Wyndham, John (19 page)

Coker laid down the compasses he was using.

“Then what do you suggest?”

“Well, it seems to me we could cover a lot of ground pretty
quickly from the air, and well enough. You can bet your life that anyone who
hears an aircraft engine is going to turn out and make a sign of some kind.”

Coker shook his head. “Now why didn’t we think of that
before? It ought to be a helicopter, of course—but where do we get one, and
who’s going to fly it?”

“Oh, I can make one of them things go, all right,” said the
radioman confidently.

There was something in his tone.

“Have you ever flown one?” asked Coker.

“No,” admitted the radioman, “but I reckon there’d not be a
lot to it, once you got the knack.”

“H’m,” said Coker, looking at him with reserve.

Stephen recalled the locations of two R.A.F. stations not
far away, and that there had been an air-taxi business operating from Yeovil.

In spite of our doubts, the radioman was as good as his
word. He seemed to have complete confidence that his instinct for mechanism
would not let him down. After practicing for half an hour, he took the
helicopter off and flew it back to Charcott.

For four days the machine hovered around in widening
circles. On two of them Coker observed; on the other two I replaced him. In
all, we discovered ten little groups of people. None of them knew anything of
the Beadley party, and none of them contained Josella. As we found each lot, we
landed. Usually they were in twos and threes. The largest was seven. They would
greet us in hopeful excitement, but soon, when they found that we represented
only a group similar to their own, and were not the spearhead of a rescue party
on the grand scale, their Interest would lapse. We could offer them little that
they had not got already. Some of them became irrationally abusive and
threatening in their disappointment, but most simply dropped back into
despondency. As a rule they showed little wish to join up with other parties
and were inclined rather to lay hands on what they could, building themselves
into refuges as comfortably as possible while they waited for the arrival of
the Americans, who were bound to find a way. There seemed to be a widespread
and fixed idea about this. Our suggestions that any surviving Americans would
be likely to have their hands more than full at home was received as so much
wet-blanketry. The Americans, they assured us, would never have allowed such a
thing to happen in their country. Nevertheless, and in spite of this Micawber
fixation on American fairy godmothers, we left each party with a map showing
them the approximate positions of groups we had already discovered, in case
they should change their minds and think about getting together for self-help.

As a task, the flights were far from enjoyable, but at least
ey were to be preferred to lonely scouting on the ground. However, at the end
of the fruitless fourth day it was decided to abandon the search.
At least that was what the rest of them decided. I did not feel the same way
about it. My quest was personal; theirs was not. Whoever they found, now or
eventually, would be strangers to them. I was searching for Beadley’s party as
a means, not an end in itself. If I should find them and discover that Josella
was not with them, then I should go on searching. But I could not expect the
rest to devote any more time to searching purely on my behalf.
Curiously I realized that in all this I had met no other person who was
searching for someone else. Every one of them had been, save for the accident
of Stephen and his girl friend, snapped clean away from friends or relatives to
link him with the past, and was beginning a new life with people who were
strangers. Only I, as far as I could see, had promptly formed a new link—and
that so briefly that I had scarcely been aware how important it was to me at
the time.

Once the decision to abandon the search had been taken,

Coker said:

“All right. Then that brings us to thinking about what we
are going to do for ourselves.”

“Which means laying in stores against the winter, and just
going on as we are. What else should we do?” asked Stephen.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Coker told him. “Maybe it’d
be all right for a while—but what happens afterward?”

“If we do run short of stocks—well, there’s plenty more lying
around,” said the radioman.

“The Americans will be here before Christmas,” said Stephen’s
girl friend.

“Listen,” Coker told her patiently. “Just put the Americans
in the jam-tomorrow-pie-in-the-sky department awhile, will you. Try to imagine
a world in which there aren’t any Americans—can you do that?”

The girl stared at him.

“But there must be,” she said.

Coker sighed sadly. He turned his attention to the radioman.

“There won’t always he those stores. The way I see it, we’ve
been given a flying start in a new kind of world. We’re endowed with a capital
of enough of everything to begin with, but that isn’t going to last forever. We
couldn’t eat up all the stuff that’s there for the taking, not in
generations—if it would keep. But it isn’t going to keep. A lot of it is going
to go bad pretty rapidly. And not only food. Everything is going, more slowly
but quite surely, to drop to pieces. If we want fresh stuff to eat next year,
we shall have to grow it ourselves; and it may seem a long way off now, but
there’s going to come a time when we shall have to grow everything ourselves.
There’ll come a time, too, when all the tractors are worn out or rusted, and
there’s no more gas to run them, anyway— when we’ll come right down to nature
and bless horses—if we’ve got ‘em.

“This is a pause—just a heavensent pause—while we get over
the first shock and start to collect ourselves, but it’s no more than a pause.
Later we’ll have to plow; still later we’ll have to learn how to make plowshares;
later than that we’ll have to learn how to smelt the iron to make the shares.
What we are on now is a road that will take us back and back and back until we
can—if we can—make good all that we wear out. Not until then shall we be able
to stop ourselves on the trail that’s leading down to savagery. But once we can
do that, then maybe we’ll begin to crawl slowly up again.”

He looked round the circle to see if we were following him.

“We
can
do that—if we will. The most valuable part of
our flying start is knowledge. That’s the short cut to save us starting where
our ancestors did. We’ve got it all there in the books if we take the trouble
to find out about it.”

The rest were looking at Coker curiously. It was the first
time they had heard him in one of his oratorical moods.

“Now,” he went on, “from my reading of history, the thing
you have to have to use knowledge is leisure. Where
everybody
has to
work hard just to get a living and there is leisure to think, knowledge
stagnates, and people with it. The thinking has to be done largely by people
who are not directly productive—by people who appear to be living almost
entirely on the work of others, but are, in fact, a long-term investment.
Learning grew up in the cities, and in great institutions—it was the labor of
the countryside that supported them. Similarly, we
must
become big
enough to support at very least the leader, the teacher, and the doctor.”

“Well?” said Stephen after a pause.

“I’ve been thinking of that place Bill and I saw at Tynsham.
We’ve told you about it, The woman who is tying to run it wanted help, and she
wanted it badly. She has about fifty or sixty people on her hands, and a dozen
or so of them able to see. That way she can’t do it. She knows she can’t— but
she wasn’t going to admit it to us. She wasn’t going to put herself in our debt
by asking us to stay. But she’d be very glad if we were to go back there after
all and ask to be admitted.”

“Good Lord,” I said. “You don’t think she deliberately put
us on the wrong tack?”

“I don’t know. I may be doing her an injustice, but it is an
odd thing that we’ve not seen or heard a single sign of Beadley and Company,
isn’t it? Anyhow, whether she meant it or not, that’s the way it works, because
I’ve decided to go back there. If you want my reasons, here they are—the two
main ones. First, unless that place is taken in hand, it’s going to crash,
which would be a waste and a shame for all those people there. The other is
that it is much better situated than this. It has a farm which should not take
a lot of putting in order; it is practically self-contained, but could be
extended if necessary. This place would cost a lot more labor to start and to
work.

“More important, it is big enough to afford time for
teach-mg—teaching both the present blind there and the sighted children they’ll
have later on. I believe it can be done, and I’ll do my best to do it—and if
the haughty Miss Durrant can’t take it, she can go jump in the river.

“Now the point is this. I
think
I could do it as it
stands— but I
know
that if the lot of us were to go we could get the
place reorganized and running in a few weeks. Then we’d be living in a
community that’s going to grow and make a damned good attempt to hold its own.
The alternative is to stay in a small party which is going to decline and get
more desperately lonely as time goes on. So, how about it?”

There was some debate and inquiry for details, but not much
doubt. Those of us who had been out an the search had had a glimpse of the
awful loneliness that might come. No one was attached to the present house. It
had been chosen for defensible qualities, and had little more to commend it.
Most of them could feel the oppression of isolation growing round them already.
The thought of wider and more varied company
was
in itself attractive.
The end of an hour found the discussion dealing with questions of transport and
details of the removal, and the decision to adopt Coker’s suggestion had more
or less made itself. Only Stephen’s girl friend was doubtful.

“This place Tynsham—it’s pretty much off the map?” she asked
uneasily.

“Don’t you worry,” Coker assured her. “It’s marked on all
the best American maps.”

It was sometime in the early hours of the following morning
that I knew I was not going to Tynsham with the rest. Later, perhaps, I would,
but not yet....

My first inclination had been to accompany them, if only for
the purpose of choking the truth out of Miss Durrant regarding the Beadley
party’s destination. But then I had to make again the disturbing admission that
I did not know that Josella was with them—and, indeed, all the information I
bad been able to collect so far suggested that she was not. She bad pretty
certainly not passed through Tynsham. But if she had not gone in search of
them, then where had she gone? It was scarcely likely that there had been a
second direction in the University Building, one that I had missed.

And then, as if it had been a flash of light, I recalled the
discussion we had had in our commandeered apartment. I could see her sitting
there in her blue party frock, with the light of the candles catching the
diamonds as we talked.

“What about the Sussex Downs? I know a lovely old farmhouse
on the north side. .“ And then I knew what I must do. ...

I told Coker about it in the morning. He was sympathetic,
but obviously anxious not to raise my hopes too much.

“Okay. You do as you think best,” he agreed. “I hope— Well,
anyway, you’ll know where we are, and you can both come on to Tynsham and help
to put that woman Through the hoop until she sees sense.”

That morning the weather broke. The rain was falling
in
sheets
as I climbed once more into the
familiar
truck, yet I was feeling elated
and hopeful; it could have rained ten times harder without depressing inc or
altering my intention. Coker came out to see me off. I knew why he made a point
of it, for I was aware without his telling me that the memory of his first rash
plan and its consequences troubled him. He stood beside the cab, with his hair
flattened and the water trickling down his neck, and held up his band.

“Take it easy, Bill. There aren’t any ambulances these days,
and she’ll prefer you to arrive all in one piece. Good luck—and my apologies
for everything to the lady when you find her.”

The word was “when,” but the tone was “if”

I wished them well at Tynsham. Then I let in the clutch and
splashed away down the muddy drive.

The morning was infected with minor mishaps. First it was
water in the carburetor. Then I contrived to travel a dozen miles north under
the impression I was going east, and
before
I had that fully rectified I
was in trouble with the ignition system on a bleak upland road miles from
anywhere. Either these delays or a natural reaction did a lot to spoil the
hopeful mood in which I had started. By the time I had the trouble straightened
out, it was one o’clock and the day bad cleared
“p.

The sun came out. Everything looked bright and refreshed,
but even that, and the
fact that
for the next twenty miles everything
went smoothly, did not shift the mood of depression that was closing over me
again. Now I was really on my own, I could not shut out the sense of
loneliness. It came upon me as it bad on that day when we bad split up to
search for Michael Beadley—only with double the force.... Until then I had
always thought of loneliness as something negative—an absence of company, and,
of course, something temporary.

...That day I had learned that it was much more. It was
something which could press and oppress, could distort the ordinary and play
tricks with the mind. Something which lurked inimically nil around, stretching
the nerves and twang-big them with alarms, never letting one forget that there
was no one to help, no one to care. It showed one as an atom adrift in
vastness, and it waited all the time its chance to frighten and frighten horribly—that
was what loneliness was really trying to do; and that was what one must never
let it do..

To deprive a gregarious creature of companionship is to maim
it, to outrage its nature. The prisoner and the cenobite are aware that the
herd exists beyond their exile; they are an aspect of it. But when the herd no
longer exists, there is, for the herd creature, no longer entity. He is a part
of no whole, a freak without a place. If he cannot hold onto his reason, then
he is lost indeed: most utterly and most fearfully lost, so that he becomes no
more than the twitch in the limb of a corpse.

It needed far more resistance now than it had before. Only
the strength of my hope that I would find companionship at my journey’s end
kept me from turning hack to find relief from the strain in the presence of
Coker and the others.

The sights which I saw by the way had little or nothing to
do with it. Horrible though some of them were, I was hardened to such things
by now. The honor had left them, just as the honor which broods over great
battlefields fades into history. Nor did I any longer see these things as part
of a vast, impressive tragedy. My struggle was all a personal conflict with the
instincts of my kind. A continual defensive action, with no victory possible. I
knew in my very heart that I would not be able to sustain myself for long
alone.

To give myself occupation I drove faster than I should. In
some small town with a forgotten name I rounded a corner and ran straight into
a van which blocked the whole street. Luckily my own tough truck suffered no
more than scratches, but two vehicles managed to hitch themselves together with
diabolical ingenuity, so that it was an awkward business singlehanded, and in
a confined space, to separate them. It was a problem which took me a full hour
to solve, and did me good by turning my mind to practical matters.

Alter that I kept to a more cautious pace, except for a few
minutes soon after I entered the New Forest. The cause of that was a glimpse
through the trees of a helicopter cruising at no great height. It was set to
cross my course some way ahead. By ill luck the trees there grew close to the
side of the road, and must have hidden it almost completely from the air. I put
on a spurt, but by the time I reached more open ground the machine was no more
than a speck floating away in the distance to the north. Nevertheless, even the
sight of it seemed to give me some support.

A few miles farther on I ran through a small village which
was disposed neatly about a triangular green. At first sight it was as charming
in its mixture of thatched and red-tiled cottages with their flowering gardens
as something out of a picture book. But I did not look closely into the gardens
as I passed; too many of them showed the alien shape of a triffid towering
incongruously among the flowers. I was almost clear of the place when a small
figure bounded out of one of the last garden gates and came running up the road
toward me, waving both arms. I pulled up, looked around for triffids in a way that
was becoming instinctive, picked up my gun and climbed down.

The child was dressed in a blue cotton frock, white socks,
and sandals. She looked about nine or ten years old.
A
pretty ttle
girl—I could see that, even though her dark brown curls were now uncared for
and her face dirtied with smeared tears. She pulled at my sleeve.

“Please, please,” she said urgently, “please come and see
what’s happened to Tommy.”

I stood staring down at her. The awful loneliness of the day
lifted. My mind seemed to break out of the case I had made for it. I wanted to
pick her up and hold her close to me. I could feel tears behind my eyes. I held
out my hand to her, and she took it. Together we walked back to the gate
through which she had come.

“Tommy’s there,” she said, pointing.

A little boy about four years of age lay on the diminutive
patch of lawn between the flower beds. It was quite obvious at a glance why he
was there.

“The thing hit him,” she said. “It hit him and he fell down.
And it wanted to hit me when I tried to help him. Horrible
thing!”

I looked up and saw the top of a triffid rising above the
fence that bordered the garden.

“Put your bands over your ears. I’m going to make a bang,” I
said.

She did so, and I blasted the top off the triffid.

“Horrible
thing!”
she repeated. “Is it dead now?”

I was about to assure her that it was, when it began to
rattle the little sticks against its stem, just as the one at Steeple Honey had
done. As then, I gave it the other barrel to shut it up.

“Yes” I said. “It’s dead now.”

We walked across to the little boy. The scarlet slash of the
sting was vivid on his pale cheek. It must have happened some hours before. She
knelt beside him.

“It isn’t any good,” I told her gently. She looked up, fresh
tears in her eyes. “Is Tommy dead too?”

I squatted down beside her and shook my head. “I’m afraid he
is.”

After a while she said:

“Poor Tommy! will we bury him—like the puppies?”

“Yes,” I told her.

In all the overwhelming disaster, that was the only grave I
dug—and it was a very small one. She gathered a little bunch of flowers and
laid them on top of it. Then we drove away.

Susan was her name. A long time ago, as it seemed to her,
something had happened to her father and mother so that they could not see. Her
father had gone out to try to get some help, and he had not come back. Her
mother went out later, leaving the children with strict instructions not to
leave the house. She had come back crying. The next day she went out again:
this time she did not come back. The children had eaten what they could find,
and then began to grow hungry. At last Susan was hungry enough to disobey
instructions and seek help from Mrs. Walton at the shop. The shop itself was
open, but Mrs. Walton was not there. No one came when Susan called, so she had
decided to take some cakes and biscuits and candies and tell Mrs. Walton about
it later.

She had seen some of the
things
about as she came
back. One of them had struck at her, but it had misjudged her height, and the
sting passed over her head. It frightened her, and she ran the rest of the way
home. After that she had been very careful about the
things,
and on
further expeditions had taught Tommy to be careful about them too. But Tommy
had been so little he had not been able to see the one that was hiding in the
next garden when he went out to play that morning. Susan had tried half a
dozen times to get to him, but each time, however careful she
was,
she
had seen the top of the triffid tremble and stir slightly. ...

An hour or so later I decided it was time to stop for the
night. I left her in the truck while I prospected a cottage or two until I
found one that was fit, and then we set about getting a meal together. I did
not know much of small girls, but this one seemed to be able to dispose of an astonishing
quantity of the result, confessing while she did so that a diet consisting
almost entirely of biscuits, cake, and candies had proved less completely
satisfying than she had expected. After we had cleaned her up a bit, and I,
under instruction, had wielded her hairbrush, I began to feel rather pleased
with the results. She, for her part, seemed able for a time to forget all that
had happened in her pleasure at having someone to talk to.

I could understand that. I was feeling exactly the same way
myself. But not long after I had seen her to bed, and come downstairs again, I
heard the sound of sobbing. I went back to her.

“It’s all right, Susan,” I said. “It’s all right. It didn’t
really hurt poor Tommy, you know—it was so quick.” I sat down on the bed beside
her and took her hand. She stopped crying.

“It wasn’t just Tommy,” she said. “It was after Tommy— when
there was nobody, nobody at all. I was so frightened ..”

“I know,” I told her. “I
do
know. I was frightened
too.”

She looked up at me.

“But you aren’t frightened now?”

“No. And you aren’t either. So you see, we’ll just have to
keep together to stop one another being frightened.”

“Yes,” she agreed with serious consideration. “I think
that’ll be all right So we went on to discuss a number of things until she fell
asleep.

“Where are we going?” Susan asked as we started off again
the following morning.

I said that we were looking for a lady.

“Where is she?” asked Susan. I wasn’t sure of that.

“When shall we find her?” asked Susan.

I was pretty unsatisfactory about that too. “Is she a pretty
lady?” asked Susan.

“Yes,” I said, glad to be more definite this time.

It seemed, for some reason, to give Susan satisfaction.

“Good,” she remarked approvingly, and we passed to other
subjects.

Because of her, I tried to skirt the larger towns, but it
was impossible to avoid many unpleasant sights in the country. After a while I
gave up pretending that they did not exist. Susan regarded them with the same
detached interest as she gave to the normal scenery. They did not alarm her,
though they puzzled her and prompted questions. Reflecting that the world in
which she was going to grow up would have little use for the overniceties and
euphemisms that I had learned as a child, I did my best to treat the various
horrors and curiosities in the same objective fashion. That was really very
good for me too.

By midday the clouds had gathered and rain began once more.
When, at five o’clock, we pulled up on the road just short of Pulborough, it
was still pouring hard.

“Where do we go now?” inquired Susan.

“That,” I acknowledged, “is just the trouble. It’s somewhere
over there.” I waved my arm toward the misty line of the Downs, to the south.

I had been trying hard to recall just what else Josella had
said of the place, but I could remember no more than that the house stood on
the north side of the hills, and I had the impression that it faced across the
low, marshy country that separated them from Pulborough. Now that I had come so
far, it seemed a pretty vague instruction: the Downs stretched away for miles
to the east and to the west.

“Maybe the first thing to do is to see if we can find any
smoke across there,” I suggested.

“It’s awfully difficult to see anything at all in the rain,”
Susan said practically, and quite rightly.

Half an hour later the rain obligingly held off for a while.
We left the truck and sat on a wall side by side. We studied the lower slopes
of the hills carefully for some time, but neither Susan’s sharp eyes nor my
field glasses could discover any trace of smoke or signs of activity. Then it
started to rain again.

“I’m hungry,” said Susan.

Food was a matter of trifling interest to me just then. Now
that I was so near, my anxiety to know whether my guess had been right overcame
everything else. While Susan was still eating I took the truck a little way up
the hill behind us to get a more extensive view. In between showers, and in a
worsening light, we scanned the opposite hills again, without result. There
was no life or movement in the whole valley, save for a few cattle and sheep
and an occasional triffid lurching across the fields below.

An idea came to me, and I decided to go down to the village.
I was reluctant to take Susan, for I knew the place would be unpleasant, but I
could not leave her where she was. When we got there I found that the sights
affected her less than they did me: children have a different convention of the
fearful until they have been taught the proper things to be shocked at. The
depression was all mine. Susan found more to interest than to disgust her. Any
somberness was quite offset by her delight in a scarlet silk macintosh with
which she equipped herself in spite of its being several sizes too large. My
search, too, was rewarding. I returned to the truck laden with a head lamp like
a minor searchlight, which we had found upon an illustrious-looking
Rolls-Royce.

I rigged the thing up on a kind of pivot beside the cab
window and made it ready to plug in. When that was ready there was nothing to
do but wait for darkness and hope that the rain would let up.

By the time it was fully dark the raindrops had become a
mere spatter. I switched on, and sent a magnificent beam piercing the night.
Slowly I turned the lamp from side to side, keeping its ray leveled toward the
hills, while I anxiously tried to watch the whole line of them simultaneously
for an answering light. A dozen times or more I traversed it steadily, switching
off for a few seconds at the end of each sweep while we sought the least
flicker in the darkness. But each time the night over the hills remained pitchy
black. Then the rain came on more heavily again. I set the beam full ahead and
sat waiting, listening to the drumming of the drops on the roof of the cab
while Susan fell asleep leaning against my ann. An hour passed before the
drumming dwindled to a patter, and ceased.
Susan woke up as I started the beam taking across again. I had completed the
sixth travel when she called out:
“Look, Bill! There it is! There’s a light!”
She was pointing a few degrees left of our front. I switched
off our lamp and followed the line of her finger. It was difficult to be sure.
If it were not a trick of our eyes, it was something as dim as a distant
glowworm. And even as we were looking at it the rain came down on us again in
sheets. By the time I had my glasses in my hand there was no view at all. I
hesitated to move. It might be that the light, if it had been a light, would
not be visible from lower ground. Once more I trained our light forward and
settled down to wait with as much patience as I could manage. Almost another
hour passed before the rain cleared again. The moment it did, I switched off
our lamp.
“It
is!”
Susan cried excitedly. “Look! Look!”