Childhood's End (21 page)

So just accept it, and don't worry unless there are any later

symptoms. Then let me know at once."

That evening, Jean passed the verdict on to her husband. He did not seem as relieved as she had hoped, and she put it down to worry over the damage to his beloved theatre. He just grunted "That's fine" and settled down with the current issue of Stage and Studio. It looked as if he had lost interest in the whole affair, and Jean felt vaguely annoyed with him.

But three weeks later, on the first day that the causeway was reopened, George and his bicycle set off briskly towards Sparta.

135

The beach was still littered with masses of shattered coral, and in one place the reef itself seemed to have been breached. George wondered how long it would take the myriads of patient polyps to repair the damage.

There was only one path up the face of the dliff, and when he had recovered his breath George began the climb. A few dried fragments of weed, trapped among the rocks, marked the limit of the ascending waters.

For a long time George Greggson stood on that lonely track, staring at the patch of fused rock beneath his feet. He tried to tell himself that it was some freak of the long-dead volcano, but soon abandoned this attempt at self-deception. His mind went back to that night, years ago, when he and Jean had joined that silly experiment of Rupert Boyce's. No-one had ever really understood what had happened then, and George knew that in some unfathomable way these two strange events were linked together. First it had been Jean, now her son. He did not know whether to be glad or fearful, and in his heart he uttered a silent prayer:

"Thank you, Karellen, for whatever your people did for Jeff. But I wish I knew why they did it."

He went slowly down to the beach, and the great white gulls wheeled around him, annoyed because he had brought no food to throw them as they cirded in the sky.

17

Kiu~u~'s request, though it might have been expected at any time since the foundation of the Colony, was something of a bombshell. It represented, as everyone was fully aware, a crisis in the affairs of Athens, and nobody could decide whether good or bad would come of it.

Until now, the Colony had gone its way without any form of interference from the Overlords. They had left it completely alone, as indeed they ignored most human activities that were not subversive or did not offend their codes of behaviour. Whether the Colony's aims could be called subversive was uncertain. They were non-political, but they represented a bid for intellectual and artistic independence. And from that, who knew what might come? The Overlords might well be

136

able to foresee the future of Athens more clearly than its

founders-and they might not like it.

Of course, if Karellen wished to send an observer, inspector, or whatever one cared to call him, there was nothing that could be done about it. Twenty years ago the Overlords had announced that they had discontinued all use of their surveillance devices, so that humanity need no longer consider itself spied

upon. However, the fact that such devices still existed meant that nothing could be hidden from the Overlords if they really wanted to see it.

There were some on the island who welcomed this visit as a chance of settling one of the minor problems of Overlord psychology-their attitude towards Art. Did they regard it as

a childish aberration of the human race? Did they have any

forms of art themselves? In that case, was the purpose of this

visit purely asthetic, or did Karellen have less innocent

motives?

All these matters were debated endlessly while the preparations were under way. Nothing was known of the visiting Overlord, but it was assumed that he could absorb Culture in unlimited amounts. The experiment would at least be attempted, and the reactions of the victim observed with interest by a battery of very shrewd minds.

The current chairman of the council was the philosopher, Charles Yan Sen, an ironic but fundamentally cheerful man who was not yet in his sixties and was therefore still in the prime of life. Plato would have approved of him as an example of the philosopher-statesman, though Sen did not altogether approve of Plato, whom he suspected of grossly misrepresenting Socrates. He was one of the islanders who was determined to make the most of this visit, if only to show the Overlords that men still had plenty of initiative and were not yet, as he put it, "fully domesticated".

Nothing in Athens was done without a committee, that ultimate hall-mark of the democratic method. Indeed, someone had once defined the Colony as a system of interlocking committees. But the system worked, thanks to the patient studies of the social psychologists who had been the real founders of Athens. Because the community was not too large, everyone in it could take some part in its running and could be a citizen in the truest sense of the word.

It was almost inevitable that George, as a leading member

137

of the artistic hierarchy, should be one of the reception committee. But he made doubly sure by pulling a few strings. If the Overlords wanted to study the Colony, George wanted equally to study them. Jean was not very happy about this.

Ever since that evening at the Boyces', she had felt a vague hostility towards the Overlords, though she could never give any reason for it. She just wished to have as little to do with them as possible, and to her one of the island's main attractions had been its hoped-for independence. Now she feared that this independence might be threatened.

The Overlord arrived without ceremony in an ordinary manmade flyer, to the disappointment of those who had hoped for something more spectacular. He might have been Karellen himself, for no-one had ever been able to distinguish one Overlord from another with any degree of confidence. They all seemed duplicates from a single master-mould. Perhaps, by some unknown biological process, they were.

After the first day, the islanders ceased to pay much attention when the official car murmured past on its sightseeing tours. The visitor's correct name, Thanthalteresco, proved too intractable, for general use, and he was soon christened "The Inspector". It was an accurate enough name, for his curiosity and appetite for statistics were insatiable.

Charles Yan Sen was quite exhausted when, long after midnight, he had seen the Inspector back to the flyer which was serving as his base. There, no doubt, he would continue to work throughout the night while his human hosts indulged in the frailty of sleep.

Mrs. Sen greeted her husband anxiously on his return.

They were a devoted couple, despite his playful habit of calling her Xantippe when they were entertaining guests. She had long ago threatened to make the appropriate retort by brewing him a cup of hemlock, but fbrtunately this herbal beverage was less common to New Athens than the old.

"Was it a success?" she asked as her husband settled down to a belated meal.

"I think so-but you can never tell what goes on inside those remarkable minds. He was certainly interested, even cornplimentary. I apologized, by the way, for not inviting him here. He said he quite understood, and had no wish to bang his head on our ceiling."

"What did you show him today?"

138

"The bread-and-butter side of the Colony, which he didn't seem to find as boring as I always do. He asked every question

you could imagine about production, how we balanced our

budget, our mineral resources, the birth rate, how we got our food, and so on. Luckily I had Secretary Harrison with me, and he'd come prepared with every Annual Report since the

Colony began. You should have heard them swapping statistics.. The Inspector's borrowed the lot, and I'm prepared to bet that when we see him tomorrow he'll be able to quote any

figure back at us. I find that kind of mental performance frightfully depressing."

He yawned and began to peck haif-heartedly at his food.

"Tomorrow should be more interesting. We're going to do the schools and the Academy. That's when I'm going to ask some questions for a change. I'd like to know how the Overlords bring up their kids-assuming, of course, that they have any."

That was not a question that Charles Sen was ever to have answered, but on other points the Inspector was remarkably talkative. He would evade awkward queries in a manner that was a pleasure to behold, and then, quite unexpectedly, would become positively confiding.

Their first real intimacy occurred while they were driving away from the school that was one of the Colony's chief prides. "It's a great responsibility," Dr. Sen had remarked, "training these young minds ftr the future. Fortunately, human beings are extraordinarily resilient: it takes a pretty bad upbringing to do permanent damage. Even if our aims are mistaken, our little victims will probably get over it. And as yoti've seen, they appear to be perfectly happy." He paused for a moment, then glanced mischievously up at the towering figure of his passenger. The Inspector was completely clothed in some reflecting silvery cloth so that not an inch of his body was exposed to the fierce sunlight. Behind the dark glasses, Dr. Sen was aware of the great eyes watching him emotionlessly-or with emotions which he could never understand. "Our problem in bringing up these children must, I imagine, be very similar to yours when confronted with the human race. Wouldn't you agree?"

"In some ways," admitted the Overlord gravely. "In others, perhaps a better analogy can be found in the history of your colonial powers. The Roman and British Empires, for that

139

reason, have always been of considerable interest to us. The case of India is particularly instructive. The main difference

between us and the British in India was that they had no real

motives for going there-no conscious objectives, that is, except such trivial and temporary ones as trade or hostil~ty to

other European powers. They found themselves possessors

of an Empire before they knew what to do with it, and were

never really happy until they had got rid of it again."

"And will you," asked Dr. Sen, quite unable to resist the

opportunity, "get rid of your empire when the time arises?"

"Without the slightest hesitation," replied the Inspector.

Dr. Sen did not press the point. The forthrightness of the

reply was not altogether flattering: moreover, they had now

arrived at the Academy, where the assembled pedagogues

were waiting to sharpen their wits on a real, live Overlord.

"As our distinguished colleague will have told you," said Professor Chance, Dean of the University of New Athens, "our main purpose is to keep the minds of our people alert, and to enable them to realize all their potentialities. Beyond

this island"-his gesture indicated, and rejected, the rest of

the globe-"I fear that the human race has lost its initiative.

It has peace, it has plenty-but it has no horizons."

"Yet here, of course.. . ?" interjected the Overlord blandly.

Professor Chance, who lacked a sense of humour and was vaguely aware of the fact, glanced suspiciously at his visitor.

"Here," he continued, "we do not suffer from the ancient obsession that leisure is wicked. But we do not consider that it is enough to be passive receptors of entertainment. Everybody on this island has one ambition, which may be summed up very simply. It is todo something, however small it may be, better than anyone else. Of course, it's an ideal we don't all achieve. But in this modern world the great thing isto have an ideal. Achieving it is considerably less important."

The Inspector did not seem inclined to comment. He had discarded his protective clothing, but still wore dark glasses even in the subdued light of the Common Room. The Dean wondered if they were physiologically necessary, or whether they were merely camouflage. Certainly they made quite impossible the already difficult task of reading the Overlord's thoughts. He did not, however, seem to object to the some-

140

what challenging statements that had been thrown at him, or the criticisms of his race's policy with regard to Earth which they implied.

The Dean was about to press the attack when Professor

Sperling, Head of the Science Department, decided to make it a three-cornered fight.

"As you doubtless know, sir, one of the great problems of

our culture has been the dichotomy between art and science.

I'd very much like to know your views on the matter. Do you subscribe to the view that all artists are abnormal? That their work-or at any rate the impulse behind it-is the result of some deep-seated psychological dissatisfaction?"

Professor Chance cleared his throat purposefully, but the

Inspector forestalled him.

"I've been told that all men are artists to a certain extent, so that everyone is capable of creating something, if only on a rudimentary level. At your schools yesterday, for example, I noticed the emphasis placed on self-expression in drawing, painting and modelling.~The impulse seemed quite universal, even among those clearly destined to be specialists in science. So if all artists are abnormal, and all men are artists, we have an interesting syllogism.. . ."

Everyone waited for him to complete it. But when it suited

their purpose the Overlords could be impeccably tactful.

The Inspector came through the symphony concert with flying colours, which was a good deal more than could be said for many human members of the audience. The only concession to popular taste bad been Stravinsky's "Symphony of Psalms": the rest of the programme was aggressively modernistic. Whatever one's views on its merits, the performance was superb, for the Colony's boast that it possessed some of the finest musicians in the world was no idle one. There had been much wrangling among the various rival composers for the honour of being included in the programme, though a few cynics wondered if it would be an honour at all. For all that anyone knew to the contrary, the Overlords might be tone deaf.