‘It’s no good makin’ a fuss, young feller,’ advised a police sergeant. ‘If I’d been taking money today, I could have made my fortune and retired on it. You get back ’ome now! ’
There had been nothing for it but to turn his car round and drive sullenly back to Exeter. There he munched a necessary, though unappreciated, meal, while he decided on the next move.
‘No private cars along ’ere,’ the policeman had said. But the trucks were going through—those same damned trucks which had hindered him all night. Hundreds of them. They were passed without question, and, moreover, without a search. It ought to be possible to jump one and stow away….
After a number of uncomfortable miles the truck stopped. The tail-board was lowered.
‘ ‘Ere, you, come along out of it,’ demanded a voice. A hand fastened firmly on to Ralph’s collar and dragged him painfully from his hiding-place amid wooden stakes and rolls of barbed wire. He landed among a group of men under the command of a sergeant. The latter came close to him, his pointed moustaches adding ferocity to his expression as he shouted:
‘What the-blazes do you think you were doing in that -lorry? You come along ’ere with me.’
The officer to whom he was taken had heard him out and then regarded him seriously.
‘I like your spirit,’ he said, ‘but just listen to me a minute.
You seem lo know something of the situation, but you’re tackling it the wrong way. It’s no good your going over there.’ He waved his hand to the west. ‘You couldn’t do a damned thing if you got through, except make yourself another victim.
‘Your girl doesn’t want you to die. You know, if you give it a moment’s thought, that she’d be far prouder of you for helping to fight this stuff and beat it; for helping to blot the damned growths out and make thousands of people safe.’
‘But she’s-! ’
‘And don’t you realise that from the body of every man who dies out there, more of the yellow balls grow? If you go out there, you’ll not only be helpless, but you’ll be giving your body to feed them. No, my lad, your job is to help us to fight against the menace. This is a state of emergency, and we need all the help we can get. What about it?’
Ralph at length consented, though with not too good a grace. He knew the officer was right. It was his job to fight, not to throw away his life, but … He did not quite trust himself. Sometime the urge to find Dorothy might prove too strong for him….
His working partner’s voice broke in on his thoughts. ‘What d’yer say to a cigarette, mate?’
Ralph delivered a final blow to the stake they were fixing, and agreed. To right and left of them across the moorland hills stretched the long line of posts. Here and there, parties of men who had completed their sections were already beginning to weave an impenetrable net of barbed wire around the stakes. Behind, on the roadway, was a never-ending line of trucks loaded with more wire and yet more stakes, while closer, between themselves and the road, a sweating army of men laboured to dig a broad trench.
Ralph was amazed at the organisation which in two or three days had enabled the authorities to be well on the way to barricading off a whole corner of the country. At the same time he was puzzled; the purpose of the wire was obvious, but he failed to understand the reason for the broad, shallow trench. Nor was his partner, Bill ’Awkins, as he called himself, able to explain its use. But he was ready to concede that the authorities knew what they were about, and were not wasting any time.
‘Yus,’ he remarked, ‘they’re quick on the job, they are. Why, a few nights ago there was a gale warning—p’raps you ’eard it?’
Ralph nodded.
‘Well, the minute they knew that, they changed their plans like a flash. This ’ere line was to ’ave been miles farther forward; they’d even begun to get the supplies up there when the order for retreat came. You see, the wind in these parts is pretty near always from the west; that’s what’s got ’em scared —the idea of this stuff being swept right across the country. If it’s true what they say about some feller a-startin’ it on purpose, then ’e picked a likely place.
‘ ’Owever, the wind didn’t come to much, after all. Most of them yeller balls just rolled a bit, and then got stuck in the valleys and ’ollows and suchlike—blamed lucky it was, too.’ ‘Then all this,’ said Ralph, indicating the defences, ‘is in case a real storm comes along?’
‘That’ll be about the idea,’ Bill agreed.
They smoked for a while in silence. From time to time a great plane would roar across the moor, carrying food supplies to be dropped to the isolated; and, once, a large caterpillar tractor came swaying and plunging past them, bound for the west. Bill grinned as he caught sight of the men aboard it and the instruments they held.
‘What are they?’ asked Ralph. ‘Looks like a squad of divers going on duty.’
‘Asbestos suits and masks,’ the other explained. ‘And they’re carrying flamethrowers. Those’ll give the blinkin’ things a bit of a toasting! ’
CHAPTER FIVE
THE ATTACK ON THE WIND
Some six nights later, Ralph sat with a group in the stable which was their billet. One man was holding forth pessimistically.
‘I suppose they’re doing a bit of good with all this flamethrowing and whatnot, but it ain’t getting ’em far. It’s the plant underneath that they want to get at, not just the yellow balls. They’re only the fruit—you don’t kill an apple-tree by knocking off the apples. Fungi have a sort of web of stuff spreading all through the ground around them; that’s the life of the things, and that’s what they-’
There came a thunderous knocking on the door and a stentorian call to turn out.
‘Wind’s rising,’ said the sergeant. ‘You all know your jobs. Get to ’em, and look slippy! ’
The wind swept in from the Atlantic at gale force. The first few puffs stirred the yellow balls and rolled them a little at the ends of their skimpy stalks. Later followed a gust which twisted them so that the stalks snapped and they were free to roll where the wind urged. As the pressure grew to a steady blast, it swept up a mass of the light balls and carried them bounding across the countryside, an army of vegetable invaders launching their attack to capture the land and destroy human beings.
The wind of a week before had moved only the balls in the most exposed positions, but this time, none but the youngest and least developed had the strength in their stalks to resist the air which tore at them. Every now and then a splashing flurry of white would spring from the hurtling, bouncing horde as the tough, yellow skin of one was ripped by some sharp spike or the corner of a roof. Then the great spores themselves were caught up by the wind and carried on faster as an advance guard of the yellow army.
The gale seemed to display a diabolical zest for this new game. It increased its force to drive the balls yet more furiously. Hedges, ditches and trees failed to check the headlong charge. Even rivers proved no obstacle; with the wind behind, the balls sailed across in their thousands, bobbing and jerking on the rough surface.
They were thrust relentlessly down the narrow streets of the little towns, jostling and jamming against the corners of the buildings until the houses were hidden in a cloud of swirling spores, and the surviving balls tore loose to follow bowling in the wake of their fellows.
This time, the wind did not desert them. Many lodged in sheltered hollows, but they served merely to fill them up and make a path over which the rest could travel. The wave of invaders climbed the slopes and swept up and out on to the moor, where, unobstructed, they gathered speed to charge yet more swiftly upon the defenders.
There was a line of fire across the country. Ralph had soon learned the purpose of the broad trench. Filled now with blazing oil and wood, it formed a rampart of flame.
‘Here they come,’ cried the look-out, clinging to a swaying perch high above.
Soon all could see the few whirling balls which seemed to lead the way, and the turgid mass of yellow pressing close behind the outrunners.
/> They held their breaths….
The first balls hurled themselves to destruction upon a cheval-de-frise, a hedge of bristling spikes which slit and tore their skins and set free the spores to go scudding on into the flames. But they came too thick and fast. In many places they piled up solid against the sharp fence, forming ramps for those behind to come racing over the top and fall among the meshes of barbed wire.
Every now and then a ball seemed to leap as though it possessed motive power within itself. Missing the wire, it would bowl across no-man’s-land to a final explosion in the flaming ditch, its burning spores shooting aloft like the discharge of a monstrous firework.
‘My God! ’ muttered the man next to Ralph. ‘If this wind doesn’t drop soon, we’ll be done. Look at that!’
‘That’ was one of several balls which, miraculously escaping all traps prepared for it, had leaped past them into the darkness behind.
‘They’ll catch it in the nets back there and burn it when the wind drops,’ Ralph replied with a confidence which he scarcely felt. ‘The thing that worries me is that the fires may die down—we can’t get near to fuel them from the lee side here.’
But, as luck had it, the fires outlasted the wind.
‘Men,’ began the officer in charge, the next morning, ‘it was a pretty near thing last night, and we have to thank providence that we successfully withstood it. But we can’t afford to waste time. We’ve got to get to work at once. There may be another wind any time, and that mass of stuff choking the spikes must be cleared before it comes. I want every man who has experience of flamethrowers to step forward.’
Ralph, in company with many others, stepped out. He had no knowledge of flamethrowers, but it was the only way he could acquire an asbestos suit and get out into the danger area. For more than a week he had stifled his anxiety to know Dorothy’s fate, and now he could bear it no longer.
As he struggled into the heavy covering which would not only insulate him from fire, but also withstand the deadly spores, he turned over his plan. Perhaps such a simple getaway was unworthy of the name of a plan. Roughly, it consisted in placing himself among the foremost of those who would be clearing the ground with their fire-sprays, and working gradually ahead until the thickly scattered balls should give him concealment from the rest of the party. All he had to do then was to walk off to the west.
The only risk, once he was away, was that one of the food-carrying planes might spot him. But the chance was remote, and it was unlikely that a lone straggler would be considered worthy of investigation.
The scheme worked as he had expected. No hue and cry was raised after him as he wormed away. In a very little while he stood alone at the threshold of the stricken district.
As far as he could see in three directions, the land was dotted with the yellow balls, poised ominously where the wind had left them, and seeming to wait for the next gale to pick them up and send them swirling onward to more victims. Surrounded by the evilly glittering skins, he shuddered for a moment before his determination reasserted itself.
He drew a deep breath through his mask, threw back his head and strode on, a lone, grey figure, the only moving object in a scene of desolation.
In the first village he found a motor-cycle with its tank half full, and for six miles it shattered the silence of the moor as he drove it, zigzagging to avoid the growths which littered the road. Then came a sharp valley so choked with balls that he must leave the motor-cycle, throw away the heavy flamethrower and climb across the balls themselves.
On several occasions one burst beneath his weight and he dropped some feet in a flurry of spores which threatened to choke his breathing mask until he could wipe them away. Then, laboriously, he must pick himself up and struggle on, while streams of sweat soaked his clothing beneath the clumsy suit. Once he almost turned back to pick up the flamethrower with the idea of burning his way through the mass, but he remembered that its cylinder was already half discharged. Desperately he battled, until at last his feet found the bracken and heather of the farther hillside.
Afterwards, he could recall little of that journey. He became uncertain even of the number of days which passed as he tramped on and scrambled through one choked valley after another.
Only odd incidents startled him now and then out of a stupid weariness: the little town on the moor where men and women lay dead in the streets while the fungus preyed on them, and the windows of the houses were full of yellow balls which mercifully hid the rooms .. the voice of a madman chanting hymns in a barricaded hut; hymns which turned to cursing blasphemies as he heard Ralph’s step outside … the things which had been men, and which he was forced to move when thirst tortured him to find a drink in a dead inn____
But somehow, with dulled senses, he strove on through the nightmare while with every mile he covered, the fear of what he might find at his goal increased.
He felt that he was almost home when he crossed the River Tamar which separates Devon from Cornwall. The bridge was choked with the fungus. Upstream was wedged a solid mass of yellow, but below it the river raced, bearing an occasional serenely floating ball which would later meet its fate before the fire boats in Plymouth Sound.
At last, St. Brian. The balls were fewer here. The wind had carried most of them away. His own home. Farther on, Dorothy’s home—blank, locked … deserted?
He broke a window to enter, and wandered about the empty rooms. No trace of fungus inside the house. No trace, either, of Dorothy. Perhaps she was upstairs. He was weak and hungry. Every step of the climb was an effort.
At the door of her room he hesitated. Would she be there; the yellow balls growing from her, feeding upon her still body? He opened the door; anything was better now than uncertainty. No one on the bed—no one in the room at all. He began to laugh hysterically. Dorothy had fooled the balls. They hadn’t got her. She was alive, he was sure now—alive in spite of those damned balls. He fell on the bed, half-laughing, half-crying.
Suddenly he stopped. A sound outside. Voices? Painfully he crawled across to look out of the window. A group of people was coming up the road. People he knew. They were wearing ordinary clothes, and among them was Dorothy—Dorothy!
He tore off his mask and tried to shout to them. Funny; his voice wouldn’t work, somehow. Never mind. Dorothy had fooled the yellow balls. That was damned funny. ‘He was laughing again as he sank to the floor.
‘Yes, dear, I’m real,’ said Dorothy, at the bedside.
‘But—but how-?’
‘When I got here I found that Daddy had gone. The only thing was for me to go, too. Several of us went down the river in a boat and rowed along nearly to Land’s End. Right in the toe of Cornwall we were beyond the balls, and to windward of them. Then, when it was safe-’
‘Safe?’
‘Yes, dear. It’s safe now. The balls are just like an ordinary fungus now—they don’t attack living things any more. Then we came home and found you here.’
‘Not now. You mustn’t talk any more, dear. You’ve been very ill, you know.’
Ralph acquiesced. He went to sleep peacefully, her hand in his and a smile on his face.
ENVOI
The Prince Khordah of Ghangistan regarded the nephew of Haramin, bent low before him.
‘Your plan has failed,’ he said.
The nephew of Haramin nodded dumbly.
‘But,’ continued the Prince, ‘it has cost that accursed country more than did ever our wars—and we have lost nothing. Tell me, why did it fail?’
‘Your Highness, the stock did not breed true. After two or so generations it was no longer a parasite, but had reverted to a common, saprophytic fungus.’
‘Which, however, it will take them many years to suppress?’ ‘Many years,’ the other repeated hopefully.
The Prince Khordah spent a few moments in contemplation.
‘We are not displeased,’ he said at length. ‘Doubtless the first arrow did not kill a lion. There are other means, nephew of Haramin?’
r />
The bent figure heaved a sigh of relief.
‘There are other means,’ he agreed.
John Wyndham, Wanderers of Time
(Series: # )
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