So she had come away, with the intention of trying to reach the Sea.

After that, she could barely remember anything of her stumble through the forest; it had lasted all night, and yet she had come such a short distance from the explosion site that I surmised she must have been blundering in circles, until Stubbins and I found her.

Stubbins and I resolved that our best course would be to take Hilary out of the forest, away from the damaging Carolinum emissions, and bring her to our encampment along the beach, where Nebogipfel’s advanced ingenuity might be able to concoct some way to make her more comfortable. But it was clear enough that Hilary did not have the strength to walk further. So we improvised a stretcher of two long, straight fallen branches, with my trousers and Stubbins’s shirt tied between them. Wary of her blistered flesh, we lifted Hilary onto this makeshift construction. She cried out when we moved her, but once we had her settled on the stretcher her discomfort eased.

So we set off back through the forest, towards the beach. Stubbins preceded me, and soon I could see how his bare, bony back prickled with sweat and dirt. He stumbled in the forest’s scorched gloom, and lianas and low branches rattled against his unprotected face; but he did not complain, and kept his hands wrapped around the poles of our stretcher. As for me, staggering along in my under-shorts, my strength was soon exhausted, and my emptied-out muscles set up a great trembling. At times, it seemed impossible that I could lift my feet for another step, or keep my stiffening hands wrapped around those rough poles. But, watching the stolid determination of Stubbins ahead of me, I strove to mask my fatigue and to follow his pace.

Hilary lay in a shallow unconsciousness, with her limbs convulsing and mumbled cries escaping her lips, as echoes of pain worked their way through her nervous system.

When we reached the shore we set Hilary down in the shade of the forest’s rim, and Stubbins lifted her head, cupping her skull in one hand, as he fed her sips of water. Stubbins was a clumsy man, but he worked with an unconscious delicacy and sensitivity that overcame the natural limitations of his frame; it seemed to me that he was pouring his whole being into those simple acts of kindness for Hilary. Stubbins struck me as fundamentally a good, kind man; and I accepted that his detailed care of Hilary was motivated largely by nothing more nor less than simple compassion. But I saw, too, that it would have been unbearable for poor Stubbins to have survived — thanks only to the lucky chance of following an assignment away from the camp during the disaster — when all of his fellows had perished; and I foresaw that he would spend a good deal of his remaining days on such acts of contrition as this.

When we had done our best we picked up the stretcher and progressed along the beach. Stubbins and I, all but naked, our bodies coated with the soot and ash of the burned forest, and with the broken body of Hilary Bond suspended between us, walked along the firmer, damp sand at the Sea’s fringe, with cool, wet sand between our toes and brine wavelets lapping against our shins.

When we reached our small encampment, Nebogipfel took command. Stubbins fussed about, but he impeded Nebogipfel’s movements, and the Morlock served me with a series of hostile glares until I took Stubbins’s arm and pulled him away.

“Look here, old chap,” I said, “the Morlock might look a little strange, but he knows a sight more medicine than I do — or you, I should hazard. I think it’s best if we keep out of his way for a bit, and let him treat the Captain.”

Stubbins’s great hands flexed.

At length I had an idea. “We still need to seek out any others,” I said. “Why not build a fire? If you use green wood, and produce enough smoke, you should raise a signal which will be visible for miles.”

Stubbins fell in with this suggestion with alacrity, and he plunged without delay into the forest. He was like some clumsy animal as he hauled out branches from the wood, but I felt relief that I had found a useful purpose for the helpless energy surging within him.

Nebogipfel had prepared a series of opened palm-nut shells, set in little cups in the sand, each filled with a milky lotion he had devised. He asked for Stubbins’s clasp-knife; with this, he began to cut away Hilary’s clothing. Nebogipfel scooped up handfuls of his lotion and, with his soft Morlock fingers, he began to work it into her worst-damaged flesh.

At first Hilary, still all but unconscious, cried out at these ministrations; but before long her discomfort passed, and she appeared to be passing into a deeper, more peaceful sleep.

“What is the lotion?”

“A salve,” he said as he worked, “based on palm-nut milk, bivalve oil and plants from the forest.” He pushed his slit-mask more comfortably over his face, and left on it streaks of the sticky lotion. “It will ease the pain of the bums.”

“I’m impressed by your foresight in preparing the salve,” I said.

“It did not take much foresight,” he said coolly, “to anticipate such victims, after your self-inflicted catastrophe of yesterday.”

I felt a stab of irritation at this. Self-inflicted? None of us had asked the confounded German to come through time with his Carolinum Bomb. “Blast you, I was trying to congratulate you on your efforts for this girl!”

“But I would much rather not have you bring me such sad victims of folly, as exercises for my compassion and ingenuity.”

“Oh — confound it!” The Morlock really was impossible at times, I thought — quite un-human!

Stubbins and I maintained our bonfire, feeding it with wood so green it spat and fractured and sent up billows of cloudy-white smoke. Stubbins set off for brief, ineffectual searches of the forest; I was forced to promise him that if the fire met with no success in a few days, we should resume our expedition around the explosion epicenter.

It was on the fourth day after the Bombing that more survivors began to arrive at our beacon. They came alone, or in pairs, and they were burned and beaten up, clothed in the ragged remnants of jungle kit. Soon Nebogipfel was running a respectable field hospital — a row of palm-frond pallets, there in the shade of the dipterocarps — while the able-bodied among us were set to work with rudimentary nursing duties and the collection of more supplies.

For a while we hoped that there might be, elsewhere, some other encampment better equipped than ours. Perhaps Guy Gibson had survived, I speculated, and had taken things in hand, in his practical, level-headed way.

We had a brief burst of optimism along these lines when a light motor vehicle came bounding along the beach. The car bore two soldiers, both young women. But we were to be disappointed. These two girls were merely the furthest-flung of the exploratory expeditions the Force had sent out from its base: they had been following the shore to the west, looking for a way to strike inland.

For some weeks after the attack we maintained patrols along the beach and into the forest. These occasionally turned up the remains of some poor victim of the Bombing. Some of these appeared to have survived for a time after the first blast, but, enfeebled by injuries, had proved unable to save themselves or call for help. Sometimes a bit of kit would be brought back. (Nebogipfel was keen that any scraps of metal should be retrieved, for he argued that it would be some considerable time before our little residual colony would be able to smelt ore.) But of further survivors, we found none; the two women in their car were the last to join us.

We kept the signal fire burning, though, day and night, long after any reasonable hope of more survivors had vanished.