Omega (15 page)

Felicity answered before thinking: 'By all means - I agree with Claire, actually, but if you liked
The Sea Priestess
it's still . . .' She broke off, suddenly realizing.

'Miss - you all right?'

The irrelevant thought came to her, unreasonably inflaming her anger:
He couldn't even take the trouble to put them in alphabetical order. . .
. She picked up the list, so fiercely that she almost tore it. 'I'm sorry, Don. You can't have
Moon Magic.
Or anything else by Dion Fortune.'

'But, miss-why?'

Claire Evans joined Don, drawn away from her shelf-browsing by the unwonted sharpness in the teacher's tone. Felicity looked up at them. Don, Claire, the inseparables -
two of her favourites; she had been midwife to their blossoming minds, their probing intelligence; even indirectly to their love.

'Are you two busy for an hour?'

Surprised by the question, they glanced at each other and said, 'No, miss,' together.

Felicity knew she was breaking the rules by involving them in her own anger against the headmaster but she could not help herself. 'You see this list? It contains all the authors the headmaster considers to be dangerously pagan-oriented. I've go to
remove them all from the school
library shelves and loc
k them in a cupboard. I suppose
I'm lucky I haven't got t
o make a bonfire of them in the playground...
Will you give me a hand?'

They stared at her and then they stared at the list.

'Miss Holroyd - you can't do it!'

'Are you asking me to disobey the head, Claire?'

'I . . .' The girl changed her tack, asking suddenly: 'Miss, are
you
a pagan?'

'I'm a Quaker.'

'I don't know much about Quakers, but I know you, miss. And I know what you've always told us. People got a right to say what they believe and write about it - and we ought to look at 'em all, an' then decide what
we
believe. Not have anyone
tell
us what to believe or think. Right?'

Felicity sighed. 'Right.'

Don held out the list to her and asked almost shyly: 'Well?'

Claire followed up immediately with: 'You want us to
help
you with that thing?'

There was a long moment while anger, love, and professional habit struggled within Felicity Holroyd. Then something broke. She took the list calmly from the boy's fingers and tore it in two. 'Will you please take a note to the head for me? It won't take me a minute to write it.'

'You're not resigning, are you?'

The alarm in Claire's eyes strengthened her, overcoming the instant of panic her decision had sparked in her. 'No, Claire. I'm going to lock myself in this library and refuse to budge. And I'm not removing a single book. You can tell the others - Miss Holroyd's staging a protest sit-in.'

'We'll stay here with you!'

'You will not. Thanks for offering but no. A sit-in's one thing - inciting pupils to join it's another. Put me in the wrong straight away. Just take the note for me - and remember you don't know what's in it if he asks you.'

Clair
e hesitated, then nodded. 'All
right. But while you're writing it, I'm going to get you some sandwiches and a bottle of coke. Two or
three
bottles. No point in making it a hunger-strike.'

'And a sleeping bag,' Don said. 'Don't lock up till we're back, will you?'

'I don't like it, Mr Barker,' the police sergeant said. 'There must be about a hundred and fifty kids out there picketing and another hundred blocking the corridor to the library. We've tried reasoning with them but they just start chanting and drown us. The library door's very solid and she's got heavy steel filing cabinets jammed against it - we can see that through the window. The windows are all steel-barred, too. What is this place, Fort Knox?'

'My predecessor put them in, during the vandalism wave in the eighties,' the headmaster told him. 'Look, Sergeant, I want that woman
out.
She's been there all last night and this morning. I gave her an ultimatum for eight o'clock this morning to come out or be dismissed. She said she would stay there till my instructions about the books were withdrawn. There was no question of that, of course, so at eight-fifteen I told tier she was dismissed and pushed her formal letter of dismissal under the door. That was while I could still
reach
the door. A few minutes later the pupils started arriving - with
banners,
Sergeant! The whole thing's a conspiracy. She must have told them what she was going to do and they got ready for this - this outrage, overnight.'

'You're their headmaster, sir. Surely they'd listen to you before they'd listen to the police?'

'Do you think I haven't tried, damn it? And my staff? - or most of them, anyway. I strongly suspect that one or two of the other teachers are in sympathy with her though none of them have said so to my face. . . . First I reasoned with the pickets, and all they said was, "Sorry, sir, but we think Miss Holroyd's right." They simply refused to move. So then I threatened them. I had no alternative.'

'Threatened them with what exactly, sir?'

With
you,
Sergeant. I told them they had one hour to clear the corridor and the playground and assemble in their classrooms. After that I would call in the police to clear them.'

'Did
any
obey you?'

The headmaster snorted. 'About a dozen. Out of two or three hundred. So, you see, my threat has to be made good. Otherwise we face total breakdown of discipline - how permanent, God alone knows.'

'Have you called on parents for help?'

'Sergeant, this is a working weekday and our pupils come from an area of about forty square kilometres.... I've managed to contact a few and get them here. One father persuaded his son to go home and that's all.' The headmaster frowned nervously. 'Another unfortunate factor -Miss Holroyd is popular with parents. . . . One husband and wife arrived together and told me flatly that if Miss Holroyd had felt driven to this extraordinary action there must be something wrong with
my
attitude. They refused to help. In fact, they smiled and waved at the children in the playground on the way out - and the children cheered them. It was intolerable.'

The sergeant seemed to be about to ask something, and then to think better of it. After a moment or two he said, 'Look, Mr Barker, you're asking me to take my men and clear a way through those kids - boys
and
girls - by force, and then to smash down the door, or do the same thing from outside and cut through the window-bars. And then to bring their heroine out under arrest, right through the middle of them. The mood they're in, we'd have little chance of doing all that without kids getting hurt. If you ask me,
no
chance. . . . Why don't we just play it cool? Keep my lads in sight and let the kids wonder what we mean to do. By this evening, they'll start being hungry and bored.. . .'

'Sergeant, there are reporters outside. They've been pestering me all morning. Television news have been on the phone - BBC
and
ITN - and if this thing isn't cleared up pretty dam' quick there'll be cameras in the street. And you think those youngsters will drift away through
boredom?'

The sergeant said, cxpressionlessly: 'I think I'd better call in my superiors, sir.'

'Yes,' the headmaster told him. 'I think you'd better.'

Few newly elected Members of Parliament can have had such heaven-sent material for a maiden speech as Quentin White. House of Commons etiquette decrees that maiden speeches be received with special sympathy and tolerance whether one agrees with them or not, but in the present climate of the House White commanded even closer attention than that laid down by parliamentary good manners.

Virtually every member, of course, had read the
Evening News
edition which White brandished in his hand as he spoke, and those who had not were hurriedly scanning copies borrowed from their neighbours.

The page 1
splash read:

SCHOOL BLAZE ENDS LIBRARY LOCK-OUT
15
children,
27
others injured

Six children were hospitalized with bone fractures, nine with lesser injuries, and five policemen and 22 adult civilians were also admitted following the rioting and arson which climaxed Wolverhampton schoolteacher Felicity Holroyd's protest lock-out this afternoon.

The fire, which broke out in or near the school library minutes before police cut through a steel-barred window to arrest Miss Holroyd, was still raging an hour later. Firemen's work was hampered by the crowd of anxious parents, escaping children, and onlookers -some vociferously protesting for or against Miss Holroyd - who packed the narrow streets around the school.

Miss Holroyd was arrested on a charge of causing a breach of the peace, and a police spokesman said other charges might be preferred against her when the incident had been fully investigated.

Twelve adult demonstrators and twenty-three chil
dren had been arrested at the t
ime of going to press.

Cause of the fire and the exact point of outbreak were still unknown, and the police spokesman refused to speculate. He agreed, however, that in addition to aggravating panic, the fire had incited some demonstrators to shout that Miss Holroyd had started it, and others to insist that it was the work of a provocateur. From this, street fighting had broken out.

Miss Holroyd locked herself in the library at about 5.30 pm yesterday in protest against the headmaster's order to remove certain pagan-oriented books from the shelves.

'She did it quite without warning,' headmaster William Barker told our reporter. 'She did not even ask me to reconsider my order - merely barricaded
herself in and sent one of the pupils to me with a note.

'Next morning, hundreds of pupils set up a mass picket-line, with banners and placards already prepared. Miss Holroyd had clearly incited these children, for whom she shared responsibility, into deliberate, organized rebellion against authority.

'And for what? In
an attempt to keep morally poi
sonous
material on the library shelves
'

Quentin White made the most of it.

'The tip of the iceberg, Mr Speaker. Or should I say the crack in the sewer? For while honourable members debate whether or not to give His Majesty's Government the powers it seeks, the bearers of moral infection
are
busy below the surface, gnawing at the fabric of our civilization. Because one headmaster was on the watch, and took action, the underground menace - at one point only - took fright and struck. The result? Physical damage, certainly - to an important school and to the bodies of innocent children and adults. But who can calculate the moral and psychological damage?

'More important, Mr Speaker - I have already emphasized that this has happened
at one point only,
where the spark of one man's integrity and one woman's breach of professional ethics - to say the very least - have detonated an explosion. Who can calculate the extent of the danger which is still concealed, still undetonatcd? At what point could local disaster erupt into national disaster?

'I believe, sir, that the answer stares honourable members in the face. The moral threat could erupt uncontrollably, if we suffered just one more natural calamity like the wave of earth tremors from which we have barely recovered. The experts cannot assure us that it will not happen. They cannot even assure us that the next earthquake would not be incalculably worse.

'If that should happen - and happen without warning -His Majesty's Government will be fighting on two fronts. Against physical disruption on an unheard-of scale - and against the spiritual saboteurs who would seize on that disruption with eagerness.

'Mr Speaker, new as I am
to this Mother of Parliaments,
I urge honourable mem
bers to waste no time in arming
Hi
s Majesty's Government with the
powers that it
must
have,
before
the crisis w
hich may break upon us any day, any hour
'

For the Prime Minister to rise, seeking the Speaker's eyes, in the middle of a maiden speech was so unthinkable that a tremor of astonishment ran through the House. Quentin White, quick-witted but still unsure of procedure, bowed towards the Premier and sat down in mid-sentence.