Free The Green Book by Jill Paton Walsh Page A

gravity.”
    â€œWhen I knock things over, they fall down, just like at home,” Pattie said, doubtfully.
    â€œThat’s just the ship’s gravity machine, making it happen inside the ship,” said Joe. “To make us feel normal.”
    But the ship was small enough to frighten us too, when we thought of spending years inside it. “We will still be here when I’m fourteen!” said Joe, as though he found that as hard to believe as Pattie found the lack of gravity.
    â€œBetter get used to it, then,” said Sarah. We had pills to make us sleep a lot of the time, but the rules said everyone had to be awake some of each forty-eight hours. When people were awake, they played games—Monopoly, and Go, and backgammon, and chess, and Mastermind, and Space Invaders, which were all on the ship’s computer and could be played with the video screens. And one of the grownups had even brought along as his special luxury a funny hand set for playing chess which let you play it with another person instead of with the computer. When we weren’t playing games, we could read the books we had brought. Joe asked Father why there were no books to read on the computer screens.
    Father told us that all the new, well-equipped spaceships belonged to big wealthy countries. They had flown off to find distant, promising-looking planets. “We were the bottom of the barrel,” he said, “the last few to go from an old and poorer country, and only an old ship available, and no time to outfit it properly. Our computer was intended for exploration journeys, not for colonization. It has no spare memory; it can barely manage our minimum needs. And there was so little fuel we couldn’t get lift-off with anything extra on board—no useful livestock, like sheep or cows; just ourselves, and what the organizers thought we needed for survival. But we are lucky to be away at all, remember, and they allocated us a much nearer destination so that our old ship could get us somewhere.”
    There were some chickens in cages on the ship, with two very noisy cocks who had lost their sense of timing in the flight through darkness and crowed at all the wrong times when we were trying to sleep. And there were rabbits too; we could let them out and play with them. Rabbits are fun when you are very small and like furry things, but they aren’t much fun, really. You can’t teach them tricks. All they ever think about is munching. And when we got bored with rabbits, all we had was that one book each to go back to. Of course, we tried to read slowly. “Read each sentence at least twice, before you read another,” the rule books said, under “Helpful Suggestions.” But Sarah couldn’t read that slowly. At home she read four or five books every week. She finished her book quickly and then wanted to borrow Pattie’s.
    Pattie wouldn’t let her. So she swapped with Joe, and read his. He had brought Robinson Crusoe . Sarah didn’t much like Robinson Crusoe .
    â€œYou’d better think about him, old girl,” Joe said to her. “That island is just like where we’re going, and we have to scratch a living on it, just like Crusoe.”
    â€œWell, I hope we don’t have to pray and carry on like him,” said Sarah.
    Joe didn’t like Sarah’s book any better than she liked his. Hers was called The Pony Club Rides Again . Joe didn’t like horses, and he couldn’t resist telling Sarah that, after all, she would never see a horse again as long as she lived.
    So then they both wanted to borrow Pattie’s book. Pattie wouldn’t lend it. “I haven’t finished it myself yet,” she kept saying. “It’s not fair. You finished yours before you had to lend it.”
    In the end, Father made her give it to them. It was thin and neat, with dark green silky boards covered with gold tooling. The edges of the pages were gilded and shiny.