Web

by John Wyndham

  John Wyndham

  United Kingdom, 1903-1969

  Web

  1979, EN

  The island of Tanakuatua seems like heaven to the 40 people who go there in order to create a utopian society, but soon they start to die in a horrible way and it seems that something strange and deadly is out there in the jungle.

  One

  The question I find most difficult to answer; the one which always crops up sooner or later when the subject is mentioned, is, approximately:

  “But how on earth did you come to get yourself mixed up in a crazy affair like this, anyway?”

  I don’t resent it – partly, I suppose, because it does carry the implication that I can normally be regarded as a reasonably sane citizen – but I do find it scarcely possible to give a reasonably sane answer.

  The nearest I can come to an explanation is that I must have been a little off-balance at the time. This could, I imagine, have been the effect of delayed shock: unnoticeable as an aberration, unsuspected by myself yet a shock deep-seated enough to upset my critical sense, to blunt my perceptions and judgement.

  I think that may have been the cause.

  Almost a year before I met Tirrie and so became ‘mixed up in the affair’ I had a nasty accident.

  We were driving – at least, my daughter Mary was actually driving, I was beside her and my wife in the back – along the A272, not far from Etchingham. We were doing, I suppose, about thirty-five when a lorry that must have been travelling at over fifty overtook us. I had a glimpse of it skidding as its back wheels were level with us, another of its enormous load tilting over us…

  I came round hazily in bed, a week later. They let two more weeks go by before they told me that my wife and Mary were both dead.

  I was in that hospital for two months. I came out of it healed as it seemed to me – but dazed and rudderless, with a feeling of unreality, and an entire lack of purpose. I resigned my post. That, I realize now, was the very thing I ought not to have done – the work would have helped to get me back on balance more than anything else, but at the time it seemed futile, and to require more effort than I could make. So I gave up, convalesced at my sister’s home near Tonbridge, and continued to drift along there in a purposeless way, with little to occupy my mind.

  I am not used to lack of purpose. I suspect that it creates a vacuum which sooner or later has to be filled – and filled with whatever is available when the negative pressure reaches a crucial point.

  That is the only way I can account for the undiscriminating enthusiasm which submerged my commonsense, the surge of uncritical idealism which discounted practical difficulties and seemed to reveal to me, finally and undeniably, my life work and my justification, when I first heard of Lord Foxfield’s project.

  Alas for disillusion. I would like to convey if I could the whole bright prospect as I saw it then. It was such stuff as dreams are made of. But now it is gone, sicklied o’er with the pale cast of cynicism. I look at myself as at someone else moving half-awake…and yet…and yet at times I feel that there was the spark of an idea, an ideal behind it that could have started a flame – had the Fates shown us one touch of benevolence.

  The original idea, or the core of the idea, that grew into the Foxfield Project seems to have occurred spontaneously and simultaneously in the minds of his Lordship and Walter Tirrie. The former publicly claims its authorship; the latter was known to claim privately that it was inspired by him. It seems possible that it was a spark thrown off in the course of conversation between them which ignited in both, and was industriously fanned by both minds.

  Walter was, by profession, an architect, but perhaps more widely known as an ardent correspondent and persistent setter-right of the world in the columns of several weekly reviews. From this he had graduated to being a moderately familiar figure speaking on platforms devoted to numerous causes. There may even have been some truth in his claim to have introduced the idea to Lord Foxfield, for if one takes the trouble to track back over his letters in the correspondence columns over a few years it is possible to find not only faint inklings of the plan, but also of his feeling that he was the man, Dei gratia, to realize it. Though it would seem that it was only after his meeting with his Lordship that the insubstantial fragments of the idea began to fall into form.

  This possibly took place because his Lordship could contribute more than mere form; he could give it expression, endow it with money, put his weight behind it, and pull strings where necessary.

  And why was he willing to back it in all these ways?

  Well, one can dismiss straight away all the subtle schemes and dubious intentions with which gossip credited him. His motive was quite uncomplicated and ingenuous: he was, quite simply, a man in search of a memorial.

  It is a desire that is not even unusual among rich, elderly men. Indeed, to quite a number of them there appears to come a revelatory day when they look at all those comma-spaced triplets of figures, and are suddenly pierced by awareness of their inability to take it with them, whereupon they are seized by the desire to convert those hollow noughts into a tangible, and usually autographed, token of their successes.

  This mood has come upon them through the ages, but of late it has become less easy to fulfil – or perhaps one should say to fulfil it with the desirable distinction of benefaction – than it was even in the days of the old tycoons. The State, now so pervasive, tends to abrogate to itself even the function of benefactor. Education is no longer an outlet; it is free, at all levels, for all. The erstwhile poor – now the lower-income brackets – are housed at municipal expense. Playing-fields are provided by the ratepayers. Public, even peripatetic, libraries are subsidized by county councils. The working-man – now the worker – prefers overtime and the telly to Clubs and Institutes.

  A man may, it is true, still found a College or two in some University, but this does not entirely suit every donor’s benefactory urge – for one thing, if there is felt to be a need for such a College someone will finance one anyway; for another, in these days of Government interference no intention or stipulation would be safe. Ministerial decision could easily modify one’s intended seat of higher learning into just another spring-board of knowhow, overnight. In fact the field for worthy acts of eleemosynary commemoration has been so sadly reduced that Lord Foxfield spent some two years after the urge struck him in a vain search for a goodwill project which, if he did not undertake it himself, was unlikely to be adopted by any Ministry, Council, Corporation, Institution or Society.

  It was a period of great strain for his secretary. Word appeared to have got round, as word will, that his Lordship was ripening for a good touch, and skilful defences were needed. It took a highly plausible suggestion, or the sanction of a very influential Society, to carry a proponent past the barriers and into the Presence, and remarkably few of the schemes put forward held any interest for his Lordship when he heard them.

  “I have been discovering,” he is reported to have said, “what an astonishing amount of goodwill there is in this age – and that most of it is woolly. People have a noticeably strong sense of duty towards their ancestors – more than ninety per cent of the propositions I receive are interested in conserving for the sake of conservation, which is felt, ipso facto, to be a good thing, and their sense of duty towards their posterity seems to consist solely in preserving the past.

  “Also, they appear to be unbalanced about animals. I should not be in the least surprised if someone were to put up to me tomorrow a thoroughly humane and well-concerned proposal for the rehabilitation on a national scale of old roadside drinking-troughs for horses.”

  It would appear, however, that one serious hindrance in his Lordship’s search for an outlet was his own vanity. For Lord Foxfield was an individualist. He had made his own way by e
xploiting his own abilities according to his own judgement, and done it with a success which rendered it contrary to his nature to submerge himself in, or even to be closely identified with, a conventional Society for good works. Indeed, he had been known to point out from time to time that had certain social achievements been introduced anonymously, or even by corporate sponsors, they would have lacked the character, as well as the weight of example, which names such as Carnegie, Peabody, Ford, Nuffield, Nobel, Gulbenkian among others had given them. And, indeed it was clearly the challenge raised by such exemplars that caused him to seek a medium that would express – and, incidentally be seen to express – his desire to benefit mankind by tidying up some neglected corner of its feckless world.

  How he came to make the acquaintance of Walter Time is not recorded. Possibly he sought him out. Walter was almost constantly in a state of inky vendetta with other correspondents upon one or other of our social inadequacies, and it seems not unlikely that some of these exchanges, catching his Lordship’s eye and fancy, may have led to a meeting. At any rate, it is fairly certain that Walter was not among those who queued up with a prepared scheme heeding only financial aid. Rather it appears, as I have said, that their purpose simply grew, inkling out of their conversation, enfilading their minds, and establishing itself as the Project.

  And, once this stage was reached, all other propositions or organizations lost, from that moment, any chance they may have had of tapping the Foxfield wealth. His Lordship became finally uninterested in proposals to pour money down other people’s drains; he had invented, or discovered, a culvert quite his own.

  The intention, though ambitious, was in essence simple – in fact, in essence it was unoriginal. Its difference lay in the intention and the ability to remove it from the ineffective minds of dreamers, and give it practical existence.

  It was to set up a free, politically independent community endowed with the opportunity, and the means, to create a new climate of living.

  “The ideal start would consist of a clean slate inscribed with just two words – Knowledge and Reason,” Lord F is said to have proclaimed. “Unfortunately that is a long way from being practicable. The best that can be done is to provide a place where there is freedom to question the axioms, the prejudices, traditions, loyalties, and all those attitudes implanted in us before we could think, which together make us citizens of the world as it is, instead of becoming citizens of the world as it might be. The purpose will be to break the chain we drag behind us linking us perpetually through the generations right back to primitive man and beyond: to throw off the burden of inherited archaic lore.

  “Most of the conflict in the world reflects the conflict in our minds as we strive to move forward while the brakes of false doctrines, superstitions, obsolete standards, and misconceived ambitions are always at work on us. These checks are built-in, we cannot free ourselves from them, but we can loosen them for others. If we provide the right conditions, as free from contamination as possible, there is hope that in a generation, or in two or more generations, they may cease to bind.”

  He went on to envisage the community growing and developing, gaining recognition by gifted men of all races as a haven where one could think and work, untroubled by financial, national or other vested pressures. A new culture would arise there, a culture lit by the knowledge of its own day, with no shadowy lurking-places for the clutch-fingered brain-washing ghosts of the irrational past. In the fresh air of a new uplands minds would have space for unstinted growth in a climate where they could expand into full flower.

  From small beginnings there would grow a city; in due course would follow The Enlightened State! Men and women who perceived that the world could not muddle along in the old way for much longer, and that the break with the old thinking must be made before it was too late, would turn towards the new State with hope. To it, with its opportunity to think and work, would flock the future Einsteins, Newtons, Curies, Flemings, Rutherfords, Oppenheimers. One day, perhaps, it could become the mind-powerhouse of the world…

  And, naturally, carved into its foundations would be the name of Frederick, First Baron Foxfield…

  ♦

  In the early stages, however, the name of Lord Foxfield was, for various reasons, not associated with the Project. He preferred to use Walter Tirrie as his front-man. Consequently, it was through Walter that I first became acquainted with the scheme.

  The introduction was contrived by some friends of mine, out of kindly concern, I believe. They knew that I was unoccupied and without interests, and, possibly prompted by my sister who was also worried by my state, invited me to dinner to meet him.

  Walter was at that time already well involved in the preparations. Not the least of his troubles was the recruitment of suitable personnel or, indeed, any personnel. Letters to his usual correspondence columns giving the outline of the plan, with an invitation to any interested persons to write to him for further details had produced disappointing results. Looking back now I am not greatly surprised. It must have seemed an unrealistic proposition, and I have no doubt that had I come across it in the ordinary way I should have dismissed it as a crackpot venture.

  Listening to him talking of it with confidence – and the untroubled assurance of adequate backing – gave a different impression. I was, as I have explained, in a susceptible state, and very soon I found myself kindling to his enthusiasm.

  During the night that followed the kindling process continued. In fact somewhere in the small hours I was seeing visions of the Enlightened State in being. Unfortunately I cannot recall any of the details now. All that lingers is an impression of a place lit by a golden glow, suffused by a spirit of goodwill, hope and comradeship. (I know it sounds like a show of Russian posters depicting the future of the New Lands, but for all I know the Russians may feel as I felt then.) I was aware of a sense of revelation – as if I had been stumbling along in a half-lit world, and suddenly had been shown a brightly lighted way stretching out before me. I was filled, too, with a sense of incredulity at my own blindness hitherto – at everyone’s blindness. The path was so plain, so obvious. Get away, right away, from all the clinging briars of usage, convention, habit – and, in a clean new place help to build the foundations of a clean new world. Could there be anything better to do with one’s life than that…?

  The next day I rang up Walter, and arranged to meet him again. From that moment I was in it.

  Soon I was in it to a privileged extent. I knew that Lord Foxfield was behind it, and Walter took me to see him.

  He was not an impressive man – no, that is putting it too badly. He had a side calculated to impress: assured, slightly pompous, a little short-tempered, but that was his public, professional aspect; he donned it like a business-suit. Off-duty, so to speak, he was not afraid of showing, or possibly unconscious of showing, an odd naivety. I could never get used to the changes from one to the other.

  It was the executive manner he was wearing when he greeted me. The look he gave me had the appearance of being keen and appraising – whether it really was, or not, I still do not know. But presently, when we got on to the subject of the Project he dropped the businesslike front, and let his genuine enthusiasm take over.

  “Walter, here, will have given you the outline of our plan, Mr Delgrange,” he said, “so you’ll know that the idea is to begin with a pioneer party, to be joined by more recruits later on. It is to my mind extremely important that the original group should start along the right lines, and form the right habits of mind. If the wrong observances, wrong attitudes and outlook are able to establish themselves at the beginning, the task of eradicating them to create the kind of society we have in mind will add greatly to our difficulties.

  “Now, I have taken the trouble to find out about you, Mr Delgrange. I know in general the views you are credited with. I know that you have some standing as a social historian, and I have read with interest two of your books. They have shown me that you are an intelligent observer of so
cial trends, and I have come to the conclusion, and I know Walter agrees with me, that your trained observation could be of immense assistance to us, in the early stages at least, in determining the best forms for our institutions, as well as in steering the community towards those forms – and away from less desirable forms which may tend to arise.”

  He continued to embroider this theme at some length, and I ended the evening with the rather dazed realization that I had been given the task of drawing up and submitting for his approval a provisional draft constitution for the Enlightened State – as well as the job of applying it in practice later on.

  It kept me busy for some months.

  This is no place to go into the details of the organization of the pioneer party. Nor do I know a lot, for it was not my job. I was vaguely aware that Walter was disappointed by the responses to his call for recruits, and felt that he was expecting too much. He seemed surprised to discover the scarcity of intellectuals who were also good practical men. And then, when he had relinquished the thought of finding them combined in the same individual, surprised again that neither type was presenting itself with the readiness he had hoped for.

  I did my best to arouse interest in some of my friends, but found invariably that it stopped well short of my desire to take part in the venture. I was much too taken up with the Project at that time to perceive that their chief reaction to my enthusiasm was concern on my behalf, even when they tried, as some of them did, to dissuade me. Anyway, recruitment was Walter’s department, and he was not very expansive about its progress.

  It was not long after my introduction to Lord Foxfield that Walter disappeared for a couple of months in search of a suitable site for the Project. I heard nothing from him during this time, nor was he very communicative when he returned. This, he gave me to understand, was for reasons of policy. He would say nothing of the location except that he was satisfied that it was ideal for the purpose. Negotiations for acquiring it were, he explained, going to be delicate; it would be best if as few people as possible were aware of them until they were complete. With that I had to be satisfied.