Pawley's Peepholes

by John Wyndham

  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, good-time 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 ding-dong going on farther down the road. A couple of girls with heads that looked like globes of gilded basket-work 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 chrysanthemum-head 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 fun-fair?”

  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 Councillor'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 — “Councillor'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, labelled:

  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 Councillors?”

  She looked surprised.

  “Well — there's Mr Palmer,” she said, rather doubtfully.

  “He'd be a — a youngish man?” I inquired, off-handedly.

  “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 councillors,” 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 labelled:

  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 ultra-high or infra-low 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 g
rabbed 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 (NON-RESIDENTS) 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 the 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 smoul­dering 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 prize-hunts, 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£

  and there were half a dozen empty seats, at that.

  The arrival of the platform brought a well-supported Bronx cheer, and a shrilling of whistles. The driver remained indifferent as he steered straight through the crowds. His passengers looked less certain of them­selves. Some of them did their best to play up; they giggled, made motions of returning slap for slap and grimace for grimace with the crowd to start with. Possibly it was as well that the tourist girls couldn't hear the things the crowd was shouting to them, but some of the gestures were clear enough. It couldn't have been a lot of fun gliding straight into the men who were making them. By the time the plat­form was clear of the crowd and disap­pearing through the front of the Bon Marché pretty well all the tourists had given up preten­ding that it was; some of them were looking a little sick. By the expression on several of the faces I reckoned that Pawley might be going to have a tough tune explaining the culture aspect of it to a depu­tation some­where.

  The next night there were more empty seats than full ones, and someone reported that the price had come down to 10s.

  The night after that they did not show up at all, and we all had a busy time with the job of returning the half-crowns, and refusing claims for wasted petrol.

  And the next night they didn't come, either; or the one after that; so then all we had to do was to pitch into the job of cleaning up West­wich, and the affair was practically over — apart from the longer term business of living down the repu­tation the place had been getting lately.

  At least, we say it's over. Jimmy, however, maintains that that is probably only the way it looks from here. According to him, all they had to do was to modify out the visibility factor that was causing the trouble, so it's possible that they are still touring around here — and other places.

  Well, I suppose he could be right. Perhaps that fellow Pawley, whoever he is, or will be, has a chain of his funfairs operating all round the world and all through history at this very moment. But we don't know — and, as long as he keeps them out of sight, I don't know that we care a lot, either.

  Pawley has been dealt with as far as we are concerned. He was a case for desperate measures; even the vicar of All Saints' appreciated that; and undoubtedly he had a point to make when he began his address of thanksgiving with: “Paradoxical, my friends, paradoxical can be the workings of vulgarity...”

  Once it was settled I was able to make time to go round and see Sally again. I found her looking brighter than she'd been for weeks, and lovelier on account of it. She seemed pleased to see me, too.

  “Hullo, Jerry,” she said. “I've just been reading in the paper how you organized the plan for getting rid of them. I think it was just wonderful of you.”

  A little time ago I'd probably have taken that for a cue, but it was no trigger now. I sort of kept on seeing her with her arms full of twins, and wondering in a dead-inside way how they got there.

  “There wasn't a lot to it, darling,” I told her modestly. “Anyone else might have hit on the idea.”

  “That's as maybe — but a whole lot of people don't think so. And I'll tell you another thing I heard today. They're going to ask you to stand for the Council, Jerry.”

  “Me on the Council. That'd be a big laugh—” I began. Then I stopped suddenly. “If — I mean, would that mean I'd be called ‘Councillor’?” I asked her.

  “Why — well, yes, I suppose so,” she said, looking puzzled.

  Things shimmered a bit.

  “Er — Sally, darling — er, sweet­heart, there's — er — something I've been trying to get round to saying to you for quite a time...” I began.

  BOOK INFORMATION

  THE BEST OF JOHN WYNDHAM

  SPHERE BOOKS LIMITED

  30/32 Gray's Inn
Road, London WCIX 8JL

  First published in Great Britain by Sphere Books Ltd 1973

  Copyright © The Executors of the Estate of the late John Wyndham 1973

  Anthology copyright © Sphere Books Ltd 1973

  Introduction copyright © Leslie Flood 1973

  Bibliography copyright © Gerald Bishop 1973

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The Lost Machine: Amazing Stories, 1932

  The Man from Beyond: Wonder Stories, 1934

  Perfect Creature: Tales of Wonder, 1937

  The Trojan Beam: Fantasy, 1939

  Vengeance by Proxy: Strange Stories, 1940

  Adaptation: Astounding Science Fiction, 1949

  Pawley's Peepholes: Science Fantasy, 1951

  The Red Stuff: Marvel Science Stories, 1951

  And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: Startling Stories, 1951

  Dumb Martian: Galaxy Science Fiction, 1952

  Close Behind Him: Fantastic, 1953

  The Emptiness of Space: New Worlds, 1960

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circu­lated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Set in Linotype Times

  Printed in Great Britain by

  Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk.

  ISBN 0 7221 9369 6