CHILDREN OF THE THUNDER

by John Brunner

  And realized the likeliest possibility in the same instant. He uttered a shrill whistle. During the conference in New York at which he had met Claudia, he had bumped into a thin tall man with graying hair, who seemed not to know anyone else present and whose sole identification consisted in a name badge reading guest. He was obviously bored and—fortunately for Peter—rather drunk. On spotting Peter’s badge, which identified him as representing Continuum/Quasar, he had struck up a conversation.

  After which… Peter racked his brains for further details. The gray-haired growser, who proved to be a lawyer, had made it clear how much he loathed the people who were, in his view, attempting to undermine the American Constitution by imposing a state religion—or possibly it was “religion state by state,” for his argument grew more confused with each Martini he sank. At any rate he was noisily predicting that the result would be world domination by the Communist bloc because they would wind up with a monopoly of practical science while his own people would be reduced to praying, sticking pins in chance-opened Bibles, and casting lots to decide whose eldest son should be sacrificed to stave off disaster.

  And he had said… Yes! It was coming back! He had said, “If you want to hear the only sound sense being talked during this entire weekend, you must catch Claudia Morris. Has she given her speech yet?”

  Peter’s answer was sharp. “Yes, this morning. Weren’t you there?”

  A headshake: “She sent me the text and I read it last week. Great stuff. We need more like Claudia… You going to do a program about her? Y’ought to!”

  At which point, not waiting for a reply, he turned and waved his empty glass at the barman.

  Peter was minded to slip away. Yet something made him hesitate. A lawyer who was plainly agnostic—the ongoing dispute between the scientists and the fundamentalists… And now Continuum was definitely scheduled for the chop, he needed plenty of leads if he was to stand any hope of surviving as a freelance.

  I gave him my card with that code written on the back. And I never asked his name!

  But as far as he could recall, that was the one and only time he had ever released that code—normally reserved for intimate friends and very special informants—to anybody outside Britain.

  Why would he be on that board?

  An answer sprang instantly to mind: it was used by people who disagreed with Claudia. Probably the lawyer was not in fact one of its contributors—just maintained a program to monitor it. This could be interesting!

  With exaggerated care Peter tapped out the password he had received, then waited for the screen to light.

  What it scrolled was a montage of OCR’ed news cuttings, obviously run fast and carelessly because there were many errors, but the gist was plain. At first they related to attempts by fundamentalists to take over major centers of American education, using the vast monetary leverage they had accumulated as the millennium approached and the faithful grew less and less confident that the Rapture would save them seven years before the onset of Armageddon. Time was running out…

  Then the subject switched abruptly to something Peter had heard about but never taken seriously: a group nicknamed “the Strugfolk” after one Cecil Strugman, who had inherited millions of dollars from a family meat-packing business, turned vegetarian-ecologist-rationalist, and mounted a counter-campaign designed to prove that of the fundamentalists unconstitutional by emphasizing their use of un-American terms like “king” and “lord”—precisely what the Founding Fathers had striven to get rid of. With growing excitement Peter sat down at his desk, occasionally halting the display as a salient point emerged.

  Until this moment he had imagined that this venture was essentially symbolic, and doomed to inevitable failure. On the contrary: if he was to believe what he was reading, the Strugfolk had been burrowing away through strata of legal precedents, assembling a virtually unassailable case while at the same time attracting additional funds from industrial corporations whose directors were afraid that in the next generation there might not be any petroleum geologists or volunteers for lunar prospecting missions… at any rate, not outside Russia, Europe and Japan.

  Ranged against them, naturally, were the worshippers of the Almighty Dollar who were growing far richer far quicker by manipulating the stock markets with computerized help than anyone could hope to achieve these days by actually working.

  Peter whistled again. He had never seen that particular split in American society so graphically portrayed. Of course, here in Britain—

  And even as he pursed his lips, the lines on the screen wiggled into illegibility for a moment, then reformed as garbage. He jumped to his feet, abruptly furious.

  The bastards! The bastards!

  He recognized the warning. Special Branch (or SIS, or whichever—there wasn’t much distinction between the various British police agencies any longer) had been prompt to obey Big Brother at Langley. Here were data the ordinary citizen of the UK was not supposed to access.

  Fits. You wouldn’t see it on TV these days. Or read it in the papers… Except maybe on TV Plus or in the Comet!

  For a moment he actually thought kindly of Jake Lafarge, who of late had been stingy in providing him with assignments.

  His mind darting back to what Claudia had said about the British government’s obsession with secrecy, he pounded fist into palm. That gray-haired lawyer, doing him a favor (but why? Logically, because Claudia must be involved with the Strugfolk, or else her university was under threat from the bigots—stop! He was spiralling in three directions at once and he had to force himself back on an even keel)—

  That lawyer might well have unintentionally wished on him another visit from the Bill.

  Well, like everyone else in his profession, he had emergency arrangements. If only they weren’t so expensive…!

  Sighing, he dumped the text from America into a remote store supposed to be inviolate under the Data Protection Act. It was almost certainly not, given the massive computing power the government disposed of nowadays, but at least it might not be worth their while trying to break the rule by which it was enciphered. If they had really been upset, they wouldn’t have left anything on his screen at all, but simply disguised the event as a system crash by engineering a block-wide power failure, and the hell with how many innocent users suffered as a result. On busy nights some areas of London could be seen flashing like trafficators—if the streetlamps were still working.

  Then he set all his alarms, so as to make the police’s arrival as conspicuous as possible. He belonged to a Neighborhood Watch. When such schemes had been set up in the eighties, few people had foreseen that within so short a time they would become hated rather than supported by the police and government. None of the other residents of his building belonged, but there were fifteen members within earshot of his alarms, prepared to turn out at any time of day or night with cameras, video-cameras, sound-recording equipment…

  Christ! This is how it must have been in Russia before glasnost! Except the neighbors wouldn’t have had so much of the essential gear.

  His miserable train of thought was broken by the phone. For a moment he assumed it must be the Bill ringing from downstairs asking whether he would come quietly. Then he spotted the calling number on the display screen. It was the one on which he had been trying to reach Jim Spurman.

  He rushed to answer, and heard a voice that was suddenly familiar despite the passage of four years.

  “Peter Levin! Jim Spurman here! I’m sorry! We had a computer glitch and the bocky machines told me Petra Levin, an ex-student of mine that I sincerely hope I’ll never set eyes on again… I gather you want to talk about what Claudia Morris has been up to lately, is that right?”

  Abruptly alert again, Peter said tensely, “Yes! What can you tell me?”

  A dry chuckle. “Well, as I’ve so often seen, I’m afraid, among sundry of my colleagues, she appears to be yielding to pressure. One has to be forgiving—I’m suffering much the same problem myself, though luckily
I’m blessed with a supportive vice-chancellor. But isn’t it always the fate of pioneers to be mocked by the whenzies?”

  Oh, lord. I’d forgotten how devotedly he imitates the usage of his students…

  “I’d like a scrap or two more data on that level,” Peter said aloud.

  “You didn’t hear that this university of hers became a prime target for the bigots? What’s the name of it—?”

  “Never mind!” Peter cut in. “I know what you mean.”

  “What you should say nowadays”—reprovingly—“is the inverse: ‘you know what I mean.’ As long ago as the mid-eighties this had been spotted as…”

  What progress from probation officer to professor can do to muddle someone’s thinking!

  As politely as he could contrive, Peter intimated how little interested he was in the fact that since their last encounter Jim Spurman had decided to concentrate on verbal usage as an infallible index of predictable social behavior. Sitting on the corner of his desk, staring out of the window, watching the lights of airliners ascending and descending around Heathrow, he finally managed to insert a further question about Claudia’s university.

  “Ah! I’m surprised you haven’t heard. Well, it seems one set of funders, the repulsive lot, are displacing another who are somewhat more welcome.”

  This was getting worse by the minute! Peter had one ear cocked for the arrival of Special Branch. But if they did turn up, he wanted at least to pry some sense out of Professor Spurman first…

  Controlling himself with vast effort, he said, “I take it you mean religious fundamentalists are trying to buy control of the university where she works.”

  “Featly!”

  But that’s not why and how one uses that word… Cancel that. He’s just explained why she’s afraid the money for her sabbatical may be withdrawn.

  “Please go on!”

  “Well, obviously, as soon as she went high-profile with her book, and so many people responded positively, she was a prime target for the obscurantists. I’m not shamming when I say we get literally dozens of letters every week in my department from parents who feel she’s explained why their children went to the bad. How else do you think we’ve managed to maintain our funding when what we’re spreading the gospel about is anathema to the received wisdom? We can point to massive public support!”

  Peter’s mouth was growing dry; he had indulged in too much free wine at the book launch, and the coffee hadn’t helped, being no doubt largely ersatz despite the label on the jar. Still staring out of the window beyond which red and white and green lights wove endless abstract patterns, he said after a pause, “Let me get this straight. You’re saying her university—”

  “Is due to be swung to the anti-science side by a massive injection of money. Precisely. The poor bitch is going to have to fight like hell to retain her tenure.”

  “Have you seen her lately? Or spoken to her?”

  The next words were accompanied by an audible frown.

  “Funny you should ask that. As a matter of fact, I’ve been rather disappointed in the lady recently, given that I worked so hard to promote her ideas over here… That’s why I suspect she’s bending under pressure. When I last tried to get in touch she didn’t return my call, and a message I posted on an email board she used to log on to at least as often as I did—”

  Flash.

  Bright in the sky above Heathrow Airport. Peter’s jaw dropped even as he realized what he was watching.

  Bang.

  But it was worse than a bang. It was a slap, a growl, a rumble, and then a succession of thuds. The phone was still murmuring. He disregarded it, waiting for what he was sure must follow. It did, and windows over half of London shook in their frames, as a fireball shed glowing fragments on—where would it be? Hounslow? Southall? Likely both, and even further!

  And I happened actually to be watching! Camera!

  Incontinently he let fall the phone, rushed to snatch up what he should have seized the moment the glare first lit the sky, aimed and shot. This was going to save him from the Bill! Here was what had been so long predicted, the fruit of the government’s policy of withdrawing public funds from air traffic control on the grounds that private firms were far more cost-efficient. But in the service of Mammon they sometimes skimped the exhaustive checks needed to make sure all their computers could always talk to one another… And as a result, two airliners had collided and caught fire above what for a generation had been promoted as the busiest airport in the world.

  Not to mention an awful lot of people’s homes.

  Clearing up the mess would occupy the Bill for quite a while, just as making sure the blame fell on some overworked traffic controller instead of the people who had made fortunes by cutting the necessary corners would preoccupy the government. He could relax—

  Oh no I can’t!

  The phone was saying something. He caught it up without looking and snapped, “Thanks for what you didn’t tell me! But you’ve been pre-empted!”

  “What do you mean?”—in a frosty academic tone.

  “Watch the TV news!”

  He cut Spurman off and tapped the Comet’s number.

  Engaged.

  Well, of course. The line must be stacked umpteen deep. Hundreds of people closer to the accident must be phoning all the papers, TV stations, et cetera et cetera, hoping their amateur footage (because three out of four families now owned, etc., therefore high standard of living) might make it to the screen for a fat fee…

  With an increasing sense of desperation, compounded by memory of the debt he had incurred by dumping those data from America into secure store, he spent a while staring toward the fires breaking out where fragments of the airliners had fallen. From here, though, he could no longer see anything but an orange glow, like old-style sodium lamps on fluctuating current.

  And other planes being diverted to Luton and Gatwick.

  He poured himself another shot of whisky. The bottle was nearly empty and he made a mental note to buy more tomorrow, if there was any in the shops; most, in this desperate economic climate, was earmarked for export. Even as he was raising the glass, however, the phone shrilled.

  “Yes?”

  “Jake Lafarge. Did you know two planes—?”

  “I saw it! I even shot some pictures!”

  “Pictures we got, and TV beats all of us anyhow. Give me eight hundred words explaining why it happened! Nearly ten percent of our regular readers are shareholders in British Airways—and it was two BA planes that collided!”

  There was a tone of pleading in Jake’s voice. But Peter had been mentally drafting just such an article for years. He drew a deep breath and reached for his modem.

  “Put me on line,” he said. “I can set it cold.”

  And brought it in at 789 by automatic count: a chilling indictment of the policies that had led to the worst midair crash in British history, long predicted, now a fact.

  “Front page,” Jake said when he called back. “Thanks.”

  And many thanks to you, sir!

  For to have an article like that splashed and by-lined on page one of a national paper without being subbed was like an accolade—even though the Comet was not exactly in the front rank. In the morning, Peter was woken far sooner than he would have liked (since he had made the mistake of finishing the whisky to bring himself down from the high his article had engendered) by a succession of colleagues complimenting him, saying it was the best thing he’d done, how much they wished they could have had the same chance, he was a lucky growser and why didn’t he—?

  And most important: come and say it again on TV Plus at lunch-time, if you’re prepared to confront a pro-government spokesman “to provide balance.”

  He had to think about that for a moment. Then he concluded he had unassailable documentation. And what the hell else was he going to do with his life?

  He made mincemeat out of the bocky cank from the government. All of a sudden he was famous again. Of course, that me
ant he needed protection, but TV companies still had clout, and there was talk of making a documentary…

  It was giddying. But the most important part was that he felt as though he was falling back into the context of a team. He knew in the distant parts of his mind that the airliner crash would be forgotten in a week or less, except by the bereaved and those whose homes had been burned down—and of course the lawyers suing on their behalf, who stood to make a mint—but this was the way he had…

  Yes. This was the way he had grown up. He’d been a kid before he signed with the Continuum team. His years with them had constituted his true adolescence. Now, after a gap that might be termed his Wanderjahre, he had the chance to continue the process.

  He was reminded of Claudia Morris a few days later when he received the bill for the data about the Strugfolk that he had dumped in a fit of panic. The amount was horrifying, and although he paid up for fear of incurring a bad credit rating, he filed an erase code.

  When Professor Spurman left a message on his answering machine inquiring whether he could confirm a rumor that Claudia Morris was in Britain, he wiped the tape without bothering to call back.

  I don’t know who I am.

  Oh, I know my name all right—Sheila Hubbard. At least Hubbard is what I go by, though really it’s the name of my mother’s second husband. The first was an artist called Doug Mackay. He and Ingrid (my mother) broke up when I was still very young. I never quite found out why, but I get the impression it was something to do with her wanting a kid and him not caring to be lumbered, though I had this attachment to him that must have been more like a fixation because when she got married again, to Joe (who’s a real business whiz, a highflyer absolutely dripping money), I got all kind of upset. I sneaked a look at a psychiatrist’s report on me once. It was full of loaded terms like “disturbed” and “irrelevance of affect.”