‘Specimens!’ Percival cried. ‘Those are my people you’re talking about! My friends!’ He took himself in hand and, with that unnerving facility which I had observed in him on those other rare occasions when his passions were strong enough that they threatened to carry him away, he simply folded away his anger. Sensibly and quietly he asked: ‘Surely you don’t intend to destroy your own ancestors, Sanfeil? Look at everything we have in common – things which Honoré here couldn’t begin to understand, any more than old Clever-clogs Erik.’ (Lechasseur assures me that these were Percival’s exact words.) ‘It’s perfectly obvious that mankind’s future – his past, from your point of view – lies with us.’
‘Your distress is quite understandable, Percival,’ Sanfeil said. ‘Naturally you are used to thinking of yourselves as the higher type, and Honoré’s as the lower, and that is nothing but the truth. But you are wrong to believe that this means that you must live and they must die.’
‘But the higher type must supersede the lower,’ Percival said. ‘It’s nature’s law.’
‘In the long run, in the eye of history, that must always be true,’ Sanfeil said. ‘You are our glorious precursors, an early leitmotif anticipating our great crescendo. You are anachronisms.’
‘But you can’t let us die,’ Percival insisted levelly. ‘If we die in the past, then you in your present will cease to exist.’
The green man said, ‘But you are not our ancestors, Percival. Honoré’s people are.’
Percival paled. ‘What?’ he cried.
Finding himself unequal to the temptation, Lechasseur interjected, ‘I have to say I worked that one out a couple of minutes ago.’
Sanfeil continued, ‘You say, if your race dies, that my people can never come to be. On the contrary, it is the extinction of your people that gives life to mine. This must happen, Percival, and neither you nor I nor any other may prevent it. Before it can burn brighter, your light must become diffused throughout the whole race of mankind. Your lives will be ploughed back into the Earth, that she may bring forth more abundant life. It is your life-energy, that spark expressed in you so brilliantly and briefly, that shall impel the rest of humankind on that long and painful evolutionary ascent, and at last to the glory which you see around you now. It is they, not you, who are to be the Coming Men.’
‘This will be an atrocity,’ said Percival. ‘To let creatures like us die, so that creatures like him may live? We are the higher type – we will not be subsumed into the lower! It goes against every principle we have.’
‘On the contrary,’ said Sanfeil. ‘It conforms with your highest principle, as you yourself would see if your mind was not occluded still by the subhuman within you. You must allow your own brief efflorescence to fade, so that I and my kind may come into being. We are more fully human than you: in us the Spirit of Man waxes greater and nobler than ever before. Far more so than in your little race.
‘My people are the more developed type, and your deaths will enable that development. It will be a noble sacrifice, Percival, to allow your kind to pass in order that a better may arise.’
The Fall Of The Retreat
The Thing Happens
The night which followed my arrival I spent in a single room of one of the Retreat’s outbuildings. The children slept communally, as they performed most of their daily tasks, but they kept some rooms apart in a converted stables for those rare occasions when the need for privacy might arise.
Emily and I had conversed late with Beech, Violet and the others. We three visitors had at the playwright’s insistence been conducted around the machine-shed where the residents kept the majority of their marvellous inventions. Ever the dilettante, Beech had asked wearyingly many technical questions relating to the frequency of psychic wave-lengths and the like, before consenting to retire. The three of us had been allocated neighbouring rooms, and the children left us there. A watch had been assigned to the perimeter, in case the ‘soldier gang’ attempted any infiltration. Violet and another girl were to take the first shift.
I did not sleep. My renewed contact with these exceptional young people, together with the other frantic occurrences of the past days, conspired efficiently to sabotage my repose: additionally, I had been unsettled to a great degree by the facts which Gideon Beech had disclosed.
At four o’clock in the morning, I was disturbed by a bold knock at my bedroom door. I rose, my heart percussing painfully, and called, ‘Please wait a moment.’ Opening the door I discovered Emily, fully dressed, although the state of her clothes implied that she had been endeavouring to sleep in them. Apologising for my own night-attire, I bade her enter.
Emily, who as I have mentioned was in her outlook a most unconventional young woman, sat down on my bed. ‘I hoped you’d be awake,’ she said. ‘Mr Beech got up an hour or so ago, I think. I haven’t heard him come back.’ I remarked that old men rarely slept well, as I had cause to appreciate. She made a rueful face, and said that some young women had trouble also.
Despite the season, the night air on the hillside was chill, and the Retreat’s inhabitants, whose constitutions were sturdier than ours, seemed not to be greatly concerned with the heating of their accommodation. I drew my dressing-gown about me tightly, and joined Emily on the bed. ‘Erik, how long have you known these children?’ she asked me.
I considered the question carefully. ‘In Percival’s case, nearly ten years,’ I said. ‘The others rather less: as you will recall, you made Violet’s acquaintance before I did. Why do you ask?’
‘It’s just that they seem so trusting of you,’ Emily said. ‘And not only you, but Mr Beech and me as well. Given that they’re planning to wipe us all out, it seems rather rash of them, don’t you think? How do they know I’m not in league with these soldiers?’
‘Well, they are telepathic,’ I said reasonably. ‘As for wiping us out, I don’t honestly believe that they plan anything of the kind. It seems to me that all their rhetoric on the subject is philosophical rather than pragmatic. It is a point of faith with them that their species will overtake our own, and I believe that evolutionary precedent is on their side in the matter. They have no reason to attempt to hasten the process, although they will naturally defend themselves if they are threatened.’
‘Well, if you’re that fatalistic about it then they’ve nothing to fear from you,’ Emily declared. ‘And Mr Beech is obviously keen to be associated with the winning side. Which leaves me... and it occurs to me that bringing me here is a much better way of keeping me under control than leaving me in London, knowing what I know.’
‘Oh, come now,’ I began to say, but I was interrupted. An oppressive sense of panic, without apparent cause or antecedent, settled upon me like heavy earth in a grave. Cries of alarm began to arise from outside the building, accompanied after a moment or two by the sound of booted, running feet. ‘Good heavens!’ I exclaimed in confusion. ‘Whatever is going on?’
‘It’s the attack,’ Emily said, and my appalled senses became aware that a sharp stuttering which occasionally overlaid the cacophony outside could only be the noise of gunfire. ‘We have to leave at once.’
‘But no-one can attack the Retreat,’ I stupidly asserted. ‘The defences –’
‘Never mind that!’ cried Emily. ‘They may not have found the car yet.’ Opening the door, she quickly checked the corridor outside for intruders, then beckoned me ahead. I shivered in my flimsy coverings as I succeeded her out of the building and into the night. A number of the indoor lights had been switched on, throwing a dozen squares of yellow onto the muddy grass. Silhouettes of running men and shafts of light from torches were everywhere. Almost immediately a man was upon us, and I panicked; but Emily’s limbs moved quickly in the dark, and a moment later our assailant lay groaning on the muddy ground.
Emily led me grimly onward through the mayhem, and I quickly lost all sense of our location. We had travelled perhaps forty
paces before we were pinioned in the intersecting beams of a pair of torches, and a rough voice called out, ‘Stop right there!’ I was dazzled, but could nonetheless detect, within the circles of illumination, the tips of gun-barrels trained upon us. I endeavoured to follow Emily’s example by raising my hands, but my limbs would not co-operate. I was shaking like a sapling, although whether from the cold or from the shock of finding myself once again upon a battlefield as I, a young medical orderly, had been so long ago in France, I have no clear notion.
‘It’s the damned normals,’ a second voice offered, and one of the gun-barrels was lowered.
Coarsely, the first said: ‘You mean the _______ traitors.’ The accent was unmistakeably American.
‘Save it for later, Krovsky,’ said the other. By contrast this man’s voice was that of a working-class Londoner, and I would shortly learn that Emily knew him as ‘PC Grayles,’ the constable who had questioned her at St Pancras Station. ‘The Colonel don’t want these ones damaged,’ said Grayles. ‘Just get them out of the way.’ Muscular fingers gripped Emily’s and my shoulders, and we were forcibly marched into the farmhouse, where Gideon Beech, composed and fully dressed, sat waiting for us in the kitchen.
‘These the ones?’ the American named Krovsky asked Beech. The light of the kitchen exhibited our captor to my scrutiny, and I saw that he was the same man who had been St John Spears’ chauffeur. Now that I came to examine him more closely he was of a particular Slavic type, stocky, brutal and intractable. As a fighting-man, I thought, he would be cruel, and difficult to hurt. He had a visor covering his face which I though at first must be a gas-mask, but it concealed neither mouth nor nose: circles of dark glass shielded the eyes, however, and a pair of elaborate box-like constructions enclosed the ears. The man’s kit bore no identifying insignia, and would have been more accurately classed as combat fatigues than as a uniform.
Beech said, ‘Please sit down, Miss Blandish – you too, Clevedon. This shouldn’t take too long. I trust you’ve not been hurt?’ Still shivering, I moved closer to the stove, which had been recently lit, and seated myself there.
‘Is this your doing, Mr Beech?’ asked Emily coldly. Beech conceded that, regrettably but necessarily, it was. ‘In that case I’d prefer to stand,’ she replied.
Krovsky pushed her roughly down into a chair. ‘Stay put,’ he said. He left us, slamming the door and locking us inside with Gideon Beech.
More Opinions Of Beech
It would be some while before Emily and I were able to piece together the whole story of the assault upon the Retreat. At the time we were most certainly not inclined to inquire of Beech precisely what actions he had taken in order to lay the farmstead open to the soldiers, although Emily’s initial supposition that he had contrived somehow to disable the psychic amplification machine upon which the automatic defences relied would prove to have been well founded.
For the attack to have been mounted at all must certainly have taken a considerable use of resources on St John Spears’ part; but it was obvious by now that such were at his disposal. The operation could scarcely have occurred, even in such an insignificant region of the British Isles, without the blessing of His Majesty’s Government; and whatever other lies he might have told me, it would transpire that Mr Spears really was a millionaire.
As later conversations would establish, Beech had been approached by Spears on the afternoon which followed my own rejection of the pretended philanthropist’s advances. The American’s visit to me had been nearly his last resort in attempting to locate the supernormals’ sanctuary: it was only by coincidence that one of his staff had intercepted a telegram from Percival in London to Gideon Beech, and Spears had held out little hope that one of Beech’s known evolutionary opinions would be sympathetic to his goals.
That evening Beech had awaited the imminent arrival of his young friend Jelena, and had obediently allowed her to remove him to the Retreat, whose location he had earlier surrendered to Spears without demur. With us and with the children he had conferred in detail upon their plans for the farm’s defence, and he had paid meticulous attention as they conducted us around their assorted miraculous machines. Rising at three when he considered that Emily and I would likely be asleep (he was mistaken, but in the event neither of us suspected him sufficiently to challenge him), he had sabotaged the psychical amplifier, and had then signalled to a soldier on a nearby hilltop using nothing more sophisticated than Morse code and a hand-torch.
The waiting soldiers breached the perimeter without harm, and with Beech’s information were able quickly to find and to dispatch the sentries (‘Argos’ of the many eyes was on duty at the time, with a youth named Lucas). Each of the individual supernormals would have been able to mount a psychical assault against a single soldier which would have been painful at the very least; but just as the simple head-sets worn by Grayles and his colleague at St Pancras had protected them against Violet’s evasions, so the bulkier models which had been issued to the attackers formed a potent barrier against any such offensive. Additionally, a former stage-magician whom Spears had bizarrely recruited to his employ had placed the men in a mild hypnotic trance, which supposedly acted as a further safeguard against psychic infiltration.
The Retreat fell to the invaders within the space of an hour. It was possible that there might have been other devices in the machine-workshop which could have aided the defenders; indeed, Jimmie had been observed in that very place, apparently attempting frantically to activate one of them. The young mechanical genius had subsequently vanished, which (though they were keeping the machine-shed well guarded) was a matter of serious concern to Spears and his men.
For the moment, however, we knew little of this. Our greatest preoccupation (or rather Emily’s, since if I am honest my own primary concern was to warm myself up sufficiently to avoid hypothermia) was to establish why it was that Beech had betrayed our supernormal friends.
‘The children trusted you,’ said Emily quietly. ‘How could you set those soldiers on them?’
The old man said: ‘I presume that you intend the question morally, Miss Blandish, but it has a practical application also. How could I possibly betray the young people when they trusted me? How was I able, in other words, to conceal my intent from them? And for that matter, how was I able to incapacitate their arcane devices?’
‘That isn’t what I meant,’ said Emily; but I could see that Beech had aroused her interest.
‘Then perhaps it is what you should have meant,’ the playwright said. ‘If this little operation fails, then it’s a skill which we may all have to learn to cultivate. Let these young people only live, and in a few years’ time the rest of us will be their slaves at best. You’ve heard them talk: their very existence makes us obsolete, they say; and that’s a thing I’ve no desire to be.
‘I will admit that winning this trust of theirs (which I have, incidentally, no regrets about betraying) has been a long and arduous struggle. It has required enormous, and if I did not wish to be scrupulously accurate I might say superhuman, self-discipline and control, together with some advanced auto-mesmeric technique which I have picked up at no small personal expense. Fortunately, the children are secure enough in their own superiority that they are bound to underestimate a cuckoo in their midst. Not that they are wrong, for the most part, to be so: I would not wish you to think that. Each of them is by far superior to the average Homo sapiens man or woman. There are, however, a few of us among the parent species (statistical monsters, genii) who are so far above the average that we may rival, and even in some respects may better, these youthful specimens of the peculiar; particularly when we have ourselves attained a sagacious maturity.
‘It is we few, we precious few in all the meanings of that hackneyed scribblers’ phrase, who now stand like a bastion between the venerable race of mankind and his enslavement or extinction...’
Thus, and much more, spoke Gideon Beech. Yet w
hile he had been speaking I had formed the impression, which quickly became a firm conviction, that in actuality the old man had very little idea of how he had been able to deceive the supernormals; and that, if he had not been able to fall comfortably back upon his monumental personal conceit, he would have been at a loss to account for it.
When I had first read one of Beech’s plays, nearly a half-century earlier, I had felt myself inspired by the nobility of its author’s ambition. I had been already cognisant despite my relative youth that any devotion I might feel to family, class, country or any other of the phantom causes to which a man is popularly invited to pledge his loyalties, would constitute nothing more worthy than a mean-spirited and partial extension of my own self-interest. The work of Beech identified, espoused and bruited forth a greater allegiance: a wider patriotism which adopted mankind, indeed the whole of life itself, as its constituency. This cause, I knew at once, must override every one of the meagre obsessions of which I was expected to partake. I felt the spirit of his words call out to me, awakening within me a yearning to raise mankind beyond his current limits, to shape him into a more complete expression of his lofty potential.
Well, I had been substantially correct. The soul in Beech which had cried out to me (or rather to that spirit in me which Sanfeil strove always to awaken), was not Beech’s own, but that of his own far-future observer and controller.
The Story Of Spears
It is the same boundless self-confidence which causes the American male to be so admirable and attractive in defeat, which renders him all but insufferable in victory. So it was with Mr (or, as it seemed I now must call him, Colonel) St John Spears, when some time later he, along with Grayles, deigned to pay the three of us a visit in the farmhouse kitchen. Like his men, Spears wore black overalls lacking insignia, but there was no doubt from the deferential stance and mode of address which all adopted when he was present, that he was the commander of their renegade force. Though evidently fatigued, as were we all, he bore with him an air of self-satisfaction which suggested that he considered the capture of the Retreat to be no small achievement for himself, and perhaps also (as I perceived it, and no doubt my judgement was impaired by my dislike of the man) as no small triumph over me personally.
Peculiar Lives Page 10