The morning was infected with minor mishaps. First it was water in the carburetor. Then I contrived to travel a dozen miles north under the impression I was going east, and before I had that fully rectified I was in trouble with the ignition system on a bleak upland road miles from anywhere. Either these delays or a natural reaction did a lot to spoil the hopeful mood in which I had started. By the time I had the trouble straightened out, it was one o’clock and the day bad cleared “p.

The sun came out. Everything looked bright and refreshed, but even that, and the fact that for the next twenty miles everything went smoothly, did not shift the mood of depression that was closing over me again. Now I was really on my own, I could not shut out the sense of loneliness. It came upon me as it bad on that day when we bad split up to search for Michael Beadley—only with double the force… Until then I had always thought of loneliness as something negative—an absence of company, and, of course, something temporary.

…That day I had learned that it was much more. It was something which could press and oppress, could distort the ordinary and play tricks with the mind. Something which lurked inimically nil around, stretching the nerves and twang-big them with alarms, never letting one forget that there was no one to help, no one to care. It showed one as an atom adrift in vastness, and it waited all the time its chance to frighten and frighten horribly—that was what loneliness was really trying to do; and that was what one must never let it do..

To deprive a gregarious creature of companionship is to maim it, to outrage its nature. The prisoner and the cenobite are aware that the herd exists beyond their exile; they are an aspect of it. But when the herd no longer exists, there is, for the herd creature, no longer entity. He is a part of no whole, a freak without a place. If he cannot hold onto his reason, then he is lost indeed: most utterly and most fearfully lost, so that he becomes no more than the twitch in the limb of a corpse.

It needed far more resistance now than it had before. Only the strength of my hope that I would find companionship at my journey’s end kept me from turning hack to find relief from the strain in the presence of Coker and the others.

The sights which I saw by the way had little or nothing to do with it. Horrible though some of them were, I was hardened to such things by now. The honor had left them, just as the honor which broods over great battlefields fades into history. Nor did I any longer see these things as part of a vast, impressive tragedy. My struggle was all a personal conflict with the instincts of my kind. A continual defensive action, with no victory possible. I knew in my very heart that I would not be able to sustain myself for long alone.

To give myself occupation I drove faster than I should. In some small town with a forgotten name I rounded a corner and ran straight into a van which blocked the whole street. Luckily my own tough truck suffered no more than scratches, but two vehicles managed to hitch themselves together with diabolical ingenuity, so that it was an awkward business singlehanded, and in a confined space, to separate them. It was a problem which took me a full hour to solve, and did me good by turning my mind to practical matters.

Alter that I kept to a more cautious pace, except for a few minutes soon after I entered the New Forest. The cause of that was a glimpse through the trees of a helicopter cruising at no great height. It was set to cross my course some way ahead. By ill luck the trees there grew close to the side of the road, and must have hidden it almost completely from the air. I put on a spurt, but by the time I reached more open ground the machine was no more than a speck floating away in the distance to the north. Nevertheless, even the sight of it seemed to give me some support.

A few miles farther on I ran through a small village which was disposed neatly about a triangular green. At first sight it was as charming in its mixture of thatched and red-tiled cottages with their flowering gardens as something out of a picture book. But I did not look closely into the gardens as I passed; too many of them showed the alien shape of a triffid towering incongruously among the flowers. I was almost clear of the place when a small figure bounded out of one of the last garden gates and came running up the road toward me, waving both arms. I pulled up, looked around for triffids in a way that was becoming instinctive, picked up my gun and climbed down.

The child was dressed in a blue cotton frock, white socks, and sandals. She looked about nine or ten years old. A pretty ttle girl—I could see that, even though her dark brown curls were now uncared for and her face dirtied with smeared tears. She pulled at my sleeve.

“Please, please,” she said urgently, “please come and see what’s happened to Tommy.”

I stood staring down at her. The awful loneliness of the day lifted. My mind seemed to break out of the case I had made for it. I wanted to pick her up and hold her close to me. I could feel tears behind my eyes. I held out my hand to her, and she took it. Together we walked back to the gate through which she had come.

“Tommy’s there,” she said, pointing.

A little boy about four years of age lay on the diminutive patch of lawn between the flower beds. It was quite obvious at a glance why he was there.

“The thing hit him,” she said. “It hit him and he fell down. And it wanted to hit me when I tried to help him. Horrible thing!”

I looked up and saw the top of a triffid rising above the fence that bordered the garden.

“Put your bands over your ears. I’m going to make a bang,” I said.

She did so, and I blasted the top off the triffid.

“Horrible thing!” she repeated. “Is it dead now?”

I was about to assure her that it was, when it began to rattle the little sticks against its stem, just as the one at Steeple Honey had done. As then, I gave it the other barrel to shut it up.

“Yes” I said. “It’s dead now.”

We walked across to the little boy. The scarlet slash of the sting was vivid on his pale cheek. It must have happened some hours before. She knelt beside him.

“It isn’t any good,” I told her gently. She looked up, fresh tears in her eyes. “Is Tommy dead too?”

I squatted down beside her and shook my head. “I’m afraid he is.”

After a while she said:

“Poor Tommy! will we bury him—like the puppies?”

“Yes,” I told her.

In all the overwhelming disaster, that was the only grave I dug—and it was a very small one. She gathered a little bunch of flowers and laid them on top of it. Then we drove away.

Susan was her name. A long time ago, as it seemed to her, something had happened to her father and mother so that they could not see. Her father had gone out to try to get some help, and he had not come back. Her mother went out later, leaving the children with strict instructions not to leave the house. She had come back crying. The next day she went out again: this time she did not come back. The children had eaten what they could find, and then began to grow hungry. At last Susan was hungry enough to disobey instructions and seek help from Mrs. Walton at the shop. The shop itself was open, but Mrs. Walton was not there. No one came when Susan called, so she had decided to take some cakes and biscuits and candies and tell Mrs. Walton about it later.

She had seen some of the things about as she came back. One of them had struck at her, but it had misjudged her height, and the sting passed over her head. It frightened her, and she ran the rest of the way home. After that she had been very careful about the things, and on further expeditions had taught Tommy to be careful about them too. But Tommy had been so little he had not been able to see the one that was hiding in the next garden when he went out to play that morning. Susan had tried half a dozen times to get to him, but each time, however careful she was, she had seen the top of the triffid tremble and stir slightly…