The Seeds of Time (13 page)

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 leaned 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:

and on the final one:

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 £1!

or:

Know the Answers About Your Ancestors

with full, good-time loads aboard, but I never heard of another regular procession.

In the Council Offices they were tearing what was left of their hair, and putting up notices left, right, and centre about what was not allowed to the ‘tourists' – and giving them more good laughs – but all the while the thing got more embarrassing. Those ‘tourists' who were on foot took to coming close up and peering into your face, and comparing it with some book or piece of paper they were carrying – after which they looked disappointed and annoyed with you, and moved on to someone else. I came to the conclusion there was no prize at all for finding me.

Well, work has to go on: we couldn't think of any way of
dealing with it, so we had to put up with it. Quite a number of families moved out of the town for privacy and to stop their daughters from catching the new ideas about dress, and so on, but most of us just had to keep along as best we could. Pretty nearly everyone one met those days looked either dazed or scowling – except, of course, the ‘tourists'.

I called for Sally one evening about a fortnight after the platform procession. When we came out of the house there was a ding-dong going on further down the road. A couple of girls with heads that looked like globes of gilded basket-work were scratching the daylights out of one another. One of the fellows standing by was looking proud of himself, the rest of the party was whooping things on. We went the other way.

‘It just isn't like our town any more,' said Sally. ‘Even our homes aren't ours any more. Why can't they all go away and leave us in peace? Oh, damn them, all of them! I hate them!'

But just outside the park we came upon one little chrysanthemum-head sitting on apparently nothing at all, and crying her heart out. Sally softened a little.

‘Perhaps they are human, some of them. But what right have they to turn our town into a horrible fun-fair?'

We found a bench and sat on it, looking at the sunset. I wanted to get her away out of the place.

‘It'd be grand away in the hills now,' I said.

‘It'd be lovely to be there, Jerry,' she sighed.

I took her hand, and she didn't pull it away.

‘Sally, darling –' I began.

And then, before I could get any further, two tourists, a man and a girl, had to come along and anchor themselves in front of us. That time I was angry. You might see the platforms almost anywhere, but you did reckon to be free of the walking tourists in the park where there was nothing to interest them, anyway – or should not have been. These two, however, had found something. It was Sally, and they stood staring at her, unabashed. She took her hand out of mine. They conferred. The
man opened a folder he was carrying, and took a piece of paper out of it. They looked at the paper, then at Sally, then back to the paper. It was too much to ignore. I got up and walked through them to see what the paper was. There I had a surprise. It was a piece of the
Westwich Evening News
, obviously taken from a very ancient copy indeed. It was badly browned and tattered, and to keep it from falling to bits entirely it had been mounted inside some thin, transparent plastic. I wish I had noticed the date, but naturally enough I looked where they were looking – and Sally's face looked back at me from a smiling photograph. She had her arms spread wide, and a baby in the crook of each. I had just time to see the headline: ‘Twins for Town Councillor's Wife', when they folded up the paper, and made off along the path, running. I reckoned they would be hot on the trail of one of their damned prizes – and I hoped it would turn round and bite them.

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 Falmer,' she said, rather doubtfully.

‘He'd be a – a youngish man?' I inquired, 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 of 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 Granddad one of the Boys? – Our £1 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:

‘After all, the Mayor has his restaurants, and the pubs'll be all for it, too.'

‘You've got a point there,' he admitted. ‘Very well, we'll put it to them. Come along.'

For the whole of three days we worked hard on it. On the fourth we went into action. Soon after daylight there were gangs out on
all the roads fixing barriers at the municipal limits, and when they'd done that they put up big white boards lettered in red:

The same morning the television permission was revoked, and the national papers carried large display advertisements:

WANT TO KNOW
:

What Your Great Great Granddaughter will Wear?

How Your Great Great Grandson will Look?

Next Century's Styles?

How Customs will Change?

We reckoned that with the publicity there had been already there'd be no need for more detail than that – though we ran some more specialized advertisements in the picture dailies:

and so on. We bought enough space to get it mentioned in the news columns in order to help those who like to think they are doing things for sociological, psychological, and other intellectual reasons.

And they came.

There had been quite a few looking in to see the sights before, but now they learned that it was something worth charging money for the figures jumped right up – and the more they went up, the gloomier the Council Treasurer got because we hadn't made it five shillings, or even ten.

After a couple of days we had to take over all vacant lots, and some fields further out, for car parks, and people were parking far enough out to need a special bus service to bring them in. The streets became so full of crowds stooging around greeting any of Pawley's platforms or tourists with whistles, jeers, and catcalls, that local citizens simply stayed indoors and did their smouldering there.

The Treasurer began to worry now over whether we'd be liable for Entertainment Tax. The list of protests to the Mayor grew longer each day, but he was so busy arranging special convoys of food and beer for his restaurants that he had little time to worry about them. Nevertheless, after a few days of it I started to wonder whether Pawley wasn't going to see us out, after all. The tourists didn't care for it much, one could see, and it must have interfered a lot with their prize-hunts, but it hadn't cured them of wandering about all over the place, and now we had the addition of thousands of trippers whooping it up with pandemonium for most of the night. Tempers all round were getting short enough for real trouble to break out.

Then, on the sixth night, when several of us were just beginning to wonder whether it might not be wiser to clear out of
Westwich for a bit, the first crack showed – a man at the Town Hall rang me up to say he had seen several platforms with empty seats on them.

The next night I went down to one of their regular routes to see for myself. I found a large, well-lubricated crowd already there, exchanging cracks and jostling and shoving, but we hadn't long to wait. A platform slid out on a slant through the front of the Coronation Café, and the label on it read:

and there were half a dozen empty seats, at that.

The arrival of the platform brought a well-supported Bronx cheer, and a shrilling of whistles. The driver remained indifferent as he steered straight through the crowds. His passengers looked less certain of themselves. Some of them did their best to play up; they giggled, made motions of returning slap for slap and grimace for grimace with the crowd to start with. Possibly it was as well that the tourist girls couldn't hear the things the crowd was shouting to them, but some of the gestures were clear enough. It couldn't have been a lot of fun gliding straight into the men who were making them. By the time the platform was clear of the crowd and disappearing through the front of the Bon Marché pretty well all the tourists had given up pretending that it was; some of them were looking a little sick. By the expression on several of the faces I reckoned that Pawley might be going to have a tough time explaining the culture aspect of it to a deputation somewhere.