Stephen was the next to return. The expedition seemed to have affected him much as it bad me, for he shook his head us answer to my questioning look and made straight for the bottle I had opened. Ten minutes later the radio ambitionist joined us. He brought with him a disheveled, wild-eyed young man who appeared not to have washed or shaved for several weeks. This person had been on the road; it was, it seemed, his only profession. One evening, he could not say for certain of what day, he had found a fine comfortable barn in which to spend the night. Having done somewhat more than his usual quota of miles that day, he had fallen asleep almost as soon as he lay down. The next morning he had awakened in a nightmare, and he still seemed a little uncertain whether it was the world or himself that was crazy. We reckoned he was a little, anyway, but he still retained a clear knowledge of the use of beer.
Another half hour or so passed, and then Coker arrived. He had had no better luck than Stephen and I.
Back in Charcott Old House that evening we gathered again around the map. Coker started to mark out new areas of search. We watched him without enthusiasm. It was Stephen who said what all of us, including, I think, Coker himself, were thinking:
“Look here, we’ve been over all the ground for a circle of some fifteen miles between us. It’s clear they aren’t in the immediate neighborhood. Either your information is wrong or they decided not to stop here and went on. In my view it would be a waste of time to go on searching the way we did today.”
Coker laid down the compasses he was using.
“Then what do you suggest?”
“Well, it seems to me we could cover a lot of ground pretty quickly from the air, and well enough. You can bet your life that anyone who hears an aircraft engine is going to turn out and make a sign of some kind.”
Coker shook his head. “Now why didn’t we think of that before? It ought to be a helicopter, of course-but where do we get one, and who’s going to fly it?”
“Oh, I can make one of them things go, all right,” said the radioman confidently.
There was something in his tone.
“Have you ever flown one?” asked Coker.
“No,” admitted the radioman, “but I reckon there’d not be a lot to it, once you got the knack.”
“H’m,” said Coker, looking at him with reserve.
Stephen recalled the locations of two R.A.F. stations not far away, and that there had been an air-taxi business operating from Yeovil.
In spite of our doubts, the radioman was as good as his word. He seemed to have complete confidence that his instinct for mechanism would not let him down. After practicing for half an hour, he took the helicopter off and flew it back to Charcott.
For four days the machine hovered around in widening circles. On two of them Coker observed; on the other two I replaced him. In all, we discovered ten little groups of people. None of them knew anything of the Beadley party, and none of them contained Josella. As we found each lot, we landed. Usually they were in twos and threes. The largest was seven. They would greet us in hopeful excitement, but soon, when they found that we represented only a group similar to their own, and were not the spearhead of a rescue party on the grand scale, their Interest would lapse. We could offer them little that they had not got already. Some of them became irrationally abusive and threatening in their disappointment, but most simply dropped back into despondency. As a rule they showed little wish to join up with other parties and were inclined rather to lay hands on what they could, building themselves into refuges as comfortably as possible while they waited for the arrival of the Americans, who were bound to find a way. There seemed to be a widespread and fixed idea about this. Our suggestions that any surviving Americans would be likely to have their hands more than full at home was received as so much wet-blanketry. The Americans, they assured us, would never have allowed such a thing to happen in their country. Nevertheless, and in spite of this Micawber fixation on American fairy godmothers, we left each party with a map showing them the approximate positions of groups we had already discovered, in case they should change their minds and think about getting together for self-help.
As a task, the flights were far from enjoyable, but at least ey were to be preferred to lonely scouting on the ground. However, at the end of the fruitless fourth day it was decided to abandon the search.
At least that was what the rest of them decided. I did not feel the same way about it. My quest was personal; theirs was not. Whoever they found, now or eventually, would be strangers to them. I was searching for Beadley’s party as a means, not an end in itself. If I should find them and discover that Josella was not with them, then I should go on searching. But I could not expect the rest to devote any more time to searching purely on my behalf.
Curiously I realized that in all this I had met no other person who was searching for someone else. Every one of them had been, save for the accident of Stephen and his girl friend, snapped clean away from friends or relatives to link him with the past, and was beginning a new life with people who were strangers. Only I, as far as I could see, had promptly formed a new link-and that so briefly that I had scarcely been aware how important it was to me at the time.
Once the decision to abandon the search had been taken,
Coker said:
“All right. Then that brings us to thinking about what we are going to do for ourselves.”
“Which means laying in stores against the winter, and just going on as we are. What else should we do?” asked Stephen.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Coker told him. “Maybe it’d be all right for a while-but what happens afterward?”
“If we do run short of stocks-well, there’s plenty more lying around,” said the radioman.
“The Americans will be here before Christmas,” said Stephen’s girl friend.
“Listen,” Coker told her patiently. “Just put the Americans in the jam-tomorrow-pie-in-the-sky department awhile, will you. Try to imagine a world in which there aren’t any Americans-can you do that?”
The girl stared at him.
“But there must be,” she said.
Coker sighed sadly. He turned his attention to the radioman.
“There won’t always he those stores. The way I see it, we’ve been given a flying start in a new kind of world. We’re endowed with a capital of enough of everything to begin with, but that isn’t going to last forever. We couldn’t eat up all the stuff that’s there for the taking, not in generations-if it would keep. But it isn’t going to keep. A lot of it is going to go bad pretty rapidly. And not only food. Everything is going, more slowly but quite surely, to drop to pieces. If we want fresh stuff to eat next year, we shall have to grow it ourselves; and it may seem a long way off now, but there’s going to come a time when we shall have to grow everything ourselves. There’ll come a time, too, when all the tractors are worn out or rusted, and there’s no more gas to run them, anyway-when we’ll come right down to nature and bless horses-if we’ve got ‘em.
“This is a pause-just a heavensent pause-while we get over the first shock and start to collect ourselves, but it’s no more than a pause. Later we’ll have to plow; still later we’ll have to learn how to make plowshares; later than that we’ll have to learn how to smelt the iron to make the shares. What we are on now is a road that will take us back and back and back until we can-if we can-make good all that we wear out. Not until then shall we be able to stop ourselves on the trail that’s leading down to savagery. But once we can do that, then maybe we’ll begin to crawl slowly up again.”
He looked round the circle to see if we were following him.
“We can do that-if we will. The most valuable part of our flying start is knowledge. That’s the short cut to save us starting where our ancestors did. We’ve got it all there in the books if we take the trouble to find out about it.”
The rest were looking at Coker curiously. It was the first time they had heard him in one of his oratorical moods.