The Seeds of Time

I went back and sat down again beside Sally. That picture certainly had spoilt things-‘Councillor’s Wife’! Naturally she wanted to know what I’d seen on the paper, and I had to sharpen up a few lies to cut my way out of that one.

We sat on awhile, feeling gloomy, saying nothing.

A platform went by, labelled:

TROUBLE-FREE CULTURE - GET EDUCATED IN

MODERN COMFORT

We watched it glide away through the railings and into the traffic.

‘Maybe it’s time we moved,’ I suggested.

‘Yes,’ agreed Sally, dully.

We walked back towards her place, me still wishing that I had been able to see the date on that paper.

‘You wouldn’t,’ I asked her casually, ‘you wouldn’t happen to know any Councillors?’

She looked surprised.

‘Well-there’s Mr Palmer,’ she said, rather doubtfully.

‘He’d be a-a youngish man?’ I enquired, off-handedly.

‘Why, no. He’s ever so old-as a matter of fact it’s really his wife I know.’

‘Ah!’ I said. ‘You don’t know any of the younger ones?’

‘I’m afraid not. Why?’

I put over a line about a situation like this needing young men of ideas.

‘Young men ef ideas don’t have to be councillors,’ she remarked, looking at me.

Maybe, as I said, she doesn’t go much on logic, but she has her own ways of making a fellow feel better. I’d have felt better still if I had had some ideas, though.

The next day found public indignation right up the scale again. It seems there had been an evening service going on in All Saints’ Church. The vicar had ascended his pulpit and was just drawing breath for a brief sermon when a platform labelled:

WAS GT. GT. GRANDAD ONE OF THE BOYS? - OUR Ł1

TRIP MAY SHOW YOU

floated in through the north wall and slid to a stop in front of the lectern. The vicar stared at it for some seconds in silence, then he crashed his fist down on his reading desk.

This,’ he boomed. ‘This is intolerable! We shall wait until this object is removed.’

He remained motionless, glaring at it. The congregation glared with him.

The tourists on the platform had an air of waiting for the show to begin. When nothing happened they started passing round bottles and fruit to while away the time. The vicar maintained his stony glare. When still nothing happened, the tourists began to get bored. The young men tickled the girls, and the girls giggled them on. Several of them began to urge the man at the front end of their craft. After a bit he nodded, and the platform slid away through the south wall.

It was the first point our side had ever scored. The vicar mopped his brow, cleared his throat, and then extemporized the address of his life, on the subject of ‘The Cities of the Plain.’

But no matter how influential the tops that were blowing, there was still nothing getting done about it. There were schemes, of course. Jimmy had one of them: it concerned either ultra-high or infra-low frequencies that were going to shudder the projections of the tourists to bits. Perhaps something along those lines might have been worked out sometime, but it was a quicker kind of cure that we were needing; and it is damned difficult to know what you can do about something which is virtually no more than a three-dimensional movie portrait unless you can think up some way of fouling its transmission. All its functions are going on not where you see it, but in some unknown place where the origin is-so how do you get at it? What you are actually seeing doesn’t feel, doesn’t eat, doesn’t breathe, doesn’t sleep … It was while I was considering what it actually does do that I had my idea. It struck me all of a heap-so simple.

I grabbed my hat and took off for the Town Hall.

By this time the daily processions of sizzling citizens, threateners, and cranks had made them pretty cautious about callers there, but I worked through at last to a man who got interested, though doubtful.

‘No one’s going to like that much,’ he said.

‘No one’s meant to like it. But it couldn’t be much worse than this-and it’s likely to do local trade a bit of good, too,’ I pointed out.

He brightened a bit at that. I pressed on: