by Anthology
Finds two incredible girls in the sitting room. Thinks it’s something to do with me. First bust-up in twenty years. In the middle of it girls vanish,” he said succinctly.
One couldn’t do more than make a few sympathetic sounds.
That evening when I went to see Sally I found her sitting on the steps of the house, in the drizzle.
“What on earth—?” I began.
She gave me a bleak look.
“Two of them came into my room. A man and a girl. They wouldn’t go. They just laughed at me. Then they started to behave just as though I weren’t there. It got—well, I just couldn’t stay, Jerry.”
She went on looking miserable, and then suddenly burst into tears.
From then on it was stepped up. There was a brisk, if one-sided, engagement in the High Street next morning. Miss Dotherby, who comes of one of Westwich’s most respected families, was outraged in every lifelong principle by the appearance of four mopheaded girls who stood giggling on the corner of Northgate. Once she had retracted her eyes and got her breath back, she knew her duty. She gripped her umbrella as if it had been her grandfather’s sword, and advanced. She sailed through them, smiting right and left—and when she turned round they were laughing at her. She swiped wildly through them again, and they kept on laughing. Then she started babbling, so someone called an ambulance to take her away.
By the end of the day the town was full of mothers crying shame and men looking staggered, and the Town Clerk and the police were snowed under with demands for somebody to do something about it.
The trouble seemed to come thickest in the district that Jimmy had originally marked out. You could meet them elsewhere, but in that area you couldn’t help encountering gangs of them, the men in colored shirts, the girls with their amazing hairdo’s and even more amazing decorations on their shirts, sauntering arm-in-arm out of walls, and wandering indifferently through cars and people alike.
They’d pause anywhere to point things out to one another and go off into helpless roars of silent laughter. What tickled them most was when people got angry with them. They’d make signs and faces at the stuffier sort until they got them tearing mad—and the madder, the funnier. They ambled as the spirit took them, through shops and banks, and offices, and homes, without a care for the raging occupants.
Everybody started putting up ‘Keep Out’ signs; that amused them a lot, too.
It didn’t seem as if you could be free of them anywhere in the central area, though they appeared to be operating on levels that weren’t always the same as ours. In some places they did have the look of walking on the ground or floor, but elsewhere they’d be inches above it, and then in some places you would encounter them moving along as though they were wading through the solid surface. It was very soon clear that they could no more hear us than we could hear them, so that there was no use appealing to them or threatening them in that way, and none of the notices that people put up seemed to do anything but whet their curiosity.
After three days of it there was chaos. In the worst affected parts there just wasn’t privacy any more. At the most intimate moments they were liable to wander through, visibly sniggering or guffawing. It was all very well for the police to announce that there was no danger, that the visitants appeared unable actually to do anything, so the best way was to ignore them. There are times and places when giggling bunches of youths and maidens demand more ignore power than the average person has got. It could send even a placid fellow like me wild at times, while the women’s leagues of this and that, and the watch committee-minded were living in a constant state of blown tops.
The news had begun to get about, and that didn’t help, either. News collectors of all kinds came streaming in. They overflowed the place. The streets were snaked with leads to movie cameras, television cameras and microphones, while the press photographers were having the snappy picture time of their lives, and, being solid, they were almost as much of a nuisance as the visitants themselves.
But we hadn’t reached the peak of it yet. Jimmy and I happened to be present at the inception of the next stage. We were on our way to lunch, doing our best to ignore visitants, as instructed, by walking through them. Jimmy was subdued. He had had to give up theories because the facts had largely submerged him. Just short of the café we noticed that there was some commotion farther up the High Street, and seemingly it was coming our way, so we waited for it. After a bit it emerged through a tangle of halted cars farther down, and approached at a rate of some six or seven miles an hour. Essentially it was a platform like the one that Sally and I had seen at the crossroads the previous Saturday, but this was a deluxe model. There were sides to it, glistening with new paint, red, yellow and blue, enclosing seats set four abreast. Most of the passengers were young, though there was a sprinkling of middle-aged men and women dressed in a soberer version of the same fashions. Behind the first platform followed half a dozen others. We read the lettering on their sides and backs as they went by:
Pawley’s Peepholes on the Past—Greatest invention of the age History Without Tears—for £1 See How Great Great Grandma Lived Ye Quainte Olde 20th Century Expresse See Living History in Comfort—Quaint Dresses, Old Customs Educational! Learn Primitive Folkways—Living conditions Visit Romantic 20th Century—Safety Guaranteed Know Your History—Get Culture—$1 Trip Big Money Prize if you Identify Own Grandad/Ma—Most of the people on the vehicles were turning their heads this way and that in gogeyed wonder interspersed with spasms of giggles. Some of the young men waved their arms at us and produced silent witticisms which sent their companions into inaudible shrieks of laughter. Others leant back comfortably, bit into large, yellow fruits and munched. They cast occasional glances at the scene, but reserved most of their attention for the ladies whose waists they clasped. On the back of the next to last car we read:
Was Great Great Grandma as Good as she Made Out? See the Things Your Family History Never Told You
and on the final one:
Was Great Great Spot the Famous before they got Careful—The Real Inside Dope may win you a Big Prize!
As the procession moved away, it left the rest of us looking at one another kind of stunned. Nobody seemed to have much left to say just then.
The show must have been something in the nature of a grand premiere, I fancy, for after you were liable anywhere in the town to come across a platform labelled something like:
Was Great Great History is Culture—Broaden Your Mind Today for only $1!
or:
Was Great Great Know the Answers About Your Ancestors
with full, goodtime loads aboard, but I never heard of another regular procession.
In the Council Offices they were tearing what was left of their hair, and putting up notices left, right and centre about what was not allowed to the ‘tourists’—and giving them more good laughs—but all the while the thing got more embarrassing. Those ‘tourists’ who were on foot took to coming close up and peering into your face, and comparing it with some book or piece of paper they were carrying—after which they looked disappointed and annoyed with you, and moved on to someone else. I came to the conclusion there was no prize at all for finding me.
Well, work has to go on: we couldn’t think of any way of dealing with it, so we had to put up with it.
Quite a number of families moved out of the town for privacy and to stop their daughters from catching the new ideas about dress, and so on, but most of us just had to keep along as best we could. Pretty nearly everyone one met those days looked either dazed or scowling—except, of course, the ‘tourists’.
I called for Sally one evening about a fortnight after the platform procession. When we came out of the house there was a dingdong going on farther down the road. A couple of girls with heads that looked like globes of gilded basketwork were scratching the daylights out of one another. One of the fellows standing by was looking proud of himself, the rest of the party was whooping things on. We went the other way.
“
It just isn’t like our town any more,” said Sally. “Even our homes aren’t ours any more. Why can’t they all go away and leave us in peace? Oh, damn them, all of them! I hate them!”
But just outside the park we came upon one little chrysanthemumhead sitting on apparently nothing at all, and crying her heart out. Sally softened a little.
“Perhaps they are human, some of them. But what right have they to turn our town into a horrible funfair?”
We found a bench and sat on it, looking at the sunset. I wanted to get her away out of the place.
“It’d be grand away in the hills now,” I said.
“It’d be lovely to be there, Jerry,” she sighed.
I took her hand, and she didn’t pull it away.
“Sally, darling—” I began.
And then, before I could get any further, two tourists, a man and a girl had to come along and anchor themselves in front of us. That time I was angry. You might see the platforms almost anywhere, but you did reckon to be free of the walking tourists in the park where there was nothing to interest them, anyway—or should not have been. These two, however, had found something. It was Sally, and they stood staring at her, unabashed. She took her hand out of mine. They conferred. The man opened a folder he was carrying, and took a piece of paper out of it. They looked at the paper, then at Sally, then back to the paper. It was too much to ignore. I got up and walked through them to see what the paper was. There I had a surprise. It was a piece of the Westwich Evening News , obviously taken from a very ancient copy indeed. It was badly browned and tattered, and to keep it from falling to bits entirely it had been mounted inside some thin, transparent plastic. I wish I had noticed the date, but naturally enough I looked where they were looking—and Sally’s face looked back at me from a smiling photograph. She had her arms spread wide, and a baby in the crook of each. I had just time to see the headline: ‘Twins for Town Councilor’s Wife,’ when they folded up the paper, and made off along the path, running. I reckoned they would be hot on the trail of one of their damned prizes—and I hoped it would turn round and bite them.
I went back and sat down again beside Sally. That picture certainly had spoilt things—“Councilor’s Wife”! Naturally she wanted to know what I’d seen on the paper, and I had to sharpen up a few lies to cut my way out of that one.
We sat on awhile, feeling gloomy, saying nothing.
A platform went by, labeled: Was Great Great Trouble-free Culture—Get Educated in Modern Comfort We watched it glide away through the railings and into the traffic.
“Maybe it’s time we moved,” I suggested.
“Yes,” agreed Sally, dully. We walked back towards her place, me still wishing that I had been able to see the date on that paper.
“You wouldn’t,” I asked her casually, “you wouldn’t happen to know any Councilors?”
She looked surprised.
“Well—there’s Mr Palmer,” she said, rather doubtfully.
“He’d be a—a youngish man?” I inquired, offhandedly.
“Why, no. He’s ever so old—as a matter of fact, it’s really his wife I know.”
“Ah!” I said. “You don’t know any of the younger ones?”
“I’m afraid not. Why?”
I put over a line about a situation like this needing young men of ideas.
“You men of ideas don’t have to be councilors,” she remarked, looking at me.
Maybe, as I said, she doesn’t go much on logic, but she has her own ways of making a fellow feel better.
I’d have felt better still if I had had some ideas, though.
The next day found public indignation right up the scale again. It seems there had been an evening service going on in All Saints’ Church. The vicar had ascended his pulpit and was just drawing breath for a brief sermon when a platform labeled:
Was Great Great Was Gt Gt Grandad one of the Boys?—Our $1 Trip may Show You
floated in through the north wall and slid to a stop in front of the lectern. The vicar stared at it for some seconds in silence, then he crashed his fist down on his reading desk.
“This,” he boomed. “This is intolerable! We shall wait until this object is removed.”
He remained motionless, glaring at it. The congregation glared with him.
The tourists on the platform had an air of waiting for the show to begin. When nothing happened they started passing round bottles and fruit to while away the time. The vicar maintained his stony glare. When still nothing happened the tourists began to get bored. The young men tickled the girls, and the girls giggled them on. Several of them began to urge the man at the front end of their craft. After a bit he nodded, and the platform slid away through the south wall.
It was the first point our side had ever scored. The vicar mopped his brow, cleared his throat and then extemporized the address of his life, on the subject of ‘The Cities of the Plain’.
But no matter how influential the tops that were blowing, there was still nothing getting done about it.
There were schemes, of course. Jimmy had one of them: it concerned either ultrahigh or infralow frequencies that were going to shudder the projections of the tourists to bits. Perhaps something along those lines might have been worked out some time, but it was a quicker kind of cure that we were needing; and it is damned difficult to know what you can do about something which is virtually no more than a three-dimensional movie portrait unless you can think up some way of fouling its transmission.
All its functions are going on not where you see it, but in some unknown place where the origin is—so how do you get at it? What you are actually seeing doesn’t feel, doesn’t eat, doesn’t breathe, doesn’t sleep . . . It was while I was considering what it actually does do that I had my idea. It struck me all of a heap—so simple. I grabbed my hat and took off for the Town Hall.
By this time the daily processions of sizzling citizens, threateners and cranks had made them pretty cautious about callers there, but I worked through at last to a man who got interested, though doubtful.
“No one’s going to like that much,” he said.
“No one’s meant to like it. But it couldn’t be much worse than this—and it’s likely to do local trade a bit of good, too,” I pointed out.
He brightened a bit at that. I pressed on: “After all, the Mayor has his restaurants, and the pubs’ll be all for it, too.”
“You’ve got a point there,” he admitted. “Very well, we’ll put it to them. Come along.”
For the whole of three days we worked hard on it. On the fourth we went into action. Soon after daylight there were gangs out on all the roads fixing barriers at the municipal limits, and when they’d done that they put up big whiteboards lettered in red:
WESTWICH THE CITY THAT LOOKS AHEAD COME AND SEE IT’S BEYOND THE MINUTE—NEWER THAN TOMORROW SEE THE WONDER CITY OF THE AGE TOLL (NONRESIDENTS) 2/6—
The same morning the television permission was revoked, and the national papers carried large display advertisements :
COLOSSAL! UNIQUE! EDUCATIONAL! WESTWICH PRESENTS THE ONLY AUTHENTIC FUTURAMATIC SPECTACLE WANT TO KNOW: WHAT YOUR GREAT GREAT GRANDDAUGHTER WILL WEAR? HOW YOUR GREAT GREAT GRANDSON WILL LOOK? NEXT CENTURY’S STYLES? HOW CUSTOMS WILL CHANGE? COME TO WESTWICH AND SEE FOR YOURSELF THE OFFER OF THE AGES THE FUTURE FOR 2/6—
We reckoned that with the publicity there had been already there’d be no need for more detail than that—though we ran some more specialized advertisements in the picture dailies:
WESTWICH GIRLS! GIRLS!! GIRLS!!! THE SHAPES TO COME SAUCY FASHIONS—CUTE WAYS ASTONISHING—AUTHENTIC—UNCENSORED GLAMOUR GALORE FOR 2/6—
and so on. We bought enough space to get it mentioned in the news columns in order to help those who like to think they are doing things for sociological, psychological and other intellectual reasons.
And they came.
There had been quite a few looking in to see the sights before, but now they learnt that it was something worth charging money for t
he figures jumped right up—and the more they went up, the gloomier the Council Treasurer got because we hadn’t made it five shillings, or even ten.
After a couple of days we had to take over all vacant lots, and some fields farther out, for car parks, and people were parking far enough out to need a special bus service to bring them in. The streets became so full of crowds stooging around greeting any of Pawley’s platforms or tourists with whistles, jeers and catcalls, that local citizens simply stayed indoors and did their shouldering there.
The Treasurer began to worry now over whether we’d be liable for Entertainment Tax. The list of protests to the Mayor grew longer each day, but he was so busy arranging special convoys of food and beer for his restaurants that he had little time to worry about them. Nevertheless, after a few days of it I started to wonder whether Pawley wasn’t going to see us out, after all. The tourists didn’t care for it much, one could see, and it must have interfered a lot with their prizehunts, but it hadn’t cured them of wandering about all over the place, and now we had the addition of thousands of trippers whooping it up with pandemonium for most of the night. Tempers all round were getting short enough for real trouble to break out.
Then, on the sixth night, when several of us were just beginning to wonder whether it might not be wiser to clear out of Westwich for a bit, the first crack showed—a man at the Town Hall rang me up to say he had seen several platforms with empty seats on them.
The next night I went down to one of their regular routes to see for myself. I found a large, well lubricated crowd already there, exchanging cracks and jostling and shoving, but we hadn’t long to wait. A platform slid out on a slant through the front of the Coronation Cafe, and the label on it read:
CHARM & ROMANCE
OF 20TH CENTURY—$15