Prisoner of Fire (2 page)

Did it matter who? They were all the enemy, all jailers. All that mattered was what Dugal had found and what he had told. While she was contemplating the situation, Vanessa used what she considered to be her strongest block—an old nonsense song with a monotonous refrain: Ten Green Bottles. Once she started that compulsive sequence running through her head, she could be reasonably sure that even Dugal would be blocked by the idiotic repetition.

The important thing was not to let anyone know that she had noticed the probe. The important thing was just to lie back on the grass and appear to enjoy the blue sky, the spring sunlight.

Vanessa had closed her eyes, and did not seem to be aware of Dr. Lindemann’s presence until he spoke to her.

“Are you asleep, Vanessa?” he said softly.

She opened her eyes, squinted up at him against the sky. He was not bad-looking for a middle-aged man of forty, or thereabouts. She knew that, apart from his professional concern, he found her sexually interesting also.

“Not asleep, Dr. Lindemann. Just daydreaming.”

“Oh
. About anything special?”

So he was the one who had used Dugal. She had an inspiration. Carry the war to the enemy. “Nothing important. I was just thinking about the electrified fences.”

Dr. Lindemann appeared to stroke a beard that did not exist. “Interesting. Do you know why you were thinking about the electrified fences.”

She sat up. “Yes. It seems so sad—especially on a spring day—that we are shut off from the rest of the world, and it is shut off from us.”

Dr. Lindemann smiled. “Precautions, Vanessa. Nothing but precautions. You lead a sheltered existence. You are lucky. The outside world could be a very dangerous place to people such as you. You watch tri-di. You know the level of violence that exists in our so-called civilised society. The masses are always looking for scapegoats—communists, Catholics, immigrants, anarchists, spies. Even espeople like you. Have you considered that you are fortunate in being so well protected?”

“Yes. And I am thankful that I have a secure life with good friends and good teachers. But, just occasionally, I feel like a prisoner.”

Dr. Lindemann laughed. “A morbid thought. You are not a prisoner, Vanessa. You are a privileged person. Soon you will be eighteen. For a few months you are still a minor, and your welfare is our responsibility. But when you attain your majority, if you still want to leave, we shall not stand in your way. If you still want to leave, you will be able to walk out through the gate with nearly a thousand Euros in your pocket and no obligations to Random Hill whatsoever.”

Vanessa remembered (low key) the last person who had done just that. James Grey, a boy who was the
best telepath that Random Hill had ever developed. It was nearly a year ago.

Vanessa and James had been psychologically intimate. By mutual consent they had agreed not to use blocks with each other. James had been convinced that the Random Hill set-up was a complicated conspiracy to restrict the liberty of paranormals. On his eighteenth birthday, he had decided to leave the institution and try his luck in the outside world. He had been given money, his identity card and the clothes he needed. Within an hour of leaving Random Hill, he had been found dead—horribly murdered.

His body had been brought back, and the older children had been allowed to see it, if they wished. Some of them did so wish, Vanessa among them. The wounds had been skilfully concealed, but not too skilfully. Especially for young people with some imagination.

Vanessa recalled his last, anguished transmission. “Don’t try it. Not this way. They have thugs waiting…”

So she said to Dr. Lindemann: “I don’t suppose I shall ever want to leave Random Hill or reject the training I have been given. I have too many friends here. Where would I find such friends outside?”

“Perhaps you are right. But don’t let me influence you, my dear. Make up your own mind. There is plenty of time.”

“Yes,” said Vanessa. “There is plenty of time.”

Though she knew that time was running out. How long could you live in a situation where you had to use mental blocks to maintain your privacy and be yourself?

I
N
THE SUMMER
of 1973, Jenny Smith, aged eighteen, daughter of a Sussex farmer, had run away from home. Jenny had been an exceptionally intelligent child and had distinguished herself at school. Her teachers had discovered a peculiarity. In any form of oral examination, where the teacher already knew the answers to the questions being asked, Jenny invariably gained one hundred per cent. In any oral examination where the teacher did not know the answers to the questions, she still scored outstandingly high marks, but never one hundred per cent. In written examinations, whether the presiding teacher knew the answers or not, Jenny still scored one hundred per cent or very near to it.

Her teachers wanted her to go on to university. So did Jenny. Her father, a kindly but stolid man of fifty-three, did not. Having recently buried his wife, he saw no reason why he should continue to pay good wages to a housekeeper when Jenny was old enough to take over.

Jenny had wanted to take a degree in English Literature. Her father vetoed the notion. Jenny became an unpaid housekeeper on an isolated down land farm that was ten miles from the nearest town. She stood the isolation—physical, emotional, intellectual—through one long winter. Then she ran away.

She
took ten pounds out of the housekeeping money, packed her few clothes in a battered hold-all, walked five miles to the main road and thumbed a lift to London.

She went to an employment agency and got a temporary job. Since she could not type or take shorthand, it was a very lowly job. She became a filing clerk for a company in the City which specialised in the marketing of petrochemical products.

She found herself a room in Bayswater, and was content for a while to cook meals over a single gas ring, to listen to the radio and to read the books it was necessary to read if one hoped to take an external degree in English Literature.

After a time, she was promoted to the grandiose status of Information Assistant, which meant that she had to answer the phone and search for the data required by high-powered executives. Sometimes, they wished to know about the seismic surveys in Brazil, or natural gas deposits in Australia, or butyl rubber production in the U.S.A., or crude oil reserves in the U.S.S.R. She was rather good on these kind of problems, particularly if she had to consult a specialist. She seemed to know the answers almost before they were given.

Meanwhile, she met John. John had a room in the same apartment house. He had at the time a good job supervising girls who packed chocolate bars in a large factory. He was a Rhodesian; and his complexion was dark enough, his cheekbones broad enough, his hair black enough to suggest a touch of negro blood somewhere along the line.

John was a drop-out arts graduate, an idealist. He could have taken some sinecure in a museum of fine arts or a commercial gallery, or even in the expanding
sub-industry of post-graduate research. Instead, he chose to drift. The job in the chocolate factory was, so he said, simply the means by which he could buy an air-ticket to Japan. He said he wanted to take a look at Japanese culture and also find out what the radical students were doing.

John and Jenny were never in love; but each had an uncanny ability to know what the other was thinking and feeling. Sometimes, they seemed to indulge in conversations where neither opened their lips. Eventually, they went to bed together—as much for mutual comfort and an extension of intimacy as for sexual desire.

Within six weeks of their getting to know each other, John was killed—stupidly and absurdly—in a demonstration outside the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square. The demonstration had started peacefully enough as a disciplined protest against the alleged charges of malpractice against an American negro doctor in Alabama. But a lot of people turned up—it being a fine day—the provos became violent, and the mounted police, that splendid British anachronism, were called in. Somebody threw a nails-and-gelignite bomb, intended for the mounted police. It fell short. Two demonstrators were killed and seven injured. John was one of the dead.

By that time, though she did not yet know it, Jenny was pregnant. Somehow, she learned to accept his death. Somehow she managed to hold down her job in the city. Indeed, she prospered. She learned much about the company for which she worked, and she learned something of the manipulation of stocks and shares. She learned not so much from what people said as from what they thought.

While the baby swelled in her stomach, she learned
to make money. By the time the child was born, she had become intent upon making money as a means to power.

Also she had met a bright young man—not empathetic in the way that John had been empathetic—but sensitive enough and attractive enough to draw her allegiance and physical desire. He wanted to marry her, but he did not want to be encumbered with a child not his.

Jenny bore her baby and put it into a home. Then she married her bright young man and became very, very rich. She never went back to the farm in Sussex, and she never enquired after the welfare of her daughter. When she was thirty-nine years old, she took an overdose of sleeping tablets. But by then she knew what had happened to Vanessa.

I
T
WAS SHORTLY
after midnight. Vanessa had left the dormitory and had stolen a pole from the gymnasium and also a four-pound lumber axe from the forester’s hut. Tonight she would be free or dead.

She had been practising pole-jumping for several days. She hoped it had not been noticed, but she did not count on it. In practice jumps she had managed to leap nearly ten feet. The electrified fence was eight feet high. Theoretically, she should have easy clearance. But before she could get to the fence, there was the thorn hedge. A narrow avenue would have to be cut through it. She needed at least twenty paces for her run.

Vanessa wore only the dark blue trousers and vest and the light plimsolls she used for physical education. They were the only things she could think of that were practical enough for the task ahead. Fortunately, it was a warm night. Fortunately, also, there was some moonlight.

The moon was both friend and enemy. She needed its light to hack a way through the thorn hedge, to see where the fence was and where to plant the pole when she made her leap. But it exposed her. It made her feel naked.

This was not the first time Vanessa had been out
late at night. She had used several evenings to check when the guards and the dogs made their rounds. They were very regular. They came round at half-hourly intervals until midnight, then at one-hourly intervals until dawn. The midnight rounds had just been made.

Vanessa had chosen, to make her leap over that part of the fence that was farthest away from the school. It was nearly a quarter of a mile from the main buildings; and it had the additional advantage of being partially screened from the school by a group of beech trees.

Cutting a way through the hedge was going to be noisy—and she would have to skip very carefully over the thorn stumps—but these were risks that could not be avoided. Better to face them than remain a prisoner or, in desperation, leave as poor James had left.

Exposing herself as little as possible as she crossed the moonlit lawns, Vanessa had darted from the shadow to patch of shadow, like a true creature of the night. Constantly, she looked back apprehensively over her shoulder. Constantly she ran through a verbal mind-block to defeat any accidental or deliberate probe. Dugal would be asleep; and without Dugal the para-psychologists of Random Hill were almost blind.

She arrived at the place she had chosen, laid down the axe and pole, and leaned against a beech tree for a while to get her breath and renew her courage. She looked around her. The world was curiously still and beautiful. How easy it would be to take back the pole and the axe, creep back into the dormitory and accept the security of clean sheets, regular meals, an orderly existence.

But the price you had to pay for such security was too high. You had to surrender freedom of action.

That
could be borne. What could not be borne was that you also had to surrender freedom of thought. Vanessa, though only seventeen, knew very well what the parapsychologists of Random Hill were doing. They were intent upon turning a group of gifted children into controlled sensing machines. The government needed people with paranormal powers for sophisticated techniques of communication, for plain simple espionage, for non-verbal interrogation, for internal security and for every dirty game that governments throughout the world were prepared to play to maintain their own authority. From odd remarks that Dr. Lindemann had made, Vanessa knew that China, Russia, America and most of the other countries that presumed to play at international politics were rapidly developing their own paranormal resources.

Vanessa did not want to be part of any political game, dirty or clean. She simply wanted to be herself, her own woman. She wanted to live in peace. It was a simple ambition and, in the world of 1990, a brave ambition. There was a price tag on that, also.

She took a last look round at the peaceful, nocturnal world. How clean everything seemed. How clean and clear. She looked up at the stars. Many were obscured by the haze of moonlight; but enough burned to indicate that truly the universe was too poignantly beautiful for people to allow themselves to be destroyed in meaningless ways.

She brushed tears from her face, lifted the axe and approached the thorn hedge. She had been able to practise pole-jumping. She had not been able to practise cutting down thorn hedges. She had no idea how long it would take or how much noise she would make.

This was the testing time.

An
owl hooted.

Vanessa chose her spot and swung the axe. She aimed low, where the tough wood entered the ground. The first blow glanced off, the axe-head was buried in earth. Vanessa pulled it clear and swung again. This time the axe bit. Not deeply, but it bit. The hedge shook. Overhanging thorns snagged at her hair, scratched her face, hooked in her vest. Vanessa ignored them and swung again with all her might. The blow sounded like a pistol shot through the still, clear night. She ignored the blood on her face, the scratches on her body, wrenched the axe loose and swung again. And again. And again.