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!”
“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 thin8s 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 our 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.
I held my breath and strained my ears. There was a feeling, rather than a sound, of throbbing in the air. It was faint, but gradually swelling.
“It is-it’s a plane!” Josella said.
We looked to the west, shading our eyes with our hands. The humming was still little more than the buzzing of an insect. The sound increased so slowly that it could come from nothing but a helicopter; any other kind of craft would have passed over us or out of hearing in the time it was taking.
Josella saw it first. A dot a little out from the coast, and apparently coming our way, parallel with the shore. We stood up and started to wave. As the dot grew larger, we waved more wildly, and, not very sensibly, shouted at the tops of our voices. The pilot could not have failed to see us there on the open beach had he come on, but that was what he did not do. A few miles short of us he turned abruptly north to pass inland. We went on waving madly, hoping that he might yet catch sight of us. But there was no indecision in the machine’s course, no variation of the engine note. Deliberately and imperturbably it droned away toward the hills.
We towed our arms and looked at one another.
“If it can come once, it can come again,” said Josella sturdily, but not very convincingly.
But the sight of the machine had changed our day for us. It destroyed quite a lot of the resignation we had carefully built up. We had been saying to ourselves that there must be other groups but they wouldn’t be in any better position tan we were, more likely in a worse. But when a helicopter could come sailing in like a sight and sound from the past, it raised more than memories: it suggested that someone somewhere was managing to make out better than we were… . Was there a tinge of jealousy there?… And it also made us aware that, lucky as we had been, we were still gregarious creatures by nature.
The restless feeling that the machine left behind destroyed our mood and the lines along which our thoughts had been running. In unspoken agreement, we began to pack up our belongings, and, each occupied with our thoughts, we made our way back to the half-track and started for home.
CONTACT
We had covered perhaps half the distance back to Shirning when Josella noticed the smoke. At -first sight it might have been a cloud, but as we neared the top of the hilt we could see the gray column beneath the more diffused upper layer. She pointed to it, and looked at me without a word. The only fires we had seen in years had been a few spontaneous outbreaks in later summer. We both knew at once that the plume ahead was rising from the neighborhood of Shirning. I forced the half-track along at a greater speed than it had ever done on the deteriorated roads. We were thrown about inside it, and yet still seemed to be crawling. Josella sat silent all the time, her lips pressed together and her eyes fixed on the smoke. I knew that she was searching for some indication that the source was nearer or farther away; anywhere but at Shirning itself. But the closer we came, the less room there was for doubt. We tore up the final lane quite oblivious of the stings whipping at the vehicle as it passed. Then, at the turn, we were able to see that it was not the house itself but the woodpile that was ablaze.