Pawley's Peepholes

  PAWLEY'S PEEPHOLES

  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.
r />   But 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

  PAWLEY'S PEEPHOLES (1951)

  When I called round at Sally's I showed her the paragraph in the Westwich Evening News.

  “What do you think of that?” I asked her.

  She read it, standing, and with an impatient frown on her pretty face.

  “I don't believe it,” she said, finally.

  Sally's principles of belief and disbelief are a thing I've never got quite lined up. How a girl can dismiss a pack of solid evidence as though it were kettle steam, and then go and fall for some ad­ver­tise­ment that's phoney from the first word as though it were holy writ, I just don't ... Oh well, it keeps on happening, anyway.

  This paragraph read:

  MUSIC WITH A KICK

  Patrons of the concert at the Adams Hall last night were astonished to see a pair of legs dangling knee-deep from the ceiling during one of the items. The whole audience saw them, and all reports agree that they were bare legs, with some kind of sandals on the feet. They remained visible for some three or four minutes, during which time they several times moved back and forth across the ceiling. Finally, after making a kicking move­ment, they disap­peared up­wards, and were seen no more. Exami­nation of the roof shows no traces, and the owners of the Hall are at a loss to account for the phe­nom­enon.

  “It's just one more thing,” I said.

  “What does it prove, anyway?” said Sally, apparently forget­ful that she was not believing it.

  “I don't know that — yet,” I admitted.

  “Well, there you are, then,” she said.

  Sometimes I get the feeling that Sally has no real respect for logic.

  However, most people were thinking the way Sally was, more or less, because most people like things to stay nice and normal. But it had already begun to look to me as if there were things happen­ing that ought to be added together and make something.

  The first man to bump up against it — the first I can find on record, that is — was one Constable Walsh. It may be that others before him saw things, and just put them down as a new kind of pink elephant; but Constable Walsh's idea of a top-notch celebration was a mug of strong tea with a lot of sugar, so when he came across a head sitting up on the pave­ment on what there was of its neck, he stopped to look at it pretty hard. The thing that really upset him, according to the report he turned in when he had run half a mile back to the station and stopped gibbering, was that it had looked back at him.

  Well, it isn't good to find a head on a pave­ment at any time, and 2 a.m. does some­how make it worse, but as for the rest, well, you can get what looks like a reproach­ful glance from a cod on a slab if your mind happens to be on some­thing else. Constable Walsh did not stop there, however. He reported that the thing opened its mouth “as if it was trying to say some­thing”. If it did, he should not have mentioned it; it just naturally brought the pink elephants to mind. However, he stuck to it, so after they had examined him and taken disap­point­ing sniffs at his breath, they sent him back with another man to show just where he had found the thing. Of course, there wasn't any head, nor blood, nor signs of clean­ing up. And that's about all there was to the incident — save, doubt­less, a few curt remarks on a conduct-sheet to dog Constable Walsh's future career.

  But the Constable hadn't a big lead. Two evenings later a block of flats was curdled by searing shrieks from a Mrs. Rourke in No. 35, and simul­ta­neous­ly from a Miss Farrell who lived above her. When the neigh­bours arrived, Mrs. Rourke was hysterical about a pair of legs that had been dang­ling from her bedroom ceiling, and Miss Farrell the same about an arm and shoulder that had stretched out from under her bed. But there was noth­ing to be seen on the ceiling, and noth­ing more than a dis­credit­able amount of dust to be found under Miss Farrell's bed. And there were a number of other inci­dents, too. It was Jimmy Lindlen who works, if that isn't too strong a word for it, in the office next to mine who drew my atten­tion to them in the first place. Jimmy collects facts. His defi­ni­tion of a fact is anything that gets printed in a news­paper — poor fellow. He doesn't mind a lot what sub­jects his facts cover as long as they look queer. I suspect that he once heard that the truth is never simple, and deduced from that that everything that's not simple must be true. I was used to him coming into my room, full of in­spi­ra­tion, and didn't take much account of it, so when he brought in his first batch of cuttings about Con­stable Walsh and the rest I didn't ignite much.

  But a few days later he was back with some more. I was, a bit sur­prised by Ms playing the same kind of pheno­mena twice running, so I gave it a little more atten­tion than usual.

  “You see. Arms, heads, legs, torsos, all over the place. It's an epidemic. There's some­thing behind it. Some­thing's happening” he said, as near as one can voca­lize italics.”

  When I had read a few of them I had to admit that this time he had got hold of some­thing where the vein of queer­ness was pretty constant.

  A bus driver had seen the upper half of a body set up vertically in the road before him — but a bit too late. When he stopped and climbed out, sweat­ing, to exa­mine the mess, there was noth­ing there. A woman hang­ing out of a window, watch­ing the street, saw another head below her doing the same, but this one was pro­ject­ing out of the solid brick­work. Then there was a pair of arms that had risen out of the floor of a butcher's shop and seemed to grope for some­thing; after a minute or two they had with­drawn into the solid cement with­out trace — unless one were to count some detri­ment to the butcher's trade. There was the man on a build­ing job who had become aware of a strangely dressed figure standing close to him, but supported by empty air —after which he had to be helped down and sent home. Another figure was noticed between the rails in the path of a heavy goods tram, but was found to have vanished with­out trace when the train had passed.

  While I skimmed through these and some others, Jimmy stood waiting, like a soda siphon. I didn't have to say more than, “Huh!”

  “You see,” he said. “Something is happening.”

  “Supposing it is,” I conceded cautiously, “then what is it?”

  “The manifestation zone is limited,” Jimmy told me impressively, and produced a town plan. “If you look where I've marked the incidents you'll see that they're grouped. Somewhere in that circle is ‘the focus of disturbance’.” This time he managed to vocalize the inverted commas, and waited for me to register amaze­ment.

  “So?” I said. “Disturbance of just what?”

  He dodged that one.

  “I've a pretty good idea now of the cause,” he told me weightily.

  That was normal, though it might be a different idea an hour later.

  “I'll buy it,” I offered.

  “Teleportation!” he announced. “That's what it is. Bound to come sooner or later. Now some­one's on to it.”

  “H'm,” I said.

  “But it must be.” He leaned forward earnestly. “How else'd you account for it?”

  “Well, if there could be tele­por­ta­tion, or tele­port­age, or whatever it is, surely there would have to be a trans­mitter and some sort of re­assem­bly station,” I pointed out. “You couldn't expect a person or object to be kind of broad­cast and then come together again in any old p
lace.”

  “But you don't know that,” he said. “Besides, that's part of what I was mean­ing by ‘focus’. The trans­mitter is some­where else, but focused on that area.”

  “If it is,” I said, “he seems to have got his levels and posi­tions all to hell. I wonder just what happens to a fellow who gets himself re­assem­bled half in and half out of a brick wall?”

  It's details like that that get Jimmy impatient.

  “Obviously its early stages. Experimental,” he said.

  It still seemed to me un­com­fort­able for the subject, early stages or not, but I didn't press it.

  That evening was the first time I mentioned it to Sally, and, on the whole, it was a mis­take. After making it quite clear that she didn't believe it, she went on to say that if it was true it was pro­bably just another inven­tion.

  “What do you mean,” ‘just another invention’? Why, it'd be revolutionary!” I told her.

  “The wrong kind of revolution, the way we'd use it.”

  “Meaning?” I asked.

  Sally was in one of her wither­ing moods. She turned on her dis­illu­sioned voice:

  “We've got two ways of using invent­ions,” she said. “One is to kill more people more easily: the other is to enable quick-turn­over spivs to make easy money out of suckers. Maybe there are a few except­ions like X-rays, but not many. Invent­ions! What we do with the product of genius is first of all ram it down to the lowest common deno­mi­nator and then multiply it by the vulgarest possible frac­tion. What a century! What a world! When I think what other cen­turies are going to say about ours it makes me go hot all over.”

  “I shouldn't worry. You won't be hearing them,” I said.

  The withering eye was on me.

  “I should have known. That is a remark well up to the Twentieth-Century standard.”

  “You're a funny girl,” I told her. “I mean, the way you think may be crazy, but you do do it, in your own way. Now most girl's futures are all cloud-cuckoo beyond next season's hat or next year's baby. Outside of that it might be going to snow split atoms for all they care — they've got a com­fort­ing feeling deep down that nothing's ever changed much, or ever will.”