The Best of (8 page)

But in the end the adaptability of my race asserted itself. I began to hunt and live off the land about me. I struggled through two bouts of fever and successfully sustained a period of semistarvation when my food was finished and game was short.

For company I had only a pair of sixlegged, silverfurred creatures, which I had trained. I found them one day, deserted in a kind of large nest and dying with hunger. Taking them back with me to the Nuntia I fed them and found them friendly little things. As they grew larger they began to display remarkable intelligence. Later I christened them Mickey and Minnie—after certain classic film stars at home—and they soon got to know their names.

And now I come to the last and most curious episode, which I confess I do not yet understand. It occurred several years after Nuntia's landing. A foraging expedition upon which Mickey and Minnie accompanied me as usual had taken us into country completely unknown to me. A scarcity of game and a determination not to return emptyhanded had caused me to push on farther than usual.

At last, at the entrance to a valley, Mickey and Minnie stopped. Nothing I could do would induce them to go on. Moreover they tried to hold me back, clutching at my legs with their forepaws. The valley looked a likely place for game and I shook them off impatiently. They watched me as I went, making little whining noises of protest, but they did not attempt to follow.

For the first quarter mile I saw nothing unusual. Then I had a nasty shock. Farther on an enormous head reared above the trees, looking directly at me. It was unlike anything I had ever seen before but thoughts of giant reptiles jumped to my mind.

Tyrannosaurus must have had a head not unlike that. I was puzzled as well as scared. Venus could not be still in the age of the giant reptiles. I could not have lived here all this time without seeing something of them before.

The head did not move—there was no sound. As my first flood of panic abated it was clear that the animal had not seen me. The valley seemed utterly silent, for I had grown so used to the sounds of rain that my ears scarcely registered them. At two hundred yards I came within sight of the great head again and decided to risk a shot.

I aimed at the right eye and fired.

Nothing happened—the echoes thundered from side to side; nothing else moved. It was uncanny, unnerving. I snatched up my glasses. Yes, I had scored a bull'seye, but ... Queer. I decided that I didn't like the valley a bit, but I made myself go on.

There was a curious odour in the air, not unpleasant yet a little sickly. Close to the monster I stopped. He had not budged an inch. Suddenly, behind him, I caught a glimpse of another reptile—smaller, more lizardlike but with teeth and claws that made me sweat.

I dropped on one knee and raised the rifle. I began to feel an odd swimming sensation inside my head. The world seemed to be tilting about me. My rifle barrel wavered. I could not see clearly. I felt myself begin to fall. I seemed to be falling a long, long way....

When I awoke it was to see the bars of a cage.

Dagul stopped reading. He knew the rest. "How long ago, do you think?" he asked.

Coin shrugged his shoulders.

"Heaven knows. A very long time, that's all we can be sure of. The continual clouds—and did you notice that he claims to have tamed two of our primitive ancestors? Millions of years...

"And he warns us against Earth." Dagul smiled. "It will be a shock for the poor creature. The last of his race—though not, to judge by his own account, a very worthy race. When are you going to tell him?.

"He's bound to find out soon, so I thought I'd do it this evening. I've got permission to take him up to the observatory...

"Would you mind if I came too?.

"Of course not...

Gratz was stumbling among unfamiliar syllables as the three climbed the hill to the Observatory of Takon, doing his best to drive home his warnings of the perfidy of Earth and the ways of great companies. He was relieved when both the Takonians assured him that no negotiations were likely to take place.

"Why have we come here?" he asked when they were in the building and the assistant, in obedience to Goin's orders, was adjusting the large telescope.

"We want to show you your planet," said Dagul.

There was some preliminary difficulty due to differences between the Takonian and the human eye but before long he was studying a huge shining disc. A moment later he turned back to the others with a slight smile.

"There's some mistake. This is our moon...

"No. It is Earth," Goin assured him.

Gratz looked back at the scarred pitted surface of the planet. For a long time he gazed in silence. It was like the moon and yet —despite the craters, despite the desolation, there was a familiar suggestion of the linked Americas, stretching from pole to pole — a bulge which might have been the West African coast. Gratz gazed in silence for a great while. At last he turned away.

"How Long?" he asked.

"Some millions of years..."

"I don't understand. It was only the other day—.

Goin started to explain but Gratz heard none of it. Like a man dreaming he walked out of the building. He was seeing again the Earth as she had been—a place of beauty, beautiful in spite of all that man had made her suffer. And now she was dead, a celestial cinder.

Close by the edge of the cliff which held the observatory high above Takon he paused. He looked out across an alien city in an alien world towards a white point that glittered in the heavens. The Earth which had borne him was dead. Long and silently he gazed.

Then, deliberately, with a step that did not falter, he walked over the cliff's edge.

#3 The Best Of John Wyndham

(1937)

THE first thing I knew of the Dixon affair was when a deputation came from the village of Membury to ask us if we would investigate the alleged curious goingson there.

But before that, perhaps, I had better explain the word 'us'.

I happen to hold a post as Inspector for the S.S.M.A.—in full, the Society for the Suppression of the Maltreatment of Animals—in the district that includes Membury. Now, please don't assume that I am wobbleminded on the subject of animals. I needed a job. A friend of mine who has influence with the Society got it for me; and I do it, I think, conscientiously. As for the animals themselves, well, as with humans, I like some of them. In that, I differ from my coInspector, Alfred Weston; he likes—liked? — them all; on principle, and indiscriminately.

It could be that, at the salaries they pay, the S.S.M.A. has doubts of its personnel—though there is the point that where legal action is to be taken two witnesses are desirable; but, whatever the reason, there is a practice of appointing their inspectors as pairs to each district; one result of which was my daily and close association with Alfred.

Now, one might describe Alfred as the animalloverpar excellence. Between him and all animals there was complete affinity—at least, on Alfred's side. It wasn't his fault if the animals didn't quite understand it; he tried hard enough. The very thought of four feet or feathers seemed to do something to him. He cherished them one and all, and was apt to talk of them, and to them, as if they were his dear, dear friends temporarily embarrassed by a diminished I.Q.

Alfred himself was a wellbuilt man, though not tall, who peered through heavilyrimmed glasses with an earnestness that seldom lightened. The difference between us was that while I was doing a job, he was following a vocation—pursuing it wholeheartedly, and with a powerful imagination to energize him.

It didn't make him a restful companion. Under the powerful magnifier of Alfred's imagination the commonplace became lurid. At a runofthemill allegation of horsethrashing, phrases about fiends, barbarians and brutes in human form would leap into his mind with such vividness that he would be bitterly disappointed when we discovered, as we invariably did, (a) that the thing had been much exaggerated, anyway, and (b) that the perpetrator had either had a drink too many, or briefly lost his temper.

It so happened that we were in the office together on the morning that the Membury deputation arrived.

They were a more numerous body than we usually received, and as they filed in I could see Alfred's eyes begin to widen in anticipation of something really good—or horrific, depending on which way you were looking at it. Even I felt that this ought to produce something a cut above cans tied to cats' tails, and that kind of thing.

Our premonitions turned out rightly. There was a certain confusion in the telling, but when we had it sorted out, it seemed to amount to this:

Early the previous morning, one Tim Darrell, while engaged in his usual task of taking the milk to the station, had encountered a phenomenon in the village street. The sight had so surprised him that while stamping on his brakes he had let out a yell which brought the whole place to its windows or doors. The men had gaped, and most of the women had set up screaming when they, too, saw the pair of creatures that were standing in the middle of their street.

The best picture of these creatures that we could get out of our visitors suggested that they must have looked more like turtles than anything else—though a very improbable kind of turtle that walked upright upon its hind legs.

The overall height of the apparitions would seem to have been about five foot six. Their bodies were covered with oval carapaces, not only at the back, but in front, too. The heads were about the size of normal human heads, but without hair, and having a hornylooking surface. Their large, bright black eyes were set above a hard, shiny projection, debatably a beak or a nose.

But this description, while unlikely enough, did not cover the most troublesome characteristic—and the one upon which all were agreed despite other variations. This was that from the ridges at the sides, where the back and front carapaces joined, there protruded, some twothirds of the way up, a pair of human arms and hands!

Well, about that point I suggested what anyone else would: that it was a hoax, a couple of fellows dressed up for a scare.

The deputation was indignant. For one thing, it convincingly said, no one was going to keep up that kind of hoax in the face of gunfire—which was what old Halliday who kept the saddler's had give them. He had let them have half a dozen rounds out of twelvebore; it hadn't worried them a bit, and the pellets had just bounced off.

But when people had got around to emerging cautiously from their doors to take a closer look, they had seemed upset. They had squawked harshly at one another, and then set off down the street at a kind of waddling run. Half the village, feeling braver now, had followed them. The creatures had not seemed to have an idea of where they were going, and had run out over Baker's Marsh. There they had soon struck one of the soft spots, and finally they had sunk out of sight into it, with a great deal of floundering and squawking.

The village, after talking it over, had decided to come to us rather than to the police. It was well meant, no doubt, but, as I said:

"I really don't see what you can expect us to do if the creatures have vanished without trace."

"Moreover," put in Alfred, never strong on tact, "it sounds to ine that we should have to report that the villagers of Membury simply hounded these unfortunate creatures—whatever they were—to their deaths, and made no attempt to save them."

They looked somewhat offended at that, but it turned out that they had not finished. The tracks of the creatures had been followed back as far as possible, and the consensus was that they could not have had their source anywhere but in Membury Grange.

"Who lives there?" I asked.

It was a Doctor Dixon, they told me. He had been there these last three or four years.

And that led us on to Bill Parsons' contribution. He was a little hesitant about making it at first.

"This'll be confidential like?" he asked.

Everyone for miles around knows that Bill's chief concern is other people's rabbits. I reassured him.

"Well, it was this way," he said. " 'Bout three months ago it'd be—"

Pruned of its circumstantial detail, Bill's story amounted to this: finding himself, so to speak, in the grounds of the Grange one night, he had taken a fancy to investigate the nature of the new wing that Doctor Dixon had caused to be built on soon after he came. There had been considerable local speculation about it, and, seeing a chink of light between the curtains there, Bill had taken his opportunity.

"I'm telling you, there's things that's not right there," he said. "The very first thing I seen, back against the far wall was a line of cages, with great thick bars to 'em—the way the light hung I couldn't see what was inside: but why'd anybody be wanting them in his house?"

"And then when I shoved myself up higher to get a better view, there in the middle of the room I saw a horrible sight—a horrible sight it was!" He paused for a dramatic shudder.

"Well, what was it?" I asked, patiently.

"It was—well, it's kind of hard to tell. Lying on a table, it was, though. Lookin' more like a white bolster than anything—'cept that it was moving a bit. Kind of inching, with a sort of ripple in it—if you understand me."

I didn't much. I said:

"Is that all?"

"That it's not," Bill told me, approaching his climax with relish. "Most of it didn't 'ave no real shape, but there was a part of it as did—a pair of hands, human hands, astickin' out from the sides of it..."

In the end I got rid of the deputation with the assurance we would look into the matter. When I turned back from closing the door behind the last of them I perceived that all was not well with Alfred.

His eyes were gleaming widely behind his glasses, and he was trembling.

"Sit down," I advised him. "You don't want to go shaking parts of yourself off."

I could see that there was a dissertation coming: probably something to beat what we had just heard.

But, for once, he wanted my opinion first, while manfully contriving to hold his own down for a time. I obliged: