“I’m eighteen. It was my birthday-the day the comet came.”
I could not think of anything to say to that that would not seem cruel. The pause drew out. I saw that she was clenching her hands together. Then she dropped them to her sides, the knuckles quite white. She made as if to speak, but did not.
“What is it?” I asked. “What can I do except prolong this a little?”
She bit her lip, then:
“They-they said perhaps you were lonely,” she said. “I thought perhaps if”-her voice faltered, and her knuckles went a little whiter still-“perhaps if you had somebody
I mean, somebody here.. . you-you might not want to leave us. Perhaps you’d stay with us?”
“Oh God,” I said softly.
I looked at her, standing quite straight, her lips trembling slightly. There should have been suitors clamoring for her lightest smile. She should have been happy and uncaring for a while-then happy in caring. Life should have been enchanting to her, and love very sweet….
“You’d be kind to me, wouldn’t you?” she said. “You see, I haven’t
“Stop it! Stop it!” I told her. ‘You mustn’t say these things to me. Please go away now.”
But she did not go. She stood staring at me from eyes that could not see me.
“Go away!” I repeated.
I could not stand the reproach of her. She was not simply herself-she was thousands upon thousands of young lives destroyed….
She came closer.
“Why, I believe you’re crying!” she said.
“Go away. For God’s sake, go away!” I told her.
She hesitated, then she turned and felt her way back to the door. As she went out:
“You can tell them I’ll be staying,” I said.
The first thing I was aware of the next morning was the smell. There had been whiffs of it here and there before, but luckily the weather had been cool. Now I found that I had slept late into what was already a warmer day. I’m not going into details about that smell; those who knew it will never forget it; for the rest it is indescribable. It rose from every city and town for weeks, and traveled on every wind that blew. When I woke to it that morning it convinced me beyond doubt that the end had come. Death is just the shocking end of animation; it is dissolution that is final.
I lay for some minutes thinking. The only thing to do now would be to load my party into trucks and take them in relays into the country. And all the supplies we had collected? They would have to be loaded and taken too-and I the only one able to drive… . It would take days-if we had days.
Upon that, I wondered what was happening in the building now. The place was oddly quiet. When I listened I could hear a voice groaning in another room, beyond that nothing. I got out of bed an hurried into my clothes with a feeling of alarm. Out on the landing, I listened again. There was no sound of feet about the house. I had a sudden nasty feeling as if history were repeating itself and I were back in the hospital again.
“Hey! Anybody here?” I called.
Several voices answered. I opened a nearby door. There was a man in there. He looked very bad, and he was delirious. There was nothing I could do. I closed the door again.
My footsteps sounded loud on the wooden stain. On the next floor a woman’s voice called: “Bill-Bill!”
She was in bed in a small room there, the girl who had come to see me the night before. She turned her bead as I came in. I saw that she had it too.
“Don’t come near,” she said. “It is you, Bill?
“I thought it must be. You can still walk; they have to creep. I’m glad, Bill. I told them you’d not go like that-but they said you had. Now they’ve all gone, all of them that could.”
“I was asleep,” I said. “What happened?’
“More and more of us like this. They were frightened.”
I said helplessly, “What can I do for you? Is there anything I can get you?”
Her face contorted; she clutched her arms round her and writhed. The spasm passed, and left her with sweat trickling down her forehead.
“Please, Bill. I’m not very brave. Could you get me something to-to finish it?”
“Yes,” I said. “I can do that for you.”
I was back from the drugstore in ten minutes. I gave her a glass of water and put the stuff into her other hand.
She held it there for a little, without speaking. Then:
“So futile to have lived at all-and it might all have been so different,” she said. “Good-by, Bill-and thank you for trying to help us.”
I looked down at her as she lay. I felt very angry with the stupidity of death. A thousand would have said: “Take me with you”; but she had said: “Stay with us.”
And I never even knew her name.
EVACUATION
It was the memory of the redheaded young man who had fired on us that conditioned my choice of a route to Westminster.
Since I was sixteen my interest in weapons has decreased, but in an environment reverting to savagery it seemed that one must be prepared to behave more or less as a savage, or possibly cease to behave at all, before long. In St. James’s Street there used to be several shops which would sell you any form of lethalness, from a rook rifle to an elephant gun, with the greatest urbanity.
I left there with a mixed feeling of support and banditry. Once more I had a useful hunting knife. There was a pistol with the precise workmanship of a scientific instrument in my pocket. On the seat beside me rested a loaded twelve-bore and boxes of cartridges. I had chosen a shotgun in preference to a rifle-the bang is no less convincing, and it also decapitates a triffid with a neatness which a bullet seldom achieves. And there were triffids to be seen right in London now. They still appeared to avoid the streets when they could, but I had noticed several lumbering across Hyde Park, and there were others in the Green Park. Very likely they were ornamental, safely docked specimens-on the other hand, maybe they weren’t.
And so I came to Westminster.
The deadness, the finish of it all, was italicized there. The usual scatter of abandoned vehicles lay about the streets. Very few people were about-I saw only three who were moving. Two were tapping their way down the gutters of Whitehall, the third was in Parliament Square. He was sitting close to Lincoln’s statue and clutching to him his dearest possession-a side of bacon from which he was hacking a ragged slice with a blunt knife.
Above it all rose the Houses of Parliament, with the hands of the clock stopped at three minutes past six. It was difficult to believe that all that meant nothing any more, that it was now just a pretentious confection in uncertain stone which would decay in peace. Let it shower its crumbling pinnacles onto the terrace as it would-there would be no more indignant members complaining of the risk to their valuable lives. Into those halls which had in their day set world echoes to good intentions and sad expediencies the roofs could, in due course, fall; there would be none to stop them, and none to care. Alongside, the Thames flowed imperturbably on. So it would flow until the day the Embankments crumble and the water spread out and Westminster became once more an island in a marsh.
Some eight hours spent searching the district left me clue-less, arid despondent. The only logical place I could think of to go was back to the University Building. I reckoned Josella would think the same-and there was a hope that some others of our dispersed party might have drifted back there in an effort to reunite. It was not a very strong hope, for common sense would have caused them to leave there days ago.
Two flags still hung above the tower, limp in the warm air of the early evening. Of the two dozen or so trucks that had been accumulated in the forecourt, four still stood there, apparently untouched. I parked the car beside them and went into the building. My footsteps clattered in the silence.
“Hub! Hullo, there!” I called. “Is there anyone here?”
My voice echoed away down corridors and up wells, diminishing to the parody of a whisper and then to silence. I went to the doors of the other wing and called again. Once more the echoes died away unbroken, settling softly as dust. Only then, as I turned back, did I notice that an inscription had been chalked on the wall inside the outer door. In large letters it gave simply an address: