Argosy, September 1955 — page 128: what you’re looking at

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

rs £ ‘<9. 126 JOHN WYNDHAM I did not see his real difficulty. After all, God, being omnipotent, could cause anything He liked. I tried to explain that to Uncle Axel, but he shook his head. ‘“ We’ve got to believe that God is sane, Davie boy. We'd be lost indeed if we didn’t believe that. Whatever happened out there—” he waved a hand round the horizon at large—‘“‘ what happened there was not sane, not sane at all. It was something too great for men, but beneath the wisdom of God. So what was it? What can it have been? ”’ “‘"Fribulation:. .‘.”’ I began. : ‘A preacher’s word,” said Uncle Axel. ‘‘ A peeled mirror of a word, reflecting nothing. It’d do them good to see for them- selves. ‘They’d not understand, but at least they might begin to think.” , “ What 7s it like out there, then? ” I asked. He looked at me seriously for a moment. Then he said, “‘ All right, but keep it to yourself. There are plenty like your father who want to think that the outside is nothing but Badlands to the end of the earth, except where it’s sea.”’ *“TIsn’t it? ’’ I said, in surprise. “Tt isn’t, boy. Ill tell you—the part of it I know, anyway...” I knew, of course, that Uncle Axel had made several voyages, but he seldom spoke of them, and because I believed that there was nothing but Badlands or sea, there hadn’t seemed to be much to inquire about. That was what I had been taught, and that in the centre of the world of Badlands there was one oasis of purity, ever threatened and ever to be defended against external encroachment and inter- nal deviation; this was our land of Labrador, of which Waknuk was only a very small district. Labrador was thought to be the name that the Old People had given the country. The one or two references in Nicholson’s Repentances were puzzling. Round most of Labrador there was a great deal of water, called the sea, which was important because of fish. Nobody in Waknuk, except Uncle Axel, had ever seen this sea: it was a long way off, but if you were to go four hundred miles or so to the east or north, or a little less to the north-west, you would come to it. Butif you were to go south-west or south, you wouldn’t, because you would be stopped by the Badiands. From some of the higher places in the Fringes you could look out over the Badlands, and guess about them, but nobody knew what it was really like there. There were lots of stories about them, of course, but as no one who had ever ventured into them had been known to survive for long, it was difficult to see how they could be true. People said, though on no clear authority, that in the time of the Old People, Labrador had been so cold that no one could really live there. But that had been a long time ago. A thousand years? two thousand years? even more? Nobody knew. comicbooks.conn a q : ; i —. Fe ee Pet, il i A at =