CHILDREN OF THE THUNDER Read online

  Sister Ursula was calling. Pale and exhausted, Dymphna emerged into the light. Her clothing was in neat array again.

  “Poor child,” said Sister Ursula, laying a bony arm around her shoulders. “I heard you moaning, didn’t I? Be comforted! Surely your mother has been called to join the company in heaven.”

  Dymphna made no reply. But it was hard for her not to chuckle as she fell asleep.

  You’re watching TV Plus. It’s time for Newsframe.

  Reports of intensely acid rain over much of northwest Europe during the afternoon led to sharp rises on the Stock Exchange, particularly in respect of wool, cotton and linen futures, and shares in companies producing synthetic fibers also showed a marked gain. However, forestry and agricultural shares fell by several points.

  General Thrower’s views have been condemned by a number of opposition MPs, one of whom accused him of attempting to revive the Blackshirts of the 1930’s…

  By the time Peter had bought and eaten a doner kebab, washed down with a can of lager, it was after ten, but he felt restless rather than tired. He considered phoning a girl who lived nearby, to ask if he might drop in, but decided his day had taken too much out of him. Besides, though she had shown him her AIDS certificate, he wasn’t sure it was valid. According to the grapevine, several of last year’s batches of vaccine had proved faulty.

  The television was still on, so he decided to play channel roulette. Even as he punched the first button on the remote control, however, he remembered he had checked neither his answering machine nor his email, though he should have done so by calling in from the conference hall, or at the latest when he arrived home.

  Annoyed with himself, for there was always a chance that a new assignment might be in the offing, and currently he needed all the work he could get, he played back the phone messages first. Someone wanted him at the launch party for a new book; he made a note of that, because there would be free food and booze and possibly some useful contacts. Someone else had invited him (and who could guess how many colleagues?) to a meeting of physicists at The Hague next month, but made no reference to expenses, let alone a fee—assuming, obviously, that he would find a paper or magazine to pay his way. It might be worth sussing out, but it didn’t sound especially hopeful. And that was it.

  Maybe email would be more interesting. His modem still being up, he entered his net-code and dumped the contents of his mailbox into local memory. Reviewing what appeared on screen, though, he found nothing but routine odds and ends: a friend promising to answer an inquiry when she’d done some research (blast! If he didn’t get that story out quickly someone else would beat him to it); a call from a woman called Lesley Walters saying it had been too long since they interfaced (who in hell was she? Had they interfaced, as it were, in bed, and if so would it be worth renewing the acquaintance?); and—

  Nuts!

  The rest was junk mail. Thank goodness they’d been forced to abandon the idea of billing email users for incoming messages! Victorian values be damned—that was reverting to the past with a vengeance! There was that story in Walter Scott’s memoirs about paying for a parcel containing the MS of a romance about Indian lovers by a woman who had never set foot outside the English town where she was born, and then as much again for another copy that she’d sent for fear the first might go astray…

  Some day he was going to buy one of those new gadgets that wiped junk automatically unless countermanded. But demand for them was so great that the price was staying up in the stratosphere, like the cost of water purifiers in California this year.

  Thinking of California: he might perhaps log on some time with Harry Shay, who was also on this net. Living in the old Silicon Valley area, he was no doubt suffering the effects of the poisoned water there. There might even be a short feature in what he had to say, provided the TV and newspaper editors weren’t yet sick of being fed the same old disaster stories over and over.

  I know I’m sick of writing them.

  There still wasn’t anything worth looking at on TV: a bunch of idiot quiz shows, darts and snooker, a series of reruns some of which were also quiz shows, darts and snooker… A Scandinavian satellite channel was carrying one of the new interactives, hailed as the latest greatest manifestation of the medium, but it had apparently been commandeered by randy adolescent males greedy for tits and bums. Lord! Among the reasons he—and other tenants—had bought a flat in this building, formerly a nurses’ hostel, was that the owners promised a satellite dish on the roof. How could he or anyone have been naive enough to imagine that extra quantity guaranteed extra quality?

  Dispirited, he considered finishing his whisky, but better sense prevailed and he made a cup of tea instead. He had another job tomorrow, no more promising than today’s, but better than nothing, so he must not risk a hangover. Yet after the tea he was still not ready to turn in. Some of the tantalizing hints he had picked up at the computer conference, those he would never have dared to include in his story, were itching at the back of his mind. Meeting people who were permanently high on enthusiasm for their speciality always had that effect on him. What he chiefly wanted to do was access a mathematical database and study up on the theory of prime numbers—

  Access a data-base!

  Of course. That was the best way to exploit this vacant slot in his life. It had been nearly a week since he last consulted the various bulletin boards he subscribed to. What was the point of letting money leak out of his bank account like blood from a wound if he didn’t utilize the services he was paying for?

  Admittedly, it would be a lot more fun to log on to Minitel—he understood French pretty well—and spend a while with AMY or AMANDINE or one of the other erotica services, the like of which had never been permitted in Britain although they thrived across the Channel. Some people admired the common sense of the French authorities; by encouraging masturbation, AIDS might be held in check until there was enough vaccine to send it the way of smallpox. He had even written a story along those lines, but it had been rejected. Offensive to the religious minority…

  He began to feel a little less contemptuous about the interactive he had just switched off. He wondered how the alleged objectors would feel if they tuned into that.

  But—automatically his fingers were tapping out the code that interrogated his bank, and for a moment he felt alarmed until he remembered that what Jake Lafarge was due to pay him would put him handsomely in credit for another week or two—but at this moment what he needed was a lead. He needed to find and file a story at top price, and Jake was in the market.

  Well, then: back to basics. There was an American board called BIOSOC where he had often spotted profitable clues. Now if he could only remember how to retrieve its access code…

  Oh, yes. Something that speaker said today, the one who told amusing stories. Never let anyone second-guess your thinking, even if you are afraid of forgetting what you chose for a password. Pick something you will never forget and no one else will ever guess and hide all your passwords behind it. And don’t write it down in clear!

  All old stuff, but no less valid for being tried and true. Here was the proof. Being reminded meant he didn’t actually have to invoke his master code, which was the name of a woman he had dreamed of in his teens, fallen in love with never having met her or anybody in the slightest like her, but which was engraved in his memory—a name he never spoke nor wrote. Were he one day to meet a person with that name…

  He never had. It didn’t matter. He had recalled how to access BIOSOC, which specialized in three areas of great concern to him: medical drugs, biology and genetics, and the connection of both with human behavior. He keyed in his fourteen-letter password, which since this was an American data-base was THEBEERSTOOCOLD, and waited for the screen to light.

  He was not, of course, expecting to find any messages addressed to him personally. He logged on to BIOSOC only intermittently, and in any case journalists were not overly welcome on such boards. Essentially what they provided was a me
ans of swapping data between specialists in adjacent fields in the hope of sorting out problems that were hanging them up. Now and then, however, adding two and one-and-a-half together out of hints and scraps had led him to an interesting story.

  Of course, that had mainly been while he was working for Continuum, and could pass on what he spotted to someone else rather than strive to trace all the ramifications by himself. He did miss—he was obliged more and more to admit the fact—he did miss the support, the interaction, that he had enjoyed during those eight delirious years, especially after the program evolved into a co-production with German, American and Australian networks, so that one never knew who was able to dredge up what fascinating unsuspected facts at the weekly planning conferences held over a satellite link…

  For a while he had even imagined that rationality might overcome the worldwide spread of blind religious fanaticism. Well, the chance of that seemed slimmer all the time—but he still felt doomed to carry on the fight.

  Enough!

  Sometimes at this late hour, especially if he had had a disappointing day, he tended to grow maudlin. He forced his attention back to the screen. Having dumped into memory in less than a heartbeat everything the board had to offer, his computer was now scrolling through the data at a leisurely pace. So far none of the keywords he had chosen for this particular configuration had made it beep and freeze. But, even as he was reaching for the wipe command because the sequence had cycled to personal messages, it did precisely that.

  He blinked. What in the world—? Oh! All of a sudden, there among a gaggle of pseudonyms was a name that the machine had recognized. And so did he.

  Vaguely, at any rate. For a moment “Claudia Morris” was as strange as the handle of the woman who wanted to interface with him again, and he was at a loss to know why he had posted it on his email list. Then recollection dawned.

  Yes, of course. That conference in New York when I was still with Continuum. I chatted with her in the bar for a bit. No doubt I picked up a lead that made me want to keep track of her. But why?

  He was on the point of punching for access to Who’s Who in American Science, as the likeliest stimulus to memory, when he slumped back in his chair and snapped his fingers. Lord above! How could he have forgotten that Dr. Claudia Morris was the author of Our Greatest Nuclear Danger: Crime and the Traditional Family? She had even signed his copy!

  It had caused a scandal: how long ago—three years? No, more like four. It had appeared just before Continuum became, as the sour joke went among its contributors, “Discontinue ‘em.” Had the program still been running, an hour slot would certainly have been devoted to Dr. Morris and her radical, but extensively documented, views. Boiling her argument down to fundamentals, she maintained that the runaway crime rate in the Western world was primarily due to an attempt to keep in being the structure of the nuclear family, a system for the bearing and raising of children that no longer accorded with the needs of society. Raise a generation with ten, twenty, fifty “parents” to all of whom they owed equal loyalty, she proposed, and young people would no longer feel the need to strike out randomly at an impersonal mass of anonymous authoritarian strangers.

  Well, even in this age when a “sensation” is out of date within a day and forgotten after three…

  He re-read the message she had posted:

  CLAUMOR / CLAUDIA MORRIS / WILL BE IN LONDON ENGLAND UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE ON SABBATICAL TO RESEARCH A THESIS. CHECK BIOSOC FOR UK ADDRESS AND CODE. POSTED THIS BOARD ONLY!

  And the date of her arrival was appended: today.

  Well, well, well!

  The chances were excellent he was the first science journalist in Britain to spot this announcement. One of the few things he remembered about Dr. Morris was that she was disdainful of publicity; she had spent half their time together mocking the ignorance of those who had reviewed her book so generously that for at least one week it made the New York Times bestseller list.

  So her publisher would be the likeliest lead to her. And he knew several people working in the same field that she was almost bound to contact. He set about collating their numbers right away.

  But it took until well after midnight, despite his array of state-of-the-art-two-years-ago equipment, before he felt he could relax and turn in, satisfied that wherever in the city Claudia Morris decided to put up, the moment her name was mentioned over a phone line belonging to her publisher or any friend of hers he had a number for, he or one of the machines he paid for access to would be alerted.

  Such facilities, of course, did not come cheap. As soon as possible, he must, he warned himself, find somebody to underwrite his costs.

  “Wilson, Whitfield House!” barked the head prefect of Hopstanton School. Tall, suave, fair, eighteen, he was due to leave for university in three months. At the moment, however, his duty was to marshal thirteen- and fourteen-year-old new boys in a drab Victorian corridor.

  These so-called “squits,” waiting to meet their respective housemasters, shifted from foot to foot. The school’s main intake was in September, at the beginning of the scholastic year, so those who came to it in May at the start of the summer term typically arrived with some blot on their copybooks from the preparatory boarding schools they had attended since they were eight or nine.

  But none of the newcomers stepped forward in response.

  “Wilson!” the head prefect barked again.

  A slender boy with dark hair and brown eyes, seeming more at ease than his companions, glanced up.

  “Do you by any chance mean Cray Wilson?” he offered in a clear voice that had obviously already broken.

  Taken aback, the prefect looked at the list in his hand. He said after a moment, “Wilson R.C.!”

  “Ah. That must be me. I’m sorry, it should read ‘Cray Wilson, R.’ R for Roger. That’s why I didn’t answer at once. I do hope the error will not be repeated.”

  While the prefect was still hunting for words, Roger walked past him with impeccable aplomb. The prefect called out, “Third on the right—Mr. Brock!”

  “Thank you. I took notice of the signs on the doors as I came in.”

  And was already knocking, and being told to enter.

  Later, the head prefect, who came from Tolland’s House, told Flitchwood, prefect of Whitfield House, “You’re going to have to watch out for that Wilson—I mean, Cray Wilson! He smells like trouble!”

  “Funny!”—with a frown. “I’d have said he was settling in a sight faster than any other squit we’ve had this year. What makes you so concerned about him?”

  “I… I don’t know. Except he’s awfully cocky!”

  “We’ll soon sort that out of him,” Flitchwood promised.

  In the meantime: “So you’re Wilson, are you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What?”

  “My surname is actually Cray Wilson, sir. I just had to explain the mistake to the prefect on duty outside.”

  “Hmm! All right, then: I’ll get it sorted out… Well, take a pew!”

  The boy complied, studying his new housemaster. Fat and graying, he sat behind a table rather than a desk. It was obvious that these rooms must have been assigned and reassigned to scores of new purposes since they were built a century or more ago. There were bookshelves and filing cabinets, even a computer terminal, but none of them fitted the space allotted. In the boy’s view, it was high time the whole edifice was demolished to make room for something functional.

  If anything in a school of this type could be honored with that epithet.

  Mr. Brock was not alone. Sitting at his left was a thin fortyish woman in a green dress with blue eyes and brown hair and an inexpert smear of lipstick. The boy smiled at her, and his immediate guess was confirmed. She smiled back, whereby her face was transformed and became almost pretty. Since—well, it had to be—her husband was still riffling through a file of papers, she risked leaning forward and speaking.

  “Welcome to Whitfield House, Roger! I’m Mrs. Brock. Do re
member, won’t you, that if you ever have any problems—”

  “Not yet, please, Margaret!” Mr. Brock cut in. She subsided, blushing, while he leaned back in his chair and surveyed Roger beneath untidy gray eyebrows.

  “The first thing I have to say to you, young man, is this. According to a letter I have in front of me, from the headmaster of your prep school, while your examination marks were excellent in a wide range of subjects, the moral effect you had on your fellow pupils was not what might have been wished! What do you have to say to that?”

  Ah. I was wondering what line the old bastard was going to take. He could scarcely say, could he, that most of his staff were customers for the sexual services we kids provided? Especially when his bee-lov-ed daughter joined in so enthusiastically! He wouldn’t wish it to be noised abroad that she adored a gang-bang!

  It had been an enjoyable and highly profitable undertaking, especially after the teachers started bringing in clients from the town. Roger was only sorry that it had been cut short. However, one of his friends’ parents had discovered, during the holidays and out of reach of Roger’s powers of persuasion, that his son had contracted rectal gonorrhea. So the cat had finally been let out of the bag.

  Of course, the scandal had been efficiently hushed up, and money had changed hands, and his old school was back to normal—though several of the staff had vanished overnight and had to be replaced. Moreover he had wrought a suitable revenge on the bastard who had shopped him. Having found out that the family was due to go abroad, since they lived not far away he had cycled over with a reel of extension cable on the back of his bike, located an electric heater, plugged it into the reel without unwinding it, and switched on. The resulting blaze had caused a gratifying amount of damage…