Consider Her Ways by John Wyndham Read Free Book Online Page A

members of the tribe are appointed to look after them as if they were children, and to guard them.
    ‘It’s necessary to guard them because the Indian belief is that chuinjuatin liberates the spirit from the body, setting it free to wander anywhere in space and time, and the guardian’s most important job is to see that no other wandering spirit shall slip into the body while the true owner is away. When the subjects
recover they claim to have had wonderful mystical experiences. There seem to be no physical ill effects, and no craving results from it. The mystical experiences, though, are said to be intense, and clearly remembered.
    ‘Dr Hellyer’s friend had tested his synthesized chuinjuatin on a number of laboratory animals and worked out the dosage, and tolerances, and that kind of thing, but what he could not tell, of course, was what validity, if any, the reports of the mystical experiences had. Presumably they were the product of the drug’s influence on the nervous system – but whether that effect produced a sensation of pleasure, ecstasy, awe, fear, horror, or any of a dozen more, it was impossible to tell without a human guinea-pig. So that was what I volunteered for.’
    I stopped. I looked at their serious, puzzled faces, and at the billow of pink satin in front of me.
    ‘In fact,’ I added, ‘it appears to have produced a combination of the absurd, the incomprehensible, and the grotesque.’
    They were earnest women, these, not to be side-tracked. They were there to disprove an anomaly – if they could.
    ‘I see,’ said the spokeswoman with an air of preserving reasonableness, rather than meaning anything. She glanced down at a paper on which she had made a note from time to time.
    ‘Now, can you give us the time and date at which this experiment took place?’
    I could, and did, and after that the questions went on and on and on …
    The least satisfactory part of it from my point of view was that even though my answers caused them to grow more uncertain of themselves as we went on, they did at least get them; whereas when I put a question it was usually evaded, or answered perfunctorily, as an unimportant digression.
    They went on steadily, and only broke off when my next meal arrived. Then they went away, leaving me thankfully in peace – but little the wiser. I half expected them to return, but when they did not I fell into a doze from which I was awakened by the incur
sion of a cluster of the little women, once more. They brought a trolley with them, and in a short time were wheeling me out of the building on it – but not by the way I had arrived. This time we went down a ramp where another, or the same, pink ambulance waited at the bottom. When they had me safely loaded aboard, three of them climbed in, too, to keep me company. They were chattering as they did so, and they kept it up inconsequently, and mostly incomprehensibly, for the whole hour and a half of the journey that ensued.
    The countryside differed little from that I had already seen. Once we were outside the gates there were the same tidy fields and standardized farms. The occasional built-up areas were not extensive and consisted of the same types of blocks close by, and we ran on the same, not very good, road surfaces. There were groups of the Amazon types, and, more rarely, individuals, to be seen at work in the fields; the sparse traffic was lorries, large or small, and occasional buses, but with never a private car to be seen. My illusion, I reflected, was remarkably consistent in its details. Not a single group of Amazons, for instance, failed to raise its right hands in friendly, respectful greeting to the pink car.
    Once, we crossed a cutting. Looking down from the bridge I thought at first that we were over the dried bed of a canal, but then I noticed a post leaning at a crazy angle among the grass and weeds: most of its attachments had fallen off, but there were enough left to identify it as a railway-signal.
    We