I followed his gaze to Violet, now beginning to emerge from her rapture of telepathic communion; and for the first time I thought to wonder who had been the other partner in the generation of that spirit which now grew within her.
The Struggle For Survival
The retaking of the Retreat was as close to being bloodless as such an affair could possibly have come. No doubt an observer who was still expecting, as we all had been during the past few days, to witness a cataclysmic struggle for survival between two noble races would have found the actual events of that noontide comically bathetic. What occurred instead was a more elegant operation, the realisation of a preconceived ideal with the minimum expense of violent effort.
The function of the device which Percival had cannibalised was simply to transmit the harsh, disruptive noises generated by the prisoners’ ear-pieces into the soldiers’ own. Once it was activated and their concentration thus disrupted, the troops were helpless: their shots went wide, they were unable to communicate with one another, and they did not even succeed in barricading the doors to the meeting-hall. Most of them merely collapsed, clutching ineffectually at their ears, but for the soldiers’ own protection the head-sets had not been made such as might easily or quickly be removed. Those few men who did manage to struggle free of them succumbed immediately to the barrage of psychical assaults launched against them by Percival. They could do little to prevent us from invading their stronghold and releasing the prisoners therein.
The one soldier who caused us real trouble was the brutish Krovsky, who (being perhaps reluctant to entrust his sanity to apparatus whose construction he was aware had employed a supernormal’s hand) had actually removed his protective head-gear some time earlier. When the attack began he equipped himself with a pistol and a young hostage; but he, too, fell beneath the psychic battery.
The keys to the manacles were obtained and the captives liberated; their former warders were relieved of all their weapons and corralled into a corner of the meeting-space; and I found myself immediately assailed by doubt. Percival had turned the tables very skilfully upon Spears and his men, but what were tables turned in such a situation? Were our current circumstances actually more desirable, or had Emily, Lechasseur and I willingly assisted Percival in defeating the one force which might have averted the evolutionary ascendancy of Homo peculiar? Could it be that Percival had duped the three of us with his talk of a moral epiphany? I began to wonder if I had perhaps been a terribly foolish old man.
Such was undoubtedly the opinion of St John Spears. ‘For God’s sake, Clevedon,’ he pleaded with me, ‘you’ve got to see sense. And you –’ (this to Lechasseur) ‘– yes, you, Sam Spade, whoever the Hell you are. I don’t care what these creatures have said or done to fool you into taking their side – they’ve turned you against your own kind, don’t you see that? If you’d seen the things I’ve seen, if you knew what these monsters can do, you’d see it my way, both of you. You fought in the first war, didn’t you, Clevedon?’ (Of course I had not.) ‘And you, boy – did you think the Nazis were worth fighting? Just you wait and see what these freaks do to you!’
I confess that I was deeply troubled. Lechasseur’s reaction was, I think, one of contempt.
Suddenly a piping voice said next to me, ‘I think that meeting my family must have broken that man’s mind,’ and Spears gasped in horror as I looked down at the flaxen crown of Freia’s head. The little girl was gazing (I thought perhaps sorrowfully) at Spears, who was cowering now: with her were Emily and, as I realised to my surprise, the missing Jimmie.
I turned uneasily away from the unfortunate Colonel as Percival strolled over to us. He said, ‘That worked, then. Splendid – though you took your time. Terminal shut down all right?’
‘Shut down, dismantled, all the important bits jumped up and down on,’ grinned Jimmie. ‘They’ll not get the old girl working in a hurry.’
A moment’s careful thought revealed what must have happened, and this would shortly be confirmed to me by Emily’s account. It seemed that when she and Freia had leaped through time together, they had followed the life-trail of Gideon Beech some seven hours into the past, arriving unobserved in the machine-shed just as the playwright had been sabotaging the psychic amplifier. Woman and girl had waited there until Jimmie had turned up; had watched while he had hastily prepared the terminal for use; and had then plucked him out of time with them the instant he had sent his telepathic message, causing what all of us had understood as his baffling vanishment.
To transport a third party on a journey through time was a feat which had not previously appeared possible to Emily, or which at least had never yet been attempted by her and Lechasseur. As we drove back to London later that day, she would speculate that on this occasion it had been Freia’s presence, and more precisely the clarity and focus of the child’s time-sensitive talent, that had made the thing a practicality.
For now, though, my principal feeling was one of elation at seeing the two time-travellers again. Inevitably, Percival dashed my sensation of relief. ‘Jimmie,’ he asked now, ‘did Freia pass on my other request?’
The mechanical genius grinned again. ‘She did indeed. I’ve given us twenty minutes – hope that’s enough. If not, it’s too damned late to do anything about it now.’
Alarmed, I asked them, ‘Twenty minutes? Twenty minutes until what, precisely?’
At first Percival looked irritated, and then merely long-suffering. ‘Well, you know, it’s not as if we can keep these men here forever. We can’t just let them go, either – they’d be back soon enough, with bigger guns and tanks and helicopters. What we have at present is what they call a “stand-off”.’
I was mystified to see that, behind him, most of the other supernormals had begun to arrange themselves into a ring, their hands joined as for a dance. ‘Which is why,’ he went on, raising his voice to address the crowd of military prisoners as well as our small circle, ‘Jimmie has set the Retreat’s generator to over-load itself. It’s a rather special generator, which produces energy by the direct annihilation of matter. You’ve got about a quarter of an hour to get as far from here as possible, before a chain reaction takes away a good-sized portion of this hillside.’
‘Good God!’ I exclaimed. Similar cries of alarm were coming from the men in the corner.
Violet came to stand on Percival’s right-hand side, Jimmie at his left. ‘Come on then, kid,’ said Percival, and lifted an affronted Freia onto his shoulders.
He said to me: ‘Don’t forget Giddy Beech, and those sentries we locked up. I’m not saying that you have to free them, mind. It’s up to you. Just... don’t forget Giddy, and what his nature has made of him.
‘We’re off now, Erik. You’d better look sharp.’ Percival took his friends’ hands, completing the circle.
There was a blinding flash, blue lightning roared, and all of the peculiar children vanished together into time.
Epilogue
Since our return to London, my communication with Honoré Lechasseur and Emily Blandish has been both tenuous and sporadic. The lives they lead are complex and unpredictable, and they rarely have the time to spare for social niceties, but Emily at least is kind enough to write to me on occasion.
I understand that their encounter with the supernormal children, including the events at the Retreat and even Lechasseur’s bewildering sojourn in the distant future, is to them merely another in the succession of peculiar occurrences which forms the texture of their lives together. For me these matters, and the facts which they have revealed, have become the central concern of my existence, and so, of course, some difference of perspective is unavoidable.
I do know that we each received a visit in early July from St John Spears, accompanied by a government official who carried a sheaf of papers for our autographs. The Colonel blusteringly denounced me as a traitor to the human race, but from what I could gather he is quite relieved to be fr
ee at last of the problem of the supernormals. The civil servant merely requested guarantees as to our silence on any number of points, including the actions of Spears’ unit and the whole existence of the Hampdenshire Programme. I signed wherever he indicated, without the slightest intention of abiding by his stipulations.
For a time I corresponded with Gideon Beech at his home in Hertfordshire; but the power of that enormous intellect is waning at last. Despite my earnest efforts to convince him that Percival’s people have nothing more to concern them in our time, the ancient playwright abides in terror of their returning to take revenge upon him. He experiences grave difficulty now in distinguishing between his own theatrical fantasias and reality, and I fear that he is not long for this world.
Indeed, I am certain of it. When Honoré Lechasseur related to me the vision which he had been granted by Sanfeil, and in particular when he described the detail of those twin lives, lit by an inner fire not their own, which would emerge unscathed from the Retreat and yet would fade to nothing within the span of a few months; I honestly believe that, in recounting this to me, the good man did not know that he was imparting the news of my own imminent, inevitable demise.
The alternative would be to suppose that he had for some reason formed a dislike of me, which I can scarcely credit to have been the case. He is not an unkind person, merely one who is more suited to acting in and upon the world than he is to analysing it with any kind of intellectual rigour.
I recognise the affliction which ails Beech: for I am myself a sufferer. All of the incidents which followed after the supernormals’ exodus into time: the soldiers’ panicked evacuation, and our own headlong departure from the doomed Retreat, with Beech and myself crammed into the rear of the Oxford; the light and heat and noise which bathed us all at once as Lechasseur drove frantically, inexpertly, ignoring Emily’s shouted advice; even the sheer smooth crater which appeared behind us, swallowing up the farmstead, and at which we stopped to stare in awe; all these I perceived faintly, distantly, through a numbing haze of fear. I felt inside me, rising up inescapably, the anger of my uninvited passenger: the vast and icy displeasure of Sanfeil, the Coming Man. As I have committed to these pages the history of these my life’s climactic occurrences, I have felt in me that chilly condemnation, tolerating my completion of this final task before my life shall end.
So be it. It has been a life in which I have striven always to surpass the limitations of my nature, and to urge my fellow men to do likewise. It has been lived in the firm belief that mankind’s present sorry state should be, in his great history to come, the exception rather than the rule; that the human spirit, though it be at present but a feeble glimmering among the dullness of our brute animal lives, will one day be kindled and nurtured till it waxes brighter than the stars; and that there can be no higher cause than the attainment by that spirit of an excellence ever greater, subtler and more vivid. If my ideas as to how these goals might be attained were culpably mistaken, still I cannot credit that I was wrong to extol them.
No more. The history is written, and now perhaps the historian may know peace.
* * *
5th September: It is with an astonishment and exhilaration of which I scarcely thought myself now capable, that I resume my story for one final time. This very night, Percival has returned to visit me.
It happened much as before: I stood outside my study window underneath the stars, and turned my gaze upwards into that dread immensity. The smoke from an early bonfire wafted past me, and its fragrance brought to my mind those ancient inventions of our race, the warning-beacon and the burning-stake: bright symbols of our capacity for salvation and for cruelty. A voice said quietly behind me, ‘Hullo, Clever-clogs!’ and turning, I saw Percival.
He looked as if he was perhaps in his mid-forties, the wiry hair turned nearly all to grey, the skin creased all around the corners of those large green eyes. ‘It’s been quite a time, Erik,’ he said. ‘Longer for me than for you.’ He was, he told me, sixty-four years old, and he might look forward to decades, perhaps centuries, of vigorous life. In fact he is my own age to the day, and that is why he chose this time in his own life to come to me tonight. He has seen, done and created many things since we last met: most of these he did not attempt to describe to me, but he tells me that he is now the father of eight children, firstly with Violet, and more recently with another whom I have not met.
‘Fatherhood shook me out of my complacency, I don’t mind telling you,’ he said. ‘It’s shocking really, looking back on it, that it took a threat to my own family to bring home what I would have done to your whole people. God, what a selfish young monster I was! But I was only human, after all, and that’s a quality which is appalling quite as often as it’s glorious.’
‘“Only human?”’ I said. ‘Were you no better, then, than that?’
He laughed. ‘Oh, that old chestnut. Yes, we’re better – but “better at”, not “better than”. Of course we’re better when it comes to telepathy, time-travel and the like. We’re better at thinking, and so at all the trivia of art and science and culture. But spiritually better, morally better? No, old man. That was a youthful folly of mine, like so many others.’
He did not tell me where in the reaches of time and space the men and women of his race have made their home, although he hinted that their era will succeed a nearer age when many tyrannies and cataclysms are to be inflicted upon my own species. He spoke of future epochs when the Earth lies fallow, unencumbered by human occupation, while mankind explores his universe: these times will abound in animal and plant life, Percival maintains, and will incorporate a multiplicity of periods when a community may endure unobserved for centuries.
‘You’ve had no trouble from Sanfeil’s people, then?’ I asked.
He looked shrewdly at me. ‘Honoré told you everything, I suppose. No, we’ve seen no signs of their meddling. Yourself?’
I told him of my fears, my consciousness of the Coming Man’s anger spreading within me like a cancer, occluding my perceptions and darkening my spirit. Percival stood silent for a while before saying: ‘You know, Erik... Sanfeil insisted that my people must die, so his could live. He said our little microcosm had to be snuffed out, its embers used to kindle the more glorious flame of his own race.
‘In those days we all perceived the struggle in terms of my species’ survival against yours, Homo peculiar versus Homo sapiens. But what Sanfeil said made it sound as if his kind was also at stake. My kind had to die, so his could live. And, well, we didn’t. We found a way out, instead.’
‘But they will live,’ I said. ‘Surely that’s inevitable. You and Lechasseur visited their future, after all.’
‘My grandchild brought me here,’ he told me. ‘Freia’s grandchild too, as it happens. We cracked the problem of combining the channelling and sensitive genes a generation ago. Some of the brats are regular little time-machines in their own right.’ He chuckled. ‘Sometimes it causes their parents no end of grief, just tracking them down.
‘What I mean to say, old man, is that we’ve visited a lot of history, and we’ve learned a few things too about how time works. It’s more complicated than you might suppose. When I say that we’ve seen no signs of Sanfeil’s people, I mean anywhere. It’s as if they never existed.’
‘But I feel him,’ I said. ‘His presence, here inside me.’
‘The possibility of him, perhaps,’ he said. ‘A guilty ghost. He may feel real, Erik, but he has never had the power to command you.
‘And even if he had, what then? You can’t be always considering the distant future, forever in thrall to some descendant who may never exist, and whose life you couldn’t begin to imagine anyway. Do what seems best to you, believe the things you must, and act at all times as if you bear the responsibility for your own life. Even if it turns out not to be the truth, you’ve honoured your humanity that way, at least. That may be the truest fulfilment tha
t any truly human being can achieve.’
He left me shortly afterward, striding silently away into the night with that familiar loping gait. He did not say, and I did not feel the need to ask, why he had chosen this night of my life on which to visit me.
The smoke of the distant bonfire continued to drift on the wind, and for what seemed the first time, I felt at peace.
Afterword
by the Author, Philip Purser-Hallard
‘This book has two authors...’
Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men, 1930.
William Olaf Stapledon was born in 1886 and died, like Erik Clevedon, in 1950. By profession a philosopher and poet, by inclination a pacifist and socialist, Stapledon became after his death the second most influential figure in British science fiction after HG Wells, with a profound and lasting effect on authors as diverse as CS Lewis, Arthur C Clarke and Brian Aldiss.
I’ve loved and admired Stapledon’s novels since I first read Last and First Men at the age of thirteen, and the fascination which his immense and awe-inspiring vision of future history inspired in me has stayed with me ever since. In adolescence, and later as a postgraduate student writing on SF, I devoured nearly all his other fiction: Star Maker, Last Men in London, Odd John and Sirius, as well as more obscure works such as The Flames and Darkness and the Light.
However, like CS Lewis, I admire Stapledon’s prodigious imagination more than I do his philosophy. His work has certain flaws which are endemic to the British SF of the inter-War era, together with some disturbing aspects of its own. To twenty-first century sensibilities, the most shocking of these is his espousal of eugenics, which continued for years after the atrocities carried out in the name of that philosophy by the Nazis had become well known. Despite such reservations however, Stapledon remains a magnificent writer of SF, and one of the true geniuses of the genre.
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