The Guardians (3 page)

“Yes, Mr. Kennealy,” Rob said.

He had turned away. He found himself grasped by the shoulders, and Mr. Kennealy stared into his eyes.

“It's for your good, Rob,” he said. “Believe that. I can't explain, but it's for your good.”

Inside the holovision screen one figure lunged, the other parried and struck back and the first dropped ludicrously on his back, into the thorns. Rob nodded. “I'd better go back and see about packing my things.”

T
HE BOARDING SCHOOL STOOD ON
land enclosed by a bend in the River Thames. The main part, including the games area and most of the classrooms, was in late twentieth century style, bare and sprawling. The boarding houses which marched along the inner perimeter were more recent, austere within but their exteriors colored and ornamented. Rob had been allotted to G-House, which was pastel blue crossed by broad transverse stripes of orange.

For the first few days he was too confused to take in much beyond an impression of constant activity.
The day was filled to overflowing. Broadcast alarms woke the dormitories at half past six and there was a scramble to wash and dress and reach the games area by seven. They were nearly a quarter of a mile from it—only H-House was farther off. You had to run in wet weather, with a cape flapping around you. On arrival there was roll call. Latecomers, if only by half a minute, were put on report and given extra gymnastics in the evening.

The half hour of exercises in the morning was theoretically followed by half an hour's free time before breakfast at eight o'clock. But you quickly learned the importance of queuing in advance outside the dining room because the food, apart from being poor and badly cooked, was never sufficient to go round. For those at the end of the queue the horrible lumpy porridge was further diluted with hot water, there was half a portion of reconstituted egg or half a rissole, and there might not even be a slice of bread. Senior boys pushed their way to the front at the last minute; juniors had no option but to stand in line.

Morning school was from 8:45 till 12:30, when
there was a break for lunch and more queuing. In the afternoons they had games—gymnastics again, in bad weather—until tea at half past four. Then there was evening school from five to seven, after which you were free until lights out at nine. Free, that is, if you had not been detailed for extra gym, or for one of the hundred jobs which prefects or any other seniors required to have done. Rob went to bed exhausted each night and slept soundly on a lumpy three-section mattress resting on the metal slats of his truckle bed.

Gradually he took stock of his surroundings. There were thirty boys of roughly his own age in his dormitory. He was aware of something going on at the far end on the first night, of voices and cries of pain, but he was too tired to pay much attention. It happened the next night, and he realized that there were bigger boys present and that one of the younger boys was being tormented. D'Artagnan, he thought, would not have lain quietly in bed. He would have done something—tackled the bullies. Nor was it much good putting up the excuse that he had no Porthos, Athos or Aramis, and no prospect of finding
them among the unfriendly jostling boys in the dormitory. D'Artagnan would have acted on his own. The tormentors left in the end. He could hear the boy sobbing after they had gone, and fell asleep with the sound in his ears.

He asked a ginger-haired, pale boy called Perkins about it the following day while they were waiting to go into class.

“Simmons, you mean? He was just getting the Routine.”

“The Routine?”

Perkins explained: it was a ritual bullying conducted on new boys.

“I'm new, and they haven't done anything to me,” Rob said.

“Too new. The first three weeks they leave you alone. You've got your turn to come.”

“What do they do? What did they do to you?”

“Various things,” Perkins said. “The worst was tying string around my forehead and tightening it. I thought my eyes were going to pop out.”

“Did it hurt a lot?”

“Did it hurt! I'll give you a tip: yell just a bit. If you don't yell
they keep at you till you do. And if you yell too much they keep on as well. If it's just a bit, they get bored.”

They went into class—history of engineering. The master was a small, neat, gray-haired man who rattled through his talk quickly and perfunctorily. He was dealing with rocket propulsion, flashing slide after slide through the projector. He asked for questions in a way that did not invite response, but Rob said, “It's not much used now, is it, sir?”

The master looked at him with some surprise. “Hardly at all. In terraplaning, of course, but there are no really useful applications.”

“It was chiefly intended for interplanetary exploration, wasn't it, sir?”

“Yes.”

“Why was that given up? Men landed on the moon, and probes reached Mars.”

The master paused before replying. “It was stopped because it was pointless, Randall. It is Randall? Billions of pounds were spent on utterly useless projects. We have different priorities now. Our aims are the happiness and well-being of
mankind. We live in a saner, more ordered world than our fathers did. Now, if you have satisfied your vanity by interrupting, we will get on with the lesson. A much more useful invention, and one that is still used in an improved form, is the jet engine. The origin of this . . .”

Some of the other boys were looking at him with disgust. In his old school it had not been popular to ask questions. He realized it was probably going to be worse here.

He wondered if the world really was so much happier than in the past. No one starved, it was true, and the only war was the faraway one in China. No one who stayed out of trouble had to fight in that if they did not want to. There were holovision and the Games, the carnivals—all kinds of amusements. Riots, too, of course, but they were over quickly and mostly people could avoid them. Many seemed to enjoy them. What the master had said was probably right.

Rob came back to more immediate considerations and thought about what Perkins had told him. It was a consolation that they left you alone for three weeks. He had only been here three days.

•  •  •

The weather had been blustering and rainy when Rob first came to the boarding school. Then there were several days of warm, bright weather, more like summer than spring. On the evening of the second he succeeded in dodging a group of prefects on the prowl for slaves and made his way around the edge of the playing fields—crossing them was probably forbidden and anyway would have been conspicuous—to the river.

It surprised him that no one had done the same. This might be forbidden too, but he was prepared to chance that to get an hour's peace and solitude. It was also true, as he had learned long ago, that most people—boys or adults—disliked being alone. He was glad of his own company normally, at present very much so.

He had brought a book with him and, on impulse, his mother's photograph and the bundle of letters. The book was one of the two he had borrowed from the Public Library. He had not had time to take it back before leaving the Kennealys and he did not see how he was going to be able to
return it now. The library was six or seven miles away and, in any case, boys were not allowed out of the school grounds without special permission—never granted to a junior. He supposed he would have to hand the books in for the school to send back.

But he was not in a hurry to do this because as far as he could see they were irreplaceable. There was no library in the school, no books except those used as aids to the various visual learning techniques. He had not really thought there would be, but it was a blow all the same. He was reading the books he had as slowly as possible, drawing them out. This one was called
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
and was about a Victorian London in which armies of local patriots fought pitched battles in the gaslit streets. It was fantasy, of course. Even a hundred and fifty years ago London had been enough of a Conurb for that to have been impossible. But it was nice to think about. He thought of the struggles today between supporters of the different terraplane factions. It was not the same. A parish would have been something worth fighting for. He read
half a dozen pages and closed the volume at the end of a chapter.

He looked at the photograph instead and wondered about the smile. He had known his mother as someone not only ill, but also unhappy. She had a few acquaintances, no friends. Rob held the bundle of letters in his hands. Their very existence was a link with the past. No one wrote letters nowadays. If people did not visiphone, they sent sound-grams. It was strange, and strangely pleasant, to think of one person writing words on paper, slowly and carefully, to send to another.

He had thought before of reading them but had held back. They were private: probably he should have got rid of them, dropped them in the nearest waste-disposer. He pulled off the rubber band and held the top envelope in his hands. They were both dead, and he was left. He pulled the sheets of paper out carefully, unfolded them and began to read.

They were love letters as he had expected. It was not on that account he wanted to read them. The thought had been that he might somehow get closer to the memory of his mother, understand the smile
in the photograph. The letter did not help though. It was conventional, telling the man how much she loved him, how slow the days were passing before she could hope to see him again. Rob felt some disappointment. He was folding the letter up to put it back in the envelope when something struck him. The address at the top: White Cottage, Shearam, Glos. “Glos.” was short for Gloucestershire. And Gloucestershire was in the County.

He looked through other letters which confirmed it. His mother had been born in the County. She had met his father when he came in to work on a special job—there must have been contact still in those days—had fallen in love with him and come to the Conurb to marry him.

•  •  •

The County was not mentioned on holovision, but Rob had heard talk about it. The tone was usually a mixture of envy and contempt. The gentry lived in the County, the gentry and their servants. There were others, the Commuters, who worked professionally in the Conurbs but had their permanent homes in the County. Doctors, lawyers, senior
officials, factory executives came into this class. Some went back nightly by private copter, others on weekends.

Those who lived all the time in the Conurbs had no desire to cross the border to the other world. There were good reasons for this. Life in the County was supposed to be very dull. There were no Games there and no holovision. No cities—no dance halls or amusement parks, no bright lights. Nothing but fields and villages and a few very small towns. Horses, seen in the Conurbs only at race tracks, provided the universal means of transport. (Copters were only used by Commuters to get in and out.) Everything was slow, unhurried, boring. There were no electrocars or buses, no monorail trains.

Worse than anything was the fact that there was, as Conurbans understood it, no community life. There were no crowds, no sense of being part of a noisy mass of people who could give each other reassurance and security. Conurbans were sociable and gregarious, enjoying one another's company. At the seaside the really popular beaches were those
where everyone was packed together, the sand barely visible for the bodies lying or sitting on it. In the County, they knew, there were empty fields stretching to the horizon, shores on which the only sound was the cry of gulls, moors where a man might walk—horrifying thought—for hours and meet no one.

Rob had heard these defects dwelt on. The gentry were probably used to them. They lived idly on their investments rather than working. That might be enviable (though the working week in the Conurbs was only twenty hours) but not what went with it. The gentry's lives were dull because they themselves were only half alive. They could not have put up with the excitement, the “go,” which characterized life in the Conurbs. As for the Commuters, they might be bosses but they were really no better than hangers-on, aping their betters. There was something sneaky and dishonest about living in two worlds. The Conurbans prided themselves on their own single-heartedness.

Views such as these were well known to Rob, though he recalled now that he had never heard
them expressed by his parents. He had not challenged them, though he had not in every way agreed with them. There was even something desirable in the thought of those empty fields, the unpeopled moors and beaches. But he had kept his feelings to himself.

One other thing he remembered. The greatest contempt had been reserved for those who lived in the County as servants, ministering to the needs of the gentry. Their spinelessness in accepting that kind of servitude was seen as utterly repulsive. He realized why the County had never been mentioned by his mother and father. His mother obviously had not been gentry, so she must have come from the servant class.

It was a shock, a great shock. He felt ashamed and then, in an odd way, angry. His mother had not been spineless. Gentle, yes, but brave also, especially during the final years of illness. If they were wrong about that they could be wrong about other things, too. He realized with another smaller shock that he was thinking of the other Conurbans as Them—something different from himself.

•  •  •

There were no lessons on Saturday morning but that did not make the day one to look forward to, because instead there was the weekly school inspection. Friday evening was devoted to an extensive cleaning and tidying program, supervised by the prefects, and this was continued after breakfast on Saturday. The inspection, by the Master of Discipline, started at eleven and lasted for roughly an hour and a half. He took with him an entourage of prefects, who noted down the names of offenders against his rules for later punishment.