CHILDREN OF THE THUNDER

by John Brunner

  Table of Contents

  DEDICATION

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PART ONE

  PART TWO

  CHILDREN OF THE THUNDER

  John Brunner

  To Wendy Minton

  for being a brick

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  While researching this novel I received a great deal of helpful information from Dr. Louis Hughes of Harley Street, London, to whom I am consequently much obliged.

  —JKHB

  PART ONE

  “Little Johnny may, like the sons of Belial, love evil for its own sake; he may hate being nice to others, but recognize it as a cost he has to incur if he is the more effectively to do them in later, and he may very accurately calculate the optimal concessions he must make to niceness for the sake of nastiness.”

  —From “What’s Good For Us” by

  Alan Ryan (New Society 30 Jan 87)

  The swimming pool was empty save for windblown litter. Most private pools in Silicon Valley were out of use this year, despite the heat of the California summer. Too many industrial solvents had leaked into the local water table, and the price of purifiers capable of removing them had tripled in the past three months.

  Nonetheless—perhaps because they had arrived from Britain too recently not to treasure every sunny day as though tomorrow it might snow—Harry and Alice Shay had received their boring old cank of a visitor beside the pool, in canvas chairs with their names stencilled on the back.

  From the refuge of his private wing of the house, David, who was nearly fourteen, spied on them between the slats of a Venetian blind. At this distance he could hear nothing, but he could make plenty of informed guesses about the conversation. Shaytronix Inc. was undergoing what was politely called a “liquidity crisis” and the caller was Herman Goldfarb, the firm’s accountant, a portly, bespectacled man in his mid-fifties, and an absolutely archetypal whenzie, forever saying, “I can remember when—”

  For at least two reasons he was looking extremely uncomfortable. His dark suit was doubtless okay in an office with the air-conditioning turned up high, but it was absurd for out-of-doors, even though he had been accorded a tall cold drink and the shade of a striped umbrella. So far he hadn’t even doffed his jacket. And what was more…

  The long-standing West Coast cult of the body beautiful was yielding to the risk from the ever-strengthening radiation passed by Earth’s damaged ozone layer. Nonetheless both Shays still adhered to it enthusiastically. Though he was about the same age as Goldfarb, and going gray even to the hair on his chest, Harry kept in excellent shape and didn’t mind who knew it. He was wearing exiguous French briefs and a pair of dark glasses. So was Alice—plus a gleaming coat of suncream. Harry liked her to be admired. He was inordinately proud of having married her when he was forty and she was barely twenty.

  He tended to skate lightly over the fact that he had abandoned his first wife and two teen-age children in order to do so.

  For a while it amused David—who was wearing nothing at all—to watch Goldfarb pretending not to stare at his mother’s bosom. But that soon palled, and he went back to his computer. Coupled to a modem that accessed an international datanet, it was running a program of his own devising from which he hoped for interesting results.

  This large, cool, low-ceilinged room, built on at right angles to the older main part of the house, was his private kingdom. A curtain across an alcove concealed his bed and the door to the adjacent bathroom. Shelves on all sides were crammed with books and tapes, barely leaving space for his stereo and his TV set, the latter murmuring to itself with the sound turned low. In the center of the floor stood a desk with his computer on it, its half-open drawers full of untidy papers. Most of the rest was taken up with memorials to past and current interests: along one wall a comprehensive home laboratory, including a second-hand electron microscope and a rig for genalysis and enzyme and ribozyme tailoring; elsewhere a bench with a rack of woodworking tools below it; at another place a broken-down domestic robot he was partway through repairing and modifying; in the furthest corner an easel bearing an abandoned portrait, jars nearby holding brushes on which the paint had dried six months ago…

  The air was full of gentle music. On a whim he had set his auto-composer to generate a fugue on a theme of his own using the traditional instrumentation of a Dixieland jazz band. The effect, he thought, was rather striking.

  The computer program still seemed to be quite a distance from the end of its run. When the TV said something barely distinguishable about riots in half a dozen big cities, David glanced incuriously at the screen. A mob, mainly composed of young blacks, was hurling rocks at store windows. Turning up the sound with the remote control, he caught the name of a soft drink, and curled his lip. So they were protesting about the FDA’s ban on CrusAde! Foolishness on a grand scale, that! Something about the way the stuff was promoted had made him wary, and it wasn’t just the claim that by buying it you would be serving the cause of the godly—half the profits, it was said, would go to some fundamentalist church already worth as much as a minor-league multinational. So he had bought a can not to drink but to analyze, and several weeks before the FDA clampdown had found out about the trace of a designer drug that it contained, not so much an additive as an addictive.

  He had no trouble identifying it. It was one of his own inventions, and particularly popular with the dealers he supplied it to because it hooked its users nearly as fast as crack—nearly as fast, indeed, as the legendary (but in David’s opinion also mythical) Big L.

  How the makers of CrusAde had ever expected to get away with it, heaven knew. Maybe they had just hoped to take advantage of people’s increasing distrust—and dislike—of government.

  And/or the increasing immunity churches enjoyed from the enforcement of the law.

  The computer beeped. He turned back to it.

  And tugged in annoyance at his dark hair. Either there was a glitch in his program, which he doubted, or the data he was searching for were totally shellbacked. Or, of course, they simply were not available on-line. The last seemed all too likely, given their confidential nature.

  Well, that settled it. Harry Shay was going to have to move his family back to Britain for as long as necessary, whether or not Shaytronix Inc. went belly-up in consequence. In fact, in David’s view, it would serve the puky cank right if he lost control of the firm he had founded. He would still be a very wealthy man, for he was good at providing—well—safety nets. What he would say if he ever found out that for the past eighteen months David had been imitating him by siphoning the proceeds of his drug-designing to a bank in the Bahamas, it was impossible to guess. But if the need arose the revelation would provide leverage; being a minor, he’d had to deposit the money in his parents’ name, with credit references furnished unwittingly by members of the Shaytronix board, and what he had done was so barely legal, relying as it did on gene-tailoring to make yeasts secrete his new drugs rather than synthesizing them, that news of it would instantly draw FBI and maybe SEC attention to the corporation. Indeed, the former had already taken notice of David, although not the company—but there would be no further trouble from that quarter, or at any rate from those particular agents… Faced with such a threat, Harry would have no alternative but to sell up and agree to return to England.

  It probably wouldn’t be necessary, though. David had considerable confidence in his powers of persuasion, especially after his brush with the FBI. Nonetheless, if push came to shove he would have no qualms about exerting that kind of pressure on his father.

  He tilted back his chair and heaved a sigh, thinking: Father—son…

  He had suspected since he was ten and known since he was twelve that Harry was
not in fact his father. At any rate, given his and his parents’ respective blood groups, the odds were entirely against it. Harry was fond of saying that biotechnology was going to recover from its current setbacks, and would indeed become the next boom industry once fifth-generation computers had been digested. Accordingly he had been delighted when David requested a biology kit for his twelfth birthday—one the boy had carefully selected because blood-typing was among the experiments listed in the instruction manual. He had, though, drawn the line at providing an actual blood sample, and David had had to sneak a tissue out of the bathroom waste-bin one morning when Harry had cut himself shaving. A tampon used by his mother had been easy to obtain, though somewhat harder to dispose of discreetly afterward.

  And more than once, when he had glimpsed his father naked, he had noticed what appeared suspiciously like a vasectomy scar…

  He was a very cool, very reasonable child. He would have been quite content if Harry and Alice had levelled with him from the start, or at least from the age at which he could be expected to understand answers to the relevant questions. What made him deeply, icily angry with his parents was the fact that they had lied to him. Worse: they had gone to great lengths to reinforce their lie not only directly but indirectly. For instance, his mother, even now, was given to asking people, “Don’t you think David looks like his father?”

  Maybe I do. If I knew who my father was, I could say.

  There came a shy tap at the door. Aware what it portended, he strode noiselessly to the window again. His parents were still arguing with Goldfarb, who had finally removed his jacket, and it looked as though the discussion was growing as heated as he was. They should be at it for another half-hour, at least.

  So he waited, his face twisting into a feral grin.

  After a pause the door opened and Bethsaida entered circumspectly, come to make his bed and change his towels. She was the Shays’ Filipina cook and housekeeper: pretty, plump, married to a steward working on a cruise liner, a respectable Catholic mother of three—and desperately hoping her employers’ son wasn’t in here.

  On realizing he was, and naked, she gasped and made to flee, but he was too quick. Darting past her, he pushed the door shut with his foot as he embraced her from behind, cupping her breasts in his small pale hands and nuzzling the nape of her neck. She made to resist for a moment, and then the magic took over. He unzipped her skirt and let it fall, followed by her panties, and drew her half-clad toward the rumpled bed. She moaned a little while he gratified himself, but she could not stop herself from giving in.

  It had been a good two years since anyone had failed to do as David had wanted when he wanted it.

  Now what he wanted most in all the world was to find out why.

  You’re watching TV Plus. Now for Newsframe.

  A child has died in Scoutwood, County Durham, and thirteen people are in hospital, after eating vegetables grown in the garden of a house sited on a former rubbish tip. Arthur Smalley, 31, unemployed, who grew and sold them but is said to have been afraid to eat any himself, has been charged with failing to declare the income they brought in and will appear in court tomorrow.

  General Sir Hampton Thrower, who resigned as deputy C-in-C of NATO in protest against the withdrawal of medium-range nuclear missiles, told a cheering crowd at Salisbury that patriotic Britons should declare their views and…

  Freelance science writer Peter Levin returned to his three-roomed top-floor flat in London’s Islington behind schedule and in a foul temper.

  He had spent the day covering a conference on computer security. It sounded newsworthy. Two months ago a logic bomb had burst in a computer at British Gas, planted, no doubt, by an employee disgruntled about the performance of his or her shares, which resulted in each of its customers in the London area being sent the bill intended for the next person on the list—whereupon all record of the sums due had been erased. Consequently such matters were in the forefront of public attention.

  However, Peter was much afraid that the editor of the Comet, from whom he had pried the assignment, wasn’t going to be happy with the outcome. The paper, founded two years ago, was in effect a news digest, aimed at people with intellectual pretensions but whose attention span was conditioned by the brevity of radio and TV bulletins, and what the guy wanted was a string of sensational snippets about his readers’ privacy being infringed, bent programmers blackmailing famous corporations, saboteurs worming their way into GCHQ and the Ministry of Defense… But most of what Peter had brought home consisted of a series of dry mathematical analyses, because the proceedings had been dominated by cryptographers. Worse yet, the most interesting session had been closed to the press and everyone else bar members of the sponsoring society.

  Then, to add the final straw, he’d found that yet another unrepaired sewer had burst, putting his local underground line out of action, so he’d had to come back by bus, and while he was waiting at the stop it had begun to rain.

  Cursing aloud, he dumped his briefcase with its load of conference documents and commercial handouts on a chair, draped his damp jacket over its back to await cleaning, and kicked off his shoes, soaked because he had trodden in one of the storm’s first puddles. In socks he padded toward the doorless closet that passed for his kitchen, found a half-full bottle of whiskey, and poured a lot of it on a little ice.

  After the second gulp he calmed down. There was an angle he could exploit, although it was far from ideal. One of the speakers—the only one with any sense of humor—had devoted part of his talk to the lack of comprehension still shown by lay computer users when faced with the need to invent secure passwords. Most of his listeners were serious-faced young men and women (an unexpected number of the latter, which was also a point worth mentioning) more concerned with the mathematical implications of their work than its value to companies trying to keep industrial spies from penetrating their research records, but some of his examples had made even them break into derisive laughter. In particular, his account of how that managing director—

  But it was time to stop thinking and start writing! The clock on his computer showed half-past seven, and he had been sternly warned that he must file, via modem, before nine if his copy was to make the Scottish and West Country editions. Despite the fact that the Comet’s management boasted of possessing the most advanced technology of any newspaper in Britain, its outlying offices still wouldn’t accept text direct from London without plenty of time to sub-edit it for the local readership. Maybe that explained why the paper had never achieved its target circulation, and was rumored to be on the verge of bankruptcy.

  Hating to think what corruption might be introduced by scientifically illiterate meddling, Peter retrieved his pocket organizer from his jacket, downloaded its contents to the computer and set about converting rough notes into a usable story. Rain battering the roof-slates provided a dismal counterpoint to the tapping of the keys.

  In the upshot he beat his deadline by a comfortable margin. He was even tolerably pleased with the way he had highlighted the joky speech and played down the mathematical side without actually ignoring it. He celebrated by pouring another drink, then paced back and forth to stretch his legs. He was stiff not only from his stint at the keyboard but also from spending so much of the day on plastic chairs apparently designed for Australopithecus. But there was bound to be a phone call once the editor had had a chance to read his text, so despite increasing hunger pangs he did not yet dare to go out for a bite to eat.

  The wait, though, was a long one, and during it his previous mood of depression and frustration returned. In his late thirties now, he felt he deserved something better than this apartment. The politest term one could apply to such accommodation was “compact”: this room that he worked in, with the computer and his reference library; a bedroom so much reduced by shoehorning in a shower and toilet that he had to walk sideways around the bed when he needed to change the sheets; and what he termed his “if-you-can-call-it-living” room which despite i
ts electronic wall with TV, stereo/CD and radio tuner was scarcely calculated to overawe his visitors, especially female ones.

  No, that was untrue—the result of a bad day and bad weather. In fact, he rarely lacked for presentable girlfriends, even though he was by no stretch of the imagination handsome. He was of average height, reasonably slim, in reasonably good health, with dark hair and brown eyes. Nothing about him was out of the ordinary, even his voice. Indeed, every time he heard himself on tape, he was struck by how much it resembled any and every British male voice on radio or TV, a common denominator, as it were…

  Thinking of the TV, remembering it was time for a news bulletin, he switched on, and found the lead story was a subject he himself had written about a score of times, to the point where he was getting bored with it. Yet another group of famine-desperate black refugees had penetrated the cordon sanitaire the South Africans maintained along their northern border, and duly been shot down on the grounds that they were “biological warfare vectors”… There was no doubt who was going to win this particular war of attrition: the Afrikaners, like other wealthy advanced nations, had the AIDS vaccine while their opponents just had AIDS. Nowadays the incidence of “slim” in Kenya, Uganda, Angola, was estimated at fifty percent. What army could prevail against so subtle and vicious an enemy?

  And the next item concerned a food colorant that had been shown to reduce intelligence in children—about ten years too late to save its millions of victims. To this one he paid serious attention, even making notes.

  Stories with a medical slant were the chief kind that editors called on him to handle, because of the way he had drifted into his highly specialized field. In his early twenties he had been a student at a London teaching hospital, hoping to enter general practice. When he was at the midpoint of his course, however, and not making much headway, he met by chance a researcher for TV Plus, the maverick among Britain’s television services, rarely attracting as much as ten percent of the audience yet constantly breaking major stories the competition was afraid to touch. The producer of the science series Continuum was planning a documentary on recent advances in medicine. Peter was able to supply useful information and prevent one gross mistake from reaching the screen—for which he received due acknowledgment in the credits.