Childhood's End, Page 9

  Rupert’s voice suddenly bellowed from a concealed speaker.

  “Jean! George! Where the hell are you hiding? Come down and join the party. People are beginning to talk.”

  “Perhaps I’d better go too,” said Rashaverak, putting his book back on the shelf. He did that quite easily, without moving from the floor, and George noticed for the first time that he had two opposed thumbs, with five fingers between them. I’d hate to do arithmetic, George thought to himself, in a system based on fourteen.

  Rashaverak getting to his feet was an impressive sight, and as the Overlord bent to avoid the ceiling it became obvious that, even if they were anxious to mix with human beings, the practical difficulties would be considerable.

  Several more cargoes of guests had arrived in the last half hour, and the room was now quite crowded. Rashaverak’s arrival made matters a good deal worse, because everyone in the adjacent rooms came running in to see him. Rupert was obviously very pleased with the sensation. Jean and George were much less gratified, as no one took any notice of them. Indeed, few people could see them, because they were standing behind the Overlord.

  “Come over here, Rashy, and meet some of the folks,” shouted Rupert. “Sit on this divan — then you can stop scraping the ceiling.”

  Rashaverak, his tail draped over his shoulder, moved across the room like an icebreaker worrying its way through a pack. As he sat down beside Rupert, the room seemed to become much larger again and George let out a sigh of relief.

  “It gave me claustrophobia when he was standing. I wonder how Rupert got hold of him — this could be an interesting party.”

  “Fancy Rupert addressing him like that, in public too. But he didn’t seem to mind. It’s all very peculiar.”

  “I bet you he did mind. The trouble with Rupert is that he likes to show off; and he’s got no tact. And that reminds me some of those questions you asked!”

  “Such as?”

  “Well — ‘How long have you been here?’ ‘How do you get on with Supervisor Karellen?’ ‘Do you like it on Earth?’ Really, darling! You just don’t talk to Overlords that way!”

  “I don’t see why not. It is about time someone did.”

  Before the discussion could get acrimonious, they were accosted by the Shoenbergers and fission rapidly occurred. The girls went off in one direction to discuss Mrs Boyce; the men went in another and did exactly the same thing, though from a different viewpoint. Benny Shoenberger, who was one of George’s oldest friends, had a good deal of information on the subject.

  “For heaven’s sake don’t tell anyone,” he said. “Ruth doesn’t know this, but I introduced her to Rupert.”

  “I think,” George remarked enviously, “that she’s much too good for Rupert. However, it can’t possibly last. She’ll soon get fed up with him.” This thought seemed to cheer him considerably.

  “Don’t you believe it! Besides being a beauty, she’s a really nice person. It’s high time someone took charge of Rupert, and she’s just the girl to do it.”

  Both Rupert and Maia were now sitting beside Rashaverak, receiving their guests in state. Rupert’s parties seldom had any focal point, but usually consisted of half a dozen independent groups intent on their own affairs. This time, however, the whole gathering had found a centre of attraction.

  George felt rather sorry for Maia. This should have been her day, but Rashaverak had partially eclipsed her.

  “Look,” said George, nibbling at a sandwich. “How the devil has Rupert got hold of an Overlord? I’ve never heard of such a thing — but he seems to take it for granted. He never even mentioned it when he invited us.”

  Benny chuckled.

  “Just another of his little surprises. You’d better ask him about it. But this isn’t the first time it’s happened, after all. Karellen’s been to parties at the White House and Buckingham Palace, and —”

  “Heck, that’s different! Rupert’s a perfectly ordinary citizen.”

  “And maybe Rashaverak’s a very minor Overlord. But you’d better ask them.”

  “I will,” said George, “just as soon as I can get Rupert by himself.”

  “Then you’ll have to wait a long time.”

  Benny was right, but as the party was now warming up it was easy to be patient. The slight paralysis which the appearance of Rashaverak had cast over the assembly had now vanished. There was still a small group around the Overlord, but elsewhere the usual fragmentation had taken place and everyone was behaving quite naturally.

  Without bothering to turn his head, George could see a famous film producer, a minor poet, a mathematician, two actors, an atomic power engineer, a game warden, the editor of a weekly news magazine, a statistician from the World Bank, a violin virtuoso, a professor of archaeology and an astrophysicist. There were no other representatives of George’s own profession, television studio design — which was a good thing, as he wanted to get away from shop. He loved his work; indeed, in this age, for the first time in human history, no one worked at tasks they did not like. But George was the kind of man who could lock the studio doors behind him at the end of the day.

  He finally trapped Rupert in the kitchen, experimenting with drinks. It seemed a pity to bring him back to earth when he had such a faraway look in his eye, but George could be ruthless when necessary.

  “Look here, Rupert,” he began, perching himself on the nearest table. “I think you owe us all some explanations.”

  “Um,” said Rupert thoughtfully, rolling his tongue round his mouth. “Just a teeny bit too much gin, I’m afraid.”

  “Don’t hedge, and don’t pretend you’re not still sober, because I know perfectly well you are. Where does your Overlord friend come from, and what’s he doing here?”

  “Didn’t I tell you?” said Rupert. “I thought I’d explained it to everybody. You couldn’t have been around — of course, you were hiding up in the library.” He chuckled in a manner which George found offensive. “It’s the library, you know, that brought Rashy here.”

  “How extraordinary!”

  “Why?”

  George paused, realizing that this would require tact. Rupert was very proud of his peculiar collection.

  “Er — well, when you consider what the Overlords know about science, I should hardly think they’d be interested in psychic phenomena and all that sort of nonsense.”

  “Nonsense or not,” replied Rupert, “they’re interested in human psychology, and I’ve got some books that can teach them a lot. Just before I moved here some Deputy Under-Overlord, or Over-Underlord, got in touch with me and asked if they could borrow about fifty of my rarest volumes. One of the keepers of the British Museum Library had put him on to me, it seemed. Of course, you can guess what I said.”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “Well, I replied very politely that it had taken me twenty years to get my library together. They were welcome to study my books, but they’d darn well have to read them here. So Rashy came along and has been absorbing about twenty volumes a day. I’d love to know what he makes of them.”

  George thought this over, then shrugged his shoulders in disgust.

  “Frankly,” he said, “my opinion of the Overlords goes down. I thought they had better things to do with their time.”

  “You’re an incorrigible materialist, aren’t you? I don’t think Jean will agree at all. But even from your oh-so-practical viewpoint, it still makes sense. Surely you’d study the superstitions of any primitive race you were having dealings with!”

  “I suppose so,” said George, not quite convinced. The table-top was feeling hard, so he rose to his feet. Rupert had now mixed the drinks to his satisfaction and was heading back to his guests. Querulous voices could already be heard demanding his presence.

  “Hey!” protested George, “just before you disappear there’s one other question. How did you get hold of that two-way television gadget you tried to frighten us with?”

  “Just a bit of bargaining. I pointed out
how valuable it would be for a job like mine, and Rashy passed the suggestion on to the right quarters.”

  “Forgive me for being so obtuse, but what is your new job? I suppose, of course, it’s something to do with animals.”

  “That’s right. I’m a super-vet. My practice covers about ten thousand square kilometres of jungle, and as my patients won’t come to me I’ve got to look for them.”

  “Rather a full-time job.”

  “Oh, of course it isn’t practical to bother about the small fry. Just lions, elephants, rhinos, and so on. Every morning I set the controls for a height of a hundred metres, sit down in front of the screen and go cruising over the countryside. When I find anyone in trouble I climb into my flyer and hope my bedside manner will work. Sometimes it’s a bit tricky. Lions and such-like are easy — but trying to puncture a rhino from the air with an anaesthetic dart is the devil of a job.”

  “Rupert!” yelled someone from the next room.

  “Now look what you’ve done! You’ve made me forget my guests. There — you take that tray. Those are the ones with vermouth — I don’t want to get them mixed up.”

  It was just before sunset that George found his way up to the roof. For a number of excellent reasons he had a slight headache and felt like escaping from the noise and confusion downstairs. Jean, who was a much better dancer than he was, still seemed to be enjoying herself hugely and refused to leave. This annoyed George, who was beginning to feel alcoholically amorous, and he decided to have a quiet sulk beneath the stars.

  One reached the roof by taking the escalator to the first floor and then climbing the spiral stairway round the intake of the air-conditioning plant. This led, through a hatchway, out on to the wide, flat roof. Rupert’s flyer was parked at one end; the centre area was a garden — already showing signs of running wild — and the rest was simply an observation platform with a few deckchairs placed on it. George flopped into one of these and regarded his surroundings with an imperial eye. He felt very much monarch of all he surveyed.

  It was, to put it mildly, quite a view. Rupert’s house had been built on the edge of a great basin, which sloped downwards towards the east into swamplands and lakes five kilometres away. Westwards the land was flat and the jungle came almost to Rupert’s back door. But beyond the jungle, at a distance that must have been at least fifty kilometres, a line of mountains ran like a great wall out of sight to north and south.

  Their summits were streaked with snow, and the clouds above them were turning to fire as the sun descended in the last few minutes of its daily journey. As he looked at those remote ramparts, George felt awed into a sudden sobriety.

  The stars that sprang out in such indecent haste the moment the sun had set were completely strange to him. He looked for the Southern Cross, but without success. Though he knew very little of astronomy, and could recognise only a few constellations, the absence of familiar friends was disturbing. So were the noises drifting in from the jungle, uncomfortably close at hand. Enough of this fresh air, thought George. I’ll go back to the party before a vampire bat, or something equally pleasant, comes flying up to investigate.

  He was just starting to walk back when another guest emerged from the hatchway. It was now so dark that George could not see who it was, so he called out; “Hello, there. Have you had enough of it too?” His invisible companion laughed.

  “Rupert’s starting to show some of his movies. I’ve seen them all before.”

  “Have a cigarette,” said George.

  “Thanks.”

  By the flame of the lighter — George was fond of such antiques — he could now recognise 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 Maia 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 realised that Jan wanted to be alone. It was getting cold, anyway, so he took his leave and rejoined 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 mechanical 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.

  Chapter 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 power 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 taboo 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 brought about 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 much 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 difficulty, following a syllabus that would have seemed very strange a century before. His main subjects had been mathematics and physics, but as subsidiaries he had taken philosophy and music 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 — though 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 Tisen 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 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.