A Box of Nothing

by Peter Dickinson

  The orange blobs began again. The bullets whumped in. The pilot wasn’t shooting at the gas bag this time, but at the basket. Nothing you could do, except sit there waiting to be hit. No use cowering behind the side of the basket. That wouldn’t stop a bullet. Better to watch.

  Something jarred his right hand, making the whole arm tingle. He thought a bullet had hit him, only there was no blood. Then he saw it was the rope he’d been clutching that had been hit. He’d been gripping it so tight that the blow had travelled right up his arm, as though he were part of the airship too.

  The rope wasn’t quite cut through. Snaky worms of cord were unwinding themselves around the few tense threads that still joined the two halves and held the basket to the gas bag. That was all right. The Burra would make them wind up in a second. Only they didn’t.

  Burning! They were on fire! A foul hot smell like a plastic cup put down on a hot cooker. It was the blue milk crate under the computer beginning to melt. Some of the wires inside it were red-hot.

  There was a violent, tearing bang. Shafts of blue light, too bright to look at, beamed from the antennas at the ends of the basket. The antennas melted with their heat as they shot through. The bolts of energy came and went so fast that James hadn’t time to blink before they were gone. They met and crossed right where the biplane was storming in. The biplane exploded. Wings, tail, engine, fuselage, pilot, gunner went tumbling through the sky in all directions. Done!

  The Burra must have put everything into those twin bolts of energy. Not just what it had to spare—everything it had. The force had been terrific. It was all over in a second, but as the beams blasted out they made the flimsy basket kick the other way, as if it had been buffeted by a solid lump of air. It swung up and sideways, tried to flip right over, slapped into the gas bag, which stopped it, slumped back onto its ropes. The sudden strain was too much for those last few threads of the one James had been holding. They snapped. The basket tilted again, downward this time. Somehow the Burra managed to use its last few scraps of energy to keep itself together and prevent any of its parts from falling out, but James wasn’t one of them.

  Desperately he scrabbled for a hold as the basket tipped farther, spilling him right out. The rope was wrenched from his grasp, and he was falling head over heels through the air.

  Chapter 12: Captured

  Falling, falling. Air rushing faster and faster. Head over heels. Sky and land whirling upside down. Great white cloud coming. Whump!

  Whump into soft white cloud, only it wasn’t a cloud, more like some kind of bulgy bed, or a soft white trampoline that has somehow got stuck at the bottom of your jump and won’t push you back. Still falling, but not so fast. Sky steady overhead.

  Very carefully, because the cloud thing was wobbly and he was scared of toppling off it, James sat up and looked around. Not far off and a bit above him he saw a rat dangling under an enormous parachute. Even then, it took him time to understand that he had fallen on top of the other parachute—there’d been two rats in the biplane, pilot and gunner. This one was falling faster because of James’s extra weight. The white cloth bulged up around him so that he couldn’t see the ground.

  They’d fallen a long way already. High overhead a white gull with a tattered wing was trying to tow the airship away. It had the broken rope in its beak. The gas bag looked floppy. The basket still dangled sideways and James could just see the Burra lolling limp by the engine. It must still be in some sort of a daze after the fight. Perhaps it would wake up and mend itself and come and rescue him.

  He wasn’t ready for the landing. He heard a bump below. The bulge of the parachute went out of shape, began to flop, stopped holding him, sent him slithering down, clutching at nothing … thump.

  A wild squeak. Another thump. He’d landed.

  Wasn’t hurt, either, only thumped. Fallen on something. The parachute was still flopping softly down as James stood up. A rat with the parachute harness attached was lying on the ground with its eyes open. Dead?

  No—its whiskers were quivering. He must have fallen on top of it and stunned it—yes, thump, squeak, thump, like that. The other parachute was still in the sky. First thing was to get away from the rats and hide somewhere until the Burra came and rescued him. No trees, no bushes, just the bare slopes of a small valley. Get up over the ridge for a start.

  He scrambled up the slope, noticing as he did so that it was a bit different from the slope he’d climbed by the iron sea. Not so steep, but that wasn’t it. No, it was made of different things. Not cookers and fridges but bits of old wagons, and ploughs, and things like that, all gone fossil. He understood without thinking about it that this was an older kind of place.

  He ducked over the ridge, panting, and began to leap from jut to jut down the far slope, watching all the time for his next foothold, so that it was not until he reached the bottom of the valley and took a quick look around for a hiding place that he saw the gull.

  It lay on its side near a small black stream. The white feathers were striped with blood. He thought it was dead, but then it moved a great yellow foot.

  He ran over and gazed down. It was big enough to help him fight the second rat if it wasn’t too wounded, but when he got near he saw it was really dying. He stood and gazed down at it and the yellow unreadable eye stared back. If only he could do something.

  Mop up the blood? No use. Get it a drink of the foul black water? Nothing to carry it in. Better leave it and find somewhere Perhaps the rat would forget about him once it had found the gull.

  James had actually turned away when he remembered his box of nothing. It probably wouldn’t do any good, but it had helped when the computer had gone mad. And it couldn’t do any harm, not if the gull was dying.

  He pulled it out of his inside pocket and placed it against the largest patch of blood. His idea, if you could call it that, was that it might somehow unbullet the bullet inside the wound.

  The gull stirred at the touch. Then, quick as a blink, it shrank. One moment there’d been a huge, wounded bird lying on its side, and the next there was an ordinary seaside gull struggling to its feet. It strutted a couple of steps and rattled its feathers into place, sending a spatter of little bright things onto the ground. Then it gave James a gull’s typical haughty one-eyed stare, stretched its wings, and flew off.

  James put the box back into his pocket as he watched it go, then picked up one of the bright things that had fallen out of its feathers. It was a scrap of silver paper … a sweet wrapping or something … roughly twisted into the shape of a bullet. He was still looking at it and wondering, when something squeaked sharply behind him.

  He turned. A rat airman was standing there, only a few feet away. It was pointing a huge revolver straight at James’s head.

  A little later James was walking along a narrow track, with the rat he had stunned in front of him and the other rat, the one with the revolver, behind. Far away to his right he could see the airship, like a coloured speck in the sky, being towed by several gulls. It was too small for him to see whether the Burra had mended itself and got the basket straight, but anyway none of the gulls had come to look for him, or for their fallen comrade.

  The rats marched on all fours. The one behind carried the revolver, cocked, in its teeth. Before they’d started it had shown James how quickly it could get into the firing position. Still, James kept thinking that he ought to be able to escape by using his box, somehow getting close enough to touch a rat and turn it back into an ordinary animal. If only there weren’t two of them. But the one in front had a revolver in its belt, and it would have time to draw and fire while James was dealing with the one behind. And, anyway, he couldn’t be sure whether the box would work on rats. It had on the gull, but then the gull had been dying. Suppose a rat shot at him while he was carrying the box. Would the bullet turn into a bit of silver paper before it had hit him? Or after? If only he could be sure how the box worked.


  He was still trying to get up the nerve to do something when they met the patrol. Or perhaps it was a search party, because four of them were carrying stretchers. The rest were rat soldiers. They all became very excited when they met. The rat officer rubbed whiskers with the pilot and gunner and then the whole group gathered in a chattering ring around James. The officer pranced up and squeaked at him. James shook his head. The officer pulled out a pistol and began to jump up and down, which seemed to be the rats’ habit when they were angry. James became frightened, but at last the officer must have grasped that he couldn’t understand rat language. It stopped jumping around and squeaked orders to the others. They all marched down the track.

  By the time they reached the railroad line James was extremely tired. The rats let him sit down while they got a meal ready. It was just water with a soapy taste and a grey dry mess, like oatmeal before it’s cooked. James found he could eat it by mixing some water with it, but it was too nasty for more than a few mouthfuls. The sun was almost overhead by now. Except for the two who were guarding James, the rats lay around panting in the desert heat.

  At last, from far across the plain, a faint hoot came floating. Everyone jumped up and stared along the dead straight line of the tracks. James could see nothing at first, then there was a blob of smoke, then a dot below the blob, and now a louder hoot and the wuff wuff wuff of the pounding engine. The officer pulled out a huge pistol and fired it into the air. A flare soared up and burst into pink light, which drifted slowly down. The engine hooted in answer. Its wheels screeched on the track and it came to a halt close by where they were waiting. It was a great black beast of a machine, far more impressive than the gibbering rats, but its driver was a rat too.

  After a lot of furious squeaking the soldiers cleared all the passengers out of three compartments and James was made to climb into one. The officer and the two air-rats came too. The engine started with a tremendous burst of wuffing, but almost at once the officer insisted on tying a blindfold around James’s eyes, so that he couldn’t see anything at all.

  He must have slept, despite the hard seat and the rat smell, because the next thing he knew he was being prodded to his feet and pushed through the carriage door, still with the blindfold tight around his head. Rats gripped both his wrists in their teeth and hustled him through a squeaking crowd. He was yanked up onto a sort of platform, which jerked beneath him, toppling him off his feet to the sound of squeaky rat jeers all around him. He realized that he was on the back of a truck, guarded by rat soldiers.

  The truck roared through clattering streets. Traffic honked. A siren whooped ahead. The street was very bumpy, but it didn’t last. The truck roared for a short while over a smoother surface with no traffic nearby. It halted twice while rats squeaked around. When it stopped for the third time James was lifted roughly down and the bandage taken from his eyes.

  After all that darkness he blinked blindly through the glare. It wasn’t daylight. The sky overhead was murky and almost dark. He must have slept all afternoon. Now he was standing in a brilliantly lit space with a great ring of lights all around. The only shadows were cast by rows of huts. As his pupils narrowed in the brightness he began to see, rising above the ring of lights, the watchtowers that guarded one of the camps where General Weil kept his prisoners. James was inside it.

  Chapter 13: General Weil

  The camp was a horrible place. The only times it stopped being horrible were when James was asleep, too unhappy to dream, but even then the guards were likely to come and wake him up and make him stand by his mattress for an hour, for no reason at all. There was only the disgusting dry oatmeal stuff to eat and only the foul soapy water to drink.

  None of the prisoners were rats. They were other creatures of the Dump—mice, voles, toads, and such—all grown large and clever in their own ways. Each sort lived in separate huts, the slow, sad toads in one block, the mice in another, and so on. James wasn’t allowed near any of them, but from what he could see the voles were the best. There was something unbeatable about them. Though they were tottery with starvation, they would never give in to the bullying guards. Even at the most terrifying moments there would be a shrill mutter somewhere in the ranks, followed by a burst of scornful vole laughter. The mice tried to please the rats, cringing and creeping. It didn’t do them any good. These were in the huts on either side of James. He didn’t see enough of the toads and the others to know how they behaved.

  He was in a tiny hut by himself. Next to it was a cage containing two of the great gulls. When James was allowed out for exercise he would look at their grey, bedraggled plumage and their yellow untamed eyes. For some reason they gave him a kind of hope.

  The worst thing wasn’t the food or the loneliness or the cruel guards or the big flies flocking around like pigeons—it was the ants. Red ants, a foot high. The rats used them as guard dogs. They could bite with their huge jaws and they could spit burning acid. A guard, on purpose, put a drop of the acid on James’s skin to warn him how much it hurt. It hurt, all right. The ants lived in a great nest under the camp, which meant that there was no hope of tunnelling out.

  No hope of escape, not by any ordinary means. No hope at all. Everything had gone wrong, just when it seemed to be going so right. James kept remembering the brilliant morning when the airship had floated over Rat City and he had looked down on this very camp, off on the expedition with the Burra to find what was wrong with the Dump. Sometimes he wondered if he hadn’t in fact found what was wrong, here, this foul camp. That was wrong, wasn’t it? In moods like this, when he was sure the guards weren’t watching, he would take his box of nothing out and turn it over and over, looking for clues to how it opened. If he could only find the secret, then perhaps the nothing would come flooding out and swallow the whole terrible camp, and Rat City, and the Dump, and James would be back outside the fence with Mum shouting at him. But somehow he knew that wasn’t the answer. The camp was wrong, yes, but it was only an effect, not a cause. The cause was somewhere else, and he had to get there. Then, perhaps, the box would be ready to open.

  He made scratches in a secret place on the wall behind his mattress to help him count the days. On the twelfth morning, before it was light, there was a lot of squeaking and scurrying around, and the oatmeal stuff was shoved through the door earlier than usual, and then James’s guards made him sweep his hut clean and fold his blanket into a neat square and then go and stand in the space between the gulls’ cage and his hut.

  He waited for hours in the icy dawn while all the other prisoners were brought out and made to stand in lines. It was a sort of parade. At last, when the sun was up and James was just beginning to stop shivering, he heard a shrill fanfare of rat trumpets. The rat anthem blared from the camp loudspeakers and the guards strutted up and down with truncheons, beating any prisoners they thought weren’t standing properly at attention. Several hundred smart rat soldiers marched into the space opposite the prisoners, stood at attention, and presented arms. A big open car rolled into sight, driven by a chauffeur with an armed guard beside him. In the back seat lolled a small grey rat wearing an enormous cap covered with gold braid. It was General Weil.

  The general got out of the car and inspected his soldiers. Senior officers walked respectfully behind him. He crossed the space and began to inspect the prisoners, not really bothering to look at them but chatting over his shoulder to the officers, who answered with smarmy rat snickers. Sometimes the general rubbed his paws together or smoothed his white whiskers. James guessed he was really enjoying himself, strolling around like this in front of his prisoners. A bit like Granddad taking people around his garden.

  When the general reached the gull cage he stopped. This was what he had come for. He looked fiercely at the gulls and began to squeak. Soon he was jumping up and down in excitement, the way all the rats seemed to, only more so. He shrilled and spat until there was froth on his whiskers. He was terrifying, a mad little old r
at who could do what he liked with everyone. With James.

  At last he moved on. He was probably still in a bit of a daze after using all that energy yelling at the gulls, because he went straight past James without noticing him, but one of his officers caught up with him and said something very respectfully and he stopped, stared, and came back. His whiskers quivered. He squeaked a question and an officer answered. He came closer, wrinkling his nose. James could smell his ratty breath. His mean little eyes under the huge cap were as sharp as pins. He put out a paw and prodded James’s chest. He snickered. Then his expression changed.

  He snapped an order. James’s guards seized his arms. An officer came forward and tried to open James’s anorak. He didn’t understand about the zipper, but he got it loose in the end and pulled the anorak open. General Weil darted in with a quick rat rush and put his paw into James’s inside pocket, which was just where he had prodded the anorak from the outside. He must have felt that there was something there, then. The box of nothing. He snatched it out.

  And it worked.

  One moment there was the dreadful ruler of Rat City standing in the middle of his prison camp with his soldiers behind him, and the next there was nothing but a huge gold-braided cap lying on the ground, jiggling as the rat trapped under it tried to get out.

  James knew exactly what to do without having to think about it. His guards had let go of his arms in their astonishment, so he pounced, grabbed both sides of the cap, squeezed them together till he could hold them in one hand, and then with his other hand pulled the wriggling creature out and held it up by the nape of its neck.

  The camp seemed to go mad. The rat soldiers stood and stared, and so did the guards, but the ants came swarming out of their nest and ran about biting and spitting among the ranks. The voles rushed at the soldiers and wrestled their guns away. The rats were three times their size and outnumbered them, too, but they just let it happen. They could easily have jumped on James and rescued their leader, but it was as though the whole of Rat City depended so much on him that if he wasn’t there to give the orders none of the others dared do anything.