The Seeds of Time (26 page)

They kept her in bed a few days, with instructions to rest and relax; but it was difficult to relax when things kept on going round and round in one's head.

‘Oh God,' she prayed, ‘won't You stop them? It isn't
their
world to do as they like with. It's Your world, and mine – the heart's world that they are destroying with their brain's world. Please, God, while there is still time – You destroyed their presumption at Babel, won't You do it again, before it's too late?'

Felicity remembered the prayer as she sat at her desk, looking at the beautiful flower.

They had put a fence round the place where the aeroplane had crashed, and set guards, too, to keep people away. Inside it, men in overall suits prowled and prowled, searching, listening, watching counters.

Cobalt was the trouble, they said. She had wondered how that could be. But it was not the artist's cobalt they wanted: the scientists had taken even the deep blue colour of the sea, and had done something deadly to that, too, it appeared.

Though not altogether, not necessarily deadly, Miss Simpson who taught science at the High School had explained to her. The aeroplane had been carrying some radio-active cobalt intended for a hospital somewhere in the Middle East. In the crash, or perhaps in the first explosion, the lead box that kept it safe had been broken open. It was extremely dangerous, and had to be recovered.

‘How? Dangerous?' Felicity had wanted to know.

And
Miss Simpson had told her something of the effects of gamma rays on living matter.

Several weeks had passed before the searching men were completely satisfied, and went away. They had left the fence, no longer guarded, simply as a mark to indicate the piece of ground that was not to be ploughed this season. The ground had been left free to grow what it would.

And out of the noise, the destruction, the fire, the deadly radiations had sprung the lovely flower.

Felicity went on looking at it for a long time in the silent room. Then she raised her eyes, and glanced along the rows of desks where the bright faces had been.

‘I see,' she said, to the emptiness and the unseen. ‘I'm weak. I have had too little faith.'

She had a disinclination to revisit the site of the crash alone. She asked Marielle to come with her on Saturday and show her where the flowers grew.

They climbed by a cool path through the woods, crossed a stile and the pasture beyond it. When they came to the enclosure, its fence already pushed flat in several places, they found a man already within it. He wore a shirt and blue jeans, and was engaged in unslinging a heavy cylinder from his back. He laid the thing carefully on the ground and pulled out a large spotted handkerchief to wipe his face and neck. He turned as they approached, and grinned amiably. Felicity recognized him as the farmer's second son.

‘Hot work carrying three or four gallons on your back this weather,' he explained apologetically, wiping the handkerchief down his arms so that the golden hairs stood up and glinted in the sunlight.

Felicity looked at the ground. There were five or six small clumps of the flowers growing in the weeds and grass, one of them half crushed under the cylinder.

‘Oh,'
said Marielle, in distress. You've been killing them – killing the flowers. They're what we came for.'

‘You can pick 'em, and welcome,' he told her.

‘But we wanted some roots, to grow them,' Marielle told him woefully. She turned to Felicity unhappily. ‘They're such pretty flowers, too.'

‘Pretty enough,' agreed the man, looking down at them. ‘But there it is. Can't have this lot seeding all over the rest, you see.'

‘You've poisoned them all – every one?' Marielle asked miserably.

The man nodded.

‘ 'Fraid they're done for now, for all they still look all right. 'F you'd've let me know … but it's too late now. But they'll do you no harm to pick,' he explained. ‘ 'Tisn't poison in the old way, you see. Something to do with hormones, whatever they are. Doesn't knock 'em out, as you might say, just sends 'em all wrong in the growing so they give up. Wonderful what the scientific chaps get hold of these days. Never know what they'll bring out next, do you?'

Felicity and Marielle gathered little bunches of the doomed flowers. They still looked as delicately beautiful and still had their poignant scent. At the stile Marielle stopped and stood looking sadly at her little bunch.

‘They're so lovely,' she said mournfully, with tears in her eyes.

Felicity put an arm round her.

‘They are lovely,' she agreed. ‘They're very lovely – and they've gone. But the important thing is that they came. That's the wonderful thing. There'll be some more – someday – somewhere …'

A jet came shrieking suddenly, close over the hill-top. Marielle put her hands over her ears. Felicity stood watching the machine shrink among the scream and rumble of protesting air. She held up her little posy of flowers to the blast.

‘This is your answer,' she said. ‘This. You bullies, with your vast clubs of smoke – this is greater than all of you.'

Marielle took down her hands.

‘I
hate them – I hate them,' she said, her eyes on the vanishing speck.

‘I hate them, too,' agreed Felicity. ‘But now I'm not afraid of them any more. I have found a remedy, an elixir:

It is a wine of virtuous powers;

My mother made it of wild flowers.'

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First published by Michael Joseph 1956
Published in Penguin Books 1959
This edition published 2014

Copyright © the Estate of John Wyndham, 1956

Cover illustration – Brian Cronin

All rights reserved

The moral right of the copyright holder has been asserted

Typeset by Jouve (UK), Milton Keynes

ISBN: 978-0-241-97107-9