Forty-five babies were born in a Tokyo hospital within four days of each other, a feat of timing which elicited no small amount of comment, and were flown to the island when the youngest was ten days old.
Twenty boys, twenty-five girls, their parents representative of the finest breeding stock to be found in every major nation. And the world adopted them from the start.
The weekly TV show transmitted from the island, “Project Peace,” maintained the highest audience rating ever tabulated. Cautiously edited at first, in deference to the prodigious multiplicity of international taboos, the films showed merely the fat, healthy youngsters cooing and laughing and playing happily in the bright Pacific sunlight. Careful shots, with shadows and branches amended the nakedness, to begin with, but by the time the toddlers were beginning their wide-eyed exploration of the island, people had, for the most part, grown quite accustomed to their undress. Mistakes were made, of course; the hilarious and now famous episode, in which two eight-year-olds —a Caucasian boy and his little Japanese girl companion—discovered the effects of fermented coconut sap, was poorly received in some quarters.
But on the whole, earth widened its moral outlook considerably to make room for its beloved castaways.
And the castaways, as if responding to this generous adoration, thrived and multiplied.
The intercom buzzed and Ted flicked it on. “Jepson,” he said.
“Margate,” came the nasal reply, “in Transmission. Look, Ted, we’re mighty short on next week’s show, and I hate to pad it out with any more library stuff. How about getting me a platter of something good?”
“Such as?”
“Oh, you know. Something interesting. New. Some shots of them inventing horses, or biting out doilies with their teeth. You know.”
“Yeah. New.”
“If you like, I’ll go topside and stir them up a little. There’s a certain redhead with long brown legs—”
“I’ll get you something,” Ted interrupted. He clicked off. Did Margate, he wondered sourly, have to be so typical? Every new man seemed to go through the same pattern. First, a detached, “veddy professional” attitude toward the droves of nubile beauties who wandered around topside. Next, with their probationary periods successfully over, they frequently found it necessary to visit the View Room—some of the excuses Jepson had listened to had been dillies. And finally, after becoming more or less blasé about what was so near, yet so far, they began to be obsessed with the temptation to “go topside and stir them up a little,” as Margate had put it.
That last stage was what nearly got ‘em, Ted knew. Even the graybeards on the project, who certainly realized the experiment was predicated entirely on strict nonintervention, occasionally voiced wistful, half-serious desires to have the islanders find a phonograph and an album of blues records, a flashlight, or an illustrated encyclopedia—anything that would jar them into an interesting reaction.
And there were those others who wanted to go topside once just for the hell of it. Himself, for example. He supposed that’s why he’d done it.
Ted decided to get Margate some shots of the octopus kill. Ought to go over well, he figured: Good-looking youngsters; the azure, crystal-clear depths of the lagoon; sun setting into a glory of cerise and golden clouds; and the poor squid providing the element of “danger.” He flicked .on two screens from a supplemental bank on the right wall, turned up the corresponding mikes. The room came alive with excited sounds and brilliant color.
After starting a recorder going and setting up the proper circuits, he backed away from the lively scene with a twist of the zoomar pot and turned on the sound track. Then, with ample time allowed for commentary, he panned in to the splashing mob of kids and settled down to alternate takes, first a high-angle shot from the eye concealed in a jutting needle of “coral,” then with an almost water-level view from full front. The octopus wasn’t visible, but there was plenty of inky discharge in the four feet of water to mark its presence.
With the low-level eye, Ted began getting some fine close-ups of faces as the kids ganged up to rush their quarry. From a lass of twelve or so, with Ireland written all over her freckled features, he got fifteen seconds of that ecstatic blend of joy and fear known only to children. From a tall, magnificently-built Negro boy, a fierce scowl of determination. And in contrast, the face of a quiet girl, whose unbound hair floated like a soft ebony cloud about her shoulders. Ted panned in as she pursed her lips thoughtfully and closed her eyes, a line of concentration furrowing her brow.
The brunette’s private reverie wasn’t carrying the episode forward, he realized, and with his finger poised above the alternate “take” button, he examined other faces in the group.
They were set in similar expressions.
A chill of astonishment swept him as he gazed at the youngsters. Like dripping statues, like sleepers in a dream, they held their attitudes of rapt, blind attention while ten long seconds came and went.
Fifteen seconds. Then a small blond boy opened his eyes and shuddered as if to free himself from an unpleasant vision. The spear slipped from his fingers as he turned his face slowly up to the darkening sky. “Sarrceoah ay,” he stated, as if to himself. Then louder he said the phrase, again and again.
Ted puzzled it out to mean roughly “. . . At this spot, we nine, from this spot away in no more time than it takes me to run from the spring to the shore, for there is heaviness and vast heat, down faster and unlike— Pain, otherwise—” ‘While he was speculating over the lad’s unwillingness to complete the concept—there had been a definite downward inflection to the root tones that meant refusal to elaborate, rather than inability—the other eight children broke from the spell that had held them.
Abandoning their spears, they turned almost as one, and struck out for the strip of sandy beach a hundred feet away.
And Ted Jepson got his second shock that day. An even nastier one than the first, for the youngsters were not employing their usual frantic dog-paddling. Each swam true and swiftly, with graceful economy of energy: the Australian crawl!
And in the thirty-some seconds it took them to reach the shore, Ted realized his professional career was over. No need, even, for the authorities to get out their scope needles, for the island children had copied his style perfectly—that odd, loose‑legged kick that had helped him place second in the 1992 Olympic fifty-meter event.
A correspondence-school detective could easily sew up the case.
But as the children dragged themselves across the sand and melted away into the thick foliage of the Toumefortia grove, it occurred to Ted to wonder why they had not shown off their new accomplishment before. It was New Year’s Eve he had gone topside, swimming out through the submarine locks and up to an isolated strip of beach. And this was September. Why hadn’t they been seen practicing the stroke? And why wait to use it? If they had delayed this long, maybe there was a chance they’d not do it again for a while—for long enough for him to build an alibi, plan a defense.
He’d have to hide the disk, of course. As a scientist the realization gave him a few sharp moral twinges, but as Ted Jepson who had to eat, it wasn’t so much.
The intercom buzzed as he reached to shut off the recorder. Guiltily, he snatched away his hand and flicked on the box. “Jepson,” he said.
“Radar,” shouted the other. “Chavez in Radar. Hey, I’m tracking something in at hundreds of miles an hour, maybe thousands. It looks as if—”
With an impact that shocked the little coral island to its last polyp bud, something smacked into the lagoon and began to roar. The view screens showed nothing but clouds of boiling vapor.
Ted found his voice before the other did. “You were saying?”
“Yeah! What was that?” The radar man’s words were hardly audible above the thunder from the speakers. Ted turned them down. “I was saying,” went on Radar—a noticeable shake in his voice—”that whatever it is, was, might hit the island. Where did
it land?”
“In the lagoon. Whatever it was, it was mighty hot. Water’s boiling up there. Did you get pictures of it?”
“Hope so. We started filming the second it pipped. Wanna wait till they’re here?”
Ted told him he would. Taking off the disk of the incriminating Australian crawl exhibition, he slipped it under the duty log and loaded up the recorder again. With both of them going, he began getting shots and sounds of the excited islanders as they hurried from whatever they’d been doing to line the lagoon shore.
“Still there?” asked Radar.
“Sure.”
“Meteorite! Big chunk about the size of a football. Black and kind of knobby. Got some good pictures,” he said proudly. “Sell ‘em to Life, mebby. ‘Bye.”
The steam clouds were lifting from the water, and Ted could make out pieces of what he supposed was boiled octopus floating on the surface. It had been quite a day, he mused wryly.
Taking up a pen, he began to brief the incident for the log, but a face detached itself from his memory and floated down over the page. The face of a small blond boy, his gaze upturned to the sky. And he had said something . . . something oddly important.
Ted tapped the pen thoughtfully against his teeth, and the boy’s words came drifting back: “. . . Heaviness and vast heat. Down faster . . . pain . . . from this spot we go—”
Hot and heavy and fast: the meteorite! And the lad had spoken of it at least three minutes before it hit!
Ted laid the pen carefully down on the console and wet his lips. Cautiously, and with nice control, he allowed the impossible fact into his familiar scheme of things. Then he entered the picture and studied it for a place in which the new data might fit.
An hour later he discovered it wouldn’t fit at all, but that it had managed to twist the familiar scheme into a beauty of a maze. He gave up and began to stride angrily around in his maze.
The stars burned hotly against the velvet midnight sky when he broke surface.
For long minutes he rested, floating, filling his aching lungs again and again with the rich salty air, and letting the ground swells carry him closer to the breaker line. When a comber finally humped itself beneath him, he began swimming it, lashing the luminous plankton into a frail pinkish glow like the one marking the shore. Suddenly he was with it, sliding down the long black slope, then fighting for air in the churning white thunder when the wave broke.
Wearily, Ted dragged himself up from the backrush and onto the narrow shelf of beach. In the bright starlight it looked just as it had that New Year’s Eve; three or four-hundred square feet of sand, hounded on three sides by sheer, overhanging rock walls, and on the fourth by the restless Pacific.
A blind spot. Inaccessible except from the ocean, and under water at high tide. Not worth a mike and an eye.
There were five other blind spots on the island.
One of them had to have a lot of answers hidden in it, or Dr. Ted Jepson would rapidly become the world’s most unpopular man.
He leaned against the cliff and rested. Water trickled from the pockets of his shorts. It was a forlorn gamble, he supposed, but what else could he do? Such an important discovery as an apparent precognitive ability in those nine island children had to be studied. It was not in him to keep silent about it. But to demonstrate their wild talent would also be to show them swimming like a certain ex-Olympic champ. And he would have to tell of getting drunk at the techs’ New Year’s brawl, and feeling an almighty desire for a swim; of sneaking out through the submarine tunnel—no mean feat—and up through twenty-five feet of surging ocean to this isolated beach. Scared sober by then and dreading the even more dangerous return trip, he had nevertheless put in an hour of long-wanted exercise.
And he had obviously been observed.
Choosing the least precipitous cliff, Ted began the climb, searching by touch for handholds on the spray-wet rock, pulling himself slowly upward by sheer strength. It took him a quarter of an hour to make the ascent.
With scratched and bleeding fingers, he dragged himself over the lip of the cliff and peered down at the island beyond. The first non-islander on the spot in thirty-six years.
It was a dubious honor, he reflected dourly—like being the first man to paint a goatee on the Mona Lisa.
Shedding himself of his sandals and muddy shorts, he ditched them in some bushes and set off naked down the hill. With his dark lamp-tan and sinewy build there was a fair chance of his being taken for an islander if spotted by some over-alert tech. Knowing the location of the eyes and mikes gave him better odds, he hoped, and the man on night duty in the View Room usually kept on only those screens that showed the village and its nearby paths. Not that he’d be any worse off if spotted.
Of course, he mused dryly, picking his way through a heavy stand of coconut palms, he could always stay topside. It was unlikely that they’d send a posse after him. He could hole up in one of the blind spots and maybe become a sort of god to the islanders.
But he remembered the children in the lagoon who had looked three minutes into the future ...
Punk material for worshipers.
The first blind spot he entered gave him a mild surprise. In what had been thought to be a solid tangle of bamboo and breadfruit trees, Ted found a tiny rectangular lake, made by someone’s damming up the leg of a stream. Investigation proved it to be as wide across as he could reach, up to his shoulders in depth, and about twenty paces long.
Quite adequate for practicing the Australian crawl.
But why? Why should the islanders, so enviously free of superstition and legislation, take such pains to hide the activity? Were the kids forbidden by their elders to use such a swimming style, and had they built this spot to outwit the oldsters?
A flimsy supposition at best.
He gave it up and left the thicket. It was brighter now. From the western oceans a half moon had swum above the horizon, and with it came a freshening breeze that bore the scent of wood smoke and jasmine. Ted struck off through the shadows for the second spot on his itinerary, a quarter of a mile away.
Nature had caused this one: The disastrous typhoon of ‘98 which had killed twenty of the islanders had torn from a hillside one of the “boulders” with its eye and mike setup, and had hurled it into the sea, wires and all. The area it had scanned was consequently lost, of course—a triangular half-acre of grass and rocks, crossed by two paths. Since then, by careful observation, the top brains of the project had deduced that the area was unchanged and as unimportant as ever.
Ted came to an abrupt halt as he entered the rough meadow.
The top brains, he observed, had made an impulsive deduction. Where the paths had once intersected sat a huge sphere of glass and dull metal. Two rods protruded from a band about its middle, and to an opening between them led a flight of four or five steps.
He crept to within ten yards of the thing before its purpose dawned on him. After thinking carefully for a few minutes, surprised at his own calmness, he backed cautiously away.
The tide was in when he reached the cliff so he didn’t bother to climb down. He jumped. Five minutes later he was within the island, clinging weakly to a submarine’s mooring line. Another five sufficed to see him into Dr. Finley’s austere quarters.
Ted began at the beginning, with the confession that the island children had learned the crawl from himself. The graying director of Project Peace reacted about as Ted had imagined: with anger—controlled, but contemptuous. Ted accepted the man’s bitter rebuke without reply.
Lean and dignified in his robe and sandals, Dr. Finley paced over to a frosty carafe of water and poured himself a drink. “And I gather, Jepson, from the condition of your clothes, that you’ve been topside just now.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why? Why did you see fit to jeopardize the project again?”
“I went up because the islanders have at least nine children among them capable of precognition. There’s a sight-sound
record in my quarters proving they knew of the meteorite’s coming at least three minutes in advance. Shall I get it for you?”
Finley looked away, sipped his water in silence for a time. “Not now,” he said thoughtfully. “I’m inclined to believe you. Something of this sort happened years ago. I was in the View Room and saw a youngster run in panic from beneath a cliff two hours before it gave way and fell.” He put down the glass, lighted a slender cigar. “All right, Jepson. What did you expect to find topside? Something to vindicate yourself?”