Chapter 1
Father said, âWe can take very little with us.â The list was in his hand. âSpade, saw, file, ax, for each family. Seeds, etc., will be provided. Iron rations will be provided. For each voyager a change of clothing, a pair of boots, one or two personal items only ; e.g., a favorite cooking pan, a musical instrument (small and light), a picture (unframed). Nothing under this heading will be taken if it is bulky or heavy, fragile or perishable. One book per voyager.â
It was easy to pack. We were allowed so little, and we didnât have to bother about leaving anything tidy behind us. Only the books caused a little delay. Father said, âI must take this.â He showed us an ugly big volume called A Dictionary of Intermediate Technology . âBut you must choose for yourselves,â he said. âIt wouldnât be fair of me to choose for you. Think carefully.â
We didnât think. We were excited, disturbed, and we hadnât really understood that everything else would be left behind. Father looked wistfully at the shelves. He picked up The Oxford Complete Shakespeare . âHave you all chosen your books?â he asked. âYes,â we told him. He put the Shakespeare back.
We had time to waste at the end. We ate everything we could find.
âI donât want to eat iron,â Pattie said, but nobody knew what she meant.
Then Father got out the slide projector, and showed us pictures of holidays we had once had. We didnât think much of them.
âHave they all gone brownish with age, Dad?â said Joe, our brother, the eldest of us.
âNo,â said Father. âThe pictures are all right. Itâs the light that has changed. Itâs been getting colder and bluer now for yearsâ¦but when I was young it was this lovely golden color, just like thisâlook.â
But what he showed usâa beach, with a blue sea, and the mother we couldnât remember lying on a towel, reading a bookâlooked a funny hue, as though someone had brushed it over with a layer of treacle.
Pattie was glad that Father wasnât going to be able to take the slide projector. It made him sad.
And the next day we all went away, Father and Joe, and Sarah, and Pattie, and lots of other families, and left the Earth far behind.
When this happened, we were all quite young, and Pattie was so young that later she couldnât remember being on the Earth at all, except those few last hours, and even the journey was mostly forgotten. She could remember the beginning of the journey, because it was so exciting. When we could undo our seat belts, and look out of the windows, the world looked like a Chinese paper lantern, with painted lands upon it, and all the people on the ship looked at it, and some of the grownups cried. Father didnât cry; he didnât look, either.
Joe went and talked to Father by and by, but Sarah and Pattie stood at a porthole all day long, and saw the world shrink and shrink and diminish down till it looked like a round cloudy glass marble that you could have rolled on the palm of your hand. Pattie was looking forward to going past the moon, but that was no fun at all, for the ship passed by the dark side, and we saw nothing of it. And then we were flying in a wide black starry sky, where none of the stars had names.
At first there were voices from the world below, but not for long. The Disaster from which we were escaping happened much sooner than they had thought it would, and after two days the ship was flying in radio silence, alone, and navigating with a calculator program on the computer, and a map of magnetic fields.
The journey was very boring. It was so long. The spaceship was big enough to frighten us when we thought of it flying through the void. Joe kept telling Pattie not to worry. âHeavy things donât fall down in space,â he told her. âThereâs nowhere for them to fall; no