by John Wyndham
After half a minute or so there was a shuffle of feet outside. The door was opened, and a head appeared. It was a small head with a tweed cap on the top of it. It had a stringy-looking choker beneath and a dark unshaveness across its face. It was not turned straight at me, but in my general direction.
“’Ullo, cock,” it said, amiably enough. “So you’ve come to, ’ave yer? ‘Ang on a bit, an’ I’ll get you a cup o’ char.” And it vanished again.
The instruction to hang on was superfluous, but I did not have to wait long. In a few minutes he returned, carrying a wire-handled can with some tea in it
“Where are yer?” he said.
“Straight ahead of you, on the bed,” I told him.
He groped forward with his left hand until he found the foot of the bed, then he felt his way round it and held out the can.
“’Ere y’are, chum. It’ll taste a bit funny-like, ’cause ol’ Charlie put a shot of rum in it, but I reckon you’ll not mind that.”
I took it from him, holding it with some difficulty between my bound hands. It was strong and sweet, and the rum hadn’t been stinted. The taste might be queer, but it worked like the elixir of life itself.
“Thanks,” I said. “You’re a miracle worker. My name’s Bill.” His, it seemed, was Alf.
“What’s the line, Alf? What goes on here?” I asked him.
He sat down on the side of the bed and held out a packet of cigarettes with a box of matches. I took one, lit the first, then my own, and gave him back the box.
“It’s this way, mate,” he said. “You know there was a bit of a shindy up at the university yesterday morning—maybe you was there?”
I told him I’d seen it.
“Well, after that lark, Coker—he’s the chap what did the talking—he got kinda peeved. ‘Hokay,’ ’e says, nastylike. ‘The—s’ve asked for it. I put it to ’em fair and square in the first place. Now they can take what’s comin’ to them.’ Well, we’d met up with a couple of other fellers and one old girl what can still see, an’ they fixed it all up between them. He’s a lad, that Coker.”
“You mean—he framed the whole business—there wasn’t any fire or anything?” I asked.
“Fire—my aunt Fanny! What they done was fix up a trip wire or two, light a lot of papers and sticks in the hall, an’ start in ringing the ol’ bell. We reckoned that them as could see ‘ud be the first along, on account of there bein’ a bit o’ light still from the moon. And sure enough they was. Coker an’ another chap was givin’ them the k.o. as they tripped, an’ passin’ them along to some of us chaps to carry out to the truck. Simple as kiss your ‘and.”
“H’m,” I said ruefully. “Sounds efficient, that Coker. How many of us mugs fell into that little trap?”
“I’d say we got a couple of dozen—though it turned out as five or six of ’em was blinded. When we’d loaded up about all we’d room for in the truck, we beat it an’ left the rest to sort theirselves out.”
Whatever view Coker took of us, it was clear that Alf bore us no animosity. He appeared to regard the whole affair as a bit of sport. I found it a little too painful to class it so, but I mentally raised my hat to Alf. I’d a pretty good idea that in his position I’d be lacking the spirit to think of anything as a bit of sport. I finished the tea and accepted another cigarette from him.
“And what’s the program now?” I asked him.
“Coker’s idea is to make us all up into parties, an’ put one of you with each party. You to look after the scrounging, and kind of act as the eyes of the rest, like. Your job’ll be to help us keep goin’ until somebody comes along to straighten this perishin’ lot out.”
“I see,” I said.
He cocked his head toward me. There weren’t any flies on Alf. He had caught more in my tone than I had realized was there.
“You reckon that’s goin’ to be a long time?” he said.
“I don’t know. What’s Coker say?”
Coker, it seemed, had not been committing himself to details. Alf had his own opinion, though.
“’F you ask me, I reckon there ain’t nobody goin’ to come. If there was, they’d’ve been ‘ere before this. Different if we was in some little town in the country. But London! Stands to reason they’d come ’ere afore anywhere else. No, the way I see it, they ain’t come yet—an’ that means they ain’t never goin’ to come—an’ that means there ain’t nobody to come. Cor, blimy, ’oo’d ever’ve thought it could ’appen like this!”
I didn’t say anything. Alf wasn’t the sort to be jollied with facile encouragements.
“Reckon that’s the way you see it too?” he said after a bit
“It doesn’t look so good,” I admitted. “But there still is a chance, you know—people from somewhere abroad …”
He shook his head.
“They’d’ve come before this. They’d’ve had loud-speaker cars round the streets tellin’ us what to do by now. No, chum, we’ve ’ad it: there ain’t nobody nowhere to come. That’s the fact of it.”
We were silent for a while, then:
“Ah well, ’t weren’t a bad ol’ life while it lasted,” he said.
We talked a little about the kind of life it had been for him. He’d had various jobs, each of which seemed to have included some interesting undercover work. He summed it up:
“One way an’ another I didn’t do so bad. What was your racket?”
I told him. He wasn’t impressed.
“Triffids, huh! Nasty damn things, I reckon. Not natcheral, as you might say.”
We left it at that
Alf went away, leaving me to my cogitations and a packet of his cigarettes. I surveyed the outlook and thought little of it. I wondered how the others would be taking it. Particularly what would be Josella’s view.
When Alf reappeared with more food and the inevitable can of tea, he was accompanied by the man he had called Coker. He looked more tired now than when I had seen him before. Under his arm he carried a bundle of papers. He gave me a searching look.
“You know the idea?” he asked.
“What Alf’s told me,” I admitted.
“All right, then.” He dropped his papers on the bed, picked up the top one and unfolded it. It was a street plan of Greater London. He pointed to an area covering part of Hampstead and Swiss Cottage, heavily outlined in blue pencil.
“That’s your beat,” he said. “Your party works inside that area, and not in anyone else’s area. You can’t have each lot going after the same pickings. Your job is to find the food in that area and see that your party gets it—that, and anything else they need. Got that?”
“Or what?” I said, looking at him.
“Or they’ll get hungry. And if they do, it’ll be just too bad for you. Some of the boys are tough, and we’re not any of us doing this for fun. So watch your step. Tomorrow morning we’ll run you and your lot up there in trucks. After that it’ll be your job to keep ’em going until somebody comes along to tidy things up.”
“And if nobody does come?” I asked.
“Somebody’s got to come,” he said grimly. “Anyway, there’s your job—and mind you keep to your area.”
I stopped him as he was on the point of leaving.
“Have you got a Miss Playton here?” I asked.
“I don’t know any of your names,” he said.
“Fair-haired, about five foot six or seven, gray-blue eyes,” I persisted.
“There’s a girl about that size, and blond. But I haven’t looked at her eyes. Got something more important to do,” he said as he left.
I studied the map. I was not greatly taken with the district allotted to me. Some of it was a salubrious enough suburb, indeed, but in the circumstances a location that included docks and warehouses would have more to offer. It was doubtful whether there would be any sizable storage depots in this part. Still, “can’t all ’ave a prize,” as Alf would doubtless express it—and, anyway, I had no intention of staying there any longer than w
as strictly necessary.
When Alf showed up again I asked him if he would take a note to Josella. He shook his head.
“Sorry, mate. Not allowed.”
I promised him it should be harmless, but he remained firm. I couldn’t altogether blame him. He had no reason to trust me, and would not be able to read the note to know that it was as harmless as I claimed. Anyway, I’d neither pencil nor paper, so I gave that up. After pressing, he did consent to let her know that I was here and to find out the district to which she was being sent. He was not keen on doing that much, but he had to allow that if there were to be any straightening out of the mess it would be a lot easier for me to find her again if I knew where to start looking.
After that I had simply my thoughts for company for a bit. I knew I ought to make my mind up once and for all on the right course, and stick to it. But I could not. I seesawed. Some hours later when I fell asleep I was still seesawing.
There was no means of knowing which way Josella had made up her mind. I’d had no personal message from her. But Alf had put his head in once during the evening. His communication had been brief.
“Westminster,” he said. “Cor! Don’t reckon that lot’s goin’ to find much grub in the ’Ouses o’ Parliament”
I was woken by Alf coming in early the following morning. He was accompanied by a bigger, shifty-eyed man who fingered a butcher’s knife with unnecessary ostentation. Alf advanced and dropped an armful of clothes on the bed. His companion shut the door and leaned against it, watching with a crafty eye and toying with the knife.
“Give us yer mitts, mate,” said Alf.
I held my hands out toward him. He felt for the wires on my wrists and snipped them with a cutter.
“Now just you put on that there clobber, chum,” he said, stepping back.
I got myself dressed while the knife fancier followed every movement I made, like a hawk. When I’d finished, Alf produced a pair of handcuffs. “There’s just these,” he mentioned.
I hesitated. The man by the door ceased to lean on it and brought his knife forward a little. For him this was evidently the interesting moment. I decided maybe it was not the time to try anything, and held my wrists out. Alf felt around and clicked on the cuffs. After that he went and fetched me my breakfast.
Nearly two hours later the other man turned up again, his knife well in evidence. He waved it at the door.
With the consciousness of the knife producing an uncomfortable feeling in my back, we went down a number of flights of stairs and across a hall. In the street a couple of loaded trucks were waiting. Coker, with two companions, stood by the tailboard of one. He beckoned me over. Without saying anything, he passed a chain between my arms. At each end of it was a strap. One was fastened already round the left wrist of a burly blind man beside him; the other he attached to the right wrist of a similar tough case, so that I was between them. They weren’t taking any avoidable chances.
“I’d not try any funny business, if I were you,” Coker advised me. “You do right by them, and they’ll do right by you.”
The three of us climbed awkwardly onto the tailboard, and the two trucks drove off.
We stopped somewhere near Swiss Cottage and piled out. There were perhaps twenty people in sight, prowling with apparent aimlessness along the gutters. At the sound of the engines every one of them had turned toward us with an incredulous expression on his face, and as if they were parts of a single mechanism they began to close hopefully toward us, calling out as they came. The drivers shouted to us to get clear. They backed, turned, and rumbled off by the way we had come. The converging people stopped. One or two of them shouted after the trucks; most turned hopelessly and silently back to their wandering. There was one woman about fifty yards away; she broke into hysterics and began to bang her head against a wall. I felt sick.
I turned toward my companions.
“Well, what do you want first?” I asked them.
“A billet,” said one. “We got to ’ave a place to doss down.”
I reckoned I’d have to find that at least for them. I couldn’t just dodge out and leave them stranded right where we were. Now we’d come this far, I couldn’t do less than find them a center, a kind of H.Q., and put them on their feet. What was wanted was a place where the receiving, storing, and feeding could be done, and the whole lot keep together. I counted them. There were fifty-two; fourteen of them women. The best course seemed to be to find a hotel. It would save the trouble of fitting out with beds and bedding.
The place we found was a kind of glorified boardinghouse made up of four Victorian terrace houses knocked together, giving more than the accommodation we needed. There were already half a dozen people in the place when we got there. Heaven knows what had happened to the rest We found the remnant, huddled together and scared, in one of the lounges—an old man, and elderly woman (who turned out to have been the manageress), a middle-aged man, and three girls. The manageress had the spirit to pull herself together and hand out some quite high-sounding threats, but the ice, even of her most severe boardinghouse manner, was thin. The old man tried to back her up by blustering a bit. The rest did nothing but keep their faces turned nervously toward us.
I explained that we were moving in. If they did not like it, they could go: if, on the other hand, they preferred to stay and share equally what there was, they were free to do so. They were not pleased. The way they reacted suggested that somewhere in the place they had a cache of stores that they were not anxious to share. When they grasped that the intention was to build up bigger stores their attitude modified perceptibly, and they prepared to make the best of it.
I decided I’d have to stay on a day or two just to get the party set up. I guessed Josella would be feeling much the same about her lot. Ingenious man, Coker—the trick is called holding the baby. But after that I’d dodge out, and join her.
During the next couple of days we worked systematically, tackling the bigger stores near by—mostly chain stores, and not very big, at that. Nearly everywhere there had been others before us. The fronts of the shops were in a bad way. The windows were broken in, the floors were littered with half-opened cans and split packages which had disappointed the finders, and now lay in a sticky, stinking mass among the fragments of window glass. But as a rule the loss was small and the damage superficial, and we’d find the larger cases in and behind the shop untouched.
It was far from easy for blind men to carry and maneuver heavy cases out of the place and load them on handcarts. Then there was the job of getting them back to the billet and stowing them. But practice began to give them a knack with it.
The most hampering factor was the necessity for my presence. Little or nothing could go on unless I was there to direct. It was impossible to use more than one working party at a time, though we could have made up a dozen. Nor could much go on back at the hotel while I was out with the foraging squad. Moreover, such time as I had to spend investigating and prospecting the district was pretty much wasted for everyone else. Two sighted men could have got through a lot more than twice the work.
Once we had started, I was too busy during the day to spend much thought beyond the actual work in hand, and too tired at night to do anything but sleep the moment I lay down. Now and again I’d say to myself, “By tomorrow night I’ll have them pretty well fixed up—enough to keep them going for a bit, anyway. Then I’ll light out of this and find Josella.”
That sounded all right—but every day it was tomorrow that I’d be able to do it, and each day it became more difficult. Some of them had begun to learn a bit, but still practically nothing, from foraging to can-opening, could go on without my being around. It seemed, the way things were going, that I became less, instead of more, dispensable.
None of it was their fault. That was what made it difficult. Some of them were trying so damned hard. I just had to watch them making it more and more impossible for me to play the skunk and walk out on them. A dozen times a day I cursed the man Coker f
or contriving me into the situation—but that didn’t help to solve it: it just left me wondering how it could end….
I had my first inkling of that, though I scarcely recognized it as such, on the fourth morning—or maybe it was the fifth—just as we were setting out. A woman called down the stairs that there were two sick up there; pretty bad, she thought.
My two watchdogs did not like it.
“Listen,” I told them. “I’ve had about enough of this chain-gang stuff. We’d be doing a lot better than we are now without it, anyway.”
“An’ have you slinkin’ off to join your old mob?” said someone.
“Don’t fool yourself,” I said. “I could have slugged this pair of amateur gorillas any hour of the day or night. I’ve not done it because I’ve got nothing against them other than their being a pair of dim-witted nuisances—”
“’Ere—” one of my attachments began to expostulate.
“But,” I went on, “if they don’t let me see what’s wrong with these people, they can begin expecting to be slugged any minute from now.”
The two saw reason, but when we reached the room they took good care to stand as far back as the chain allowed. The casualties turned out to be two men, one young, one middle-aged. Both had high temperatures and complained of agonizing pain in the bowels. I didn’t know much about such things then, but I did not need to know much to feel worried. I could think of nothing but to direct that they should be carried to an empty house near by, and to tell one of the women to look after them as best she could.
That was the beginning of a day of setbacks. The next, of a very different kind, happened around noon.
We had cleared most of the food shops close to us, and I had decided to extend our range a little. Prom my recollections of the neighborhood, I reckoned we ought to find another shopping street about a half mile to the north, so I led my party that way. We found the shops there, all right, but something else too.
As we turned the corner and came into view of them, I stopped. In front of a chain-store grocery a party of men was trundling out cases and loading them on to a truck. Save for the difference in the vehicle, I might have been watching my own party at work. I halted my group of twenty or so, wondering what line we should take. My inclination was to withdraw and avoid possible trouble by finding a clear field elsewhere; there was no sense in coming into conflict when there was plenty scattered in various stores for those who were organized enough to take it. But it did not fall to me to make the decision. Even while I hesitated a redheaded young man strode confidently Out of the shop door. There was no doubt that he was able to see—or, a moment later, that he had seen us.