CHILDREN OF THE THUNDER

by John Brunner

  Smartly but not conspicuously dressed, carefully made up and with her hair styled to make her look much older than her true age, Pepita Hallam brought her supermarket trolley to a halt and glanced along the row of busy checkouts. She didn’t like to leave by the same one two weeks running. Not that she had ever had any problems, but it was as well to be on the safe side.

  Although it meant waiting rather longer, she chose a line that included two women whose trolleys were almost collapsing under their loads. She could, she felt sure, have cut straight in at the head of the line today, because her aura—as she thought of it—felt particularly strong, but she suspected there were limits to its efficacy. Again, she preferred not to run any risks.

  Besides, later this morning she wanted to make a good few other purchases under less advantageous circumstances.

  The girl at the desk was suitably tired and harassed. She barely glanced at Pepita, loading her wheeled canvas shopper, as she totted up the bill. Including two bottles of vodka and a carton of king-sized cigarettes for her mother, it came to more than forty-six pounds. Pepita handed over three twenty-pound notes. The girl made change. Pepita waited with an expectant air.

  “Oh, sorry,” the girl said after a moment, and handed back the twenties. Pepita favored her with a flashing smile and went her way.

  There was an unusually rapid turnover of staff at this supermarket. Pepita sometimes wondered whether she had anything to do with that.

  Her bill at the make-up counter of the chemist’s was seven pounds something. She proffered one of the twenties and received it back plus change. Things didn’t go quite so smoothly when she bought her weekly stock of tights, plus some new underwear, for the shop was a lot less crowded and the assistant not as easy to distract, but she still received a ten on top of the change she was entitled to. Not wanting to wear out her aura, she decided to go to only one more shop, to pick up some tapes by her favorite group, and then head for home.

  Where the rest of the aura would have to be used up, as it were, on her mother. Cynthia Hallam was in a miserable state today…

  But then, she generally was.

  She and Pepita lived in a block of council flats where the lifts kept breaking down, surrounded by what had been intended as gardens and playgrounds but had turned instead into a giant rubbish-heap. It was a rough area, seething with constant suppressed violence—not that that bothered Pepita much, for she had ways of coping. In this instance she had decided to acquire a large and muscular boyfriend, whose threats would stave off unwanted attentions. His name was Kevin and he was seventeen. She felt nothing but contempt for him, but she had him well trained. Tonight, when he took her to the local disco, he would watch over her like a guard-dog, and be content when he returned her to the door of her home with a quick peck on the cheek… though doubtless puzzled afterward that after doing so much for her he settled for so little in return.

  Today the lifts were working, which was a mercy, for she had no idea where Kevin was at the moment and she wouldn’t have cared to carry her shopping up the stairs. The flat, of course, was a mess, apart from her own room which she kept meticulously tidy, but that was the way of things. Her mother was pretty much of a mess, too—sitting around moping in a soiled dressing gown, red-eyed and snappish. She spoke not a word until she had seized the cigarettes, lit one, and poured and drunk half a tumblerful of vodka.

  Eventually she said in a dull voice, “Show me what you got.”

  Stowing her purchases in the kitchen cupboard, Pepita complied.

  “All right, I suppose,” her mother approved grudgingly, and turned to retrieve her glass. Behind her back Pepita pulled a rude face, implying:

  You couldn’t have done a tenth as well!

  Which was true. Could anyone?

  A little later, stretched out on her bed listening to her new tapes—her player had been second-hand, but it was an expensive make and she took good care of it—that question returned to haunt her as it had so often in the past.

  Could anyone else do what she’d been doing this past couple of years? Not always, only when the aura was at its height… but what she could get away with on days like today still astonished her.

  For the latest of countless times she reviewed what she knew of her background. She had acquired the information in garbled form, scrap by scrap, when her mother was in a particularly self-pitying mood.

  And of course drunk, but that went without saying.

  What she had pieced together went like this. After five years of marriage her parents had still had no children, and they both wanted at least one. According to Cynthia—but who could tell how true the claim might be?—her husband, whose name was Victor, was convinced the fault lay on her side, or at any rate maintained so. After one row too many she had decided to find out. And it wasn’t.

  He must have known all along, for the moment she became pregnant he called her a whoring bitch and walked out, never to be heard of again—quite a feat in modern computerized Britain.

  Hence the squalid council flat. Hence the dependence on exiguous government grants, second-hand clothes from jumble sales, and—increasingly—the bottle. At one time, Pepita suspected, the authorities had threatened to take her away, and for long enough to satisfy them Cynthia had pulled herself together. Now, of course, no one seemed to care. Every other week in the papers or on the telly government spokesmen kept complaining about how much it cost to keep children in care, masking their true opinions behind a veneer of humanitarianism, mouthing respect for the “ties of blood” and the unique care and affection that only a natural parent could provide…

  Load of bocky old canks!

  The tape had played through and was starting afresh on the first side. She reached out a languid arm to change it for another of her new acquisitions. Before switching it on, she was afflicted by a sudden shiver. It was going to be such a long time before she could legally move out! She would have to be sixteen, free from the school that she dutifully attended—and where she was regarded as a first-rate student, for she had a keen mind. A term often applied to her was “sensible.” Sometimes the teachers confided their surprise at how well she coped, having to act as her mother’s deputy in almost everything.

  Well, it was the easiest way…

  But sometimes she was tempted, as now, simply to walk out. How long, though, could she survive if she did? She made a mental resolution. She must practice more with her aura, work out when the best times were to exploit it, and also establish whether she could make it act better on people who weren’t as distracted and preoccupied as shop assistants. For instance, she ought to try a policeman, and maybe someone at the National Assistance office, and—come to that, why not a post office, or even a bank?

  A dazzling vision of crisp new fifty-pound notes overwhelmed her for a moment. But at length, with a sigh, she lay back on the bed again.

  No, better not. At least this way she had some degree of control over her life. Nonetheless, she felt a stir of shame at her own reluctance to cut loose.

  Know something, Peppy? she said to herself, half aloud. At bottom you’re a bocky coward, aren’t you?

  And, resigned to the fact, switched on the new tape and shut her eyes.

  You’re watching TV Plus. Time for Newsframe.

  The source of the blue dye that caused thousands of liters of milk to be condemned in Yorkshire last week has been traced. The farmer added to his cows’ regular feed a batch of out-of-time potato crisps from a local supermarket, without removing the blue salt-bags. A spokesman for the County Veterinary Inspectorate said the cows were none the worse, but declared that in view of the mounting potato shortage the crisps’ expiry date should have been extended.

  Six teenage boys have been remanded in custody in North London following allegations that they stripped a black girl of fifteen naked and painted her with red-white-and-blue stripes. Asked to comment at a news conference, General Sir Hampton Thrower said…

  Peter stared at Claudia for a lo
ng moment. Then he gave a harsh laugh and took another swig of his drink.

  “You seem to be implying,” he said at last, “that you’ve tracked down a group of hereditary criminals. Born to the trade, as it were.”

  Her eyes fixed on him, she nodded.

  “But why shouldn’t they, too, be accounted for by your theory? Pressure to conform to the ideal of the nuclear family, which you argue is obsolete, could just as well explain—”

  “Oh, sure!” she cut in. “Don’t you think I want it to? If only to spite the puky funders with their endless gabble about original sin! But these are the exceptions that are going to prove my rule in the proper sense, right?”

  “I see,” Peter murmured. And in fact he did. He wasn’t used to meeting sociologists willing to apply strict scientific rigor to their work, and it made a refreshing change from those who preferred bombinating in a vacuum. He never expected to like this woman, but he was starting to respect her.

  Claudia was going on.

  “My sabbatical was due, and I needed a subject for a thesis. This looked like the ideal challenge. If I could show that my ideas held good even in cases of this kind, I’d have put the whole argument on a much firmer basis. I had a couple of other possibilities in reserve in case this one wasn’t accepted, but in the upshot it was approved almost at once. Now, of course, I think I can guess why. The puky Dean just wanted me out of the way when he caved in to the bribes he was being offered… Did you ever hear the story of the student who received a record grant for his doctorate thesis? It was to be about the effect on academics and business executives of a series of extremely large bribes.”

  If she intended that to be funny, it didn’t show in her face or voice.

  “Next I was going to ask what you know about artinsem, but I think I can guess the answer. A lot. Because that was another of the subjects Continuum tackled.”

  Peter gave another short laugh. “No, oddly enough. I do know a lot about it, but from personal experience. Lord, I haven’t thought about it in years!”

  Claudia started upright. “Now I know I was right to change my mind about talking to you! Explain, explain!”

  “You know, this is ridiculous,” he answered slowly, staring at the carpet. “It was so minor an episode in my life, I’ve been thinking Ellen is my only child. In fact she’s not. I must have kids scattered over half creation! Grief! I hope they don’t all come home to roost!”

  “How did this happen?”

  He shrugged, leaning back. “Before I went into television I was studying medicine. Grants for people like me weren’t exactly generous, though not as bad as they are now, so when one of my friends told me he was being paid five quid for donating semen I asked if I could—well, get in on the act.”

  “Which you did?”

  “Why not? To be candid, I wasn’t thinking so much about the money. I was rather hoping to be told I was sterile.”

  “That’s an extraordinary attitude!”

  “Not at the time it wasn’t. We were out of the Swinging Sixties, but we hadn’t yet reached the AIDS phase and a lot of the sixties’ attitudes were lingering. Around them, though, people were starting to cast doubts on the Pill. A tolerably attractive guy with a certificate of sterility could have played the field… Claudia, I must be drunk!” He set his glass aside with a gesture of annoyance. “I never admitted that to anyone before!”

  She let it pass. “Obviously you weren’t,” she prompted.

  “Sterile? Of course not. My count fell square in the middle of the normal range. What was more, they happened to need someone of my physical type and coloration at the clinic. So, over the next year and a half, nearly two years, I dropped by every six or eight weeks and—ah—went through the motions, as and when they had a couple of similar appearance.”

  “There’s a limit, isn’t there?”

  Peter nodded. “Ten times. So I made fifty quid. I hope they pay more nowadays—a fiver isn’t much when tube and bus fares start at a pound!”

  “Did you have to give any sort of undertaking?”

  “Lord, yes. Apart from pledging myself to report any disease I might be suffering from, especially the STDs which were fairly rife around then, and any medication I might be taking—this of course was the reason practically all the donors were medical or dental students, who could be expected to understand the importance of keeping their word—apart from that, the main one was an undertaking never to attempt to trace the recipient. Frankly, though, I can’t imagine how you’d set about that.”

  “Now that’s something I need to investigate.” Claudia leaned forward intently. “What can you tell me about the way donors’ records were maintained?”

  “Well, I can only speak for the one clinic that I know about,” Peter countered. “Very little AID was done under the Health Service. About ninety percent was private.”

  “Because of the high cost?”

  “Not at all. In my day the fee was around—oh—twenty or thirty pounds, plus of course the cost of preliminary consultations and examinations. A hundred quid would probably have covered the lot. Not excessive even then, for a couple desperate to have a child.”

  “And there are, or were, a lot of clinics undertaking such work?”

  “ ‘Were’ is more like it. People grew so terrified of AIDS they wouldn’t risk an unknown donor any more, so transplantation and in vitro fertilization have taken over almost completely… Well, I don’t know what you mean by ‘a lot.’ But I’ve seen some figures. Just a second.” He knitted his brows with the effort of memory. “Yes, that sounds right. In those days the annual rate of artificial insemination was between three and four thousand.”

  “Hmm!” Claudia sounded depressed. “You’re talking about an average of ten per day, year in, year out, over quite a long period—and just in Britain, at that.”

  “Easily.”

  “I confess I hadn’t realized it was quite so high. I’d been expecting to amass my data fairly quickly, write my first draft, take a couple of months off to explore Europe, and revise at leisure before going home… But you haven’t answered my question about donors’ records. I presume they had to be kept. Apart from—oh—not wanting a black kid to turn up in a white family, for instance, what if one of the donors proved to be carrying a deleterious gene and had to be traced and warned? Back then they couldn’t have screened them in advance, could they?”

  Peter shook his head, his expression still vaguely tinged with amazement.

  “You know, I really hadn’t given the matter a thought in years… Why do you need to find out about the records? Do you—?” He checked. “You don’t honestly think you’re looking for a common father in all these cases?”

  “I sincerely hope not!” was Claudia’s tart reply. “Can you imagine anything more destructive to my theory? No, what I want to do is prove that the whole notion is—is stupid!”

  “Well, if some mental handicaps are known to be hereditary, like Down’s syndrome and Alzheimer’s disease, which depend on chromosome malformations—”

  “Why can I not accept that the same may be true of inadequate criminal personalities?” she cut in. “Believe me, all your arguments have been thrown at me before. The answer to that one is that the kids I have data on are not inadequate. Absolutely the contrary. They are coping far better than almost anybody else. Think about the evidence. Didn’t I say the second thing that connects them is that they get away with what they’ve done?”

  Contrary to his former intention, Peter took another sip of whiskey. He said, “I’m going to have to ponder that. As to records of donors, though… Well, that was one of the points I raised when I first went to the clinic.”

  “You call it a clinic. Was it part of a hospital, a larger operation?”

  “Not at all. It was the consulting rooms of two doctors in partnership, one man and one woman, an obstetrician and a gynecologist. They had premises in Wimpole Street. That’s not quite as famous as Harley Street but it’s just around the corne
r. I didn’t get to know the woman at all—the friend who let me in on the act had some sort of contact with the man, I don’t recall what—and I believe that not long afterward there was a bustup between them and the partnership was dissolved. But that was after I’d exhausted my quota.”

  “You keep harking back to your own experience,” Claudia murmured. “Would you stick to generalities for a bit? I want to know how they kept their records!”

  “Ah… Sorry.” Peter licked his lips. “They were on regular index cards. Each donor was given a code known only to the doctor and his nurse. I wasn’t even told what my code was. I didn’t ask. It struck me as a good way of keeping the data confidential.”

  “What if, say, the doctor and his nurse were killed in a car crash? Wouldn’t the other partner have been able to access the data?”

  “I’ve no idea. Grief!”—with sudden force. “This all happened well over a decade ago. Besides, it’s late. You expect me to remember minor details like that?”

  “My turn to say sorry,” Claudia sighed. “Didn’t I say earlier that I’m becoming obsessed with this? I had so much hoped the data might be stored on a computer, because computers can be hacked… Well, you’re right: it is late. I’d better be going. Want to copy that disk of mine before I leave?”

  But Peter wasn’t paying attention. He tensed and snapped his fingers. “Just a moment! It’s coming back to me… Yes, that was part of what the row was about, the one that led to the breakup of the partnership. I was told about it afterward by another of my fellow students, who stayed the course and became a GP as I’d intended to. He’d been a donor as well. There must have been—oh—at least half a dozen from my hospital. We all vaguely knew who else was on the list, but it wasn’t any reason for us to be friends, you see.”

  “Breakup…?” Claudia prompted.

  “Ah. Yes. Well, Dr. Chinn—the male doctor—felt the setup was becoming like an assembly line. At least that’s what I was told. So when his female partner suggested going over to a computerized record system he tried to veto it because he felt it was too impersonal as well as less secure. But she had more clout than he did, or more money invested, or something, and in the end he quit.”