Childhood's End (12 page)

"Rupert's starting to show some of his movies. I've seen them all before."

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"Have a cigarette," said George.

"Fhanks."

By the flame of the lighter-George was fond of such antiques-he could now recognize his fellow-guest, a strikingly handsome young negro whose name George had been told but had immediately forgotten, like those of the twenty other complete strangers at the party. However, there seemed something familiar about him, and suddenly George guessed the truth.

"I don't think we've really met," he said, "but aren't you Rupert's new brother-in-law?"

"That's right. I'm Jan Rodricks. Everyone says that Mala and I look rather alike."

George wondered whether to commiserate with Jan for his newly acquired relative. He decided to let the poor fellow find out for himself; after all, it was just possible that Rupert would settle down this time.

"I'm George Greggson. This is the first time you've been to one of Rupert's famous parties?"

"Yes. You certainly meet a lot of new people this way."

"And not only humans," added George. "This is the first chance I've had of meeting an Overlord socially."

The other hesitated for a moment before replying, and George wondered what sensitive spot he had struck. But the answer revealed nothing.

"I've never seen one before, either-except of course on

TV."

There the conversation languished, and after a moment George realized that Jan wanted to be alone. It was getting cold, anyway, so he took his leave and re-joined the party.

The jungle was quiet now; as Jan leaned against the curving wall of the air intake, the only sound he could hear was the faint murmur of the house as It breathed through its mcdianical lungs. He felt very much alone, which was the way he wanted to be. He also felt highly frustrated-and that was something he had no desire to be at all.

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8

No Utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time.

As their material conditions improve, men raise their sights and become discontented with powers and possessions that once would have seemed beyond their wildest dreams. And even when the external world has granted all it can, there still remain the searchings of the mind and the longings of the heart.

Jan Rodricks, though he seldom appreciated his luck, would

have been even more discontented in an earlier age. A century before, his colour would have been a tremendous, perhaps an overwhelming, handicap. Today, it meant nothing. The inevitable- reaction that had given early twenty-first-century negroes a slight sense of superiority had already passed away.

The convenient word "nigger" was no longer tabu in polite society, but was used without embarrassment by everyone. It had no more emotional content than such labels as republican or methodist, conservative or liberal.

Jan's father had been a charming but somewhat feckless Scot who had made a considerable name for himself as a professional magician. His death at the early age of forty-five had been aggravated by the excessive consumption of his country's most famous product. Though Jan had never seen his father drunk, he was not sure that he had ever seen him sober.

Mrs. Rodricks, still very mt~çh alive, lectured in advanced probability theory at Edinburgh University. It was typical of the extreme mobility of twenty-first-century Man that Mrs. Rodricks, who was coal black, had been born in Scotland, whereas her expatriate and blond husband had spent almost all his life in Haiti. Maia and Jan had never had a single home, but had oscillated between their parents' families like two small shuttlecocks. The treatment had been good fun, but had not helped to correct the instability they had both inherited from their father.

At twenty-seven, Jan still had several years of college life ahead of him before he needed to think seriously about his career. He had taken his bachelors' degrees without any difilculty, following a syllabus that would have seemed very strange a century before. Ilis main subjects bad been mathematics and physics, but as subsidiaries he had taken philosophy and

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musical appreciation. Even by the high standards of the time he was a first-rate amateur pianist.

In three years he would take his doctorate in engineering

physics, with astronomy as a second subject. This would

involve fairly hard work, but Jan rather welcomed that. He

was studying at what was perhaps the most beautifully situated place of higher education in the world-the University of Cape Town, nestling at the foot of Table Mountain.

He had no material worries, yet he was discontented and saw no cure for his condition. To make matters worse, Maia's own happiness-thotigh he did not grudge it in the least-had underlined the chief cause of his own trouble.

For Jan was still suffering from the romantic illusion-the cause of so much misery and so much poetry-that every man has only one real love in his life. At an unusually late age, be had lost his heart for the first time, to a lady more renowned for beauty than constancy. Rosita Tsien claimed, with perfect truth, to have the blood of Manchu emperors flowing in her veins. She still possessed many subjects, including most of the Faculty of Science at Cape. Jan had been taken prisoner by her delicate, flower-like beauty, and the affair had proceeded far enough to make its termination all the more galling. He could not imagine what had gone wrong....

He would get over it, of course. Other men had survived similar catastrophes without irreparable damage, had even reached the stage when they could say, "I'm sure I could never have been really serious about a woman like that!" But such detachment still lay far in the future, and at the moment Jan was very much at odds with life.

His other grievance was less easily remedied, for it concerned the impact of the Overlords upon his own ambitions. Jan was a romantic not only in heart but in mind. Like so many other young men since the conquest of the air had been assured, he had let his dreams and his imagination roam the unexplored seas of space.

A century before, Man had set foot upon the ladder that could lead him to the stars. At that very moment-could it have been coincidence?-the door to the planets had been slammed in his face. The Overlords had imposed few positive bans on any form of human activity (the conduct of war was perhaps the major exception), but research into space flight had virtually ceased. The challenge presented by the science

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of the Overlords was too great. For the moment, at least, Man had lost heart and had turned to other fields of activity. There was no point in developing rockets when the Overlords had Infinitely superior means of propulsion, based on principles of which they had never given any hint.

A few hundred men had visited the moon, for the purpose of establishing a lunar observatory. They had travelled as passengers in a small vessel loaned by the Overlords-and driven by rockets. It was obvious that little could be learned from a study of this primitive vehicle, even if its owners handed it over without reservation to inquisitive terrestrial scientists.

Man was, therefore, still a prisoner on his wn planet. It was a much fairer, but a much smaller, planet than it had been a century before. When the Overlords had abolished war and hunger and disease, they had also abolished adventure.

The rising moon was beginning to paint the eastern sky with.

a pale milky glow. Up there, Jan knew, was the main base of the Overlords, lying within the ramparts of Pluto. Though the supply ships must have been coming and going for more than seventy years, it was only in Jan's lifetime that all concealment had been dropped and they had made their departure in clear sight of Earth. In the two-hundred-inch telescope, the shadows of the great ships could be dearly seen when the morning or evening sun cast them for miles across the lunar plains. Since everything that the Overlords did was of immense interest to mankind, a careful watch was kept of their comings and goings, and the pattern of their behaviour (though not the reason for it) was beginning to emerge. One of those great shadows had vanished a few hours ago. That meant, Jan knew, that somewhere off the moon an Overlord ship was lying in space, carrying out whatever routine was necessary before it began its journey to its distant, unknown home.

He had never seen one of those returning ships launch itself towards the stars. If conditions were good the sight was visible over half the world, but Jan had always been unlucky. One could never tell exactly when the take-off would be-and the Overlords did not advertise the fact. He decided he would wait another ten minutes, then rejoin the party.

What was that? Only a meteor sliding down through Eridanus. Jan relaxed, discovered his cigarette had gone out, and lit another.

He was half-way through it when, half a million kilometres

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away, the Stardrive went on. Up from the heart of the spreading moon-glow a tiny spark began to climb towards the zenith.

At first its movement was so slow that it could hardly be perceived, but second by second it was gaining speed. As it

climbed it increased in brilliance, then suddenly faded from sight. A moment later it had reappeared, gaining speed and brightness. Waxing and waning with a peculiar rhythm, it

ascended ever more swiftly into the sky, drawing a fluctuating

line of light across the stars. Even if one did not know its real distance, the impression of speed was breathtaking: when one knew that the departing ship was somewhere beyond the moon, the mind reeled at the speeds and energies involved.

It was an unimportant by-product of those energies, Jan knew, that he was seeing now. The ship itself was invisible, already far ahead of that ascending light. As a high-flying jet may leave a vapour trail behind it, so the outward-bound vessel of the Overlords left its own peculiar wake. The generally accepted theory-and there seemed little doubt of its truth- was that the immense accelerations of the Stardrive caused a local distortion of space. What Jan was seeing, he knew, was nothing less than the light of distant stars, collected and focused into his eye wherever conditions were favourable along the track of the ship. It was a. visible proof of relativity-the bending of light in the presence of a colossal gravitational field.

Now the end of that vast, pencil-shaped lens seemed to be moving more slowly, but that was only due to perspective. In reality the ship was still gaining speed: its path was merely being foreshortened as it hurled itself outwards to the stars. There would be many telescopes following it, Jan knew, as Earth's scientists tried to uncover the secrets of the Drive. Dozens of papers had already been published on the subject; no doubt the Overlords had read them with the greatest interest.

The phantom light was beginning to wane. Now it was a fading streak, pointing to the heart of the constellation Carina, as Jan had known that it would. The home of the Overlords was somewhere out there, but it might circle any one of a thousand stars in that sector of space. There was no way of telling its distance from the Solar System.

It was all over. Though the ship had scarcely begun its Journey, there was nothing more that human eyes could see. But in Jan's mind the memory of that shining path still burned,

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a beacon that would never fade as long as he possessed anibition and desire.

The parry was over. Almost all the guests had climbed back into the sky and were now scattering to the four corners of the globe. There were, however, a few exceptions.

One was Norman Dodsworth, the poet, who had got unpleasantly drunk but had been sensible enough to pass out befbre any violent action proved necessary. He had been deposited, not very gently, on the lawn, where it was hoped that a hyena would give him a rude awakening. For all practical purposes he could, therefore, be regarded as absent.

The other remaining guests were George and Jean. This was not George's idea at all: he wanted to go home. He disapproved of the friendship between Rupert and Jean, though not for the usual reason. George prided himself on being a practical, level-headed character, and regarded the interest which drew Jean and Rupert together as being not only childish in this age of science, but more than a little unhealthy. That anyone should still place the slightest credence in the supernormal seemed extraordinary to him, and finding Rashaverak here had shaken his faith in the Overlords.

It was now obvious that Rupert had been plotting some surprise, probably with Jean's connivance. George resigned himself gloomily to whatever nonsense was coming.

"I tried all sorts of things before I settled on this," said Rupert proudly. "The big problem is to reduce friction so that you get complete freedom of movement. The old-fashioned polished table and tumbler set-up isn't bad, but ft's been used for centuries now and I was sure that modern science could do better. And here's the result. Draw up your chairs- are you quite sure you don't want to join, Rashy?"

The Overlord seemed to hesitate for a fraction of a second. Then he shook his head. (Had they learned that habit on Earth? George wondered.)

"No, thank you," he replied. "I would prefer to observe. Some other time, perhaps."

"Very well-there's plenty of time to change your mind later."

Oh, Is there? thought George, looking gloomily at his watch.

Rupert had shepherded his friends round a small but massive

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table, perfectly circular in shape. It had a flat plastic top which he lifted off to reveal a glittering sea of closely packed ball-bearings. They were prevented from escaping by the table's slightly raised rim, and George found it quite impossible to imagine their purpose. The hundreds of reflected points of light formed a fascinating and hypnotic pattern, and he felt himself becoming slightly dizzy.

As they drew up their chairs, Rupert reached under the table and brought forth a disc some ten centimetres in diameter, which he placed on the surface of the ball-bearings.

"There you are," he said. "You put your fingers on this, and it moves around with no resistance at all."