LITMIR.BIZ

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was all shot, sir. Oh – if you’d seen … They weren’t meant to shoot. The officer called out to stop. But they were young chaps – crazy. Crazy! All crazy. I’ll never forget …’

      She interrupted herself with a burst of coughing, which turned to weeping. Five minutes later she was mercifully dead.

      Wyvern searched grimly for Byers, the old postmaster. He found him at last some yards down the railway line in the direction of Stratton. The old man lay dead, face down in a clump of docks. In his hand was clutched a note. It read: CON – THEY ARE AFTER TELEPATHS FOR BIG BERT. YOU MUST LEAVE. LOVE EVER, LUCE.

      Conrad crushed it, tears in his eyes, knowing he would never see his sister again.

      The message was fairly clear to him. Big Bert was Bert the Brain, the giant electronic computer situated in the British Republics Sector on the Moon. He could guess why Our Beloved Leader and his gang of thugs should want a telepath for it: he had heard the state secrets which turned into ugly public rumours …

      The message told Wyvern something else. It told him that his sister remembered he had the freak power. When they were small children together he had once revealed the secret to her. The indescribable blending of egos had terrified them both; Wyvern never repeated the experiment, and neither of them ever referred to it again. Yet she had not forgotten.

      And when Jim Bull’s Gestapo got to work on her – would she not, perhaps under narcotics, give up her secret? If she did so, Wyvern would be a doomed man.

      Lucie was right: he must go. But where? America, now more rigidly isolationist than ever before, licking its terrible internal wounds? Russia, where rumour said anarchy prevailed? The new state of Indasia, hostile to the rest of the world? Turkey, the crackpot state which had risen by virtue of the general collapse? The still-warring African republics?

      Wyvern toweled himself down, thinking hard. Telepaths were as rare as total eclipses; no doubt the State would like the aid of one. Wyvern had willingly revealed his wild talent to no human but Lucie. He kept it shut away in a tight compartment. For if he tried to ‘read people’s minds’ (as popular parlance inexactly put it), the people would be instantly as aware of his mental presence as if he were shouting. And although his power was of limited range, it flowed out in all directions, so that he was unable to confine it quietly to one desired receiver.

      The power had been erratic throughout childhood; with puberty it had come into real being. But Wyvern kept it locked away during the hopeless years of war and devastation. Only occasionally, as with Nicky, had he ventured to use it, and then with a feeling of guilt, as if he had an unearned gift.

      Of course, there had been the man in London … Wyvern had been on leave just before the capital was obliterated. A drunk had barged into him down Praed Street. In a moment of anger, the drunk’s mind had opened: the two stood locked in that overpowering union – and then both shut off abruptly. Yet Wyvern knew if he ever met that man again, the recognition would be mutual.

      Most of Praed Street must have sensed that strange meeting; but then a crickeytip droned overhead, and everything else was forgotten in a general dive for shelter.

      Still bothered by that memory. Wyvern hung his damp clothes over a line and began to dry his hair.

      There was a loud rapping at his door. For a moment he had forgotten he was not alone in Stratton Hall. Instinctively he tensed, then relaxed. Not so soon …

      ‘Come in,’ he said.

      It was Plunkett, one of his pupils on the course he ran here.

      ‘Sir, come into the rec, quick!’ Plunkett said. ‘They’ve just announced it on the telly – OBL’s had his chips!’

      OBL was an irreverent way of referring to Jim Bull, Our Beloved Leader.

      Wyvern followed the youngster downstairs at a run. His government job was to teach relays of twelve young men the essentials of his own invention, cruxtistics, the science of three-di mathematical aerial lodgements, first established in space and later adapted to stratospheric fighting. He enjoyed the task, even if it was for a loathed régime, for the squads of eager young men, changing every five weeks, brought life to the decaying house, with its peeling paint and its two ancient servants.

      It had been Plunkett, for instance, who had invented the Flyspy-baiter. He had trapped birds and tied tinfoil to their legs; when released, they had flown off and attracted the miniature gyro after them, televising frantically and signalling to HQ for help.

      Plunkett led the way to the rec room. The other eleven youths were clustered round the ill-coloured tellyscreen. They called excitedly to their instructor.

      On the screen, men marching. Wyvern found time to wonder how often he had seen almost identical shots – how often, over years and years of war, armistice and betrayed peace; it seemed a miracle there were still men to march. These now, lean and shabby, paraded beneath the angular front of the capital’s city hall, with its asymmetrical clock tower.

      ‘Our on-the-spot newsreel shows you crack troops pouring into the capital for the funeral of Our Beloved Leader, to be held tomorrow. The assassin is expected to be apprehended at any minute; there is nobody in the whole Republic who would not gladly be his executioner!’

      The metallic voice stopped. There were more scenes from other parts of the inhabitable country: York, Glasgow, Hull. Shouting, marching, shows of mourning, the dipping of banners.

      ‘And now we give you a personal message from Colonel H,’ the unseen commentator said. ‘Friends, Colonel H! – Head of the New Police, Chief Nursemaid of State, Our Late Beloved Leader’s Closest Friend!’

      Colonel H lowered into the cameras. Aping the old Prussian style, his hair was clipped to a short stubble, so that it looked now as if it stood on end with his fury. His features were small, almost pinched, their niggardliness emphasised by two heavy bars of dark eyebrow and a protruding jaw. He was less popular generally than Jim Bull but more feared.

      ‘Republicans!’ he began, as one who should say ‘curs’, ‘Our Beloved Leader has been killed – raped of his life by bloody brutes. We have all lost a friend! We have all lost our best friend! By allowing him to die we have betrayed him and his high ideals. We must suffer! We must scourge ourselves! We shall suffer – and we shall be scourged! We have been too easy, and the time for easiness is not yet, not while there are still maniacs among us.

      ‘I shall take over temporary leadership until a new Beloved Leader is elected by republican methods. I mean to make tight the chinks in our security curtain. The way will be hard, republicans, but I know you will suffer gladly for the sake of truth.

      ‘Meanwhile, it makes me happy to announce that the two murderers of Our Late Beloved Leader have just been apprehended by our splendid New Police. Here they are for you all to view – and loathe. Their punishment will be announced later.’

      The scowling visage faded.

      On the screen, a bullet-riddled sports car lay overturned near a roadside garage. A motley crowd of soldiers and civilians jostled round it. An officer stood on top of a tank, bellowing his lungs out through a megaphone. Nobody paid him any attention. It was pouring with grey rain.

      The camera panned between the crowd. Two terrified men stood against the overturned car. One, the driver, silently hugged a shattered arm; the other, a small fellow in a blue mac, stood to attention and wept.

      ‘These are the blood-crazed, reactionary killers!’ screamed the commentator.

      ‘Crikey!’ Plunkett exclaimed, ‘they don’t look capable of passing dud cheques!’

      ‘Stand by for shots from the British Republics Sector of the Moon!’ the commentator said.

      The familiar domes like great cloches faded in. Utilitarian architecture, ventilation towers, mobs of people surging back and forth, waving sticks, shaking fists.

      ‘These true republicans demonstrate their loyalty to the

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