A Box of Nothing (9 page)

Chapter 17: The Race Is On

“And the lizard had been shot,” said James.

“You are sure?” said the Burra.

“I don't see how it could've been anything else. Even before I saw the rat food I knew it had been shot.”

“Rats, then. And more than one lizard.”

“It's an expedition, you see. The lizards belong in the desert. Like camels. The rats use them for carrying things. When they get sick or something, the rats just shoot them and go on.”

The Burra paused even longer than usual.

“We think we had better start the engine,” it said.

“What about getting back?”

“We will have to think about that. But it is important to get there first. We don't know why. It is just a feeling. We belong to the Dump, remember. We feel what it feels. That is how we knew it had ceased to function. Now we know we must get there before the rats.”

“Oh, all right. Anyway it's boring, just drifting. Let's go.”

The engine chuttered awake as the anchors undug themselves. Now the breeze seemed to come from dead ahead, roasting hot but better than stillness. The dunes slid by at triple speed. Though there was nothing new to see, it was exciting, and part of the excitement was knowing that if the wind did drop, or they ran out of fuel, there was absolutely no way they would ever walk all those miles back to safety across the scorching cinders. They would die in the desert, and nothing would save them.

The sun went down and the stars came out. James slept, but the engine battered away all night, and when he woke in the morning he was quite certain he could see that the curve of the dunes was sharper than it had been the day before. The circles must still be immense, but they were getting slowly smaller as the airship drove toward their centre.

Toward evening they came to another dead lizard. The Burra agreed there was no special point in landing, but pumped gas to skim lower over the spot. On the slope beyond the lizard, to one side of the trail, was a small white dot. As they came nearer, James saw it was balanced on a sort of stalk, like a peculiar desert flower. The airship swooped past, only a few feet away, and now he could see what it really was. The white bit was a sun helmet, the old-fashioned kind explorers used to wear. The stalk was a rifle stuck in the ground. At its foot was a narrow mound, a grave.

But still the tracks went straight on. In the shadow-casting evening light the lizards' footprints were clearly marked on either side of the groove where they had dragged their tails.

“I think there's only two left,” James said.

“So do we. The question is, how far ahead are they?”

“It can't be too far. I mean, if that first one had been killed weeks ago, the flies wouldn't have been interested in it. We must be going faster than they are now. How far do you think it is to the middle? I've been trying to figure out the formula. I think I can see a way, but I don't know how the maths is supposed to work.”

He got out his picture and showed the Burra the circles he'd drawn on the back, and the lines he'd put in. The Burra grunted. It was the sort of equation the computer could have done in a thousandth of a second, but there was no point in asking it. The Burra had to think it out. James counted ridges and helped guess distances. From time to time he heard a calculator bleeping inside the duffel bag under the Burra's sailor shirt.

“We have had to do a lot of guessing,” said the Burra at last. “Sometime tomorrow, we think.”

“Have you got enough fuel?”

“Yes, if the wind holds.”

James slept. All night the engine muttered through his dreams. They were nightmares, mostly. One was about General Weil, wearing a sun helmet and whipping his great lizard across the dunes. He had a chain-saw strapped to his saddle because at the dead centre there grew the only tree in all this world, a marvellous star tree, and General Weil was going to cut it down and bring all the stars crashing out of the sky. He had to be stopped. James was on his bike, whizzing along, but then he was trying to force his wheels through soft sand, and then the bicycle melted away and he was plodding up a slithering dune and the flies were buzzing and muttering all around, waiting for him to die. And then he woke up. That was typical, but he had several of that kind of dream.

When he woke in the morning the first thing he did was look at the dunes. The curve was clearly there now, easy to see from the height at which the airship flew. For a moment he thought the tracks had vanished and they'd passed the rat expedition in the night, but then he saw them, only a faint dotted line. No lizard footprints, no central groove.

“They've left the lizards behind,” he said. “They're going on, on foot.”

“Yes,” said the Burra. “Just two of them, we think.”

“They must be incredibly brave. How far to the middle now?”

“About twelve hours.”

“I thought you said before that.”

“The wind is dying. It is hardly helping us at all.”

“Oh. Are you going to have enough fuel?”

“Perhaps.”

As the sun rose the tracks vanished. James only knew they were still following them when, about midday, they passed another grave, marked like the first one with a helmet and rifle, but dug so shallow that the tip of the rat's tail stuck out of the cinders. He went to the front of the basket and stared across the burning dunes. Even in the shadow of the gas bag the heat was dreadful. The breeze the airship made as it pushed along was like the rush of hot air you feel if someone opens an oven and you're standing too close. But the curve of the dunes had become so strong that James could see they really were like the rings of an enormous target. And the bull's-eye had to be somewhere dead ahead. There.

If it had been the star tree he'd dreamed about, he'd have seen it by now. He screwed up his eyes and stared through the glare across the narrowing rings. Was there something there? A sort of darker patch?

Knowing how far it was made the airship seem to go slower. You could watch time pass by the way the shadow of the gas bag sidled across the dunes. At first it was over to the left. At midday it was right underneath. An hour later it was a bit to the right. Then it was more than twice as far.

It was about there when James saw the explorer. Or rather he saw a white dot near the ridge of one of the dunes a long way in front. It vanished over the top, and the airship drove on. Quite a long time later he saw it again, and a dark shape beneath it struggling slowly up over the cinders. Next time it came into sight it was obviously a rat wearing a sun helmet. The airship had crossed nine ridges while the rat was moving from one to the next. In fact, they would catch up while it was still on this ridge.

At first the rat seemed not to notice the airship, but continued to struggle up the slope. You could see from the way it moved that it was totally exhausted with heat and effort, but still somehow driving itself on. It seemed to hear the engine for the first time as it paused for a moment to rest at the top of the dune.

The rat turned and looked back at the sky, shading its eyes with one paw. It unslung its rifle and waited. When the airship came in range it started to shoot, but it was so tired that the barrel rocked to and fro and most of the shots went wild. A few may have hit the gas bag, but if so the Burra sealed them almost at once.

As the airship sailed by James saw that the explorer was a large rat with almost black fur, nothing like horrible General Weil. He knew it would have killed him if it could, and killed the Burra too—supposing there was any way you could kill something like the Burra—rather than let them reach the centre first, but even so he felt sorry for it. It had tried so hard and got so far. When they were out of range it slung its rifle onto its back and started on all fours down the next slope.

Now from this height he could see the centre. Or rather he could see where it was. The sun was shining slantwise again, and the ridged rings stood out strongly with the shadows between them. He could see their far sides dwindling into the distance. At the very heart was something like a huge pool.

Done it, he thought. We'll be first. We should be there before the sun goes down.

The thought was still in his mind when the engine coughed, stopped, started, coughed twice, and stopped completely.

“Out of fuel,” said the Burra.

“We're almost there. We can just drift. The rat can't possibly catch up.”

James watched a ridge below slide backward, slow as dreams. The valley took an age to cross. Directly over the next ridge the airship stopped completely.

“No wind,” said the Burra.

Chapter 18: The Box Opens

The sun went down through bars of scarlet. The airship hung in stillness. Nothing moved. It was as though the black pool made the stillness, stopping the wind that had blown so steadily across the desert from ever quite reaching it. Suddenly the light left the ridges of the dunes and all the desert was in shadow. James stopped watching out aft to see how the rat was getting on. It had crossed three ridges since the airship stopped. There were four before it caught up and then six more to the black centre.

“Can't you wiggle your fins and sort of row us forward?” he said.

“It may be worth a try,” said the Burra.

James heard a gentle swishing noise overhead. Slowly the airship swung around until it was facing the way they had come. The last rim of the sun dipped out of sight and at the same moment shadow swept up and covered the gas bag. Stars came out like lights being turned on. The airship was still over the same dune.

“I know,” said James. “If you go lower, you can let me down on a rope like you did when I went to look at the lizard. I'll tow you.”

“Do you think you can?”

“We've got to get there first.”

The moment his shoes touched the cinders James started down the slope with the rope still knotted to his shoulders. His feet made rattling little avalanches at each step. Above him he could hear a different rattle and slither as every strand of cord the Burra could spare undid itself and then knotted itself to his line. The longer the better. There was no point in trying to tow until he was well up the far slope, because he'd be pulling mainly downward.

At last he crossed the valley floor and started to climb. It was just like his dream, step after plodding step, with the cinders slithering back beneath his weight so that it was like trying to run up a down escalator. Still no use pulling because that would just drag him back and down instead of hauling the airship forward. The weight of the rope began to be a nuisance. He gave up trying to climb straight and zigzagged instead, though at the end of each zig he was only a few feet higher than the last one. The dune was like a mountain. And the explorer rat had four feet. Much easier like that. It could probably climb straight. If it could cross two dunes while he was crossing one, it would catch up with him.

The thought drove him desperately on. Long after his legs had become floppy bags of jelly, they kept moving somehow while his lungs sucked at the crackling dusty air. At last the slope eased and he could climb straight. On, on. He staggered to the top and turned to pull. He wouldn't be able to make the next ridge, not without a rest.

The moon had risen, full and bright. The airship glistened like a sleeping fish in the black of the night. James gripped the rope to haul it in, but as soon as he had his feet firm it started hauling of its own accord from the other end, pulling so hard that he had to lean right back, like in tug-of-war.

The Burra was right. It was that first bit of pull when the rope was almost level—that was what mattered. The closer the airship got, the more it would waste energy just pulling down, not longways. But the Burra judged its course beautifully, pumping gas so that it could swoop down directly toward James and skimming the basket past so close he could have put up his hand and touched it.

“Run and jump when I call!” shouted the Burra as it whistled by.

James turned. The Burra was pumping gas the other way now, making its flight curve upward. The rope was paying itself out. He got ready. The Burra's grating cry floated across the night.

“Now!”

James ran, sprinting across the clogging cinders. The rope kept pace, so that it hung in an easy curve between him and the airship. The slope dipped down, steeper and steeper.

“Jump!” shouted the Burra.

It was more of a stagger than a leap, but it was something, a forward effort, and he was in the air. The rope had tightened at the last moment and now he was swooping through the air like Tarzan on a vine, with the wind whistling around him, out and down across the valley, faster and faster, and then up, slower now, and landing with a soft thump, sprawling on cinders well up the next slope.

He flung out his arms and legs, spreading himself as wide as he could to stop himself from slipping down. Carefully he rose to his feet and started to climb. Much better than last time, most of the steep part done for him, but still harder work than he'd ever done in his life. If it hadn't been so important—he didn't know why— he would have lain down on the cinders and given up. It wouldn't have been fair, asking him to kill himself, almost, climbing and hauling like that. But it was.

Slowly he staggered the last few steps to the top of the next ridge, turned, and dug his feet into the cinders, ready to be the anchor by which the airship could haul itself forward and on. The Burra seemed to understand how tired he was. Perhaps it could feel his feelings along the rope. Anyway, it gave him a bit of a rest before the rope tightened. As he stood there, gasping and shivering, a movement caught his eye. Not on the ridge he had just left, but the one beyond. For a few seconds a white spot gleamed in the moonlight, with a darkness below it too large to be its shadow. The thing scuttled across the cinders and vanished into the valley. In that moment the whole urgency of the race came back into James's mind. He forgot his tiredness and leaned against the pull of the tautening rope, trying to hurry the airship on.

“That rat's only one ridge behind,” he called as the airship skimmed past. “He's running!”

“We know,” called the Burra. “We are just keeping pace. Ready? Now!”

Knowing what it was going to be like, James managed the Tarzan bit much better this time, and the Burra had had some practice too. James landed farther up the next dune and managed not to slither at all. So they moved on. Swoop, scramble, haul. Swoop, scramble, haul. The swoops were exciting, and the hauling bits weren't too bad, but the scrambling, slithering climb seemed worse and worse, even though the Burra was landing him farther up the dune each time. Only the thought of the rat scuttling along behind kept him going. That rat, he knew, had crossed hundreds of miles of desert. Its companions had died, and so had its lizards. It had travelled on foot over the burning cinders for a whole long day. And still, somehow, it was managing to run. General Weil didn't deserve to have a rat like that exploring for him. He didn't see it again, but the Burra did. They were just keeping pace.

The Burra counted the ridges still to go. There had been six when James had started to tow the airship. Four, three, two, last one … He staggered to the top of the ridge, turned, dug his heels in, hauled just as before, and then as the airship swooped by he turned again, ran and leaped …

Out over nothing. Out over an enormous blackness, with the rope lifting him in toward the swaying basket while the pumps chuckered away, shoving gas into the bag so that the airship would float up as well as out. He scrambled over the edge of the basket and sat down.

“Whew!” he said.

His legs were like cold modelling clay and he went on shivering with exhaustion even after his blankets had slithered along to wrap themselves around him. As soon as the basket had stopped swinging around, he crawled to its side and looked over the edge.

The blackness was a hole, but there was no bottom to it, and no sides.

The moon was well up by now. If the hole had been an ordinary crater, however deep and still, you would have seen a bit of its edges, cliffs going down into shadow, with a glimmer or two below. But there wasn't anything, only blackness.

The hole was bigger than itself. If you looked at its edges, where the last circle of dune sloped down to it, it was about a mile across. But when you looked down into it you could see—although you couldn't actually see anything—you could see that it was much, much bigger than that. Inside, it went on forever.

And it was still, far stiller than a stone or a pool. Stiller than empty sky. The stars in the sky flung their light out at 186,000 miles a second, but when the light hit the hole it stopped moving. It became nothing.

It became part of the nothing that the crater was. The original nothing, which was there before anything was there, like he'd told the man in the Nothing Shop. The same sort of nothing he'd got in his box.

This was where the box belonged. He took it out of his anorak pocket and looked at it in the moonlight. It hadn't changed.

“What d'you suppose I'm supposed to do?” he said. “Just drop it in?”

“We don't know,” said the Burra. “There is not much time. That rat is almost at the last ridge.”

“I'm sure I'm supposed to open it first.”

James was kneeling in the silence, twisting and tugging at the box as he'd done so often before, when he heard music. It was all on one note, the usual computer bleep, but it had a dancing sort of rhythm, like a song that suddenly comes into your mind when you thought you'd forgotten it. The computer's indicator light was shining extra-bright.

“Well, someone is happy,” said the Burra. It produced its grating laugh and patted the computer casing in a friendly way. The movement froze. The Burra blinked.

“Oh,” it said.

In the silence and stillness you noticed every movement. James wasn't looking that way, but suddenly he saw the explorer's white sun helmet gleam on the last ridge. He was just going to call out when he felt the Burra's furry, fingerless paw touch his forearm.

His mind fizzed. The only way he was able to think about it afterward looked completely stupid. He saw an equation in his head. He saw it so clearly that he felt he could have picked the figures and symbols up and moved them around, but he knew that as soon as he let go they'd slide back to the same place. The equation didn't mean anything.

0 - 0 ÷ 0 = !

That's all. But there was a sort of spinning excitement in the 0s, all possible possibles balancing each other out, meeting in the glorious explosion of the !, which was like the largest of all rockets roaring away toward the sky, bathed in the flame of its thrust, turning gravity inside out with the sheer power of its take-off, so that it would never be able to fall back into nothing again.

In that fizzing instant James's hands knew the secret of the box. They had to pull and push at the same time, twisting in both directions at once, with a sudden little jiggle in the middle that had to come at exactly the right moment.

He did the pull-push and started the twists. He felt the box beginning to open, so he held it over the side and did the jiggle and finished the twists. It didn't open into two. It opened into three. That was the real secret. It seemed to spring apart in his hands.

He dropped it and leaned over the side to watch it fall.

BOOM!