The Guardians (18 page)

“Did Mike know—about his father?”

She shook her head. “It is not a thing one talks about.”

But somehow the seed of rebelliousness had been transmitted, to spring into growth when Mike found a ragged boy and helped him, and understood that someone from the Conurb could be a human being like himself. And then he had looked around and seen the stagnation and rottenness festering under the elegant surface of the life he knew: the corruption that could manipulate people like puppets, and the acquiescence of the puppets in their silken bonds.

Rob shivered. Mike had seen things to which he, almost deliberately, had blinded himself. The bait which he had been offered today and had so nearly taken had been more subtle and powerful but no less poisonous. The chance to be not a puppet, but a puppet master.

“You are young, Rob—too young to understand,” Mrs. Gifford said. “But they will soon find him. I am sure they will. You cannot hide for long in the County. I told them the clothes he would be wearing, and they promised to do their best to make sure he did not get hurt.”

Rob stood up.

“Are you going to bed?”

“Yes.” He bowed but did not look at her. “Goodnight ma'am.”

•  •  •

The fine weather had held and with it the moonlight. The fence glittered away in the distance, a barrier easily crossed except in men's minds. He was better equipped this time: he had brought a trowel to help him scrape a hole under the wire.

Since he made his decision a lot of things had become clear, going back even to his days in the Conurb. He remembered when he had waked in the night and heard men's voices in the Kennealys' flat. A dangerous business, one of them had said—you have to take account of the risks. He had known they were talking about his father's accident but had thought they were talking about the risks of being an electrician. But the dangerous business could have been something different. His father had been a good electrician and it was incredible he could have made the mistake he was supposed to have done. If he were part of a conspiracy, on the other hand . . . It might explain Mr. Kennealy's
refusal to help when he was sent to the boarding school, too. “You'll be safer there,” he had said, and then corrected it to “better looked after.” Perhaps that wasn't a slip of the tongue but an expression of conviction: the son of a rebel secretly killed by the police would not be safe in the home of a fellow revolutionary.

Rob looked up at the fence. He was going back into the Conurb, back to the crowds and the smells, the processed foods and the blaring din, the mindless mob singing the latest pop song or discussing who beat whom in the Games the previous night. He was heading for the address Mike had given him. The rest was unknown and uncertain. They would be trying to create the revolution there which had failed so miserably here. Even though there might be a few who would help, like Mr. Kennealy, the odds were fantastically against them. But once you did see things clearly there was no alternative.

He remembered a long time ago, when he could only have been five or six. His father had promised to take him for a walk but canceled it at the last minute because he had to go to see Mr. Kennealy
about something urgent. Rob had cried and been ashamed of crying. His father had gone all the same, and had brought him back a bar of chocolate to make amends. Rob remembered his first sulky refusal and his father's voice: “It really was important, Rob. I wouldn't have let you down for anything that wasn't important.”

He had a strange feeling as though after all it had come right. He was going with his father, long years behind but following.

Sonnet stood patiently beside him. He slapped her rump and said, “Home, girl. Back to your stable.”

Then he knelt down and began to dig.

Read on for a peek at John Christopher's lunar adventure novel!

M
ARTY HAD TO GO ALL
the way across the Bubble every morning, since school and his parents' apartment were both on the perimeter but almost exactly opposite. This did not present much of a problem: he only had to walk a hundred yards to pick up an autocabin. After that he punched his destination on the dial and the robots took over, swinging the cabin out onto the overhead moving cable and plotting the course which would take him most directly to the school depot. He had timed it once at twenty and a half minutes, and knew it would never vary by more than
seconds. It could have been a bore but he usually had enough homework held over to pass the time. The dial panel served as a desk; fairly stable except when the cabin swung out onto a new line with a jerk that sent his stylo skittering across the plastic. That sometimes meant blanking out several lines and rewriting them.

Morning was Earth-time, of course. The sun took fourteen days to arc its way across the sky above the Bubble, its glare reduced but not eliminated by the film sprayed on the inside of the huge transparent dome, and then for another fourteen days there was night, the stars and the bright globe of Earth surrounded by the deep blackness of space. That was how it was now but the long lunar night was approaching its end. Tomorrow the sun would be up.

A minute before the journey's end the dial pinged softly at him. Marty set about gathering his things. He looked out of the side and saw a boy from his class, Ben Trillici, in a cabin that was on a line converging with his toward the school run-in. There was some fun in gauging which would hit the relay first and slide through while the robot controls held the
second cabin back. His was the one that made it, and he gave a thumbs-up sign and grinned. Other cabins were coming in and he checked them over to see if Paul was in one. He was not, though. Marty's guess was that he was already in school; he himself was a couple of minutes later than usual.

It was only at assembly that he realized Paul must be away. He was surprised at that. They had visiphoned the previous evening about a problem in math, and he had seemed O.K. then. Moon-sickness, of course, could come on you pretty quickly. (Even after nearly fifty years of people living in the Bubble the doctors did not understand it completely: they said it was partly a disturbance of the inner ear, partly psychological.) It would have to be Moon-sickness. Owing to the barrier precautions and the isolation there were no other forms of illness. In films he had seen people on Earth suffering from things like flu and head colds, and wondered what it must be like to have to cough and sneeze like that.

The first class was history. They were doing the Roman Empire and Mr. Milligan, the teacher, ran a reconstruct film on the screen. You saw a Roman
family on the day of a triumph, watched the yawning slaves prepare breakfast as the deep blue sky paled behind the roofs of the villa, heard the creak of oxcart wheels in the narrow streets where the stone, through the long years, had worn into deep ruts. The family itself consisted of father and mother and five children, two boys and three girls. One of the boys was about Marty's age. He ate figs and crusty bread for breakfast, washing it down with watered wine, and was dressed in a toga which he had just become old enough to wear. Dawn had broken over the city of Rome, and the sun was a soft gleaming gold in powder blue.

Marty let his gaze stray from that scene to the windows of the classroom. Mr. Milligan had not blanked them; teachers rarely did during the lunar night. They looked through the transparent wall of the Bubble to the plain and distant mountains. Nothing moved or changed there. In the brightness of Earthlight one saw the stretch of flat blackness and the faraway jagged peaks. One or two of the high points dazzled white; signs of a different kind of dawn.

He came back to the film. With the sound track
muted, Mr. Milligan was pointing out things of which they ought to take special note: the atrium with its tinkling fountain, the triclinium with couches along three sides of the great dining table. Then the family set out, attended by slaves, for the Senate stand from which they would watch the procession. The girls and their mother rode in litters but the senator and his sons walked through the colorful and now crowded streets. In schools on Earth, Marty gathered, reconstruct films gave you the smell of the scene in addition to sight and sound. He had asked his father why this was not done on the Moon—was it a technical problem? Not technical, his father had said, but a matter of policy. Smell was the most powerful of all the senses, and they did not think it advisable.

English followed. They were on the late nineteenth-century Romantic poets. Mrs. Kahn read Swinburne to them:

The full streams feed on flower of rushes,

Ripe grasses trammel a travelling foot,

The faint fresh flame of the young year flushes

From leaf to flower, and flower to fruit;

And fruit and leaf are as gold and fire,

And the oat is heard above the lyre,

And the hoofed heel of a satyr crushes

The chestnut-husk at the chestnut-root . . .

Streams, he thought—rushes, grasses standing high by a riverside and full of flowers, trees breaking into leaf in spring after a long winter . . . He knew what they were. He had seen them on television and the movie screen. He had even seen one fantasy film in which satyrs ran wild through a sunlit glade.

He felt a bit lost at recess. Paul and he usually gossiped about TV, or continued one of their interminable games of chess, or just sat about idly and companionably. They kept more or less to themselves. Although everybody knew everybody in the Bubble, people made one or two friends and stuck to them. This morning Marty was on his own. So was Steve du Cros, but he nearly always was alone. He was an orphan, both his parents having been killed in a launch explosion when he was five or six,
and a loner. He was not much liked and gave the impression of not minding that: he had a sharp tongue. The teachers were not enthusiastic about him either. He often broke rules and always gave the impression that he might be just going to.

Then, with recess almost over, Marty saw Paul come in at the door. All Lunarians (the name given those who had been born on the Moon) were taller than they would have been on Earth, but Paul was more so than most—a six-footer at fourteen. He had a thin gangling frame and a face that was ugly except when he smiled. That was his usual expression though, and he smiled now, catching sight of Marty. But there was something else in his look, something odd.

Marty said: “How is it? I thought you must have the sickness.”

Paul shook his head. “I'm fine.”

“Then how come you missed the first two classes? Not that there was anything to miss.”

“I had to see old Sherrin. Dad brought me in.”

Sherrin was the principal. Marty asked curiously: “What about? Flunking physics in the last exams?”

“No.”

There was something which he seemed both eager and reluctant to tell. Marty said impatiently: “Then what?”

“My folks have decided that . . . They're sending me down.”

Sending down meant only one thing, one destination: the globe lighting the black sky above their heads. Marty could not believe it. He said: “But why?”

Paul shrugged. “Some medical stuff.”

“And when?”

“Next flight.”

“That's . . .”

“Yes,” Paul said. “Next week.”

•  •  •

Marty thought about it in the cabin going back, about the whole business of living in the Bubble and what it meant. Those who came here did not go on home leave: the cost of transporting a human being across a quarter of a million miles, although less than it had once been, was still fantastic. You contracted, usually in your early twenties, for twenty-five years'
service. At the end of that time you retired to Earth, with enough money to make your retirement years easy, even luxurious.

This meant living for a quarter of a century under the unnatural artificial conditions which the Moon enforced. As much as possible was done to make them tolerable. There was family life, for instance. Men and women were recruited in roughly equal numbers, with a preference for married couples or those engaged to be married. They could have children, though large families were discouraged. The children grew up in the Bubble, never knowing anything else except at second hand on a screen. At any time after early childhood parents could, if they chose, decide to send them down—send them back to Earth. The snag was that the trip was one-way and once only. Parents and child would not see each other again, except on the expensive inter-world visiphone link, until the end of the parents' tour of duty. For Lunarians sending down also involved several weeks of conditioning on Earth in a special unit, with gravity slowly built up to full Earth strength and muscles trained to bear the extra weight.

Marty, like Paul, was fourteen. He had been born in the Bubble five years after his mother and father had come to the Moon. Their contract had six more years to run. There had been some talk of his going back to an Earth university when he was nineteen, which would be a year before their return. He had never thought of going down earlier. But neither, so far as he knew, had Paul.