Read The Green Book for Free Online

wheat looked all right; in fact, it looked lovely, covering the plain around Shine with a marvelous bright tender green. Little blades like swords stood up through the black ground, and put a green pale haze over the ground, and then grew thicker and stronger, and stood like velvet shining in the sun. A silky look was on the green acres. It certainly didn’t look like anything that was native to the new planet—it looked like home, oh, it made people ill with homesickness. It made them sad, and tired and unhappy. Not the young children—it got the grownups. And the worry deepened when Bill, who was the farming expert along with Arthur, found that he could break a blade of wheat clean across, snapping it like glass between his fingers. And so fear grew with the wheat, a terrible fear that there would be no way to grow food on the new planet. And we could never go anywhere else; there was only a burnt-out spacecraft to remind us of far journeys, and of course, though nobody ever mentioned it, Earth wasn’t there any more. If the wheat failed us, there was only a box of pills that would be kinder than hunger.
    Probably it was because the wheat was turning to glass that Bill was so bad-tempered and horrible. He was one of the farmers, and he felt it was up to him. And day by day the wheat looked less right. It should have been milky green, solid, like leaves on Earth, and it was growing brighter and transparent, till the light struck through the stands of blades in the fields, and they shone like emeralds, and sparkled transparent and clear. There was never any wind on Shine, never a ripple across the wheat or a movement of water in the lake, and that at least was lucky, for a wind would have broken every blade of wheat clean across, it was so delicate and brittle as it grew tall.
    Bill was the one who had Homer. Father wanted Homer. He said it was the best book on the planet, since so many people had chosen badly, and the Grimm was all torn and incomplete. And Bill wouldn’t let him borrow it. Father let Bill come to our hut and read the technology book, but Bill wouldn’t even let Father read his Homer without paying. And he wouldn’t take any pay except food. And Father wouldn’t consider paying in food. We all said we’d do without supper and not grumble if we got a good story, but Father said we were on iron rations now, and it would damage our health to have less.
    It was Joe who helped. He understood things better, being older. He heard Pattie and Jason and the other little children playing counting and skipping games down on the lake shore. Pattie was singing, and Mary was skipping rope, and Jason and some other kids were turning it, when Joe came by.
    There aren’t any birds ,
    And there aren’t any bees ,
    To share the sugar on the candy trees .
    One, two ,
    Two, three ,
    A suck for you, and a suck for me
    Pattie chanted.
    â€œWhat’s that, then, sis?” said Joe. “I don’t remember that from Earth.”
    â€œWell, of course not, silly,” said Pattie. “How could you? There aren’t any candy trees on Earth, are there?”
    â€œWhat do you mean?” he asked. “What are candy trees?”
    So the children stopped skipping and took him and showed him the candy trees. They were growing in the wood that the logs for building Shine had come from. They didn’t look very different from the other trees, but they had little crimson droplets oozing here and there from the bark. If you put out a finger to touch the droplet, your finger stuck, and when you pulled it off and licked, it tasted sweet. Not just sweet, either, but delicious. Jason showed Joe how to roll up the trickles of ooze into a lovely sticky red lump like toffee to pop in your mouth.
    Joe was very pleased. He ate quite a lot, and he told us not to tell anyone else for that day, and he took some wrapped in broken leaves to show Father.
    That evening Father took all the sugar