The Seeds of Time
- Автор: Уиндем Джон Паркс Лукас Бейнон Харрис
- Язык: английский
- Год: Michael Joseph
- ISBN: 0-7181-0362-9
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «The Seeds of Time». Краткое содержание книги:
‘All over?’ enquired Jimmy interestedly.
She scorned him.
‘There I was in my bath, and when I happened to look up there was a man in a green shirt, standing watching me. Of course, I screamed, at once.’
‘Of course,’ agreed Jimmy. ‘Very proper. And what happened then, or shouldn’t we ?’
‘He just stood there,’ said Anna. ‘Then he sniggered, and walked away through the wall. Was I mortified!’
‘Very mortifying thing, a snigger,’ Jimmy agreed.
Anna explained that it was not entirely the snigger that had mortified her. ‘What I mean is,’ she said, ‘things like that oughtn’t to be allowed. If a man is going to be able to walk through a girl’s bathroom wall, where is he going to stop?”
Which seemed a pretty fair question.
The boss arrived just then. I followed him into his room. He wasn’t looking happy.
‘What the hell’s going on in this damned town, Jerry?’ he demanded. ‘Wife comes home yesterday. Finds two incredible girls in the sitting-room. Thinks it’s something to do with me. First bust-up in twenty years. In the middle of it girls vanish,’ he said succinctly.
One couldn’t do more than make a few sympathetic sounds.
That evening when I went to see Sally I found her sitting on the steps of the house, in the drizzle.
‘What on earth ?’ I began.
She gave me a bleak look.
‘Two of them came into my room. A man and a girl. They wouldn’t go. They just laughed at me. Then they started to behave just as though I weren’t there. It got-well, I just couldn’t stay, Jerry.’
She went on looking miserable, and then suddenly burst into tears.
From then on it was stepped up. There was a brisk, if one-sided, engagement in the High Street next morning. Miss Dotherby, who comes of one of Westwich’s most respected families, was outraged in every lifelong principle by the appearance of four mop-headed girls who stood giggling on the corner of Northgate. Once she had retracted her eyes and got her breath back, she knew her duty. She gripped her umbrella as if it had been her grandfather’s sword, and advanced. She sailed through them, smiting right and left-and when she turned round they were laughing at her. She swiped wildly through them again, and they kept on laughing. Then she started babbling, so someone called an ambulance to take her away.
By the end of the day the town was full of mothers crying shame and men looking staggered, and the Town Clerk and the police were snowed under with demands for somebody to do something about it.
The trouble seemed to come thickest in the district that Jimmy had originally marked out. You could meet them elsewhere, but in that area you couldn’t help encountering gangs of them, the men in coloured shirts, the girls with their amazing hair-do’s and even more amazing decorations on their shirts, sauntering arm-in-arm out of walls, and wandering indifferently through cars and people alike. They’d pause anywhere to point things out to one another and go off into helpless roars of silent laughter. What tickled them most was when people got angry with them. They’d make signs and faces at the stuffier sort until they got them tearing mad-and the madder, the funnier. They ambled as the spirit took them, through shops and banks, and offices, and homes, without a care for the raging occupants. Everybody started putting up ‘Keep Out’ signs; that amused them a lot, too.
It didn’t seem as if you could be free of them anywhere in the central area, though they appeared to be operating on levels that weren’t always the same as ours. In some places they did have the look of walking on the ground or floor, but elsewhere they’d be inches above it, and then in some places you would encounter them moving along as though they were wading through the solid surface. It was very soon clear that they could no more hear us than we could hear them, so that there was no use appealing to them or threatening them in that way, and none of the notices that people put up seemed to do anything but whet their curiosity.
After three days of it there was chaos. In the worst affected parts there just wasn’t any privacy any more. At the most intimate moments they were liable to wander through, visibly sniggering or guffawing. It was all very well for the police to announce that there was no danger, that the visitants appeared unable actually to do anything, so the best way was to ignore them. There are times and places when giggling bunches of youths and maidens demand more ignore-power than the average person has got. It could send even a placid fellow like me wild at times, while the women’s leagues of this-and-that, and the watch-committee minded were living in a constant state of blown tops.
The news had begun to get about, and that didn’t help, either. News collectors of all kinds came streaming in. They overflowed the place. The streets were snaked with leads to movie-cameras, television cameras, and microphones, while the press-photographers were having the snappy-picture time of their lives, and, being solid, they were almost as much of a nuisance as the visitants themselves.
But we hadn’t reached the peak of it yet. Jimmy and I happened to be present at the inception of the next stage. We were on our way to lunch, doing our best to ignore visitants, as instructed, by walking through them. Jimmy was subdued. He had had to give up theories because the facts had largely submerged him. Just short of the cafe we noticed that there was some commotion further up the High Street, and seemingly it was coming our way, so we waited for it. After a bit it emerged through a tangle of halted cars further down, and approached at a rate of some six or seven miles an hour. Essentially it was a platform like the one that Sally and I had seen at the crossroads the previous Saturday, but this was a de luxe model. There were sides to it, glistening with new paint, red, yellow, and blue, enclosing seats set four abreast. Most of the passengers were young, though there was a sprinkling of middle-aged men and women dressed in a soberer version of the same fashions. Behind the first platform followed half a dozen others. We read the lettering on their sides and backs as they went by:
PAWLEY’S PEEPHOLES ON THE PAST - GREATEST INVENTION
OF THE AGE
HISTORY WITHOUT TEARS - FOR Ł1
SEE HOW GREAT GREAT GRANDMA LIVED
YE QUAINTE OLDE 20TH CENTURY EXPRESSE
SEE LIVING HISTORY IN COMFORT - QUAINT DRESSES
OLD CUSTOMS
EDUCATIONAL ! LEARN PRIMITIVE FOLKWAYS - LIVING CONDITIONS
VISIT ROMANTIC 20TH CENTURY - SAFETY GUARANTEED
KNOW YOUR HISTORY - GET CULTURE - Ł1 TRIP
BIG MONEY PRIZE IF YOU IDENTIFY OWN GRANDDAD/MA
Most of the people on the vehicles were turning their heads this way and that in gog-eyed wonder interspersed with spasms of giggles. Some of the young men waved their arms at us and produced silent witticisms which sent their companions into inaudible shrieks of laughter. Others leant back comfortably, bit into large, yellow fruits, and munched. They cast occasional glances at the scene, but reserved most of their attention for the ladies whose waists they clasped. On the back of the next-to-last car we read:
WAS GREAT GREAT GRANDMA AS GOOD AS SHE MADE OUT?
SEE THE THINGS YOUR FAMILY HISTORY NEVER TOLD YOU
and on the final one:
SPOT THE FAMOUS BEFORE THEY GOT CAREFUL - THE REAL
INSIDE DOPE MAY WIN YOU A BIG PRIZE!
As the procession moved away, it left the rest of us looking at one another kind of stunned. Nobody seemed to have much left to say just then.
The show must have been something in the nature of a grand premiere, I fancy, for after that you were liable anywhere in the town to come across a platform labelled something like:
HISTORY IS CULTURE - BROADEN YOUR MIND TODAY
FOR ONLY Ł1 !