Free The Green Book by Jill Paton Walsh Page B

It had a creamy silk ribbon to mark the place, and pretty brown and white flowered end-papers. And it was quite empty.
    â€œThere’s nothing in it!” cried Sarah, staring.
    â€œIt’s a commonplace book,” said Joe.
    â€œWhat’s that?” asked Sarah.
    â€œA sort of jotter, notebook thing, for thoughts you want to keep.”
    â€œAnd she’s been pretending to read it for months!” said Sarah, beginning to giggle. They both laughed and laughed. Other people came by and asked what the joke was. Everyone laughed.
    â€œOh, Pattie, dear child,” said Father when he heard about it. He didn’t laugh, he looked a mixture between sad and cross.
    â€œIt was my choose,” said Pattie very fiercely, taking her book back and holding it tight.
    Father said, “She was too young. I should have chosen for her. But no use crying over spilt milk.”
    We did get used to being on the ship, in the end. A funny thing happened to the way people felt about it. At first, everyone had hated it, grumbled all the time about tiny cubicles, about no exercise, about nothing to do. They had quarreled a lot. Grownup quarreling isn’t very nice. We were luckier than most families; we didn’t seem to quarrel, though we got very cross and scratchy about things, just like other people. But time went by, and people settled down to playing games, and sleeping, and talking a little, and got used to it, and so when at last everyone had had four birthdays on the ship, and the journey had been going on for what seemed like forever and ever, and the Guide told us all there were only months to go now, people were worried instead of glad.
    â€œWe shall be lucky if we can walk more than three steps, we’re so flabby,” said Father, and people began to do pushups in their cabins, and line up for a turn on the cycle machine for exercising legs.
    Joe began to ask a lot of questions. He didn’t like the answers he got and he talked to Pattie and Sarah about it after lights-out in sleeping times. “They just don’t know what this place is going to be like,” he told them. “They think it should support life; they know there is plant growth on it, and they suppose that means we could grow wheat. But there may be wild animals, or any kind of monster people on it already, they don’t know.”
    â€œCouldn’t there possibly be wild ponies, Joe?” said Sarah.
    â€œNo, sis, I don’t think so,” said Joe, very kindly. “And if this place isn’t any good, we can’t go anywhere else. The fuel won’t last. All they’ve got for us if it isn’t any good are pills.”
    â€œI don’t want to take pills,” said Pattie.
    â€œWe’ll have to, if all the others are taking them,” Sarah told her. “We couldn’t be left alone.”
    â€œI think we ought to be allowed a choose,” said Pattie.
    â€œOh, Pattie!” said Joe, grinning at her from his bunk. “You’re a fine one to talk about choosing! What good is your choosing, you goose!”

Chapter 2
    A time came when we reached the light of a new sun. Bright golden light filled the spaceship from the starboard portholes. The cocks woke up and crowed as if for all the missing mornings on the whole long trip. The sun warmed the ship, and made it hard to sleep at sleeping time. And then the new planet loomed up on the starboard side. It looked unlike the Earth, said the grownups, who could remember what the Earth had looked like. It was redder and shinier; it had no cloud drifts around it. When it got near, it looked like maps in bright colors. It didn’t look green. People spent all day looking anxiously through the portholes at it, trying to guess the meaning of what they could see. Just before touchdown, we could all see a land with mountains, craggy and rocky, and large lakes lying on the land surface everywhere; but as the ship came in to land,