Wanderers of Time

by John Wyndham

  ‘So what?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. But suppose, just suppose, they would only hand over that cargo on condition you were turned over to them.’

  ‘Would that do them any good?’

  ‘They could claim for their own people’s benefit to have dealt with plotters as they should be dealt with.’

  ‘Fantastic. Who’s going to believe that?’ the Captain asked.

  The Assistant Commissioner shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Quite a lot of people if it’s shouted loudly enough. The same kind of thing has worked often before. It’s wonderful what they take.’ He ruminated a few moments. ‘They made a mess of 1914. They came a cropper in 1940. And now they’re working up for it again. You know, when I look at them, I know just how Henry the Second must have seen Thomas a Becket.’

  But the A.C. was wrong. Public indignation over the demand worked up quickly, and, as ever, concentrated in groups on various aspects: against the presumptuous belief that the handing over of British subjects to a foreign court could be tolerated for a moment: against the existence of any plot:

  against the feasibility of such an arrangement. The calmest partisans suggested that there should be a trial for the purpose of clearing us, but that it should be held in England where a sense of justice and not the good of the state could be relied on to produce a verdict.

  The next day the situation was inflamed. Reports of the murder of Sinderton and the attempt on Captain Belford were published. We learned that the Embassy was still pressing for our extradition on the ground that we had, in dropping the derelict from no charted territory, committed an act of piracy which placed us beyond the protection of our government.

  A news message from Germany went one better. The Excelsis, it said, carried no cargo. She was an empty hulk. This, they claimed, was substantiated by a member of the crew who had confessed that we had stopped at the Moon and hidden the cargo there before coming on to Earth.

  The Captain and I gasped over this latest piece of effrontery. They had gone one better than the A.C.’s prophecy: they wanted both us and the cargo.

  Well, maybe their own people believed that about the cargo, but it didn’t go down too well over here at first. It takes civilised people quite a while to appreciate ‘the big lie’ technique.

  It was queer, too, why we should bother to drop an empty hulk when it might have been full of explosives as they had previously claimed. But they didn’t seem to bother about little points like that. It was years later that some journalist dug up the story of the treasure on the Moon and people began wondering about it.

  At the time, the whole thing seemed to us to be just farcical. However, when the Assistant Commissioner came to see us once more it turned out to be not so humorous after all.

  ‘They want you over there,’ he said. ‘You realise what that means. Execution. And more. Before you are condemned they’ll have a confession out of you by some means that you stole the Excelsis’s cargo and hid it on the Moon. They’ll brand you as both pirates and criminals.

  ‘We, naturally, have no wish to surrender you. But, and it is a big but, according to international law their claim is perfectly good. A person accused of engineering a crime in free space is eligible for trial in the country of the plaintiff.’

  That was a facer. Naturally, until that moment, we had neither of us given serious consideration to the German claim.

  ‘It puts us in an awkward position,’ he went on, for all the World as if it didn’t put us in a jam. ‘It boils down to this.

  Either we must hand you over and connive at what we know to be injustice, or else we must commit a flagrant breach of international law.

  ‘We have, I repeat, no wish to do the former. Yet, in our position can we do the latter?

  ‘The Government is very worried over you two. You see, you have a political aspect, too, now. Foreign relations are none too easy; it’s no time to flout international agreements. On the other hand, the party majority at home is none too stable. Any big popular outcry will almost certainly result in their losing the next election: and handing you over would raise an almighty shindy.’

  I felt that if we were to be political counters it was extremely lucky that we had the feeling of the people with us.

  ‘As I, and several who are much more influential than I, see it.’ he went on, ‘there is one remedy, and one only. You two are going to have to disappear.’

  ‘Disappear?’

  ‘Make an escape—preferably a spectacular escape—from custody.’

  ‘I don’t like that,’ said the Captain. ‘I’m a man with a clean record. I’ve done nothing I’m ashamed of. I ought to have a chance to clear myself.’

  ‘Of course, you don’t like it. Nor do we. But you’d like still less being made to sign a false confession.’

  ‘Let them try to make me.’

  ‘I’d rather not,’ said the Assistant Commissioner. There was a lot of unpleasant suggestion in his voice. It took quite a time to din a full realisation of the position into the Captain, he was so satisfied with the clearness of his own innocence. It was an hour before we could get him to see the thing in the round, so to speak.

  Then there was a lot to arrange. False names, and passports. A method by which his wife could also disappear and join him. Money to be banked for us under our new names. But we got it all fixed at last, with the Captain still looking a bit bewildered as if his sense of values had been turned upside down.

  Well, that’s about where truth ends and legend begins, and as everyone knows the legends, I need not repeat them here.

  It seems a pity in a way to spoil a daring and exciting exploit this way, but, as you see, with the whole thing beautifully stage-managed and all guns loaded with blanks it wasn’t really too difficult. We just shot off into the blue.

  I kept my new name for some years until the whole thing had blown over and when I changed it back no one thought of identifying me with the escaped Fearon. Belford’s name had become too well known, so he had to stick to his new one for the rest of his life.

  My hope is that this account will at last put a stop to these perpetual treasure hunts to the Moon. Several lives and a lot of money have been thrown away on them. Once and for all, then; Captain Belford’s treasure does not exist. It never did.

  CHILD OF POWER

  CHAPTER ONE

  OF MICE AND MEN

  It was one of those evenings more often imagined than granted in the Lake District. The stir in the air scarcely ruffled the water and it was warm enough to enjoy sitting out on the terrace after sunset. Peace had crept gradually over the valley to settle down finally with the closing of the public bar. The peak of the mountain opposite was still silhouetted against the lingering afterglow, lights occasionally wandered across its black base and the sound of a car engine came over the lake to us no louder than the buzz of a bumble bee. One sat and drank beer and smoked and chatted.

  We were a chance-met group, such as any pub in the district might have held that night. A business man and his son from somewhere in Lancashire, two American college boys energetically seeing England from bicycles bought within an hour of their arrival at Southampton, a tall man in whose speech was a faint suggestion of the north Midlands, his wife, and Joan and myself. The four others in the place, two young men and young women whose notion of a holiday seemed to consist of dissipating the maximum of ergs in the minimum of time, had already left us in order that no mountain might put them to shame on the morrow.

  Conversationally, we had rambled quite a way. We had considered the inhabitants and character of the neighbourhood, thence we had somehow arrived at the Spanish question and settled that, which had entailed our decision that certain social reforms were vitally necessary all over the world, and this in its turn had led us to speculation on the future in general and the future of man in particular. One of the Americans was touched into eloquence on the subject.

  ‘It’s such a darned muddle in most people’s minds
,’ he said. ‘They know that nothing is really static, it’s all got to change, but along with that they’re convinced that modern man is God’s last word—and yet that’s contradicted again because if they were as convinced of it as they think they are they’d do something to straighten out the system and make it a decent world for this climax of evolution to live in—to settle down in permanently.’

  ‘As it is,’ put in his companion, ‘they just tinker away at it a bit because instinct rather than reason tells them that it’s a waste of time to make the perfect social set-up for our kind of man when he may be superseded by another kind who won’t be satisfied with that set-up at all.’

  ‘What do you mean by another kind of man?’ asked the Lancashire man from behind his pipe. ‘What other kind can there be?’

  ‘What about a type with a super brain?’ suggested his son. ‘Something like “The Hampdenshire Wonder” that Beresford wrote about, or Stapledon’s “Odd John.” Didn’t you read those books?’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ his father said, bluntly. ‘I’ve something better to do with my time than readin’ tales about fancies and freaks.’

  ‘It’s only the form,’ said his son. ‘What they’re suggesting is that the next step will be a great brain development.’

  ‘Oh, aye. Chaps wi’ big ’eads, and suchlike. I don’t believe it.’

  ‘That’s not the only possibility,’ put in Joan, beside me. ‘I think the next step will be psychic. Perhaps telepathy, or a kind of clairvoyance that can really be used; or perhaps they’ll be able to see things that we can’t see now—as some people say animals can.’

  ‘Sounds retrogressive to me,’ the first American told her. I’d say most of those things did exist in man, and do in animals to a certain extent now, but that they’ve atrophied with the development of the brain. No, I guess brain development’s the way it goes. Though in a way I’d say you’re right about seeing things. Eyes are still improving. Maybe they’ll be able to see the infra-red or the ultra-violet, and p’raps some emanations we know nothing about. But I think the brain and the reasoning faculties will gradually develop beyond anything we can conceive at present.’

  ‘Why gradually?’ asked his friend. ‘There doesn’t seem to have been much change in the last five thousand years. Why not at a jump?—that’s the way with mutations.’

  ‘Maybe, but how do you think a sudden mutation is going to survive boneheads like us? We’d probably put it out of the way out of kindness, or lock it up in an asylum and not let it breed. I can see us defending ourselves mighty toughly against any mutations.’

  ‘And very right, too,’ said the Lancashire man. ‘ ’Oo wants to breed freaks or mutilations or whatever they are? Put ’em out of their misery, be ’umane, I say.’

  ‘But they wouldn’t be freaks, Father. If they were the natural next step in development, they’d be normal.’

  ‘If they ’ad big ’eads and thought different from other people they’d be freaks. A big ‘ead’s a freak, same as a bearded woman. I’ve seen ’em at Blackpool. A man’s the same as the rest of us or ’e’s a freak. Stands to reason.’

  The tall man from the Midlands spoke out of the darkness to the Americans.

  ‘I think you’re right about the jump, but what sort of a jump’s it going to be? That’s the question. It can’t be too big a physical change at one step. We, just like the wild animals, hate a variation from our norm, and I agree we’d be pretty sure to suppress it for a humane or for any other reason which happened to suit us. No, we must have survived to reach this stage by taking a series of small and not very obvious jumps in safety.’

  ‘But small jumps would mean pretty frequent jumps, or we’d never have had time to get from the amoeba to here,’ said one of the Americans. ‘Now, if there’s been a jump worth a nickel in the last five thousand years I’ve not heard of it. That’s surely a long time to stay put. Maybe we have come to the end or maybe nobody’s noticed it when it happened.’

  ‘Or,’ said the tall man, ‘maybe it’s just about to happen.’ He puffed at his cigarette so that it glowed and lit up his face. One had a feeling from his tone that he was not just speaking at random. The American asked:

  ‘You’ve an idea what it might be?’

  ‘Might be—well, yes. But, mind you, I’m laying no claim to prophecy. As far as I go is to say that I have seen a variation from the normal which does not seem to be due to any of those glandular upsets which commonly cause freaks. It is, to the best of my knowledge, unique, but, of course, there may beothers. If there are, I see no reason why they should not survive and stabilise the new type.’

  ‘Which is?’ prompted the American.

  ‘An additional sense. A sixth sense.’ There was a slightly disappointed pause.

  ‘Well, I don’t know that there’s much in that.’ said the ‘ Lancashire man. ‘Means knowing things as nobody told you, and you ’aven’t read. There’s a word for it—oh, aye, intuition, that’s it. Young lady I once knew ’ad it. She went into the fortune reading business. Didn’t do so bad, either.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean,’ the tall man told him a trifle shortly- ‘I’m not talking about a mixture of guesswork, humbug and adding two and two. I mean a real sense, with organs of perception as real as your eyes and your ears and your nose and your tongue.’

  ‘I don’t see as you need any more. They’re enough, aren’t they?’

  The rest ignored him.

  ‘Organs for the perception of what?’ asked the elder American curiously.

  The tall man did not reply at once. He turned up the end of his cigarette and regarded it for a moment.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you about it. But I warn you that all the names and places will be faked. If there is any chance of following the business up, I want to do it myself.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE STRANGE CASE OF TED FILLER

  The tall man paused again as though seeking an opening.

  ‘It’s an odd little story, and to explain to you how I come to know so much about it, I shall have to reveal that I practise medicine. That’s a thing I keep quiet as a rule when I am away from home. It alters people’s attitude if they know it and shuts one off from them almost as much as if one were a clergyman.

  ‘However, that is my profession and for twenty years, until, in fact, two years ago when I moved south, I practised in Irkwell in Derbyshire. It’s a place which is typical of the kind of semi-industrialised village you find round there. Most of the men are employed in the quarries or the mills, a few work lead in the pits where there’s any left to work. The women work in the mills, too, until they marry and start having more children than they want. The place is partly cottages of local stone but mostly rows of shoddy cottages put up in the last century when the mills came. In general, it’s a kind of semi-rural slum. Not the kind of place you’d expect to produce any advance on modern humanity—and yet there’s no doubt in my mind that young Ted Filler was something more than an ordinary freak.

  ‘His mother, Ada, regarded his arrival more as an act of God than a personal achievement until she found out that he was a boy. It was a discovery which had the result of infusing more interest into the family life. Her three previous contributions had all been girls, and this, and the deaths of the two younger in infancy, had helped to give her an attitude of discouraged fatalism about the whole business. But with Ted’s birth she seemed to make a fresh start and he began his independent existence enviably protected by first child devotion and fourth child experience.

  ‘Not that he appeared to be in the least in need of special treatment. He was a healthy, well-formed child whose yells when he was washed were encouragingly lusty. I did not detect the least sign of abnormality in him, nor do I think would anyone else have done so. I was able with complete honesty to assure his father and mother that they had a remarkably fine son—and that wasn’t too common in my Irkwell practice.

  ‘Nevertheless, when I called on Mrs. Filler
again I found satisfaction somewhat diluted.

  ‘ “ ’E worries us, ’e does,” she said. “Not but what ‘e ain’t a dear little chap and me proud of ’im,” she added, in the manner of one anxious not to appear ungrateful. “But ’e ain’t like the others was. ’E’s that difficult to get to sleep, you’d never believe. And then sometimes when you’ve got ’im to sleep ’e’ll wake up all of a sudden and look at you just like ’e’s ’ad the fright of ’is little life, then ’e’ll begin to ’owl. Ee, an’ ’e does ’owl. Fair frightened me and Jim first time ’e done it. We thought ’e wasn’t never going to stop. An ’e didn’t, not till ’e was fair wore out—and so was we. I’d like you to ’ave a look at ’im, Doctor, if you will. I don’t feel easy about him, an’ that’s a fact.”

  ‘I gave the child a careful examination. From what I knew of Ada Filler I was fairly certain she wasn’t one to get worked up unnecessarily, though of course you can never be sure. The baby was lying in its cot, blue eyes wide open, but quite quiet and peaceful. There didn’t seem to be a thing as it shouldn’t be and I said so.

  ‘ “I’m glad to ‘ear that,” said his mother. “Still—I don’t know. ’E’ll lie quiet that way for hours when you’d think ’e’d be asleep, then all of a sudden, for no reason, off ’e’ll go like a ’ooter. An’ nowt as I can do’ll stop ’im.”

  ‘Well, there wasn’t anything really to worry about. Some children are like that; they take one look at the world and hate it on sight and you can’t blame them much in a place like Irkwell, but in the end they learn to put up with it, like the rest of us. Nevertheless, young Ted Filler seemed to be taking his time about settling down. Whenever I looked in during the next few weeks it was the same tale. Once or twice I heard him howling. It was a remarkable achievement. I didn’t wonder that his parents were looking worn and that the rest of the street was behaving pretty offensively to them.