A Box of Nothing (8 page)

Chapter 15: Duel

“We have seen this going on several times,” said the Burra. “But we have not understood what was happening. It was too far off. It is how they avoid continual quarrels, of course.”

“I suppose so,” said James. He was feeling too sick with fright to think about it. The way duels worked in gull country was a bit like old-fashioned duelling with pistols, except the gulls didn't have pistols so they took turns dropping rocks on each other. There were special rules about how far apart they had to be, and so on. There was even a rule about what happened when one of the duellists couldn't fly—because it had broken a wing bone in an earlier duel, for instance. They were using this rule for James. He and the Burra, who was his second, were waiting on a special ledge where the cliff sloped away above so that a gull could fly directly over it to drop its rocks. The ledge was on an overhang, so that the gull could go down and circle almost directly below when it was its turn to have rocks dropped on it.

“It is rather a sensible system, in its way,” said the Burra.

“I think it's absolutely stupid,” said James. “I think the gulls are even stupider than the rats.”

“We think you will be very unlucky to be bit,” said the Burra. “You are a smaller target than a gull. We offered to let the challenger fly lower to take that into account …”

“You did what!”

“Well, we decided it was more honourable. Remember we are trying to prove you are not a rat. And we also thought that if we did not offer they might ask, but if we did offer they would feel honour bound to refuse.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Ah, it looks as though we are ready. You drop first.”

“I'm going to aim to miss.”

“Oh, no. Most unwise. An added insult. This is serious, James.”

“You're telling me!”

A gull swooped down to the ledge and collected the Burra, who waved good luck as it was carried away. James went to the edge of the ledge and picked up one of the rocks that had been laid ready there. There were six of them, three each, about the size of tennis balls. If one of those landed on your head from a height, it would smash right through. Gulls broke wings in duels, didn't they? That showed.

He looked over the dizzy drop. Down there his opponent was circling close against the cliff. He tried to work out the problem. If he aimed where the bird was now, how far would it have flown by the time the stone reached it? He had to miss, but not too badly. His answers wouldn't work. On ledges and crags all around, other gulls were gathered, like spectators at a snooker tournament, silent, intense. At last the signal came, one harsh squawk from the referee. James took his time, making sure they all saw be was doing his best to hit. He almost did, too, much nearer than he meant. The rock whistled down inches beside the bird's head. The bird sailed smoothly on as though nothing had happened.

Another squawk and it was James's turn to be the target. His opponent came soaring up to the ledge, picked up a stone in its beak without landing or looking at James, and spiralled on into the sky.

James began to walk around and around in a small circle, imitating the way the gull had flown below. He held his head back and looked straight in front of him, but inside he was really scared. It wasn't like falling out of the airship or being captured by the rats, or even meeting General Weil. Then everything had been sudden and strange and he hadn't really understood what he was frightened of. This time he knew exactly. A rock was going to fall out of the sky, and if it hit him it would smash his head in. And he mustn't look up, or dodge, or flinch. Just walk steadily around and around.

Smack! The rock slapped into the ledge a couple of paces ahead of him. He hadn't even heard the signal squawk.

While he waited for his opponent to take its place again below, James looked at the rock he was going to throw. It was just like an ordinary big flint, the sort you could pick up in a field. He remembered what had happened to the rat bullets when he'd found the dying gull by the stream and touched it with the box of nothing. Suppose he were to put the box on his head while he was walking around

Just to see, he took the box out and tried it on the rock. Nothing much happened. The change wasn't in the stone, but in the way he was looking at it. It was still a flint, but now he noticed that all along one side two lines of flakes had been carefully chipped away in a sort of pattern, leaving an edge that was sharp enough to cut your finger if you weren't careful. An old flint axe, or something. He'd seen ones like it on school visits to the museum. If that landed on your noggin …

Dimly he heard the signal to fire. Without even bothering to aim, he tossed the rock away. He was still in the daze of horror when all around him the cliff rang with gull cries. Now he looked over the edge and saw his opponent breaking from the circle and beginning to fly up, while two or three white feathers floated away on the breeze. This time the gull landed on the ledge and looked at James with its fierce, proud stare. Slowly it lowered its head. James put his right arm in front of his waist and bowed, the way he'd learned to for last term's class play. The gull bowed again.

They went on bobbing up and down to each other, the way gulls do sometimes, until several more gulls landed on the ledge, one of them bringing the Burra.

“Well done,” said the Burra. “They seem to have decided that your coolness under fire shows you are a gull, after all.”

“Did I hurt the one I hit?”

“A glancing blow only. Most satisfactory.”

“When can we go? I don't like it here. I want to get moving.”

“About two days, if all goes well.”

“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 splash 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.