The Chrysalids

Rachel came in, made faint by the distance.

‘Katherine was unconscious. There’s been nothing understandable since then. Mark and I are afraid—’ She faded, in a foggy reluctance to continue.

‘Go on,’ Michael told her.

‘Well, Katherine’s been unconscious so long we’re wondering if she’s — dead.’

‘And Sally—?’

This time there was even more reluctance.

‘We think — we’re afraid something queer must have happened to her mind…. There’ve been just one or two little jumbles from her. Very weak, not sensible at all, so we’re afraid…’ She faded away, in great unhappiness.

There was a pause before Michael started with hard, harsh shapes.

‘You understand what that means, David? They are scared of us. Ready to break us down in the attempt to find out more about us — once they can catch us. You mustn’t let them get hold of Rosalind or Petra — far better to kill them yourself than let that happen to them. You understand?’

I looked at Rosalind lying asleep beside me, the red of the sunset glistening on her hair, and I thought of the anguish we had felt from Katherine. The possibility of her and Petra suffering that made me shudder.

‘Yes,’ I told him, and the others. ‘Yes — I understand.’

I felt their sympathy and encouragement for a while, then there was nothing.

Petra was looking at me, more puzzled than alarmed. She asked earnestly, in words:

‘Why did he say you must kill Rosalind and me?’

I pulled myself together.

‘That was only if they catch us,’ I told her, trying to make it sound as if it were the sensible and usual course in such circumstances. She considered the prospect judicially, then:

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘Well,’ I tried, ‘you see we’re different from them because they can’t make thought-shapes, and when people are different, ordinary people are afraid of them—’

‘Why should they be afraid of us? We aren’t hurting them,’ she broke in.

‘I’m not sure that I know why,’ I told her. ‘But they are. It’s a feel-thing not a think-thing. And the more stupid they are, the more like everyone else they think everyone ought to be. And once they get afraid they become cruel and want to hurt people who are different—’

‘Why?’ inquired Petra.

‘They just do. And they’d hurt us very much if they could catch us.’

‘I don’t see why,’ Petra persisted.

‘It’s the way things work. It’s complicated and rather nasty,’ I told her. ‘You’ll understand better when you’re older. But the thing is, we don’t want you and Rosalind to be hurt. You remember when you spilt the boiling water on your foot? Well, it’d be much worse than that. Being dead’s a lot better — it’s sort of like being so much asleep that they can’t get at you to hurt you at all.’

I looked down at Rosalind, at the gentle rise and fall of her breasts as she slept. There was a vagrant wisp of hair on her cheek; I brushed it away gently and kissed her without waking her.

Presently Petra began:

‘David, when you kill me and Rosalind—’

I put my arm round her. ‘Hush, darling. It isn’t going to happen, because we aren’t going to let them catch us. Now, let’s wake her up, but we won’t tell her about this. She might be worried, so we’ll just keep it to ourselves for a secret, shall we?’

‘All right,’ Petra agreed.

She tugged gently at Rosalind’s hair.

We decided to eat again, and then push on when it was a little darker so that there would be stars to steer by. Petra was unwontedly silent over the meal. At first I thought she was brooding upon our recent conversation, but I was wrong, it appeared: after a time she emerged from her contemplations to say, conversationally:

‘Sealand must be a funny place. Everybody there can make think-pictures — well, nearly everybody — and nobody wants to hurt anybody for doing it.’

‘Oh, you’ve been chatting while we were asleep, have you?’ remarked Rosalind. ‘I must say that makes it a lot more comfortable for us.’

Petra ignored that. She went on:

‘They aren’t all of them very good at it, though — most of them are more like you and David,’ she told us kindly. ‘But she’s much better at it than most of them, and she’s got two babies and she thinks they will be good at it, only they’re too little yet. But she doesn’t think they’ll be as good at it as me. She says I can make stronger think-pictures than anybody at all,’ she concluded complacently.

‘That doesn’t surprise me one bit,’ Rosalind told her. ‘What you want to learn next is to make good think-pictures instead of just noisy ones,’ she added deflatingly.

Petra remained unabashed. ‘She says I’ll get better still if I work at it, and then when I grow up I must have babies who can make strong think-pictures, too.’

‘Oh you must, must you?’ said Rosalind. ‘Why? My impression of think-pictures up to now is that chiefly they bring trouble.’

‘Not in Sealand.’ Petra shook her head.’ She says that everybody there wants to make them, and people who can’t do it much work hard to get better at it.’

We pondered that. I recalled Uncle Axel’s tales about places beyond the Black Coasts where the Deviations thought that they were the true image, and anything else was a mutant.

‘She says,’ Petra amplified, ‘that people who can only talk with words have something missing. She says we ought to be sorry for them because, however old they grow, they’ll never be able to understand one another much better. They’ll have to be one-at-a-times always, never think-togethers.’

‘I can’t say I feel very sorry for them at present,’ I remarked. ‘Well, she says we ought to because they have to live very dull, stupid lives compared with think-picture people,’ Petra said, somewhat sententiously.

We let her prattle on. It was difficult to make sense of a lot of the things she said, and possibly she had not got them right, anyway, but the one thing that did stand out clearly was that these Sealanders, whoever and wherever they were, thought no small beans of themselves. It began to seem more than likely that Rosalind had been right when she had taken ‘primitive’ to refer to ordinary Labrador people.

In clear starlight we set out again, still winding our way between clumps and thickets in a south-westerly direction. Out of respect for Michael’s warning we were travelling as quietly as we could, with our eyes and ears alert for any sign of interception. For some miles there was nothing to be heard but the steady, cushioned clumping of the great-horses’ hoofs, slight creaking from the girths and panniers, and, occasionally, some small animal scuttling out of our way.

After three hours or more we began to perceive uncertainly a line of deeper darkness ahead, and presently the edge of more forest solidified to loom up like a black wall.

It was not possible in the shadow to tell how dense it was. The best course seemed to be to hold straight on until we came to it, and then, if it turned out to be not easily penetrable, to work along the edge until we could find a suitable place to make an entrance.

We started to do that, and had come within a hundred yards of it when without any warning a gun went off to the rear, and shot whistled past us.

Both horses were startled, and plunged. I was all but flung out of my pannier. The rearing horses pulled away and the lead rope parted with a snap. The other horse bolted straight towards the forest, then thought better of it and swerved to the left. Ours pelted after it. There was nothing to be done but wedge oneself in the pannier and hang on as we tore along in a rain of clods and stones flung up by hoofs of the lead horse.

Somewhere behind us a gun fired again, and we speeded up still more….

For a while or more we hurtled on in a ponderous, earth-shaking gallop. Then there was a flash ahead and half-left. At the sound of the shot our horse sprang sideways in mid-stride, swerved right, and raced for the forest. We crouched still lower in the baskets as we crashed among the trees.

By luck alone we made the entry at a point where the bigger trunks were well separated, but, for all that, it was a nightmare ride, with branches slapping and dragging at the panniers. The great-horse simply ploughed ahead, avoiding the larger trees, thrusting through the rest, smashing its way by sheer weight while branches and