I stayed there perhaps twenty minutes. The sun was low, end half the square thrown into shadow. Soon I would have to go in. While there was light I could sustain myself; in the dark, things could steal quietly upon me. Already I was on my way back to the primitive. Before long, perhaps, I should be spending the hours of darkness in fear as my remote ancestors must have done, watching, ever distrustfully, the night outside their cave. I delayed to take one more look around the square, as if it were a page of history I would learn before it was turned. And as I stood there I heard the gritting of footsteps on the road—a slight sound but as loud in the silence as a grinding millstone.

I turned, with my gun ready. Crusoe was no more startled at the sight of a footprint than I at the sound of a footfall, for it had not the hesitancy of a blind man’s. I caught a glimpse in the dim light of the moving figure. As it left the road and entered the garden II saw that it was a man. Evidently he had seen me before I heard him, for he was coming straight toward me.

“You don’t need to shoot,” he said, holding empty hands wide apart.

I did not know him until he came within a few yards. Simultaneously, he recognized me.

“Oh, it’s you, is it?” he said. I kept the gun raised.

“Hullo, Coker. What are you after? Wanting me to go on another of your little parties?” I asked him.

“No. You can put that thing down. Makes too much noise, anyway. That’s how I found you. No,” he repeated, “I’ve had enough. I’m getting to hell out of here.”

“So am I,” I said, and lowered the gun.

“What happened to your bunch?” he asked. I told him. He nodded.

“Same with mine. Same with the rest, I expect. Still, we tried

“The wrong way,” I said. He nodded again.

“Yes,” he admitted. “I reckon your lot did have the right idea from the start—only it didn’t look right and it didn’t sound right a week ago.”

“Six days ago,” I corrected him.

“A week,” said he.

“No, I’m sure— Oh well, what the hell’s it matter, anyway?” I said. “In the circumstances,” I went on, “what do you say to declaring an amnesty and starting over again?”

He agreed.

“I’d got it wrong,” he repeated. “I thought I was the one who was taking it seriously—but I wasn’t taking it seriously enough. I couldn’t believe that it would last, or that some kind of help wouldn’t show up. But now look at it! And it must be like this everywhere. Europe, Asia, America—think of America smitten like this! But they must be. If they weren’t, they’d have been over here, helping out and getting the place straight that’s the way it’d take them. No, I reckon your lot understood it better from the start.”

We ruminated for some moments, then I asked:

“This disease, plague—what do you reckon it is?”

“Search me, chum. I thought it must be typhoid, but someone said typhoid takes longer to develop—so I don’t know. I don’t know why I’ve not caught it myself—except that I’ve been able to keep away from those that have and to see that what I was eating was clean. I’ve been keeping to cans I’ve opened myself, and I’ve drunk bottle beer. Anyway, though I’ve been lucky so far, I don’t fancy hanging around here much longer. Where do you go now?”

I told him of the address chalked on the wall. He bad not seen it. He had been on his way to the University Building when the sound of my shot had caused him to scout round with some caution.

“It—” I began, and then stopped abruptly. From one of the streets west of us came the sound of a car starting up. It ran up its gears quickly and then diminished into the distance.

“Well, at least there’s somebody else left,” said Coker. “Andwhoever wrote up that address. Have you any idea who it was?”

I shrugged my shoulders. It was a justifiable assumption that it was a returned member of the group that Coker had raided—or possibly some sighted person that his party had failed to catch. There was no telling how long it had been there. He thought it over.

“It’ll be better if there’s two of us. I’ll tag along with you and see what’s doing. Okay?”

“Okay,” I agreed. “I’m for turning in flaw, and an early start tomorrow.”

He was still asleep when I awoke. I dressed myself much more comfortably in the ski suit and heavy shoes than in the garments I had been wearing since his party had provided them for me. By the time I returned with a bag of assorted cans, he was up and dressed too. Over breakfast we decided to improve our welcome at Tynsham by taking a loaded truck each rather than travel together in one.

“And see that the cab window closes,” I suggested. ‘There are quite a lot of triffid nurseries around London, particularly to the west.”

“Uh-huh. I’ve seen a few of the ugly brutes about,” he said offhandedly.

“I’ve seen them about—and in action,” I told him.

At the first garage we came to we broke open a pump and filled up. Then, sounding in the silent streets like a convoy of tanks, we set off westward with my truck in the lead.

The going was wearisome. Every few dozen yards one had to weave round some derelict vehicle. Occasionally two or three together would block the road entirely so that it was necessary to go dead slow and nudge one of them out of the way. Very few of them were wrecked. The blindness seemed to have come upon the drivers swiftly, but not too suddenly for them to keep control. Usually they had been able to draw in to the side of the road before they stopped. Had the catastrophe occurred by day, the main reads would have been quite impassable, and to work our way clear from the center by side streets might have taken days—spent mostly in reversing before impenetrable thickets of vehicles and trying to find another way round. As it was, I found that our over-all progress was less slow than it seemed in detail, and when, after a few miles, I noticed an overturned car beside the road I realized that we were by this time on a route which others had traveled, and partially cleared, ahead of us.

On the farther outskirts of Staines we could begin to feel that London was behind us at last. I stopped, and went back to Coker. As he switched off, the silence closed, thick and unnatural, with only the click of cooling metal to break it. I realized suddenly that I bad not seen a single living creature other than a few sparrows since we had started. Coker climbed out of his cab. He stood in the middle of the road, listening and looking around him.

he murmured.

I looked bard at him. His grave, reflective expression turned suddenly to a grin.

“Or do you prefer Shelley?” he asked.

Come on, let’s find some food.”

“Coker,” I said as we completed the meal sitting on a store counter and spreading marmalade on crackers, “you beat me. What are you? The first time I meet you I find you ranting— if you will forgive the appropriate word—in a kind of dockside lingo. Now you quote Marvel to me. It doesn’t make sense.”

He grinned. “It never did to me, either,” he said. “It comes of being a hybrid—you never really know what you are. My mother never really knew what I was, either—at least she never could prove it, and she always held it against me that on account of that she could not get an allowance for me. It made me kind of sour about things when I was a kid, and when I left school I used to go to meetings—more or less any kind of meetings as long as they were protesting against something. And that led to me getting mixed up with the lot that used to come to them. I suppose they found me kind of amusing. Anyway, they used to take me along to arty-political sorts of parties. After a bit I got tired of being amusing and seeing them give a kind of double laugh, half with me and half at me, whenever I said what I thought. I reckoned I needed some of the background knowledge they had, and then I’d be able to laugh at them a bit, maybe, so I started going to evening classes, and I practiced talking the way they did, for use when necessary. There’s a whole lot of people don’t seem to understand that you have to talk to a man in his own language before he’ll take you seriously. If you talk tough and quote Shelley they think you’re cute, like a performing monkey or something, but they don’t pay any at-tendon to what you say. You have to talk the kind of lingo they’re accustomed to taking seriously. And it works the other way too. Half the political intelligentsia who talk to a working audience don’t get the value of their stuff across— not so much because they’re over their audience’s heads, as because half the chaps are listening to the voice and not to the words, so they knock a big discount off what they do hear because it’s all a bit fancy, and not like ordinary, normal talk. So I reckoned the thing to do was to make myself bilingual, and use the right one in the right place—and occasionally the wrong one in the wrong place, unexpectedly. Surprising how that jolts ‘em. Wonderful thing, the English caste system. Since then I’ve made out quite nicely in the orating business. Not what you’d call a steady job, but full of interest and variety…Wilfred Coker. Meetings addressed. Subject no object. That’s me.”