A Box of Nothing

by Peter Dickinson

  Suddenly, almost straight ahead, James saw the glitter of starlit snow.

  “Look out!” he yelled.

  The noisy motor started before the shout was over. A propeller whumped at air. Slowly the ship swung sideways, almost grazing the cliff. The basket rocked violently where the wind buffeted into the mountain. The ship swung on until the nose pointed into the wind. Now every rope and cord shrieked in the streaming air as the engine slowly threshed their way out of danger.

  As soon as they were clear it slowed, working only hard enough to keep them over the same spot as they floated up and up until they were above the level of the peaks. Then the ship turned, the engine cut out, the shrieking of the cords died away, and they swept silently on above the jagged ridges.

  From this height James could see, far to the right, a faint paling of the sky and a silvery pink line along the sea, ending where the mountains broke the horizon. The range seemed to go on forever. He remembered the Dump he used to know, the one you saw across the street when you turned the corner of Floral Street. You could bike around that and be back in ten minutes, easy.

  “Why’s it all got so big?” he said.

  “We don’t know but we hope to find out. Now, look there!”

  James twisted to crane over the other side of the basket. He gasped. They had crossed the mountain wall and reached a large inland plain. It ought still to have been pitch-dark down there, out of reach of the first dawn light, but it wasn’t.

  Pale street lighting threaded its way in crisscross patterns, dotted lines of lamps running endlessly across the plain as far as he could see. In some places there were fuzzy patches, vaguely lit with orange, where trails of smoke blotted out the street lights. Separate from these, James saw two squares of much brighter light.

  The first was just a very big floodlit building, some kind of town hall by the look of it. The other one was different, because the square of brightness ran around a darker patch in the centre, but there was still enough light there for James to see rows and rows of huts. A line of guard towers stood in the bright-lit border of the square, but it was too far away for him to see the fence between them. He knew it must be there, from movies he’d seen at home on TV.

  “It seems they still use gas lighting for most things,” said the Burra. “Electricity is for what they consider important. That must be General Weil’s palace.”

  “And his prison camp, I suppose,” said James. “He’s that sort. What’s the orange bits?”

  “Furnaces. Iron foundries. There is a lot of iron to be mined out of the Dump.”

  Slowly the sky turned paler, and as it did so the lights below grew faint and went out. Soon James could see the endless lines of little houses, street after street of them, cramped and huddled. They weren’t even proper houses—sheds and huts, some round like mud huts in safari movies, some patched out of corrugated iron and other rubbish. But all so cramped, and not a garden anywhere. The streets ran every which way, except in a few places where a grand highway had been carved through the muddle, or where railway lines snaked their way into the city, with early trains puffing along under trails of greasy smoke. The first rat workers, tiny dots from this height, were scurrying through the dawn streets. James didn’t see any of them even pause to look at the amazing sight above them.

  And it was amazing. When he got bored with watching the huge grey slum below—depressing and also a bit frightening—he turned his attention to the airship. This was more fun.

  The plastic bags that the Burra had collected on the shore had melted themselves into a single enormous bag, a patchwork of different colours, the blue sort that farmers buy fertilizer in and green supermarket shopping bags, and pink and mauve ones from posh dress shops, and yellow ones from liquor stores, all jumbled together without any pattern, just lovely splotches of colour compared with the drab grey city below. The plastic must be several layers thick, for strength, James thought, and the whole bag was held into shape by the great upside-down string-net bag that he’d seen weaving itself on the cavern floor. Extra strong cords ran down from this to carry the basket in which he sat.

  It was more like a canoe than a basket, really, except for having wheels and being full of holes. It was tiny compared with the gas bag, but it was crammed with oddments from the cavern. They weren’t the sort of things you’d take on an expedition, either. There was a dressmaker’s dummy and a stuffed fish and the light coil and an old windup gramophone with a horn and an ironing board and a supermarket trolley and a lot of other junk. He remembered some of it from the cavern, though it had never done anything there. He was staring at the stuffed fish when it winked at him. Of course it was alive, and so were all the other things. They were all members of the Burra—the Burra Council, elected to come on this expedition. The Burra had explained about that, hadn’t it?

  And the pieces of the airship must be members, too, the basket and the engine and even the ropes and plastic bags. The computer, of course, and the electrical gadgets James had seen making themselves in the cavern. Two of these, in their milk crates, sat in the prow and stern with their reshaped saucepan lids on top. Some kind of radar, James thought. The third one was under the computer, near the middle.

  “Do we go just where the wind pushes us?” James asked.

  “We can go where we like if we use our engine,” said the Burra. “But fuel is limited and we may need most of it to come back. For the moment the wind is taking us the way we feel is right. We can make minor adjustments with some fins we have, like a fish’s, on top of the gas bag.”

  “That’s brilliant too.”

  “Thank you. We are quite pleased with ourself so far.”

  “It’s terrific to be going somewhere. I like you, Burra, but I do want to go home. I don’t really belong here, you see. Do you think we’re really going to be able to do something about the Dump? Just us, when there’s such a lot of it?”

  The Burra was silent for quite a long time.

  “We think there must be a reason for things,” it said at last. “We may look like a complete accident, but we do not feel like one. We do not feel that you are here by accident, James, with your box. So perhaps we are doing the right thing. Now you will have to stop talking while we see how effective our next contraption turns out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look over there. The gulls are coming.”

  Chapter 10: Gull Attack

  By now the sun was over the mountains, though the great Rat City still lay in shadow below. The snowy peaks glittered in the sideways light. Looking along the line of the Burra’s arm, James saw several flecks of pure white floating in the brilliant air. He counted nine. Gulls.

  He remembered gulls at the seaside, the fierce ripping beaks, the way they snatched a thrown crust out of the air, their small eyes yellow and cruel. These gulls were a hundred times that size, and the gas bag that carried him and the Burra was soft, so easy a target. In spite of what the Burra had said, James was scared.

  “What will they do?” he said.

  “Please do not talk,” said the Burra. “We need to concentrate. But it will be all right.”

  It took a spare eye out of its shirt pocket and screwed it into the back of its head, between the ears, then settled by the computer. The milk crate under the computer began to hum. So did the two at the front and back of the basket. The saucepan lids stood up on extending stalks so that they looked like metal flowers. Surprisingly, the engine didn’t start up, but James could feel that the whole airship had changed slightly, had come fully awake, tense and ready.

  And only just in time.

  The gulls came incredibly fast. A few seconds ago they’d been white specks in the blue morning sky, but now they were birds, skimming in perfect formation towards the airship. Yes, nine of them. They grew and grew. The Burra didn’t seem to be doing anything.

  They looked as if they meant to
ram straight into the gas bag, but when they were about a hundred yards away James heard a single harsh squawk and they peeled off to the left in perfect formation, like an Air Force display. They circled the airship twice in silence, apart from the hiss of wind over their feathers. Another squawk, and the flanker broke formation and headed in. Straight for the basket. Straight at James.

  He stared, frozen, at the great yellow beak as it rushed toward him.

  The gull fell out of the sky.

  It stopped flying. All its feathers stood on end. Its wings went out of control. Its eyes closed. It dropped.

  The speed of its flight made it fall in a curve, under the basket and out on the far side. James craned over the edge to watch it tumble. Sad, all that brightness and speed, gone. Dead.

  But halfway to the ground the gull came alive again. The wings gave a few wild flips, the feathers shook themselves into place, and it was a bird, and flying.

  It was obviously dazed, and just zigzagged around until two of its comrades, who had gone swooping down to help when it fell, joined it and led it back up. The other six, meanwhile, continued to circle the airship.

  When they were all nine together again there was a lot of squawking. Then the squadron broke up into three sets of three, flying formation around the gas bag, like Indians around a wagon camp. This time the attack came without any signal. All at once, all together, three birds swooped in from different directions.

  A moment later all three were tumbling out of the sky.

  James was watching the one straight in front of him, but he could hear the others hit the invisible barrier, a sort of soft whump, and the rush of flight ending. He looked down to follow their fall. They didn’t all three come alive at quite the same time —hitting the barrier seemed to stun some worse than others— but none of them reached the ground, and before long the airship was drifting on with its escort of nine gulls circling well clear of the barrier, puzzled and careful, but not giving up. By no means.

  They tried everything. Attacks from below and above. Attacks in mass formation. Attacks in quick succession. Gentle probings and high-speed dives. They were brave, all right, because the same thing happened every time—about thirty yards from the airship they met the force field and fell. Even accidentally touching it with a wing tip seemed to do the trick.

  James remembered how, when the Burra had first tried to make contact with the computer and it had gone haywire, he’d run in to rescue the Burra and the computer had knocked him clear across the cavern. If it could do that when it was mad, with pink paint dribbling over its insides, it could easily deal with nine gulls when it was working properly. He began to feel a bit sorry for the gulls.

  At first, after he’d got over his fright, James thought it was funny to see those fierce and haughty creatures, white wind-riders, lords of the realm of air, suddenly change to clowns when the currents of the force field stood their feathers on end. But as the morning went on he began to think he’d seen the joke often enough.

  By now the airship had reached the edge of Rat City, a shambling vague line between sheds and huts on one side and an untidy, hummocky, empty plain beyond. In one or two places out in this desert, there were groups of proper houses, with swimming pools and tennis courts. In a lonely valley there was a huge prison camp near the entrance to a mine. He didn’t see a tree or a bush anywhere. Some of the rats below seemed to notice what was going on in the sky. Particularly at the prison camp they got highly excited, and a whole regiment of guards rushed out of barracks and took up defensive positions.

  At last the gulls seemed to give up, and simply circled gravely around.

  “If only we could send a message,” said James.

  “What sort of a message?” said the Burra. “We do not speak gull. We doubt if we can even think gull.”

  “I don’t know. A sign or something. If I were a gull … You haven’t got a white feather anywhere?”

  “We could make one,” said the Burra.

  “A good big one, so we could wave it at them. Only it would be better if we could send it. Sort of more friendly.”

  “All right,” said the Burra.

  At James’s feet a big white plastic bag—one of the spares the Burra had brought to mend itself with—started to rustle and crinkle. A mid-rib ridged up and a shape grew around it until the bag became a white feather from a gigantic plastic bird. A cord unraveled itself from the net, dangled down, and knotted itself around the quill. At the other end of the cord a blister bulged out of the gas bag, squeezed through the net, and became a separate balloon, which drifted gently away from the airship, carrying the feather below it. The gulls came closer to watch, but were still careful to keep outside the force field. The balloon moved out in a series of jerks, as if it were being patted along by an invisible hand. The gulls drifted by, each with its head cocked to one side as it eyed the Burra’s gift. You can’t tell what gulls are thinking, James decided. They’re too different.

  He knew when the balloon reached the barrier because the invisible hand gave it one last extra-strong pat and then it was drifting free, moved only by the wind. A gull came cautiously in and took the cord in its beak. There was a short gull conference, and then seven of them were soaring away toward a distant line of blue hills at the far edge of the plain. The one with the balloon looked like a child going home from a party. Two stayed to circle the airship as a guard, or escort.

  “Gone to report,” said the Burra.

  Chapter 11: Secret Weapon

  Half an hour later James was kneeling with his elbows on the edge of the basket, watching the two gulls circle past. It was not very interesting. There isn’t much to do on an airship. Though the Burra had relaxed a bit once it had decided the gulls weren’t going to try any more attacks, it was still too busy being an airship to have anything left to amuse James with. So he counted the times the gulls went by.

  He made a sort of game of it. There was one bit of the circle where they flew directly in front of the sun. It was too bright for him to watch them pass, so he shut his eyes and swung his head and tried to be looking exactly at the gull when it came out beyond the brightness and he could open his eyes again.

  A hundred and one. A hundred and two. A hundred and three. When he reached two hundred he’d think of another game. A hundred and …

  And the gull wasn’t there. Yes, it was. It was plummeting down, not flying. Loose feathers drifted above it. There was blood on one wing. The engine had started. No, it hadn’t. Yes, it had now, but before that there’d been something like another engine, a sort of steady clatter. The other gull was hurtling around from the side. At the edge of the patch of glare where James couldn’t look, a dark shape, black against the brightness, grew out of nothing. Its shadow swept across the gas bag and then it was out of the glare and he could see it, a two-seater biplane, swinging to meet the gull’s attack. The gull was far faster, far more at home in the air, but the biplane had guns. James could hear their tokka-tokka above the airship’s engine and the biplane’s own engine roaring at full throttle. It must have come gliding out of the sun, silent as a bird, and caught the gulls by surprise. It had got one. Now it was battling with the second.

  The fight didn’t last long. A puff of feathers shot from the gull’s wing. The bird jerked in midair, gave a violent clumsy flap, and rose out of the line of fire of the biplane’s fixed front guns, though the rear gunner was still blasting away. The gull struggled clear, flying limpingly with one wing. Against the clear blue sky James could see a whole section of flight feathers had been shot clean away.

  The biplane didn’t try to follow it. Instead, while the rear gunner kept the gull at a distance, it turned slowly around and started in toward the airship. James could see it clearly now, just like a World War One fighter, with a radial engine and wings strutted and stayed. The propeller was a circular blur, behind which rose three bumps. The middle one was the head of the
rat pilot in helmet and goggles, and the two smaller ones were the synchronized machine guns on the engine cowl.

  Bright orange blobs winked at the muzzles of the guns. And the force field didn’t work against bullets.

  James heard the whum whum whum as they slogged into the gas bag. For a long, cool moment before things started to happen he had time to think about it. Perhaps the bullets were too small, or they came too fast, or they weren’t properly alive, or something. Anyway, the Burra hadn’t known there’d be a rat aeroplane, and the Burra knew a lot about the rats because the TV told it, even when it wasn’t switched on. The biplane must be a state secret. General Weil’s secret weapon. That was why he’d got in such a rage against the gulls in the speech James had watched. He was getting his rats ready to declare war on them. Typical …

  And then James was gulping with fright. He could hear the gas whistling out of fifty holes. He clutched his blanket around him and felt, somehow, that it was frightened too. It’ll be all right, he tried to think. When the biplane reaches the force field …

  But it didn’t. Perhaps the pilot had heard what had happened to the gulls. Rats down below must have seen them falling out of the air. Perhaps he didn’t want to get too close in case the bag exploded. At any rate, when he was still well clear, he roared his engine and zoomed overhead, out of sight behind the bag, and then circling around, turning, slowly, slowly, pointing straight at the airship, coming in again.

  The hissing had stopped, so the gas bag must have mended itself. But the engine had stopped too. James noticed that his blanket seemed to have gone dead. Apart from the drone of the approaching engine, everything was very still, so still that James noticed the dish of the gadget beside him swivelling around to point at the biplane. The other one was doing the same. They were the only things moving.

  Perhaps the Burra would do something this time. Perhaps the computer had thought of a way. It better had.