“Yes—when enough of them can be spared from the mere business of keeping alive. I’ve collected a mass of biochemical books in the hope that perhaps sometime there will be people who can make use of them—I shall teach David all I can, and he must hand it on. Unless there is leisure for work on it sometime, I can see nothing ahead but the reservations.”
Josella frowned down on a group of four triffids ambling across a field below us.
“If I were a child now,” she said reflectively, “I think I should want a reason for what happened. Unless I was given it—that is, if I were allowed to think that I had been born into a world which had been quite pointlessly destroyed—I should find living quite pointless too. That does make it awfully difficult, because it seems to be just what has happened…”
She paused, pondering, then she added:
“Do you think we could—do you think we should be justified in starting a myth to help them? A story of a world that was wonderfully clever, but so wicked that it had to be destroyed—or destroyed itself by accident? Something like the Flood, again? That wouldn’t crush them with inferiority—it could give the incentive to build, and this time to build something better.”
“Yes…” I said, considering it. “Yes. It’s often a good idea to tell children the truth. Kind of makes things easier for them later on—only why pretend it’s a myth?”
Josella demurred at that.
“How do you mean? The triffids were—well, they were somebody’s fault, or mistake, I admit. But the rest?”
“I don’t think we can blame anyone too much for the triffids. The extracts they give were very valuable in the circumstances. Nobody can ever see what a major discovery is going to lead to—whether it is a new kind of engine or a triffid—and we coped with them all right in normal conditions. We benefited quite a lot from them, as long as the conditions were to their disadvantage.”
“Well, it wasn’t our fault the conditions changed. It was—just one of those things. Like earthquakes or hurricanes—what an insurance company would call an act of God. Maybe that’s just what it was—a judgment. Certainly we never brought that comet.”
“Didn’t we, Josella? Are you quite sure of that?”
She turned to look at me.
“Are you trying to tell me that you don’t think it was a comet at all?”
“Just exactly that,” I agreed.
“But—I don’t understand. It must——What else could it have been?”
I opened a vacuum-packed can of cigarettes and lit one for each of us.
“You remember what Michael Beadley said about the tightrope we’d all been walking on for years?”
“Yes, but——”
“Well, I think that what happened was that we came off it—and that a few of us just managed to survive the crash.”
I drew on my cigarette, looking out at the sea and at the infinite blue sky above it.
“Up there,” I went on, “up there there were—and maybe there still are—unknown numbers of satellite weapons circling round and round the Earth. Just a lot of dormant menaces, touring around, waiting for someone, or something, to set them off. What was in them? You don’t know; I don’t know. Top-secret stuff. All we’ve heard is guesses—fissile materials, radioactive dusts, bacteria, viruses…Now suppose that one type happened to have been constructed especially to emit radiations that our eyes would not stand—something that would burn out or at least damage the optic nerve.”
Josella gripped my hand.
“Oh no, Bill! No, they couldn’t… That’d be—diabolical… Oh, I can’t believe——Oh no, Bill!”