Argosy, September 1955 — page 127: what you’re looking at

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

THE CHRYSALIDS 125 I told him what little I did know and when it had happened, and he said he’d try to find out about it. “I'd be pretty sure something as sudden as that means an accident, though,’ he consoled me. “Aunt Harriet called this a hideous world,” I said. ‘‘ Do you think it’s a hideous world, Uncle Axel? ”’ - He thought that over, spending what seemed to me a long time on a simple question, then he said, “‘ If it’s the people she was meaning, I think they’re more stupid than bad. As for the place—”’ he lifted his head and looked across the fields and woods, and then at the blue mountains in the distance—“ well, I reckon it’s not as good as it might be, and I reckon it was once a whole lot better than it is now, most likely: but, for all that, I’d rather be here than in the other places I’ve seen.”’ I looked where he was looking. In the foreground the great bank came curving into view from the left, and then ran straight as an arraw towards the mountains. It was very, very old, and crumbled almost away in some places, but no one could ever mistake it for a work of nature. The sight of it prompted me to ask, ‘“ Was the world better when the Old People were here? ”’ ** Must’ve been,”’ said Uncle Axel. “'The Old People must’ve been very wonderful themselves,” I said, looking at the massiveness of the bank, “‘ with their big cities, and the machines that ran about, and the other machines that could fly.” “'That’s nothing but stories,’ he told me. ‘“ People like to think the Old People were wonderful, so they say they could do anything—even fly like birds. What I say is if they were only half as wonderful as people say, how is it they’re not still here? ”’ *“ But it wasn’t like birds,” I told him. ‘‘ The machines didn’t have wings, they had kind of whirling things on the top of them.”’ He looked at me very hard. So then I had to tell him about the dreams I had had of this place—only I still thought it was the Old People I was dreaming of. He couldn’t make a lot of that. He seemed to think they were just stories I’d picked up somewhere, and kept on thinking about. He shook his head. ‘““'There’s a lot of nonsense talked about the Old People,’ he persisted, “‘ but where are they? ” “God sent Tribulation upon them,” I quoted. ‘“ Sure, sure. ‘That’s easy to say, but not so easy to understand, especially when you’ve seen a bit of the world. ‘Tribulation wasn’t just tempests and hurricanes and floods and fires, the way they often tell you. It was like all of them together, and something a lot worse, too. I can understand that it destroyed almost all the world. What I don’t understand is the queer things it did to what was left.” “Except here,’’ I suggested. ** Not except here, but less here than anywhere else,” he corrected me. ‘‘ What could it have been? ‘That’s what’s been puzzling me for nearly twenty years now. You’ve got to see it to understand what I mean. What could possibly have caused it? ” comicbooks.conm