Children of the Dust by Louise Lawrence

dreamer, Erica! You, and the rest of the make-Britain-great-again brigade. This place will fall down around our ears whilst you're still sitting on your backside hoping for a scientific breakthrough. It's not going to happen . . . and Dwight sees that.'
    Ophelia chewed her finger nails. Her parents quarrelled. They seldom did anything else but quarrel. They were not like Dwight's parents, loving each other and him. Harsh light shone on the green linoleum floor, shone on her father's grey hair and Erica's spectacles. There was a flush on her face, and her eyes flashed with annoyance, and she was not about to give up.
    'Without technology you wouldn't be alive now!' Erica said furiously.
    'And countless millions of people wouldn't be dead!' retorted Bill. 'Lest we forget: it was science and technology that invented the bomb and devastated the earth . . . not to mention blokes like MacAllister with his blind obedience to Central Government policy. Is that what you call creative thinking, Erica?'
    Erica put on her white laboratory overall.
    'I'm going!' she said.
    'Maybe one day you'll face it!' said Bill.
    There was a knock on the door.
    And Erica opened it.
    'Domestic harmony is one beautiful thing,' said Colonel Allison in his slow American drawl. 'You can hear it all the way to the recreation room.'
    'What do you want?' Erica asked sourly.
    'Ophelia,' said Colonel Allison. 'A message from Dwight. There's baseball in the storage depot and you're to report to second base.'
    'And stop biting your nails!' said her father.
----
    There were one hundred and twenty-two children in the Avon bunker, their ages ranging from Mrs Sutcliffe's two-month-old baby to Dwight Allison, who was seventeen. There was a creche and kindergarten for the little ones and graded education for the rest. Schooling began at 09.00 hours and ended at 17.00 hours, and included supervised sports sessions with Sergeant -Major Wilkinson in the recreation hall. With so many experts in the bunker they did not lack qualified tuition. At sixteen Ophelia was already studying advanced genetics with Dr Stevenson two afternoons a week. She knew how to dissect the ovum of a rat and isolate the chromosome that gave rise to mutational blindness. She could remove and replace it with a non-mutated chromosome from a bunker-bred rat. But in the next generation the mutation recurred. In cartography Bernard Sowerby was updating the Ordnance Survey maps from aerial photographs, and Dwight was working on designs for an elevator shaft to a projected lower basement area.
    Educationally they were far in advance of pre-war standards, yet they were still considered children. They still played baseball in the storage depot, collected cockroaches and raced them along the dining hall tables, fed invasion messages from outer space into the main computer, and got rips in the navy blue government-issued overalls. They were still, during weekends and evenings, part of the noisy unruly horde of youngsters who careered through the confines of the bunker, believing it unconditionally theirs. But once too often some unidentified child robbed the cultivation area of its ripe tomatoes. And once too often some unidentified child visited the communications room, overheard communiques from Central Government, and blabbed restricted information. A rumour spread that the Prime Minister was dead and Air Marshal Hughes had taken over. Bill Harnden discussed it during a schoolroom debate.
    'Is this the end of democracy?' he asked.
    'What democracy?' said Dwight. 'Avon has been a totalitarian state for the last twenty years.'
    Ophelia was not much interested in politics. The bunker had always been run by General MacAllister and it made no difference to her who ran the country as a whole. It was General MacAllister who imposed the restrictions, placed the cultivation area and the communications room out of bounds to all persons under the age of eighteen. She missed the feel of sunlight through plastic, the