The Best of (22 page)

I went back and sat down again beside Sally. That picture certainly had spoilt things—"Councillor's Wife"! Naturally she wanted to know what I'd seen on the paper, and I had to sharpen up a few lies to cut my way out of that one.

We sat on awhile, feeling gloomy, saying nothing.

A platform went by, labelled: Was Great Great Troublefree Culture—Get Educated in Modern Comfort We watched it glide away through the railings and into the traffic.

"Maybe it's time we moved," I suggested.

"Yes," agreed Sally, dully. We walked back towards her place, me still wishing that I had been able to see the date on that paper.

"You wouldn't," I asked her casually, "you wouldn't happen to know any Councillors?"

She looked surprised.

"Well—there's Mr Palmer," she said, rather doubtfully.

"He'd be a—a youngish man?" I inquired, offhandedly.

"Why, no. He's ever so old—as a matter of fact, it's really his wife I know."

"Ah!" I said. "You don't know any of the younger ones?"

"I'm afraid not. Why?"

I put over a line about a situation like this needing young men of ideas.

"You men of ideas don't have to be councillors," she remarked, looking at me.

Maybe, as I said, she doesn't go much on logic, but she has her own ways of making a fellow feel better.

I'd have felt better still if I had had some ideas, though.

The next day found public indignation right up the scale again. It seems there had been an evening service going on in All Saints' Church. The vicar had ascended his pulpit and was just drawing breath for a brief sermon when a platform labelled:

Was Great Great Was Gt Gt Grandad one of the Boys?—Our £1 Trip may Show you floated in through the north wall and slid to a stop in front of the lectern. The vicar stared at it for some seconds in silence, then he crashed his fist down on his reading desk.

"This," he boomed. "This isintolerable! We shall wait until thisobject is removed."

He remained motionless, glaring at it. The congregation glared with him.

The tourists on the platform had an air of waiting for the show to begin. When nothing happened they started passing round bottles and fruit to while away the time. The vicar maintained his stony glare. When still nothing happened the tourists began to get bored. The young men tickled the girls, and the girls giggled them on. Several of them began to urge the man at the front end of their craft. After a bit he nodded, and the platform slid away through the south wall.

It was the first point our side had ever scored. The vicar mopped his brow, cleared his throat and then extemporized the address of his life, on the subject of 'The Cities of the Plain'.

But no matter how influential the tops that were blowing, there was still nothing getting done about it.

There were schemes, of course. Jimmy had one of them: it concerned either ultrahigh or infralow frequencies that were going to shudder the projections of the tourists to bits. Perhaps something along those lines might have been worked out some time, but it was a quicker kind of cure that we were needing; and it is damned difficult to know what you can do about something which is virtually no more than a threedimensional movie portrait unless you can think up some way of fouling its transmission.

All its functions are going on not where you see it, but in some unknown place where the origin is—so how do you get at it? What you are actually seeing doesn't feel, doesn't eat, doesn't breathe, doesn't sleep... It was while I was considering what it actually does do that I had my idea. It struck me all of a heap—so simple. I grabbed my hat and took off for the Town Hall.

By this time the daily processions of sizzling citizens, threateners and cranks had made them pretty cautious about callers there, but I worked through at last to a man who got interested, though doubtful.

"No one's going to like that much," he said.

"No one's meant to like it. But it couldn't be much worse than this —and it's likely to do local trade a bit of good, too," I pointed out.

He brightened a bit at that. I pressed on: "After all, the Mayor has his restaurants, and the pubs'll be all for it, too."

"You've got a point there," he admitted. "Very well, we'll put it to them. Come along."

For the whole of three days we worked hard on it. On the fourth we went into action. Soon after daylight there were gangs out on all the roads fixing barriers at the municipal limits, and when they'd done that they put up big whiteboards lettered in red:

WESTWICH THE CITY THAT LOOKS AHEAD
COME AND SEE IT'S BEYOND THE MINUTE—
NEWER THAN TOMORROW
SEE THE WONDER CITY OF THE AGE
TOLL (NONRESIDENTS) 2/6

The same morning the television permission was revoked, and the national papers carried large display advertisements :

COLOSSAL!UNIQUE!EDUCATIONAL!
WESTWICH PRESENTS THE ONLY AUTHENTIC
FUTURAMATIC SPECTACLE WANT TO KNOW:
WHAT YOUR GREAT GREAT GRANDDAUGHTER
WILL WEAR? HOW YOUR GREAT GREAT
GRANDSON WILL LOOK?
NEXT CENTURY'S STYLES?
HOW CUSTOMS WILL CHANGE?
COME TO WESTWICH AND SEE FOR YOURSELF
THE OFFER OF THE AGES
THE FUTURE FOR 2/6

We reckoned that with the publicity there had been already there'd be no need for more detail than that —though we ran some more specialized advertisements in the picture dailies:

WESTWICH GIRLS! GIRLS!! GIRLS!!!
THE SHAPES TO COME
SAUCY FASHIONS—CUTE WAYS
ASTONISHING—AUTHENTIC—UNCENSORED
GLAMOUR GALORE FOR 2/6

and so on. We bought enough space to get it mentioned in the news columns in order to help those who like to think they are doing things for sociological, psychological and other intellectual reasons.

And they came.

There had been quite a few looking in to see the sights before, but now they learnt that it was something worth charging money for the figures jumped right up—and the more they went up, the gloomier the Council Treasurer got because we hadn't made it five shillings, or even ten.

After a couple of days we had to take over all vacant lots, and some fields farther out, for car parks, and people were parking far enough out to need a special bus service to bring them in. The streets became so full of crowds stooging around greeting any of Pawley's platforms or tourists with whistles, jeers and catcalls, that local citizens simply stayed indoors and did their smouldering there.

The Treasurer began to worry now over whether we'd be liable for Entertainment Tax. The list of protests to the Mayor grew longer each day, but he was so busy arranging special convoys of food and beer for his restaurants that he had little time to worry about them. Nevertheless, after a few days of it I started to wonder whether Pawley wasn't going to see us out, after all. The tourists didn't care for it much, one could see, and it must have interfered a lot with their prizehunts, but it hadn't cured them of wandering about all over the place, and now we had the addition of thousands of trippers whooping it up with pandemonium for most of the night. Tempers all round were getting short enough for real trouble to break out.

Then, on the sixth night, when several of us were just beginning to wonder whether it might not be wiser to clear out of Westwich for a bit, the first crack showed—a man at the Town Hall rang me up to say he had seen several platforms with empty seats on them.

The next night I went down to one of their regular routes to see for myself. I found a large, welllubricated crowd already there, exchanging cracks and jostling and shoving, but we hadn't long to wait. A platform slid out on a slant through the front of the Coronation Cafe, and the label on it read:

CHARM & ROMANCE OF 20TH CENTURY—15£

and there were half a dozen empty seats, at that.

The arrival of the platform brought a wellsupported Bronx cheer, and a shrilling of whistles. The driver remained indifferent as he steered straight through the crowds. His passengers looked less certain of themselves. Some of them did their best to play up; they giggled, made motions of returning slap for slap and grimace for grimace with the crowd to start with. Possibly it was as well that the tourist girls couldn't hear the things the crowd was shouting to them, but some of the gestures were clear enough. It couldn't have been a lot of fun gliding straight into the men who were making them. By the time the platform was clear of the crowd and disappearing through the front of the Bon Marché pretty well all the tourists had given up pretending that it was; some of them were looking a little sick. By the expression on several of the faces I reckoned that Pawley might be going to have a tough tune explaining the culture aspect of it to a deputation somewhere.

The next night there were more empty seats than full ones, and someone reported that the price had come down to 10s.

The night after that they did not show up at all, and we all had a busy time with the job of returning the halfcrowns, and refusing claims for wasted petrol.

And the next night they didn't come, either; or the one after that; so then all we had to do was to pitch into the job of cleaning up Westwich, and the affair was practically over—apart from the longer term business of living down the reputation the place had been getting lately.

At least, we say it's over. Jimmy, however, maintains that that is probably only the way it looks from here. According to him, all they had to do was to modify out the visibility factor that was causing the trouble, so it's possible that they are still touring around here—and other places.

Well, I suppose he could be right. Perhaps that fellow Pawley, whoever he is, or will be, has a chain of his funfairs operating all round the world and all through history at this very moment. But we don't know —and, as long as he keeps them out of sight, I don't know that we care a lot, either.

Pawley has been dealt with as far as we are concerned. He was a case for desperate measures; even the vicar of All Saints' appreciated that; and undoubtedly he had a point to make when he began his address of thanksgiving with: "Paradoxical, my friends, paradoxical can be the workings of vulgarity..."

Once it was settled I was able to make time to go round and see Sally again. I found her looking brighter than she'd been for weeks, and lovelier on account of it. She seemed pleased to see me, too.

"Hullo, Jerry," she said. "I've just been reading in the paper how you organized the plan for getting rid of them. I think it was just wonderful of you."

A little time ago I'd probably have taken that for a cue, but it was no trigger now. I sort of kept on seeing her with her arms full of twins, and wondering in a deadinside way how they got there.

"There wasn't a lot to it, darling," I told her modestly. "Anyone else might have hit on the idea."

"That's as maybe—but a whole lot of people don't think so. And I'll tell you another thing I heard today. They're going to ask you to stand for the Council, Jerry."

"Me on the Council. That'd be a big laugh—" I began. Then I stopped suddenly. "If—I mean, would that mean I'd be called 'Councillor'?" I asked her.

"Why—well, yes, I suppose so," she said, looking puzzled.

Things shimmered a bit.

"Er—Sally, darling—er, sweetheart, there's—er—something I've been trying to get round to saying to you for quite a time..." I began.

#8 The Best Of John Wyndham

John Wyndham

(1951)

(1951)

(Note: The Government is of the opinion that in the present critical situation the widest possible publicity should be given to the facts of the case and the events which gave rise to it. It is, therefore, with official approval and encouragement that the proprietors of WALTERS SPACENEWS here reprint in pamphlet form the account first published in both the printed and broadcast versions of the issue of that journal dated Friday, 20th July 2051)

Here is an official Government emergency warning:

"From now until further notice Clarke Lunar Station will be closed to traffic. No vessel of any kind at present on the Station may put to space, nor will any local craft be permitted to take off from there. All vessels now in space, whether earthward or outward bound, scheduled to call at Clarke must make immediate arrangements to divert to Whitley. Outward bound craft will ground at the normal Whitley Lunar Station base; earthward bound vessels will be directed to the emergency field andmust ground there. Any vessel ignoring this instruction will be refused grounding and be dealt with severely. It is emphasized that any vessel grounding at or near Clarke for any reason whatsoever will be refused permission to leave. This warning is effective immediately."

It is likely that only a few of the millions who heard that announcement, or the versions of it in other languages, broadcast on the evening of Monday last, 16th July, took any great notice of it, in spite of its seriousness of tone. After all, though we call this the Space age, only a fractional percentage of us have ever been or ever will be in space.

Readers of this journal cannot fail to have been troubled, more likely alarmed, by the order, but they think of space in a specialized way as something directly affecting their calling or livelihood.

But to the average man, what is the Moon? It is an airless, cheerless cinder, the scene of some mining, useful as a testing ground for space conditions, but chiefly notable as a waystation apparently designed by providence for the convenience of spacevoyaging humanity. He knows that it is important, but he does not knowhow important, nor why.

He knows, perhaps, that the Clarke Lunar Station was first opened over fifty years ago, and that it was so named in honour of the octogenarian Doctor of Physics who did so much to further spacetravel, but he does not realize what, in terms of mathematics, of power and payload, the existence of such a Station and fuelling base means. Nor that its absence would entail suspension of spacetravel almost entirely for a very long time, until we could completely organize our methods—if we could.

Luckily we are not altogether denied use of the Moon by the closing of Clarke; we can still operate through the Whitley Station—at present. But if that cannot be maintained in use, the question of continued spacetravel ships of the present types becomes grave to the point of hopelessness.