CHILDREN OF THE THUNDER Page 18

  “Yes. Yes, as a matter of fact. Even though I don’t know why.” She was sweating and trembling, proof that his charm had worked as easily on her as on Bethsaida.

  “But you do. And it isn’t very much to ask, is it?”

  “No… Oh well, all right.” Swinging her computer behind her back, Gladys dropped to her knees as he unzipped, then checked with an apologetic expression, saying, “I—uh… I don’t have an AIDS certificate, you know.”

  “I do.”

  “At your age?”

  “I’ve been living in California, remember.”

  “All right.”

  She wasn’t very skilled. He found himself wondering what Alice was like at this; then, whether it might be advisable to advertise for the people he was looking for; then—

  Eventually he came, and thanked her. Conceivably she might prove useful, one of these days.

  You’re watching TV Plus. Now for Newsframe.

  At an emergency meeting of the European Parliament, called to consider the catastrophic loss of tree-cover in Northern Europe, Britain again vetoed attempts to reduce atmospheric pollution on grounds of cost. The West German Green spokesman proposed that oxygen-counts should be added to all TV weather reports; this motion was defeated in spite of powerful scientific backing.

  Supporters of General Thrower were today accused by an opposition MP of fomenting racial hate in schools. Asked to comment, the general said, “The purity of our heritage is precious to all right-thinking people. I myself…”

  “Peter, good to see you! And you must be Dr. Morris! Sit down, make yourselves comfortable! Laura love, bring us coffee, hm? Or would you prefer something stronger? Let me give you a preview of what we have lined up! It’s going to rock the competition!”

  They were in the wide low-ceilinged room that was the Comet office. It looked more like the set of a cheapo sixties science-fiction film than any place where ordinary people worked. Eight sub-editors were at work on display screens underlined by keyboards, flanked by microphones, for they were currently experimenting with voice-input of news-stories. So far, however, the technology worked only in Finnish, the language of the country where it had been developed, because it was phonetic and unambiguous.

  Now and then one of the subs, assigned today to carry out a routine test, said something loudly and clearly to a microphone, inspected what appeared on screen, swore, and recorded the nature of the fault before rectifying it by more conventional means.

  Jake Lafarge was a ruddy man in his middle forties, with a moustache the shape and color of a worn brown bootbrush and a prominent pot belly, testimony to his weakness for drink. But he had kept the Comet afloat for a year longer than the pessimists had predicted, and the paper’s backers were cautiously allotting more and still more money as he came up with neat new ideas that exploited its ultramodern technological equipment. Each in turn, though it might achieve little in the long run, prompted a flash of new interest among the public and a transient upturn in the sales graph. His latest coup had been to realize that the incredibly expensive computers his proprietor had bought allowed him to fake news pictures from what was already in store in the library, and this was what he wanted now to demonstrate to Claudia and Peter.

  “Today’s Guardian broke the capture of that opium-lord in Northern Burma!”

  He was slumping into a swivel chair and feverishly hitting (mishitting and cursing) keys on a board before him.

  “What they didn’t get, because their photographer was shot in the kidneys and died on the way out, was—this!”

  Triumphantly he pointed at the screen. In full color it showed the said opium-lord surrounded by Burmese troops holding him at gunpoint. Another touch on the board, and there he was being manacled; again, and he was being forced aboard a helicopter with a sack over his head.

  “Sorry about the sack,” Jake sighed. “But the machines weren’t up to a convincing left-rear profile… The rest is spot-on, though, even the ‘copter! Isn’t it amazing?”

  He wiped the screen and swung his chair through ninety degrees to confront them again, beaming exultantly.

  There followed, fortunately, an interruption. The girl he had addressed as Laura arrived with cupfuls of coffee—real, at least, not assembled in a dispenser. Having issued it like field-rations, having offered capsules of milk and sachets of sugar, Jake leaned back and demanded of Claudia, “Well! Don’t we have a breakthrough?”

  “It’s phony,” she responded in a grumpy tone. “And not original.”

  Peter tensed so violently he almost spilled scalding liquid in his lap. Did she not realize how much depended on—?

  But she was continuing.

  “The first time a hoax of that kind was pulled, as I recall, was during the Spanish-American War. I think it may have been the Vitagraph company—the one O. Henry wrote scripts for—but I’m not certain. It was around then, anyhow. They faked newsreels in the studio using silhouettes and cut-outs, and audiences all over the States and even abroad were fooled to the point where they clapped and cheered. Later, during World War I—”

  Jake’s face darkened. Peter was framing a hasty apology, and at the same time planning what he was going to say to Claudia as soon as they got kicked out of here, when he realized abruptly that his reflex assumption had been wrong. Jake wasn’t flushing with rage. He was… Yes! Incredibly, he was blushing at having been caught out!

  “The sinking of the Lusitania! You—you—you… Oh, bloody hell! I’m sorry! It’s just that I so seldom meet anyone who remembers further back than what was in this morning’s paper, or on the news last night, and even that is stretching it these days.”

  Claudia leaned back and crossed her legs, neat as usual in one of her formal trouser-suits; she had five that Peter had managed to count, all in the autumn colors, old-gold, russet, sage-green, wine-red and plum-blue. Today she wore plum-blue.

  She said composedly, “What all this boils down to is—”

  Brass tacks? Peter recalled her comment from the night of their first meeting in London, and wondered how wrong he could have been.

  But she was continuing:

  “—you’re trying to update a trick that’s been tried before with earlier technology. It made the groundlings cheer in the old days when there wasn’t anything else. Do you honestly think it’s going to part them from their money when they all have color television, VCRs, hi-fi and CD rigs, and God knows what?”

  There was a terrifying pause—for Peter, at least, who was envisaging the collapse of his Ellen-tested deal. (Why should he think of her at just this moment?)

  Then Jake slapped his desk, open-palmed, and jumped to his feet. Pacing back and forth within the shoulder-high partitions that defined his territory, no larger than was Ellen’s room at home (a second time!), he said:

  “How the hell did you sus me out so fast—? Excuse me just a moment! Laura!”

  “Yes?”—as it were from the air.

  “Total privacy for the next ten minutes! And I don’t care if it’s his Ultraviolet Highness in person!”

  “Sure, Jake. Right away!”

  Privacy? In an open-plan office?

  Then something happened to the air; it made Peter’s ears feel numb, obliging him to yawn and release the pressure in his Eustachian tubes. Awed, he realized this was the effect of a technique he had read and heard about and never experienced before: a sonic barrier.

  Undisturbed, as though it were no worse than what one felt as an airliner soared to altitude, Claudia fixed Jake with her implanted irises. Responding like a rabbit confronted by a snake, he halted in mid-stride and swung to face her.

  “Blast you—woman!” The last word carried a load of venom. “For targeting my weakest point!”

  It was too early for Jake to be drunk, Peter thought. And yet…

  “All this fabulous technology! And here I am acting like Wenceslas’s page!”

  “ ‘Mark my footsteps, good my page! Tread thou in them boldly! Thou shalt find—�
�”

  Claudia got that far before Jake pounded fist into palm and stamped on the floor.

  “Yes! Yes! Yes! I’m following up everyone else’s stories because my stinking boss won’t spend as much on decent correspondents overseas as he does on these damned machines! And you’re bloody right! Dressing up second-hand material isn’t going to keep the paper on its legs! I need an exclusive—a major break—something that nobody else can get at before I do! When Peter rang me up he promised he had found one. Tell me what it is.”

  He slumped back into his chair, breathing hard. “It had better be good,” he concluded. “But if it is—well, you can count on all the help you need.”

  When Peter returned home he was in a daze. The outside world seemed distant and unreal. Claudia, despite all his misgivings, had sold the story beautifully. Jake was over the moon about it, regardless of the long lead-time. Provided he had it before Christmas, he had said…

  Which presumably was the deadline set by his proprietor for discontinuing the paper.

  Moving stealthily, as though to make too loud a noise would wreck his mood, he let himself into the flat and hung up the coat he had donned against the increasing chill of autumn—and grew abruptly aware of a humming noise from the living room.

  But there shouldn’t be anybody there! Today was a school day, and Ellen ought still to be with the helpful minder—

  Intruders?

  In the hallway there was a stand that held two umbrellas and a heavy walking stick. He caught up the latter and rushed through the door, prepared to wield it like a club. But it was Ellen who turned to him, wide-eyed, alarmed. She was seated at his desk, silhouetted against the green-gleaming screen of his computer.

  “Oh, Dad! It’s you! You frightened me!”

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” was his foolish reply. “Why aren’t you at Jeannette’s?”

  Instead of answering him at once, she was wiping the display with slim and accurate fingers, not looking at the keyboard. Now she rose to embrace him.

  For once he thrust her aside and held her at arm’s length, searching her face suspiciously.

  “What else have you been up to? I didn’t tell you you could use my rig!”

  “I know you didn’t! But I haven’t done any harm, I swear! It’s just that…” Her eyes were filling with tears. “I did mean to tell you, I swear, only—”

  “Come to the point! Please!”

  She turned away glumly and sat down. Avoiding his harsh gaze, she said, “I couldn’t stand the way the other kids were treating me because I’m not white.”

  “What? But I thought—”

  “Oh, Jeannette’s all right. She does her best to shut them up, but now that all their parents seem to be wearing Thrower ribbons…

  “So I lied to Jeannette. Said you were going to be home earlier in future and it was all right if I came straight here after school.”

  “And she didn’t check with me?”

  “She left a message on your answering machine.”

  “I didn’t find it!”

  “No. I—uh…” Dreadfully embarrassed, Ellen licked her lips. “I called back and said it was all okay, and then I wiped the tape. I know I shouldn’t have, but I simply couldn’t take it any more. Honestly I couldn’t!”

  She twisted round to confront him defiantly. “And I haven’t just been coming straight home and costing you a fortune in computer charges! I got myself a job. So if I have cost you anything, I can pay it back.”

  “A job?”

  “Yes!”—defiantly. “Three afternoons a week for an hour. I clean house for an old lady! She gives me ten pounds! It isn’t much, but at least it’s pocket-money.”

  Pocket-money.

  That brought Peter to a frozen halt. Harsh words died on the tip of his tongue. He was so totally unused to parenthood, he had forgotten about pocket-money. Here was this teenage girl who was his daughter, going out two or three evenings a week with boyfriends, and he wasn’t even giving her enough to pay for a bus or taxi home if something went amiss!

  And here he was standing, ridiculously, with a stick in his hand as though to fend off a burglar…

  Swallowing hard, he replaced it in the hallway. Returning to the living room, he said, “Ellen darling, it’s me who ought to apologize. I’m sorry about the pocket-money. Here!” He groped for his billfold. “Would a tenner a week do for starters? I’ll see about a raise, soon as I can.”

  Instead of merely taking the money, she caught hold of his hand and kissed it. Her long sleek hair brushed his skin as she raised her head, all tears forgotten.

  A sense of warmth pervaded his entire being as he smiled back.

  “And that may be quite soon,” he said after a pause.

  “Was it useful, trying out your idea on me?”

  “Useful! Grief! We have to go back to the Comet tomorrow. A high-powered lawyer will be there with a draft contract. That’s in the morning. In the afternoon, if all goes well, we’re scheduled to meet an ultra-super hacker, who Jake swears can get at practically any data anywhere, so long as the machine’s on line… By the way, I suppose you checked my email.”

  Instantly crestfallen, Ellen bit her lip and gave a nod.

  “I’m sorry. It was one of the things I thought would help me to figure out your system.”

  Let there not have been any more messages from women wanting to interface with me again…

  Not, on reflection, that he imagined Ellen would have been upset by it…

  “And was there anything?” he said after a pause.

  “Some people called Shay, that you’ve been trying to reach in California.”

  “Oh!” His interest quickened. “What—?”

  “They’ve moved. I think they’re back in Britain. But they don’t want their new address made public.” She was all little girl at the moment; he could imagine her aged six, with her hair in a fluffy halo around her head. “I—uh—I hope you don’t mind, but I tried to find it anyway. I thought you might be pleased if I tracked them down.”

  That, Peter thought, should have made him annoyed. But he couldn’t summon even the ghost of anger. Instead he had to fake sternness as he said, “You’ve got to learn, young woman, that this kind of thing can be dangerous! Harry Shay is very, very rich! If he finds out someone’s attempting to invade his privacy he could easily afford to bribe a few policemen and have me locked up under the Data Protection Act!”

  “Goodness!” Her eyes grew wider than ever. “Dad, I’m sorry! I had no idea!”

  “All right, forget about it. Just bear in mind that for the foreseeable future all our—ah—dodgy operations must go by way of the computers at the Comet office.”

  Our? Why had he said that? The sense of unreality that he had felt on the way home was growing unaccountably stronger…

  “Dad! Sit down!” Ellen urged, guiding him to a chair. “Let me fetch you a drink. What do you want? I think there’s some whiskey left. Dinner can be ready in half an hour if you like!”

  Well, it had been a hard day. A rest in a comfortable chair, a good stiff drink, a meal cooked and served for him—yes, that sounded like a well-deserved reward.

  When she brought his drink, mixed precisely as he liked it, along with a glass of orange squash for herself, Ellen perched on the arm of his chair and after a moment, unexpectedly, leaned over to kiss the crown of his head… where, as the touch of her lips reminded him, he was starting to go bald.

  “Dad,” she whispered. “Dad!”

  “What is it?” He reached up to stroke her neck. “Want me to tell you again how useful you were last night? You were, you know! While we were in Jake’s office, I could have shut my eyes and sworn it wasn’t Claudia but you doing that marvelous sales job!”

  “No,” she whispered, her mouth still close to his scalp. “No, I just wanted to say… Dad, I love you. After the awful thing that happened, I was so frightened of what might become of me! But you’ve been wonderfully kind!”

&nbs
p; “I love you, too,” Peter said sincerely. And only later realized it was the first time he had said that, save to various and half-forgotten mistresses, since he stopped saying it to his mother at about the age of eight.

  He pulled her down on to his lap and for a long while held her close, glowing inwardly, not wanting to be the first to break the mood. Facing the chair they shared, the TV was playing, but the sound was turned down and without a commentary the images that filled the screen struck him as meaningless.

  Then at last Ellen jumped to her feet.

  “Dinner!” she exclaimed. “Country Captain! Frozen chicken pieces, I’m afraid, but I’ve done my best. I do hope it’s good!”

  Me, too. But at least I know one thing that is. Claudia was right, wasn’t she? And I thought she was a shellbacked feminist who hated men. Until last night…

  The recollected taste of her mouth mingled on his tongue with the sharp bite of whisky. Utterly relaxed for the first time in years, Peter awaited Ellen’s call to join her at the table and try out her culinary masterpiece.

  Within a short while of his family’s return to England, thanks to the computer search program he kept running night and day David Shay had established two facts for certain.

  Harry had indeed had a vasectomy. It was in his medical records. And it had been done while he was still living with his former wife, very probably at her insistence. Right up to the time when he moved to California, there was no mention of the operation having been reversed.

  So how had Alice become pregnant? For a while he considered the possibility she had had an affair with a friend, but eventually he dismissed it as out of keeping with Harry’s attitude toward her. He might be proud of his wife’s figure, and like her to show it off, but he was nonetheless possessive, sometimes downright jealous.

  That left, essentially, one alternative: artinsem. In David’s view Harry could have tolerated her having a baby by an anonymous stranger, particularly since the technique was adequately impersonal, and fourteen or fifteen years ago it was still plenty widespread.