“My sweet, all the things up there were diabolical… Do you doubt that if it could be done, someone would do it?…Then suppose there were a mistake, or perhaps an accident—maybe such an accident as actually encountering a shower of comet debris, if you like—which starts some of these things popping…
“Somebody begins talking about comets. It might not be politic to deny that—and there turned out to be so little time, anyway.
“Well, naturally these things would have been intended to operate close to the ground, where the effect would be spread over a definitely calculable area. But they start going off out there in space, or maybe when they hit the atmosphere—either way, they’re operating so far up that people all round the world can receive direct radiations from them…
“Just what did happen is anyone’s guess now. But one thing I’m quite certain of—that somehow or other we brought this lot down on ourselves… And there was that plague, too: it wasn’t typhoid, you know…
“I find that it’s just the wrong side of coincidence for me to believe that out of all the thousands of years in which a destructive comet could arrive, it happens to do so just a few years after we have succeeded in establishing satellite weapons—don’t you? No, I think that we kept on that tightrope quite a while, considering the things that might have happened—but sooner or later the foot had to slip.”
“Well, when you put it that way——” murmured Josella. She broke off and was lost in silence for quite a while. Then she said:
“I suppose, in a way, that should be more horrible than the idea of nature striking blindly at us. And yet I don’t think it is. It makes me feel less hopeless about things because it makes them at least comprehensible. If it was like that, then it is at least a thing that can be prevented from happening again—just one more of the mistakes our very great grandchildren are going to have to avoid. And, oh dear, there were so many, many mistakes! But we can warn them.”
“H’m—well,” I said. “Anyway, once they’ve beaten the triffids, and pulled themselves out of this mess, they’ll have plenty of scope for making brand-new mistakes of their very own.”
“Poor little things,” she said, as if she were gazing down increasingly great rows of grandchildren, “it’s not much that we’re offering them, is it?”
We sat there a little longer, looking at the empty sea, and then drove down to the town.
After a search which produced most of the things on our wants list, we went down to picnic on the shore in the sunshine—with a good stretch of shingle behind us over which no triffid could approach unheard.
“We must do more of this while we can,” Josella said. “Now that Susan’s growing up I needn’t be nearly so tied.”
“If anybody ever earned the right to let up a bit, you have,” I agreed.
I said it with a feeling that I would like us to go together and say a last farewell to places and things we had known, while it was still possible. Every year now the prospect of imprisonment would grow closer. Already, to go northward from Shirning, it was necessary to make a detour of many miles to by-pass the country that had reverted to marshland. All the roads were rapidly growing worse with the erosion by rain and streams, and the roots that broke up the surfaces. The time in which one would still be able to get an oil tanker back to the house was already becoming measurable. One day one of them would fail to make its way along the lane, and very likely block it for good. A half-track would continue to run over ground that was dry enough, but as time went on it would be increasingly difficult to find a route open enough even for that.
“And we must have one real last fling,” I said. “You shall dress up again, and we’ll go to——”
“Sh-sh!” interrupted Josella, holding up one finger and turning her ear to the wind.