Mungus: Book 1 Read Online Free

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