Wyndham, John (11 page)

“Sandra Telmont,” he explained. “Sandra is our professional
remembrancer—continuity is her usual work, so we 4 regard it as particularly
thoughtful of Providence to contrive her presence here just now.”

The young woman nodded to me and looked harder at Josella.

“We’ve met before,” she said thoughtfully. She glanced down
at the pad on her knee. Presently a faint smile passed across her pleasant,
though unexotic countenance,

“Oh yes, of course,” she said in recollection.

“What did I tell you? The thing clings like a flypaper,”
Josella observed to me.

“What’s this about?” inquired Michael Beadley.

I explained. He turned a more careful scrutiny on Josella.

She sighed.

“Please forget it,” she suggested. “I’m a bit tired of
living it down”

That appeared to surprise him agreeably.

“All right,” he said, and dismissed the matter with a nod.

He turned back to the table. “Now to get on with things.
You’ve seen Jaques?”

“If that is the Colonel who is playing at Civil Service, we
have,” I told him.
He grinned.
“Got to know how we stand. Can’t get anywhere without
knowing your ration strength,” he said, in a fair imitation of
the Colonel’s manner. “But it’s quite true, though,” he went
on. “I’d better give you just a rough idea of how things stand.
Up to the present there are about thirty-five of us. All sorts.
We hope and expect that some more will come in during the
day. Out of those here now, twenty-eight can see. The others
are wives or husbands—and there are two or three children—
who cannot. At the moment the general idea is that we move
away from here sometime tomorrow if we can be ready in
time—to be on the safe side, you understand.”
I nodded. “We’d decided to get away this evening for the
same reason, I told him.
“What have you for transport?”
I explained the present position of the station wagon. “We
were going to stock up today,” I added. “So far we’ve practically nothing
except a quantity of anti-triffid gear.”
He raised his eyebrows. The girl Sandra also looked at me
curiously.
“That’s a queer thing to make your first essential,” he
remarked.
I told them the reasons. Possibly I made a bad job of it,
for neither of them looked much impressed. He nodded casually and went on:
“Well, if you’re coming in with us, here’s what I suggest
B ring in your car, dump your stuff, then drive off and swap
it for a good big truck. Then Oh, does either of you know anything about
doctoring?” he broke off to ask.
We shook our heads.
He frowned a little. “That’s a pity. So far we’ve got no one
who does. It’ll surprise me if we’re not needing a doctor be-
fore long—and, anyway, we ought all of us to have inoculations. . . Still,
it’s not much good sending you two off on a medical supplies scrounge. What
about food and general stores? Suit you?”
He flipped through some pages on a clip, detached one of them and handed it
to me. It was headed No. 15, and below was a typed list of canned goods, pots
and pans, and some bedding.
“Not rigid,” he said, “but keep reasonably close to it and we’ll avoid too
many duplications. Stick to best quality. With the food, concentrate on value
for bulk—I mean, even
if
corn flakes are your leading passion in life,
forget ‘em. I suggest you keep to warehouses and big wholesalers.” He took hack
the list and scribbled two or three addresses on it.

“Cans and packets are your food line—don’t get led away by
sacks of flour, for instance; there’s another part on that sort of stuff.” He
looked thoughtfully at Josella. Heavyish work, I’m afraid, but it’s the most
useful job we can give you at present. Do as much as you can before dark.
There’ll be a general meeting and discussion here about nine-thirty this
evening.”

As we turned to go:

“Got a pistol?” he asked.

“I didn’t think of it,” I admitted.

“Better—just in case. Quite effective simply fired into the air,”
he said. He took two pistols from a drawer in the table and pushed them across.
“Less messy than that.” he added, with a look at Josella’s handsome knife.
“Good scrounging to you.”

Even by the time we set out after unloading the station
wagon we found that there were still fewer people about than on the previous
day. The ones that were showed an inclination to get on the sidewalks at the
sound of the engine rather than to molest us.

The first truck to take our fancy proved useless, being
filled with wooden cases too heavy for us to remove. Our next find was
luckier—a five-tonner, almost new, and empty. We trans-shipped, and left the
station wagon to its fate.

At the first address on my list the shutters of the loading
bay were down, but they gave way without much difficulty to the persuasions of
a crowbar from a neighboring shop and rolled up easily. Inside, we made a find.
Three trucks stood backed up to the platform. One of them was fully loaded with
cases of canned meat.

“Can you drive one of these things?” I asked Josella.

She looked at it.

“Well, I don’t see why not. The general idea’s the same,
isn’t it? And there’s certainly no traffic problem.”

We decided to come back and fetch it later, and took the
empty truck on to another warehouse, where we loaded in parcels of blankets,
rugs, and quilts, and then went on farther to acquire a noisy miscellany of
pots, pans, caldrons, and kettles. When we had the truck filled we felt we bad
put in a good morning’s work on a job that was heavier than we had thought. We
satisfied the appetite it had given us at a small pub hitherto untouched.

The mood which filled the business and commercial districts
was gloomy—though it was a gloom that still had more the style of a normal
Sunday or public holiday than of collapse. Very few people at all were to be
seen in those parts. Had the catastrophe come by day, instead of by night after
the workers had gone home, it would have been a hideously different scene.

When we had refreshed ourselves we collected the already loaded
truck from the food warehouse and drove the two of them slowly and uneventfully
back to the university. We parked them in the forecourt there and set off
again. About six-thirty we returned once more with another pair of well-loaded
trucks and a feeling of useful accomplishment.

Michael Beadley emerged from the building to inspect our
contributions. He approved of it all save half a dozen cases that I had added
to my second load.

“What are they?” he asked.

“Triffid guns, and bolts for them,” I told him.

He looked at me thoughtfully.

“Oh yes. You arrived with a lot of anti-triffid stuff,” he
remarked.

“I think it’s likely we’ll need it,” I said.

He considered. I could see that I was being put down as a
bit unsound on the subject of triffids. Most likely he was accounting for that
by the bias my job might be expected to give—aggravated by a phobia resulting
from my recent sting and wondering whether it might connote other, perhaps less
harmless, unsoundnesses.

“Look here,” I suggested, “we’ve brought in four full truckloads
between us. I just want enough space in one of them for these cases. If you
think we cant spare that, I’ll go out and find a trailer, or another
truck.”

“No, leave ‘em where they are. They don’t take a lot of
room,” he decided.

We went into the building and had some tea at an improvised
canteen which a pleasant-faced, middle-aged woman had competently set up there.

“He thinks.” I said to Josella, “that I’ve got a bee in my
bonnet over triffids.”

“He’ll learn—I’m afraid,” she replied. “It’s queer that no
one else seems to have seen them about.”

“These people have all been keeping pretty much to the
center, so it’s not very surprising. After all, we’ve seen none ourselves
today.’’

‘Do you think they’ll come right down here among the streets?”

“I couldn’t say. Maybe lost ones would.”

“How do you think they got loose?” she asked.

“If they worry’ at a stake hard enough and long enough, it’ll
usually come in the end, The breakouts we used to get sometimes on the farms
were usually due to their all crowding up against one section of the fence
until it gave way.

“But couldn’t you make the fences stronger?”

We could have done, but we didn’t want them fixed quite
permanently. It didn’t happen very often, ‘and when it did it was usually
simply from one field to another, so we’d just drive them back and put up the
fence again. I don’t think any of them will intentionally make this way. From a
triffid point of view, a city must be much like a desert, so I should think
they’ll be moving outward toward the open country on the whole. Have you ever
used a triffid gun?” I added.

She shook her head.

After I’ve done something about these clothes, I was thin
king of putting in a bit of practice, it you’d like to try,” I suggested.

I got back an hour or so later, feeling more suitably clad
as a result of having infringed on her idea of a ski suit and heavy shoes, to
find that she had changed into a becoming dress of spring green. We took a
couple of the triffid guns and went out into the garden of Russell Square,
close by. We had spent about half an hour snipping the topmost shoots off
convenient bushes when a young woman in a brick-red lumber jacket and an elegant
pair of green trousers strolled across the grass and leveled a small camera at
us.

Who are you—the press?” inquired Josella.

“More or less,” said the young woman. “At least, I’m the
official record. Elspeth Cary.”

“So soon?” I remarked. “I trace the hand of our order-conscious
Colonel.”

“You’re quite right,” she agreed. She turned to look at
Josella. “And you are Miss Playton. I’ve often wondered—”

Now look here,” interrupted Josella. “Why should the one
static thing in a collapsing world be my reputation? Can’t we forget it?”

“Jim,” said Miss Cary thoughtfully. “Jib-huh.” She turned to
another subject. “What’s all this about triffids?” she asked.

We told her.

“They think,” added Josella, “that Bill here is either scary
or scatty on the subject.”

Miss Cary turned a straight look at me. Her face was interesting
rather than good-looking, with a complexion browned by stronger suns than ours.
Her eyes were steady, observant, and dark brown.

“Are you?” she asked.

‘Well, I think they’re troublesome enough to be taken seriously
when they get out of hand,” I told her.

She nodded. “True enough. I’ve been in places where they are
out of hand. Quite nasty. But in England—well, ifs hard to imagine that here.”

“There’ll not be a lot to stop them here now’,” I said.

Her reply, if she had been about to make one, was forestalled
by the sound of an engine overhead. We looked up and presently saw a helicopter
come drifting across the roof of the British Museum.

That’ll be Ivan,” said Miss Gary. “He thought he might manage
to find one. I must go and get a picture of him landing. See you later.” And
she hurried off across the grass.

Josella lay down, clasped her hands behind her head, and
gazed up into the depths of the sky. When the helicopter’s engine ceased,
things sounded very much quieter than before we had heard it.

Josella lay facing upward with a faraway look in her eyes. I
thought perhaps I could guess something of what was passing in her mind, but I
said nothing. She did not speak for a little while, then she said:

You know, one of the most shocking things about it is to
realize how
easily
we have lost a world that seemed so safe and
certain.”

She was quite right. It was that simplicity that seemed
somehow to be the nucleus of the shock. From very familiarity one forgets all
the forces which keep the balance, and thinks of security as normal. It is not.
I don’t think it had ever before occurred to me that man’s supremacy is not primarily
due to his brain, as most of the books would have one think. It is due to the
brain’s capacity to make use of the information conveyed to it by a narrow
band of visible light rays. His civilization, all that he had achieved or might
achieve, hung upon his ability to perceive that range of vibrations from red
to violet. Without that, he was lost. I saw for a moment the true tenuousness
of his hold on his power, the miracles that he had wrought with such a fragile
instrument.

Josella had been pursuing her own line of thought.

“It’s going to be a very queer sort of world—what’s left of
it. I don’t think we’re going to like it a lot,” she said reflectively.

It seemed to me an odd view to take—rather as if one should
protest that one did not
like
the idea of dying or being born. I
preferred the notion of finding out first how it would be, and then doing what
one could about the parts of it one disliked most, but I let it pass.

From time to time we had heard the sound of trucks driving
up to the far side
of
the building. It was evident that most of the
foraging parties must have returned by this hour. I looked at my watch and
reached for the triffid guns lying on the grass beside me.

“If we’re going to get any supper before we hear what other
people feel about all this, it’s time we went in,” I said.

I fancy all of us had expected the meeting to be simply a
kind of briefing talk. Just the timetable, course instructions, the day’s
objective—that kind of thing. Certainly I had no expectation of the food for
thought that we received.

It was held in a small lecture theater, lit for the occasion
by an arrangement of car headlamps and batteries. When we went in, some half
dozen men and two women, who appeared to have constituted themselves a
committee, were conferring behind the lecturer’s desk. To our surprise we found
nearly a hundred people seated in the body of the hail. Young women
predominated at a ratio of about four to one. I had not realized until Josella
pointed it out to me how few of them were able to see.

Michael Beadley dominated the consulting group by his height.
I recognized the Colonel beside hint The other faces were new to me, save that
of Elspeth Cary, who had now exchanged her camera for a notebook, presumably
for the benefit of posterity. Most of their interest was centered round an
elderly man of ugly but benign aspect who wore gold-rimmed spectacles and had
fine white hair trimmed to a rather political length. They all had an air of
being a little worried about him.

The other woman in the party was not much more than a
girl—perhaps twenty-two or -three. She did not appear happy at finding herself
where she was. She cast occasional looks of nervous uncertainty at the
audience.

Sandra Telmont came in, carrying a sheet of foolscap. She
studied it a moment, then briskly broke the group up and sorted it into chairs.
With a wave of her hand she directed Michael to the desk, and the meeting
began.

He stood there, a little bent, watching the audience from
somber eyes as he waited for the murmuring to die down.

When he spoke, it was in a pleasant, practiced voice and
with a fireside manner.

“Many of us here,” he began, “must still be feeling numbed
under this catastrophe. The world we knew has ended in a flash. Some of us may
be feeling that it is the end of everything. It is not. But to all of you I
will say at once that it
can
be the end of everything—if
we let
it.

“Stupendous as this disaster is, there is, however, still a
margin of survival. It may be worth remembering just now that we are not unique
in looking upon vast calamity. Whatever the myths that have grown up about it,
there can be no doubt that somewhere far back in our history there was a Great
Flood. Those who survived that must have looked upon a disaster comparable in
scale with this and, in some ways, more formidable. But they cannot have despaired;
they must have begun again—as we can begin again.

“Self-pity and a sense of high tragedy are going to build
nothing at all. So we had better throw them out at once, for it is builders
that we must become.

“And further to deflate any romantic dramatization, I would
like to point out to you that this, even now, is not the worst that could have
happened. I, and quite likely many of you, have spent most of my life in
expectation of something worse. And I still believe that it this had not
happened to us, that worse thing would.

“From August 6, 1945, the margin of survival has narrowed
appallingly. Indeed, two days ago it was narrower than it is at this moment. If
you need to dramatize, you could well take for your material the years
succeeding 1945, when the path of safety staffed to shrink to a tightrope along
which we had to walk with our eyes deliberately closed to the depths beneath
us.

“In any single moment of the years since then the
fatal slip might have been made. It is a miracle that it was not. It is a
double
miracle that can go on happening for years.

“But sooner or later that slip must have occurred. It would
not have mattered whether it came through malice, carelessness, or sheer
accident: the balance would have been lost and the destruction let loose.

“How bad it would have been, we cannot say. How bad it
could
have been—well, there might have been no survivors; there might possibly
have been no planet..

“And now contrast our situation. The Earth is intact,
Un-scarred, still fruitful. It can provide us with food and raw materials. We
have repositories of knowledge that can teach us to do anything that has been
done before—though there are some things that may be better unremembered. And
we have the means, the health, and the strength to begin to build again.”

He did not make a long speech, but it bad effect. It must
have made quite a number of the members of his audience begin to feel that
perhaps they were at the beginning of something, after all, rather than at the
end of everything. In spite of his offering little but generalities, there was
a more alert air in the place when he sat down.

The Colonel, who followed him, was practical and factual. He
reminded us that for reasons of health it would be advisable for us to get
away from all built-up areas as soon as practicable—which was expected to be at
about 1200 hours on the following day. Almost all the primary necessities, as
well as extras enough to give a reasonable standard of com
fort,
had now
been collected. In considering our stocks, our aim must be to make ourselves as
nearly independent of outside sources as possible for a minimum of one year. We
should spend that period in virtually a state of siege. There were, no doubt,
many things we should all like to take besides those on our lists, but they
would have to wait until the medical staff (and here the girl on the committee
blushed deeply) considered it safe for parties to leave isolation and fetch
them. As for the scene of our isolation, the committee had given it
considerable thought, and, bearing in mind the desiderata of compactness,
self-sufficiency, and detachment, had come to the conclusion that a country
hoarding school, or, failing that, some large country mansion, would best serve
our purposes.

Whether the committee had, in fact, not yet decided on any
particular place, or whether the military notion that secrecy has some
intrinsic value persisted in the Colonel’s mind, I cannot say, but I have no
doubt that his failure to name the place, or even the probable locality, was
the gravest mistake made that evening. At the time, however, his practical
manner had a further reassuring effect.

As he sat down, Michael rose again. He spoke encouragingly
to the girl and then introduced her. It had, he said, been one of our greatest
worries that we had no one among us with medical knowledge; therefore it was
with great relief that he welcomed Miss Berr. It was true that she did not hold
medical degrees with impressive letters, but she did have high nursing
qualifications. For himself, he thought that knowledge recently attained might
be worth more than degrees acquired years ago.

The girl, blushing again, said a little piece about her
determination to carry the job through, and ended a trifle abruptly with the
information that she would inoculate us all against a variety of things before
we left the hall.

A small, sparrowlike man whose name I did not catch rubbed
it in that the health of each was the concern of all, and that any suspicion of
illness should be reported at once, since the effects of a contagious disease
among us would he serious.

When he had finished, Sandra rose and introduced the last
speaker of the group: Dr. E. H. Vorless, D.Sc., of Edinburgh, professor of
sociology at the University of Kingston.

The white-haired man walked to the desk. He stood there a
few moments with his finger tips resting upon it and his head bent down as if
he were studying it. Those behind regarded him carefully, with a trace of
anxiety. The Colonel leaned over to whisper something to Michael, who nodded
without taking his eyes off the doctor. The old man looked up. He passed a hand
over his hair.

“My friends,” he said, “I think I may claim to be the oldest
among you. In nearly seventy years I have learned, and had to unlearn, many
things—though not nearly so many as I could have wished. But if, in the course
of a long study of man’s institutions, one thing has struck me more than their
stubbornness, it is their variety.

“Well, indeed do the French say
autres temps, autres
maurs.
We must all see, if we pause to think, that one kind of community’s
virtue may well be another kind of community’s crime; that what is frowned
upon here may be considered laudable elsewhere; that customs condemned in one
century are condoned in another. And we must also see that in each community
and each period there is a widespread belief in the moral rightness of its own
customs.

“Now, clearly, since many of these beliefs conflict, they
cannot all be ‘right’ in an absolute sense. The most judgment one can pass on
them—if one has to pass judgments at all is to say that they have at some
period been ‘right’ for those communities that bold them. It may be that they
still are, but it frequently is found that they are not, and that the
communities who continue to follow them blindly without heed to changed
circumstances do so to their own disadvantage—perhaps to their ultimate
destruction.”

The audience did not perceive where this introduction might
be leading. It fidgeted. Most of it was accustomed, when it encountered this
kind of thing, to turn the radio off at once. Now it felt tapped. The speaker
decided to make himself clearer.

“Thus,” he continued, “you would not expect to find the same
manners, customs, and forms in a penurious Indian village living on the edge
of starvation as you would in, say. Mayfair. Similarly, the people in a warm
country, where life is easy, are going to differ quite a deal from the people
of an overcrowded, hard-working country as to the nature of the principle
virtues. In other words, different environments set different standards.

“I point this out to you because the world we knew is
gone—finished.

“The conditions which framed and taught us our standards
have gone with it. Our needs are now different, and our aims must be different.
If you want an example. I would point out to you that we have all spent the day
indulging with perfectly easy consciences in what two days ago would have been
housebreaking and theft. With the old pattern broken, we have now to find out
what mode of life is best suited to the new. We have not simply to start
building again; we have to start
thinking
again—which is much more
difficult, and far more distasteful.

“Man remains physically adaptable to a remarkable degree.

But it is the custom of each community to form the minds of
its young in a mold, introducing a binding agent of prejudice. The result is a
remarkably tough substance capable of withstanding successfully even the
pressure of many innate tendencies and instincts. In this way it has been
possible to produce a man who against all his basic sense of self-preservation
will voluntarily risk death for an ideal—but also in this way is produced the
dolt who is sure of everything and knows what is ‘right.’

“In the time now ahead of us a great many of these prejudices
we have been given will have to go, or be radically altered. We can accept and
retain only one primary prejudice, and that is that
the race is worth
preserving.
To that consideration all else will, for a time at least, be
subordinate. We must look at all we do, with this question in mind: ‘Is this
going to help our race survive—or will it hinder us?’ If it will help, we must
do it, whether or not it conflicts with the ideas in which we were brought up.
If not, we must avoid it, even though the omission may clash with our previous
notions of duty and even of justice.

“It will not be easy; old prejudices die hard. The simple
rely on a bolstering mass of maxim and precept; so do the timid; so do the
mentally lazy—and so do all of us, more than we imagine. Now that the
organization has gone, our ready reckoners for conduct within it no longer Live
the right answers. We
must
have the moral courage to think and to plan
for ourselves.”

He paused to survey his audience thoughtfully. Then he said:

“There is one thing to be made quite clear to you before you
decide to join our community. It is that those of us who start on this task
will all have our parts to play. The men must work—the women must have babies.
Unless you can agree to that, there can be no place for you in our community.”

After an interval of dead silence, he added:

“We can afford to support a limited number of women who
cannot see, because they will have babies who can see. We cannot afford to
support men who cannot see. In our new world, then, babies become very much
more important than husbands.”

For some seconds after he stopped speaking, silence continued,
then isolated murmurs grew quickly into a general buzz.

I looked at Josella. To my astonishment, she was grinning
impishly.

“What do you find funny about this?” I asked a trifle
shortly.

“People’s expressions mostly,” she replied.

I had to admit it as a reason. I looked round the place, and
then across at Michael. His eyes were moving from one section to another of the
audience as he tried to sum up the reaction.

“Michael’s looking a bit anxious,” I observed.

“He should worry,” said Josella.
“If
Brigham Young
could bring it off in the middle of the nineteenth century, this ought to be a
pushover.”

“What a crude young woman you are at times,” I said.
“Were you in on this before?”

“Not exactly, but I’m not quite dumb, you know. Besides,
while you were away someone drove in a bus with most of these blind girls on
board. They all came from some institution. I said to myself, why collect them
from there when you could gather up thousands in a few streets round here?

The answer obviously was that (a) being blind before this
happened, they had been trained to do work of some kind, and (b) they were all
girls. The deduction wasn’t terribly difficult.”