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  He turned back. There was nowhere he wanted to go to, and the dirty, empty streets repelled him. He recalled that in his wrecked studio there was a box of clay he used for modeling; perhaps he could interest himself with that, although every spark of inspiration felt dead.

  When the lump he was molding into shape began to resemble Franklin's head, he gave up and went indoors.

  "Had a pleasant day?" Mrs. Annivale asked, coming downstairs.

  "Just great! We went over to see Mother's grave this morning and this afternoon I've had a good read of some two-year-old magazines."

  She looked at him and grinned. "You talk quite a bit like your dad. He's asleep, by the way -- I shouldn't wake him. I'm just going round to my place to get my grater; I'm going to make you a cheese pud tonight. Why don't you come round with me? You haven't seen my place yet."

  Moodily, he went with her. Her house was bright and clean and seemed to contain very little furniture. In the kitchen, Bush asked, "Why don't you move in with Father and save rent and everything, Mrs. Annivale?"

  "Why don't you call me Judy?"

  "Because I didn't know it was your name. Father always calls you Mrs. Annivale to me."

  "Formal! I hope you and I don't have to be formal, do we?" She was standing idly near him, looirng at him, showing her teeth a little.

  "I asked you why you didn't move in with my father."

  "Suppose I said I fancied younger men?" There was no mistaking the tone in her voice or the look in her eye. Everything was convenient, he told himself. Her bed would be clean, his father was asleep next door, she knew he was off next week. Unbidden, his betraying body told him it liked the idea.

  Hastily, he turned from her. "Then that's jolly sweet of you to look after him, Judy."

  "Look, Ted -- "

  "Got the cheese grater? We'd better go and see if he's okay." He led the way back, feeling a fool; so evidently did she, judging by the way she chattered. But after all . . . well, it would have been like incest. There were some things you had to draw the line at, however much of a moral wreck you were!

  Although such was not the case, Judy Annivale seemed to imagine she had offended Bush and was tiringly pleasant to him. Once or twice, he had to take refuge in his studio with the half-formed bust of Franklin. And on the day the truck was due to come for him, she followed him down into the studio.

  "Beat it!" he said. He saw death in the lines round her mouth.

  "Don't be unsociable, Ted! I wanted to see what you were doing in the art line. I used to think I was artistic once."

  "If you want to play with my clay, go ahead, but just don't follow me around! Are you trying to be a mother to me or something?"

  "Do you really think I've been showing you signs of motherliness, Ted?"

  He shrugged his shoulders. He had no morals. Maybe he was passing up a good opportunity that tomorrow would see lost forever.

  James Bush thrust his head inside the shed.

  "So this is where you've both got to?"

  "I was just saying how much I admired Ted's artistic talents, Jim. I used to be a bit artistic myself once, as a girl. I'm sure all the wide perspectives of the past that you've traveled must have helped a lot."

  Perhaps a whisper of suspicion passed over James Bush's brain. In irritation, he said, "Nonsense, the boy's seen next to nothing! You're like most folk -- you don't seem to realize how ancient the Earth is and how little of its past is accessible even to mind-travelers."

  "Oh, not that clock analogy, Father!" Bush had heard this set-piece before.

  But his father was covering the exit. Painstakingly, he explained a standard textbook diagram to Judy, a diagram in which it was supposed that the Earth was created at midnight. Then followed long hours of darkness with no life, the time of fire and an alien atmosphere and long rains, the Pre-Cambrian times or Cryptozoic Era, of which little was known or could be known. The Cambrian Period marked the beginning of the fossil record and did not arrive till ten o'clock on the clock face. The reptiles and amphibians put in an appearance with the Carboniferous Period at about eleven o'clock, and were gone by quarter to twelve. Mankind's appearance was made at twelve seconds to noon, and the time since the Stone Age was a fraction of a second.

  "That's what I mean about perspectives!" Judy said gamely.

  "You perhaps miss the point, my dear. All those grand millions of years the mind-travelers make so free with in their conversation are but the last ten minutes on the dial. Man is a small thing, his little life is not only ended but begun with a sleep."

  "The clock analogy is misleading," Bush said. "It doesn't leave room for the immense future, many times all that's past. You think your clock puts everything in perspective but really it ruins it."

  "Well, we can't see the future, can we?"

  The question was unassailable, at least for a little while.

  Chapter 7

  THE SQUAD

  The truck delivered Bush at the training center at ten-thirty in the morning. By midday, his civilian clothes had been taken from him, to be replaced by a coarse khaki uniform; his head had been shaved; he had plunged through a cold disinfectant bath; been inoculated against typhoid, cholera, and tetanus and vaccinated against smallpox; been examined to see that he was not suffering from a venereal disease; had his voice- and retina-patterns taken and his finger-prints recorded; and paraded at the cookhouse for an ill-cooked meal.

  The course proper began at 1300 hours sharp, and from then until the end of the month was almost unremitting.

  Bush was put in Ten Squad, under a Sergeant Pond. Pond drove his men through a succession of difficult or impossible tasks. They had to learn to march and even run in step. They had to learn to respond to orders given a quarter of a mile away by the human voice, if such a designation was seemly for Sergeant Pond's noises, shouting at its most ragged and repulsive pitch. They had to learn to climb brick walls and to fall from upper-story windows; they had to learn to climb ropes and to wade through stagnant pools; they had to learn how to dig meaninglessly deep holes and strangle their fellow men; to shoot and stab and swear and sweat and eat garbage and sleep like dead men. To begin with, a sardonic part of Bush's brain amused itself by standing apart and watching his actions. Now and again, it would come forward and say, "The object of this exercise is to make you less an individual, more a machine for taking orders. If you cross this rope bridge without failing on the rocks below, you will be less human than you were before you attempted it. Gobble down this bit of sea-lion pie and you will be even less of an artist than you were yesterday." But the sardonic part of Bush's brain was soon anesthetized by constant meaningless activity. He was too tired and bemused for criticism to flourish, and the harsh roar of Pond's voice supplanted the whisper of his intelligence.

  Nevertheless, he was alert enough to notice the activities of some of his fellow recruits. Most of them, the great majority, accepted and suffered as he did, putting their private selves away, as it were, the better to endure. There were also two small minorities; one consisted of those unfortunates who could not put away their private selves. They got on parade late with their boots dusty; they could not eat the food; they turned left when the rest turned right; they half-drowned in the scummy ponds; sometimes, they wept instead of sleeping at night.

  The other small minority called 'themselves "The Tripe-shop Troopers." They were the ones who enjoyed Seageant Pond's insults, who relished the degradations of the barracks square, who were born for stabbing sawdust dummies. And in their spare time, they drank wildly, beat up the members of the other minority, vomited unexpectedly on the floor, sucked up to Pond, and generally behaved like heroes.

  They also gave the squad its backbone and spirit, and Bush wondered afterwards if he would have got through the course without his desire to prove himself as good and tough as they.

  He did best and outshone the rest of the course only on the firing range, where the squad frittered away every Monday and Thursday morning in draughty surr
oundings. Here, they learned to fire light-guns, which might (or more probably might not) become standard items of their equipment later. The light-guns fired pulsed beams of coherent light that could burn a neat little black hole right through a man at half-a-mile. But it was less the killing potentialities of the weapon than its artistic side that attracted Bush. This slender metal barrel dealt with the basic substance df all painters, light: ordered it, organized it; the ruby laser it contained spat out light in milliseconds' worth, delivering it in parallel, monochrome beams onto target. As Bush burned out his bull's-eyes, he felt he was indulging in the only artistic pursuit left to a man in time of emergency.

  Among all the marching, chasing, and mock-fights to which Ten Squad was subjected, lectures were given on various subjects. The squad then sat on benches in blessed momentary peace, and Bush sometimes snatched these periods to wonder what the object of the course was.

  Clearly, it had been cobbled quickly together from other established military courses, but he could not see that it had much connection with his future as an agent which had been mapped out for him. He appreciated that he was being systematically degraded, and perhaps more effectively than The Tripeshop Troopers, who gloatingly took all the punishment meted out. He just failed to see its purpose; and then he realized what all this would mean to the undermind; knowing its own worth, it would be shamed and defeated, and would die more easily when ordered to.

  But that was nonsense, because . . . Their duty was not to die. The hatred Sergeant Pond injected into them for twelve hours a day was to help them suffer, not die. The undermind was being fed poison -- and nobody was protesting! They must be mad. And this conspiracy was no freak of General Bolt's regime; it was ubiquitous, eternal. Men had always poisoned themselves in this way, making themselves coarse of habit, dim of wit, void of individuality. As an artist, he had always been alone. Now for the first time, he was surrounded by his fellow men, and he saw into them. They had windows in their chests. There was something moving in there, peering out through the windows; the windows were misty, steamed over by the breath as it was sucked in among the sponges of the lungs; it was hard to see. One of the things inside was writing on the window with a finger. It was a message for help, something explaining the sanity of all mankind, but not only were the letters back to front, they ran in the wrong direction. Bush was on the verge of deciphering the words when --

  His name was called, and he sat up abruptly.

  His name was called, and he had been asleep!

  "Bush, you have ten seconds to answer the question." A red-faced officer, one Captain Stanhope, stood by the blackboard, glaring at Bush. The rest of the squad had turned round to stare and the Troopers were grinning and nudging each other. "The carotid vein!" one whispered across at Bush.

  "The carotid vein, sir," Bush said, clutching at a straw.

  The squad rocked with laughter. The troopers nearly fell onto the floor in their delight.

  Stanhope barked for silence. When the squad had been reduced to silence, he said, "All right, Bush, I asked you what carrots were good for. You tried to be funny. I'll deal with you afterwards."

  Bush directed a glare of hatred at the hearties.

  He marched up to the captain afterwards, as the rest of the squad was clattering out, and stood rigidly at attention till the officer deigned to notice him.

  "You were trying to be funny at my expense."

  "No, sir, I was asleep."

  "Asleep! What do you mean, asleep, when I was talking?"

  "I'm exhausted, sir. There's too much running around on this course."

  "What were you in pre-revolutionary days?"

  "Artist, sir. I did groupages and that sort of thing."

  "Oh. What's your name?"

  "Bush, sir."

  "I know that. Your full name, man."

  "Edward Bush."

  "Then I know your work." Stanhope softened slightly. "I used to be an architect before the need for architecture disappeared. I admired some of the things you did. Liked your groupages, especially the one you made for Southall station; the spatial-kinetic series you did was a revelation. I have -- had -- a book on your work, with illustrations."

  "The one by Branquier?"

  "That's the name, Branquier. Well, I'm happy to meet you, though hardly in these surroundings and conditions. You're an expert mind-traveler, too, I hear."

  "I've been doing it a long time."

  "You shouldn't be on a course like this! Weren't you picked for minding by Wenlock himself?"

  "That may be partly why I'm here."

  "Mmm. I see. What do you think of this Wenlock-Silverstone controversy? Don't you feel that the Wenlock orthodoxy may well be a myth, and that Silverstone in fact has a great deal to offer if his side of the matter were not distorted? So many suppositions have been taken for facts, haven't they?"

  "I don't know, sir. I know nothing about it."

  Stanhope smiled. "They've gone now. You can speak freely to me. Quite honestly, the regime are all wrong in hunting Silverstone, aren't they? Don't you think?"

  "As I said, sir, it's a tough course. I can't think any more. I have no opinions."

  "But as an artist, on a vital matter like Silverstone, you must have very strong opinions."

  "No, none, sir. Blisters on feet and hands, sir; no opinions."

  Stanhope drew himself up. "Bush, dismiss -- and next time I catch you dozing in my lectures, you'll be in bad trouble."

  Bush marched away, solid and flat-footed. Inwardly, he laughed and sang. The bastards weren't going to catch him that easily!

  But he wondered very much about the news that the regime was hunting Silverstone. It sounded authentic. And why should they be sounding out his views on the subject?

  At that time, he had only two weeks to run before he found out, but those two weeks dragged on interminably as the course went its pointless way. Being anti-social, Bush found barracks-room life no pleasanter when it became clear that his brush with Stanhope had made him something of a favorite with the Troopers.

  "What ho, mate! How's the old carrots going down?" they would call, with oafish good-humor, and never tired of his lewd answer.

  At last, the final straw dummy had been stabbed, the last illiterate talk on seeing without being seen listened to, the last mile run. Ten Squad paraded for its final tests, followed by personal interviews, alone in the shabby lecture huts with two officers.

  Bush found himself with a bald-headed man, Captain Howes, and Captain Stanhope.

  "You can sit down," Stanhope said. "We are going to ask you a series of questions, just to test your knowledge and reaction speed. What is wrong with this sentence: 'Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night. God said let Newton be and all was light'?"

  "It's an accurate quote from some poet or other -- Pope? But it isn't true. There's no God, and Newton didn't illuminate as much as his generation supposed."

  "What's wrong with this sentence: 'The regime are mistaken in persecuting Silverstone'?"

  "Collective noun should be followed by singular verb."

  Stanhope scowled. "What else?"

  "I don't know."

  "Why not?"

  "What regime? What Silverstone? I don't know."

  "Next question." They went on through a maze of trivia, the captains taking it in turn to interrogate, sitting staring moodily at Bush while they were resting. At last the farce came to an end.

  Captain Howes cleared his throat and said, "Cadet Edward Bush, we are pleased to say that you have passed your test. We allot you a score of about 89 per cent, with the rider that you have an unstable personality, peculiarly suited to mind-travel. We hope to send you on a special mission into the past within a few days."

  "What sort of a mission?"

  Howes laughed unconvincingly. He was a big man, not ill-looking, who seemed more in control than Stanhope. "Come, you've had enough for today! Relax, Bush! The course is over. Captain Stanhope and I will see you back here tomorrow mornin
g at nine-thirty, to give you full briefing. Till then, you can go away and celebrate."

  He bent down and pulled a bottle out of the drawer of the desk, handing it solemnly over to Bush. "Don't imagine the regime has no time for fun, Bush, or no sense of the better things in life. Go and enjoy yourself and accept this gift with the compliments of the officers of the course."

  When they had gone, Bush examined the bottle of drink with some curiosity. It had a big tartan label and was called "Black Wombat Special: Genuine South Indian Rice Whisky, Brewed in Madras from a forbidden recipe." He flipped up the metal cap and sniffed cautiously. He shivered.

  Tucking the bottle inside his tunic, he took it back to the barracks room.

  The Tripeshop Troopers were already celebrating the end of the couse, drinking vile resinous drinks out of tin mugs. They greeted Bush with a cheer and arch references to the carotid vein. Destined to begin life anew as memhers of the newly formed mind-travel police, working in mufti, they had a week's leave coming to them on the morrow. They were vowing to spend the whole leave drunk.