Free The Green Book by Jill Paton Walsh

Chapter 1
    Father said, “We can take very little with us.” The list was in his hand. “Spade, 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.”
    It was easy to pack. We were allowed so little, and we didn’t have to bother about leaving anything tidy behind us. Only the books caused a little delay. Father said, “I must take this.” He showed us an ugly big volume called A Dictionary of Intermediate Technology . “But you must choose for yourselves,” he said. “It wouldn’t be fair of me to choose for you. Think carefully.”
    We didn’t think. We were excited, disturbed, and we hadn’t really understood that everything else would be left behind. Father looked wistfully at the shelves. He picked up The Oxford Complete Shakespeare . “Have you all chosen your books?” he asked. “Yes,” we told him. He put the Shakespeare back.
    We had time to waste at the end. We ate everything we could find.
    â€œI don’t want to eat iron,” 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 didn’t think much of them.
    â€œHave they all gone brownish with age, Dad?” said Joe, our brother, the eldest of us.
    â€œNo,” said Father. “The pictures are all right. It’s the light that has changed. It’s been getting colder and bluer now for years…but when I was young it was this lovely golden color, just like this—look.”
    But what he showed us—a beach, with a blue sea, and the mother we couldn’t remember lying on a towel, reading a book—looked a funny hue, as though someone had brushed it over with a layer of treacle.
    Pattie was glad that Father wasn’t 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 couldn’t 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 didn’t cry; he didn’t 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. “Heavy things don’t fall down in space,” he told her. “There’s nowhere for them to fall; no