John Wyndham - The Chrysalids

On that we broke off. Rosalind finished packing up, and we arranged the gear to make the panniers more comfortable than they had been the previous night. Then we climbed up, I on the left again, Petra and Rosalind together in the right-hand basket this time. Rosalind reached back to give a thump on the huge flank, and we moved ponderously forward once more. Petra, who had been unusually subdued during the packing-up, burst into tears, and radiated distress.

She did not, it emerged from her snuffles, want to go to the Fringes, her mind was sorely troubled by thoughts of Old Maggie, and Hairy Jack and his family, and the other ominous nursery-threat characters said to lurk in those regions.

It would have been easier to pacify her had we not ourselves suffered from quite a residue of childhood apprehensions, or had we been able to advance some real idea of the region to set against its morbid reputation. As it was, we, like most people, knew too little of it to be convincing, and had to go on suffering her distress again. Admittedly it was less intense than it had been on former occasions, and experience did now enable us to put up more of a barrier against it; nevertheless, the effect was wearing. Fully half an hour passed before Rosalind succeeded in soothing away the obliterating hullabaloo. When she had, the others came in anxiously; Michael inquiring, with irritation:

‘What was it this time?’

We explained.

Michael dropped his irritability, and turned his attention to Petra herself. He began telling her in slow, clear thought-forms how the Fringes weren’t really the bogey place that people pretended. Most of the men and women who lived there were just unfortunate and unhappy. They had been taken away from their homes, often when they were babies, or some of them who were older had had to run away from their homes, simply because they didn’t look like other people, and they had to live in the Fringes because there was nowhere else people would leave them alone. Some of them did look very queer and funny indeed, but they couldn’t help that. It was a thing to be sorry, not frightened, about. If we had happened to have extra fingers or ears by mistake we should have been sent to the Fringes — although we should be just the same people inside as we were now. What people looked like didn’t really matter a great deal, one could soon get used to it, and —

But at about this stage Petra interrupted him.

‘Who is the other one?’ she inquired.

‘What other one? What do you mean?’ he asked her.

‘The somebody else who’s making think-pictures all mixed up with yours,’ she told him.

There was a pause. I opened right out, but could not detect any thought-shapes at all. Then:

‘I get nothing,’ came from Michael, and Mark and Rachel, too. ‘It must be—’

There was an impetuous strong sign from Petra. In words, it would have been an impatient ‘Shut up!’ We subsided, and waited.

I glanced over at the other pannier. Rosalind had one arm round Petra, and was looking down at her attentively. Petra herself had her eyes shut, as though all her attention were on listening. Presently she relaxed a little.

‘What is it?’ Rosalind asked her.

Petra opened her eyes. Her reply was puzzled, and not very clearly shaped.

‘Somebody asking questions. She’s a long way, a very long, long way away, I think. She says she’s had my afraid-thoughts before. She wants to know who I am, and where I am. Shall I tell her?’

There was a moment’s caution. Then Michael inquiring with a touch of excitement whether we approved. We did.

‘All right, Petra. Go ahead and tell her,’ he agreed.

‘I shall have to be very loud. She’s such a long way away,’ Petra warned us.

It was as well she did. If she had let it rip while our minds were wide open she’d have blistered them. I closed mine and tried to concentrate my attention on the way ahead of us. It helped, but it was by no means a thorough defence. The shapes were simple, as one would expect of Petra’s age, but they still reached me with a violence and brilliance which dazzled and deafened me.

There was the equivalent of ‘Phew’ from Michael when it let up; closely followed by the repeated equivalent of ‘Shut up!’ from Petra. A pause, and then another briefly-blinding interlude. When that subsided:

‘Where is she?’ inquired Michael.

‘Over there,’ Petra told him.

‘For goodness sake—’

‘She’s pointing south-west,’ I explained.

‘Did you ask her the name of the place, darling?’ Rosalind inquired.

‘Yes, but it didn’t mean anything, except that there were two parts of it and a lot of water,’ Petra told her, in words and obscurely. ‘She doesn’t understand where I am either.’

Rosalind suggested:

‘Tell her to spell it out in letter-shapes.’

‘But I can’t read letters,’ Petra objected tearfully.

‘Oh, dear, that’s awkward,’ Rosalind admitted. ‘But at least we can send. I’ll give you the letter-shapes one by one, and you can think them on to her. How about that?’

Petra agreed, doubtfully, to try.

‘Good,’ said Rosalind. ‘Look out, everybody! Here we go again.’

She pictured an ‘L’. Petra relayed it with devastating force. Rosalind followed up with an ‘A’ and so on, until the word was complete. Petra told us:

‘She understands, but she doesn’t know where Labrador is.

She says she’ll try to find out. She wants to send us her letter-shapes, but I said it’s no good.’

‘But it is, darling. You get them from her, then you show them to us — only gently, so that we can read them.’

Presently we got the first one. It was ‘Z.’ We were disappointed.

‘What on earth’s that?’ everyone inquired at once.

‘She’s got it back to front. It must be “S,”’ Michael decided.

‘It’s not “S,” it’s “Z,”’ Petra insisted tearfully.

‘Never mind them. Just go on,’ Rosalind told her.

The rest of the word built up.

‘Well, the others are proper letters,’ Michael admitted.’ Sea-land — it must be—’

‘Not “S”; it’s “Z,”’ repeated Petra, obstinately.

‘But, darling, “Z” doesn’t mean anything. Now, Sealand obviously means a land in the sea.’

‘If that helps,’ I said doubtfully. ‘According to my Uncle Axel there’s a lot more sea than anyone would think possible.’

At that point everything was blotted out by Petra conversing indignantly with the unknown. She finished to announce triumphantly: ‘It is “Z”. She says it’s different from “S”: like the noise a bee makes.’

‘All right,’ Michael told her, pacifically, ‘but ask her if there is a lot of sea.’

Petra came back shortly with:

‘Yes. There are two parts of it, with lots of sea all round. From where she is you can see the sun shining on it for miles and miles and it’s all blue—’

‘In the middle of the night?’ said Michael. ‘She’s crazy.’

‘But it isn’t night where she is. She showed me.’ Petra said. ‘It’s a place with lots and lots of houses, different from Waknuk houses, and much, much bigger. And there are funny carts without horses running along the roads. And things in the air, with whizzing things on top of them—’

I was jolted to recognize the picture from the childhood dreams that I had almost forgotten. I broke in, repeating it more clearly than Petra had shown it — a fish-shaped thing, all white and shiny.

‘Yes — like that,’ Petra agreed.

‘There’s something very queer about this, altogether, ‘Michael put in. ‘David, how on earth did you know—?’

I cut him short.

‘Let Petra get all she can now,’ I suggested. ‘We can sort it out later.’