scientific expeditions. It should not be too difficult to arrange my escape and then I shall return to the solitary church in that enchanted world, where by day fantastic birds fly through the petrified forest and jewelled alligators glitter like heraldic salamanders on the banks of the crystalline rivers, and where by night the illuminated man races among the trees, his arms like golden cartwheels and his head like a spectral crown.
The Reptile Enclosure
'They remind me of the Gadarene swine,' Mildred Pelham remarked.
Interrupting his scrutiny of the crowded beach below the cafeteria terrace, Roger Pelham glanced at his wife. 'Why do you say that?'
Mildred continued to read for a few moments, and then lowered her book. 'Well, don't they?' she asked rhetorically. 'They look like pigs.'
Pelham smiled weakly at this mild but characteristic display of misanthropy. He peered down at his own white knees protruding from his shorts and at his wife's pimp arms and shoulders. 'I suppose we all do,' he temporized. However, there was little chance of Mildred's remark being overheard and resented. They were sitting at a corner table, with their backs to the hundreds of ice-cream eaters and cola-drinkers crammed elbow to elbow on the terrace. The dull hubbub of voices was overlayed by the endless commentaries broadcast over the transistor radios propped among the bottles, and by the distant sounds of the fair-ground behind the dunes. A short drop below the terrace was the beach, covered by a mass of reclining figures which stretched from the water's edge up to the roadway behind the cafeteria and then away over the dunes. Not a single grain of sand was visible. Even at the tideline, where a little slack water swilled weakly at a debris of old cigarette packets and other trash, a huddle of small children clung to the skirt of the beach, hiding the grey sand.
Gazing down at the beach again, Pelham realized that his wife's ungenerous judgment was no more than the truth. Everywhere bare haunches and shoulders jutted into the air, limbs lay in serpentine coils. Despite the sunlight and the considerable period of time they had spent on the beach, many of the people were still white-skinned, or at most a xo7
boiled pink, restlessly shifting in their little holes in a hopeless attempt to be comfortable.-Usually this spectacle of jostling, over-exposed flesh, with its unsavoury bouquet of stale sun-tan lotion and sweat looking along the beach as it swept out to the distant cape, Pelham could almost see the festering corona, sustained in the air by the babble often thousand, transistor radios, reverberating like a swarm of flies - would have sent him hurtling along the first inland highway at seventy miles an hour. But for some reason Pelham's usual private distaste for the general public had evaporated. He felt strangely exhilarated by the presence of so many people (he had calculated that he could see over 5°thousand along the five-mile stretch of beach) and found himself unable to leave the terrace, although it was now 3 o'clock and neither he nor Mildred had eaten since breakfast. Once their corner seats were surrendered they would never regain them. To himself he mused: 'The ice-cream eaters on Echo beach… ' He played with the empty glass in front of him. Shreds of synthetic orange pulp clung to the sides, and a fly buzzed half-heartedly from one to another. The sea was flat and calm, an opaque grey disc, but a mile away a low surface mist lay over the water like vapour on a vat. 'You look hot, Roger. Why don't you go in for a swim?' 'I may. You know, it's a curious thing, but of all the people here, not one is swimming.'
Mildred nodded in a bored way. A large passive woman, she seemed content merely to sit in the sunlight and read. Yet it was she who had first suggested that they drive out to the coast, and for once had suppressed her usual grumbles when they ran into the first heavy traffic jams and were forced to abandon the car and complete the remaining two miles on foot. Pelham had not seen her walk like that for ten years. 'It is rather strange,' she said. 'But it's not particularly warm.'
'I don't agree,' Pelham was about to continue when he suddenly stood up and looked over the rail at the beach. Half way down the slope, parallel with the promenade, a continuous stream of people moved slowly along an informal Io8
right-of-way, shouldering past each other with fresh bottles of cola, lotion and ice-cream.
'Roger, what's the matter?'
'Nothing… I thought I saw Sherrington.' Pelham searched the beach, the moment of recognition lost.
'You're always seeing Sherrington. That's the fourth time alone this afternoon. Do stop worrying.'
'I'm not worrying. I can't be certain, but I felt I saw him then.'
Reluctantly, Pelham sat down, edging his chair fractionally closer to the rail. Despite his mood of lethargy and vacuous boredom, an indefinable but distinct feeling of restlessness had preoccupied him all day. In some way associated with Sherrington's presence on the beach, this uneasiness had been increasing steadily. The chances of Sherrington - with whom he shared an office in the Physiology Department at the University - actually choosing this section of the beach were remote, and Pelham was not even sure why he was so convinced that Sherrington was there at all. Perhaps these illusory glimpses - all the more unlikely in view of Sherrington's black beard and high severe face, his stooped long-legged walk - were simply projections of this underlying tension and his own peculiar dependence upon Sherrington.
However, this sense of uneasiness was not confined to himself.
Although Mildred seemed immune, most of the people on the beach appeared to share this mood with Pelham. As the day progressed the continuous hubbub gave way to more sporadic chatter. Occasionally the noise would fall away altogether, and the great concourse, like an immense crowd waiting for the long-delayed start of some public spectacle, would sit up and stir impatiently. To Pelham, watching carefully from his vantage point over the beach, these ripples of restless activity, as everyone swayed forward in long undulations, were plainly indicated by the metallic glimmer of the thousands of portable radios moving in an oscillating wave. Each successive spasm, recurring at roughly half-hour intervals, seemed to take the crowd slightly nearer the set.
Directly below the concrete edge of the terrace, among the mass of reclining figures, a large family group had formed a private enclosure. To one side of this, literally within reach of Pelham, the adolescent members of the family had dug their own nest, their sprawling angular bodies, in their damp abbreviated swimming suits, entwined in and out of each other like some curious annular animal. Well within earshot, despite the continuous background of noise from the beach and the distant fair-grounds, Pelham listened to their inane talk, following the thread of the radio commentaries as they switched aimlessly from one station to the next.
'They're about to launch another satellite,' he told Mildred. 'Echo XXII.'
'Why do they bother?' Mildred's flat blue eyes surveyed the distant haze over the water. 'I should hav6 thought there were more than enough of them flying about already.'
'Well…' For a moment Pelham debated whether to pursue the meagre conversational possibilities of his wife's reply.
Although she was married to a lecturer in the School of Physiology, her interest in scientific matters was limited to little more than a blanket condemnation of the entire sphere of activity. His own post at the University she regarded with painful tolerance, despising the untidy office, scruffy students and meaningless laboratory equipment. Pelham had never been able to discover exactly what calling she would have respected. Before their marriage she maintained what he later realized was a polite silence on the subject of his work; after eleven years this attitude had barely changed, although the exigencies of living on his meagre salary had forced her to take an interest in the subtle, complex and infinitely wearying game of promotional snakes and ladders.
As expected, her acerbic tongue had made them few friends, but by a curious paradox Pelham felt that he had benefited from the grudging respect this had brought her.
Sometimes her waspish comments, delivered at the overlong sherry parties, always in a loud voice during some Conversational silence (for example, she had described the elderly occupant of the Physiology chair as 'that gerontological freak' within some five feet of the Professor's wife) delighted Pelham by their mordant accuracy, but in general there was something frightening about her pitiless lack of sympathy for the rest of the human race. Her large bland face, with its prim, rosebud mouth, reminded Pelham of the description of the Mona Lisa as looking as if she had just dined off her husband. Mildred, however did not even smile.
'Sherrington has a rather interesting theory about the satellites,' Pelham told her. 'I'd hoped we might see him so that he could explain it again. I think you'd be amused to hear it, Mildred. He's working on I R Ms at present - '
