The Chrysalids

tomatoes, then my lettuces, now my goddam beans. Never knew a year like it. The others I’ve had before, but who ever heard of beans getting tabulated?’

‘Are you sure?’ I said.

‘Sure. ‘Course I am. Think I don’t know the way a bean ought to look, at my age?’

He glared at me out of the white fuzz.

‘It’s certainly a bad year,’ I agreed.

‘Bad,’ he said, ‘it’s ruination. Weeks of work gone up in smoke, pigs, sheep and cows gobbling up good food just to produce ‘bominations. Men making off and standing-to so’s a fellow can’t get on with his own work for looking after theirs. Even my own bit of garden as tribulated as hell itself. Bad! You’re right. And worse to come, I reckon.’ He shook his head. ‘Aye, worse to come,’ he repeated, with gloomy satisfaction.

‘Why?’ I inquired.

‘It’s a judgment,’ he told me. ‘And they deserve it. No morals, no principles. Look at young Ted Norbet — gets a bit of a fine for hiding a litter of ten and eating all but two before he was found out. Enough to bring his father up out of his grave. Why, if he’d done a thing like that — not that he ever would, mind you — but if he had, d’you know what he’d have got?’ I shook my head. ‘It’d have been a public shaming on a Sunday, a week of penances, and a tenth of all he had,’ he told me, forcibly. ‘So you’d not find people doing that kind of thing much then — but now—! What do they care about a bit of fine?’ He spat disgustedly into the muck-pile. ‘It’s the same all round. Slackness, laxness, nobody caring beyond a bit of lip-service. You can see it everywhere nowadays. But God is not mocked. Bringing Tribulation down on us again, they are: a season like this is the start. I’m glad I’m an old man and not likely to see the fall of it. But it’s coming, you mark my words.

‘Government regulations made by a lot of snivelling, weak-hearted, weak-witted babblers in the East. That’s what the trouble is. A lot of namby-pamby politicians, and churchmen who ought to know better, too; men who’ve never lived in unstable country, don’t know anything about it, very likely never seen a mutant in their lives, and they sit there whittling away year after year at the laws of God, reckoning they know better. No wonder we get seasons like this sent as a warning, but do they read the warning and heed it, do they—?’ He spat again.

‘How do they think the south-west was made safe and civilized for God’s people? How do they think the mutants were kept under, and the Purity standards set up? It wasn’t by fiddling little fines that a man could pay once a week and not notice. It was by honouring the law, and punishing anybody who transgressed it so that they knew they were punished.

‘When my father was a young man a woman who bore a child that wasn’t in the image was whipped for it. If she bore three out of the image she was uncertified, outlawed, and sold. It made them careful about their purity and their prayers. My father reckoned there was a lot less trouble with mutants on account of it, and when there were any, they were burnt, like other deviations.’

‘Burnt!’ I exclaimed.

He looked at me. ‘Isn’t that the way to cleanse deviations?’ he demanded fiercely.

‘Yes,’ I admitted, ‘with crops and stock, but—’

‘The other kind is the worst,’ he snapped, ‘it is the Devil mocking the true image. Of course they should be burnt like they used to be. But what happened? The sentimentalists in Rigo who never have to deal with them themselves said: “Even though they aren’t human, they look nearly human, therefore extermination looks like murder, or execution, and that troubles some people’s minds.” So, because a few wishy-washy minds did not have enough resolution and faith, there were new laws about near- human deviations. They mustn’t be cleansed, they must be allowed to live, or die naturally. They must be outlawed and driven into the Fringes, or, if they are infants, simply exposed there to take their chance — and that is supposed to be more merciful. At least the Government has the sense to understand that they mustn’t be allowed to breed, and sees to it that they shan’t — though I’d be willing to bet there’s a party against that, too. And what happens? You get more Fringes dwellers, and that means you get more and bigger raids and lose time and money holding them back — all lost because of a namby-pamby dodging of the main issue. What sort of thinking is it to say “Accursed is the Mutant,” and then treat him like a half-brother?’

‘But a mutant isn’t responsible for—’ I began.

‘“Isn’t responsible,”’ sneered the old man. ‘Is a tiger-cat responsible for being a tiger-cat? But you kill it. You can’t afford to have it around loose. Repentances says to keep pure the stock of the Lord by fire, but that’s not good enough for the bloody Government now.

‘Give me the old days when a man was allowed to do his duty and keep the place clean. Heading right for another dose of Tribulation we are now.’ He went on muttering, looking like an ancient and wrathful prophet of doom.

‘All these concealments — and they’ll try again for want of a proper lesson; women who’ve given birth to a Blasphemy just going to church and saying how sorry they are and they’ll try not to do it again; Angus Morton’s great-horses still around, an “officially approved” mockery of the Purity Laws; a damned inspector who just wants to hold his job and not offend them in Rigo — and then people wonder why we get tribulated seasons…’ He went on grumbling and spitting with disgust, a venomously puritanical old man….

I asked Uncle Axel whether there were a lot of people who really felt the way old Jacob talked. He scratched his cheek, thoughtfully.

‘Quite a few of the old ones. They still feel it’s a personal responsibility — like it used to be before there were inspectors. Some of the middle-aged are that way, too, but most of them are willing enough to leave it as it is. They’re not so set on the forms as their fathers were. They don’t reckon it matters much what way it’s done so long as the mutants don’t breed and things go along all right — but give them a run of years with instability as high as it is this year, and I’d not say for certain they’d take it quietly.’

‘Why should the deviation-rate suddenly get high some years?’ I asked him.

He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Something to do with the weather, they say. Get a bad winter with gales from the south-west, and up goes the deviation-rate — not the next season, but the one after that. Something comes over from the Badlands, they say. Nobody knows what, but it looks as though they’re right. The old men see it as a warning, just a reminder of Tribulation sent to keep us on the right path, and they make the most of it. Next year’s going to be a bad one, too. People will listen to them more then. They’ll have a sharp eye for scapegoats.’ He concluded by giving me a long, thoughtful look.

I had taken the hint and passed it on to the others. Sure enough the season had been almost as tribulated as the one before, and there was a tendency to look for scapegoats. Public feeling towards concealments was noticeably less tolerant than it had been the previous summer, and it increased the anxiety we should in any case have felt over our discovery of Petra.

For a week after the river incident we listened with extra care for any hint of suspicion about it. We found none, however. Evidently it had been accepted that both Rosalind and I, in different directions, had happened to hear cries for help which must, in any case, have been faint at the distance. We were able to relax again — but not for long. Only about a month went by before we had a new source of misgiving.

Anne announced that she was going to marry….

10

There was a shade of defiance in Anne, even when she told us.

At first we did not take it very seriously. We found it difficult to believe, and we did not want to believe, that she was serious. For one thing, the man was Alan Ervin, the same Alan I had fought on the bank of the stream, and who had informed on Sophie. Anne’s parents ran a good farm, not a great deal smaller than Waknuk itself; Alan was the blacksmith’s son, his prospects were those of becoming the blacksmith himself in his turn. He had the physique for it, he was tall and healthy, but that was about as far as he went. Quite certainly Anne’s parents would be more ambitious for her than that; so we scarcely expected anything to come of it.

We were wrong. Somehow she brought her parents round to the idea, and the engagement was formally recognized. At that point we became alarmed. Abruptly, we were forced to consider some of the implications, and,