Emily said helplessly, “We can’t stay in isolation. We can’t spend our lives like this.”
“We can, we must, we will,” retorted Michael fiercely. “Or until we know exactly what it is all about. We five are close. In a way we love each other. I suppose that is why we think of ourselves as the Family. But we are more than a family. We have to be. We are a sort of fighting unit—not in the sense of making war, but in the sense of being determined to discover the truth. The truth may be crazy—or it may drive us crazy. But we have to find the kind of truth that satisfies us, not the kind that could so easily be supplied by them. We can not let them find out what we are really like until we have found out what they are really like. We can accept no risks. Anything from a drybone at all, any act of friendship, should be suspect.”
“Do you hate them?” asked Jane. “Or are you afraid?”
“Afraid,” confessed Michael, “not so much of what they will do to us as of what we may be to them.”
Ernest gave a twisted smile. “We may be their pets—like rabbits. Or they might be part of some elaborate system designed by someone or something simply to look after us. I don’t believe anything I’m told, anymore—the war, the outside world, anything. I don’t disbelieve it either. But I am only ever going to believe what I—or we—personally can prove.”
“Ernest has hit it,” said Michael. “They may treat us as children, they may conceal as much as they wish. But we know that we are children no longer. The games, the amusements, the diversions don’t satisfy. We need something more. We need the truth. We need to stop being bewildered and absorbed in our own nightmares. We need to plan a campaign of investigation—a campaign to which we are all dedicated and which they do not suspect…. I only wish we had someone to guide us.”
He stopped and looked at his companions. They were all looking steadily at him.
Ernest said: “We have someone to guide us, Michael. I’m afraid that is your job…. I have some intelligence, but I am not too strong on courage, I think.” He grinned. “With Horatio, it seems to be the reverse. As for Jane and Emily—well, isn’t the responsibility too much? So that leaves you.”
Michael looked at the Family, and said nothing. Because there was nothing to say. Somebody had to do it. Somebody had to make the mistakes and know it was his fault when things went wrong. But now, he realized, he was five times more afraid than before. And that, too, was something he would have to keep to himself.
Emily touched his hand, and was surprised to find it very cold.
11
The Family was now psychologically committed. Until that Saturday morning in Green Park, it had been no more than a group of friends, drawn to each other by loneliness, fear, frustration, lack of hard facts, and the acute awareness of their common physical difference from the drybones. But now the Family was in the process of becoming an underground movement, an escape committee dedicated to escaping from the labyrinthine ignorance in which the drybones seemed to wish to keep all fragiles.
Their overt behavior was as it had previously been, as was expected of them. They went to high school and endured the normal routine of creative and leisure activities. They participated in normal domestic activities with their mothers and fathers. They developed hobbies, went to the cinema, met socially, watched television, played healthy games, and did their best to conform as much as possible. But secretly they began to list in order of priority questions to be answered, problems to be solved, projects to be undertaken.
Michael and Ernest continued to learn to read, but they progressed far faster than they allowed Mr. Shakespeare to suspect At the same time, and secretly, they began to teach Horatio and Jane and Emily—who, in public, still showed no interest in reading at all. From reading, the art of writing followed naturally. Michael and Ernest were soon able to copy the shapes of letters quickly. Thus they were able to preserve and communicate their ideas and to increase their skills so that they would be ready for the time when they could get hold of real books containing real information—if, indeed, such existed.
Mr. Shakespeare restricted them to a diet of easy-reading books containing only children’s stories. Perhaps, thought Michael, he hoped to discourage them, to bore them, so that in the end they would think that reading had nothing to offer.
Drybone or fragile—they were still not sure which—Mr. Shakespeare was an enigmatic person. Most days he seemed to exhibit a completely drybone personality. But just occasionally, he revealed something more. While apparently discouraging them from reading, he also held out the possibility—as usual, when they were ready for it—that one day Michael and Ernest might be allowed to visit the library. He would not tell them where the library was, and Michael and Ernest searched the streets of central London in vain, but he said enough to convince them of its existence.
The Family took to meeting very regularly to consider the tasks it had set itself and to work out what Michael was fond of calling the strategy of investigation. Such meetings were not kept secret from fathers and mothers or other drybones. They were merely disguised as social activities of one kind or another. For all practical purposes, the Family was simply a group of adolescents indulging in the accepted rituals and sudden enthusiasms of adolescents.
The list of questions to be answered became formidable. Why did fragiles have drybone parents? Why (Mr. Shakespeare possibly excepted) were there no adult fragiles? How were fragiles made? How were drybones made? How big was London? Was it possible to leave the city? Was there really another high school containing fragiles as well as drybones? Did the library exist? Was there really a world outside London in which other, similar cities existed and in which wars were being fought? Had the Americans, if they existed, landed on Mars, if it existed? What was real and what was unreal? Who was mad and who was sane?
All taboo questions—questions that the drybones would dismiss, laugh away as absurd or counter with “You are not yet old enough or intelligent enough to understand.” But, as Ernest claimed, if anyone really wanted to understand he must be intelligent enough to understand at least some of the truth.
“All our lives,” said Michael, late one evening when the Family had gathered on the lamplit Embankment, “they have tried to keep us under a kind of intellectual sedation. They have done their best to educate us against initiative, against exploration. Which makes it especially difficult, because not only do we have to fight against the drybones’ conspiracy, we have to fight against ourselves—against the fears they have planted, against the urge to play safe and stay secure.” He looked at Emily. “We may even have to fight against personal feelings and emotions if they weaken our determination to discover what it is all about.”
“Talk, talk, talk,” said Horatio, disgustedly. “Why don’t we do something? Why don’t we get something going? It will make us feel a lot better.”
“Providing it is not dangerous,” added Jane. “I mean really dangerous.”
“How do we know what is dangerous?” asked Ernest. “Speaking for myself, ignorance is dangerous to my sanity. I know that.”
“Horatio is right,” said Michael. “The time has come to do something. There’s one thing I’m sure of—it won’t be long before the drybones discover that we’re not just playing at being ordinary young people anymore. It will be interesting to see what they do.”