John Cristopher
THE POSSESSORS
An Avon Book
AVON BOOKS
A division of The Hearst Corporation
959 Eighth Avenue New York,
New York 10019
Copyright © 1964 by John Christopher.
Published by arrangement with Simon and Schuster, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 65-10387.
All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon and Schuster, Inc., 630 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10020.
First Avon Printing, October, 1966
Cover illustration by Don Crowley
Printed in the U.S.A.
The Possessors had a long memory, but not long enough to encompass their origins. At one time, it seemed likely, they had had a separate life, but for aeons which were now uncountable their life had been bound up with the— to them—evanescent lives of the Possessed. Without them, they could not act or think, but through them they were the masters of this cold world. They raised cities above the ice, spun on strange sailing craft across the vast deserts of snow, conquered at last the chill cloudy skies. All this they did, living in the bodies of the Possessed, at once united with them and remote from their brutishness. It was not that they despised their hosts who were their slaves; in a way, and insofar as the term had any meaning in their experience, they were fond of them. When the disaster came, they would have saved them if they could.
With a longer warning, it might have been possible. Already their rockets had reached the planet’s two moons, had probed toward the three other worlds that made up the family of this sun. A century would have been enough, even fifty years. But the facts were clear, the extrapolation certain. In less than ten years their sun would explode, turn nova, increase in size until the planet’s very orbit lay inside its flame and fury. There was no way of saving the Possessed from their fate.
For themselves, though, there was a chance; or rather for the spores which were their children. A small chance, but a chance. metal arks were built by the patient dextrous hands of the Possessed, set up on launching sites, prepared and made ready. And in due course they watched, Possessors and Possessed, as fire broke out beneath them, lifting them, forcing them up into the pale windy skies. Already it was warmer, and the sun’s heat had begun to melt the planet’s crust of ice. The Possessors knew that the end was not far off.
But the spores, in their steel cocoons, were safe for the moment in the cold deeps of space. Most, in the end, would perish. Perhaps all would. But some might survive. Somewhere, in the unimaginable future, on some inconceivably distant world, the Possessors might live again.
There was neither time nor distance nor sentience: merely life, suspended. As, over thousands of years, their fates took them, they were unaware of death. It was almost always the same—the effortless fall through the mesh of a new solar system, faster and faster until the ship, already melting, plunged into the sun. This end, as the Possessors had known, was the one the probabilities overwhelmingly favored.
But the ships had been launched in their hundreds, and there was a chance that some might fare better. Three did. Three were caught in the lesser gravitational fields of planets, and plunged into air, not flame. And when they did, the automatic control worked as the Possessors had planned. Long before the metal of the capsule began to glow with friction from the atmosphere, the spores were ejected. And floated down, like bubbles.
One was a world of water, another of fiery scorching desert. The bubbles survived a little longer in the first than the second, but in either case not long. The third world was less homogeneous than the other two.
They drifted down through the thickening air to many different places. Some landed in water, some in desert heat. They fell in jungle and on grassland, among rocks and on fertile meadows. The results were the same. One dropped in front of a child, brown, naked, sitting on his haunches and playing with a primitive wooden toy. The child watched, stretched a hand out, drew hack and whimpered as the balloon, before his eyes, burst and dissolved into nothingness. Hours later, only one spore survived.
It lay where it had fallen, m a crevice high up on a mountain. There was snow all around, and fresh snow seeping out of a steely sky. As time passed, the snow buried the spore. It lay there, protected, insentient but alive, throughout the winter.
The spring and summer brought a thaw. Ice and snow were melted, to flow in small bright rivulets down the mountainside. But not all the snow melted. The glaciers were advancing again, slowly, barely perceptibly, moving forward in another stage of their age-long dance. Winters were a little colder, summers a shade less warm. Year by year, the snow piled thicker, heavier, on the buried spore. The pressure did it no harm. It lay in its cold protective prison, mindlessly waiting.
And in time the glaciers retreated again. The snow blanket thinned, taking one decade with the next. There were stresses and strains, the shift and crunch of pressures that had been stabilized and now once more were unequal. Ice cracked, snow began to slide. After long long years of stasis, suddenly there was motion.
1
There were two intermediate stations on the way up to Nidenhaut, where the rack-and-pinion railway came to a halt at a covered-in station festooned with icicles. They had crossed the snow line a few hundred yards beyond the second stop; in half an hour they had climbed two thousand feet from the valley floor, itself a thousand feet above sea level. Douglas Poole hefted his bag down onto the platform, and carried it out past the barrier. Sunlight, reflected from snow, dazzled him. He was blinking and could not, at first, see much of the person who addressed him.
“Mr. Poole, is it? George Hamilton.”
The voice had the clipped assurance of an ex-R.A.F. accent. A hand was extended, and he took it. The grip was firm. As his eyes grew accustomed to the light, he saw that the rest of the appearance fitted: a lean large-boned man, with some puffiness about the face and a bristling mustache, black flecked with white. He was wearing ski pants, a blue anorak, and a black astrakhan hat squarely on his head.
“Yes,” he said, “I’m Poole. I didn’t expect to be met, though. I didn’t say which train I would be coming on.”
“Most people who take the morning flight to Geneva wind up on this one. Actually, I wasn’t meeting you specifically. There’s some stuff on board for us—meat and veg. It’ll take them a quarter of an hour to unload it. Feel like a noggin while we wait?”
Douglas hesitated for a moment. When he had looked at his watch, as the train was pulling into the station, the time had been ten minutes short of four o’clock. After all, though, he was on holiday.
“That’ll be fine,” he said.
Hamilton led the way past a Volkswagen Minibus, with chained wheels and a dented offside wing, to the Buffet de la Gare. Douglas had a glimpse of Nidenhaut itself, a single street with wooden buildings on either side, shops, a couple of hotels. The mountain slope stretched away above it to a summit sharp and white against blue sky. They went up steps, and turned right onto a terrace set out with tables and chairs, the tables topped with umbrellas advertising Campari and Pepsi-Cola. It jutted over the railway line, and looked across the valley to the southern peaks. Douglas recognized the serrated crest of the Dent du Midi.
“You drink beer?” Douglas nodded. Hamilton spoke to a waiter, too fast for Douglas’s halting French to follow him. “Not a bad view, this.”
“Very impressive.”
“They drive you bloody mad at times, these mountains, but it’s pretty fine, really. What sort of flight did you have?”
“Uneventful.”
“The best kind. I stick to train and boat. I’m scared of the
other stuff. You’re staying a fortnight with us, that right?”
“Yes.”
“I never know. Mandy keeps the lists. Have you done much skiing?”
“Practically none. A couple of weeks during my National Service. We were stationed in Austria. Nothing since then.”
“We’ve got some nice easy slopes for you. And some other beginners so you won’t get shown up too badly. It’s a good crowd in at the moment. You’ll like them.”
He said politely, “I’m sure I will.”
The drinks were brought out. There was a slight breeze coming down off the snow, but it was hot in the sun. The beer was welcome. It was very pale in color, but surprisingly full-bodied.
“They make a strong beer in these parts,” he said.
Hamilton grinned. “It’s better with a shot of cognac, don’t you think? A bit thin on its own.”
“Well,” he said, “thanks for the warning.”
“We like to turn the thing into a sort of family party, up at the chalet,” Hamilton said. “With only a few guests, and pretty well isolated, one more or less has to. I’ll tell you whom you’ll be meeting. The Deepings, to start with.
He’s in business—something to do with textiles. They’ve got a couple of boys with them, but they’re no trouble.” Douglas shook his head. “I don’t mind children.”
“Nor do I, provided they behave themselves. Anyway, the Deepings are only staying a couple more days. Then we have the Graingers. He’s a surgeon, plastic type. Puts on new noses, lifts the sagging breast. Remarkably cheerful with it. And she’s a sweetie. The other two are sisters. A Mrs. Winchmore, and a Miss Blackstone. But the Mrs. is a widow. Very pleasant, on the quiet side. The younger one’s got plenty of life, though. A good crew, all round.”
“Yes.”
Hamilton finished his drink, and exhaled heavily. “As I say, we run this show for coziness. It works, most of the time.”
“I’m sure it does, Mr. Hamilton.”
“George. George and Mandy.” His smile was at once cheerful and peremptory. “We insist on that.”
“Of course. I’m Douglas.”
He was inwardly dubious about this crash-program approach to familiarity, and wondered for a moment if the whole thing had not been a mistake. He had accepted the need, the urgent need, for a break, but he could have chosen something else. A cruise, perhaps, on a large ship where one could get away from people if one wanted to. But he was here. He would have to make the best of it.
“Right,” Hamilton said. “They should have the stuff off by now. We’ll take off, if you’re ready.”
The speed with which Hamilton drove the Minibus with chains over the snow-packed road would not, Douglas felt, do his tires any good. It did not do much for his own peace of mind, either. Once out of the village, the road—track, rather—followed a shoulder of the mountain, nowhere very wide and in places alarmingly narrow. The drop was on Hamilton’s side. Douglas had occasional startling glimpses past him of the valley floor, the Rhone a tiny rivulet wandering through minuscule fields. The car rocked, and he put his hand on the corner of his seat to steady himself.
“You’re all right on the way up,” Hamilton said cheerfully, “as long as you take it steady all the way. It’s going down that’s tricky. Chap went over the edge, the year before we took over. They fished him and the car out of a gully, about eight hundred feet below. Identification a bit difficult in both cases.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Three years.” He took a hand off the wheel to slap his chest. “And the old lungs have been clear for two. I used to whistle like a flute.”
The road curved sharply, and at the same time narrowed dramatically. There was a rock overhang on the right, some snow-covered marker posts on the left; after that, a sickening emptiness. Douglas felt the rear of the car break away as the back tires lost adhesion. Only for a moment. Hamilton corrected expertly and confidently. But he had not, Douglas felt with some resentment, come on holiday to Switzerland in order to be scared out of his wits.
“Can’t you take it steady at a lightly slower speed?” he asked.
Hamilton did not reply at once. He was revving the car even harder up a steeper stretch of road. He said, when he had eased off, “You’ve got to have a run at that one. Otherwise you can get stuck, even with chains. That corner back there is a bloody nuisance altogether. There was a landslip eighteen months ago which it took a week to dig out. Cost us a packet.”
“So there are some disadvantages to living in the Alps.”
The road began to level out, and Hamilton slackened speed.
“Plenty,” he said. “We’re nearly there now.”
They swung around another corner, and Douglas saw the house. It was built high up in a bowl that some geological cataclysm, long ago, had scooped out of the mountainside. The road they were on zig-zagged up to it. There was no sign of a road beyond.
“You’re at the end of the line, then?” Douglas said.
“In winter, we are. In summer they drive cattle higher up. There are a couple of herdsmen’s huts, and a weekend chalet. All shut up now, of course.”
It was a typical Swiss chalet, built in wood, with a wide terrace balcony on the first floor and smaller individual balconies on the two floors above. There were a couple of outhouses to one side, and a vast pile of cut logs stacked between them and the chalet. Smoke drifted up from a couple of the chimneys, dark against the white hillside which framed the house. The place had a solid, reassuringly comfortable look. On an easy slope, about a hundred yards from the chalet, four people were skiing. Douglas was relieved to see that they were making a poor job of it.
The car rattled to a halt in front of the chalet, and he saw that the main entrance was to one side and higher up. The part immediately in front of them was by way of being a basement—the house had been built on a slope. As he got out of the Minibus, a door opened, and a man came out, gaunt-looking, in his sixties, wearing a blue apron.
“Peter,” Hamilton said. He pronounced the name in the German fashion. “Look after Mr. Poole’s luggage.” He turned to Douglas. “Come in, and we’ll see about getting you warmed up.”
They went up stone steps, snow-covered but sanded. The front door was at the top, a heavy wooden affair, with narrow double-glazed windows on either side. It gave onto a tiny lobby, and a second equally massive door. Hamilton pushed it open, and motioned Douglas to go in. The hall was dim, but warm and smelling pleasantly of spices. Hamilton followed him.
“Mandy!” he called. “New arrival. Come and check him in.”
By the time they went in for supper, he had got the hang of the house and knew a little of the people in it. His own room was one of three on the first level (taking the main entrance as ground level) and was a pleasant, simply furnished chamber, pine-paneled and with paintings of mountains on the walls. It had a washbasin, a radiator, and double-glazed French windows leading to one of the balconies he had seen from below. The view from it was impressive. The house looked southwest and across the valley to the peaks opposite. Hamilton had identified two of them for him as Grammont and the Comettes de Bise. Looking right, one saw the lake, still and blue and distant. He had watched one of the steamers crawling toward Geneva.
On the ground floor, immediately to the right of the entrance lobby, there was a small room which was a combination smoking room and bar. Beyond that were the salon and the dining room, both with access to the veranda. They were furnished simply, but in good taste. In the dining room there was a long black oak refectory table, around which the Hamiltons seated themselves and their guests. Hamilton took the head of the table nearest to the salon, and his wife faced him at the other end. Douglas sat between the two married ladies, Ruth Deeping and Elizabeth Grainger. The former was redheaded and seemed excitable, with a thin face prematurely lined—he judged her to be in her late thirties—and showing signs of strain, but attractive when she smiled. Elizabeth Grainger, the surgeon’s wife, was that
rare thing, a genuine beauty. She was dark, rather above average height, her features lovely in themselves and well proportioned. She carried herself with grace, and with the assurance of a woman who has never doubted her looks, nor their impression on others. She did not say much, but spoke in a clear, confident voice.
Immediately opposite him were Leonard Deeping, and Jane Winchmore, the widow. Deeping was in his middle forties, a stocky jowling man with grizzled hair set in a careful wave, and a natty taste in dress. He had changed into a dark blue-check suit and wore a red silk waistcoat under it. Although he lived and carried on his business in London, he had a pronounced north-country accent—Lancashire probably. A bit dull, Douglas thought, and a bit of a trickster.
Jane Winchmore had been widowed early—she could scarcely be thirty. Her best feature was her hair, which was thick silky gold, cut short, but she had the kind of features that went well with it: high Slavonic cheekbones, a generous mouth. When she smiled, he saw that she had excellent teeth. She did not smile much, though. She gave the impression of listening to another conversation, watching another scene.
Her sister, sitting between Deeping and Hamilton, was altogether different, both in appearance and manner. She was slighter, very dark, reminding him of pictures of Princess Margaret. She had quite striking blue eyes, which she used to effect. She was a good deal younger than her sister, much the youngest present, and she chattered continually. Deeping and Hamilton competed amiably for her attention. She showed every sign of enjoying this, but Douglas noticed that once or twice she glanced covertly in his direction. A girl, he decided, who would be reluctant to accept that one could have too much of a good thing.
The final member of the party was Selby Grainger,
The Possessors Page 1
