John Wyndham: The Chrysalids

I caught Michael wondering with some alarm if this was not a trick, and whether he might not have been better off if he had tried to run for it. Before I could reply the Sealand woman came in reassuring us again, telling us to keep calm and have patience. Rosalind emphasized that to Petra.

‘Has it got you, too?’ I asked her.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The wind from the machine blew it right into the cave — Petra, darling, you heard what she said. You must try to keep still.’

The throbbing and the whirring which had dominated everything grew less as the machine slowed down. Presently it stopped. The succeeding silence was shocking. There were a few half-muffled calls and smothered sounds, but little more. I understood the reasons for that. Strands had fallen across my own mouth. I could not have opened it to call out if I wanted to.

The waiting seemed interminable. My skin crawled under the touch of the stuff, and the pull of it was becoming painful.

The Sealand woman inquired: ‘Michael? – Keep counting to guide me to you.’

Michael started counting, in figure shapes. They were steady until the one and the two of his twelve wavered and dissolved into a pattern of relief and thankfulness. In the silence that had now fallen I could hear him say in words: ‘They’re in that cave there, that one.’

There was a creak from the ladder, a gritting of its poles against the ledge, and presently a slight hissing noise. A dampness fell on my face and hands, and the skin began to lose its puckered feeling. I tried to open my eyes again; they resisted, but gave slowly. There was a sticky feeling about the lids as I raised them.

Close in front of me, standing on the upper rungs of the ladder, and leaning inwards, was a figure entirely hidden in a shiny white suit. There were still filaments leisurely adrift in the air, but when they fell on the headpiece or shoulders of the white suit they did not stick. They slithered off and wafted gently on their downward way. I could see nothing of the suit’s wearer but a pair of eyes looked at me through small, transparent windows. In a white-gloved hand was a metal bottle, with a fine spray hissing from it. ‘Turn over,’ came the woman’s thought. I turned, and she played the spray up and down the front of my clothes. Then she climbed the last two or three rungs, stepped over me where I lay and made her way towards Rosalind and Petra at the back of the cave, spraying as she went. Michael’s head and shoulders appeared above the sill. He, too, was bedewed with spray, and the few vagrant strands that settled him lay glistening for a moment before they dissolved. I sat up and looked past him.

The white machine rested in the middle of the clearing. The device on top of it had ceased to revolve, and now that it was observable, seemed to be a sort of conical spiral, built up in a number of spaced sections from some almost transparent material. There were glazed windows in the side of the fish-shaped body, and a door stood open.

The clearing itself looked as if a fantastic number of spiders had spun there with all their might and main. The place was festooned with threads, which appeared more white than glossy now: it took a moment or two of feeling something was wrong with them before one perceived that they failed to move in the breeze as webs would. And not only they, but everything was motionless, petrified.

The forms of a number of men, and horses, too, were scattered among the shacks. They were as unmoving as the rest.

A sudden sharp cracking came from the right. I looked over there, just in time to see a young tree break off a foot from the ground, and fall. Then another movement caught the corner of my eye — a bush slowly leaning over. Its roots came out of the ground as I watched. Another bush moved. A shack crumpled in on itself and collapsed, and another. It was uncanny and alarming….

Back in the cave there was a sigh of relief from Rosalind. I got up and went to her, with Michael following. Petra announced in a subdued, somewhat expostulatory, tone:

‘That was very horrid.’

Her eyes dwelt reprovingly and curiously on the white-suited figure. The woman made a few final, all-encompassing passes with her spray, then pulled off her gloves and lifted back her hood. She regarded us: we frankly stared at her.

Her eyes were large, with irises more brown than green, and fringed with long, deep-gold lashes. Her nose was straight, but her nostrils curved with the perfection of a sculpture. Her mouth was, perhaps, a little wide; the chin beneath it was rounded, but not soft. Her hair was just a little darker than Rosalind’s, and, astonishingly in a woman, it was short. Cut off nearly level with her jaw.

But more than anything it was the lightness of her face that made us stare. It was not pallor, it was simply fairness, like new cream, and with cheeks that might have been dusted with pink petals. There was scarcely a line in its smoothness, it seemed all new and perfect, as if neither wind nor rain had ever touched her. We found it hard to believe that any real, living person could look like that, so untouched, so unflawed.

For she was no girl in a first tender blossoming, unmistakably she was a woman — thirty, perhaps; one could not tell. She was sure of herself, with a serenity of confidence which made Rosalind’s self-reliance seem almost bravado.

She took us in, and then fixed her attention upon Petra. She smiled at her, with just a glimpse of perfect, white teeth.

There was an immensely complex pattern which compounded pleasure, satisfaction, achievement, relief, approval, and, most surprisingly to me, a touch of something very like awe. The intermixture was subtle beyond Petra’s grasp, but enough of it reached her to give her an unwonted, wide-eyed seriousness for some seconds as she looked up into the woman’s eyes; as if she knew in some way, without understanding how or why, that this was one of the cardinal moments of her life.

Then, after a few moments, her expression relaxed; she smiled and chuckled. Evidently something was passing between them, but it was of a quality, or on a level, that did not reach me at all. I caught Rosalind’s eye, but she simply shook her head and watched.

The Sealand woman bent down and picked Petra up. They looked closely into one another’s faces. Petra raised her hand and tentatively touched the woman’s face, as if to assure herself that it was real. The Sealand woman laughed, kissed her and put her down again. She shook her head slowly, as if she were not quite believing.

‘It was worth while,’ she said in words, but words so curiously pronounced that I scarcely understood them at first. ‘Yes. Certainly, it was worth while!’

She slipped into thought-forms, much easier to follow than her words.

‘It was not simple to get permission to come. Such an immense distance: more than twice as far as any of us has been before. So costly to send the ship: they could scarcely believe it would be worth it. But it will be…’ She looked at Petra again, wonderingly. ‘At her age, and untrained — yet she can throw a thought half-way round the world!’ She shook her head once more, as if still unable to believe it entirely. Then she turned to me.

‘She has still a great deal to learn, but we will give her the best teachers, and then, one day, she will be teaching them.’

She sat down on Sophie’s bed of twigs and skins. Against the thrown-back white hood, her beautiful head looked as though it were framed by a halo. She studied each of us thoughtfully in turn, and seemed satisfied. She nodded.

‘With one another’s help, you have managed to get quite a long way, too; but you’ll find that there is a lot more we can teach you.’ She took hold of Petra’s hand. ‘Well, as you’ve no possessions to collect, and there’s nothing to delay us, we might as well start now.’