“Only so few years ago,” Josella said reflectively, “people were wailing about the way those bungalows were destroying the countryside. Now look at them!”

“The countryside is having its revenge, all right,” I said. “Nature seemed about finished then—’Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?’”

“It rather frightens me. It’s as if everything were breaking out. Rejoicing that we’re finished, and that it’s free to go its own way. I wonder? Have we been just fooling ourselves since it happened? Do you think we really are finished with, Bill?”

I’d had plenty more time when I was out on my foragings to wonder about that than she had.

“If you weren’t you, darling, I might make an answer out of the right heroic mold—the kind of wishful thinking that so often passes for faith and resolution.”

“But I am me?”

“I’ll give you the honest answer—not quite. And while there’s life, there’s hope.”

We looked on the scene before us for some seconds in silence.

“I think,” I amplified, “only think, mind you, that we have a narrow chance—so narrow that it is going to take a long, long time to get back. If it weren’t for the triffids, I’d say there was a very good chance indeed—though still taking a longish time. But the triffids are a real factor. They are something that no rising civilization has had to fight before. Are they going to take the world from us, or are we going to be able to stop them?

‘The real problem is to find some simple way of dealing with them. We aren’t so badly off—we can hold them away. But our grandchildren—what are they going to do about them? Are they going to have to spend all their lives in human reservations kept free of triffids only by unending toil?

“I’m quite sure there is a simple way. The trouble is that simple ways so often come out of such complicated research. And we haven’t the resources.”

“Surely we have all the resources there ever were, just for the taking,” Josella put in.

“Material, yes. But mental, no. What we need is a team, a team of experts really out to deal with the triffids for good and all. Something could be done, I’m sure. Something along the lines of a selective killer, perhaps. If we could produce the right hormones to create a state of imbalance in triffids but not m other things… It must be possible—if you have enough brain power turned onto the job.”

“If you think that, why don’t you try?” she asked.

“Too many reasons. First, I’m not up to it—a very mediocre biochemist, and there’s only one of me. There’d have to be a lab, and equipment. More than that, there’d have to be time, and there are too many things which I have to do as it is. But even if I had the ability, then there would have to be the means of producing synthetic hormones in huge quantities. it would be a job for a regular factory. But before that there must be the research team.”

“People could be trained.”

“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 horn 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 Rood, 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 ori—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!”

“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.”