by John Wyndham
John Wyndham
* * *
THE SECRET PEOPLE
Contents
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part Three
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Follow Penguin
THE SECRET PEOPLE
John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris was born in 1903, the son of a barrister. He tried a number of careers including farming, law, commercial art and advertising, and started writing short stories, intended for sale, in 1925. From 1930 to 1939 he wrote short stories of various kinds under different names, almost exclusively for American publications, while also writing detective novels. During the war he was in the civil service and then the army. In 1946 he went back to writing stories for publication in the USA and decided to try a modified form of science fiction, a form he called ‘logical fantasy’. As John Wyndham he wrote The Day of the Triffids, The Kraken Wakes, The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos (filmed as Village of the Damned), The Seeds of Time, Trouble with Lichen, The Outward Urge, Consider Her Ways and Others, Web and Chocky. John Wyndham died in March 1969.
Part One
* * *
1
On an afternoon in September 1964, the ears of the inhabitants of Algiers were unpleasantly assaulted by an uproar from the skies. The sound was different from the familiar drumming boom of the regular mail and passenger service, and it was equally unlike the staccato throbbing of the desert police patrols; it was, in fact, an entirely new brand of aerial noise, more offensive than either. The strollers in the streets stopped to look up, the loiterers in cafés moved from under their striped awnings, even the hagglers in the markets momentarily suspended business to stare surprisedly overhead.
The cause of the sensation came streaking across the blue Mediterranean – a small silver aeroplane, hurling itself out of the northern sky. It amazed the watchers that so small a craft could make so fierce a noise, but the sight of it astonished them no less, for it roared through the heavens, trailing behind it a wake of flame fully six times its own length. It was diving as it crossed the city, coming down to earth like a silver comet with a scarlet tail. A moment later it had passed out of sight. The crackling roar of its engines grew less and presently ceased. Algiers, with a few caustic censuals of the noise-loving pilot, turned back to its business and its drinks, and forgot the silver plane’s existence.
Mark Sunnet taxied the plane to a stop and emerged from his cabin to greet the astonished aerodrome authorities. He was polite to them, but not expansive. He had grown weary of the sensation which inevitably attended his arrivals and departures, and frequent explanations to interested authorities of the superiority of his machine over the ordinary propeller-driven craft had become tedious. Accordingly, he pleaded tiredness. He had flown, he told them, non-stop from Paris, and proposed spending only one night in Algiers before pushing on to the south. Could anyone, he added, recommend him to a comfortable hotel? A member of the aerodrome staff suggested that the Hôtel de Londres could provide hot baths, comfortable beds and excellent food. He thanked the man, gave instructions for the care of his plane and, leaving it still surrounded by a crowd of inquisitive pilots and ground staff, made his way to the Customs Office. Emerging a few minutes later with his papers stamped and in order, he hailed a taxi.
‘I want to go to the Hôtel de Londres,’ he said.
The driver expressed surprise in a theatrical manner.
‘The Hôtel de Londres, monsieur?’ he inquired doubtfully.
‘Certainly,’ said Mark. ‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘Alors, monsieur. It is a good hotel, no doubt, but not of the best. It is bourgeois. Monsieur has not the bourgeois air, that is evident. He should honour the Hôtel de l’Etoile, there is not a doubt of it. It is a house of the most magnificent, it is modern, it is –’
‘All right. Let’s have a look at it.’ Mark cut the eulogy short by climbing into the cab.
Fate is not above using inconsiderable details for her obscure purpose. Thus, the whole of Mark’s future was destined to depend on the trifling fact that an Algerian taxi-driver was brother to the head waiter in a hotel.
Five days later found him, still a guest of the Hôtel de l’Etoile, lounging at ease upon its broad balcony. He lay with his head turned at an angle which enabled him to watch the occupant of the next chair. The busy harbour of Algiers, lively and brilliant in the sunshine, backed by the deep blue of the Mediterranean was a panorama which could wait: for the present, Margaret claimed all his attention. He half hoped that she would not wake to disturb his placid comfort.
It was a long time since he had been allowed to indulge in the luxury of complete laziness. Of the last six years, business had occupied almost every waking hour. He had devoted himself doggedly to the uninspiring task of propping up a tottering shoe business which only the timely death of an unprogressive uncle had saved from complete disaster. The firm of Sunnet had been established over a century and had retained in the trade a reputation for turning out good, reliable stuff. And that, the uncle, an inveterate recliner upon laurels, had considered to be good enough.
The prospects of salvaging the hopelessly old-fashioned firm had been slender when Mark inherited. Almost without exception his advisers had been for selling to cut his losses, but Mark had developed a streak of obstinacy which surprised himself. He had found himself looking at the rocky business of Sunnet’s not merely as a means of livelihood, but as a challenge, and he went to work as much in a spirit of bravado as from hope of gain.
He had not been brilliant, but he had shown an obstinate determination to overcome prejudice against the firm. Gradually the trade became aware that Sunnet’s was no longer a back number; their shoes were once more being demanded and worn by the million, and Mark emerged from the cocoon of work which he had spun about him to find himself not only vindicated, but a man of means. And this was the time to slack off. He had no intention of devoting his life to shoes, nor to the making of money from shoes. He had done what he had set out to do, and with the concern forging ahead, he felt the need of personal freedom. He had called his managers together and told them that he intended to go away for a while.
‘Finding new markets, sir?’ the chief buyer inquired hopefully.
‘God forbid. I’m going to have a holiday – a real holiday. And I’m not leaving an address. It’ll be up to you fellows to manage things between you while I’m away.’
His first step had been to buy a machine lately imported from America. The makers, unromantic men of little imagination, had been able to find no better name for their product than ‘Strato-Plane’. Mark, after one flight in it to those regions far above the clouds, renamed it the Sun Bird; and the Sun Bird it remained.
The first three weeks of his new leisure he occupied in trans-European flitting. Paris, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Warsaw, Berlin, Vienna, Paris again; hither and thither with all the delight of a child in a new toy until he tired of fast movement for its own sake and began to contemplate a less hurried, though more extensive, trip. The Sun Bird’s flying range was immense and the world lay open to him. There was little sense in restricting himself to Europe where one large city was, after all, not very unlike another, when he had the time and the means to range as far as he wished. Moreover, he found himself growing a tri
fle tired of his own exclusive society. Accordingly, he had bethought him of a friend now farming in Cape Province, and the Sun Bird was turned to the south.
But now his intended trip had been cut short before it had well begun. His proposed stop of one night in Algiers had already been multiplied by five, and looked like extending still more. And the reason for his change of plan was reposing in the chair beside him.
Her head lay back on its deep-red curls against a cushion, and her slender, sun-browned hands rested, fingers interlocked, in her lap. Her face, too, had acquired a tinge of golden brown and the African sun had raised upon it the faintest scatter of shadows – scarcely dark enough to be called freckles. Mark approved critically. Many of the red-haired girls he had known, he reflected, had had an unsatisfactory, a kind of unfinished look about the eyes, but there was no trace of that in Margaret’s face. The hazel eyes themselves were hidden now behind lids trimmed with perfectly genuine dark lashes. Her mouth, not too large, but certainly without any petulant smallness, was curved in a slight smile. The smile increased as he watched. The lids lifted.
‘Well, do you approve of it?’
Mark laughed. ‘I thought you were asleep.’
‘Most women know when they are being inspected.’
‘Then you can never really sleep in public.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
She smiled at him again and stretched her arms lazily. Mark swung his legs to the floor and sat up, looking out into the hot sunshine across the shimmering water. Both of them felt that it was time to make a move, but the day did not encourage activity.
‘What shall we do?’ he asked her.
‘I don’t know. You suggest something.’
Mark reflected. The tennis courts were not far away, but they would be simmering like hot-plates on such a day. There was the swimming pool; or they might go a little way up the coast and bathe, or …
‘What about the New Sea? We’ve neither of us seen that yet.’
She turned, surprised.
‘But it’s ever so far from here – right beyond the mountains. Three or four hundred miles. Even in a plane –’
‘In an ordinary plane it would take some time,’ he agreed, ‘but not in my Sun Bird. You wait till I show you. It’s just an afternoon jaunt for a rocket plane.’
‘A rocket plane? Like the new American mail carriers?’
‘Well, hardly as big as all that, but she is a rocket plane. There aren’t many of them about yet, but there will be soon: they’re the coming thing, not a doubt of it.’
The girl looked doubtful.
‘But are they quite safe?’
‘The Sun Bird’s taken me safely enough all round the continent and brought me across here. Besides, do you think I’d suggest your going in her if she weren’t the safest thing in the skies? You wait till you see her. Hurry up and change, then I’ll show you.’
Margaret Lawn made her way obediently towards the lift. The business of changing she performed almost automatically, using her mirror with an unwonted perfunctoriness. Her holiday was progressing in an expected and yet in an unexpected manner. Mark, for instance, had not been entirely unexpected – not that she had ever seen or even heard of him before, but the occasion was bound to provide a playmate of some kind. He might have been called Tom or Dick or Harry: he happened to be called Mark. Nevertheless, the state of affairs at present was not quite as she had foreseen. Events were not proceeding quite according to the course plotted for them. She had a sensation as though she were trying to steer a car with a wheel which had too much play. One got along without accidents, but there was an unwonted breathlessness, an unusual lack of assurance. More disturbing she found the growing conviction that she did not want to steer, and that it no longer amused her to apply the manoeuvring skill which she had displayed on previous occasions. This was the more irritating in that there was nothing striking about Mark to account for it. He was really a perfectly ordinary young man, and Margaret, like many another, had not felt that she was destined to fall in love with an ordinary young man. And yet it was happening – had happened. She was irritable with herself. She, Margaret Lawn, who had hitherto with justification considered herself reliable, capable, and a mistress of difficult situations, was undergoing an unwilling change; realizing, with feeble protest, that she quite incredibly wanted to hand over the controls. Changing, full in the face of all her principles, from an active to a passive: and, worse still, half enjoying the change.
It did not take her long to slip off her light frock and put on more serviceable clothes. In general – that is, apart from present emotional uncertainties – she was a young woman who knew her own mind and disdained the more elementary tricks. Her reappearance on the balcony was made with little delay.
‘Will it do?’ she asked.
Mark rose from his chair and looked at her neat white riding suit with approval.
‘My dear, it couldn’t be better. Even if it wouldn’t do, it suits you far too well for me to say so.’
They took a taxi to the aerodrome where Mark’s orders for his machine to be wheeled out set the mechanics bustling.
Rocket-propelled planes were still such a novelty that his was the first to be seen in Algiers. A few were in experimental service upon the mail routes, but the general public knew them only from photographs. A privately owned stratosphere rocket was all but unique upon the eastern side of the Atlantic, and as she was drawn clear of the hangar most of the ground staff within sight hurried to lend interested assistance.
‘And that’s your Sun Bird?’ Margaret said, watching the attendants trundle the little plane into the sunlight.
Mark nodded. ‘How do you like her? Looks a bit quaint at first sight, I’ll admit.’
‘I think she’s lovely,’ the girl answered, without moving her gaze from the glittering silver shape.
The Sun Bird’s proportions differed noticeably from those of propeller-driven aircraft. Her fuselage was wider and decidedly shorter, and the wings stubbier and broader. Two windows were set right in the nose and others well forward in the sides. Despite the unfamiliar shape caused chiefly by new problems of weight distribution, there was no effect of squatness: she looked what she was, a compact little bundle of power, as different from the ordinary plane as a bumble bee from a seagull.
Mark made a short investigation – somehow he never managed to feel as easy about foreign mechanics as he did about the home variety – but he found no cause for complaint. The fuel tanks were full and all the necessary adjustments had been faithfully made. He unlocked the cabin door and slid into the driving seat, beckoning the girl in beside him. She followed and looked round with interest. The two seats were set side by side right in the nose. In the small cabin was room for more seats behind them, but either these had never been fixed, or Mark had had them removed. Against the sides was a series of lockers and cupboards, and to metal staples set in the floor and walls were attached straps for the purpose of securing any loose baggage.
Mark was shouting final instructions to the ground staff, warning them to stand well clear unless they wished to be grilled. Then he slammed the door, cutting off all sound from the outer world. He advised Margaret to lean her head against the padded rest behind her seat.
‘The acceleration’s a bit fierce when we take off,’ he explained.
She leaned back obediently, and he looked out of the window to make certain that the men had taken his advice to heart.
‘Right. Here we go then.’
He gripped the stick with one hand, and with the other advanced a small lever set in the left arm of his seat. A roaring drone broke out: a cluster of fiery daggers stabbed from the bunch of rocket ports in the tail. The whole sturdy little ship shuddered and jumped. Then she was off, hurtling across the field, spitting flames behind her. Margaret felt as if a great invisible weight were pressing her back into her seat.
Suddenly the Sun Bird seemed to leap from the ground. Nose up, she soared, climbing into the blue
African sky at an angle which caused the watching ground staff’s jaws to drop. For a few minutes she was visible as a glitter of steel and a flash of fire in the heavens, then she was gone, leaving only a trail of smoke to show her path.
The chief mechanic shook his head; the Sun Bird struck him as being a bit too new-fangled, he felt no temptation to ride on a roaring rocket. His comrades were agreeing among themselves that her climb was magnifique, but that the din of her discharge was épouvantable.
Mark flattened out at twenty-one thousand feet and turned the nose to the south-east. He smiled at the girl.
‘Like it?’
‘It certainly is the last word in lifts, but I’m not quite sure that I really like it. I’m not frightened, but – well, it is a bit breathtaking at first, isn’t it?’
‘You soon get used to that.’
They had to raise their voices only slightly, for the makers had lined the hull with an efficient sound-deadening material, and the windows consisted of double sheets of non-splintering glass with a semi-vacuum between. The result was to reduce the roar of the rocket discharges to no more than a constant, muffled drone.
‘Look down there,’ Mark said.
A view of the North African coast bordering the vivid Mediterranean was spread for them. At such a height no movement was visible. Land and sea were laid out in the sunlight, looking oddly artificial, like a vast, brilliantly coloured relief map beneath a huge arc light. The blue was cut off sharply by the green of the coast, which gave way gradually to the darker hues of the mountains to the south. To Margaret’s unaccustomed eyes the plane was suspended almost stationary above an untrue world.
‘Are we moving at all?’ she asked.
For answer, Mark pointed to the speed indicator. The needle was hovering around the two-hundred mark, and she could see that it was slowly making its way higher.
‘It’s the height,’ he explained. ‘If there were any clouds about, you’d realize our speed. As it is, you can’t, but you should be getting your first glimpse of the New Sea within the hour.’