Argosy, September 1955 — page 113: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Iit it will do to us and our children—to the people of tomorrow.” So he takes us to Waknuk, in the country that was once called Labrador, and in this pioneer community, battling against new primeval difficulties and terrors, peopled by a generation with a different way of life, strange Command- ments, and even undreamed-of powers—in this new society, for all its primitive strangeness, we recognize our own. This world could be our world— we could be these people. BY JOHN WYNDHAM except as a background which was sometimes pleasant, but usually severe and puzzling. And then all these things happened on top of one another: it was as if they woke me up, and after that the world could never look quite the same. The first of these things was the invasion. That’d be about two or three weeks before Petra came, and it meant a kind of off- stage feeling of excitement all round because it was a real invasion that time. Occasional small raids or forays used to happen two or three times a year. Nobody took a lot of notice of them as a rule except the people who got raided. Usually they had time to get away and only lost their stock and sometimes had their houses burnt. But this time it was different. The people of the Fringes—at least, one had to call them people because although they are really Deviations, and therefore Blas- phemies, they do often look quite like ordinary human people, if nothing has gone too much wrong with them—these people, then, don’t have a lot out there in the Fringes, which is the border country between civilized parts and the Badlands. So they come to steal our grain and livestock and tools, weapons too if they can get them; and sometimes they carry off children. Some years they get more hungry and come more often, but usually there is little plan about it; just a matter of a dozen or so of them raiding quickly, and then running off back into Fringes country. ‘The people who live near the border seem to look on it rather as one might on a bad season. There wasn’t any plan to deal with it, either, because you never could tell within four or five hundred miles where they might come next. The result was that when the Fringes people found a leader and came as an organized invasion there was not at first any system comiclbooks.conn