Mungus: Book 1 (3 page)

My mother knew how much Saul
loved the game.  She spent a considerable amount of her teacher’s salary to make the best baseball for her son that she could.  She bought half a pound of cotton and wrapped it and rewrapped it as tight as possible into a ball.  She then wrapped that ball in leather and sowed it shut with red stitches.  Saul always took it into the theatre when he watched the Yankees play.  He tossed it back and forth in his hands, rubbing it, thumbing the stitches.

             
My prized possession was buried deep within our suitcase.  I didn’t get it out as much as Saul played with his baseball, but the memory of my parents made it my favorite thing in the world.  My father was a welder.  He helped to remold and repair metal on the ship.  When my grandmother died, before they shot her body out into space, my father took her wedding ring off of her finger.  He then took his father’s and welded them together so that the iron rings were no longer rings, but were in the shape of a small turtle.  My mother used to call me “Mr. Turtle.”  I don’t know why she did, but it always made me giggle.

             
The nights passed, and the phone in the orphanage rang.  Miss Mabel came and dragged children out of bed to be sent down to Mungus.  No matter how much I held my breath when she passed by that first month, she never came to drag my brother or me out of bed.

On Sunday morning Saul and I sat in the UV room.  It was a white fluorescent room with UV lamps hanging above.  UV time was mandatory for everyone on the ship.  I had heard stories of early days when there were dangerously high rates of depression.  The doctors examined the people and decided that they were not getting enough vitamin D because they were being deprived of something that our ancestor’s bodies had gotten accustomed to—the sun.  Since the
Grecos were traveling through space and did not have the luxury of a sun above their heads every day, the scientists at the time created a UV room full of fluorescent lights.  The idea was that people would sit in there for some time every week so that their bodies would produce the needed chemicals.  After some testing and lobbying, UV time was made a mandatory requirement for all members of the Greco ship.  Depression rates went down, or so I was told, and so for the last 700 years of the Greco’s flight UV time was mandatory.

             
Despite the testimonies that I had heard, I was not convinced that UV time prevented depression.  I hated it.  Every year we were sent a ship calendar that gave us a UV schedule.  Saul and I had to go at the same time, 6:30 a.m. on Sunday mornings, one of our two days off a week.  It was the earliest time that you could be scheduled on what was in my opinion the worst day of the week.  I dragged myself out of bed, took the train to the UV station with Saul, stripped down to my underwear, put on my sunglasses, and piled into the white room with nine other nearly naked men.

             
I was tired and lay down on the white floor in the middle of the room and tried to sleep.  The fluorescents buzzed above me as the temperature rose.  Saul had brought a comic book into the room and was reading while the rays soaked into him.  The lights shone so bright against his doughy skin that he seemed to glow.  I shut my eyes and tried to doze off but the men around me wouldn’t stop talking.

             
“I don’t understand why we have to sit in here for UV time when we’re about to go down to Mungus,” a young, slim man said.

             
“You’re going to Mungus?” a bald man asked.  I didn’t remember his name, but I had seen him before.  He worked at the market and was always bustling around outside, moving boxes on forklifts while he chugged down sodas.  He had broad shoulders and little black hairs curled all over his body.

             
“Yeah, I’m going down.”

             
The bald man let out a laugh and rubbed his knees and shook his head.

             
“What’s wrong with going down to Mungus?” the younger man asked.  He leaned toward the bald man.

             
I shut my eyes behind my sunglasses and tried to not let my tired mind dwell on what they were talking about.  I wanted to sleep and I had heard the same conversation hundreds of times.

             
“There’s nothing wrong with it, I would just never do it.”

             
“Why’s that?”

             
The bald man chuckled again.  “I just have a hard time believing that when those seven years are up that you will be getting the freedom that they promised.”

             
“But it’s in the contract…”

             
“I’ve read the contract,” the bald man said.  He began to raise his voice, “It’s the contract that made me so skeptical.  Have you read the whole thing?  You’re not allowed to communicate with anyone on the ship once you enter Rumus.  You don’t think that that sounds weird?  You don’t think that that’s a clue that they’re probably not going to be honest with you?”

             
The younger man began to raise his voice too.  “No, I don’t.  That kind of thing makes sense if you’re trying to establish a nation.  And excuse me for having a family and wanting to be with my kids.  I would have to separate with them if I wanted to stay and help to build Terra.”

             
“Are you serious?  Have you been listening to what’s been going on around you?  Tons of families are getting split up.  Don’t think that just because you signed a ‘family request form’ that you are going to get to stay with your family.”

             
At this I opened my eyes and looked at the bald man as he continued to rant.

             
“The Jones’s, do you know them?  Cindy and James got split up.  The Mickelson’s whole family got divided.  The Lee’s seven-year-old daughter was taken from her parents and sent down to Mungus alone.  The Burkner’s dad got split up from them…”

             
The young man was getting red in the face.

             
“Geoff Spinner got separated from his kids, he’s still on the ship and they’re down there.  Mickey Jones’s wife is down on Mungus and they signed one of those contracts.  Arnold…”

             
“Shut up!” the younger man hollered, flailing his hands in the air as he talked.  “Just shut up.  I don’t care.  I don’t care what you think.  If I wanted advice, I would have asked you, but I didn’t.  Leave me alone, I want to sit in here in peace.”

             
The bald man looked at me and made a comical wide-eyed face as if to say, “that guy’s crazy,” and the room grew quiet.  There was a thick tension and no one was talking.  The younger man was panting with anger and people sat still and seemed to be careful not to breathe the wrong way.  I tried to remain as quiet as possible.

             
Saul laughed hard and slapped his knee.  The noise made me flinch in the silence, but Saul was as happy as could be.  Apparently something that he had read in his comics was funny and he let out a joyful giggle.  After he laughed, everyone in the room giggled before becoming quiet again.  People didn’t talk after that, but Saul’s laughter had taken some of the tension out of the room.

             
After fifteen more minutes of the heat soaking into my body and the UV lights humming, the intercom crackled overhead and then a woman’s voice spoke across the ship, “Jasper Rowlings, Vancil Jones, Gregory Marshall, Cathi Akin, Michael Thomas and Brenda Hall, please report to the loading dock.  Thank you.”  The intercom cracked and it was quiet once again.  I had been hearing intercom announcements for the past month, and they still hadn’t called my name.  Each time that woman’s voice came on across the ship my heart rate rose and my ears picked up.  It was my understanding that they tried to reach people who were supposed to go down to Mungus by calling them on the phone first and then if they didn’t pick up they would call for them over the intercom.  After a whole month, I was still as anxious about being separated from Saul as I was the first day.

             
After our UV time, Saul and I went and threw his baseball in the park for a few hours and then it was lunch.  We sat in the orphanage’s cafeteria, a small room filled with cheap plastic tables and chairs that was now nearly empty.  We ate alone in the quiet room.  The chairs were small and when Saul sat down his knees touched the bottom of the table.  Lunch was meatloaf, green beans, and glasses of room-temperature tap water.

             
Saul ate hurriedly, engulfing huge bites of meatloaf with his fork.  I wasn’t hungry.  I couldn’t stop thinking about what the bald man had said about so many families getting split up.  And despite us putting in our contracts as soon as possible, we still hadn’t been called.  I didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

             
Saul scrapped his plate clean and I passed my meatloaf over to him.  “Are you not hungry?” he asked.

             
“Not really.”

             
“Are you sick,” Saul dug his fork into the meatloaf and took a bite.

             
“No.”

             
I heard a phone ringing somewhere else.

             
“Are you worried?”

             
I looked up at Saul and he stopped chewing.  My eyes felt on the verge of tears.  I was scared.  I didn’t want to be separated from him.  No, more significant than that, I didn’t want him to be separated from me.  The bald man had made a good point.

             
I suppressed my emotions, smiled, and said, “No, what’s there to be worried about?”

             
“I don’t know,” he said.

             
He continued chewing and said, “It would be getting near the end of baseball season about this time of the year.”

             
“Really?” I said.  I wasn’t interested and stared off as Saul continued to ramble on about baseball.

             
Miss Marianna scooted into the cafeteria.  Her eyes were wide with excitement, as they always were, and painted with blue and green makeup.  “Saul and Walt, would you two come here please?” she asked, and then shuffled back into the orphanage bedroom.

             
We followed her and when we were alone she said, “I know how much you two wanted to be together on Mungus…”

             
Saul and I looked at each other then back at Miss Marianna who was frowning.

             
Her frown turned into a smile.  “I just got a phone call.  You two are wanted at the loading dock.  Go, hurry and grab your suitcases!”

             
Saul and I jumped up and down in excitement and then my brother wrapped his thick arms around me and swung me around in the air.  Miss Marianna clapped and said, “I’m so happy for you two.”

             
Saul went and grabbed his suitcase under his bed and then we hugged Miss Marianna goodbye.  I wanted to say goodbye to the other Ms, but they were not in the orphanage at that time.

             
Miss Marianna looked down at Saul’s suitcase, “Don’t you need to grab your things, Walt?”

             
“I’m packed with Saul.”

             
She frowned at this.  “What if you two were separated?”

             
“I don’t know, but we weren’t.”

             
We hugged Miss Marianna goodbye once more, told the children in the cafeteria goodbye and then took the train to the loading dock.  Neither of us could suppress the smiles that had spread across our faces as we sat down on our suitcase in a great line of people and waited to board a ship that would take us to Mungus.

3

Mungus

             
From where we sat in the loading dock I could see Mungus through a window high up in the ceiling.  I couldn’t stop fidgeting from excitement.  The planet sat suspended in a sea of black outer space.  Three fourths of the planet were lit up and the other quarter was covered in a dark shadow where the sun didn’t touch.  A smooth line of darkness divided the two sections.  The lighter part of the planet seemed to glow with blues and greens sitting still and clouds of white drifting over the surface like ghosts.

             
The only other times that I had been to the loading dock of the ship were for funerals.  Three of my grandparents, both of my parents, a teacher, and a friend of mine who died of cancer.  Funerals were held at this place because the Greco tradition was to send the dead body out into space and the loading dock was the only place that this could be done.  Sending a body away after the person died always gave me a sense of finality.  I never felt as though a person was really dead until I saw their body leave the ship.  Even though I had seen so many funerals at the loading dock, it wasn’t a place that I associated with sadness.  I was sad when my parents died, and I cried for each one, but the funerals were happy times.  I could see my friends, my family, and a speaker would remind me of the good times that I spent with that deceased person.  I actually liked funerals.