by Ruskin Bond
Boo, like the other children, had a good life: he ate well, he played and studied, and at night he played chess by candlelight with his father and brother, though his brother cheated. Sometimes Boo visited the school library and read the old books, touching the yellowed plastic pages carefully, tracing words written on another planet.
Of the many children in his school, Boo liked Jan the best. She laughed at his jokes and didn’t make fun of him as some of the others did. He liked the way she braided her dark hair into two long tresses and the way her mouth dimpled when she smiled.
He decided to show her his secret swimming place, but she hesitated at the vent shaft opening. “I don’t think I can do it.”
Boo crouched in the shaft and held out his hand. “It’s easy — only thirty meters of this. Or is the mayor’s daughter too afraid?”
Jan scowled and jumped inside. Boo led the way through the echoing metal tunnel, following his familiar path. They heard the steady, soft draft of air through the system, inhale, exhale, the respiration of automatic systems centuries old, the breathing of a great metal being.
The tunnel’s surfaces glowed blue with the residual radiation of charged particles. When Boo opened a hatch, the tang of chlorine filled the shaft. Boo rested his feet on the steel ladder’s top rung. “What do you think?”
Speechless, Jan looked past him into more water than she had ever imagined. The ship’s main fresh water tank, forty meters by thirty, held millions of liters of water. Boo had never touched the bottom, but he knew it must be deep. Most of the ultraviolet treatment lamps suspended above the water still worked, giving the chamber an eerie blue glow.
“Ready?” Boo slipped off his outer clothes and dropped smoothly into the cold liquid.
“Where are you?” Jan scanned the water. “Boo?”
Boo laughed as he resurfaced in the middle of the tank. “Come on in.”
“O.K., but look the other way,” said Jan. When Boo turned away, Jan slid her overalls off before slipping into the water. “Oh, it’s cold!”
“You’ll get used to it,” Boo told her, and she did.
They visited the reservoir three or four times a month after that, and the metal walls echoed with their laughter. They left the humid, sticky heat of the busy decks and disappeared into their own cool, clean world.
Then, one day as they chased each other through the water, they heard a bell ring out three times.
“What was that?” asked Jan, treading water.
“I’ve never —” Boo was interrupted by a message in a language that sounded like a distorted, garbled version of his own.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Boo, sensing danger.
Far below the two swimmers, rusting sluice gates began to grind open.
“Did you feel that?” asked Jan as the water trembled.
Boo, his stomach knotted with fear, pushed Jan toward the ladder as the warning message repeated. The water pulled at his legs and tried to drag him under.
“Quick, get out!” he told Jan.
She hauled herself up the slick metal ladder and into the vent shaft, then reached down for Boo. “Come on!”
As the unseen sluice gates opened farther, the water formed a vicious whirlpool in the tank’s center, a maelstrom that clawed at Boo’s body as he reached for the ladder.
With a wail of sirens, automatic systems sucked water from the main chamber and through the open sluices. Boo fought the current and reached out for Jan’s hand, feeling every muscle and sinew straining. Churning water seethed around the ladder, clawing at Boo and dragging him down.
“You can do it!” Jan stretched down.
Boo’s fingers brushed Jan’s for a moment before the riptide pulled him under, down and down, into the open maw of the sluice. The swirling current slammed his body into the curving walls of the pipeline, his lungs burned with the last gasps of oxygen, and Boo knew he was going to die. His limbs flailed in the silent, black, churning vortex.
Then, suddenly, Boo broke through the surface of another chamber. He clung to the nearby ladder, gasping for breath. As he watched, the bubbling surface of the water subsided, and the sluice gates below him slammed shut. Boo was alone, trapped in the forward water tank.
He looked around at a smaller version of his swimming hole, at the same metal walls and overhead lights. But all these lights were working, forcing Boo to shield his eyes from the glare. Slowly, one rung at a time, he climbed the steel ladder and hammered at the grating with his fist until it gave way with a crash. Boo crawled into the duct and lay back, exhausted.
He didn’t know how long he had been unconscious, but he woke suddenly, cold and confused. Then he remembered the sluice gates, and Jan. He looked down into the tank; the water’s surface was calm. He could see no opening or exit other than the vent.
Boo fought the sensations of fear and panic and began to crawl along the vent shaft until he came to an intersection: he recognized none of these tunnels. He sniffed at the current of warm air and followed a new shaft, which ended in a steel grille. Boo looked through the mesh, down into a corridor just like those he had grown up in, except this corridor was clean and well-lit, sterile even. No grass, no vegetation.
Boo set his feet against the grille and kicked it open. He dropped to the corridor floor, crouched and wary, listening. He walked slowly on a strange floor of small flexible hooks that tickled his bare feet. From the curving corridor ahead, he heard voices speaking the same language as the warning message.
As he pressed himself flat to the corridor wall, a hidden door behind him slid open. Boo fell inside, landing on his back. The cabin seemed identical to Boo’s home, with its built-in kitchen, folding plastic tables, recessed cupboards, and foam chairs. But where Boo’s home was shabby and worn, the fittings here appeared sleek and almost new. A wide viewscreen dominated one wall.
When Boo saw the small refrigerator, he realized how hungry he was. He sorted through plastic boxes until he found glistening chunks of strange food. He gulped the tangy, sour cubes and drank from the faucet.
One of the bedrooms looked just like his, with twin bunks and closets; inside one he found children’s clothes, but they were too small. In the other bedroom, he found a small adult-size jumpsuit made from soft, warm, white fabric. The front edges of the suit fastened without buttons.
Boo was trying on a pair of boots when he heard the door open and a child’s voice call out.
The small boy saw the stranger in the bedroom and began to scream. Boo pushed past the child and into the corridor, running blindly, the scream pursuing him. He twisted past surprised crew members dressed in identical jumpsuits.
Above his head, a siren sounded. Boo looked for an escape route and found a ventilation grille at shoulder height. He ripped the mesh cover off, jumped up, and crawled along the duct until someone gripped his legs and pulled him back.
Boo tried to cling to the smooth surface of the duct but was dragged from safety. His body hit the floor, and Boo looked up into a stranger’s eyes and the end of a small weapon.
Boo Stared at the man holding the weapon, trying to understand the strange language that sounded close to Boo’s own, yet so different. A crowd of thin, pale men and women appeared as the question was impatiently repeated. Then, as the man tightened his grip on the gun, a pale, light-haired woman stepped forward and pushed the weapon away from Boo.
“Where are you from?” She spoke slowly, and her speech, though heavily accented, was understandable.
Boo pointed to the rear of the ship.
The woman nodded. “What is your name?”
“Boo.”
“That is a strange name.”
“Maybe so, but it’s mine,” said Boo.
The woman smiled and helped him up. “I am Susan.”
“How come you understand me?”
“We are not so different,” said Susan. “We all spoke the same language once; some of us still remember the old tongue and sing the old songs. Now, tell me what h
appened.”
As Boo explained, Susan guided him through corridors of sleek metal and plastic, past spider-legged cleaning and repair robots. Everything looked new and shiny, unlike Boo’s home decks. Boo stared at the crowd following him, at their pale skin and scrawny bodies.
The crowd paused outside a massive metal door that opened to reveal an air lock. Only Susan and the man with the weapon stepped inside with Boo.
When the inner doors parted, Boo gazed in awe at the ship’s control center: in a cavernous, curving room larger than the freshwater tank, teams of people sat before banks of flashing screens and control stations. The operators, slender and pale with bulbous joints and white hair, turned from their stations and stared at Boo as if seeing some wild, mythical animal.
On a raised dais at the room’s center, in a padded acceleration couch, lay the captain. Boo had never seen anyone so old: the man seemed as helpless and frail as a blind, newborn grub. Countless years had stretched his skin and molded his face into a translucent skull with fleshless lips. Liquids pulsed feebly through the plastic tubes that connected the captain to the couch.
Directly above him floated the hologram of a blue-and-green sphere. Another hologram, an image of the slender ship itself, approached the projected planet from a point over Boo’s head.
Susan bowed to the captain and spoke. Boo couldn’t hear the whispered reply, but he saw the captain wave him over.
“You are from the aft?” The old man spoke formally, in Boo’s language.
Boo nodded.
“You live well? You eat?”
Again Boo nodded, more scared by this living corpse than by anything in his life.
“How many are alive?”
Boo said, “Three hundred or so.”
“So many? I never imagined …” The old man closed his eyes. “I remain here out of duty, my boy. This ship keeps me alive, repairs me and sustains me, because I am the captain. But duty demands difficult choices, sometimes. I am so sorry.”
As the captain fell silent, Susan guided Boo to the air lock.
“I can never go back?” Boo demanded. “Never?”
Susan shook her head. “I am sorry.”
Boo thought of his family, and of Jan.
“It could have been much worse,” said Susan.
“How?”
“The Protocol tells us to kill all trespassers.”
Boo realized then how much Susan had done for him: she had risked her position on the ship and saved his life.
They gave him a small room, little more than a bunk and a shower, next to Susan’s cabin. At first Mark and Elaine, her two children, were scared of Boo, but eventually they grew curious.
“What is the aft like?” Mark asked Boo at dinner.
“Yes, tell us,” said Elaine. Like their mother, both children had blond hair and intense blue eyes.
Boo explained slowly, still getting used to the dialect of the forward crew. “It’s very different from here: there are no robots, and most of the machines don’t work. But plants and crops grow everywhere, and we have good food.”
Boo stared at his plate of greasy, yellow, manufactured protein and wished he had a bowl of his mother’s tofu and vegetables.
“What happened to your dad?” Boo asked, thinking of his own family.
The children looked away as Susan explained, “Occasionally people here get sick, and some can’t fight it off. The virus or germ is too strong.”
Each day, Mark and Elaine showed Boo around the ship and taught him how to use the many machines. They took Boo to their school, where he sat in a gleaming, bright classroom and tried to follow the viewscreen lessons. The other children stared at the new arrival in class and flocked around him at recess, curious about the ship’s aft.
“There are monsters back there,” one boy assured Boo.
Another added, “And ghosts!”
Boo smiled. “There are no monsters or ghosts. Just people like us and like your parents.”
Boo taught the children how to play his favorite sports, pelota and handball, even though they grew tired quickly. The children soon accepted Boo, but most adults still avoided him.
Every week, Susan took Boo and her children to concerts in the main auditorium, where groups of crew members played ancient, strange instruments of polished wood. The soft melodies echoed down the ship’s corridors and drifted through Boo’s body.
“What was that?” he asked after the first concert.
“Classical music,” said Susan, smiling. “It is the sound of our past.”
Some nights, the crew would sing the ancient songs, tales of seas and forests, cities and ships. Susan took Boo wherever she went, partly to protect him from the suspicious glares of the crew members, but also because the two got along well. He was grateful that she was trying to help him, but at the end of each day he lay on his bunk, thinking of his parents, listening to the ventilation pumps, and planning his escape.
Susan taught Boo how to use the ship’s systems. Sitting at the cabin viewscreen with the remote keypad on his knees, Boo explored a vessel he had grown up in but never understood.
He journeyed from the engine’s raging nuclear inferno, gripped tight in magnetic coils, to the forward control room. He saw his home from above, as if he were crouched on the metal skin of the hull looking inward. He learned the ship’s name: Boreas, the god of the north wind in a language old before the ship had been built.
And he discovered that the ship was traveling through space to a specific destination: 47 Ursae Majoris, the planet he had seen in the captain’s viewscreen. And they were almost there.
Boo asked, “What happens when we arrive?”
“We follow the Protocol.” Susan looked away. “Survey probes will verify the planet’s suitability. Then the forward crew will descend to the surface and begin construction. Once the settlement is self-sufficient, the ship … the ship will be sent off on auto-destruct sequence.”
“What about my family, my friends?” Boo jumped to his feet. “Who decided this?”
“The captain, centuries ago. When the trouble started, and crewmen fought crewmen, the aft was sealed and the Protocol created.”
Boo paced the small cabin. “I’ve got to warn them.”
“Boo, you’ve got to think of yourself. And of me: I put myself at risk by telling you this. If the captain didn’t need engineers like me, we’d both be in trouble.” She paused. “You will only make things worse if you leave here. Your family and friends still won’t survive, and you will be risking the lives of my family and me, as well.”
Boo stared at her. He wanted to argue with Susan but knew it was no use. Instead he said, “I understand.”
But when Susan left the cabin, Boo took her remote command pod and made for the vent shafts.
Choosing a corridor adjacent to the sealed bulkhead, Boo opened a duct and crawled along until he saw the shimmering curtain of microwave radiation that separated the ship’s fore and aft. Boo typed a combination into the pod.
The pod beeped, but the radiation remained.
Boo tried other combinations with no result. Then, finally, something worked, and the control pod’s small screen displayed the phrase Shut down, and the shield disappeared.
He crawled as fast as he could through the duct. As his boots cleared the burn marks seared in the metal, the radiation curtain snapped back into place behind him with the crackle of imploding air molecules.
Boo took a deep breath and crawled on through the network of shafts. It seemed like hours before he heard voices and dropped down into the middle of a meeting.
Jan pushed through the stunned crowd and threw her arms around Boo’s neck. “I thought I’d never see you again!”
Boo saw his parents rushing toward him, tears streaming down his mother’s face. He turned and said, “Jan, I need to speak with your father.”
“Who else knows about this?” The mayor, Jan’s father, sat behind his desk, listening to Boo’s story.
�
��Only the people in this room,” Boo said, nodding to his parents standing behind him. “You must believe me — we’re running out of time.”
“I don’t know.” The mayor selected a fraying book from the shelf. “The old chronicles mention a long journey, a mission, but you say we’re traveling to a new planet … that’s difficult to believe. Who decided this destination?”
“Our ancestors,” said Boo patiently. “The ship was designed to support generations of families; we’re the descendants of the original crew.”
“I think you have a vivid imagination, son.”
“What if the boy is right?” asked Boo’s father.
Before the mayor could reply, the electric lights faded, plunging the office into darkness. Only the dim glow of Cerenkov radiation gilded the metal surfaces.
Boo said, “They must have realized I escaped and decided to finish us off. Listen: there’s no air moving.”
The sound of distant, essential machinery and pumps was a part of the crew’s life, taken for granted. The sudden silence was overwhelming.
“We have to get through the bulkhead and talk to them.”
“But how?” The mayor’s voice sounded small and faint.
Boo found the command pod. “Using this.”
With his parents and Jan close behind, Boo pushed through a growing, confused crowd. Lights appeared, small fireflies of candles and oil lamps that gravitated toward Boo. Soon a noisy mob strode behind him as he approached the bulkhead doors.
By candlelight, Boo found the door controls. After his father ripped the faceplate open, Boo held Susan’s command pod next to the controls and tried a combination: nothing. Boo tried many combinations, but the controls were dead. He wondered if the doors had lost all power but pushed that thought aside.
The mob began to whisper, then mumble, then jeer and shout. Jan held the smoky candle close to Boo’s sweating face as he worked. Then, just as he was about to give up, the control panel glowed blue.
Boo tried the pod’s buttons and heard the reluctant whine of rusting gears. The massive doors, three meters high by four wide, began to grind open inch by inch. Light spilled from the widening gap, blinding the crowd as they streamed into the forward decks.