The Green Drift

by John Lymington

‘Does he ever tell you what sort of plots he works out?’

  ‘I don’t know. He’s such a leg-puller and he makes up such fantastic yarns it’s.best not to believe him too much. But last night he went out there, and then Bert Davy said he had gone. I thought it was rather funny because I hadn’t seen him go, and he would always say goodnight.’

  ‘You were hurt because he had gone without doing that?’

  ‘Well, anyone is. It’s rude.’

  ‘But it hurt you more than it would hurt the normal person who knew him? Yes? Isn’t that the case? Are you not attracted to him more than one normally would be by a stranger?’

  ‘He is not a stranger! ’

  Don t quibble. It is the fact that you are in some degree in love with him, and that is why you knew lie would not go without saying goodbye to you ! ’

  ‘You—you beast! You’ve no right—’

  ‘I know that’s the truth,’ he said briefly. ‘It doesn’t mean anything to me but that it helps to build up part of a picture of which you are only the fringe” He watched her. ‘Don’t cry. This is a serious matter. I want your full attention” He walked across the room and back, watching her all the time. ‘At what time did Bert Davy say he had gone?’

  ‘About ten minutes before I closed. I didn’t believe him. I thought he was walking in the garden. Closing time is twenty to eleven— My head’s going round. You’ve made me feel terrible! What right have you—?’

  He pulled a chair and sat facing her, their knees almost touching. ‘You went out to see if he was in the garden?’ ‘Yes, I did. I called him, but there was nobody there”

  ‘In view of your feelings would you have let him stay behind after you had closed?’

  ‘No! Of course not! It would only make things worse.’ ‘Your husband knew about this feeling before he went?’ ‘He didn’t know.’

  ‘But you played it against him, because of this other woman?’ Griswold waited patiently while she burst into tears once more, but checked the time as well. When she calmed, he said, ‘But then he went away and you will not risk him staying away by making things worse with a double affair”

  She just nodded.

  ‘So that, quite frankly, you would not risk being seen out alone with Mr Chance.’

  ‘Of course not! No!’

  ‘Yet that is what you did last night”

  ‘I can’t believe I should have done that! It’s the very thing I’ve been frightened of doing. You know how sometimes there is something you mustn’t do, because it will ruin you, and yet you get to feel you’ve got to do it, and it builds up and up in you and then—’

  ‘But it never did.’

  ‘No! No, it never did”

  Yet last night you did it. Where do you stop remembering?”

  ‘The two men were still there when I came back from the garden. I saw them out and locked up. Then I went out to the porch to get the pint glass and—it was half full and there was his stick, the carved stick he was very proud of. It gave me a turn. The sort of feeling that he was still there, but nobody was there. It was a kind of shock, as if you’d seen a ghost or something.’

  ‘He writes about ghosts. Docs he talk about them?’ ‘Sometimes: Houses he’s sold, you know. Haunted—’ ‘This would be getting on for eleven o’clock?’

  ‘Yes.’ She had recovered herself. ‘I cleared the till, counted it and took the money upstairs. Then—’ Her eyes opened wide. ‘My Lord! then I heard him call out from downstairs! Yes, I did! He shouted out! ’

  ‘What did he shout?’

  ‘I’m not sure. It was something like, “Something terrible is happening! Let me out! ” Like that. I’m not sure.

  only just remembered it then.’

  ‘Then what?’

  She shook her head. ‘Nothing. I don’t believe he could have been there, or I would have remembered. I would have remembered letting him out, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘These memory lapses seem to be sharp edged,’ Griswold said, impatiently. ‘They cut off dead. Because it isn’t amnesia. It’s a deliberate—’ He got up suddenly. She watched him, waiting for him to go on, but he switched. ‘Did he say anything strange during the time he talked to you at the bar?’

  ‘Not strange for him. Very strange for anybody else.’

  ‘Is that the stick he left behind?’

  Griswold picked a stick from the table amongst a sea of papers on the table top. The handle was carved into two heads, beauty on top and the beast below.

  ‘Yes. Yes, that’s it.’

  ‘You feel a certain confusion this morning?’

  ‘Confusion! I’m steamed up! I can hardly think. I can hear things falling down like thunder. It’s the world. It can’t be true, all this! I’m going mad. I told them so. I knew ii would happen. Your feelings can only go so far then you snap. It all gives way. That’s what happens when people go mad! ’

  ‘Then you’re all mad” said Griswold briskly. ‘That should be a consolation. Everyone in this house is abnormal, I hope for the time being.’

  Her expression hardened slowly. For a moment the thought passed through her mind that here before her was the worst brain case of them all. She watched him turn to the window, and then, as if no one was looking, he put his thumb to his nose and spread out a fan of lingers. Then he put his hand back in his pocket and turned back to her.

  ‘The behaviour of humanity is predictable but incomprehensible” he said. ‘What did you expect this man to do last night in your pub?’

  ‘Well, what he did do.’

  ‘Including vanish?’

  ‘Oh no. Of course not that!’

  ‘But he did, didn’t he? You knew he hadn’t gone out through your house. I know he didn’t get over the garden wall, which is the only other physical way. So how did he go?:

  ‘He couldn’t, have gone through the house without me seeing him, and the two men there. The Gents leads off the bar through a passage. No, there’s nowhere he could have gone where I wouldn’t have seen him go. except the garden”

  ‘He didn’t go that way”

  When I heard him shout downstairs I went all cold. But then I suppose I thought he must have been out in the street.’

  Then why should he shout to be let out, if he was already out?’ Griswold laughed.

  I know, she said, and looked down at her hands for a moment. ‘Then how did he go?’

  Griswold bent forward.

  He vanished! ’ His voice was a hissing whisper, and his grin was still there.

  ‘You’re mad! ’ she said, and jumped up.

  ‘You will see,’ he said. ‘Hayles next.’ He turned away to the window.

  Barbara Baynes remained a moment, trembling with fear and anger. Then she swung round and almost ran out of the room, leaving the door open behind her.

  By contrast, and as if to make it noticeable, Hayles came in slowly, smoothly, with estimated carelessness.

  ‘What do you know?’ Griswold said.

  ‘The office had the phone call last night. Couldn’t get anyone near to corroborate, then got in touch with some of your people, got verification enough to go ahead, and then printed it. When I got there this morning—after they rang me early—they sent me to come down and make a personal estimation of it.’

  ‘It shouldn’t have been printed.’

  ‘That is not my business.’

  ‘The phones and the light were out a long time in this village.’ said Griswold. ‘Which shows how little either are used after midnight. The only calls at night for three months have been for a doctor or an ambulance.’ He shook his head and looked out of the window at the crowd. ‘No, it shouldn’t have been printed.’

  ‘Why not? That you are here proves that it should.’

  ‘How long have you to stay here?’ Griswold’s eyes were faintly luminous with suspicion as he turned from the window.

  ‘Till tomorrow,’ Hayles said.

  ‘You must be very courageous, or you don’t believe it.’

  ‘I
believe it. Somebody must stay. What are you going to do? What about those people out there?’

  ‘There’s plenty of time for them, let them sup their fill of horrors. They’ll go.’

  Hayles smiled grimly. Callousness was one of the things he Hayed with his pen, but when confronted with it he found himself weak.

  ‘Have you heard about this business before today?’ Griswold asked.

  ‘No. One hears whispers, but there are so many. Flying saucers and things have been going on for years. Nobody takes any notice of them, and then of course, all of a sudden there they aie, practically, on the doorstep.’

  ‘This is rather the reverse of that kind of thing.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is. Certainly it isn’t mechanical.’

  ‘It’s the theory that the Universe goes on creating all the time and restocking places like the earth every few million years. ‘Which refutes the Big Bang and the rest of them.’

  ‘I must confess I don’t really understand a lot of these theories.’

  ‘You can understand this one! ’ Griswold laughed.

  ‘The practical side—yes.’ Hayles shut his teeth together in a humourless grin. ‘But there is intelligence behind this. It isn’t natural accident?’

  ‘There is intelligence of a kind,’ Griswold said. ‘The point is, how are we to value intelligence? What seems to man intelligent would be arrant weakness to an insect. But what is intelligence really? An observable direction with a reason either behind it or ahead of it; a red hot poker behind or a carrot ahead”

  ‘You reduce everything to ridicule!’

  ‘We have argued this before,’ Griswold said. ‘What was said in the office about this affair this morning?’

  ‘We discussed the human angle—the people in this house faced by the possibility that—’

  ‘Did you not discuss the practical angle? The facts about the spiders? What they are doing?’

  ‘There was a discussion, yes. But I was in a hurry. I had to get down here. In any case, the only facts they had to discuss were those wrenched out of your departments” ‘We did not intend to let much out. I think the administrator was taken by surprise last night”

  ‘It should be publicly known.’

  ‘You heard the Chance tape at the office?’

  ‘I have a copy with me,’ Griswold began to walk about again. ‘If it wasn’t true it would be brilliant acting, and of course, he is pretty good, don’t you think?’

  ‘A natural,’ Hayles stared at the carpet.

  ‘Are you sensitive to atmosphere?’

  Hayles looked up sharply. ‘Yes. Especially here.’

  ‘What sensations impinge upon your sensories?’

  ‘A terrible feeling of apprehension and unreality. I came near a nervous breakdown once. I remember the feeling of unreality that came before it. Like that. You wonder how the ground is still holding you up, it seems so much a dream. Almost as soon as I came in I felt it here. Then I went back to the car down on the road and it just wasn’t me at all. I could have been walking inside a bubble remote from everything round me. I could see them, but I was cut off.’

  ‘I am trying to avoid feeling anything,’ Griswold said. ‘But it is difficult. Do you know, I keep getting waves of fear that make me sweat, as if this atmosphere is trying to get past my hard skin and into me.’

  ‘I have felt influences in haunted houses. It’s a little like that. You feel you’re not with it, and never will be. As if you can’t and never will understand while you’re still alive.’

  ‘And may not when you’re dead.’ The ironic grin came to Griswold’s face. ‘Has it ever struck you that the haunting of houses can be created by electrical impulses happening because of some juxtaposition of minerals in the neighbourhood? Such impulses can have an odd effect on the human brain, let alone the insect one.’

  ‘You’re convinced about the insects?’

  ‘Isn’t there proof enough?’

  ‘I don’t know it all.’

  ‘You’ll stay long enough to learn,’ Griswold said. ‘But I don’t think you have grasped the full scope of this thing. Think about it. We’ll talk again later.’

  He turned away to the window.

  ‘Send him in,’ he said.

  Hayles nodded, then went out, slowly, as if wondering whether to say something more. At the door he stopped and looked back.

  ‘I’m convinced that he has had a message,’ he said.

  ’From Beyond? Spiritualist-wise?’

  Hayles winced slightly. ‘That kind of thing.’

  ‘You believe in that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I believe in electrical disturbances and fraud.’ Griswold continued staring at the crowd.

  Hayles shrugged angrily and went out. Griswold loosened his tie knot and undid the collar button. He wiped his face with a folded handkerchief. Richard came in.

  ‘This business about the earth being showered with explosive seeds,’ said Griswold. ‘The one you told the journalist. How did that come about?’

  ‘He was so in earnest he blew me up. I wondered what he would look like balancing a daffodil on his nose. Then I wondered how he would look if it went off bang. Then I thought he wouldn’t look surprised enough and I wondered what he would look like if in the middle of the bang a fairy jumped out. Then X thought if the explosive seeds were filled with tiny women, and when they burst these women came out, swelled up to size and overcame the army with charm. Then I wondered how you would keep men out of the Army, or praying for war.’

  Griswold had put one foot on the seat of a chair, rested his elbow on his knee and watched Richard intently.

  ‘An idea chain,’ he said. ‘Did it ever come to anything?’ ‘I didn’t think it worth working on. Balancing the daffodil is obviously some clown I saw at a circus, perhaps when I was a child. These things have usually happened somewhere, at some time. You don’t just invent them.’

  ‘You believe that?’

  Well, there can’t be anything original, can there, not in ideas? They must be part of somebody else’s that you’ve read or heard or seen. The mind is like anything else. You can’t get anything out of it unless you put something in.’

  ‘By suggestion, sight, hearing, feeling, smell, taste—but what about telepathy?’

  ‘Of course that happens. But there again, it’s usually based on people knowing each other, having similar likes and being reminded of the same thing by things happening to both at the same time. It triggers off memory, but it’s outside incidents that start it.’

  ‘You don’t believe in magic?’

  ‘As far as humans are concerned, yes. Whatever the human brain is too slow and small to understand is magic. It can’t be anything else, because it can’t be explained.’

  ‘These seeds that come, full of women or with other erotic fillings,’ said Griswold. ‘They come into the atmosphere from space.”

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You believe that man cannot have pure inspiration but that it must be generated by an earlier experience.’ ‘Including hereditary experience. Yes. But there can’t be anything new in a world continually re-creating itself from the same weight and composition of chemicals.’

  ‘But these seeds must have come from outside?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did you admit that possibility a fortnight ago, when it is directly against your beliefs?’

  ‘It was just a daft idea.’

  ‘But its basis was that material could come in from outside?’

  ‘Yes. But there are always possibilities.’

  ‘Meteors come in.’

  ‘Pish! A speck of dust.’

  Griswold picked up a copy of the News and looked at it.

  ‘Now in this you say capsules—actual space capsules less than a quarter of an inch across. When they land, they open.’

  ‘It’s a fizz dream,’ Richard protested. ‘I must have been temporarily off my head. I don’t know how I did it. It’s the biggest hoax eve
r. Just because there’s a plague of dead spiders this morning—’

  ’Spiders,’ said Griswold. ‘So you do remember?’

  ‘But I read the article! “

  ‘But you are fizzy. There is nothing about spiders in the article. Just the capsules. It doesn’t say what’s inside them.’ Griswold’s eyes became suddenly bright, as if with hope, or excitement. ‘You remember the spiders.’

  ‘I thought I’d read it there,’ Richard said. ‘Are you sure it doesn’t mention them?’

  ‘It wouldn’t dare. It merely says, “a storm of luminous space-craft of minute size”, leaving the poor public to imagine what’s inside. Green-eyed Martians and the rest of the BEMs. The excuse given by the paper is that it publishes, not as a shocker, but to keep the general public wide awake and watchful for any possible invasion.’

  ‘Humbugs,’ Richard said, frowning. ‘But why the devil did I do it, anyway?’

  ‘You say,’ Griswold went on relentlessly, ‘that it will happen tonight, in this particular small area, this house as a centre, reaching from here to the sea and over half the village. You also say “Millions have landed already, ahead of time’’.

  ‘That’s what the people out there are staring for. They can actually see the answer under their noses but they can’t recognise it because they haven’t been told. They’re getting the pleasurable shivers. They are the people gathered around the hole in the road, quietly smoking while the workmen search for a gas leak. But they’ve been told it won’t happen till tonight, a confidence gained from the papers getting round the radio astronomers last night. You are no doubt surprised to find that your wild dream is so shockingly substantiated?’

  ‘Surprised is very mild. I’m shattered. It makes the whole thing less believable than ever. There’s only one thing that begins to peer into my cracked consciousness: I must get my wife out of this place! ’

  ‘In good time. It is only noon yet.’

  ‘But you can’t be sure-—’

  ‘Yes, we can be sure. Those people outside don’t know it, and that’s where they get some of the thrill, but we can be sure. The Nexus didn’t mislead them over that.’ He went across the room and out into the hall. It was empty but for Porch who was sitting on the front steps wiping round his neck with a handkerchief. He started as he heard Griswold cross the floor, but the Government man did not look at him. Griswold lifted his jacket, got a packet of small cigars from his pocket and carried them into the study. He kicked the door shut behind him. Richard had sat himself in his curved working chair and was jotting some notes on the back of a discarded typescript. He did not look up until he had finished. Griswold lit a cigar and wiped his face again.