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“The ‘quake must have brought it down,” said George.
“Shush! Go on, Jeff.”
“I didn’t know what to do, and I could hear the wave coming closer. Then the voice said ‘Close your eyes, Jeffrey, and put your hand in front of your face.’ It seemed a funny thing to do, but I tried it. And then there was a great flash-I could feel it all over-and when I opened my eyes the rock was gone.”
“Gone?”
“That’s right-it just wasn’t there. So I started running again, and that’s when I nearly burnt my feet, because the path was awful hot. The water hissed when it went over it, but it couldn’t catch me then-I was too far up the cliff. And that’s all. I came down again when there weren’t any more waves. Then I found that my bike had gone, and the road home had been knocked down.”
“Don’t worry about the bicycle, dear,” said Jean, squeezing her, son thankfully. “We’ll get you another one. The only thing that matters is that. you’re safe. We won’t worry about how it happened.”
That wasn’t true, of course, for the conference began immediately they had left the nursery. It decided nothing, but it bad two sequels. The next day, without telling George, Jean took her small son to the Colony’s child psychologist. He listened carefully while Jeff repeated his story, not in the least over-awed by his novel surroundings. Then, while his unsuspecting patient rejected seriatim the toys in the next room, the doctor reassured Jean.
“There’s nothing on his card to suggest any mental abnormality. You must remember that he’s been through a terrifying experience, and he’s come out of it remarkably well. He’s a highly imaginative child, and probably believes his own story.
So just accept it, and don’t worry unless there are any later
symptoms. Then let me know at once.”
That evening, Jean passed the verdict on to her husband. He did not seem as relieved as she had hoped, and she put it down to worry over the damage to his beloved theatre. He just grunted “That’s fine” and settled down with the current issue of Stage and Studio. It looked as if he had lost interest in the whole affair, and Jean felt vaguely annoyed with him.
But three weeks later, on the first day that the causeway was reopened, George and his bicycle set off briskly towards Sparta.
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The beach was still littered with masses of shattered coral, and in one place the reef itself seemed to have been breached. George wondered how long it would take the myriads of patient polyps to repair the damage.
There was only one path up the face of the dliff, and when he had recovered his breath George began the climb. A few dried fragments of weed, trapped among the rocks, marked the limit of the ascending waters.
For a long time George Greggson stood on that lonely track, staring at the patch of fused rock beneath his feet. He tried to tell himself that it was some freak of the long-dead volcano, but soon abandoned this attempt at self-deception. His mind went back to that night, years ago, when he and Jean had joined that silly experiment of Rupert Boyce’s. No-one had ever really understood what had happened then, and George knew that in some unfathomable way these two strange events were linked together. First it had been Jean, now her son. He did not know whether to be glad or fearful, and in his heart he uttered a silent prayer:
“Thank you, Karellen, for whatever your people did for Jeff. But I wish I knew why they did it.”
He went slowly down to the beach, and the great white gulls wheeled around him, annoyed because he had brought no food to throw them as they cirded in the sky.
17
Kiu~u~‘s request, though it might have been expected at any time since the foundation of the Colony, was something of a bombshell. It represented, as everyone was fully aware, a crisis in the affairs of Athens, and nobody could decide whether good or bad would come of it.
Until now, the Colony had gone its way without any form of interference from the Overlords. They had left it completely alone, as indeed they ignored most human activities that were not subversive or did not offend their codes of behaviour. Whether the Colony’s aims could be called subversive was uncertain. They were non-political, but they represented a bid for intellectual and artistic independence. And from that, who knew what might come? The Overlords might well be
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able to foresee the future of Athens more clearly than its
founders-and they might not like it.
Of course, if Karellen wished to send an observer, inspector, or whatever one cared to call him, there was nothing that could be done about it. Twenty years ago the Overlords had announced that they had discontinued all use of their surveillance devices, so that humanity need no longer consider itself spied
upon. However, the fact that such devices still existed meant that nothing could be hidden from the Overlords if they really wanted to see it.
There were some on the island who welcomed this visit as a chance of settling one of the minor problems of Overlord psychology-their attitude towards Art. Did they regard it as
a childish aberration of the human race? Did they have any
forms of art themselves? In that case, was the purpose of this
visit purely asthetic, or did Karellen have less innocent
motives?
All these matters were debated endlessly while the preparations were under way. Nothing was known of the visiting Overlord, but it was assumed that he could absorb Culture in unlimited amounts. The experiment would at least be attempted, and the reactions of the victim observed with interest by a battery of very shrewd minds.
The current chairman of the council was the philosopher, Charles Yan Sen, an ironic but fundamentally cheerful man who was not yet in his sixties and was therefore still in the prime of life. Plato would have approved of him as an example of the philosopher-statesman, though Sen did not altogether approve of Plato, whom he suspected of grossly misrepresenting Socrates. He was one of the islanders who was determined to make the most of this visit, if only to show the Overlords that men still had plenty of initiative and were not yet, as he put it, “fully domesticated”.
Nothing in Athens was done without a committee, that ultimate hall-mark of the democratic method. Indeed, someone had once defined the Colony as a system of interlocking committees. But the system worked, thanks to the patient studies of the social psychologists who had been the real founders of Athens. Because the community was not too large, everyone in it could take some part in its running and could be a citizen in the truest sense of the word.
It was almost inevitable that George, as a leading member
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of the artistic hierarchy, should be one of the reception committee. But he made doubly sure by pulling a few strings. If the Overlords wanted to study the Colony, George wanted equally to study them. Jean was not very happy about this.
Ever since that evening at the Boyces’, she had felt a vague hostility towards the Overlords, though she could never give any reason for it. She just wished to have as little to do with them as possible, and to her one of the island’s main attractions had been its hoped-for independence. Now she feared that this independence might be threatened.
The Overlord arrived without ceremony in an ordinary manmade flyer, to the disappointment of those who had hoped for something more spectacular. He might have been Karellen himself, for no-one had ever been able to distinguish one Overlord from another with any degree of confidence. They all seemed duplicates from a single master-mould. Perhaps, by some unknown biological process, they were.
After the first day, the islanders ceased to pay much attention when the official car murmured past on its sightseeing tours. The visitor’s correct name, Thanthalteresco, proved too intractable, for general use, and he was soon christened “The Inspector”. It was an accurate enough name, for his curiosity and appetite for statistics were insatiable.
Charles Yan Sen was quite exhausted when, long after midnight, he had seen the Inspector back to the flyer which was serving as his base. There, no doubt, he would continue to work throughout the night while his human hosts indulged in the frailty of sleep.
Mrs. Sen greeted her husband anxiously on his return.
They were a devoted couple, despite his playful habit of calling her Xantippe when they were entertaining guests. She had long ago threatened to make the appropriate retort by brewing him a cup of hemlock, but fbrtunately this herbal beverage was less common to New Athens than the old.
“Was it a success?” she asked as her husband settled down to a belated meal.