THE RECUSANTS

Of course I understand how Henning and Myrna came to spurn the regime of the Newmen. Who should have a better knowledge than I of the workings of their minds?

Henning was the son of a couple who had married quite young, which probably accounts for the failure of the Newmen conditioning to ‘take’ as securely as it ought to have done. He inherited too many memories and too much youthful intransigence from his father—a reactionary who had never thoroughly assimilated the teachings of the pioneer Newmen. Henning’s father did not propose to submit to his children: he would not accept wisdom from them; and the stubborn hostility he thus implanted in his son’s mind was bound to set up a conflict there.

No doubt the problem lay dormant during the early years. But when Henning married Myrna, they had to face up to it

Myrna said: “When we have children....”

She was small and dark, with a smooth olive skin and deep, wistful eyes. He was taller, and had a slight stoop—he gave the appearance of always bending protectively over her.

“When we have children, what shall we do? We must decide.”

The two of them were sitting in their three-roomed apartment overlooking the Thames. Henning had just pulsed a helicar, and they had two minutes to wait before they were taken out to dinner with friends. The thought of those friends was preying on them—they knew what to expect.

“The pattern for us,” said Henning, with distaste, “will be the same as the pattern for Paul and Lucille Marsh. Or for anyone else.”

“We’ve got to decide,” said Myrna. “There must be a way. We must be able to choose.”

“As long as we live here, under the radiation blanket, we shall produce a child who will be our ruler.”

Myrna got up and went to the door leading to the next room. In there, according to the architect’s design and also according to law, was to be a nursery. She looked at the bare walls on which their first child would tell them what pictures to hang; at the bare shelves, for which he or she would order chosen micro-recordings at the built-in cot with its adjacent control knobs for remote operation of the telescreen and audio amplifier.

And she said: “You do want us to get out, don’t you Henning? Truly?”

“Yes,” he said. “Before it’s too late. Before you have a child.”

Her small red lips were pursed. Her strangely defenceless little face was pale and wry with wonderment.

“It’s odd that we should have met and married two people as difficult as we are. The chances against our meeting....”

“If I hadn’t met you,” he said with a warmth that brought the colour gratefully back to her cheeks, “I should never have married at all. It’s only because—”

The helicar buzzed its signal from the roof, and they went up ten storeys to the exit.

* * * *

The trip was a short one. The car lifted them above London and turned north towards the residential blocks of St. Albans. Traffic was brisk at this time of the evening, but it was only a matter of moments before they swung off Skyway Beam A5 and dropped to the gleaming white estate below.

Paul and Lucille Marsh were waiting for them on the roof.

“So nice you could come,” said Lucille.

They shook hands and smiled bright, conventional smiles.

Myrna said: “What a lovely evening, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

The Marshes, taken by surprise, stared up into the sky. The retreating helicar was, for a moment, an iridescent blob of silver against a rolling wave of cumulus, tinged with fading crimson. Paul Marsh looked puzzled. Myrna realized that she had embarrassed him—the Marshes were responsible, middle-aged citizens who did not make a point of gazing into the evanescent phenomena of the skies.

Paul said: “Well, let’s go in, shall we?”

The apartment was slightly larger than the one in which Henning and Myrna lived; but its essential features were the same: People today, after all, wanted more or less the same things. More spacious accommodation was a sign of a mounting age group and increased responsibility, but there was no reason for any eccentric variation in the main equipment. There was, however, one big difference here. The nursery was occupied.

“Rowena,” said Lucille proudly, “is going to order the dinner.”

Henning glanced surreptitiously at Myrna. They were both taut, trying to look polite and respectful—and finding it hard going.

Their hosts seemed unaware of the tension. There was pride in Paul’s face as his wife went into the nursery; pride that glowed even more strongly when she returned, leading by the hand a two-year-old girl. Only it wasn’t quite that thought Henning with a shiver of distaste (I can feel that shiver of distaste now)—the child, not the mother, was the one in control—the child was, incongruously, the senior.

“Hello, Rowena,” said her father, his greying head turned towards her as though waiting for her slightest command.

Her wide eyes turned a cool, appraising stare up to him, and then glanced at the visitors. Her shrewd gaze focused on Henning.

She said: “Good evening. I understand from Paul that you work in his office.”

“That’s right,” said Henning stiffly.

“We must have a talk one day. I’ve thought of several ways of reorganizing the electronic computer bankings.”

“She doesn’t waste any time, does she?” said Paul with a deferential smile.

Rowena’s brief glance in his direction was a mingling of tolerance and contempt. She sensed, as one could hardly fail to do, the confusion in his mind—the instinctive parental affection jarring with the awed realisation that the child represented a more advanced stage of human development and would soon be in legal charge of the household. Yes, Rowena understood; but there was no more than a formal pity in her understanding. She was already too far advanced to be capable of emotional states such as that of sympathy.

She withdrew her hand from her mother’s, and moved towards the kitchen dial panel. Her small, stubby fingers began to prod and punch decisively.

* * * *

The food was splendid. There were combinations and piquant clashes of flavours such as Henning had never before imagined.

And it was a relief to find that there were only four of them at table.

Nevertheless, Myrna felt compelled to say: “What a pity Rowena couldn’t stay up to enjoy the dinner she’s ordered.”

Lucille smiled. “The fact that she is mentally so advanced doesn’t mean that she is physically capable of our sort of living yet,” she said. “She has a flair for taste patterns, but her stomach needs to be older before it’s allowed to deal with such things at this time of day. Rowena herself would be the first to insist on our adhering to the regulations.”

“It seems so odd.”

“Odd?”

“This...well, this business of being dominated by a child who can only just toddle—who has to go to bed early, whose stomach isn’t ready yet for large meals in the evening....” Myrna’s voice tailed away as she realised how shocked Lucille looked.

Paul laughed bluffly. “It’ll all sort itself out when you have a child of your own. Not that that’ll happen for some years yet, eh?” he added.

“Why not?” Myrna blurted out. “Henning and I would like to have children soon—while we’re still young.”

Paul tried to preserve his bluff manner, but it was shot through with uneasiness. He lowered his voice, as though fearful that Rowena might be listening at the bedroom door.

“That’s not advisable, you know,” he murmured. “Not advisable at all.”

His wife nodded confirmation. She licked her lips, nodded again, and said: “You don’t give the baby a chance. You and Henning need to mature before transmitting your knowledge to your child.” The words came out swiftly and mechanically, like a well-learnt lesson. “The longer you wait, the finer the inheritance for your child.”

“Yes, but....”

Myrna caught Henning’s eye, and stopped.

For the rest of the evening, conversation was general. Henning warily avoided provocative topics. Paul Marsh was his boss—you didn’t argue with your boss, or let your wife argue with your boss.

Particularly about the principles of the Newmen.

Now that he had met Rowena, Henning found that there were questions in his mind. Questions he could not ask. He could not ask Paul Marsh how soon it would be before control of the research wing passed into the hands of that small girl sleeping in that next room. He could not ask whether, when Paul had to take a back seat, there would be other changes, new instructions.

So they talked about the new pulsator, which had simplified interplanetary transmissions, and about the daily office and laboratory routine from which one might have thought they would have been glad to escape. It was all safe and unprovocative.

Even so, Lucille could not help bringing Rowena’s name in at intervals. Her mind went back to her over and over again. The household revolved around the child. And even when Paul did not mention her by name, the thought of her was clearly there.

Rowena, it leaked out, had conceived a wonderful idea for a much larger telescreen projection without having to buy the commercial equipment. So simple, yet so brilliant. Rowena had taken a vague promotion scheme of her father’s, and developed an entirely new angle on it. Rowena had combined her mother’s and father’s ideas on redecoration of the flat, and come up with a splendid new scheme.

Rowena....

Lucille hummed as she lifted the table flap and pressed it against the wall for the plates to be discharged into the disposal chute. And she turned and said:

“That tune...Rowena remembered it for me. Did I tell you, Paul?”

“No,” said Paul.

“She must have taken it over from me, along with everything else. I’d forgotten all about it—such a pretty tune, I used to love it—and suddenly she started singing it this morning. To be able to pull that up out of my memory—only of course it’s her memory now—isn’t it wonderful?”

Yes, wonderful.

I know that even Henning and Myrna, in revolt as they were against the whole regime of the Newmen, nevertheless thought it was wonderful.

And loathsome.

They were early Newmen themselves, but they had been produced by parents who resented the existence of the radiation blanket. They had not been allowed to dominate their homes; their fathers had angrily condemned those early experiments and their gradual introduction into the life of the country and then of the world.

The original experiments had been greeted by many other people with hostility—but by a great many more with incredulity. There had been shouts of derision. Television comedians in every country built a succession of jokes round the idea. New reporters went looking for new variations on the story, new gimmicks, new details of freaks and freakish happenings.

KIDS TO RULE THE ROOST, boomed the headlines. ORDERS FROM THE CRADLE.... JUNIOR FOR PRESIDENT.... NO SECRETS FROM BABY....

Jokes about mothers-in-law were swiftly converted into extravagant and improbable jokes about daughters-in-law—aged two and under.

But scorn was no weapon against reality. The Newmen had arrived.

The experiments continued, the children were born, and gradually those parents who had refused treatment began to realize that their own nice, ordinary children were going to be left behind in life’s struggle. A baby who inherited his mother’s and father’s combined memories—with all the technical and practical knowledge and skills of both parents, plus a clear picture of their emotional relationships and problems—stood a better chance of getting on in the world than did an ordinary child whose education was spread over the first twenty years of life. Formal schooling could not give a quarter of what was given to Newmen babies at the moment of birth, and before.

As more generations came along, the variation would be more and more marked. Grandchildren and great-grandchildren would be born with even more comprehensive knowledge. Their intellects would be the sum of all those preceding intellects, which had blended into their own.

The protests began to change their tune. Those who had howled most loudly against this impious tampering with nature began to howl with equal force for similar treatment for themselves. They didn’t intend to see their children overhauled and left behind by the children of others. Democracy demanded an inheritance of brilliance for all, not for a chosen few, whose brainpower would soon put them in a position to rule the world and outwit any opponents.

“But this is a complex process,” the technicians protested. “Individual results can be guaranteed. The difficulties in mass application....”

They might as well have advocated the view that automobiles should all be hand-made, for the benefit of a select few.

“Find a way,” said the governments of the world, harassed by their peoples.

The scientists reconsidered their original findings, and took steps to find a way.

The fact that it was possible to transmit the entire contents of a human mind into the embryo mind of a child not yet born had been discovered during investigations into the reactions of dogs to atomic motors. It had been noticed very early in the days of atomic-powered vehicles, that dogs were seriously disturbed by them. Radiations not perceptible to humans—and, apparently, in no way harmful—were emitted by the new motors, and these had the same effect on certain animals as a painful supersonic vibration might have. Research was instituted at once; and after a series of tests on various theories, it was found that a development of these same radiations could produce remarkable effects in human children.

An intermittent pulse injected into the brain awoke certain activities in the cortex that had been unknown before. Hitherto unused areas of the brain awoke and set to work—secretly, almost surreptitiously, it seemed to the pioneer research workers. It was only when the first Newmen children were born that the full significance of this mental activity became apparent.

An old dream of philosophers came true. Language, knowledge, experience...all were transmissible. Even personal memories could be handed on intact, in their full vividness. No longer need every child go through the laborious business of starting its education with the simple banalities, the essential but primitive groundwork—no longer was there the wearisome shaping of disjointed sounds into speech; no longer the groping for comprehension of words, concepts, diagrams, numerals. The child began where its parents left off. The child of a philosopher or scientist took up the threads of the father’s work and went on without flagging.

Human progress would be incalculably speeded up. The portents were all there. Given a few generations, mankind would increase its stature a hundredfold—a thousandfold.

The new process was speedily evolved. At other times, in other circumstances, its development might have taken considerably longer. But now there was the advice of the children to be acted on—the shrewd, mature, analytical children in the vanguard of the Newmen. They could tackle a problem of this sort with greater competence than their parents at a similar age could have tackled the building of a column of wooden blocks.

Blanket radiation was the swiftly-devised solution. A layer of force was generated over every major city and town. Beneath it, basking in it as in the radiance of an invisible sun that gave off no heat, men and women lived their normal lives. They worked, played, married...and brought into the world babies who knew their innermost thoughts and combined their talents.

The old order changed.

Physical limitations were all that held these new beings in check. For the formative years—and now ‘formative’ referred only to the development of physique—they had to depend on their parents to carry out their wishes. Adult in mind at birth, and adult in speech within the first twelve months of life, the children gave the orders. The whole balance of society shifted. Parental responsibility, so much talked about at every period of human evolution, changed its character—instead of being the responsibility of grown people towards their immature, defenceless children, it became the responsibility of inferiors towards their betters. Laws were soon put into effect, framed by two-year-olds, whereby property was automatically transferred from parents to their first-born child, with a complicated but efficient scale of adjustments if other children were born later.

In point of fact, very few parents had more than one child. The decline in the birth rate was even more noticeable in the second and third generations. The first-born child, particularly when this was a son, tended to make such intensive use of its parents and to overawe them so swiftly, that they were unable to contemplate the presence of another child in the household. Then again, the fast-developing minds of the Newmen soon grappled with world problems—with famine, disease, and overcrowding—and saw that the logical step was to reduce the population of Earth as soon as possible. Large families were anti-social. With world peace in sight, the old need for large families as cannon fodder was no longer a valid argument.

But still the world was not entirely populated with Newmen. There were still others.

Outside the cities there were still, in places, children who were no more than children. And there were reactionaries who went to join the exiles.

* * * *

Myrna said: “That settles it.”

“I think it does,” agreed Henning.

They were being carried away from the Marsh home in a helicar, drifting smoothly over the gleaming lights of the widespread city. It was a tranquil night; a radiant, glorious night—for those with eyes to see.

“I couldn’t face it,” said Myrna. “I couldn’t bear to see contempt in the eyes of any child of mine. I want to be a mother, not a slave.”

“They’ll say we’re selfish,” said Henning. “That’s what they say about anyone who break away from the pattern. They’ll say we can’t sink our selfish pride and realize that it is all for the good of the race.”

“Let them say. But they won’t stop us.”

“There’s no law to prevent our leaving the community. It’s just that we’re...well....”

“Social outcasts?” she smiled.

“Sort of.”

They dipped gently towards their roof. The glowing city rose up about them. A million sparkling eyes swam over and around them.

Myrna said: “I can’t say I’m very worried.”

“If you’re sure—”

“I’m sure. Quite sure. You know we wouldn’t be happy here.”

They went down to their flat. The door opened before Henning’s fingers, a gentle light came on automatically. He put his hand on Myrna’s arm. They looked towards the nursery door, which she had left open. The bareness of the room seemed to draw them towards it—the suction of a vacuum.

Myrna stared in once more, and shivered.

“Not here,” she said. “Oh, not here.”

“We’ll join one of the rural communities,” said Henning. “We’ll go at once. I’ll hand in my notice, and we’ll square up and go.”

“And when we’re there, we can start a family.”

“That’s it. Once we’re out from under this cursed radiation blanket, we can start. We can live on the old pattern. We can live in the older traditions, as men and women were meant to live.”

They kissed. It was as though they had taken a vow, and felt purified.

Myrna said: “It’ll be like escaping from a plague spot into clean air.”

Which showed how little they knew. Henning was a scientist of sorts, but specialisation had numbed some of his faculties. Certain concepts just did not cross his mind. He did not trouble to ask himself certain questions, let alone to seek the answers, which could so readily have been given to him by any competent authority. It did not occur to him, even for a moment, that they might already be too late.

They escaped. They ducked out from under the radiation blanket and went to live with the Southerden Community.

And they were happy, and Myrna conceived and produced a son.

That is how I come to know so much of the workings of their minds. For I am their son, whom they called Peregrine and christened in the old harbour church in the old tradition...and I entered this world with the inheritance of my parents’ knowledge and memories.

At first they did not realize. Physically, I was helpless, and to them I was merely a baby—tiny, wet, hungry, demanding.

And adorable.

Later, perhaps, they would realize the irony of it. But I doubted it. I doubted whether they could ever appreciate my feelings as I lay there. Of course they were both primitive Newmen themselves, but their memories of infancy were oddly blurred. I tried, lying there in my cradle, to sort out the memories of Henning and Myrna on this topic; but I found that there was some psychological block that would not allow them to think back that far. They denied the concept of the Newmen with both consciousness and subconsciousness.

For a few months, then, I was like any other baby.

However far I might reach with my thoughts, however impatient I might be to speak and move, I could not control the appropriate mechanisms yet. When I was hungry, I had to cry like any other infant—it was the only way of attracting attention.

It was humiliating. But I could tell that it would not last for long.

Yes, I could tell. Lying in my pram outside the cottage, I would quietly practise words. It was only a matter of application. Once I had mastered the movements of mouth and lips, even the inadequacy of the childish voice was no real deterrent.

There was one man who suspected, right from the start.

This was old Clayton, the self-appointed senior member of the Community.

I remember him leaning over the pram one morning and staring down at me with his disconcerting, pale grey eyes.

There was something ruthless about him—something crude and domineering. I was frightened. There was nothing I could do to defend myself if....

Then Myrna was there, saying, “Isn’t he coming on well?”

Clayton nodded slowly and sceptically.

“Looks very intelligent,” he said in his rasping, unmodulated voice. “Too intelligent, if you ask me. Too intelligent by half.”

Myrna laughed. Clayton went on staring at me for a moment, then turned away.

He came again. He seemed to make a point of coming to peer at me. I was sure he was waiting for me to give myself away. And I was afraid I might do so. It would be so easy; and once done, so irrevocable.

Myrna said to Henning: “That Clayton man is getting a bit queer in the head. I don’t like the way he leans over Peregrine.”

“He can’t do any harm.”

“I’m not so sure,” said Myrna.

Neither was I. Clearly the time was approaching when I would have to declare myself, and Myrna and Henning, at any rate, would have to know what I was. A life of deceit was utterly impossible. To remain pent up in a child’s body without being allowed the full play of the mind would be intolerable. Already I was fretting, wanting to shake off the bonds and put ideas into practice—ideas that would startle my parents and the rest of the Community, but which could not be left lying dormant.

* * * *

One sunny afternoon I was put out in the pram as usual. Myrna was uprooting one or two weeds near the gate, and in the distance I could, by twisting my head and thrusting up slightly over the edge of the pram, see old Clayton on the comer of the village street. Beyond him, the masts of two of our fishing boats jutted up from under the harbour wall. He was gossiping as usual. Soon he would turn and come this way, and have a look at me. And this time he might see, and act—crudely and impulsively, as I was sure he would act in all the circumstances.

I said: “Myrna, don’t go in without me.”

She straightened up and looked round, startled.

“Who’s that?”

I said: “Take me indoors, Myrna.”

Colour fled from her face. She gave a shaky little laugh and shook her head feebly. “Oh, no,” she said. “No. Oh, please, no.”

“Quickly,” I said. “Before Clayton comes.”

She pulled the pram towards the house, and carried me indoors. She was trembling so much that I was afraid she would drop me.

When we were inside, she put me down on the couch and stared at me as though I were a monster who had crept in from the sea—a hideous changeling.

She said: “You spoke. Out there. You...you spoke.”

She wanted me to be silent. I could see that she longed to be reassured, somehow. A moment’s aberration, that must be all it was. It couldn’t really have happened. I had not said a word. She must have imagined it.

But there was no escape for her.

“Yes,” I said. “I spoke.”

Her knees gave way. She slumped into a chair.

“What shall we do?” she murmured.

“When Henning comes home,” I said, “we’ll discuss it.”

It was an absurd relief to her. She was glad to postpone discussion. Knowing her as I did—knowing her through and through, as I knew her husband, my father—in every fibre of my being, I sensed her fatal cowardice. It was odd that she could be so forceful in some ways and so weak in others. Stubbornly, she had hated the world of the Newmen—bravely, she had faced the discomforts of exile in the Southerden Community; and yet now she wanted only to dodge the issue—to shut her ears and refuse to listen.

Of course, it must have been a shock. To have turned her back on the Newmen, to have hated so violently the idea of a child who would be master of the home, and then to find that the revolt had come too late....

Yes, I was sorry for her.

And for Henning.

* * * *

His drawn face, wrinkled with salt and the sun, peered down into mine when he got home. He brought the smell of the sea into the room; and he brought the smell of fear.

I said: “There’s nothing to worry about. I’m not an enemy. You must realize that. I belong here, not with those creatures in the cities.”

“I don’t understand,” he muttered. “We left before we...before....”

“The radiations must have done their work on your genes before you left the city,” I patiently explained; as though to a fumbling child. “It was an obvious possibility. It was one which you could have checked if you’d given it a moment’s thought.”

I tried not to sound too scornful. They ought to have known; but they were obstinate and impetuous, and they had not wanted to face up to any disagreeable possibilities.

Myrna took Henning by the arm. “We’ve got to keep this quiet.”

“This is something you’ll never keep quiet,” he said.

“If anyone else finds out, we’ll be turned away. The Community won’t allow this. We don’t know what they might do.”

I said: “It can’t be hushed up indefinitely. For one thing, I’m not prepared to lie low and go through a wearisome pretence of being ‘educated’ in the slow way that things are done here.” I had a pretty good mental picture of what the primitive school here must be like. “But we can probably manage to conceal things for a couple of years while I work out my plans.”

A shadow flitted across Myrna’s face. “Plans?”

“There are things to be done,” I said.

They both studied me with an apprehensiveness that would have been comic if it had not been so pitiful. They saw me as one of the threats from which they had fled. Already, it seemed, I was preparing to run their lives for them.

Henning put it into words. He had difficulty. There had not been time for him to adjust—his rather sentimental affection for me as a baby could not be immediately cancelled out and replaced by this new mistrust. He fumbled, and at last managed to say:

“You’re...one of the Newmen.”

“No more than you two are,” I reasonably pointed out. “And I’m on your side.”

It was a simple statement, but even so, they could not grasp it. It was no use trying to explain there and then. They were in no state to comprehend. I grew tired of them staring at me so blankly and hopelessly, and in a fit of irritation I told them to go away and let me rest.

They went. Slowly they backed out of the room, still watching me in horrified fascination. They might almost have been expecting me to get up and pursue them.

I wriggled my still unresponsive body into a more comfortable position, and then practised movements for twenty minutes. By the end of that time I could control my arms and fingers, but I knew that I was not ready for walking or anything too ambitious in the way of physical effort.

It was time for a sleep. So I slept.

Henning and Myrna did not return until I called them. The moment they reappeared, I could tell from Henning’s face that they had reached some solemn decision. I could guess what it was.

Henning said: “We have decided that we must go away. Perhaps in one of the provincial cities we can fit in somewhere. Our duty to you and to the Community—”

“Please don’t get mixed up in a lot of idealistic imponderables,” I said. “Sit down and listen to me.”

My voice was stilted and high-pitched. The inadequacy of it annoyed me. But they did not resist its authority. They sat down.

I went on: “You don’t seem to realize that, although I belong technically to the strain of the Newmen, I have inherited all your dislike of their civilization. In me, your rebelliousness is doubled. In fact, I’m prepared to go a lot farther than you are.”

“In what way?” demanded Henning.

“In opposing the child dictators of the city,” I said. “In opposing the whole concept of the Newmen, which is an affront to the dignity of adult man.”

“But how can you? It’s...well, it’s unnatural. We can’t expect you not to behave like the rest. The way you talk...the way you are. How can you make out you’re opposed to them?”

“I’m aware of the apparent contradiction,” I assured him. “But it will all be resolved in good time. Time,” I added, “is what I need. Time for thought, and planning. A year or two—during which we must keep the secret from Clayton and the others.”

I refused to explain further. There was too much in need of clarification in my own mind before I would confide in others; before I could give my orders.

The Community would learn in due time. The Community would be grateful to me, eventually.

* * * *

For two years I was patient. For two years I went slowly and cautiously. I made a show of learning to walk in the clumsy, old-fashioned way that was common to all the children in Southerden. I evolved a ridiculous baby speech for public use—and rarely used the adult language I knew, even to my parents, for it only upset them, and they could rarely grasp what I was talking about.

The weeks and months went by while I studied the situation and tried to shape the future to my own satisfaction.

Through the information and visual images acquired from my mother and father, I knew nearly all there was to know about the Southerden Community. There had been few new developments in the area since I had been born. When I was in any doubt, or wanted to check on a point, I asked Henning briefly for details. Reluctantly, he would answer my questions. He no longer tried to treat me as a baby—his early affection had gone now, and his face was bleak with loss. It was only with the greatest difficulty that he could bring himself to play the game in public of being an adoring father.

Myrna was better. She sometimes had a yearning expression in her eyes when she looked at me, though, did she hope that somehow it would all turn out all right?

I saw Southerden, through their eyes, as they had seen it during the first few weeks after their arrival. They had been happy then. Their vague idealism became exultant. Life was simple and full of promise.

The fishing village of Southerden stood at the entrance to a small harbour. Behind it, the hills rose gently to farmland above. The arc of the bay formed a protective arm—it enclosed the village from the wind, and the hills helped to cut it off from the world that its inhabitants had left.

Fishing and farming—two of the oldest means by which man had learned to exist on this planet. Basic and primitive.

The sea and the land, offering their eternal challenge.

Those men and women who had turned their backs on the regime of the Newmen accepted the challenge as their ancestors had accepted it. In the rhythm of village life they found satisfaction. Their children grew up gradually, and gradually learned to plough the land and draw fish from the sea. They fumbled their way towards elementary knowledge. Children here were the taught, and not the teachers.

It was deliberate retrogression. They were swimming against the tide of human progress. But there had always been such stubborn recusants, and the Newmen could afford to be tolerant.

That was one of the first essentials on which I seized. The Communities, of which Southerden was only one, owed their continued existence to the tolerance of the very people whom they most hated. If the Newmen had wished to abolish the Communities, they could have done so without effort. Only their goodwill—or, rather, their indifference—made it possible for these groups to go on existing.

We were here on sufferance.

Other folk in Southerden might take this for granted, or might never pause to consider it. But I was infuriated by the arrogance of it. To the Newmen we were all beneath contempt—we were not even worth the trouble of abolishing; we were quaint, foolish, insignificant...not to be taken seriously.

But I knew myself to be as good as the Newmen.

The seed of hatred planted in my mind by my parents germinated. Soon it would thrust up its first shoots. Soon it would blossom.

* * * *

When I was old enough to be taken out for short walks without arousing the suspicion of the villagers, I often went with Myrna to the river mouth, half a mile along the coast from Southerden.

The river cut through the hills like a saw slicing through a barrier. But the river itself was the barrier. On this side lived the Community; on the other were Newmen.

Not all the Newmen lived in towns and cities. Agriculture was still important—particularly as practised by these highly-trained, gifted experts, who tackled it with the devastating brilliance their successive generations showed in every subject. Newmen living in the country were in no way mentally retarded—prospective parents could attend mass clinics in the nearest towns and receive a modification of the original pulse injection. It was an expensive process compared with the radiation blankets of the cities; but it was nevertheless cheaper than a radiation grid system over the whole countryside would have been.

I stared across the river at farms on the slopes on the opposite side.

Smooth, silent machines clambered over the ground. Robots went gliding swiftly about their business. An occasional human being would come out to inspect the work, and would, perhaps, look across the river at us. Once a middle-aged man waved condescendingly.

Over the sea, aerial magnetic fishing went on with ruthless efficiency. Sometimes our old fishing smacks would run across the line of the aircraft, and then they would switch off and wait—again condescending, contemptuous, tolerant....

One day I was left alone in the small garden at the back of the cottage. Sunk in thought, I unlatched the gate and walked out. My steps led me down the road towards the river. I was singing to myself—a song that I knew without having ever heard it; a song my mother had known as a child.

The words shaped themselves automatically. Without realizing it, I was singing aloud, strongly.

Realization came when I found myself suddenly face to face with old Clayton. There was no time to change my expression, to look bewildered, to put on the gestures and stumbling uncertainty of a child. From the look in his rheumy eyes I knew that he saw me clearly—he saw that I was not as other children in the Community were.

* * * *

I confronted them all in the Community meeting place, a wooden building on the waterfront.

At first Clayton had tried to take the law into his own hands. He had tried to have me driven away—to throw Henning, Myrna, and myself out—without any more ado. I can still hear him screaming:

“Get ’em away from here—the child-governed—they’re dangerous. Out with them, before it’s too late.”

But I talked him down. My puny child-body quivered with an instinctive, animal fear, which I could not control, but I stood my ground and out-argued the old man. It was not too hard. I had reached far beyond his simple intelligence. I knew what thoughts and ideas to appeal to, what breaches to concentrate on in his defences. I could out-think that surly, limited mind of his.

I talked him into allowing a public hearing. It was in accordance with the traditions of the Community—the old, revered traditions. When he had agreed and gone away to arrange it, he must have been puzzled as to how he had let himself be manoeuvred into such a position.

So I sat on the platform with Henning and Myrna, and with Clayton and a couple of other older people who had founded the Southerden Community.

And I said: “My mother and father didn’t want me to be a memory inheritor. It wasn’t their fault. They didn’t know I was going to be like this.”

“But now that you are,” growled Clayton, “there’s no place for you here.”

“I belong here.”

“You can’t stay.”

“I not only can,” I said, “I must. For your sakes more than my own. For all our sakes.”

People in the body of the hall rustled and whispered. There were murmurs of mistrust.

Clayton said: “We want none of your sort here. The Communities were founded for those of us who didn’t want any part in a world where children run mad.”

“You’ve got to adjust. You’ve got to face certain problems. You can’t—“

“We aim to keep this place the way it was when we started. Freedom from the Newmen—that’s the whole idea.”

“You can’t just stand still,” I said. “You can’t allow yourselves to stagnate.”

“He talks about stagnation. D’you see?” Clayton appealed to the audience, spreading his arms wide. His horny right hand clenched into a brown, knotted fist. “Like the rest of them. He wants progress, as they call it. He’s here to fool us. He’ll work on us—try to push us into spawning Newmen—”

“No,” I said. “But the Newmen will be encroaching on us if we don’t plan. Not this year, maybe, or next. But as the newer generations come along, they’ll start to covet our land. They’ll start to think of abolishing the reservation laws and taking us over.”

“They’ve promised—”

“Promised! They’ll find good reasons for evading their guarantees. As time goes on and their scientific progress becomes swifter, they’ll be less and less patient with the scattered Communities. They’ll want our land, and they’ll want those of us who live on it to be out of the way. They put up with us now because the climate of opinion is in favour of tolerance. But soon....”

I went on fervently and persuasively. I hammered it into them. Naturally suspicious and resentful, they were very ready to believe in the eventual deceitfulness of the Newmen.

And they were right to believe. I knew that. The workings of the minds of the Newmen were easily comprehensible to me. The progressive temperament was something I could understand—the urge to move onwards, to lose patience with reactionaries, to pursue remorselessly that ultimate scientific perfection.

Only Clayton stood out. His pride was at stake. He refused to believe in the menace I hinted at, though if one of his own people had put it to him he would have been the most outspoken on the subject. He saw me as a usurper. There he, too, was right. In time I would take over from him. It had to be. I saw that. Already I was beginning.

He growled: “You’re up to no good. I don’t know what schemes you’ve got, but they’re not good for us. You’re one of them.”

“In a way I am,” I quickly admitted. “Enough so to know the way they think and how they’re likely to act. I’m aware of their potentialities—and of my own. But remember that I’ve inherited from my parents an instinctive revulsion against the Newmen and all their ways.”

It was difficult to put across. He would not be convinced. But after a while he grudgingly held his peace. He could not realize how irrevocably I had, in my own mind, already declared war on the Newmen.

“The day will come,” I assured the Community, “when we shall restore the old order to our country. The day will come when we turn off the evil machine, and the radiation will cease to be.”

* * * *

I was twelve when I killed old Clayton.

I had been very busy in the intervening years. I travelled about the country visiting other Communities, inculcating the spirit of antipathy towards the Newmen and fanning the flame where it already burned. It was easy for me to get about, even to penetrate the cities—it was obvious that I was one of the Newmen, and I was allowed into the cities without protest. Adults there treated me with respect. I made my contacts. In the Communities there was widespread suspicion of the promises given by the Newmen. They were ready to listen to me. And in the cities there were surprising numbers of older people anxious for an excuse to revolt against the young folk who dominated them.

Perhaps there would always be this stratum of the disaffected. Just as younger generations in the past had broken away from their parents and defied the beliefs of their parents, nowadays the parents were resentful. As one generation succeeded another, there would always be this envy and unrest among those who felt themselves being left behind.

In some of the Communities I met one or two others like myself. Henning and Myrna had not been the only couple to delay leaving the city until it was too late. I heard stories of some who had been sent back; but there were others who had been allowed to stay. They might prove dangerous rivals. Or so I thought at first. Then, as I cautiously explored, I found that none of them constituted a serious menace. Not one had the strength of purpose that was a legacy to me from my parents. They would be my lieutenants—none of them would aspire to becoming the commander.

The organization was gradually built up. Patience was essential.

At first, as I travelled and preached the doctrine of eventual resistance to the Newmen, I was met with scepticism and suspicion. Then, as time went on, I received more and more support.

“The Newmen won’t be patient for ever. The Newmen will forget their promises sooner or later. The Newmen will want our lands—and our children.” That was the message I preached. Repetition drove it into the minds of the Community dwellers.

Before very long it was they who were impatient for action. They clamoured for an armed uprising. They wanted to set up sabotage groups at once, which would infiltrate into the cities and destroy the power plants.

I insisted on patience. Nothing would be achieved without long-term planning. We were puny—the Newmen were not altogether unjustified in regarding us as insignificant. When we finally struck, we had to know precisely what we were doing. There would be no second attempt if the first one failed.

I restrained the rebellious elements. A grand strategy would take years to develop. We must be sure of every man and every detail before we moved. Our contacts must be perfect, our lines of communication infallible. Surprise was everything.

The length of time involved was, I admitted, a danger in itself. In all that time, in all the quite separate groups that were held together only loosely by my travels and my growing organization, surely there would be one traitor? Word would leak out somehow.

But the years went on; the plans matured slowly; and still the Newmen did not pounce. Nobody defected from our ranks. The mere fact that people had turned their backs on the Newmen in the first place seemed to be sufficient guarantee of their sincerity.

I moved in and out of the cities, and aroused no suspicion. I established my contacts, and none of them broke. The resistance movement took shape.

But there was still Clayton.

Old enough to be the grandfather of most of the members of the Southerden Community, he grew more and more bitter and surly as time went on. He had set himself up as the grand old man of the village, and it irked him to see me assuming control. I knew that he hated me. I knew that if ever an opportunity. presented itself, he would treat me as he wanted to treat all the other Newmen. Given an opportunity, he would have got rid of me.

Which is why I felt quite justified in doing what I did.

I had gone for an evening stroll along the shore, thinking out one or two problems of co-ordination. The rhythm of my steps kept my mind moving steadily in a similar rhythm.

Next week, I thought, I must go up north. The Newcastle group needed an encouraging word; Immured in their artificial city, they were growing restless. They wanted to overturn the children who surrounded them giving orders and wrenching life more and more out of its old pattern.

If, after that, I could go on for a few days to....

“Hello,” said old Clayton.

I came out of my reverie with a start. I was annoyed. I did not like being disturbed in the middle of making plans.

I said, coolly: “Good evening.”

He looked down at me and shook his head wonderingly.

Then he glanced up at the sky.

“Yes,” he said. “Come to think of it, it is a good evening. Fine light on the water down there by the shore, isn’t there?”

I hadn’t noticed. I turned to look. Presumably he was right. But what did light on the water matter?

We were only a few yards from the edge of the riverbank, shored up here where it emerged into the sea. Beyond, lights blazed on a hillside farm, and there was a faint, gentle hum that drifted across to us.

Abruptly, Clayton said: “You’d like to be one of ’em, wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said—not because I didn’t know, but because this was how conversation was carried on in the Communities; it caused a bad impression if I seized on a point too quickly and flashed out a comprehensive answer. Here, one did not tackle a subject directly—one nudged gently towards it.

“You’d like to be over there,” he snarled, waving his hand derisively across the river. “You’re one of ’em. Don’t tell me different.”

“You are well aware,” I said, “that all my energies are devoted to planning for the day when the regime of the Newmen can be ended. I’m one of you. I disapprove of the rule of children as much as you do. It upsets the natural order of things. The balance of the human race has been seriously disturbed, and I am as determined as you are that one day it must be set right.”

“So that you can be boss?”

“The question doesn’t arise.”

The dying sun struck a queer, fierce red spark from his eyes. He said: “Oh, yes, it does. Jealousy—that’s all that drives you.”

“You’re mad.”

“I’m not mad,” he said. “I can see straight. I can see that you couldn’t go back to the cities because you’d be nothing there. A nonentity. Kids of your age’d be ahead of you, and when the next lot came along you’d be one of the slaves, like every other grown man and woman in those places. So you want to rule this place instead—”

“I want to re-establish the old order,” I insisted.

“And put yourself in charge? The glorious liberator, eh? The one-eyed man, king in the country of the blind....”

We stood on the edge of the bank now. I had not remembered walking there. I was conscious only of my hatred for this man—a hatred to match his own for me. Because he was old, he thought he had the right to be offensive to me. The old had many lessons to learn.

I said: “You don’t understand. You never will understand.”

“I understand why this Community was formed,” he said. “And I understand what will happen to it if you have your way. A war—destruction. All for your own glory. All because you’re lost, son. Lost. Neither one of us nor one of them.”

I thrust my face into his in the gathering dusk, and shouted: “I’m one of you. The only one with any foresight. The only one who can save you.”

“Lost,” he repeated. “And because you’re lost, we’ve got to pay for it. It’s a heavy price.”

It was then that my patience gave out. In that instant I saw that he might still ruin everything. With his malicious tongue and his refusal to face the harsh truths of our time he might turn people against me. I could afford to run no risks. For the sake of the future—the future of the Community—action had to be taken.

So I killed him.

* * * *

He saw it coming, and laughed. I remember his laugh even now. I remember it in the same way as I remember experiences from my mother’s and father’s memories—it is etched on my mind, unforgettably, the way they are.

His eyes widened as I struck him. His harsh laugh rang in my ears for a long moment, and then fell away as he plunged from the bank. There was a splash as he struck the surface of the water.

I swayed, and then turned and went away. By the time I got back to Southerden, I had evolved a story that made the best possible use of the incident. There was no point in wasting it—it could be employed to stiffen the spirit of resistance in the Communities.

I quickened my pace as I reached the end of the village street, and looked around wildly. The first person I saw was Tom Bentley, a middle-aged man who shared one of the fishing smacks with my father.

“Hello, there, Peregrine,” he said doubtfully, as I called to him.

Always they respected me, now; but always they were uneasy in my presence.

I said, breathlessly: “Something’s happened along by the river. I’m sure one of our people is in trouble there.”

“Who?”

“I couldn’t tell. I was too far away.”

“Go on.” He glanced in the direction of the river. The shore was shrouded in mist, and the line of the hills above the bay was only faintly blacker than the sky behind. “What did you see?”

“Someone was standing on the bank, on our side. And he seemed to be...well, pulled in. It was as though someone in a boat had come quietly up below him. Someone...or something.”

In a matter of minutes a small group was formed. Armed with knives and jagged pieces of wood, some of the burliest men in Southerden made their way towards the river. There was not a sound.

Apprehensively, the leader peered over the edge. I came up beside him.

“I’m sure it was here,” I said. “One minute he was there; the next, he was gone.”

“You think someone came over and got him?”

“Someone,” I repeated, “or something.”

I could sense their uneasiness. The robots on the other side were hated. The uncanny, inhuman movements of those efficient creatures made the hackles rise. The thought of some deadly, remorseless, soulless thing being sent across the river for some reason, and for some reason dragging one of our own people in....

It was a nightmare. Senseless, irrational—yet compelling, like a nightmare.

“Maybe,” said Tom Bentley, “it wasn’t one of our folk who got pulled in. Maybe the figure you saw was one of their own people on this side.”

Either way, the thought was a disturbing one. The Community wanted nothing to do with human beings from the other side, or with their inhuman creations.

We went back to Southerden. And by morning it was realized that old Clayton was missing.

He was never found. His body must have been swept out to sea by the swirling tide in the narrow estuary. That was how I imagined it; but I did not mention this to anyone. They muttered among themselves about the Newmen, who had come over and captured one of us.

“But why?” asked my father in an argument. “What point would there be in that?”

“We don’t know what the Newmen are up to,” said Tom Bentley darkly.

“They wouldn’t want to kidnap one of us,” my father persisted. “They know all about us. They know we’re only men and women—we’ve got nothing to offer them.”

“Except, perhaps, details of our plans to take back the country one day,” said Tom Bentley.

The men in the small group turned to look at me.

Henning said slowly. “If your plans have involved poor old Clayton in trouble—”

“Clayton was never taken into our confidence,” I returned.

And Tom Bentley at once said: “I wasn’t meaning to fix any blame when I said that. It was just an idea. And if it’s true, it shows that Peregrine’s been right all along. If they’re that sort of folk, we’re right to oppose them. We’re right to hit at them when we get the chance, all along the line.”

They tried to discuss some way of establishing the facts of what had occurred. But it was a hopeless proposition. Where did you begin on a thing like that? The Community had, of its own free will, cut itself off from the Newmen. To appeal to the laws and judicial system of the Newmen would be to invite scorn.

“But we’ve got to do it,” said Henning. “The laws of this country are still the laws of this country. We can send in a formal request for an enquiry. The government in London won’t let Newmen in this part of the country behave just as they like. Kidnapping—murder, maybe....”

I said: “There have been deaths in other parts of the country at one time and another, and who has ever got any satisfaction from the Newmen?”

They listened to me. They had none of them made any real contact with Communities in other parts of the country, so they had only my word for these things. I told them how communications from the Communities to the Newmen were ignored, how protests were laughed at, and how impossible it was to establish even formal relations with Newmen who lived, perhaps, only a mile away over a hill or beyond an adjacent river.

“That’s the way we wanted it,” interposed Tom Bentley. “So I reckon we’ve got no grudge now. No more than we’ve always had, anyway,” he added grimly. “Being dispossessed—grown men having to leave the cities to escape children—we’ve always faced up to that, and this doesn’t make any difference. It only makes us more sure.”

They followed his lead. They had to agree that there was nothing to be done. Nothing yet. The day would come, as I had promised.

* * * *

Sometimes I lay awake and thought about what Clayton had said on that last day of his life.

It came back to me, nagging at my memory. It came back like his laugh, with a thousand echoes. Simpler people would have been able in time to blur over the words and forget them; but my mind could not relax its grip on anything like that.

“Jealousy...,” he had said. “You want to rule this place instead....”

“The one-eyed man, king in the country of the blind.”

Was it true?

I came in the end to a cool recognition of my own pathological condition. This ability to analyse one’s own faults was another attribute of the Newmen. I saw that the emotionalism I had inherited from my parents was driving me to behave illogically; but this realization did not in any way affect my determination. I had to accept the fact that I had certain obsessions. I knew that it was impossible to alter them. The ability to see them clearly did not mean that I could overcome them. I knew better than that. I knew better than the crude psychologists and religious moralists of earlier centuries.

Perhaps it was true that I was jealous of the Newmen who controlled the advanced civilization of the cities. I sensed what delights they experienced in the exercise of their mental faculties. My own were clamped to the ground by circumstances. In the Community I could not use my abilities to their best advantage.

But if I could not be a ruler in the cities, I would be a ruler here. I would lead a campaign.

I would be all the things Clayton had accused me of being.

And Clayton was not the only one to accuse me.

The time for action was drawing near. We had been patient, and soon this patience would be rewarded. I had chosen the time of the Conference of All Nations—when that opened in London, we would strike.

It was then that my father called me a madman.

“A fanatic,” he cried in my face. “When the world is at peace, you want to make war—”

“Only on the false civilization,” I said.

“It is world-wide now. As long as we are allowed to live out our lives in peace—”

“Will there be any peace in your mind if you allow the Newmen to take over the Communities? Are you going to be resigned to the dying out of the Communities? We know what we must do. And it shall be done.”

World peace. That was true. But to me, and to the men who were my followers, it was a detestable peace. The boasts of the Newmen had been fulfilled; and that was an intolerable state of affairs. The spread of memory and skill inheritance throughout the world had enabled men to grapple much more intelligently with international problems—the development of an international language speedily settled many difficulties of communication, and the leaders of different countries thought and spoke on a higher plane than ever before. The World Federation was formed with a speed, which would have been incredible to politicians and pessimistic diplomats of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

And the President of the World Federation was a boy of ten.

* * * *

We did not have telescreens in the Communities, and we did not receive daily newscasts. The Communities had repudiated the world of dominant children, and scorned their inventions and gadgets. But in preparing the campaign I had been forced to establish some contacts within the cities, which would supply news. Important social and political information reached me by a special messenger service. We used nothing in the way of radio transmission—dealing with a world of technicians, we did not dare to use equipment that could be tapped, traced, and eavesdropped on.

I knew about the election of the President. He was Juhan Larsen, the youngest member of a family that had given a dozen distinguished scientists to the world in the last hundred years. Even before the introduction of the Newmen radiation, the name of the Larsens had been held high in world opinion. Devoted, serious, living secluded lives and working in the interest of abstract truth, they were the paragons of civilization. Little was known about their private lives—all of them kept out of the public eye. But now when a World President was needed and that man had to be of unimpeachable integrity and brilliance, it was essential that a Larsen should be drawn out into the blaze of day.

Juhan Larsen, ten years old, would open the session of the Conference of All Nations in London. Surrounded by the Federation Government who had chosen him—like a college of cardinals, I bitterly thought—he would preside over one of the greatest conclaves of representatives of nations at peace that had ever been assembled.

He would be in London; and he would die in London.

“You’re a fanatic,” said Henning to me yet again. “What will the murder of a boy achieve? If the Newmen have been able to bring world peace, let us leave them alone.”

“They will not leave us alone,” I said. “Not much longer.”

“You can’t defeat them. They’ll outwit you.”

“No.” I was sure I knew their weaknesses and knew how to defeat them. The implacable urge was not to be denied.

“What can you hope to achieve?” Henning went on desperately. “You say you’re fighting against the Newmen. You claim to represent the concept of the dignity of the older generation as against the dominance of children. But you yourself have dominated the councils of the Communities. You’ve become one of the Newmen in thought as well as....”

He fumbled for words. He was lost in complexities with which he could not grapple.

I said: “Whatever I am, and whatever I do, it is your legacy to me.”

Myrna put her face in her hands and wept. She was very emotional, and absurdly naive. And unreasonable—for it was true, was it not, that my feelings towards the Newmen were inspired by her and Henning? Because of them, I was a weapon designed to attack and demolish the Newmen. I had been fashioned only for that. In every fibre of my being I felt it.

Abruptly, from out of nowhere, a memory surged up into my mind. It was a picture of Southerden—a small village in the sunset, with a fishing boat coming into harbour.

The breeze from the sea had a salt tang, and made a faint whistling sound as it blew between the houses. I was conscious of happiness—and tranquillity.

The memory was one of Myrna’s. It came from her early days in Southerden. It gave me a picture of Southerden that I rarely saw nowadays. I rarely looked at the village itself—it was merely the place in which I worked and schemed.

I felt strangely moved. This was how it ought to be. In years to come, when we had defeated the mechanistic system of the Newmen, and all people were free to live as Nature meant them to live, it would all come back to this—I would sit in my old age in a cottage, and watch the sun on the water and the children playing as children were meant to play along the shore....

It was a thought of sweet simplicity.

But I was not simple. I could never be like that. This was the ideal for which the Communities had been formed, and it was this ideal which I preached when I organized resistance to the Newmen. But for me it was not enough.

I did not yet know what would be enough.

The vision faded. I had no time for sentimentality. The road ahead was plain. It led inevitably towards the death of Julian Larsen. After that, the pattern of life would shape itself; after that, the roads would have to be built anew.

* * * *

On that bright, cold October day we struck.

The timing was perfect. Southern Group Five entered the power station south of the Thames and demolished the generators. There was no opposition. It was a day of festivity, and there were no guards on the power station.

In point of fact, there were no guards anywhere. The Newmen had grown overconfident, it seemed. World peace had become such a certain thing that precautions of the most obvious kind were no longer taken. The power station rocked and crumbled under the impact of carefully placed explosive. The radiation blanket over London died.

In the provincial towns and cities, similar attacks were being made simultaneously. They were equally successful.

At the same time, my forces pounced on radio stations and took over telescreen transmitters. At the very moment that President Julian Larsen was entering the Council Chamber of the World Federation Hall, erected on the site of the recently demolished Old St. Paul’s, telescreens went blank for a moment. Then vision was switched on again.

All the technical details were in the hands of city-bred rebels. I had chosen carefully. I knew whom I could trust, and they did not fail. Older men who had worked for years in the radio offices all over the country now assumed control.

The Newmen had believed too firmly in their imposed peace. They were not ready for assault

“They’ve grown smug,” I said to Michael Martin, a young man from the north whom I had chosen to act as my lieutenant in the opening campaign. “They are too complacent. They never expected a revolt from the despised country-dwellers!”

In the grand assembly, no word could reach the delegates. They were too deeply engrossed in their solemn ritual of speeches and declarations. Their faces and voices were carried out to telescreens all over the world. Even the technicians on the spot did not know that their headquarters staff had been replaced by rebels.

I watched the President on the monitor screen in Radio House, in the heart of London. It was strange to see that boy mouthing platitudes and to know that very shortly he would be dead.

In the middle of his speech of welcome, he stopped abruptly. A strange expression crossed his face. He put his right hand up to his ear as though feeling a momentary pain.

There was a murmur in the Federation Hall.

His silence lasted for a second only; but it seemed a long second. Then he looked up, and it seemed that his eyes were peering out of the screen into mine.

Something had gone wrong. But how? It was too soon for him to know yet. He had no way of knowing.

He said: “I have just received news of a misguided attack on our government. Guerrilla forces have made concerted assaults on our main cities, and seized the radio stations.”

The fretful murmur in his audience rose like the roar of a descending wave, then splashed into fragments and rustled away.

“There is no cause for alarm,” said Larsen glibly. “We had not prepared for such wanton outbreaks of war; but we were not altogether unprepared, if I may put it that way.” His thin, confident smile was infuriating. He was talking nonsense. “Although it has been against the principles of the Newmen to maintain armed forces since the signature of the World Covenant, we have always borne in mind the possibility that unruly elements might take advantage of the new enlightenment.”

Martin muttered in my ear: “Excuses, that’s all.”

“We have always based our policy,” Larsen went on, “on the assurance that the regime of the Newmen could not be overthrown within a matter of weeks. We could have only one enemy—the reactionaries who have been allowed to live in peace away from our civilization. If these barbarians”—again he seemed to be staring into my eyes—“chose to launch an insane attack on us, we have always known that we could afford to lose a few yards.”

“A few yards!” I echoed furiously.

“Things have happened as we foresaw. It is regrettable that force should once more have to be used. It is regrettable that strife should have broken out once again in a world that we believed to have been freed from the menace of war. But order will soon be restored. Already the radiation blanket, cut off momentarily by an act of sabotage, has been restored. A secondary station has come into operation—”

“Cut him off!” I snapped. “Cut transmission, and put our proclamation on.”

Martin snapped an order into the internal speaker. Almost at once Larsen faded, and suddenly one of our own men was on the screen, beginning to read the message we had prepared so laboriously.

I hurried out of the room. Julian Larsen had caused a slight upset in our plans, but if we moved fast it would not be serious.

Yet how had he received that message? He could not have known before he went into the Federation Hall, for the carefully timed attacks had not been unleashed then. Nobody had approached him while we had been watching him on the screen, and he could not have received radio warning—for the radio stations were in our hands.

My commandeered helicar sprang from the roof of Radio House, and spun down like a madly windblown leaf to the landing ground by the spacious Federation Hall.

Two men moved towards me from the main door.

I tensed, then walked briskly to meet them.

One said: “Have you got a pass?”

“I’m from Radio House,” I said. “Urgent news from the Controller there to the President. It’s been taken over—”

“Radio House as well? We heard something from inside, but—”

“I’ve got to have a word with him.”

If I had been an adult they might have suspected. They looked doubtful as it was; but they were in the middle thirties, and I was only a boy. I spoke in a voice of command—the tone they were accustomed to—and before they had time to wonder, or to argue, I was hastening into the Federation Hall.

The corridors were almost deserted. At one corner I saw a uniformed attendant coming out of a door. As it swung open and then shut, the murmur from the conference hall buzzed out like the sound of bees, and then was put off.

He glanced at me; but I went on, out of sight.

I knew the way. It had all been mapped out. Admittedly things were not what they ought to have been—the alarm had been given—but there was still no reason why the pieces of our plan should not lock firmly together.

Even as I opened the door of the President’s ante-room, I heard the muffled thunder of the explosion outside. The sound was further away than I had expected it to be—to seal the doors, the explosion ought to have been closer and more jarring; but my men knew what they were doing.

An elderly man by the door on the far side of the ante-room turned.

“What are you doing in here? You .know the President has requested privacy. Everyone knows—”

“This is urgent,” I said. “I’ve escaped from Radio House.”

I hoped that the others were close behind me. I hoped that they were assembling by the doors of the conference hall, ready to swoop.

The man said; “He’s coming off the platform now. We’ve heard rumours—he made an announcement....”

Julian Larsen appeared in the doorway. He was an inch shorter than I was, and I thought how insignificant and unworthy he was.

“What is it?” he asked, glancing at me.

And then his face set. Awareness blazed in his eyes.

I jumped, took him off balance, and stabbed him. Once...twice.... His head fell loosely back, and the gash across his throat began rhythmically to pour blood.

The man by the door squealed, and made a vague movement of his arm. I caught him, pulled him close, and smashed my fist into his face. He went down.

Then the door to the corridor was flung open. I swung exultantly round to greet my followers.

The faces were the faces of strangers.

Four of them were forcing me back against the wall, while another bent over the President. When he got to his feet there was a disturbing sadness in his face. No hatred, no vengeful fury; merely sadness.

He was a man in his early twenties. He came and stood before me. I thought he would strike me, but he simply shook his head.

“You have murdered a fine man,” he said gently.

“That’s only the beginning,” I said.

“You want to spread bloodshed?”

“We want to restore the old order,” I said. “I advise you to release me at once. My men will be here any moment. We have seized power stations and radio stations. The Federation Hall, with delegates, of all nations of the world, is surrounded—”

“It is not,” he said in the same gentle, weary voice.

I snapped: “My men—”

“Your men,” he said, “were rounded up before they got here. Your truck of explosives was blown up at the corner of the approach.”

A chill, like the first cold breeze off a freshening sea, struck me. I was alone. The men of the Communities would have to fight their way through to reach me. It might take time. They might be too late.

I thrust my face aggressively forward. “But we’ve got Radio House, and its subsidiaries through the country,” I said. “We’ve destroyed power stations. You can’t stop us.”

“We can. We are doing so already. We are reoccupying Radio House—”

“I don’t believe it.”

He nodded to one of the men holding my right arm. The grip was relaxed; but still there was one man on that side with fingers of iron.

The one who had walked away thumbed a wall control, and a small telescreen blinked into life.

I looked into the face of a boy announcer—cool, reassuring, precise...and not one of my men.

Pictures began to flicker on the screen—pictures of a brief bout of fighting in the streets of Manchester; of robot labourers already dragging shattered generators away from their mountings and setting to work on the splintered flooring.

“It was a futile attempt,” said the smooth-faced, sad-voiced man. “Why did you make it? Have you lost touch so completely with the Newmen that you don’t understand what progress we have made?”

He was about to say something else, when suddenly he seemed to concentrate on me. I saw in his eyes the same look I had seen in those of the President

He said: “How can it be...how can you be one of us and yet not aware?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said sullenly.

Again he shook his head. “I see. So that is what it is? A rogue—a stray—a lost one. And you did not know that our latest two generations have developed their telepathic faculties?”

“Telepathy...!”

Of course it was to have been expected. At that level of mental development, telepathy was the next inevitable stage. And that was how Julian Larsen had received advance warning of our successful invasions of the radio stations.

“A few more generations,” the unctuous voice purred on, “and we shall have no need of telescreens—or radio equipment of any kind. For the time being it is necessary for recent generations, for older people who have not been capable of developing the faculty. But soon the cumbersome equipment will be a thing of the past.”

I saw the wonderful vista that could open up. It was magnificent...but not for me.

“You did not stand a chance, did you?”

“At any rate,” I triumphed, “I killed your President. That will take some explaining away.”

“Your men from the Communities succeeded in the first attack because of the surprise element. Once that was over, you could not sustain your position. You yourself got in here because to older people you were clearly one of the Newmen. Again the surprise element—which could not last. Once Julian Larsen had seen you, the game was up. He sent out an instinctive warning. But we had already had a vague warning from you already—without fully realizing it, you were sending out discordant mental pulses. Many of us picked them up. We knew something must be wrong—which is why we picked up your load of explosives, and why we got to you so quickly. You yourself were the main cause of the failure of the revolt.”

“You mean...I’m telepathic. I could be—”

“You could have been one of us. If you had lived with us, accepting our disciplines and our regime, you could have developed the faculty in an elementary form at any rate. But it is too late.”

I drew myself up. “I did what I believed to be right,” I said loudly. “And people who still believe in our cause will be heartened by the knowledge that I reached the President—that it was possible to get this close, and remove him from the face of the earth.”

“The general public will never know that.”

I gestured towards the crumpled body. “But—”

The door opened again. A boy came in. I looked once more into the features of Julian Larsen.

“You did not think, did you,” went on that remorseless voice beside me, “that we would take chances with the President of the World Federation? He had to be the ultimate in human development—we had to elect a member of the Newmen free from errors, ideal for the post, and yet replaceable.”

“It’s impossible,” I shouted. “There couldn’t be more than one. You couldn’t have an exact, identical substitute....”

None of them answered. They merely nodded towards the duplicate Larsen.

“Two of them,” I said weakly.

The voice beside me said: “Identical twins. An obvious precaution, I think you will agree!”

* * * *

They have given me a room with blank walls, and an unlimited supply of writing materials and a recorder, I have told them that I will dictate my memoirs, and they have agreed.

“The spirit of resistance is not dead,” I have warned them. “It will never die.”

They merely smile sadly, with their endless, infuriating tolerance.

“I shall dictate,” I have told them, “a record of what has happened; and one day the record will be discovered, and the spark will burn again. People of the future will look back to me as the first to strike a blow against the Newmen tyranny. I shall let them see what happened. It will be an example for them.”

“Yes,” they gravely agree, “let them see. It will, as you say, be an example for them.”