Authors: Robert Westall
He continued to watch me, smiling. Enjoying himself.
Unfortunately, at that moment there came a knock on the door. A bugger-you kind of knock.
“Wait!” shouted the Head.
The door immediately opened, to admit a gangly youth with an out-thrust beaky nose, well-picked spots, and a long, white nylon coat. His hair was crewcut; he looked extremely pale and unhealthy in a tough sort of way. Like he enjoyed being unhealthy; like his idea of
keeping fit was to smoke a fag as fast as possible. His white coat had a regiment of pens in the top pocket. He had another stuck strangely behind his left ear and a clipboard in his hand.
“Right, squire. I’ve come to take delivery of Kitson, Henry, late Est of this parish. Sign here.” He slouched across the sacred Persian carpet, and thrust the clipboard under the Head’s nose with nicotine-orange fingers. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a pen—use this one.” He whipped it from behind his ear.
The Head bridled backward with distaste, as far as he could tilt his chair. Ready to give the newcomer an icy-blue glare at point-blank range.
It was a mistake. The newcomer thrust his clipboard further in, pinning the Head by the throat to his own wall.
“You sign
there.
Where I’ve marked it with a cross.” He said it with sorrow and compassion, as to an idiot child.
“I have not yet finished with Kitson.” The Head’s voice shot upward, to the verge of apoplexy.
The newcomer consulted the large watch, bristling with buttons, on his hairy wrist.
“Too late, squire. As from 21.00, Kitson is mine.”
“There may be a charge of high treason.”
“Oh, Gawd, not again,” said the newcomer wearily. “That’s all you old blokes ever think about, high treason. And I suppose you’ve got a tape recording to prove it?”
“I have.”
The newcomer glanced idly round the desk top where my eyes had searched in vain. Picked up the antique inkwell, before the Head could stop him. Examined it. “Oh, yes, one of our BB 35s—a very nice recorder. Oops, sorry!” He dropped the inkwell to the carpet and scrunched it under his slender white boot. “Dear me,
how clumsy! Fill in this complaint form, squire, and we’ll send you a replacement. Eventually.” He turned to me.
“You Kitson, kid? Seems the high-treason charge has been quashed … or do I mean squashed?… You’re a free man… sort of. Right, I’ll give you five minutes to collect your favourite teddy bear and marbles. Quick march! You’ll find me parked out front. We’ve got to be in Cambridge before midnight, and we’re doing it the hard way—through London by car.”
“This is insufferable,” shouted the Head.
“Suffer it, squire. Be brave. Suffering purifies the soul. Haven’t you read your Bhagavadgita? Thought you Ests liked that sort of crud?”
I glanced uneasily from him to the Head. The Head suddenly looked tired, like an old actor in some clapped-out play who’s forgotten his lines.
I enjoyed turning my back on him. As I left, I heard the newcomer say, “You do know
how
to write your name, don’t you?”
I couldn’t miss the Jensen Interceptor. Long, low, once sleek, till people started throwing bricks at it. It had the same unloved look as the Wire van; mesh over the windows and an enormous steel blade like a snow plough fastened over the front bumper. There were brown stains on the blade; blood, or just rust? There was another ex-Est on the back seat, looking pretty shrivelled in the remains of a striped blazer.
I took the front passenger seat.
“On your own head be it,” said the ex-Est. “He’s
insane.”
Old Spotty bustled out, shoving his pen back behind his ear.
“Your Head’s the insecure sort…” He pulled two smooth white packs from the glove compartment.
“Shove these on—you’re Techs now. Might as well die in uniform.” We broke the plastic and put on white coats, much shorter than his.
“We’re
what?”
“Techs. Don’t you know what a Tech is?”
“No—I thought I was going to the lobo-farm …”
“You are. Don’t
panic!
Us Techs run the lobo-farm. And everything else.”
“Never heard of you.”
“Naturally. Who’s heard of a sewer—till it goes wrong? Diddums thinks it was love made the world go round? Well, it’s not—it’s Techs.”
“You mean—like our mess boys?”
“I didn’t hear you say that, squire. But… yes. Your mess boy is actually a Tech 1a. And your Paramil captain’s a Tech 1z. And all the other bottle washers are something in between. But you sprogs are already Techs 2a, from the moment you put those coats on. Isn’t
that
nice?” He slammed the Jensen into gear, and the bucket seats crushed the wind out of our lungs.
“He’s
insane,”
bleated the kid in the backseat.
“Shut up, or I’ll arrange you a tongue amputation,” said Spotty.
The kid shut up. I said, “I don’t get it.”
“Let me ask you a question,” said Spotty, cornering the Jensen at ninety, right over on the wrong side of the road. “Why did you disobey your dear Headmaster and come with me?”
“Because … he looked like an old actor who’d forgotten his lines.”
“Smart kid. You may call me Cragg, as a reward. Yes, you’ve grabbed the essentials, as the bishop said to the actress.
We
let the Ests write the cruddy play and play all the heroic noble parts. But who built the theater? Who lays on the lighting and the music and the tape-recorded clapping at the end? Techs, squire, Techs! All three thousand of us. Every time you raise a glass of synthetic whisky to your rosebud lips, every time you go to the loo, you should raise your hat to the Techs. …”
“He’s
insane,”
bleated the kid in the back.
“One tongue amputation coming up,” said Cragg, as he drove down onto the armoured ferry that linked our island to the mainland. At sixty miles an hour, he skidded so wildly on the greasy deck that we nearly went through the far bulkhead. A Paramil angrily walked across to us. Cragg wound down his window by pressing a button on the dashboard. “Your decks are greasy, Gunga Din. I’m slapping an NZ 21345 on you.” He ripped a blue form off his ever-present clipboard. The Paramil paled and backed off.
“Actually,” said Cragg, pressing the button that wound the window back up, “these bloody brakes want seeing to. I’ll slap a T/F 1002 on the Centre garage instead.”
We crossed the Solent, the automated gun turrets on the ferry swinging to challenge every bit of floating wreckage that drifted by us in the dark. “The Unnems keep floating out homemade torpedoes for a laugh,” said Cragg. “Only after dark. Quite ingenious, some of them—we had ‘em brought in to the lab. We reckoned they’d do it, five years ago, so we were ready for them, long before they started.”
Beyond the guard post in the Wire, beyond the automated walls of Portsmouth, we were in Unnem land. Cragg drove like a drunk, changing his direction down side roads at the last possible moment, varying his speed without warning from ninety miles an hour to twenty. “Keep it random, boy, keep it random. Keep the snipers guessing. …” After an hour, we saw a glow in the sky ahead.
“London burning,” said Cragg. “Don’t worry. London burns every night. The Unnems cutting off their noses to spite their faces. …”
I closed my eyes, remembering the noseless Unnem I’d seen as a child. Remembering Roger… somewhere in all this, Roger…
I closed my eyes a fair number of times on that ride; especially the London bit, with the burning barricades across the motorway that the Jensen cleaved through like a ship. The flickering orange figures hurling petrol bombs so that we drove through lakes of fire. The bricks rattling off the wire mesh of the windscreen, every time we passed under an overpass. The woman I saw wandering with vacant eyes and a baby in her arms, right in the middle of the fast lane.
I don’t think we hit her.
“Wouldn’t it be more rational,” I said, keeping my voice light and steady, “to move by helicopter at night?”
“But a lot less fun,” said Cragg.
“You mean you didn’t
have
to do this?”
“What do you think I am—a bloody chauffeur or something? This is my hobby, mate. That Centre is so bloody
rational,
you have to do something for kicks to stop going potty. I’m a Tech
4n.”
“Shut up—your tongue was amputated an hour ago. Anyway, here we are at our beloved Centre.”
Fences, watchtowers, Paramils. More fences, watch-towers, Paramils. Then a huge, lighted building, with a few figures on the steps, white-coated, watching, silent, assessing the three of us.
“Two more specimens for vivisection, Cragg?”
The kid in the back began to cry.
I got out and stuck up two fingers at them.
“That one’s got enough basic aggression—he might survive,” said somebody.
I walked up to him. He wore spectacles; most of them did.
“Just you wait, mate,” I said. “Just you wait.”
“I’ll wait,” he said, just raising his clipboard a bit, calmly.
I didn’t know what that meant, then.
A year had passed.
The Hall of Technicians was crowded and still; the ranks of white coats blinding beneath massed neon lights. Three thousand Techs ran Britain and half were here tonight. But, crowded as they were, each left a three-inch gap between him and his neighbour; each was a man apart. They weren’t a group, like Ests, but a collection of individuals, held together by brains and envy. Strange how many wore spectacles, which flashed and winked across the hall, hiding eyes that roamed continuously, seeking faults; an incipient flicker in a neon tube, a smudge on a white wall, an error in button-etiquette by their neighbour.
Button-etiquette… we trainees still wore the short white coats. Tomorrow, our thighs would vanish under the long white coats of graduation. But not all long white coats were worn the same. Techs 2p left one top button undone. Those above 3a left two. Fives left their coats completely open, displaying spotless white smocks and trousers underneath. A mistake in button-etiquette was the worst fault of all…
Headtech brought his clipboard from his deep pocket with a smoothness none could fault. Wonderful things, Tech clipboards, carrying the flat buttons that keyed you in to a distant computer, the winking lights of personal communicators. Made of light alloy armour plate that could deflect any bullet or blaster, at point-blank range. One edge was honed razor-sharp (under a rubber guard) for personal defence; thrown with a quick flick of the wrist, they could kill.
How many years had Headtech practiced that smooth gesture? And he didn’t “um” and “er” like an Est. His pronouncements flowed from his lips smoothly and continuously, in that high-pitched, slightly whining tone that gives a listening computer least difficulty: computerspeak. Was it just coincidence that computerspeak, which we’d learned with such throat-wrenching difficulty, was also a complaining, niggling, nit-picking noise that gave any normal human being a pain in the arse?
“Here is the pass list, in order of merit.” Headtech ran his eyes along our faces, savouring our hope, envy, lust, despair, like a gardener sniffs a rose.
“First… Kitson, Henry.”
Every eye swung. Fellow trainees looked daggers. Senior Techs calculated: I was the new threat. I didn’t give a damn for any of them. I was first; nobody could ever take that away. All those endless hours studying systems; even the primitive robo plough still used in Africa. All those worn-out languages that Noah fed into the Ark’s computer: COBOL, FORTRAN, ALGOL. Endless so-called recreational games of four-dimensional chess, friendly as a razor fight in a back alley. Atomic fusion, neutron spectroscopy…
It had all been worthwhile; I was first.
But Headtech’s voice whined on, delicately separating each new Tech from the classmates he’d beaten; the ones who’d beaten him. We’d never forget that order of merit, if we lived to be a hundred.
He finished. No human buzz of conversation. They were waiting for the big event. My heart was in my mouth: I could still miss the big prize.
“Comtech awards the degree of ‘Summa Cum Laude’ to Kitson, Henry, for his theses on the molecular motion of water at boiling point and the life cycle of the Indian tea plant. Wheel in the tea trolley.”
Here you might have heard, with the sharpness of Techs’ ears, the indrawn hiss of mass envy.
“Kitson, Henry, step forward.”
I took two steps forward, careful to touch nobody. This placed me exactly a yard from Headtech. My down-flicking eyes picked up the trolley, moving in soundlessly from the left. White, spotless, carrying ancient things. A chipped but shining teapot. An antique electric kettle, absurdly dangling a black cable, because it had no power cell of its own. Once it had been chrome, but years of polishing had stripped it to bare copper.
“Kitson, Henry, will make the tea.”
Again, that indrawn breath of envy.
“Depress the red button,” intoned Headtech. “Pour boiling water into the teapot, first removing the lid. Rotate the pot clockwise until it is thoroughly warm.
Always
warm the pot.”
A censorious echo from the waiting ranks:
“Always
warm the pot.” Like a church service.
“Take the spoon,” intoned Headtech softly, his pebble glass roaming the ranks. “Transfer two spoonfuls of Indian tea leaves into the pot. One for each person, and
one
for the pot.”
“One
for the pot,” echoed the ranks.
It was hard not to giggle. It was hard to stop my hand trembling, spilling a few black tea leaves onto that shining white trolley. Every eye watched for my slightest error. One black speck would have ruined my career. But I managed it safely.
“When the velocity of steam issuing from the kettle no longer increases, fill the pot.”
I watched the jet of steam grow longer and longer.
“Enough,” said Headtech. “Pour.” His voice was sharp with exasperation. But the fatal error would have been not waiting long enough…
I poured. Immediately, a rich aroma ascended, billowed steamily down the hall. Real Indian tea, costly as diamonds now the Indians found they got richer growing opium. Among the ranks, every nostril twitched. I replaced the lid with the tiniest clink that only Headtech and I heard.