Tomorrow Lies in Ambush

The Happiest Day of Your Life

Jean Bannion held her youngest son close to her, and blinked to ease the sudden stinging in her eyes.

The eight-year-old nestled submissively into her shoulder. His forehead felt dry and cool, and his hair was filled with the smell of fresh air, reminding her of washing newly brought in from an outdoor line. She felt her lips begin to tremble.

“Look at her”, Doug Bannion said incredulously. “Beginning to sniff! What’d she be like if Philip was going to be away at school for years?” Looking over her as she knelt with the boy in her arms, he patted his wife on the head, looking professorial and amused. The two older boys smiled appreciatively.

“Mother is an emotional spendthrift,” said ten-year-old Boyd.

“She has a tendency towards spiritual self-immolation,” said eleven-year-old Theodore.

Jean glared at them helplessly, and they looked back at her with wise eyes full of the quality she had come to hate most since they had travelled the Royal Road—their damnable, twinkling kindness.

“Boys!” Doug Bannion spoke sharply. “Show more respect for your mother.”

“Thanks,” Jean said without gratitude. She understood that Doug had not reprimanded his sons out of regard for her feelings, but to correct any incipient flaws which might mar their developing characters. Her arms tightened around Philip, and he began to move uneasily, reminding her that she might have been losing him in a few years anyway.

“Philip,” she whispered desperately into his cold-rimmed ear. “What did you see at the movie we went to yesterday?”

“Pinnochio.”

“Wasn’t it fun?”

“For God’s sake, Jean!” Doug Bannion separated them almost roughly. “Come on, Philip—we can’t have you being late on your one and only day at school.”

He took Philip’s hand and they walked away across the gleaming, slightly resilient floor of the Royal Road’s ice-green reception hall. Jean watched them go hand-in-hand to mingle with the groups of children and parents converging on the induction suite. Philip’s toes were trailing slightly in the way she knew so well, and she sensed—with a sudden pang of concern—that he was afraid of what lay ahead, but he did not look back at her.

“Well, there he goes,” ten-year-old Boyd said proudly. “I hope Dad brings him into the practice tomorrow—I could do with his help.”

“There’s more room in my office,” said eleven-year-old Theodore. ‘Besides, the new Fiduciary Obligations Act gets its final reading next week, and I’m going to be involved in a dozen compensation suits. So I need him more than you do.”

They both were junior partners in Doug Bannion’s law firm. Jean Bannion looked for a moment into the calm, wise faces of her children and felt afraid. She turned and walked blindly away from them, trying to prevent her features from contorting into a baby-mask of tears. All around her were groups of other parents—complacent, coolly triumphant—and the sight of them caused her control to slip even further.

Finally, she seized the only avenue of escape available. She ran into the Royal Road’s almost deserted exhibition hall, where the academy’s proud history was told in glowing three-dimensional projections and bland, mechanical whispers.

The first display consisted of two groups of words; pale green letters shimmering in the air against a background of midnight blue. As the slideway carried her past them in silence, Jean read:

“Learning by study must be won;

’twas ne’er entailed from sire to son.”

Gay

“If only Gay could see us now.”

Martinelli

The next display unit showed a solid portrait of Edward Martinelli, founder of the academy and head of the scientific research team which had perfected the cortical manipulation complex. A recording of Martinelli’s own voice, made a few months before his death, began to drone in Jean’s ear with the shocking intimacy of accurately beamed sound.

“Ever since knowledge became the principal weapon in Man’s armoury, his chief ally in his battle for survival, men have sought ways to accelerate the learning process. By the middle of the Twentieth Century, the complexity of the human condition had reached the point at which members of the professional classes were required to spend a full third of their useful lives in the unproductive data-absorption phase….”

Jean’s attention wandered from the carefully modulated words—she had heard the recording twice before and its emotionless technicalities would never have any meaning for her. The complementary means the academy employed—multi-level hypnosis, psycho-neuro drugs, electron modification of the protein pathways in the brain, multiple recordings—were unimportant to her compared with the end result.

And the result was that any child, provided he had the required level of intelligence, could have all the formal knowledge—which would have been gained in ten years of conventional high school and university—implanted in his mind in a little over two hours.

To be eligible, the child had to have an IQ of not less than 140 and a family which could afford to pay, in one lump sum, an amount roughly equal to what the ten years of traditional education would have cost. This was why the faces of the parents in the reception hall had been taut with pride. This was why even Doug Bannion—who made a profession of being phlegmatic—had been looking about him with the hard, bright eyes of one who has found fulfilment.

He had fathered three flawless sons, each with an intelligence quotient in the genius class, and had successfully steered them through the selection procedures which barred the Royal Road to so many. Few men had achieved as much; few women had had the honour of sharing such an achievement….

But why, Jean wondered, did it have to happen to me? To my children? Or why couldn’t I have had a mind like Doug’s? So that the Royal Road would bring the boys closer to me, instead of …

As the slidewalk carried her on its silent rounds, the animated displays whispered persuasively of the Royal Road’s superiority to the old, prolonged, criminally wasteful system of education. They told her of young Philip’s fantastic good luck in being born at the precise moment of time in which, supported on a pinnacle of human technology, he could earn an honours law degree in two brief hours.

But, locked up tight in her prison of despair, Jean heard nothing.

Immediately the graduation ceremony was over, Jean excused herself from Doug and the two older boys. Before they could protest, she hurried out of the auditorium and went back to the car. The sun-baked plastic of the rear seat felt uncomfortably hot through the thin material of her dress.

She lit a cigarette and sat staring across the arrayed, shimmering curvatures of the other cars until Doug and the three boys arrived. Doug slid into the driver’s seat and the boys got in beside him, laughing and struggling. Sitting in the back, Jean felt shut off from her family. She was unable to take her gaze away from Philip’s neat, burnished head. There was no outward sign of the changes that had been wrought in his brain—he looked like any other normal, healthy eight-year-old boy….

“Philip!” She blurted his name instinctively.

“What is it, Mother?” He turned his head and, hearing the emotion in her voice, Theodore and Boyd looked around as well. Three pink, almost-identical faces regarded her with calm curiosity.

“Nothing. I …’ Jean’s throat closed painfully, choking off the words.

“Jean!” Doug Bannion’s voice was harsh with exasperation as he hunched over the steering wheel. His knuckles glowed through the skin, the colour of old ivory.

“It’s all right, Dad,” ten-year-old Boyd said. “For most women, the severing of the psychological umbilical cord is a decidedly traumatic experience.”

“Don’t worry, mother,” Philip said. He patted Jean on the shoulder in an oddly adult gesture.

She brushed his hand away while the tears began to spill hotly down her cheeks, and this time there was no stopping them, for she knew—without looking at him—that the eyes of her eight-year-old son would be wise, and kind, and old.