The Seeds of Time

‘Why here?’ I said again. ‘I should have thought that Harwell or a Royal Arsenal ‘

‘Experimental, so far,’ he reminded me.

‘Oh,’ I said, abashed. ‘I went on to tell him what Sally and I had seen the previous night. ‘She sort of didn’t look much like the way I think of Russians,’ I added.

Jimmy shook his head. ‘Might be camouflage. After all, behind that curtain they have to get their idea of the way our girls look mostly from magazines and picture papers,’ he pointed out.

The next day, after about seventy-five per cent of its readers had written in to tell about the funny things they had been seeing, the News dropped the facetious angle. In two days more, the thing had become factional, dividing sharply into what you might call the Classical and Modern camps. In the latter, schismatic groups argued the claims of teleportage against three-dimensional projection, or some theory of spontaneous molecular assembly: in the former, opinions could be sorted as beliefs in a ghostly invasion, a suddenly acquired visibility of habitually wandering spirits, or the imminence of Judgement Day. In the heat of debate it was rapidly becoming difficult to tell who had seen how much of what, and who was enthusiastically bent on improving his case at some expense of fact.

On Saturday Sally and I met for lunch. Afterwards, we started off in the car for a little place in the hills which seemed to me an ideal spot for a proposal. But at the main crossing in the High Street the man in front jumped on his brakes. So did I, and the man behind me. The one behind him didn’t quite. There was an interesting crunch of metal going on on the other side of the crossing, too. I stood up to see what it was all about, and then pulled Sally up beside me.

‘Here we go again,’ I said. ‘Look!’

Slap in the middle of the crossing was-well, you could scarcely call it a vehicle-it was more like a flat trolley or platform, about a foot off the ground. And when I say off the ground, I mean just that. No wheels, or legs. It kind of hung there, from nothing. Standing on it, dressed in coloured things like long shirts or smocks, were half a dozen men looking interestedly around them. Along the edge of the platform was lettered: PAWLEY’S PEEPHOLES. One of the men was pointing out All Saints’ Church to another; the rest were paying more attention to the cars and the people. The policeman on duty was hanging a goggling face over the edge of his traffic-control box. Then he pulled himself together. He shouted, he blew his whistle, then he shouted again. The men on the platform took no notice at all. The policeman got out of his box and went across the road looking like a volcano that had seen a nice place to erupt.

‘Hey!’ he shouted to them.

It didn’t worry them, but when he got within a yard or two of them they noticed him, and they nudged one another, and grinned. The policeman’s face was purplish, he spoke to them luridly, but they just went on watching him with amused interest. He reached a truncheon out of his back pocket, and went closer. He grabbed at a fellow in a yellow shirt-and his arm went right through him.

The policeman stepped back. You could see his nostrils sort of spread, the way a horse’s do. Then he took a firmer hold of his truncheon and made a fine circular sweep at the lot of them. They kept on grinning back at him as the stick went through them.

I take off my hat to that policeman. He didn’t run. He stared at them for a moment with a very queer expression on his face, then he turned, and walked deliberately back to his box; just as deliberately he signalled the north-south traffic across. The man ahead of me was ready for it. He drove right at, and through, the platform. It began to move, but I’d have nicked it myself, had it been nickable. Sally, looking back, said that it slid away on a curve and disappeared through the front of the Penny Savings Bank.

When we got to the spot I’d had in mind the weather had come over bad to make the place look dreary and unpropitious, so we drove about a bit, and then back to a nice quiet roadside restaurant just outside Westwich. I was getting the conversation round to the mood where I wanted it when who should come across to our table but Jimmy.

‘Fancy meeting you two!’ he said. ‘Did you hear what happened at the Crossing this afternoon, Jerry?’

‘We were there,’ I told him.

‘You know, Jerry, this is something bigger than we thought —a whole lot bigger. That platform thing. These people are away ahead of us technically. Do you know what I reckon they are?’

‘Martians?’ I suggested.

He stared at me, taken aback. ‘Now, how on earth did you guess that?’ he said, amazedly.

‘I sort of saw it had to come,’ I admitted. ‘But,’ I added, ‘I do have a kind of feeling that Martians wouldn’t be labelled “Pawley’s Peepholes.”’

‘Oh, were they? Nobody told me that,’ said Jimmy.

He went away sadly, but even by breaking in at all he had wrecked the mood I’d been building up.

On Monday morning our typist, Anna, arrived even more scatterated than commonly.

‘The most terrible thing happened to me,’ she told us as soon as she was inside the door. ‘Oh, dear. And did I blush all over!’