream.

  When he woke in the morning the first thing he did was look at the dunes. The curve was clearly there now, easy to see from the height at which the airship flew. For a moment he thought the tracks had vanished and they’d passed the rat expedition in the night, but then he saw them, only a faint dotted line. No lizard footprints, no central groove.

  “They’ve left the lizards behind,” he said. “They’
re going on, on foot.”

  “Yes,” said the Burra. “Just two of them, we think.”

  “They must be incredibly brave. How far to the middle now?”

  “About twelve hours.”

  “I thought you said before that.”

  “The wind is dying. It is hardly helping us at all.”

  “Oh. Are you going to have enough fuel?”

  “Perhaps.”

  As the sun rose the tracks vanished. James only knew they were still following them when, about midday, they passed another grave, marked like the first one with a helmet and rifle, but dug so shallow that the tip of the rat’s tail stuck out of the cinders. He went to the front of the basket and stared across the burning dunes. Even in the shadow of the gas bag the heat was dreadful. The breeze the airship made as it pushed along was like the rush of hot air you feel if someone opens an oven and you’re standing too close. But the curve of the dunes had become so strong that James could see they really were like the rings of an enormous target. And the bull’s-eye had to be somewhere dead ahead. There.

  If it had been the star tree he’d dreamed about, he’d have seen it by now. He screwed up his eyes and stared through the glare across the narrowing rings. Was there something there? A sort of darker patch?

  Knowing how far it was made the airship seem to go slower. You could watch time pass by the way the shadow of the gas bag sidled across the dunes. At first it was over to the left. At midday it was right underneath. An hour later it was a bit to the right. Then it was more than twice as far.

  It was about there when James saw the explorer. Or rather he saw a white dot near the ridge of one of the dunes a long way in front. It vanished over the top, and the airship drove on. Quite a long time later he saw it again, and a dark shape beneath it struggling slowly up over the cinders. Next time it came into sight it was obviously a rat wearing a sun helmet. The airship had crossed nine ridges while the rat was moving from one to the next. In fact, they would catch up while it was still on this ridge.