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  ADAPTATION

  from THE BEST OF JOHN WYNDHAM

  John Wyndham

  SPHERE BOOKS

  Published 1973

  ISBN 0 7221 9369 6

  Copyright© The Executors of the Estate of the late John Wyndham 1973

  INTRODUCTION

  AT a very tender age my latent passion for all forms of fantasy stories, having been sparked by the Brothers Grimm and the more unusual offerings in the children's comics and later the boy's adven­ture papers, was encouraged in the early 1930s by the occasional exciting find on the shelves of the public library with Burroughs and Thorne Smith varying the staple diet of Wells and Verne.

  But the decisive factor in establishing that exhila­rating ‘sense of wonder’ in my youthful imagi­nation was the discovery about that time of back numbers of American science fiction magazines to be bought quite cheaply in stores like Wool­worths. The happy chain of economic circum­stances by which American newstand returns, some­times sadly with the magic cover removed or mutilated, ballasted cargo ships returning to English ports and the colonies, must have been the mainspring of many an enthusiastic hobby devoted to reading, discussing, perhaps collecting and even writing, science fiction – or ‘scientifiction’ as Hugo Gerns­back coined the tag in his early Amazing Stories magazine.

  Gernsback was a great believer in reader partici­pation; in 1936 I became a teenage member of the Science Fiction League sponsored by his Wonder Stories. Earlier he had run a compe­tition in its fore­runner Air Wonder Stories to find a suitable banner slogan, offering the prize of ‘One Hundred Dollars in Gold’ with true yankee bragga­dacio. Discovering the result some years later in, I think, the September 1930 issue of Wonder Stories seized upon from the bargain-bin of a chain store, was akin to finding a message in a bottle cast adrift by some distant Robinson Crusoe, and I well remember the surge of jingo­istic pride (an educa­tional trait well-nurtured in pre-war Britain) in noting that the winner was an English­man, John Beynon Harris.

  I had not the slightest antici­pation then that I would later meet, and acknow­ledge as a good friend and mentor, this contest winner who, as John Wyndham, was to become one of the greatest English story-tellers in the idiom. The fact that he never actually got paid in gold was a disappoint­ment, he once told me, that must have accounted for the element of philo­so­phical dubiety in some of his work. Certainly his winning slogan ‘Future Flying Fiction’, al­though too late to save the maga­zine from foundering on the rock of eco­nomic depression (it had already been amalga­mated with its stable­mate Science Wonder Stories to become just plain, if that is the right word, Wonder Stories), presaged the firm stamp of credi­bility combined with imagi­native flair that charac­terized JBH's writings.

  John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris (the abundance of fore­names conve­niently supplied his various aliases) emerged in the 1950s as an important contem­porary influence on specu­lative fiction, parti­cularly in the explo­ration of the theme of realistic global catas­trophe, with books such as The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes, and enjoyed a popularity, which continued after his sad death in 1969, comparable to that of his illus­trious pre­decessor as master of the scientific romance, H. G. Wells.

  However, he was to serve his writing apprentice­ship in those same pulp maga­zines of the thirties, competing success­fully with their native American contributors, and it is the purpose of this present collection to high­light the chrono­logical develop­ment of his short stories from those early beginnings to the later urbane and polished style of John Wyndham.

  ‘The Lost Machine’ was his second published story, appea­ring in Amazing Stories, and was possibly the proto­type of the sentient robot later developed by such writers as Isaac Asimov. He used a variety of plots during this early American period parti­cu­larly favour­ing time travel, and the best of these was undoubtedly ‘The Man From Beyond’ in which the poign­ancy of a man's reali­za­tion, caged in a zoo on Venus, that far from being aban­doned by his fellow-explorers, he is the victim of a far stranger fate, is remark­ably out­lined for its time. Some themes had dealt with war, such as ‘The Trojan Beam’, and he had strong views to express on its futility. Soon his own induc­tion into the Army in 1940 produced a period of crea­tive inactivity corres­ponding to World War II. He had, however, previously established him­self in England as a promi­nent science fiction writer with serials in major period­icals, subse­quently reprinted in hard covers, and he even had a detec­tive novel published. He had been well repre­sented too – ‘Perfect Crea­ture’ is an amu­sing example – in the various maga­zines stemming from fan activity, despite the vicissi­tudes of their pre- and imme­diate post-war publish­ing insec­urity.

  But after the war and into the fifties the level of science fiction writing in general had increased consi­derably, and John rose to the challenge by selling success­fully to the American market again. In England his polished style proved popular and a predi­lection for the para­doxes of time travel as a source of private amuse­ment was perfectly exem­plified in ‘Pawley's Peepholes’, in which the gawp­ing tourists from the future are routed by vulgar tactics. This story was later success­fully adapted for radio and broad­cast by the B.B.C.

  About this time his first post-war novel burst upon an unsus­pecting world, and by utili­zing a couple of unori­ginal ideas with his Gernsback-trained atten­tion to logically based expla­natory detail and realis­tic back­ground, together with his now strongly deve­loped narra­tive style, ‘The Day of the Triffids’ became one of the classics of modern specu­lative fiction, survi­ving even a mediocre movie treat­ment. It was the fore­runner of a series of equally impressive and enjoyable novels inclu­ding ‘The Chrysalids’ and ‘The Mid­wich Cuckoos’ which was success­fully filmed as ‘Village of the Damned’. (A sequel ‘Children of the Damned’ was markedly inferior, and John was care­ful to dis­claim any responsi­bility for the writing.)

  I was soon to begin an enjoy­able asso­ciation with John Wyndham that had its origins in the early days of the New Worlds maga­zine-publish­ing venture, and was later to result in much kindly and essen­tial assis­tance enabling me to become a specia­list dealer in the genre. This was at the Fantasy Book Centre in Blooms­bury, an area of suitably asso­ciated literary acti­vities where John lived for many years, and which provi­ded many pleasu­rable meet­ings at a renowned local coffee establish­ment, Cawardine's, where we were often joined by such person­alities as John Carnell, John Chris­topher and Arthur C. Clarke.

  In between the novels two collec­tions of his now widely pub­lished short stories were issued as ‘The Seeds of Time’ and ‘Consider Her Ways’; others are re­printed here for the first time. He was never too grand to refuse mater­ial for our own New Worlds and in 1958 wrote a series of four novel­ettes about the Troon family's contri­bution to space explo­ration – a kind of Forsyte saga of the solar system later collected under the title ‘The Outward Urge’. His ficti­tious colla­borator ‘Lucas Parkes’ was a subtle ploy in the book version to explain Wyndham's appa­rent devia­tion into solid science-based fiction. The last story in this collection ‘The Empti­ness of Space’ was written as a kind of post­script to that series, especially for the 100th anni­versary issue of New Worlds.

  John Wyndham's last novel was Chocky, published in 1968. It was an expan­sion of a short story follow­ing a theme similar to The Chrysalids and The Midwich Cuckoos. It was a theme pecu­liarly appro­priate for him in his advancing matu­rity. When, with charac­teristic reti­cence and modesty, he announced to a few of his friends that he was marry­ing his beloved Grace and moving to the country­side, we all felt that this was a well-deserved retire­ment for them both.

  But ironically time – al
ways a fasci­nating subject for specu­lation by him – was running out for this typical English gentle­man. Amiable, eru­dite, astrin­gently humo­rous on occasion, he was, in the same way that the gentle Boris Karloff portrayed his film monsters, able to depict the night­mares of humanity with fright­ening realism, made the more deadly by his masterly preci­sion of detail. To his great gift for story-telling he brought a lively intellect and a fertile imagi­nation.

  I am glad to be numbered among the many, many thou­sands of his readers whose ‘sense of wonder’ has been satis­facto­rily indulged by a writer whose gift to posterity is the compul­sive reada­bility of his stories of which this present volume is an essen­tial part.

  — LESLIE FLOOD

  ADAPTATION (1949)

  The prospect of being stuck on Mars for a while did not worry Marilyn Godalpin a lot — not at first, anyway. She had been near the piece of desert that they called a landing field when the Andromeda came in to a bad landing. After that it did not surprise her at all when the engineers said that with the limited facili­ties at the settle­ment the repairs would take at least three months, most likely four. The asto­nish­ing thing was that no one in the ship had got more than a bad shaking.

  It still did not worry her when they explained to her, with simpli­fied astro­nautics, that that meant there could be no take-off for the Andro­meda for at least eight months on account of the rela­tive posi­tion of Earth. But she did get a bit fussed when she discovered that she was going to have a baby. Mars did not seem the right place for that.

  Mars had surprised her. When Franklyn Godalpin was offered the job of developing the Jason Mining Corpo­ration's terri­tory there, a few months after their marriage, it had been she who had persuaded him to accept it. She had had an instinct that the men who were in on the ground floor there would go places. Of Mars itself, as seen in pic­tures, her opi­nion was low. But she wanted her hus­band to go places, and to go with him. With Franklyn's heart and head pulling in oppo­site direc­tions she could have succeeded on either side. She chose head for two reasons. One was lest some day he might come to hold the lost chance of his life against her, the other because, as she said:

  “Honey, if we are going to have a family, I want them to have every­thing we can give them. I love you any way you are, but for their sake I want you to be a big man.”

  She had persuaded him not only into taking the job, but into taking her with him. The idea was that she should see him settled into his hut as com­fort­ably as the primi­tive condi­tions of the place allowed, and then go back home on the next ship. That should have been after a four-week stop — Earth reckoning. But the ship intended was the Andro­meda; and she was the last in the present oppositional phase.

  Franklyn's work left her little of his time, and had Mars been what she expected she would have been dis­mayed by the prospect of even an extra week there. But the first discovery she had made when she stepped on to the planet was that photo­graphs can be literally true while spiritually quite false.

  The deserts were there, all right. Mile upon mile of them. But from the first they lacked that harsh un­chari­table­ness that the pictures had given them. There was a quality which in some way the lens had filtered out. The land­scape came to life, and showed itself differently from the recorded shades.

  There was unexpected beauty in the colour­ing of the sands, and the rocks, and the distant, rounded moun­tains, and strange­ness in the dark deeps of the cloudless sky. Among the plants and bushes on the water­way margins there were flowers, more beau­ti­ful and more deli­cately complex than any she had seen on Earth. There was mystery, too, where the stones of ancient ruins lay half buried —all that was left, maybe, of huge palaces or temples. It was some­thing like that, Marilyn felt, that Shelley's traveller had known in his antique land:

  Round the decay

  Of that colossal wreck, boundless

  and bare,

  The lone and level sands stretch far

  away.

  Yet it was not grim. She had looked to find a sour deso­lation; the morbid after­math of eruption, destruc­tion and fire. It had never occurred to her that the old age of a world might come softly, with a gentle melan­choly, like the turning of a leaf in the fall.

  Back on Earth, people were looking on the Martian venturers as the new pioneers attacking the latest frontier opposed to man. Mars made non­sense of that. The land lay placidly open to them, unresisting. Its placidity dwindled their impor­tance, making them crude intruders on the last quiet drowsi­ness.

  Mars was coma­tose, sinking slowly deeper into her final sleep. But she was not yet dead. Seasonal tides still stirred in the waters, too, though they seldom gave any more sign of themselves than a vagrant ripple. Among the flowers and the tinkerbells there were still insects to carry pollen. Kinds of gram still grew, sparse, poorly nourished vestiges of vanished har­vests, yet capable of thriv­ing again with irri­ga­tion. , There were the thrippetts, bright flashes of flying colour, unclassi­fiable as insect or bird. By night other small creatures emerged. Some of them mewed, almost like kittens, and sometimes when both moons were up, one caught glimpses of little marmoset-like shapes. Almost always there was that most charac­teristic of all Martian sounds, the ringing of the tinker­bells. Their hard shiny leaves which flashed like polished metal needed no more than a breath of the thin air to set them chiming so that all the desert rang faintly to their tiny cymbals.

  The clues to the manner of people who had lived there were too faint to read. Rumour spoke of small groups, apparently human, farther south, but real explo­ra­tion still waited on the develop­ment of craft suited to the thin Martian air.

  A frontier of a kind there was, but with­out valour — for there was little left to fight but quiet old age. Beyond the busy settlement Mars was a rest­ful place.

  “I like it,” said Marilyn. “In a way it's sad, but it isn't saddening. A song can be like that some­times. It soothes you and makes you feel at peace.”

  Franklyn's concern over her news was greater than Marilyn's, and he blamed himself for the state of affairs. His anxiety irritated her slightly. And it was no good trying to place blame, she pointed out. All that one could do was to accept the situ­ation and take every sensi­ble care.

  The settlement doctor backed that up. James Forbes was a young man, and no saw­bones. He was there because a good man was needed in a place where un­usual effects might be expected, and strange condi­tions called for careful study. And he had taken the job because he was interested. His line now was matter of fact, and encouraging. He refused to make it remarkable.

  “There was nothing to worry about,” he assured them. “Ever since the dawn of history there have been women produ­cing babies in far more incon­venient times and places than this — and getting away with it. There's no reason at all why every­thing should not be perfectly normal.”

  He spoke his professional lies with an assu­rance which greatly increased their confi­dence, and he main­tained it steadily by his manner. Only in his diary did he admit worry­ing speculations on the effects of lowered gravi­tation and air-pressure, the rapid tempe­rature changes, the possi­bility of unknown infections and the other hazard­ous factors.

  Marilyn minded little that she lacked the luxu­ries that would have attended her at home. With her coloured maid, Helen, to look after her and keep her company she busied herself with sewing and small matters. The Martian scene retained its fascination for her. She felt at peace with it as though it were a wise old coun­sellor who had seen too much of birth and death to grow vehe­ment over either.

  Jannessa, Marilyn's daughter, was born with no great trial upon a night when the desert lay cold in the moon­light, and so quiet that only an occa­sional faint chime from the tinker­bells disturbed it. She was the first Earth baby to be born on Mars. A perfectly normal six and a half pounds —Earth — and a credit to all concerned.

  It was afterwards that things started to go less
well. Dr. Forbes' fears of strange infect­ions had been well grounded, and despite his scrupu­lous pre­cau­tions there were compli­ca­tions. Some were suscept­ible to the attacks of peni­cillin and the complex sulfas, but others resisted them. Marilyn, who had at first appeared to be doing well, weakened and then became seriously ill.

  Nor did the child thrive as it should, and when the repaired Andro­meda at last took off, it left them behind. Another ship was due in from Earth a few days later. Before it arrived, the doctor put the situa­tion to Franklyn.

  “I'm by no means happy about the child,” he told him. “She's not putting on weight as she should. She grows, but not enough. It's pretty obvious that the condi­tions here are not suiting her. She might survive, but I can't say with what effect on her constitution. She should have normal Earth condi­tions as soon as possible.”

  Franklyn frowned.

  “And her mother?” he asked.

  “Mrs. Godalpin is in no condi­tion to travel, I'm afraid.”

  “It's out of the quest­ion. In her present state, and after so long in low gravi­tation, I doubt whether she could stand a G of acce­lera­tion.”

  Franklyn looked bleakly unwilling to compre­hend.

  “You mean—?”

  “In a nutshell, it's this. It would be fatal for your wife to attempt the journey. And it would probably be fatal for your child to remain here.”

  There was only one way out of that. When the next ship, the Aurora, came in it was decided to delay no longer. A passage was arranged for Helen and the baby, and in the last week of 1994 they went on board.

  Franklyn and Marilyn watched the Aurora leave. Marilyn's bed had been pushed close to the window, and he sat on it, holding her hand. Together they watched her shoot up­wards on a narrow cone of flame and curve away until she was no more than a twinkle in the dark Martian sky. Marilyn's fingers held his tightly. He put his arm around her to support her, and kissed her.