The Guardians (19 page)

His mother was in the apartment when he arrived. She had a job outside the family, as everyone in the Bubble did, but her duties in the Food Programming Section were geared to fit in with Marty's school day. She looked tired—more so than usual. She smiled and kissed him, and asked him how school had been. He wondered if she would say something about Paul—news traveled almost instantaneously around the Bubble—but she did not. Because of that, he said nothing either. They talked about ancient Rome; she said it had been her favorite period of history when she was a girl.

He asked her: “Did you ever get to visit there? Rome, I mean?”

She nodded. “We spent a year there once. Father—your grandfather—had lived there when he was an art student.”

“What's it like?”

“Oh, well . . .” She looked at him. “You've seen modern Rome in the films. That one last week.”

“I know. But I mean—what's it really like?”

She looked away from him. “It's so long ago, Marty. I don't remember properly.” She looked through the window toward the ramp. “I think that's your father.”

Marty glanced at his finger-watch. “It's too early for him.”

“He said he might get away early today.” The door opened, and she said with what sounded like relief: “Hello, darling.”

They kissed, and his father said: “Hi, boy. They let me off the leash half an hour before time. How about you and me heading up to the reservoir and catching us two or three trout for supper?”

•  •  •

The reservoir, like the park in which it stood, was one of the things intended to make life more
natural. Keeping the recirculated water of the Bubble in this small open lake meant an extra cost in filtering and purifying plant. All such costs had to be very carefully considered. The Moon colony did what it could toward paying its way by mining and refining precious metals which were rocketed back to the mother planet, but apart from that its value lay in the less commercial fields of astronomical, selenographic and interplanetary research. The taxpayers back home footed the bill, and there was small scope for luxuries. This one, though, was regarded as justifiable. The water in the lake was only a degree or so below the Bubble atmospheric temperature of 18° centigrade, and trout flourished in it. Anyone who wanted to fish for natural protein was at liberty to do so. Other fish were grown in tanks. Meat came from the factory farm, with battery chicken as the mainstay.

Marty and his father made their way through the park to their usual fishing spot. There were four carefully trimmed lawns, flower beds and borders, a clump of shrubbery. Everything was calculated for economy and for the carefully planned
balance of life in the Bubble. The flowers were specially bred to last and all the shrubs were evergreens: deciduous plants could have been trained to adapt to a world with no seasons, but their falling leaves would have been a nuisance.

The lake had been constructed asymmetrically, in a distorted kidney shape. The Bubble itself had to be a regular hemisphere, but as far as possible things inside it were given irregular shapes and lines in an attempt to avoid monotony. Even so, even with a part of its rim left in the irregular black basalt of the Moon's natural surface, the pool could not seem anything but artificial. Anyway, there was not an inch of its border, of any place inside the Bubble, that was not as familiar to Marty as the walls of his bedroom. Nothing changed. Changing things would have cost money.

They fished in silence for a time. During lunar night the Bubble was artificially lit by high-poled lamps which were faded out toward the end of the twelve-hour day through a rheostat at the electricity plant. At the moment they were still fully lit. Marty could see the others fishing around them, twenty or
thirty, each in the place to which he came automatically. He thought of a feature film he had seen on TV about salmon fishing in Norway, with a thigh-booted man standing out in a torrent that foamed around his legs, and the valley empty to the distant gray horizon.

His father said: “You heard about Paul.”

It was not a question. Marty nodded. “Yes, he told me.”

“I was talking to his father today. There's a medical factor involved. You know what a long streak Paul has turned into. They've always known that rehabilitation to Earth gravity is tougher on tall Lunarians—it's pretty obvious why—and recently they've come to the view that if you leave things too late you get permanent posture trouble. The doctors think Paul's that sort of case.”

“I see.”

“The Millers aren't happy about it, but they have to put his health first, of course. They've only got three years of contract to run, but it's a long time.”

Marty asked: “Where will he be living, on Earth?”

“With his grandparents in California. Just outside San Francisco.”

“Sounds like a good place. We've been doing the United States in geography.”

“Pretty good. I'm from New England myself.”

Marty knew that, and also knew it was something his parents did not normally talk about. In the Bubble there was a good deal of general talk about Earth—about what TV showed was happening there—but people did not speak much about their own earlier lives.

After a pause, his father said again: “The Millers have only three years to go themselves. That helps.”

“I suppose it does.”

His father cast, and the line floated out across the placid, unrippled waters. He said: “Fifty generations of fish that have never seen a real fly but they still rise to the lure. This is a tricky problem, Marty. I've not talked about it before because it's just about impossible to explain it. Some people send their children down when they're four or five. That means they grow up as strangers, with strangers. There's a case for it. You can make a case for doing
it at any age. The Dickinsons sent Clive when he was twelve because that was the age for entry to Peter Dickinson's old boarding school in England.

“We gave it a lot of thought, your mother and I. We decided to keep you till you were ready for a university. Maybe we were being selfish—I don't know. One of the arguments on our side was that you and Paul were such buddies—had been since you crawled around a sandpit together, before you could walk. I guess that one has kind of blown up in our faces.”

Marty did not say anything. His father went on: “We've been thinking about things again. We decided you are old enough to make a decision for yourself. If you want to go down, we'll fix it.”

“Where would I live?”

“We've got relatives in different places. You could have a choice.”

His father had spoken evenly and casually, but Marty realized there was nothing casual about this, nor about the decision he should make. He was excited, and guessed the excitement could have shown in his voice. He was a bit ashamed and,
realizing that, realized something else—that it really would mean leaving them, for six long years. He would be down on Earth and they would be still up here in the Bubble. He imagined seeing his mother's anxious face, not in reality but on the flickering circle of the visiphone screen, rationed to a few minutes at a time. He said quickly: “It doesn't matter. I don't want to go down.”

“You're sure of that? You could give it thought. You don't have to make your mind up right away.”

“I'm sure,” he said. “I'm fine here.”

“Then I'm very glad. Especially on account of your mother. Life here is more of a strain on some people than others. They miss things more, things they knew back on Earth. Your mother does.”

But you don't, Marty thought with sudden resentment. He looked at his father's tall, upright figure, the strong chin, high-cheekboned face, steady gray eyes. You're happy enough here.

“It would have been rough for her if you had decided to go. It's going to be pretty rough for Mrs. Miller.”

The excitement had gone; in its place there was
a sick feeling in his stomach. He had been offered the trip to Earth and had turned it down. He was stuck with the Bubble.

His father said: “Hey, you're not watching your line! That looks like a big one.”

•  •  •

He went with the Millers by crawler to the launch station. It was six miles away along the edge of the Sea of Rains, as a precaution against blowups damaging or maybe even destroying the Bubble. The caterpillar tracks took them steadily with occasional jolts across the Moon's surface, from time to time plunging through dust pockets and sending dust scattering on either side, a shower of floating sparks in the rays of the risen sun.

Nobody spoke much. At the launch station they went on board with Paul and saw him for the last time, with all of them crowded together in the capsule. There was the bunk in which he would lie, cushioned for takeoff. And for landing. It was hard to believe that in a few weeks he would be breathing the air of Earth, not inside a protective dome but out of the whole wide sky of the planet.

Paul said: “You'll write to me. I'm counting on that.”

“Sure,” Marty said. “You, too. If you don't find you have too many other things to do.”

But he would, of course. Paul said: “I won't. Bye, Mom, Dad. I'll visiphone you right away, soon as I land.”

Mrs. Miller kissed Paul. Mr. Miller put a hand on his shoulder, squeezing hard. Then they had to get out and take a cabin across to the control center. From the viewing level they heard the relay of the countdown, and saw the exhaust gases rise in a fiery cloud from the pit before the ship itself began to rise, sliding out of its sheath, slowly at first and then faster and faster until it was a gleaming, vanishing speck in the sky. That was when Mrs. Miller started crying.

She had stopped by the time they took the crawler back to the Bubble, but the silence was worse than on the way out. Marty left them at the main airlock to make his way home. Mr. Miller said: “Thanks for coming along, Marty.”

Mrs. Miller said: “You'll come and see us still?”
Her hands held his lightly. “We wouldn't like to lose touch with you, Marty.”

As if one could lose touch with anyone inside the confines of the Bubble. He said: “I won't lose touch, Mrs. Miller.”

Read on for a peek at another exciting adventure novel by John Christopher!

I
AWOKE WITH THE EARLY
morning sun dazzling my eyes. this was not in itself unusual because my window faced east, but it triggered a sense of something being wrong. There had been a bothering light in my eyes the night before, from the full moon, and in the end I had climbed out of bed and drawn the curtains against its brilliance. Yet they were open now.

That was when I remembered the nightmare. I'd had nightmares before, when I was little—I could call up hazy recollections of smoke and fire and fear—but there had been nothing like that for
years. I had slept, in those days, in a cot beside Mother Ryan's bed, and been lifted in beside her to be comforted. Last night, too, Mother Ryan had provided comfort, but she must have come the length of the corridor to reach me. She had sat on the edge of my bed, trying to persuade me there was nothing to be frightened of. In the end, she had left me and gone to the window and opened the curtains to show me there really was nothing out there but moonlight. Even then I had taken some convincing.

It had seemed so real! And yet it was a reality without shape. I had known there were things outside but could not tell what sort of things they were. All I was conscious of was that howling, ebbing, and swelling as they circled the house. Each time it died down I thought they might be going away, but each time they came back and there seemed to be more of them than before.

My one concern was to escape—hide under the bed, or better still run and find somewhere in the house where I could not hear them. But I could not even sit up; my legs refused to move, and a dead weight pinned my shoulders. Then the shapeless
voices stopped circling and were wailing monstrously against my window. Glass could not hold against such a volume of sound . . . and as I thought that, it shattered, and I knew they were in the room with me.

I suppose that was when I started yelling, still not knowing what they were and not daring to look. It seemed a long time before Mother Ryan was beside me, telling me to hush, it was only a bad dream—urging me to open my eyes and see there was no one there but her—no sounds except those of the distant sea and the wind in the pines, and her voice, part chiding but more reassuring.

“It's Andy's the cause of it, the little-good-for. He was at the Master's brandy again yesterday, and when the liquor's in him his tongue flaps nonsense. But I'm astonished at you paying heed to him. You should be used to his blather.”

Had I been thinking clearly, it would have surprised me too. I'd known he was drunk when he came in, from his careful stiff way of walking. I hadn't believed a word of his ramblings about the black Demons, and the way they winged across the night
skies, hunting for sinners—children especially—to take back to their lairs in the moon. Paddy and I had laughed about it after he'd gone, over our bedtime milk and biscuits.