The Trojan Beam

by John Wyndham

  THE TROJAN BEAM

  from THE BEST OF JOHN WYNDHAM

  John Wyndham

  SPHERE BOOKS

  Published 1973

  ISBN 0 7221 9369 6

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

  INTRODUCTION

  AT a very tender age my latent passion for all forms of fantasy stories, having been sparked by the Brothers Grimm and the more unusual offerings in the children's comics and later the boy's adven­ture papers, was encouraged in the early 1930s by the occasional exciting find on the shelves of the public library with Burroughs and Thorne Smith varying the staple diet of Wells and Verne.

  But the decisive factor in establishing that exhila­rating ‘sense of wonder’ in my youthful imagi­nation was the discovery about that time of back numbers of American science fiction magazines to be bought quite cheaply in stores like Wool­worths. The happy chain of economic circum­stances by which American newstand returns, some­times sadly with the magic cover removed or mutilated, ballasted cargo ships returning to English ports and the colonies, must have been the mainspring of many an enthusiastic hobby devoted to reading, discussing, perhaps collecting and even writing, science fiction – or ‘scientifiction’ as Hugo Gerns­back coined the tag in his early Amazing Stories magazine.

  Gernsback was a great believer in reader partici­pation; in 1936 I became a teenage member of the Science Fiction League sponsored by his Wonder Stories. Earlier he had run a compe­tition in its fore­runner Air Wonder Stories to find a suitable banner slogan, offering the prize of ‘One Hundred Dollars in Gold’ with true yankee bragga­dacio. Discovering the result some years later in, I think, the September 1930 issue of Wonder Stories seized upon from the bargain-bin of a chain store, was akin to finding a message in a bottle cast adrift by some distant Robinson Crusoe, and I well remember the surge of jingo­istic pride (an educa­tional trait well-nurtured in pre-war Britain) in noting that the winner was an English­man, John Beynon Harris.

  I had not the slightest antici­pation then that I would later meet, and acknow­ledge as a good friend and mentor, this contest winner who, as John Wyndham, was to become one of the greatest English story-tellers in the idiom. The fact that he never actually got paid in gold was a disappoint­ment, he once told me, that must have accounted for the element of philo­so­phical dubiety in some of his work. Certainly his winning slogan ‘Future Flying Fiction’, al­though too late to save the maga­zine from foundering on the rock of eco­nomic depression (it had already been amalga­mated with its stable­mate Science Wonder Stories to become just plain, if that is the right word, Wonder Stories), presaged the firm stamp of credi­bility combined with imagi­native flair that charac­terized JBH's writings.

  John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris (the abundance of fore­names conve­niently supplied his various aliases) emerged in the 1950s as an important contem­porary influence on specu­lative fiction, parti­cularly in the explo­ration of the theme of realistic global catas­trophe, with books such as The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes, and enjoyed a popularity, which continued after his sad death in 1969, comparable to that of his illus­trious pre­decessor as master of the scientific romance, H. G. Wells.

  However, he was to serve his writing apprentice­ship in those same pulp maga­zines of the thirties, competing success­fully with their native American contributors, and it is the purpose of this present collection to high­light the chrono­logical develop­ment of his short stories from those early beginnings to the later urbane and polished style of John Wyndham.

  ‘The Lost Machine’ was his second published story, appea­ring in Amazing Stories, and was possibly the proto­type of the sentient robot later developed by such writers as Isaac Asimov. He used a variety of plots during this early American period parti­cu­larly favour­ing time travel, and the best of these was undoubtedly ‘The Man From Beyond’ in which the poign­ancy of a man's reali­za­tion, caged in a zoo on Venus, that far from being aban­doned by his fellow-explorers, he is the victim of a far stranger fate, is remark­ably out­lined for its time. Some themes had dealt with war, such as ‘The Trojan Beam’, and he had strong views to express on its futility. Soon his own induc­tion into the Army in 1940 produced a period of crea­tive inactivity corres­ponding to World War II. He had, however, previously established him­self in England as a promi­nent science fiction writer with serials in major period­icals, subse­quently reprinted in hard covers, and he even had a detec­tive novel published. He had been well repre­sented too – ‘Perfect Crea­ture’ is an amu­sing example – in the various maga­zines stemming from fan activity, despite the vicissi­tudes of their pre- and imme­diate post-war publish­ing insec­urity.

  But after the war and into the fifties the level of science fiction writing in general had increased consi­derably, and John rose to the challenge by selling success­fully to the American market again. In England his polished style proved popular and a predi­lection for the para­doxes of time travel as a source of private amuse­ment was perfectly exem­plified in ‘Pawley's Peepholes’, in which the gawp­ing tourists from the future are routed by vulgar tactics. This story was later success­fully adapted for radio and broad­cast by the B.B.C.

  About this time his first post-war novel burst upon an unsus­pecting world, and by utili­zing a couple of unori­ginal ideas with his Gernsback-trained atten­tion to logically based expla­natory detail and realis­tic back­ground, together with his now strongly deve­loped narra­tive style, ‘The Day of the Triffids’ became one of the classics of modern specu­lative fiction, survi­ving even a mediocre movie treat­ment. It was the fore­runner of a series of equally impressive and enjoyable novels inclu­ding ‘The Chrysalids’ and ‘The Mid­wich Cuckoos’ which was success­fully filmed as ‘Village of the Damned’. (A sequel ‘Children of the Damned’ was markedly inferior, and John was care­ful to dis­claim any responsi­bility for the writing.)

  I was soon to begin an enjoy­able asso­ciation with John Wyndham that had its origins in the early days of the New Worlds maga­zine-publish­ing venture, and was later to result in much kindly and essen­tial assis­tance enabling me to become a specia­list dealer in the genre. This was at the Fantasy Book Centre in Blooms­bury, an area of suitably asso­ciated literary acti­vities where John lived for many years, and which provi­ded many pleasu­rable meet­ings at a renowned local coffee establish­ment, Cawardine's, where we were often joined by such person­alities as John Carnell, John Chris­topher and Arthur C. Clarke.

  In between the novels two collec­tions of his now widely pub­lished short stories were issued as ‘The Seeds of Time’ and ‘Consider Her Ways’; others are re­printed here for the first time. He was never too grand to refuse mater­ial for our own New Worlds and in 1958 wrote a series of four novel­ettes about the Troon family's contri­bution to space explo­ration – a kind of Forsyte saga of the solar system later collected under the title ‘The Outward Urge’. His ficti­tious colla­borator ‘Lucas Parkes’ was a subtle ploy in the book version to explain Wyndham's appa­rent devia­tion into solid science-based fiction. The last story in this collection ‘The Empti­ness of Space’ was written as a kind of post­script to that series, especially for the 100th anni­versary issue of New Worlds.

  John Wyndham's last novel was Chocky, published in 1968. It was an expan­sion of a short story follow­ing a theme similar to The Chrysalids and The Midwich Cuckoos. It was a theme pecu­liarly appro­priate for him in his advancing matu­rity. When, with charac­teristic reti­cence and modesty, he announced to a few of his friends that he was marry­ing his beloved Grace and moving to the country­side, we all felt that this was a well-deserved retire­ment for them both.

  B
ut ironically time – always a fasci­nating subject for specu­lation by him – was running out for this typical English gentle­man. Amiable, eru­dite, astrin­gently humo­rous on occasion, he was, in the same way that the gentle Boris Karloff portrayed his film monsters, able to depict the night­mares of humanity with fright­ening realism, made the more deadly by his masterly preci­sion of detail. To his great gift for story-telling he brought a lively intellect and a fertile imagi­nation.

  I am glad to be numbered among the many, many thou­sands of his readers whose ‘sense of wonder’ has been satis­facto­rily indulged by a writer whose gift to posterity is the compul­sive reada­bility of his stories of which this present volume is an essen­tial part.

  — LESLIE FLOOD

  THE TROJAN BEAM (1939)

  THE IRRESISTABLE FORCE

  The officer dropped his hand. His crew could not see his face, for he stood on the obser­vation platform with his head in a steel turret. But the hand was enough. The twin engines roared, the great tank lurched like a huge monster just awakened and began to trundle forward.

  The officer, looking left and right, had the curious vision of thickets slowly moving across the country. It was strange, he thought, that with war developed as a science so many of the old tricks remained in use. How many times in the long tale of history had an army advanced under cover of bushes and branches? It was no more than a moment's specu­lation before he turned his atten­tion to keeping his machine to its place in the forma­tion.

  The weather was filthy. Sleet made it difficult to see any­thing much smaller than a house at 200 yards, and the wind which cut in through the obser­vation louvres felt like a knife sawing at his face. No doubt excellent condi­tions for an advance, in the tactical consider­ation of the author­ities, but not so good for the men who had to do the work. However, there was some conso­lation in being a tank man and not one of the infantry who would be following.

  He peered ahead and swore mildly. The sleet seemed to be getting thicker. Nature was improving her screen for their attack.

  In the old days, when a soldier was a warrior rather than a mechanic, generals had preferred to lose their men from wounds rather than from pneumonia. The great general,

  Julius Caesar, had reasonably remarked that ‘in winter all wars cease’ and until quite recently the Chinese had very sensibly gone home in preference to fighting in the rain. He wished they still did, damn them.

  But that custom, along with many others, had changed now. Some­where beyond the shroud of sleet there were thousands of Chinese sitting in trenches, pill-boxes and redoubts, ready to blow his and all the other Japanese tanks to bits if they could, despite any inclem­en­cies of weather.

  The officer frowned. He was a loyal servant of his Emperor, of course; he would be willing to shoot any­one who suggested that he was not, but, all the same, there were moments when he privately and secretly wondered if the expense in men and money was worth the object.

  His father had been in the expe­di­tion to Manchukuo and that was a defi­nite success, but his father had also been in the 1937 cam­paign which had looked like being a success in the beginning, but had drawn to such an undig­nified end for Japan in 1940. And now here was another gene­ra­tion fighting over the same ground twenty-four years later. And what if they won? Markets, they said, but could you really force the Chinese to buy things they didn't want from people they hated? He doubted it, for he had come to know their stubborn­ness well.

  The tanks passed through their own lines and entered no-man's-land. The officer aban­doned his specu­lations and became intent on his job. The sleet was still thick. He could see only the first tanks to his right and left, though clearly enough to keep his posi­tion. There was no sign of life from the Chinese lines. He won­dered what that portended. It might mean that they were actually un­aware of the coming attack, but he doubted that. If it were so, it would be their first sur­prise for a very long time; there were too many damned spies about. More probably it meant that they had some new trick to play. They nearly always had.

  Orders came through on the short wave for the whole line to incline 30° right. He acknow­ledged and passed it on. Presently they altered back again and the line was travel­ling due west once more. Still there was no sign from the oppo­sing lines. The heavy tanks lurched forward in a shrouded world at a steady ten miles an hour.

  Until now it was a tank advance like any other save that the oppo­sition was long in coming. The officer was still at his look-out and in the process of forming a theory that the Chinese must be running short of ammu­nition and conse­quently with­holding what they had for effective short-range work, when the thing which disting­uished this ad­vance from any other occurred with­out warn­ing.

  It seemed that his head was violently seized and jammed at the embra­sure in front of him. His steel helmet met the wall of the turret with a clash, instinc­tively, he put up both hands to push himself away from the wall. For a moment nothing happened, then the chin-strap gave and he staggered back violently.

  Even in that moment he was aware that the move­ment of the machine had changed. Through the din of mecha­nism he could hear the men below cursing. He stepped down from his plat­form, furious at their disobe­dience. Ten miles an hour had been the order; it was the big tank's quietest travel­ling speed. By the present motion he judged it had speeded up to twenty or more.

  Inside there was a state of confu­sion. The driver was still in his seat, though helmet­less. The others, also helmet­less, were at the front, tugging at something and swearing.

  He put his head close to the driver's.

  “Ten miles an hour!” he yelled, through the din.

  His voice was loud enough for the others to hear and they turned. He had a glimpse of a confused pile beyond them. Steel helmets, bayonets, rifles and all loose things had been thrust forward into the nose as far as they would go.

  “Get that stuff back,” he roared.

  The men looked at him stupidly and shook their heads.

  He thrust past them and seized a sub-machine gun on the top of the pile. It did not move. He tugged, but it stayed as though it had been welded to the rest. The men looked on, wide-eyed. The officer dropped his hand to his holster, but it was empty. He became aware that the driver had not obeyed, the machine was still travel­ling too fast. Catching a hold, he dragged him­self back. The driver's speedo­meter read 25 miles an hour. He cursed the man.

  “It's no good,” yelled the other, “she won't stop.”

  “Reverse!” bawled his commander.

  The twin engines roared and then began to slow. There was an appre­ciable check in the tank's speed. The place began to fill with blue smoke and a smell of singe­ing. Suddenly the noise of the engines rose as they raced furiously and the tank lurched for­ward again. The driver throttled down; the roar of the engines dwindled and died.

  “Clutches burnt out,” shouted the driver as he switched off.

  The tank went on. He and his officer stared incre­du­lously at the meter showing over twenty miles an hour, and then at each other.

  The officer swung back to his plat­form. He picked up the ear­pieces of his short-wave commu­ni­cator and spoke rapidly. There was no reply, the instru­ment was quite dead. He looked at the com­pass. For a moment he thought they had turned through a right angle and were going north, then he realized that it had jammed.

  Through the obser­vation louvres he saw that the tanks to right and left were still more or less abreast of him; one had its turret open and a man was signal­ling with his arms. He thrust his own cover upward and stood up in the sting­ing sleet. From the other's signs and the fact that he also was bare­headed he gathered that his machine was in a similar plight. He dropped down again and wiped the sweat and snow from his face.

  The tank trundled on uncontrollably towards the enemy lines.

  The tank officer watched with a frown. He could do nothing but observe, and it seemed to him that by the di
stance they had gone they should be close upon the lines, or else they had turned while he was below. It was impossible to tell.

  Suddenly he became aware of some­thing coming up on his right. As it drew nearer he could make out one of their own Japanese light tanks over­taking him at a speed eight or ten miles more than his own. The two men in it had got rid of their top shield and were hang­ing on grimly to the sides. He could see their scared and puzzled express­ions as they passed.

  While they pulled ahead he noticed that the sleet was thinner and visi­bility a little better. He could see a road crossing their path, then the yellow-brown earth of a ploughed field and then some­thing which might be water. He looked harder. Soon there was no doubt. It was a river and he could disting­uish some kind of build­ing on the opposite bank. There was no doubt that they had been pulled well off their course.

  The men in the light tank had seen it, too. When they were half­way across the ploughed field he saw them jump out and roll over in the loam. They picked them­selves up quickly to dodge the follow­ing heavy tanks. Their machine dashed on and disappeared over the river bank.

  The officer bent down. He gave rapid orders to his men to open the doors and abandon the machine. They lost no time in obeying. Look­ing back, he could see the string of muddy figures picking them­selves up and gazing after him.

  He himself waited; it was still possible that the machine might stop, but he opened the obser­vation cover and made ready. Half­way across the ploughed field he pressed the button of the emer­gency fuse, and jumped.

  He staggered up, plastered with mud and heed­less of the other run­away tanks, to watch his own. He hoped despe­rately that he had judged the time well enough to save it from falling into enemy hands. He watched it reach the built-up river bank and begin to climb. Then as it topped the rise and tilted, pre­para­tory to diving into the water, it seemed to fly apart from a flame which abruptly shot up amid­ships. The sound of the ex­plo­sion came back to him with a rum­bling boom.