“Got a pistol?” he asked.
“I didn’t think of it,” I admitted.
“Better—just in case. Quite effective simply fired into the air,” he said. He took two pistols from a drawer in the table and pushed them across. “Less messy than that,” he added, with a look at Josella’s handsome knife. “Good scrounging to you.”
* * *
—
Even by the time we set out after unloading the station wagon we found that there were still fewer people about than on the previous day. The ones that were showed an inclination to get on the sidewalks at the sound of the engine rather than to molest us.
The first truck to take our fancy proved useless, being filled with wooden cases too heavy for us to remove. Our next find was luckier—a five-tonner, almost new, and empty. We transshipped, and left the station wagon to its fate.
At the first address on my list the shutters of the loading bay were down, but they gave way without much difficulty to the persuasions of a crowbar from a neighboring shop and rolled up easily. Inside, we made a find. Three trucks stood backed up to the platform. One of them was fully loaded with cases of canned meat.
“Can you drive one of these things?” I asked Josella.
She looked at it.
“Well, I don’t see why not. The general idea’s the same, isn’t it? And there’s certainly no traffic problem.”
We decided to come back and fetch it later, and took the empty truck on to another warehouse, where we loaded in parcels of blankets, rugs, and quilts, and then went on farther to acquire a noisy miscellany of pots, pans, caldrons, and kettles. When we had the truck filled we felt we had put in a good morning’s work on a job that was heavier than we had thought. We satisfied the appetite it had given us at a small pub hitherto untouched.
The mood which filled the business and commercial districts was gloomy—though it was a gloom that still had more the style of a normal Sunday or public holiday than of collapse. Very few people at all were to be seen in those parts. Had the catastrophe come by day, instead of by night after the workers had gone home, it would have been a hideously different scene.
When we had refreshed ourselves we collected the already loaded truck from the food warehouse and drove the two of them slowly and uneventfully back to the university. We parked them in the forecourt there and set off again. About six-thirty we returned once more with another pair of well-loaded trucks and a feeling of useful accomplishment.
Michael Beadley emerged from the building to inspect our contributions. He approved of it all save half a dozen cases that I had added to my second load.
“What are they?” he asked.
“Triffid guns, and bolts for them,” I told him.
He looked at me thoughtfully.
“Oh yes. You arrived with a lot of anti-triffid stuff,” he remarked.
“I think it’s likely we’ll need it,” I said.
He considered. I could see that I was being put down as a bit unsound on the subject of triffids. Most likely he was accounting for that by the bias my job might be expected to give—aggravated by a phobia resulting from my recent sting—and wondering whether it might connote other, perhaps less harmless, unsoundnesses.
“Look here,” I suggested, “we’ve brought in four full truckloads between us. I just want enough space in one of them for these cases. If you think we can’t spare that, I’ll go out and find a trailer, or another truck.”
“No, leave ’em where they are. They don’t take a lot of room,” he decided.
We went into the building and had some tea at an improvised canteen which a pleasant-faced, middle-aged woman had competently set up there.