by John Wyndham
It was an impasse that might have lasted much longer than it did but for the fortuitous visit of a travelling Member of Parliament who was also a gadfly member of the Opposition. During his brief stay in the Midsummers he happened to hear of the Tanakuatuan’s complaint, and was much interested, almost to the point of rubbing his hands.
“Ah,” he said, after hearing one or two versions of the situation. “Very pretty. What it amounts to is that these unfortunate people, who were forcibly removed from their island in the first place because of a bomb test, are still held in a reservation, which they dislike, and the only alternative the Colonial Office offers them is that they should return to that island although the place is known to have suffered contamination from radioactive fallout. Very naturally they refuse to go back there. And who’s to blame them? I wouldn’t want to be sent back there in the circumstances. And I wouldn’t want them sent there, either. Nor would a few million other people if they knew about it…Good stuff for a Question. Got just about all the angles. Very nice indeed.”
The House, however, never heard the Question. The Colonial Office, by hurried arrangement with the Treasury, bought Tanakuatua from its former inhabitants for a very respectable sum, on paper. With this credit, it then negotiated on their behalf the purchase of the island of Imu. The inhabitants of Imu did not receive a great deal in actual cash, but they did get free transport for themselves and their belongings from their remote island to a generous reservation on a larger and more prosperous island – the very reservation, in fact, which the Tanakiiatuans had been occupying for the last ten years.
The solution proved fairly satisfactory all round. It is true that a number of Tatake’s more restive young men continued to point out that had the Government not taken their island from them by guile and force the tabu would never have come into existence, but most of his people were disposed to accept it fatalistically as an act of the gods, and prepared to make the best of things on Imu, which was, at least, an island of their own, and not a mere reservation among strangers.
Nor was the Colonial Office displeased with the solution. An awkward Question had been avoided, and now, as ground landlord of geographically inconvenient Tanakuatua (as well as Oahomu, which it had taken the opportunity to purchase at the same time) it could prevent resettlement there. Thus, since they were now uninhabited, it was able to contrive their official severance from the Midsummers Group to whose administration they had never been anything but a geographically inconvenient nuisance.
Thereafter, for a dozen years Tanakuatua reverted to the state of being an almost unvisited dot on the map, forlorn and near forgotten. The taro patches had long gone back to the wild. The coconut palms and the breadfruit trees gradually deteriorated amid choking thickets. The huts of the village collapsed and rotted away until they were overgrown without trace. Almost the only survivals of civilized times were the descendants of a few escaped goats and pigs, free now to live unthwarted lives.
Things could quite easily have been different, however. The multi-sided requirements of science, particularly military science, which may lead to anything from the building of a townlet amid eternal ice to putting a man on the moon, or from cossetting a new virus to herding flocks of electrons, produced a demand for an island. This, though pleasantly inexpensive when compared with the requirements of certain other projects, was more than a matter of allocating funds, for it was stipulated that the island should, among other qualities, be equable in climate, uninhabited, easily patrolled, and well isolated.
The list of available islands, never long, was soon reduced to two, and only the shape of Oahomu, which made its coast line easier to watch and to reach at any point in an emergency, determined that it should be fenced with barbed wire and forbidding notices, and officially designated as a Tracking Station, while Tanakuatua was allowed to drowse quietly on beneath its thickening thickets.
And so it might have remained for many more years had not Walter Tirrie, searching for a suitable location for Lord Foxfield’s Enlightened State Project, chanced to hear of it and had himself flown there to look it over.
The island appealed to him at once by its manageable size, its location, and its climate.
He was not equipped to force his way along the overgrown tracks and make a close survey, but he took soil samples in the area of the lagoon where his plane put down, and photographs of the crowding vegetation as evidence of fertility. Unfortunately more photographs taken in a rapid inspection from the air failed to come out, but they would not in any case have been good since, he reported, much of the east side of the island was obscured by mist or low cloud at the time. He was, however, able to see that there was no lack of vigorous growth anywhere save on the upper slopes of the twin hills and the saddle joining them. Even the inside walls of the two craters were clothed with bushes. Several streams, in addition to the hot spring, looked capable of giving an adequate supply of water.
The place would certainly need a lot of reclamation, but that was no obstacle. In climate, in its location far from steamer tracks, as well as in size, it seemed to him ideally suited for our purpose.
Walter’s inspection was perforce hurried, and he does seem to have felt some astonishment at finding so habitable an island unoccupied and available. Further inquiries at Uijanji explained that entirely to his satisfaction. In fact, in the recommendation he tendered on his return he included the existence of the tabu, and its deterrent effect on visits by unwanted strangers, as an additional asset.
He duly, when it had been determined which of the Offices of State concerned was the veritable holder of the title to Tanakuatua, made an offer – subject to the production of a certificate stating that all traces of abnormal radio-activity had subsided to an extent warranting the official declaration of ‘clean’ – of £20,000 for the island.
The certificate was produced, and negotiations took place.
In due course, the representatives of the Crown, knowing nothing at that stage of Lord Foxfield’s interest, emerged from them not displeased with their success in conveying to Walter Tirrie, Esq. the title to that unprofitable and troublesome parcel of real estate, the Island of Tanakuatua, in the sum of £30,000.
Three
An account of our journey to Tanakuatua would be tedious, if only because it went so smoothly, in both senses.
Almost the only unexpected event was, as I have mentioned, the defection of Horace Tupple at Panama. How Horace came to be among us at all is still a mystery. I can only imagine that Walter, in a misguided moment, thought he would act as a kind of leaven. He did not. The poor response that met his attempts to enliven the voyage, and give it a cruise-like quality, with deck-games tournaments, facetious competitions, bingo sessions and the like, together with the atmosphere of our evening discussions – which I admit had something of the style of earnest seminars – had convinced him by the time we were halfway across the Atlantic that he had landed himself in the wrong crowd. Gloom began to dampen his spirits, and his attempts to throw it off became less frequent until the night before we reached Colon he got drunk enough, and uninhibited enough, to give us his opinion of us, and of the Project as a whole. The next day he walked off.
Poor Horace. Lucky Horace!
For my part I set myself to get to know my companions. It was the best decision I could have made. For the first time since my accident I became aware of others, concerned with them as people rather than as numbers, or simply as material for the Project. I had a sense of re-awakening slowly, coming back to life – and, I confess, of increasing astonishment to find myself committed as I was. It was a sensation not exactly of disillusion, but certainly of revelation. A gradual supplanting of fantasy by fact. A slow realization that the Project was no longer theory; that we were, incredibly, on our way to make it a reality. The sense of waking up was both puzzling and a little alarming. It had in some degree that sense of misgiving, of uneasiness about what one may have done, that I imagine to follow a loss of memory.
&n
bsp; It was fortunate, I have since thought, that the process was gradual. It would have been truly alarming had it been sudden.
As it was I felt my companions changing little by little from figures into living people – and into different people from those I had expected them to be. And, perhaps, too, now we were on our way, they did change to some extent…All I can be sure of is that I changed, and that I saw them differently. Doctors used to be in the habit of recommending a cruise for various malaises; it could be that they had something there. Certainly it cleared my mind, and with consequences that were not altogether reassuring.
It came, for instance, as a disconcerting discovery that it brought home to me that the provision of means and opportunity had not produced identical opinions on the ways to employ them. I seemed in my earlier, or lyric, phase to have been thinking with the naivety of an early socialist that all must love the highest rationality when they saw it. I began to percieve, as if for the first time, that rationality is not a constant – it varies subject to individual concerns and the pressures of personality – and as a consequence that our progress towards the formation of an ideal community might be less smooth and less selfless than I had envisaged.
In fact, I became aware of my faculty of judgement stirring again, as if from hibernation.
One of its effects was to make me increasingly conscious of the very general, not to say sketchy, nature of some of our intentions. The more I thought of the way we had taken the co-operation of everyone for granted, and failed to make provision for the settlement of disagreements, the more uneasy I became. I perceived the need of an authority for reference, established by consent and available for matters in dispute, as offering greater stability than ad hoc settlements.
My efforts to pin Walter down to discussion of these, and other details which now seemed to me to have been left vague, were unsuccessful. He took an empirical line regarding such matters, brushing my approaches aside with the assertion that a formal attitude, too cut and dried, would lack the flexibility to adapt itself to circumstances. It was out of our circumstances and conditions that our institution must grow, he maintained, and refused to be drawn into argument.
This, coming from a planner of his ability, puzzled me considerably, but unable to make any headway against it I gave up after three or four attempts. Indeed, it was not the only thing about Walter that I found unexpected. He was, in general, less approachable than he had been during the preliminary work. His manner had altered, and he spent a great deal of his time in his cabin. In fact, it was not long before I had the impression that he was progressively holding aloof from the rest of us; slowly building an intangible barrier round himself – and not only round himself; it partially included Alicia Hardy who appeared to be taking on the manner of his confidential secretary.
To the rest, I suppose, the change in him was less noticeable than it was to me who had worked with him. For most of them he was the organizer, and, as such could be expected to have plenty on his mind. Of them all, only Charles Brinkley noticed the withdrawal enough to mention it, and then only in passing.
As the voyage wore on I set myself to learn more about my companions. It was not difficult. With little to occupy them, they were mostly ready to talk about themselves with very little encouragement.
I learnt without any difficulty Charles’s views on the restrictions that hedged around farming in England, and how, in exasperation, he had sold up a good farm in Nottinghamshire in order to take a chance on virgin land where he could grow crops as he saw fit, without interference and without spending half his time on paperwork.
I learnt of Joe Shuttleshaw’s disagreements with a number of his bosses, his union, and the class system, and how he wanted his children to grow up in a society which had none of these things.
I learnt of various disillusions that had caused Tom Conning and Jeremy Brandon to get away from it all; of the frustration that had impelled Jennifer Deeds; the romanticism which had suddenly decided the other Jennifer; the idealism which filled David Kamp. In fact I could attach reasons, real or ostensible, to almost all the company.
Some of them were not convincing. Camilla Cogent, when I joined her at the rail one day before we left the Atlantic, showed no disposition to confide her reasons, in fact, she had kept herself apart and apparently far away. It was her isolation that prompted me to approach her and attempt to draw her in – that, and something about her that reminded me of my daughter, Mary. When I asked her why she had come, she continued to look unseeingly at the water for so long that I thought she had not heard me. Then as I was about to repeat the question, she turned to me, still with her faraway look, and said in a flat voice:
“I thought I might be useful. Besides, as a biologist, the idea of an island that has been uninhabited for twenty years fascinates me.”
With that for the time being I had to remain content. It enabled me only to decide that her real reason was another negative – something she was getting away from. It occurred to me then that we were remarkably short on positive incentives, and I was thrown back on my previous reflection about only the misfits being free.
Nevertheless, Camilla, too, changed as the voyage went on. She discovered interests in common with Charles. The two of them would discuss problems of propagation and breeding by the hour. Mrs Brinkley set herself to bring Camilla out in her kindly way, and with some success. The faraway look, though frequent, was no longer constant.
We fell into routines. Charles doing his miles per day round the deck to keep himself fit. Jennifer Deeds conducting her daily classes for the Brinkley and Shuttleshaw children – which they all appeared to enjoy. Mrs Brinkley ensconced in deck-chair comfortably turning out unending knitting and chatting amiably to anyone who joined her. Jeremy Brandon and Tom Conning alternately beating one another at deck-tennis. Marilyn Slaight flirting with one man after another, apparently for the satisfaction of making it up with her husband after a fine row between them. And so on.
It was not until one afternoon in mid-Pacific that I exchanged more than a few polite words from time to time with Camilla. The others who had been under the canvas awning at the stern had drifted off, leaving us in sole occupation. I was reading, Camilla lost in contemplation of the ocean – at least for a time – but when I looked up from turning a page, I found that she had transferred her attention to me, and was regarding me with a slight frown. At least it was an improvement on the faraway look. I inquired:
“Can I help?”
She started to shake her head, and then changed her mind.
“Yes – after all you asked me questions. Do you mind if I ask you some?” And without waiting for an answer she went on, “You see, I’m puzzled. How did someone like you come to be included in this?”
“That’s not difficult to answer,” I told her. “Basically because I thought it worth doing – or, at least, trying.”
She nodded slowly, her eyes on my face.
“Do you mean thought – or think?” she asked shrewdly.
“I’ve not given up before it’s begun,” I said. “Have you?”
She did not answer that. Instead, she said;
“What I don’t understand is the – well, the amateurishness, to use a kind word. There seems to be plenty of money behind it.”
“There were several possible ways of launching it,” I explained. “At one time Lord F contemplated the idea of causing a town to be created – rather in the manner of a miniature Brasilia – and made ready to receive the chosen. But the cost would have been prodigious, and even had he been able to stand it there would have been little left over for the endowment, which he considered very important – particularly during the first years. Without a substantial endowment it might never be occupied, and would stand a good chance of becoming the wrong kind of monument – an empty city at the world’s end known as Foxfield’s Folly.
“Or he could have employed contractors to carry out a less ambitious scheme under the direction of the first settlers. That
was feasible, though costly, but he rejected it chiefly on the grounds that it would import an undesirable element which could result in a frontier mining-town atmosphere creating standards and practices that might be very difficult to eradicate later on.
“So it was chiefly his desire not to start off on the wrong foot which decided him to make a modest start with a pioneer party, whose task would be just as much to bring into existence a community with acceptable standards as to create habitable conditions.”
“And this is it,” she said, without any particular inflexion.
“It has been done before. Smaller ships than this took the first settlers to America – and they made at least a material success of it. Their misfortune was the size of the place – which created the need for manpower, any kind of manpower, at any cost to their principles. We don’t have to start with the axe, the handsaw, and the spade – we should have a better chance…
“Besides,” I went on, “he thought the construction of a community by the community would have a psychological value. It would be better integrated, work out its own codes and mores, feel pride in what it had constructed, and acquire a sense of solidarity which would equip it to deal unitedly with outside influences that are bound to be felt from time to time.”
She contemplated for a moment.
“Yes, I can see that is sound theoretically, but it scarcely presupposes – well, us, does it?”
“I don’t know. Most of us are not of the calibre he had in mind,” I admitted, “but it isn’t easy to persuade the most capable, even if they are sympathetic, to throw over their commitments, sell up their homes, and take a chance on a somewhat hazily defined project on the other side of the world. Mostly you have to be content with what you can get. And, after all, we are only the pioneer party. Once we get established and there is something to come to, once the project can be shown to be on its feet, it could well begin to appeal.”