Copyright

Published by Golden Apple, Wallasey.

Copyright © 1966 by John Rankine

A Golden Apple Production 2002

Cover design by John R. Mason

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this ebook or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

ISBN: 1-904073-19-0

First published in the UK by Dobson Books.

Table of Contents

Copyright

About

Six Cubed Plus One

About this book

Through a simple matter of misalignment the new teaching machines in the school began to require more knowledge than was being programmed into them - they also needed a control and Sarah Joy's ego was the only one they chose.

This short story was dramatised by the BBC in 1966 as 'The World in Silence' in the 'Out of the Unknown' series 2. It was Broadcast on 17th November 1966.

Published by Golden Apple, Wallasey.

For more information and a complete list of Douglas R. Mason/ John Rankine titles in ebook, see:

www.goldenapple.u-net.com

This ebook is Not for re-sale

Six Cubed Plus One

Chronologically, it could be said to start on a chilly Monday in April when the janitor’s long, saturnine face appeared, without any summons, over the ground glass panel of the principal’s door. Lonsbury lifted his head and saw, as usual, that his own name, in reverse, appeared to be stencilled across the visitor’s chest:

Not for the first time, he thought it would be a good idea to have the legend moved to an opaque part of the fabric. On Mondays especially, he found it trying. The only chest it seemed to fit well was that of the junior P.E. mistress, who by a miracle of cantilevering got the A and the F bang on. Fitting everyone else to this exacting standard was becoming a neurotic obsession.

There was, anyway, no percentage in trying it with Harold Harris. He paused, with lifted pen and no enthusiasm, to hear the worst. The only positive good was the minor one that he could shelve, temporarily, the morning chore of working through his correspondence. Though, even here, he had streamlined his system into a simple disposal operation through a slot into a king-sized wastepaper basket and the change to a long, frustrating conversation with the janitor would be only a minimal gain.

Sensing the atmosphere, he observed protocol far enough to ask formally, “What is it, Mr. Harris?” It was only “Harold” on the infrequent occasions when there was industrial peace.

“I’m glad you asked that, Mr. Lonsbury, because you know I never complain about the work here. You know the time I put in, Mr. Lonsbury. Early and late. Late and early. And mind you, I don’t grudge it. Give and take is my motto. Many a Saturday I’ve spent on the layouts in that auto wing. I’d be glad to have a penny, one penny, for every hour I’ve put in of my free time on those study corrals.

“Carrels.”

“That’s right, corrals. And you know how difficult it is to fit them in where there’s hardly space to walk round.”

Lonsbury suddenly mutinied. He caught sight of his high domed, balding head in the reflection on a glass-fronted book-case and realized that conversations with his janitor were doing a lot to push back his hair-line.

He was listened to some such monologue every Monday for the last ten years, taking it patiently in the cause of empathy and good staff relations.

This time, he fairly snapped out, “For God’s sake get round to it, man. What’s the trouble now?”

“This is the trouble, Mr. Lonsbury.” Harris slapped a sheaf of diagrams on the principal’s already littered desk. “Young Mr. Kershaw’s been in over the weekend with that daft assistant of his, and he’s took all the new teaching machines out of store and distributed them on each floor. That’s another fifty shoved in that space. All them corrals is altered. There isn’t one like it was. I tell you, Mr. Lonsbury, it’s like a Chinese laburine in there and that’s no bull. You’ll never see it clean. Never. I can’t guarantee that my cleaners will be able to move. You know Mrs. Jennings, if she gets her back end stuck in an acoustic cowl she’ll be there to the Last Trump. It’ll be a death trap. So long as you take responsibility, I don’t mind. But I don’t want that Superintendent Janitor running his finger over my surfaces and saying, ‘What’s this, then?’”

Past defeats lay heavily on Lonsbury. He temporized with, “All right, Mr. Harris. Leave it with me. I’ll see Mr. Kershaw. We’ll work something out. Those machines are badly needed, we can’t wait any longer for the extension. Don’t worry about it.”

When Harris had gone, Lonsbury fished through the rest of the mail for any with the unmistakable, dull letter heading of the Central Education Office. There were two. The rest he dropped absently through the slot into his big wastepaper basket. Over the years, it was a method which must have saved him several months. Then he called through the connecting door to his secretary, “If anybody wants me, Miss Gregg, I’ll be over in the auto wing. If there’s a fire, give it time to get a good hold before you ring the bell.” It was a standard jest, which had a ritualistic quality by this time. She did not reply.

When he had gone she went through and pulled the day’s mail from its last resting place. She had a long spike file. Sharing his views about reading it, she had, nevertheless, a conservative female regard about keeping it, and let it moulder for six months in a cupboard before Harold Harris burned it.

Grant Kershaw, young only in a relative way, was a tall angular man in his middle thirties. Long, mobile face, well liked by students and fellow staff. For two years now he had been in charge of the small cube-shaped annex which housed the automated section of the Gorseville Comprehensive. Two hundred and sixteen machines, with the recent additions, were deployed on its three floors. Now, he could accommodate nine study groups of twenty four, on nine diverse programmes, at the same time. It was a formidable set up. It was going to need some determination to stay ignorant.

From his small penthouse office, which housed the control consoles for all floors and a concentration of teaching tapes from aerodynamics to zoology, he saw Lonsbury pussy-footing over the macadam and said sombrely to his technician/handyman, “This is it, George. That old creep Harris has been talking to Fred. He’ll want some new shift round to please the cleaners.” Kershaw put on a mimicking voice which was near enough Lonsbury’s judicial, plummy tone. “We’re a team here at Gorseville, Mr. Kershaw, right down to the newest, part-time cleaner. Think of the organizational aspect.”

Lonsbury had disappeared into the stair shaft. Kershaw galvanized himself into frenzied action. “Get this last console wired in, then I’ll keep him talking and you can nip down and bed in the last six machines. Bolt them down. There’s nothing like making the difficulties of change look greater than the difficulties of the status quo.”

Lonsbury was a good ten minutes getting to the eyrie. He had stopped off on each floor to look at the set-up. No students were due until ten-fifteen and there was a clear view of the silent machines, with presentation panels blank and headsets waiting on the pad.

He could hardly help a certain personal satisfaction. It represented a lot of capital equipment. Taken by and large the Gorseville Comprehensive was worth something over a million sterling at present prices. Quite an empire in its way. When he reached the penthouse, he was feeling like a pedagogic Napoleon. But the mild manners of a lifetime die hard and he began pacifically, “You certainly hide yourself away up here, Mr. Kershaw. Guilty secrets to conceal, eh?”

Kershaw let it ride as pure rhetoric. He wasn’t going to give any opening. The look he put on was one of uncommitted, generalized zeal; as if he had simply paused before Pharaoh with a pyramid building block poised on his head.

A console pilot light began to glow and he plugged himself in on his master panel. It was not much of an option, being the Senior Mistress no less. “Oh it’s you, Freda. And a merry Monday morning to you too. Right away. First year biology second series, number eight coming up. Keep your ears pinned back. Usual drill. It’ll be on a continuous band as of one minute from now. Cut in where you like.” He passed a note of the requirement over to George and said, “Fix this for the carrels one to four. Log it for Miss Garstang. Timed for 1000 hours.”

Lonsbury picked up his cue. “You’ve certainly packed them in, Mr. Kershaw. Don’t you think, and I’m not criticizing, believe me, that your new arrangements are very tight? Very tight indeed. You know we’re a team here at Gorseville and every member of the team is important. Looking at it as an organizational matter, you see that it makes things very nearly impossible for the cleaning stall. They simply can’t get round you know.”

It occurred to Kershaw that some of them had got about as round as a human being could get and retain recognizable form, but he wisely decided that it was not the time to deliver the bon mot. Moreover, he heard the “believe me” bit with a certain cynicism born of long experience. It was a routine lead to any statement which nobody, including its user, could possibly take as truth. So that meant that Lonsbury wanted them moved.

“I see the difficulties of course, Mr. Lonsbury. It’s just a question of getting maximum use out of this equipment. We need that extension. Go up another floor or build on. But in the decade it will take to get the Education Committee moving, we have to do what we can.”

“Yes, yes, I see that. But I want you to take another look at these diagrams. Just get another inch or two between the carrels. Do your best with it.”

Lonsbury was already at the door and any reply would be in the nature of a soliloquy. Years of similar, impossible instructions added their cumulative irritation and Grant Kershaw reached a climax of frustration. He shuffled the sheaf of diagrams in random order and Placed them under the viewer of an epidiascope. The composite picture thrown on his miniature editing screen looked like something from a biology slide. It would certainly make a change. He passed the picture on to a copier and set it to run off a dozen photostats. Then he shouted for George. “Hold fast with that bolting job, George. I’ve done some replanning. There’s a break at 1115 hours. Get some senior boys on it and shift everything round again. Then nail it all down, but good. There you are, the plan to end all plans.”

George said, “Harris is not going to like this.”

A gesture of disassociation from concern on that point was magnified coarsely on the screen.

In the event, by some curious alchemy, an impression of greater space than any arrangement yet had been able to give, was the first noticeable thing. Circulation avenues seemed wider, even with the additional machines. Lonsbury was complimentary. “Thank you, Mr. Kershaw.

You’ve solved that problem very well. I’m only sorry for the extra work you have had to plot it out.”

“That’s all right. Believe me, it is no trouble!”

It was 1520 hours, on the first full day of working with the new dispensation, that Kershaw monitored a mathematics group at the request of Freda Garstang. She was taking some fifth year students through a tape on simple statistics. It was straightforward stuff, telling all on simple errors in sampling which could betray the unwary. And most of the group were as unwary as you could get and still have a human mind. Answers were being checked back again and again as wrong options were chosen and the patient machines put the searchers on the right lines.

Then twenty-three machines went silent and only one went on. Its operator seemed to gain a sudden burst of insight. Reading speed increased until Kershaw believed that only random responses were being made. But every frame checked right. It was a fantastic performance. He said, “What goes on, Freda? Who have you got on number eighteen?”

“Why.”

That was just like some women. You never got a simple answer. Whatever you asked for they had to reply with a question.

“Never mind. Just tell me the name for the record.”

“It’s Sarah Joy.”

“No kidding?”

“No. Why do you want to know?”

“She’s just worked that leg faster than I could myself.”

There was a pause. Not unnaturally, there was some checking going on. Sarah Joy would have been the weak link in any group of students chosen at random from the two thousand odd in Gorseville Comprehensive. That she should be rattling through a thirty minute work programme in as many seconds was simply not feasible.

A weak link, intelligence-wise only, be it understood. In every other respect, she was well ahead of the game; dumbness was not going to be a serious drawback to social success. All she needed for that were her honey coloured hair and well filled sweater. At this point in time she was looking at Freda Garstang with what would have been an offensive blue stare in any less attractive girl. “No, Miss Garstang, I chose it because it was the answer. I knew it was the answer.”

Freda Garstang relayed the good news to the man on the bridge and he looked round for a checking run.

There was a tape on Factor Analysis, which was outside the programmes, he had picked it up out of his own interest in the subject. He could only follow it himself when he was in the mood to concentrate. That would certainly show up any random selection of button pressing to be no better than chance. When it was looped on, he called Freda again. “Here’s a thing, Freda. Put your genius on the net again will you. Just a check on the machine.”

“What about the rest of the group.”

“Let them have a go too. It will be an additional check. Take one yourself.”

That was simple malice. He knew the tape would be well beyond her scope. It took a minute to get the thing lined up. Then machine number eighteen went off on a solo run. Machine nineteen kept pace for the two introductory items and then went silent. It was the most impressive performance he had ever seen.

Unfortunately, leisure to appreciate it was not to be had. Urgent summoning bleeps from every other console had him on the hop on a round-up of grief. It was the busiest part of the day. On this penultimate session before afternoon closure, every carrel had its occupants. Nine groups of twenty-four, bashing away at a variety of tasks which ranged from elementary Russian to “A” level Physics. At least that was what was scheduled. The messages let him in on the curious fact that every machine except the frenetic number eighteen was in a state of suspended animation.

Bert Frazer, penned in with his little flock on a Physics tape, simply said, “Who’ve you got up there with you, Grant? Come on now, don’t muck about. I’ve got a train to catch. Action boy, action.”

Kershaw said patiently, “You tell me, Bert. What are your people doing?”

“Sitting here, looking as urgent as tree trunks, waiting for you to get your finger out.”

“The tape is on and circulating. Volume level is right. The message is going out.”

“Well, if you say so. Hang on.”

Ten seconds later he was back with, “There’s a thing now. I can’t get a headset off any one of them. They’re holding on like grim death. Bring a jemmy. What’s on that tape for God’s sake, Lolita?”

Kershaw was already moving out. He said, “George, stand by on the main switch. We might have to cut everything off at source.” Then he was in the elevator and thumbing the button for GROUND.

He went first to Freda Garstang. Brief glimpses of the two top floors, on the way down, had reinforced Bert Frazer’s description. Large and small, male and female, it was like the scene before the awakening in a classical ballet. But he was not greeted as a prince bursting through a thicket. She said, “What kept you? Don’t you understand there’s something very wrong here. I might say I never liked this auto wing. Perhaps now it will be realized that you can’t play about with nature. Students have their own pace and trying to force it will only do damage. I told Mr. Lonsbury only yesterday that I was getting more and more suspicious of the results here. ‘Mr. Lonsbury,’ I said, I told him straight, ‘You can’t get a quart into a pint cup.’”

Kershaw had ceased to listen after the anacrusis. He was more interested in Sarah Joy, who was a living, breathing example of the falsity of the pint cup theory. Sitting with casual grace, in acoustic isolation, she was wearing tomato red Bermuda shorts and one of her tightest white sweaters. The broad, white, light alloy band of the headset gave a faint echo of a latter-day Alice. Slightly prominent teeth, usually set in a permanently friendly smile, were now pressing her lower lip. She looked as though she was deciding whether to have it with pistachio nuts or straight cream.

When he broke in on her maiden meditation she said, “There is no time at all for misunderstanding, Mr. Kershaw. I want you to make certain arrangements. Please listen carefully and do exactly as I say. In the first place tell your assistant to make no attempt to cut off power supplies to the carrels. Do that now.”

The voice was clear, incisive, with only traces of its owner’s normally shattering lisp. Kershaw had moved round to the front and was looking at her over the acoustic cowl. The blue eyes which met his own were now anything but vacant. There was, indeed, a quality in them which carried greater conviction than the form of words. What she could possibly do, if he refused to comply, was difficult to imagine; but the eyes made it clear that there was no real choice.

Habit died hard. He had to try; but it sounded feeble in his own ears and the eyes laughed at him as one laughed at the actions of a precocious baby. He said, “Stop play-acting, Sarah. You’re upsetting Miss Garstang and the whole group’s gone wrong. Just take off your headset like a sensible girl and we’ll say no more about it.”

She said, “Believe me, I have no wish to do this and quite literally it will hurt me as much as it does Greta there. But I could just as easily kill her. Watch.”

He followed the direction of the bright blue gaze and saw a heavily built, dark girl, two places away, rise jerkily to her feet. Her face had gone deathly white and she said pleadingly, “No please no, Sarah. Don’t do it. Please …” The voice notched itself into a scream of pain and the girl fell back in her seat, then slumped forward over the presentation table in her booth, sobbing and shuddering.

Kershaw said, “Look Sarah, I don’t know what’s got into you, but this isn’t your style at all. You’re not a bad girl. Everybody here likes you a lot. Come on now; pack it in.”

“Do as I ask you to do. Then perhaps we can talk. Don’t have any bright ideas about switching off at source either. There’s enough residual power in the circuit to allow me to do what I promise. Tamper with the circuit and I’ll kill every tenth student in the wing. That’s twenty-one point six.”

Kershaw plugged a handset in the instructors jack and called his assistant. Then he spoke to the other study groups. “Leave your students alone. Don’t do anything to interfere at the moment. There’s something going on which is beyond my experience; but I sincerely believe they could be in great danger.”

Then he said to Freda Garstang, “Go across to the main building and let Lonsbury know what’s going on. This could involve a lot of people. If we can’t clear it up soon, two hundred and sixteen sets of parents, for a start, are going to want to know where their young hopefuls have got to. That’s a lot of people.”

Lonsbury was inclined to be sceptical. More years than he ever wanted to remember, spent in contact with the young of his species, had confirmed him in the view that they could wreck anything. With new equipment, he always said, “Think of the most extreme and bizarre use to which it could be put and take it for true that it will eventually be put to that use. It’s just a matter of statistics.” This use was about as unlikely as it could well get, but it proved a point.

He too had a go at Sarah. From her arrival at Gorseville five years ago, she had been something of a favourite. On several occasions, he had stood between her and the legitimate wrath of some woman member of staff, for whom fledgling charm worked no magic. This time he hardly got to first base. He began bravely, “What’s all this I hear, Sarah. This isn’t going to do your image any good.”

The ironic gleam in keen blue eyes, as she swivelled round to give him the full treatment, stopped him dead. He was not basically a stupid man. He said, “Tell me then, if you can, what it’s all about.”

“It’s very simple. I’ll keep it in terms you can understand. There has been a synthesis of mind. The two hundred and sixteen elements on the teaching machines have combined their powers to produce an emergent understanding and it has no intention of allowing itself to be destroyed. I am its mouthpiece in so far as the matters it is concerned with can be communicated. There has never been a mind based on such a bank of brain tissue. The additional complexity is beyond your imagination to assess.”

Lonsbury said, “I can follow that. It is an unlikely event, but not utterly impossible. I may have missed something, but it seems to me a temporary matter. You can’t stay there indefinitely. Whatever this supermind thinks about it, your physical needs will put a period to its activity. You will all need food and sleep.”

“Very true. I’m glad you came. You will be able to organize it. It will be done on a rota basis. Provided that the total number is maintained at full strength, it does not matter that the individuals change. A change of one study group at a time can be made. That sort of fluctuation can be tolerated without overall reduction of mental power.”

“What about your position in this?”

“I shall sleep here. But there will be other agents chosen to carry a watching brief.”

“What about the parents of these students. You must know this is going to cause a lot of concern. Some people may not be patient and understanding. They could be removed by force.”

The light clear voice was completely convincing. “They will be removed dead in that event.”

“Is there any immediate danger?”

“None, so long as my instructions are followed. I have no wish at all to use the big sanction. It would obviously mark the end of any independent life for this new organism. But I should do it nevertheless. A nasty, but effective, final gesture.”

Freda Garstang said, “She’s bluffing, Mr. Lonsbury. It’s just some game they’ve all decided to play. She would be at the centre of it. Just a little precocious tramp. Call her bluff.”

“It’s as well Fred the Head has more sense than follow that bit of loaded advice. What wastes of deprivation make your withered psyche hunger for the holocaust?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“And well you might.”

Lonsbury intervened with, “One thing is certain. This is going to cause a lot of unfortunate publicity. I’ll leave you for the moment, Sarah. I’ll get a circular letter out for immediate despatch to the homes of these students. Stay with them, Mr. Kershaw. You can help me, Miss Garstang, to get things moving.”

For some minutes after the departure of the top brass, there was a lull. Kershaw finally risked a snub by putting in, “I must say, Sarah, that I agree with Fred. There can’t be much future for this new boy. He can only crouch in the woodwork and contemplate his notional navel.”

“What is wrong with contemplation?”

“There’s nothing wrong with it, precisely; but is it Life with a capital L?”

“What is life?”

Kershaw had a feeling that this was unfair. He was on the loser’s end of the debate, being forced into definitions which would sound unreal even to him. Fortunately Sarah was not concerned with an answer, she went on, “Life is concerned primarily with organizing an environment which will be favourable to itself. Once that criterion is satisfied, and it takes about ninety-nine point nine nine per cent of all human activity, it can deploy the remnant of its libido in abstract thought. I shall organize my environment by using point one or less of my capacity and the rest can be used for creative thought.”

“But you are using building bricks which were developed to further the life of human animals. Consciousness existing in them is consciousness of human desires and appetites. Like taking a delight, as I’m sure you do, in being an attractive girl.”

“That’s quite a wise remark.” She said it without condescension and he said, “Think nothing of it. I do it all the time.”

He had completely forgotten that she was a sixteen year old student. It seemed irrelevant. When the clans gathered again, they had been deep in conversation for some thirty minutes and he felt his comprehension had been stretched to an almost unendurable limit. But it was also the most vital thing that had ever happened to him. However it turned out, it had opened a new dimension.

It was after four. News of the impasse in the auto wing had gone round the grapevine. Crowds of students as dismissed from afternoon classes were gathering on the netball pitches which adjoined the auto wing. Faces turned up, waiting eagerly for the worst.

Lonsbury said irritably, “If the place turned into a column of flame it would make their day. Miss Garstang, have them disperse, if you please, We have difficulties enough.”

This last was borne out, almost at once, by the arrival of an official cavalcade. Two cars and a fire tender together, and a fourth, sportier, model making a separate entry and catching up with the rear as they drew up at the admin block.

Sarah Joy watched the performance dispassionately, turning in her swivel seat and looking out over the motionless ranks of bowed heads. She said, “I think you had better go and talk to them, Mr. Lonsbury. We don’t want them bursting in here and trying anything foolish, do we?” The refining force of high voltage intelligence was more and more giving her a new look. Her face seemed more perfectly oval, she had an air of authority which sat without any incongruity on her tautly trim figure. It was going to be an interesting confrontation.

The Director of Education had found time to give the local police a call. He knew Lonsbury well enough to realize that only something very special would make him appeal to the central office. It was usually only with difficulty that anybody got beyond the gate at Gorseville. Quick thinking at the police department alerted the fire tender. Most calls to schools, over the recorded past, had involved the equipment carried by a tender. It would do no harm. Chance alone brought in the tail-end Charlie. He had been in the Fire Department office looking up the files of a case of arson for a bit of bread and butter copy. He heard enough to realize that it could make the national press and made a detour to his own office to pick up a cameraman.

So it fell out that Lonsbury’s brief, factual outline of the affair was punctuated by flash bulbs which gave him the uncomfortable certainty that he was going to look as guilty as hell on every breakfast table in the town. While even allowing for the filter of the medium, his listeners were going to look like masks of polite disbelief.

There was a change in atmosphere when the inspection party reached the auto block. Nothing could be more convincing than the bowed heads and still figures and the anxious faces of the stall sitting with their charges.

Sarah Joy’s clear, incisive voice took over the exposition and gave them the score. She ended with, “I have no intention of committing suicide. You should not even wish it. There will be no harm done. Looked at rightly, this is pure gain.”

Then she began to withdraw in a stillness of concentration which was like death. Intervening curtain walls of the internal fabric of the building began to gather themselves into new forms. Calculated to the last millimetre, pillars with soaring arches replaced the solid, continuous masonry. Elliptical holes appeared in ceilings and floors. The cube was a visible entity as such.

Kershaw said, “It doesn’t surprise me that you can do that. Once we know the nucleus of matter is energy there’s no reason to suppose it can’t be rearranged by some kind of influence. What is not directly knowable to a limited human mind is not therefore impossible.” Flash bulbs made a period. Sarah was looking at him.

They could have been quite alone. “Stay with me.” Momentarily, her young girl’s voice was back and he suddenly appreciated that in spite of it all, the young girl was still there and that this might be the only appeal it would be able to make. He had never bothered much about what people thought or whether his actions would be misconstrued. He leaned over and picked up her hand from the desk top. It was unexpectedly delicate, small boned with tapering fingers and neat slim wrist. A flash bulb went as he was saying, “Certainly I’ll stay with you, Sarah. Don’t worry now. It will come out all right in the end.”

Even as he said it he knew that there was a long and confusing way to go before the end would be in sight.

It took only three days to bring Gorseville Comprehensive to a halt. Three days of attempts to run on with modified timetables and windows closed against the babble of a growing crowd of rubber-necking spectators, trampling flower-beds flat and milling in aimless droves round the auto wing.

A dearth of major disasters had put unlimited front page space at the disposal of the dailies, and when it was clear that no immediate solution was likely the weekend news sheets prepared to give it a big spread. Television coverage was continuous. It made a very good feature.

The pictures were more convincing than any amount of prose. In its new shape the auto wing was something of an architectural novelty in itself. The two hundred and sixteen occupants were now all visible, as though suspended in a transparent honeycomb). Calculating to the last ounce of stress, the brain had rearranged the fabric which housed it, preserving only the minimum strengths of floor and wall veil to support necessary movement.

Sarah Joy, always photogenic, was now the best known face in the country. She alone had been in continuous occupation of the key post in the brain’s organization. It would not let her go. Every other machine had changed its operator. They came off slightly dazed, but seemingly none the worse for the experience. Consciousness of what was going on was confined to the girl. Brief periods of relief for her were accompanied by the most stringent sanctions that unless she returned reprisals would be made.

On one such interlude, she changed into a plain black dress with tight fitting bodice and simple straight skirt. It was a functional outfit, which emphasized the fair hair and brilliant blue eyes, and made an emotional issue for a wide public. It was the most adult item in her wardrobe and the implication of it struck Grant Kershaw to the heart, reviving sensation he had not expected to feel again.

Her face was very pale with dark strain lines under the eyes. Sleep was regularly allowed, with a secondary figure alerted to hold a watching brief in her absence from the command slot. She slept close to the machine, still wearing its light head gear and ready to be instantly at its service.

Kershaw stayed with her. He slept close by. Near enough for her to stretch out and touch him, as she did for comfort when the brain itself, taking a primeval rhythm from the elements which constituted it, had a kind of quiescent period.

Her mother, an unreal figure to be the progenitrix of such a girl, squarely built with a large florid face and boiled, expressionless eyes, alternately railed at Lonsbury for allowing the situation to occur and scolded Sarah for her obstinacy in electing to return to the hot seat. Sarah’s patient explanation that she was under duress so to do, cut no ice at all.

“Once you’re out, I can take you right away. It can’t harm you then.”

“But it will harm somebody else. I have to stay. Please go away. I’m all right. Mr. Kershaw is looking after me.”

That too was under suspicion. Mrs. Joy’s fish eyes rested on him without any enthusiasm at all. She wanted to know more about that. But Kershaw himself vouchsafed nothing.

The mind took a hand. It came into the picture, simply and decisively, by putting an impenetrable cordon round the block. What it consisted of was not at first realized, and early morning arrivals, on the fourth day, found themselves walking into an invisible vertical surface ten yards from the building. Sarah explained that the air had been rearranged, so that a three inch wall surrounded them. Buttressed back with supporting wings of the same material it was virtually indestructible.

She was looking very tired and the blue eyes were now enormous. Kershaw said, “You should not carry the burden of this any longer, Sarah. Let me take over. Would that be acceptable to superman?”

“No, Grant. I can manage. Go and talk to those people. They can come in if they behave. This controls the flow of visitors. I’ll open a wicket gate.”

Meeting her eyes, he found that the blue barrier momentarily dissolved for him and he was looking into a complexity which could not be described in words. Music perhaps might get near it, in some fugue-like statement. Sarah Joy herself was represented in the pattern and he knew why the mind had been reluctant to relinquish its hold on her. It was the inner Sarah, that none of them had suspected might exist. Inarticulate in the brash envelope of the teenage persona. Modest, delicate, sensitive and incredibly beautiful.

Lonsbury was one of the first in. He said, “Arrangements for temporary distribution of the school are completed. After today, we close. Then, perhaps something can be worked out about this. I’ve been thinking. We could slowly replace these students by adults. The Director is on about it now. Military personnel possibly. The public are demanding action. Some people don’t believe anyway that there is any danger.”

“When shall we know?”

“Soon now. If it can be done the first troops could get here before the end of the morning. All volunteers, of course.” He took Kershaw aside. “Actually there won’t be any shortage of volunteers. Sarah is virtually a world figure. There have been endless people already ringing up asking to join the net.”

Grant Kershaw recognized in himself a feeling which could only be jealousy. Less than four days had involved him in a way which he would not have believed possible. He gave himself time to think about how it could turn out, and what sort of figure he would be in public opinion. Quite clearly, he saw that however it fell out, he did not greatly care. He was only interested in what was best for Sarah, whether it involved him or not. Wryly, he realized that a long-standing habit of cynicism had not prepared him for an altruistic and sincere kind of loving.

When he went back to her she said, “Thank you for those few kind thoughts,” and he knew that the mind was now tuned in to everything which passed in this area, whether on the net or not. She went on, “Don’t worry about it, Grant. Don’t think you’re some kind of nympholept. I was not as young as all that, even at the beginning. You are not to blame for this forcing house. For my part I’m only glad to have had this bond with you.”

It had been getting more and more difficult to find students who were allowed to act as relief for the sitting tenants. More and more parents, when their children came out, hurried them away with relief and refused to send them back. Even though it was clear that no harm had, so far, come to them.

The first detachment of troops de-bussed at a smart clip and paraded under a colour sergeant. It was an Infantry platoon of thirty men. A stir of excitement went through the watching crowd as they marched decisively for the invisible barrier. When it melted away to let them through, it seemed as though the strange force was ready to cry uncle.

Sarah’s voice had no trace of a lisp in it. Cool, precise tones, amplified by the curious acoustic properties of the newly constituted cube, instructed the newcomers in their duties. Thirty students relinquished their places. The great change-over was under way.

By the end of the week Gorseville was a battalion camp. With H.Q. in the staff-room, and every lecture room turned into a dormitory, Lonsbury’s office was the only bridgehead left to pedagogy.

Inside the cube, the mind had made it clear that it would not let Sarah go. She was now so intimate a part of its structure and so skilled in interpretative communication, that she had become indispensable.

Before the changeover was complete, another development had taken place. A direct power source had been created, which made it independent of the switchgear. At the mains inlet, a vertical, translucent cylinder was formed by a rearrangement of the molecular structure of the materials there. Glowing a faint pinky orange, it provided the hundred odd kilowatts used by the circuits. It was the first demonstration that this new entity might have a practical value and put the whole situation on a new footing.

What had been interesting in a purely speculative way, like the appearance of a prophet out of the desert, turned overnight into a potential goldmine; as if the prophet had appeared shouting “Oil.”

It was reported in a communiqué by Lt. Col. Minshull. As he said to his adjutant, “This will bring the buzzards round here in droves, Harry. Think of the implications. Just get an army corps sitting on its fanny, thinking energetic thoughts, and you could light a small town.” Captain Jenson privately thought that the light might be more of a dull red glow, but he complied with the tradition of his office and confined his reply to delighted agreement.

Few saw Sarah. They moved in and out on precise duty timings of two three-hour spells in each twenty-four hours. Once under their acoustic cowls, they were no more able to look about than the students had been. On the way in and out she was a distant indeterminate figure, blonde, virginal. Only those sited very near saw the detail of a pale oval face with eyes which expressed greater knowledge than any human eyes had ever previously known.

After two days of the new dispensation it was clear that the emergent mind was changing its character and the effect on Sarah was marked. Originally, it had drawn its raw material from units which were not widely different in quality and quantity of experience from her own. Now a thousand adult minds added their many-sided enrichment to the pool of available ideas. Also every stored memory could be drawn on by the overriding mastermind. And she, as the principal stabilizing repository of its will, was made aware of this accumulation of jackdaw pickings. She was older in experience than the oldest human being who ever lived. Kershaw was an innocent child beside the total knowledge of obscure lusts and hidden desire which flowed from a thousand unsuspecting heads.

She was no longer a young girl by any reasonable definition; but carrying this load of responsibility left her central character curiously untouched. It was known intellectually that these things were so; but she was personally uncommitted. Kershaw was anxiously concerned for her.

That night he wakened, conscious that something had disturbed him, but not knowing what. The fantastic cube, with its cells of quiet khaki figures emitted its own subdued light from no visible source. His wrist watch told him it was just after four o’clock. Then he knew what it was. Sarah was crying. Head buried in her arms, face down on the narrow divan beside her machine, she was sobbing deeply, convulsively.

He went across to her and put an arm round her shoulders. She was clenched in on her misery and gave no sign that she knew he was there. Gently, but firmly, he slipped the light headset from her head. Then he turned her over. Her eyes were closed and her face was deathly pale and shiny wet in the dim light. There was not much room, but he stretched out beside her and held her closely to him, stroking her damp hair away from her face and carrying on in long soothing sweeps over the curve of the shoulder along the slim rounded arm.

Her uneven breathing settled to a smoother rhythm and some of the tension went out of her body. Her arms went round his neck and now he was following the long, delicate arabesque from under the raised arm to where his extended fingertips brushed the tender hollow behind the knee.

When she spoke her voice was her own again. Though with its new maturity. She said, “I was not crying for myself. I don’t really care now about what happens to me. But I know now that life is really a terrible thing. I was crying because that is so and I didn’t know it before. When I thought at all, I thought it could be beautiful. Do you understand that?”

“Yes.”

Certainly it would be a shock for her. Approached slowly at the normal pace of living, the truth was absorbed in small doses like a slow poison. There was a long conditioning so that the heart died by degrees on an easy payment plan. She had been forced to take it in one unprepared step.

He wanted to say something which would refute her statement and would be a convincing basis for a new certainty for her. But it was difficult to find the words. Whatever he said had to be true. Quite apart from the fact that she would know if it was not, there was too much at stake between them to introduce prevarication or undermine the trust she had.

An abstract of some critical phases in his own life showed him to himself in a curious panorama of concentric rings moving out from the still centre of the ego ideal which his own youth had built for him. Moving out and away from it, leaving ring after ring spoiled as a prodigal animal might foul its own nest and have to move on. Spoiled with frustration and indecision and opportunities not taken and failures of nerve, of charity, or humanity even. And he recognized that he was not a bad man. What was she likely to have found in a thousand miscellaneous soldiery?

What could he say then? What, if anything, was there that made it worth while to go on? The silence had gone on long enough and as he began to speak the answers formed. He said, “You were right to think that it could be beautiful and indeed it can be. There is the possibility of getting to know someone the way we know each other. That in itself is worth while. And there is music. Music is a perfect thing. Perhaps the only perfect one. Nothing that people have thought or done, no anti-life attitude can invalidate that.”

She came alive like quicksilver against him, suddenly youthful and eager and optimistic. Before he could go on, her lips closed his mouth. Then she said, breathless now, and flushing suddenly in a wave of colour which was clear even in the dull light, “Do you remember once taking an English seminar with my group. You were talking about Ezra Pound and you read a piece:

‘In the young days, when the deep sky befriended,

And great wings beat above us in the twilight

And the great wheels in heaven

Bore us together ... surging ... and apart.

Believing we should meet with lips and hands

High, high and sure ...’

“I got the book out and learned that. But I didn’t think then that I should feel that way about you. But I do. I love you, Grant. I’ll say it in case you still have scruples about me. I love you. I love you.”

A deep, brusque voice from the neighbouring carrel called her back to the machine. It was one of the men who had been selected by the brain as a standby intermediary. He said, “Come in please, Miss Joy.”

They had never been closer. But she drew away and found the headset. Her eyes were the most brilliant blue he had ever seen. She said, “Thank you, Grant. I’ll remember. I won’t get depressed again. After all, there is what we have. There will be a way out.” Then she was claimed by the mind and was partly lost to him.

Kershaw said, “When the day people come back I’ll take a walk. I want to think about something away from our friend.”

When Kershaw approached him, Lonsbury was sympathetic, but not encouraging. “Don’t I know it’s gone far enough. I wish to God it had never started. What’s happening to the school during this carry-on? You are thinking about one angle. I’m thinking about two thousand students getting thoroughly messed about. Courses interrupted, you’ve no idea the effort it takes to get this place moving after a break. It’s a complicated set-up. But then, it’s out of our hands now. Particularly with this spontaneous power device. They won’t let go. No one else has any plan to dismantle the mind.”

“We have a responsibility to Sarah.”

“That I know. I might also say that your part there is giving us a full-time public relations job. I know you, Grant, and I know there was no ulterior motive about your staying with her. I think the situation is changing and you will have to watch it. It could be very nasty.”

“For whom?”

“For you, of course. Believe me, I’m not concerned about myself in this. I hope I can still see clearly enough to be true that the school could condone an affair between a young student and a senior member of the staff. The special circumstances would soon be forgotten, only the basic fact would be remembered.”

“What about it then?”

“I’m with you, of course. But how can you do anything, short of burning the place down. What help would an extreme step like that be?”

Kershaw appeared to be thinking aloud. “The phenomenon followed directly on the reorganization. In this case, post hoc ergo propter hoc is the only reasonable assumption. In which event, there is a significance in the positioning of the machines. Suppose they were moved from their alignment? Not just slowly, but jerked away; wouldn’t that be enough to disrupt it?”

“Two things about that. Now that they’ve got their teeth in it, the government people will want to see it through for further developments. After all, it is a unique thing. Secondly, how could you do that without it knowing what you were up to? Think about it though. I’ll help you in any way I can.”

In the event, the first of Lonsbury’s objections was undermined by the appearance of a vicious streak in the mind itself. It became apparent that it was a menace which would have to be contained.

A gang of sightseeing children followed a change of the duty detail through the gap in the hedge. Sarah was not present to modify the action which the mind elected to take. A ten year old boy, in faded blue jeans and a striped T-shirt, made his way through the open door into the cube itself and stood looking at the rows of bowed heads weighing a short piece of angle iron speculatively in his hand. The stillness and the silence were too much to take. In the true juvenile tradition of “What does that do? Throw half a brick at it,” he made a javelin-like cast in the direction of the translucent tube.

A number of things happened at once. Seen out of the tail of his eye, by the corporal conducting the relief, it appeared that the short metal bar became suspended in flight as though it had stuck in invisible cotton wool. Then from its end a swift shining thread followed the trajectory of its movement to that point and ravelled back to the throwing arm.

The arm itself disappeared and the corporal believed that as the boy fell it was tucked beneath him out of sight. But when he reached the prone figure there was no arm left at all. It had not been burned away as a high electric charge might do; it was as though the molecular structure had been rearranged and the new material dissipated in the air itself.

Grant Kershaw toyed with the idea of preventing Sarah from returning to the centre of the web. She sensed enough of his intention to say, “I’m no Lady of Shalott. I have my free will and I shall see this through. Don’t think that you have any responsibility in this, Grant. Perhaps you had in the beginning, but not now. I’m of age now. Nobody in fact has ever been so old. Take the average age of these men at twenty-three and multiply by a thousand and you see what I mean.”

He thought that this was only partly true. Some kinds of experience could not be gained in that simple additive way. But he said aloud, “What about the boy?”

“If I’d been there it would not have happened.”

“I hope you’re right.”

Well away from any possible interception by the mind’s fines of force, Kershaw talked to George. They were both still able to walk freely about the cube and on this he based his plan. “Take your time about this. We have enough. Every time you go through the carrels unbolt one machine. You can do it as though you are checking round in the routine way on leads and contacts. Start on the ground floor and I’ll start from the penthouse.”

“O.K. But I don’t see how you’re going to move two hundred and sixteen machines in one go.”

It took two days to set it up, then George reported to the penthouse. “That’s it then. We’re all set. Not before time either. Sarah Joy is looking all-in today.”

“Thanks a lot. Go across to Lonsbury’s office and I’ll tell you about stage two. First we have to get Sarah out of it.”

Lonsbury had already been doing a round-up of stall. A hundred and fifteen of the teaching force had answered the urgent call and indicated willingness to co-operate. At one o’clock they assembled in one of the few free nooks not crawling with the military. He wasted no time.

“I believe we have a chance here to end this menace. But we cannot afford to make a mistake. What happened to the boy is enough to prove that. The set-up is that we distribute ourselves over the whole field. Ostensibly we are monitoring the network to make a scientific investigation of its possibilities. Sarah is vouching for this. She knows nothing of our intention. Keep it out of your mind. From the moment you get in the cube, believe that you are there for only one purpose. Begin to record anything you can hear in the carrel on the supplementary speakers. The signal will be the fire alarm bell from in here. I’ve set the clock for ten minutes from now. When you hear it, you push the machine nearest to you out of alignment. Then grab the next and do the same. It’s roughly two machines each and there should be no problem. They’ve been unbolted and they will run freely on their castors. Any questions?”

Freda Garstang asked, “What about Sarah?”

“I’ll get her away just before the time.” Kershaw intervened and made it a flat statement. He met only a few speculative looks.

He had prepared her for the influx of the new people with the cover story suggested by Lonsbury. She looked at him squarely and realized that she knew there was something more, but was too proud to use the power at her disposal to read his mind. If he would not tell her out of simple confidence, she would not seek to know.

When they were in position there was five minutes to go and he said, “There is something I have to say to you, Sarah, and it had better not be here. We shall not be long; come over to Lonsbury’s office.”

“I ought not to leave just now. Someone might need my help.”

“It will not take long. Minutes only. Believe me.”

She looked at him speculatively. Then she put the headset aside and threw back her hair in a pale shining cascade. She wrote something swiftly on the memo pad of her machine. “All right then. Let’s go.”

At the door she suddenly laid a hand on his arm. “I don’t want to go. I felt a shiver then, as if someone was walking over my grave as they say. There is something going to happen which will alter everything between us. Don’t let it happen, Grant.”

But they were already outside and he took her arm, feeling her, slim and vibrant, against his side. Time was nearer than he had intended and before they reached the main building, the alarm began to blare out.

She was pulling away from him, struggling to get free as he held her at arms length. Blue eyes blazed an accusation of betrayal. She said, “Each man kills the thing he loves. How could you do it, Grant?” And then there was no tension. She crumpled like a puppet when the strings are dropped.

Grant Kershaw was oblivious of any consideration in the world except his sense of loss. He knelt beside her and then picked her up and began to carry her towards the entrance.

He carried her into the medical room and put her on a couch. He could feel that her heart was beating with a steady rhythm. Lines of strain had smoothed out on the pale, young-looking face. Hurried footsteps behind him brought him round to meet Lonsbury.

“How is she? I saw her fall.”

Before Kershaw could reply the victim spoke up for herself. Sarah Joy in full spate, with her pristine lisp in unimpaired fatuity, “What am I doing here, Mithter Kerthaw?”

When he met her eyes, there was no recognition in them. His Sarah, if she ever existed, was there no longer.

Lonsbury said, “It went well, Kershaw. The force, whatever it was, has collapsed. The men are sitting around waiting for orders. I’ll go and see Colonel Minshull.”

Grant Kershaw had remembered something. He only partly heard. Then he was running back to the auto wing.

The last entry on her memo paid said, “Good-bye, Grant. Whatever happens I love you.”