More of the Essential John Wyndham, page 64
“We tried to make it clear to this Arthur that we couldn't be sure that it would work in reverse — and that anyway there was this four-day calendar error, so at best it wouldn’t be exact. I don’t think he really grasped that. The poor fellow was in a wretched state. All he wanted was just a chance — any kind of chance— to get out of here. He was simply one-track.
"So we decided to take the risk — after all, if it turned out not to be possible he'd — well, he’d know nothing about it, or nothing would happen at all. The generator was still on the same setting. We put one fellow on to that, took this Arthur back to the path by your room, and got him lined up there.
"'Now walk forward,' we told him. 'Just as you were walking when it happened.' And we gave the switch-on signal. What with the doctor's dope and one thing and another he was pretty groggy, but he did his best to pull himself together. He went forward at a kind of stagger. Literal-minded fellow, he was half-crying, but in a odd sort of voice he was trying to sing: ‘Everybody's doin' it, do —’
“And then he disappeared — just vanished completely.” He paused, and added regretfully: “All the evidence we have now is not very convincing — one tennis racquet, practically new, but vintage and one straw hat, ditto.”
Mrs. Dolderson lay without speaking. He said: “We did our best, Mother. We could only try.”
“Of course you did, dear. And you succeeded. It wasn't your fault that you couldn't undo what you'd done. No, I was just wondering what would have happened if it had been a few minutes earlier, or later, that you had switched your machine on. But I don’t suppose that could have happened, or you wouldn't have been you at all.”
He looked at her a little uneasily. "What do you mean, Mother?” he asked.
"Never mind, dear. You did your best — and I expect it was the best. ...”
“He was much too distressed for us to try to keep him here. He’d have gone all to pieces. What else could we have done?”
“I don’t know — nothing, I think. It was written, I suppose.”
“What makes you think we succeeded in getting him back, Mother?”
“I know you did, dear.” She paused, then, in a quiet flat voice, as if quoting, she said: “‘Arthur Waring Batley. Second Lieutenant, of wounds received in action in France. Third of November, Nineteen-Fifteen.'”
She closed her eyes. A tear escaped and ran slowly down her cheek. Harold pulled out his handkerchief to wipe it away. She pressed his hand but did not speak. High above the house the whine of a jet plane swelled and died away.
Mrs. Dolderson said: “I shan't be sorry to go. It will hurt to leave you, Harold, my dear, but that's all I shall really mind when the time comes. Perhaps I’m a little like poor Arthur. I don't much like your world — nor the things it learns to do.”
Time Stops Today
1953
A person awaking should, in my opinion, glide smoothly back into coordination. Otherwise he feels that there is some part of him that hasn’t got back in time. And if there’s another thing I dislike, it’s the sharp drive of a woman’s elbow—well, come to that, anybody’s elbow—among the ribs, more particularly if that woman happens to be my wife. After all, it’s part of a wife’s job to learn not to do these things.
In the circumstances my response came clear out of the subconscious. “Well, really...!” said Sylvia. “I know I’m only your wife, George, but—well, really...!”
My time-lag caught up. “Sorry,” I said. “But, damn it...! What’s the matter, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” Sylvia admitted, “but I’ve got a feeling that there’s something wrong.”
“Oh, Lord!” I said and switched on the light. Naturally, everything looked just as usual. “Intuition?” I suggested.
“You needn’t sneer at me, George. What about that Sunday I knew we were going to have an accident with the car?”
“Which Sunday? There were so many.”
“Why, the Sunday we did have one, of course. I felt just the same way about it as I do now.”
I sat up in bed. The clock had been a wedding present. After a while I calculated that it was tryin to indicate 3:15 am. I listened, couldn’t hear anything, any place. Still, you know what intuition is. “I suppose I’d better have a look. Where did you think it was?” I asked her.
“What was?”
“Whatever you heard.”
“But I didn’t hear anything. I told you—it’s just a feeling that something’s wrong.”
I relaxed and leaned back on the pillow. “Would I do something about that?”
“What can you do? It’s just a feeling.”
“Then why on Earth...?” I began.
At that moment the light went out. “There!” said Sylvia, triumphantly; “I knew!”
“Good. Well, that’s over then,” I pulled up the bedclothes.
“Aren’t you going to look at it?” she inquired.
“A blown fuse can keep till morning—even if you’d not left my torch some place,” I told her.
“But it may not be a fuse.”
“To hell with it,” I muttered, getting comfortable again.
“I should have thought you would want to know,” she suggested.
“I don’t. I just want to sleep.”
When I woke again the morning was nice and bright. The sun was shining in and painting a part of the opposite wall with pale gold. I stretched a bit in warm comfort and reached for a cigarette. As I lit it, I remembered the light, I pushed the switch on and off a few times, without result. That cute electric clock still seemed to be saying 3:15; my watch said 7 o'clock, I lay back, enjoying the first few puffs at the cigarette.
Sylvia slept on. I allowed the temptation to drive my elbow into her ribs for a change to pass. She manages such a decorative and confiding appearance when she sleeps. Just then she said ‘Ugh-h-huh,” and pulled the sheet over her ear. She is not one who greets the dawn with a glad cry.
At about the same moment, it occurred to me that there was something wrong with the day—a sort of background buzz of traffic from the main road—an occasional car in our own road, milk bottle clinking and feel a general sense of stir. This morning all that was missing—even the bird-sounds, a disturbing-air-of — peace lay over the neighborhood. The more I listened, the more unnatural it seemed. At length it drove me to get up and go to the window. Behind me Sylvia said, “Hell!” and pulled the bedclothes more closely around her.
I think I must have stood looking out of the window for several minutes before I turned back, Then I “Sylvia. Something funny’s been happening.”
“Ugh,” she remarked.
Dropping the understatement, I continued, “Come and look. If you don’t see it, too, I must be going crazy.”
The tone of my voice got through to her. She opened her eyes. “What is it?”
“Come and look,” I repeated.
She yawned, pushed back the covers, and maneuvered off the bed. She thrust her feet into a pair of mules decorated, for some incomprehensible feminine reason, with feathers and pulled on a wrap as she staggered across.
“What...?” she began, Then she shut up, and stood, staring.
We live in a suburb. It’s a nice suburb, nice sort of people. The houses are pretty much alike, all with their garages and gardens. Not large houses—not large gardens, either, though quite large enough for the husbands to look after. We stand on a slope, and from the bedroom window we look down upon the backs of a similar row of houses which front upon a road parallel with ours and have gardens running up towards us, The end of our garden is separated from the end of the one opposite by a high wooden fence, which is continuous along all the properties. Across the roofs of the opposite houses, we can see the huddle of more industrial parts beyond. On fine days, we can see a considerable distance further to low hills— where houses similar to our own stand out among trees and gardens, but more often, the two residential areas are hidden from one another by the haze, thickened with smoke, that rises between them. It is not, perhaps, an inspiring view across the tall chimneys, municipal towers and the beetle-backs of several movie houses; but it does give us a sense of space and a big stretch of sky. The trouble with it, this morning, was that it gave us little else.
Just beneath us lay our lawn and flowerbeds, then the hedge which cuts off the vegetable garden. There the rows of beans, peas, and cabbages should have run down past a pear tree on the left, and a plum tree on the right, until they reached the raspberry and currant department. But they didn’t. They began— but about halfway down their proper length they just stopped. Beyond that abrupt edge there was a brown, sandy-looking soil in which a coarse grass grew in large or small patches and lonely tufts. It was dune land, except it lacked any noticeable hillocks. It stretched on and on, undulating gently into the distance, until it met brownish green hills far away.
We stared out at it in silence for some little time. Then Sylvia said in a choked voice: “Is this some kind of joke, George?”
Sylvia has two reactions to any sort of unpleasant surprise. One is that if it utterly fails to amuse her, it must be some form of joke and the other is that, whatever it concerns, I must be responsible for it, somehow. I do not pretend to know what she thought I might have been doing in order to spirit away a whole landscape, but I was able to reply with truth that no one could be more surprised than I.
At which she gave a kind of gulp and ran out of the room.
I stood where I was, still looking out. On the left was the Saggitt’s garden, running down alongside our own, and cut off in the same peculiar way. Beyond that was the Drury’s—at least, part of theirs. Not only was it cut off on a line with ours, but there was no more than a six-foot wide strip of it to be seen. Beyond, was the sandy soil.
Sylvia came back looking frightened. “It’s the same in front,” she said. “The garden’s there, and half the width of the sidewalk—then there’s just that stuff and half the garage has gone.”
I raised the window sash and looked out to the right. From that angle I could look down on the garage roof, It looked usual enough. Then I saw what she meant. “Its half the Gunners’ that’s gone,” I said.
And it had. The roof of their garage climbed to within an inch or two of the ridge, then stopped as if it had been sliced clean off. Where the rest of it should have been—and where the Gunners’ house should have been—tussocks of grass waved in a light wind.
“Thank goodness,” said Sylvia. Not uncharitably, you understand— but, after all, we had only had our new convertible a couple of weeks.
“We must be dreaming,” I said, a little shakily.
“We can’t both be,” she objected.
That, of course, was debatable, but this was scarcely the moment, so I said: “Well...am I dreaming you, or are you dreaming me?”
I let her have it: I ought to have known better than to ask the question in the first place. I hurried on some clothes and went outside to see what I could make of it. The front was just as Sylvia had said. I walked down the path, opened the gate, and stepped out on to the half-width of sidewalk. The edge, where the sandy soil began, looked just as if it had been trimmed off with a sharp knife. I bent over to look at it more closely—and caught myself a sharp crack on the head. It was so unexpected that I recoiled slightly. Then I put up a hand to see what had done it. My fingers met a smooth surface which was neither hot nor cold and seemed as solid as rock. I raised the other hand and felt across several square feet of it. It scared me a bit because, though . it was unfamiliar, it was only a step on from the quite familiar. One just had to imagine plate glass with a perfectly non-reflecting surface...
I could not touch the sandy soil and the grass beyond. The transparent wall rose from the very line where normal things ended. As I stood there, bewilderedly looking through it, I noticed an odd thing: the grass beyond was waving, yet I could not feel even a stir in the air around me.
After a moment’s thought, I went to the garage. There I chose my heaviest hammer and found an old can half full of sludgy kerosene. Outside again, I threw the contents of the can at the transparent wall. It was strange the way the stuff splattered suddenly in mid air and began to trickle down. Then I took a grip on the hammer and hit hard. The thing rebounded, and the shaft stung my fingers so that I dropped it. There. was no other perceptible result.
When I investigated at the back of the house, I found that the same invisible barrier terminated what remained of the garden—and with increased bizarre effect, for there it appeared to bisect the plum tree so that, seen from as nearly to the side as I could get, the whole trunk and spread was flat-backed like a piece of stage scenery. I wished I could crane around to see what the devil it looked like from the back, but the wall itself prevented that.
In a rough survey, I estimated that the area of normalcy enclosed by these wails would be an approximate square of seventy yards. Beyond this in all directions stretched the featureless dunes—featureless, that is, save for the hills in the distance which occupied just the same position that hills usually occupied in our view.
Not much wiser, I went back to the house.
Sylvia, who feels able to face most things better on a cup of coffee, was cursing the cooker for not heating. “Oh, there you are. Can’t you fix that fuse?”
“Well...” I began doubtfully. Then I went and looked in the box. As I had expected, the fuses were okay. I said so.
“Nonsense,” said Sylvia, “nothing goes on.”
“On the contrary, quite a lot goes on,” I said. “Though just what. Anyway, the point is—where would the power come from?”
“How would I...?” she began. Then she got the idea. She opened her mouth again, failed to find anything to say and stood looking at me.
I shook my head. “I’ll go and see the Saggitts,” I said.
It was not that I expected either of the Saggitts to be much help, but one began to have a feeling that some company would be acceptable, Still, I get along all right with Doug Saggitt, although he’s quite a bit older than I am—forty-seven, forty-eight, maybe. He’s getting thin some places, and gray in others, and though he’s not fossilizing yet, it’s hard to see why Rose married him—she being only twenty-one and quite a whistle rouser.
It seems to me that some girls, maybe when they’re half-awake one morning, get a kind of nudge from the lifeforce. ‘Hey!’ says the lifeforce. “Time you were getting married.’ ‘What, me?’ says the girl. ‘Sure. You—and someone else, of course,’ says the lifeforce. ‘But I mean to have a lot of fun first, says the girl. ‘“Maybe—but then maybe not,’ says the lifeforce ominously. ‘It could be you'll come out in spots tomorrow, or lose a leg in a car accident, or—’
After it’s gone on this way for a bit, it has the girl so paralytic with fright that she flies off wildly and marries a Doug Saggitt. After a bit, she finds that she doesn’t have spots and does have two legs, that she doesn’t have a lot of fun and does have Doug Saggitt and she begins to wonder whether Doug Saggitt was just what the lifeforce had in mind, after all. Mind you, that’s only a theory, but it does save me having to say, ‘I can’t think why she married him,’ the way the rest of the people in the road do every time they see her.
Anyway… I went over to their house and pressed the bell. It looked as if, whatever it was, we and the Saggitts were in it together—and alone, for the transparent barrier on the side beyond them passed through the Drurys’ house, including in our area simply the side-wall and a depth of perhaps six inches beyond. It looked extremely dangerous, though it showed no sign of falling. Looking at it while I waited, I reckoned that it, like the plum tree and the other things the barrier cut across, must be clamped to the invisible surface by a kind of magnetism.
I gave a second long chime on the bell. Presently I heard feet on the stairs. The door opened, and a hand thrust out some coins wrapped in a scrap of writing paper. It moved impatiently when I didn’t accept the offer; the door opened a little more and Rose’s head appeared.
“Oh,” she said. “I thought you were the milk, What’s the...?” She cut off abruptly; her eyes widened as she saw the view behind me.
‘“Wh-what’s happened?” she stuttered.
“That’s what I want to see Doug about,” I told her.
“He’s still asleep,” she said vaguely, still staring where the other side of the road ought to be.
“Well...” I began. Then Sylvia came hurrying across.
“George,” she said, with a note of accusation. “The gas doesn’t work, either.”
“Is that surprising? Look where the gasworks was,” I said, and pointed away across the dunes.
“But how can I possibly cook breakfast?”
“You can’t,” I admitted.
“But that’s ridiculous. You'll have to do something about it, George.”
“Now, what in the hell do you suppose I can do?”
Sylvia regarded me and then turned to Rose with an expression of sisterly suffering. “Aren’t men helpless?” she asked, in a voice needing no answer.
Rose was still looking round in resentful bewilderment. “If you'll rout Doug out, we can at least hold a conference about this,” I said.
Sylvia and I waited in the lounge. It wasn’t a comfortable wait. Sylvia was doing her hedgehog act—she kind of rolls into a ball of silence, with all the spines sticking out. I used to be the fool terrier in that game, but not now. I don’t know which irritates her most.
Doug made his appearance in a bathrobe, with his chin bristling and his hair on end—what there was of it. Rose followed. For some reason she had chosen to put on a hostess gown. “What the hell’s supposed to be going on?” Doug demanded.
“Listen,” I said, “before we go any further, will everybody quit barking at me as though I’d done it. You can see what’s happened, and you know about as much as I do.”
