The Secret People

by John Wyndham

  Ed, in a state of uproarious childish delight at the success of his ‘gas attack’, flung jibes after the rout. Zickle had broken into some heathen chant of victory. Even Mark found himself laughing at the farcical climax of this second attack.

  The last gasping pygmy fled from the sound of jubilation, but the hilarity continued. It took Smith a long time to impress on his followers that it was necessary to repair their defences.

  7

  Mark looked up at Smith.

  ‘It must be several days since that second attack. Do you really think they’ll come on again?’

  ‘Sure thing,’ Smith nodded emphatically. ‘Why else’d I have gotten the wall mended?’ He looked across at Gordon, who agreed.

  ‘They’re sure to try to get us one way or another. They can’t afford to let us escape at any cost in casualties.’

  ‘But it’s so long since that puff-ball business. They may have given up.’

  ‘Not they. I reckon they’re putting their heads together and thinking up a new dodge.’ Smith paused. ‘What gets me is the ingenuity of ’em last time,’ he continued. ‘Another few minutes and there’d have been hundreds of ’em through the wall. Didn’t guess the little guys had it in them to think up a stunt like that.’

  ‘They haven’t,’ said Gordon. ‘I’ll bet anything you like that Miguel or one of his crowd put them up to it; what’s more, it’s ten to one that whoever did it is putting them up to another one now. Don’t forget, this means a lot to them – just as much as it does to us. They are out to nail us, and as a matter of fact, if they do give Miguel the run of the outer caves, he stands a better chance of getting out than we do.’

  ‘Well, in that case,’ said Mark thoughtfully, ‘what are we here for?’

  The others stared at him.

  ‘I mean if we surrender and Miguel gets out, he won’t keep quiet about this place. There’ll be an expedition down here – just as there will be if we get out – so if he’s got a better chance, why not let him go willingly?’

  ‘You’re forgetting something.’

  ‘I don’t see –’

  ‘You’re forgetting that Miguel made a bargain with the pygmies. I don’t know what pygmy morals on a point like that are, but why should they keep it? He’s got no way of making them keep it that I can see. Suppose they’re just using him? They must know what his little game is, sure enough, but they won’t let him play it.’

  ‘Besides,’ Gordon broke in, ‘if they can beat a hundred and fifty of us, they’ll ask themselves why they should kowtow to Miguel and his lot – and they’ll find there’s no reason why they should. The thing I don’t understand is his falling for their promises. It’s not like his kind to do a deal without guarantees.’

  The three were silent for a time. It was Mark again who spoke first.

  ‘I should have thought,’ he said, ‘that it would have been a good move from their point of view to put those lights out.’ He looked up at the blue-white globes, shimmering unharmed in the rocky roof. ‘The confusion would just about put paid to our defence: they’d be almost certain to break through somewhere.’

  ‘Several reasons,’ Gordon explained. ‘For one thing they’re not easy to break. They may look like glass, but they’re tough. And, for another, these pygmies are more scared of the dark than any kid. It’s just about the worst kind of bogey to them. Maybe you didn’t realize it, but they’ve spent all their lives under these lamps, and that’s tied up with the third reason. It’d be sacrilege to bust them. Their lives depend on them, and they all but worship them.’ At Mark’s look of inquiry he amplified: ‘They’re symbols of Ra – you remember, he was holding one in that carving. If they break one, they are insulting him. If they break several, he is so angry that he sends darkness to plague them. According to Mahmud, they are so used to light that they can’t think of darkness as being just an absence of it, but they fear it as a concrete something by which Ra manifests displeasure. It’s for that reason more than any other that they’re so scared of it. And even that’s not a new idea – I seem to remember something about a plague of darkness over Egypt, and the Egyptians didn’t like that, much though they knew what night meant. For these little devils it must be terrifying – like being struck blind.’

  Mark was scarcely convinced. Destruction of the lights seemed such an obvious way to create utter confusion. The globes might be tough, but the pygmies’ slung stones travelled forcefully … They were not unbreakable; he remembered Gordon’s own story of one smashed experimentally. Such a superstition as Gordon suggested seemed a slender screen between themselves and chaos. He said as much. Gordon shook his head.

  ‘It’s the safest defence we could have. There’s no better guarantee than a good, well-grounded superstition. The decisions of the Hague Court or a Geneva conference are flimsy compared with it. You read a bit of anthropology one day – it’ll surprise you. People can bind fetters round themselves that they can never break – though they may be beyond reason and safety.’ His voice grew quieter and less emphatic as he ruminated: ‘Superstition and suggestion through superstition are greatly neglected powers nowadays. I don’t mean that there aren’t plenty of superstitious conventions and taboos about; there are, but they’re formless and ill-controlled, and very often conflicting. There’s a great influence over men and women just wasted and running to seed today. Instead of using it, the leaders have dropped it. The only way they attempt to control people now is by mass suggestion at a late age. That works, but it’s inefficient; it has to be boosted continually. You can easily work up a nation to war pitch, but it takes continuous energetic propaganda to keep it there. If you allow them to think for themselves, they’ll slack off, and it becomes progressively more difficult to keep up your propaganda so that they shan’t think for themselves sooner or later. What’s more, mass suggestion always begets a certain amount of counter mass suggestion – pure cussedness to begin with, as likely as not, but it goes on growing because of the defaulters who join it when they find they’ve been hoaxed by the original suggestion. Damned silly way of going on. Reminds me of those advertisements about increasing your height – it can be done, but the right time to do it is while you’re young. In the same way, suggestion will work on an adult, but if you want to make a good job of it you’ve got to start on the infant. The church has the right idea. It got in as soon as it decently could with a baptism service. When they followed that up with a proper course of training, they’d got the poor little blighter just where they wanted him. He couldn’t think for himself. He thought he could, mind you; he often thought he was doing no end of a fine think, but that didn’t matter; he was only playing a kind of game with the rules already set in his mind. In practice, he was only crawling around in a mental pen.

  ‘That was the way with most of the old religions, and a lot of them lasted a long time. They bust up mostly because they used their power wrongly, not because it weakened. Some of them didn’t give enough crawling room; they drew the walls of the pen closer and closer until something was bound to give. Others let the walls fall into disrepair so that the people inside could look out and see that the country round about wasn’t so bad after all. And then they lost their great power – all the western nations have lost it, but a good superstitious upbringing still holds the primitives.’

  ‘That was a sign that the power of superstition was ending,’ Mark interrupted. ‘The people were turning to reason instead.’

  ‘Reason, my foot. They won’t be ready for reason for thousands of years – if they last that long. My God, just look at the world, man. Reason!’

  ‘But it’s true. The religions are dying – in the west, anyhow. I know people make a vulgar noise about them, but that’s because they’re not convinced – if they were, there’d be no reason for the noise.’

  ‘Rot. The religions aren’t dying. Just because you give a thing a different name it doesn’t change it. You can have a religion without an anthropomorphic figure-head, just as you can have a s
tate without a king. Democracy, Socialism, Communism, they’re all religions.’

  Mark objected. ‘No, they’re political theories.’

  ‘Well, when did you ever find a religion that wasn’t somehow bound up with a political theory? I tell you they are just as much religions as Christianity, Mohammedanism or Buddhism. They are a superstition. What else but a superstition could produce the fantastic idea that all men are equal? Reason certainly could not. What but superstition could set people forming laws on a Lowest Common Denominator basis, and forcing brilliant intellects to abide by them? Is it a home of reason which devotes so much of its energy and wealth to preserving its unfit that its fit are neglected and become unfit themselves? And these, mind you, are recent developments among people whom you say are “turning to reason”. Reason! Oh, my God!’

  Gordon got up and stumped away. Smith grinned at Mark.

  ‘Great guy on the spielin’, ain’t he? Only trouble is that he doesn’t know what he wants any more than the rest of us. Still, it’s been handy havin’ him around; gets the boys talkin’ and arguin’ so that they forget ’emselves for a bit.’ He got up. ‘I’m goin’ over to have a look at Ed and his bunch. Comin’?’

  They made a detour and came upon the group from the rear. Certain parts of the cave had become unhealthy since Ed’s artillery school had started. Slings are instruments requiring a nicety of operation only to be attained by practice, wherefore the danger area in front of the tyros was of considerable width. In a mushroom head, leaned against the wall for target duty, two stones had lodged. Ed turned his usual cheerful countenance.

  ‘Made it – once,’ he declared proudly.

  ‘Out of how many?’ Smith asked.

  ‘Oh, lay off that. This ain’t a Tommy gun – you gotta get to know it.’

  ‘Whose is the other?’

  ‘Zickle’s. That nigger’s gonna do big things.’

  Zickle gave a show of white teeth.

  ‘Yes, me gottim,’ he agreed.

  The two stood watching the practice for a while. The speed and force of the missiles was formidable, though the aim remained erratic. Ed, undiscouraged, pointed out that when the attack should come there would be a lot of targets, not just one.

  As they wandered on, leaving him to it, Mark inquired as to progress on the tunnel. Smith answered him with the usual ‘any time now’.

  ‘Do you know what’s above?’ Mark jerked his thumb at the roof.

  ‘Not for sure. What’re you gettin’ at?’

  ‘Just this – suppose it’s a hill or a mountain?’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, you may have got up beyond normal surface-level already, and be boring your way through the heart of a mountain.’

  ‘It’s possible – but it ain’t likely. You see, there’s a hell of a lot more flat than mountains round here. It’s thousands to one against our being under any sizeable mountain, and I guess we’ve got to take the risk anyway.’

  ‘You couldn’t send out some side tunnels experimentally?’

  Smith shook his head.

  ‘Not now. It’d be a waste of time. If it hadn’t come to a showdown, it might’ve been worth trying. But with this on our hands, the best we can do is to keep straight on and up.’

  The two strolled on, talking until they were interrupted by a hail from the wall. Smith hurried over.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Something going on in the right-hand tunnel,’ said the lookout. ‘There’ve been one or two of them dodging about in there.’

  Both Smith and Mark stared, but they could make out little. There was certainly movement, though it was impossible to make out what was taking place.

  ‘Better call the men up,’ Smith decided. ‘There may be another charge.’

  Within two minutes the parapet was lined with staring faces whose owners speculated audibly, but it was half an hour before a definite move took place.

  Near the middle of the wall Ed had chosen to station himself and his ‘artillery’. The rest gave them a wide berth, and eyed them with misgiving; it had been noticed that stones had a habit of flying out of slings before the release was intended.

  At last, when the majority had decided that the alarm must be false, a few small, white figures issued from the right-hand cave mouth. Ed waited until they had formed a line, then he and his men let fly. Most of the stones clattered harmlessly; only one figure subsided. It sat on the ground, hugging a damaged knee. The rest swung their slings and replied with a volley. The men on the wall watched the missiles come arching towards them. They were bigger than the stones used before, and flung on a higher trajectory. They looked like a flight of snowballs. Only when they landed did it become clear that they were not stones at all.

  One struck the parapet just in front of Mark. It burst into a cloud of spores. He began to cough and choke as they entered his lungs. The more he gasped for breath, the more floating spores he breathed. His eyes streamed until he could scarcely see. He had a glimpse of another volley of white balls, bursting in another smother of spores.

  The whole line of men was gasping and choking in the dusty air. The flakes swirled around them like a mist, blotting everything from view. Throats and chests began to ache with coughing; each fresh paroxysm seemed to rack more painfully.

  They had been out-manoeuvred. The pygmies, or their advisers, had welcomed Ed’s fungus idea, but they had realized too that they could not hope in the face of a bombardment to roll the puff-balls up to the wall. The problem had been solved by extracting the spores from ripe balls, and stitching them into smaller skins suitable for slinging. But to what purpose?

  The wall with its defenders had now disappeared into an artificial blizzard, but the flights of spore-bombs continued to fall with accuracy wherever the cloud was thinning. The pygmies and ‘natives’ could not hope to make an attack now. Once they should reach the spore area they would be in as bad a plight as the rest. It could only be that the present barrage was intended not just to disable, but to act as a screen. What might be afoot at the end of the cave, the spluttering, choking defenders could only guess.

  At last, after what seemed an interminable period, the spore-bombs ceased to fall. The white swirl began to settle and thin, or drift away. The paroxysms of choking grew less frequent and less agonizing. Eyelids could be opened without reclosing immediately in self-defence. The red-rimmed eyes, still streaming, could peer painfully in an effort to see what had taken place behind the screen, but their vision was dimly blurred. It was noses which gave the clue – a faint smell of burning.

  A whistling flight of stones made them duck again. Mark put his recovering eyes to the spyhole, and the pygmy operations ceased to be a mystery.

  In a line across the end of the cave lay five huge piles of vegetable rubbish, and from each was ascending a column of heavy, yellow smoke. For a few feet it poured straight up, then it bent over, broadening fanwise as the draught from the tunnels behind began to carry it farther into the big cavern. The rising curls, progressively attenuated, mingled as they climbed, losing individuality in a grey-yellow haze. Already an obscuring tide was flowing across the uneven roof. Those lamps it had engulfed showed wanly; their brilliance sicklied to a gloomy dimness. Mark watched it lap about others, flowing first to either side before it thickened to submerge them, increasing the gloom step by step.

  With the decreasing light, the cave seemed to change character. It was no longer the familiar, workaday place they all knew. Nooks and corners, becoming shrouded, took on an ill aspect. Fears were born in the hidden crevices and came stealing out to attack the men’s minds, the agents provocateurs of panic.

  A group on the far right swarmed over the parapet and dropped to the loam. They started racing for the fires, oblivious of the flying stones which slashed at them. The slingmen changed their tactics and sent spore bombs which burst in their path. The running men staggered and reeled, they doubled up, and the sound of their rasping coughs came back to those still on the wall.
The stones whistled among them again, felling a number and driving the rest into an impotent fury as they floundered with a temporary blindness.

  Mark glanced round at Smith in mute inquiry. The other shook his head.

  ‘No good. That’s just what they want – to get us in the open. Once they do that it’s all up.’

  Smith was right; it was the position, not the numbers of the defenders, which had baffled the attack. Doubtless they would be able to give a good account of themselves with their clubs, but though the pygmies were small, their numbers, added to those of the ‘natives’, were not. To take to the open meant certain defeat sooner or later. Mark became gloomy. This smoke business had not been foreseen. The slight draught which played through the crevices would not be enough to keep the air breathable. The time would not be long in coming when the only alternatives would be to make a dash or to suffer asphyxiation. Either meant the end of their plan. The pygmies would probably prefer the latter; it would give them less trouble.

  The smoke was now a thick blanket over the whole roof. In the semi-darkness the men looked questioningly at their leader. Smith failed them – he could see no way out, and their eyes, roving farther along the wall, sought the burly Ed. He, too, was without a suggestion, and for the first time in Mark’s experience of him, looked dejected.

  ‘No, you ain’t got this thing right,’ he said to those who urged a charge. ‘Maybe you’ll get five minutes’ fun skull cracking, but that ain’t gonna help us any if you get your own skulls cracked after. What we gotta do is figure out some new line. And,’ he added after an interval, ‘it seems to me as there ain’t none … Gees, don’t I wish I’d never pulled that puff-ball stuff.’