Wanderers of Time

by John Wyndham

  ‘His mother took the child upstairs again and I waited for her to come back before I said anything, then I was deliberately matter of fact.

  ‘ “It’s unusual, most unusual,” I told them, “but it’s certainly not anything to be frightened about. It’s an extra sensitivity which, I confess, I don’t altogether understand at present, but we shall undoubtedly learn more about that from talking to him and watching him, now that we know what to look for. I’d like you to observe very closely all he does or says with reference to electricity and let me know in as much detail as you can. His general health appears to be perfectly good, but if you like I’ll go over him thoroughly tomorrow.

  ‘ “One thing strikes me, and that is that perhaps he’s not getting enough sleep, or not sleeping soundly when he does. We may be able to get over that by giving him a better shield than a tin box. About the rest of it, his being so forward for his age in the way he speaks and understands questions, and that kind of thing—I don’t think you need worry either. It’s rather soon to be definite about anything yet, but it does seem likely that if he has had this kind of thing going on all the time the constant stimulation may have forced his brain to develop abnormally fast. He doesn’t laugh much, does he?”

  ‘ “No, ’e’s a solemn one.”

  ‘ “Well, you know, I’d say at a guess that his brain’s pretty tired. You see, it gets no rest from this, night or day, except perhaps when he’s sleeping—we can’t tell that for certain until we know more about it—and that’s bound to tire him. Besides, although it must stimulate in one way, yet in another it deadens because it gives his mind no chance to develop along its own lines. We shall have to find a way of altering that. It may not be very difficult.

  ‘ “I’m very glad you called me in now because, though of course we don’t know how he actually feels it, it’s difficult to believe that it isn’t putting a considerable strain on him, and the sooner we can relieve the strain to some extent, the easier he will find things.

  ‘ “There’s nothing to worry about. I’ll come round tomorrow, as I said, and perhaps I shall be able to explain more about it”

  ‘I left them puzzled, though considerably, if vaguely, reassured. But I myself went home with my mind revolving unrestrainedly around the most astounding discovery. The boy had a sixth sense, something I had never heard, read or dreamed of. But from that moment I had not a vestige of doubt that young Ted was—the word seemed to coin itself— electro-sentient.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  STRANGE NEW WORLD

  The tall man paused. His face became suddenly visible in the darkness as he lit another cigarette.

  ‘It must be difficult for a non-medical man to appreciate all that meant to me,’ he went on. ‘There were so many sides to it. The sheerly professional interest, the fact oneself and no other had the opportunity to study it, the evolutionary aspect and the question of whether such a thing would become stabilised, the developments which would ensue if it did, as well as the work to be done in determining its capacities, limitations and nature.

  ‘Some people would say, I’ve no doubt, that I should, in the interests of science, have announced the discovery—and so I shall one day—but you can judge the playing up and sensationalism which would have swamped us and made quiet, normal observation impossible. Imagine what would happen when the newspapers got it—it would be worse than that silly Quins business and make scientific study even more difficult than it is with them. I thought, and I still think, that the way to learn about young Ted was to study him in his natural setting and not in a three-ring circus of advertisers and publicity men. So I laid myself out to play the whole thing down and keep it as quiet as possible.

  ‘It wasn’t as difficult as you might think to work that. Ada Filler was anxious to co-operate; her fear lest the neighbours should think there was anything “queer” about him was a great help. Jim wasn’t awkward either. If he had been unemployed it would have been different, but he had a decent job and enough sense to see that, although there might be a bit of money in it, once the thing was known young Ted would become of public interest and virtually pass out of his parents’ control.

  ‘Ave to ’appen one day, I s’pose,” was his opinion, “but the later the better, both for ’im and ’is mother, I say.”

  ‘More of a problem was young Ted himself. The most likely source of leakage was a child’s natural desire to show off before other children. Luckily, when he did try it later, chance so arranged things that he was unconvincing and merely gained a discouraging reputation among his friends as a liar. That didn’t matter, nearly all children boast and expect it of others, sometimes they believe one another, more often and without resentment, they don’t.

  ‘The first necessity seemed to me to give him a more efficient means of shielding himself from electrical influences than the one he had discovered. It was clear from his behaviour that his sense organs were always open to them, as one’s ears are to sound, but with much more troublesome results. For the purpose I cut a strip of copper foil, padded it on one side and covered the other with brown cotton, with the idea that he might wear it as a kind of broad fillet. Experimentally there was a wire lead from it with a clip at the end, for it appeared likely that the screen might work better if it were earthed.

  ‘I took the contraption round the following evening and let him try it on. The results were as good as I hoped; with an earth connection the radio influence was almost entirely screened off. It acted, one might say, as the eyelid of his new sense.

  ‘Later, I developed a variation on it for daytime use. The fillet was hidden under a cap, and wires running down inside his clothes were attached to metal tips on his boots. This, he found, had considerable damping effect; if he could put his feet on a wet surface the screening was almost complete. The device became particularly useful later when he went to school. I supplied a certificate stating that, owing to a sensitive condition of the skull, it would be necessary for him to wear a cap indoors; but for this, I think he would have found concentration against the distractions which poured in on him difficult, if not impossible.

  ‘When I set myself to learn what I could about young Ted’s sensory experiences I very soon found myself engaged on a harder task than I had bargained for. Imagine yourself born blind and trying to understand the power of sight, or born deaf and being told about sound and music, and you’ll begin to see something of what I was up against. Add the fact that your only source of information is an infant—extremely precocious in speech and understanding, it is true, but with an infant’s wandering interest—and that no words exist to express his sensations except in terms of other senses, and progress is understandably slow.

  ‘Nevertheless, I made some headway and began to form some hazy conceptions of the world his sixth sense showed him. It seemed to me that the new organs were somehow interconnected with the centres of vision and hearing, not like smell and taste, but more after the fashion of touch and hearing—you know how you can both feel and hear a deep note.

  ‘For instance, he did not care to go very near the high, tension pylons. He complained sometimes that they were “too loud” and sometimes that they were “too bright.” The perception itself seemed to partake of the nature of both. There was no occlusory device, so that, like his ears, the new organs were always on duty, yet, like eyes, they were capable of a kind of focus.

  ‘The analogy which gradually built itself up in my mind was something like this. Imagine a man standing on a hilltop. Around him in every direction—and he can see in every direction at once—is a vivid, almost glaring, landscape. He can focus on any detail of the landscape and see it clearly amid the rest whenever he likes, but focused or not, he cannot help looking, for his eyes are fixed open.

  ‘Or sometimes I would think of a man surrounded by all the intentional and unintentional instruments of noise; the sound waves beat at him incessantly, but he can pick out certain instruments if he tries. That, however, is a poorer analogy, for th
e boy’s “electro-sentient” organs had a much greater power of discrimination than the human ear has.

  ‘I’m afraid I can only convey poorly what I very dimly perceived myself, but I hope you can catch the idea to some extent. One was so hampered by lack of words and the looseness of meaning in those that had to be used. One continually ran up against things like this. It was clear enough that whatever Ted’s system of reception of radio, his cognition made it intelligible to him as music and speech just as our auditory system does for us, but if one took him close to a transmitter, as I did experimentally, he complained that the broadcasting was “too bright.”

  ‘ “You mean too loud,” I suggested.

  ‘But no. He wouldn’t have that at all. For him it was “too bright.”

  ‘I don’t want to bore you with technicalities and detailed accounts of my findings. That sort of thing is for the experts; I’ve got volumes of notes at home which I shall publish one day for them to scratch their heads over. More patience went into those than I have ever put into anything. I had to grasp each little hint and be ready to return to it later as the boy grew, for it was no good trying to force description and explanation before he was sufficiently developed to understand what I asked him. That sort of treatment produces, as I expect you know from experience, only a defiant sulkiness.

  ‘Very often it was no good putting a question flatly. One had to set the scene and observe results. For instance, I had discovered that for him telegraph wires were alive, “lighted” he called it, with their electric messages. But it was no good putting the general question which occurred to me as a natural corollary: “Can you overhear telephone conversations?” He had probably never noticed whether he could or not—try asking the average child about overtones or the composition of a shade of colour. One had to take him close to a telephone wire and inquire the result. Actually the result was positive. He could “overhear” up to a distance of ten feet or so from the wires though he found it “faint.”

  ‘There were plenty of other discoveries. He knew at once whether an electric wire was “live” or not. The current he seemed to perceive perhaps as a fluid stemmed by the gap in the circuit. The radiation from cars with magnetos worried him, coil ignition bothered him only a little. He could judge voltages in wires with astonishing accuracy up to about 500 volts. Above that he found them all “bright.”

  ‘He had a high sensitivity, too, to static electricity, so much so that in certain weather nothing could induce him to brush or comb his hair, and, perhaps as a side issue of this, he showed a power of weather prediction some degrees more accurate than his elders’.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  VOICES OF THE VOID

  By the time young Ted was ten and a half Jim had come to accept his son’s powers as a permanent quality and not, as he had half suspected before, something which would be outgrown with childhood. He began to make plans for him. More impressed, perhaps, by the means of Ted’s first self-revelation than by any of its subsequent manifestations Jim had ambitions to get him into the best wireless shop in Irkwell when he should leave school at fourteen.

  ‘ “That’s the thing,” he said. “Just let ’em try ’im once, that’s all. Why ’e can tell where any set’s wrong in a jiffy—and put it right, too. There’s good money in a wireless shop, if a man knows the job, which most of ’em don’t, seemingly. The lad ought to do well—maybe get a better job in one of the big Places in Derby in a year or two.”

  ‘He looked disappointed when I shook my head.

  “What’s wrong wi’ that?” he demanded.

  “Not good enough. Jim,’’ I told him. “What he ought to have if it can be managed is a real training. He’d just be wasting his time in a shop.”

  “What, a college trainin’ like? Seems to me like that’s more like wastin’ ’is time than t’other. If t’lad can do a job and’s a chance, let ’im do it, I say. There’s plenty o’ chaps full of book learnin’ an’ unemployed with it.”

  ‘ “Ted wouldn’t be,” I said. “You don’t realise it, Jim. This gift makes him something altogether exceptional. There’s no telling where it may lead. Have you ever seen him examine a wireless valve? The contempt he has for it! He looks at it as you or I might look at a car without springs. I took him to a hospital once to show him the apparatus; he looked at all the radiography stuff and the rest of the electrical set-up the same way.

  “You see, Jim, all our most advanced electrical appliances seem quite primitive to him. Before long he’ll begin to improve them. I tell you, Jim, I’m as certain of it as I ever was of anything in my life that he’s going to revolutionise our conceptions and use of electricity. Once he gets going we’re going to learn more in a few years than we’ve learned in the hundred and fifty since Volta made his battery. I can’t see, no one can see, what changes he may bring about. Not just here, Jim, not just in England, but all over the world. It’s going to be tremendous, I know it. And it’s up to us to see that he has the best start we can give him.”

  ‘I think now that I made a tactical error in putting it to him like that. It might have been better if I had taken his own ideas for Ted and worked him up to broader views by degrees. Sprung on him like that, it just didn’t register properly. In his own mind he probably put it down as a crazy idea. A suggestion that the boy might become locally important would have carried more weight. He shook his head.

  “Tha knows there’s no money to send our Ted to college, Doctor.”

  “Not much difficulty in raising it for a boy like him,” I said.

  “What, borrow on the chance of ’is payin’ it back when ’e ’ad a job? ’Oo’s goin’ to lend like that—’e might never ’ave a job, there’s plenty as ’asn’t; then what?”

  “No fear of that.”

  “You can say so, but you can’t be sure. I don’t like it. I’ve always paid my way and owed nobody owt. It’d be a fine thing if I was to borrow for the lad and leave ’im to find t’money to pay back. Might take ’im years. ’Amperin’ not ’elpin’, that’d be. No, ’e shall ’ave the best I can give ’im, but what I can’t, ’e shan’t ’ave; and that’s flat.’

  ‘And flat it remained. No amount of reasoning or argument did anything but confirm him in what to his eyes was the decent, self-respecting course. When at last I was forced to recognise the hopelessness of converting him I tried to tell myself that in the long run it would make little difference—a bit more slogging, more time wasted in beginning, but the same later on—yet at the back of my mind I knew that wasn’t the whole thing.

  ‘Young Ted developed well, with all his father’s sturdiness, a good share of the local commonsense outlook, and an amiable enough disposition. He held his place easily at school, not, I think, because his brain was anything but average, but because it was still in advance, though to a less extent, of his years. He got on well enough with the others and was frequently to be seen roving the town as a member of a gang of his own age or playing with them in the Irkwell Urban District Gardens. One was glad that, superficially, his interests seemed quite dully normal.

  ‘In his eleventh and twelfth years, when I had feared he might want to forsake my company entirely for that of his gang, I still managed to see quite a lot of him—largely because he liked to come out in my car, I fancy—-and it was when he was nearly twelve that I got a hint of something which bowled my imagination over.

  ‘We were out late. My car had run a big-end up on the moors miles from anywhere. We had reached a main road and at last succeeded in getting a lift part of the way home, but we were left with five miles to cover and only our feet to carry us. It was a fine summer night and about as warm as it ever is on top of the hills. We had been going for some twenty minutes when Ted took off his cap and with it the copper shield which he wore concealed in the lining.

  ‘ “It’s stopped,” he said.

  ‘I knew without asking that he meant that the B.B.C. middle and long-wave stations had closed down, and most of the powerful foreigners, too
.

  ‘ “After midnight, then,” I said.

  ‘ “Aye.”

  ‘We trudged on without speaking for a while. I knew that he was ranging about that queer electrical landscape of his, aware of things I should never know. And never had I been so—well, so jealous, I suppose it was, of his power as I was at that moment. Just then I felt that I would have given anything that could be asked of me just for a glimpse of the world through his sixth sense—just a glimpse, no matter how brief, so that I … could begin to understand.

  ‘He was at ease now. He complained these days that when the big stations were on, they were too loud so that they “dazzled” him unless he wore a shield, just as he complained that electric sparks hurt him like a very loud noise “only ; brighter-like.” I knew that was so for I had seen him wincing painfully on account of a quite distant thunderstorm. I found myself suddenly and irrationally angry with him for having this extra world open to him and being unable to convey it to me.

  ‘It was he who broke the silence and with it my unreasonable mood. He raised his hand and pointed upwards.

  ‘ “What’s out there, Doctor?”

  ‘I looked into the star scattered blue-black sky.

  ‘ “Space,” I said. “Emptiness, or nearly, with little suns and planets floating about in it.”

  ‘ “Aye, Mr. Pauley learned me that at school. But he didn’t say owt about what goes on out there.”

  ‘ “Goes on?”

  ‘ “Aye, goes on. ’E said as they was worlds, maybe like this, some of ’em, but nowt about t’ chaps as lives on ’em, and what they do there.”