The Kraken Wakes

Phase Three

Something checked us. Not with a jolt, but with a gentle yielding, and a slight rubbing sound. From where I sat in the stern of the dinghy, keeping a little way on, and steering with a muffled oar, I could see practically nothing in the darkness, but it did not feel as if we had hit the bank.

'What is it?' I whispered.

The little boat rocked as Phyllis clambered forward. There was a faint thud from some part of our gear dislodged. Presently her whisper came back:

'It's a net. A big one.'

'Can you lift it?'

She shifted. The dinghy rocked again, and then remained tilted for a moment. It relaxed back to an even keel.

'No. Too heavy,' she said.

I hadn't expected that kind of hold-up. A few hours before in daylight I had prospected the route with binoculars, from a church tower. I had observed that to the north-west there was a narrow gap between two hills, and beyond it the water widened out into a lake stretching further than I could see. It looked as if, once past that neck, one ought to be able to travel a considerable distance without coming too close to the shore. I traced the way to the gap and memorized it with care before I came down. The tide turned and began to rise before it was quite dark. We waited another half-hour, and then set off, rowing up on the flood. It had not been too difficult to find the gap, for the silhouette of the two hills showed faintly against the sky. I had moved to the stern to steer and let the tide carry us silently through. And now there was the net

I turned the craft so that the flow held us broadside against the barrier. I shipped the oar cautiously, felt for the net, and found it. It was made of half-inch rope with about a six-inch mesh, I judged. I felt for my knife.

'Hold on,' I whispered. 'I'll cut a hole.'

While I was in the act of opening the blade there came a crack, followed by a whoosh. A flare broke out above. The whole scene about us was suddenly visible, and there we sat in midstream, bathed in a hard, white light.

The lower hill, on the left, was covered with turf and a few bushes among wandering paths. To the right was a row of houses a few feet above the water-level. In front of them, and closer, was another row, built on a slant across the hillside. The house at the right-hand end was high enough for its whole roof to show above water. Its neighbours marched gradually deeper until they only showed chimney-pots, and finally nothing at all.

A rifle cracked somewhere in one of the houses in the upper row. I missed the flash, but the bullet phewed by, not far from our heads. I dropped my knife into the bottom of the dinghy, and put up my hands. A voice carried clearly from one of the dark windows:

'Get back where you came from, chum,' it advised.

I lowered my hands, looked at Phyllis, and shrugged.

'We only want to go through, to get home. We don't want to stay, or ask for anything,' she called back to the unseen man.

'That's what they all say. Where's home?' he asked.

'Cornwall,' she told him.

He laughed 'Cornwall I You've got a hope.'

'It's true,' she said.

'True it may be, but it's bloody impossible, too. And I've got my orders. It's get back or get hurt. So start moving.'

'But we've got enough food to —' Phyllis began.

I shook my head at her. From what I'd been told, the only chance had been to get through without being seen — and having food with one was not a thing to advertise.

'Okay,' I called wearily. 'We'll get back.'

There was no need for silence any more, so I tilted the outboard into the water, and wound the cord on it

'You got sense — and better not try again,' advised the voice.

'I'm kind of old-fashioned — don't like shooting people that'll act reasonable. But there's others not so particular. So just keep going, chum.'

I pulled the cord, and she started. We pushed clear of the net, and then chugged off downstream, against the tide. The flare sank gradually behind us, and burnt out. Darkness, darker than before, closed in.

Phyllis clambered over the gear, and came to sit beside me. Her gloved hand found my knee, and pressed it

'Sorry, darling,' I said.

'Can't be helped, Mike. We'll try again somewhere. Third time lucky, perhaps.'

'This time lucky,' I said. 'He shot to miss. He needn't have done that.'

'A net and a guard must mean that a lot of people have been trying this way. Where are we now?'

'I'm not sure. It's difficult to identify anything from the map. Must be somewhere in the Staines-Weybridge area, though. Seems a pity to go back now.'

'More of a pity to get shot,' said Phyllis.

We puttered along, keeping a look-out for obstacles by occasional flashes of a torch.

'If you don't know where we are, how do you know where we're heading?' Phyllis inquired.

'I don't,' I admitted. 'I'm just keeping going, like the gentleman said. It seems wise to get clear of his territory.'

Presently the moon rose and began to shine intermittently through gaps in the clouds. Phyllis pulled her coat more closely round her, and shivered a little.

'June,' she said. 'June — moon — spoon — soon. They used to sing about June nights on the river. Remember? Uh-huh. Sic transit…'

'From what I do remember they were a trifle optimistic, even then,' I replied. 'A wise man took rugs.'

'Oh?' said Phyllis. 'Who with?'

'Never you mind. Autres temps, autres mondes.'

'Autre monde,' indeed,' she said, looking round over the waste of water. 'We can't go on aimlessly like this, Mike. Let's find somewhere to get warm, and sleep.'

'All right,' I agreed, and put the tiller over a bit.

A mile or so away stood a mound, dotted with houses. One could not tell whether it was an island or not, but between it and us more houses, submerged to different degrees, protruded from the water. We selected a solid-looking white one, late-Georgian, judging from the visible upper storeys, and steered towards it.

The wood of the window-frame was too swollen to slide, so we had to push in the window with an oar before we could get inside. The torch showed a bedroom; very tasteful once, but now with a tidemark half-way up the walls. I squelched across the carpet and got the door open with a little difficulty. Outside on the landing the water was within a few inches of the top of the stairs. The floor above was all right, though. Quite comfortably furnished, too.

'This'll do,' Phyllis decided.

She lit a couple of candles, and started to rearrange things in the room she had chosen. I went down again, pulled our rolls of bedding and the other necessaries out of the dinghy, and made sure it was fastened securely, with enough slack for the tide.

When I got the stuff up Phyllis had already shed her coat and, looking business-like in a kind of windbreaker-suit, was lugging comfortable chairs in from another room. I got busy knocking away the stair-rail and breaking up the banisters for a fire.

The curtains were only cotton, so we covered them with blankets. It was not very likely that anyone would come to investigate a light, but if he did, and found the dinghy unguarded, he would certainly make off with it. Then we were able to settle down to stoking the fire and enjoying the growing warmth of the room.

Our supper consisted of biscuits, sausages cooked in the can and eaten off a fork, and tea made with bottled rainwater and condensed milk. Not an elegant meal, but in spite of the depressing thought that down in the depths of such a house, and safely out of our reach, there must be a lot of more exciting things to drink, we felt the better for it.

When it was done we extinguished the candles for economy's sake, piled on more wood, and lay back enjoying the blaze. For half a cigarette there was silence, then Phyllis said:

'Well, so far, so not very good. What now?'

It was a fair summary of my own state of mind.

'I don't like to admit it,' I said, 'but it does begin to look as if Cornwall may have to be cancelled.'

'That man was pretty scornful about it, wasn't he? But that might have been because he didn't believe us.'

'It sounded as if he foresaw a lot of obstacles in the way — with himself as the first,' I said. 'It seems likely that there are quite a lot of independent districts we should have to cross.'

'Even if we were to go back to London we should have to face getting out of it somehow, sooner or later — unless, of course, we get shot there. It's bound to go on getting worse all the time. In the country you can at least grow things. You do have a chance. But a city is a sort of desert of bricks and stones. Once you've used up what is there, you're done for.'

I considered Rose Cottage. There was some soil, of a kind — though it was not a region I should have chosen for attempting to live off the land. But it was clear that no one was going to welcome us on to good, lush land — if there was any left. And she was right about the barrenness of cities, once their reserves have been used up. I doubted any welcome in Cornwall, but Rose Cottage might offer just a chance — provided there was not someone already there, and that we could get there at all

We went on discussing the prospects in a desultory way for an hour or more without getting any further, and ended by gazing silently into the fire, devoid of further suggestions. Presently Phyllis yawned. We pulled the damp clothes from the beds, spread out on own bedding rolls with their waterproof covers on the mattresses, made up the fire again, put the shotgun handy, and then turned in.

Technically, I suppose, it was the morrow that brought us the new idea, though I have an abiding feeling that a morrow does not properly begin until breakfast-time, and this idea turned up at about one in the morning. It arrived with a bump that woke me.

I sat up with the sound of the thud still in my ears, thoroughly awakened and alert. The room was almost dark, for the fire had sunk to a few ashes. There came another, but lesser, thump on the wall outside, and then the sound of something scraping along it. I snatched up the shotgun, jumped out of bed, and whipped the blanket and curtain aside from the nearest window. There was plenty of flotsam, sheds, chicken-houses, furniture, logs, all kinds of smaller stuff that could have made the bump. On the other hand, it might have been made by somebody who had spotted the dinghy, and the loss of that would be disastrous.

I looked out. The moon was sinking now, but still bright. The dinghy still rode safely just below. The scraping came again, along the other wall. I scrambled back, and found the torch on the table between the beds.

'What's the matter?' inquired Phyllis's voice, but I was in too much of a hurry to answer. Gun in one hand and torch in the other, I ran to the next room. One of its windows faced north. I dropped the torch, raised the sash, and looked out over the levelled shotgun. Just below, there was a boat, a small, cabin motor-boat, nudging along the wall, and I was gazing down at the figure of a woman lying in her well. It was scarcely more than a glimpse, for at that moment the boat scraped to the corner of the house; the current swung her out and took her away. I caught up the torch.

'What is it?' Phyllis demanded as I pelted past the bedroom door.

'Boat,' I called back as I ran down the stairs.

The water on the next floor was waist-deep now, and icy, but I was in too much of a hurry to pay it a lot of attention. With the risen level it was difficult to get aboard the dinghy without upsetting her, but I managed it. Then, of course, the outboard had to go sulky. Not until the fourth or fifth attempt did it fire. By that time I had lost sight of the drifting motor-boat, but I turned into the current, and chased after her.

It was only by chance that I did not miss her altogether and go charging on uselessly downstream. The current had carried her straight into a submerged spinney, and I had just a glimpse of her in the tangle of branches as I passed. Like any other boat nowadays she had been painted not for show but for discretion, and it was a near thing.

When I got aboard her I flashed the light in through the open doors of the little cabin. There was no one in there. The woman lying in the well had been shot twice, in the neck and in the chest, and must have died some hours before. I lifted her over the side, and let her go.

I could not hope to tow the boat back against both tide and current with the outboard, and I was growing too numb with cold to spend time trying to find out how to run her. The best course seemed to be to make sure that she would drift no further, and hope that no one else would see her before I could come back in daylight. It was a risk. A boat of any kind was beyond price, but the alternative was almost certainly pneumonia. Moreover, I daren't delay long, for once the moon had set it wouldn't be easy to find the house again.

Phyllis was warming a blanket for me in front of the rekindled fire. Freed of my wet pyjamas, and wrapped in that, I began to glow after a bit.

'A sea-going motor-boat?' Phyllis inquired, excitedly.

'Well, kind of high in the bows — not one of those car-on-water things. So I should think it's meant for sea. Small, though.'

'Don't be irritating. You know perfectly well what I mean. Could it get us to Cornwall?'

'With our knowledge of the things, it's more a question of could we get it to Cornwall? — and there my opinion isn't worth any more than yours. We might try — at least it looks to me as if we might. See what you think when you've looked her over.'

I had no doubt whatever what she would think. But for decisive discouragement on my part we should probably have set out on an attempt to get along the coast in the little fibre-glass dinghy.

'I feel like making an offering, or something,' she said.

'Keep it until we find out whether she's sound. There could be a lot of snags yet,' I told her.

The warmth after the exposure was making me sleepy. I told her to wake me up when it began to get light, so that we could get across to the boat before anyone else should spot her.

Then I went to sleep with an easier mind than I had had for some weeks. I knew that whatever we should find in Cornwall it would be no picnic. On the other hand, London was a slowly-closing trap; a good place to get out of before it began to squeeze

Even though Bocker had been unaware of it when he gave his warning, the new method of attack had already begun, but it took six months more before it became apparent.

Had the ocean vessels been keeping their usual courses, it would have aroused general comment earlier, but with transatlantic crossings taking place only by air, the pilots' reports of unusually dense and widespread fog in the west Atlantic were simply noted. With the increased range of aircraft, too, Gander had declined in importance, so that its frequently fogbound state caused little inconvenience.

Checking reports of that time in the light of later knowledge I discovered that there were reports about the same time of unusually widespread fogs in the North-Western Pacific, too. Conditions were bad off the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido and said to be still worse off the Kuriles, further north. But since it was now some time since ships had dared to cross the Deeps in those parts information was scanty, and few were interested. Nor did the abnormally foggy conditions on the South American coast northward from Montevideo attract public attention.

The chilly mistiness of the summer in England was, indeed, frequently remarked, though more with resignation than surprise.

Fog, in fact, was scarcely noticed by the wider world-consciousness until the Russians mentioned it. A note from Moscow proclaimed the existence of an area of dense fog having its centre on the meridian 130ş East of Greenwich, at, or about, the 85th parallel. Soviet scientists, after research, had declared that nothing of the kind was on previous record, nor was it possible to see how the known conditions in those parts could generate such a state, let alone maintain it virtually unchanged for three months after its existence had first been observed. The Soviet Government had on several former occasions pointed out that the Arctic activities of the hirelings of capitalist warmongers might well be a menace to Peace.

The territorial rights of the USSR in that area of the Arctic lying between the meridians 32ş East and 168ş West of Greenwich were recognized by International Law. Any unauthorized incursion into that area constituted an act of aggression. The Soviet Government, therefore, considered itself at liberty to take any action necessary for the preservation of Peace in that region.

The note, delivered simultaneously to several countries, received its most rapid and downright reply from Washington.

The peoples of the West, the State Department observed, would be interested by the Soviet Note. As, however, they had now had considerable experience of that technique of propaganda which had been called the pre-natal tu quoque, they were able to recognize its implications. The Government of the United States was well aware of the territorial divisions in the Arctic — it would, indeed, remind the Soviet Government, in the interests of accuracy, that the segment mentioned in the Note was only approximate, the true figures being: 32ş — 4' — 35" East of Greenwich, and 168ş — 49' — 30" West of Greenwich, giving a slightly smaller segment than that claimed, but since the centre of the phenomenon mentioned was well within this area the United States Government had, naturally, no cognizance of its existence until informed of it in the Note.

Recent observations had, curiously, recorded the existence of just such a feature as that described in the Note at a centre also close to the 85th Parallel, but at a point if West of Greenwich. By coincidence this was just the target-area jointly selected by the United States and Canadian Governments for tests of their latest types of long-range guided missiles. Preparations for these tests had already been completed, and the first experimental launchings would take place in a few days.

The Russians commented on the quaintness of choosing a target-area where observation was not possible; the Americans, upon the Slavonic zeal for pacification of uninhabited regions. Whether both parties then proceeded to attack their respective fogs is not on public record, but the wider effect was that fogs became news, and were discovered to have been unusually dense of late in a surprising number of places.

Had weather-ships still been at work in the Atlantic it is likely that useful data would have been gathered sooner, but they had been 'temporarily' withdrawn from service, following the sinking of two of them some time before. Consequently the first report which did anything to tidy up the idle speculations came from Godthaab, in Greenland. It spoke of an increased flow of water through the Davis Strait from Baffin Bay, with a content of broken ice quite unusual for the time of year. A few days later Nome, Alaska, reported a similar condition in the Bering Strait; Then from Spitsbergen, too, came reports of increased flow and lower temperatures.

That straightforwardly explained the fogs off Newfoundland and certain other parts. Elsewhere they could be convincingly ascribed to deep-running cold currents forced upwards into the warmer waters above/by encounters with submarine mountain ranges. Everything, in fact, could be either simply or abstrusely explained, except the unusual increase in the cold flow.

Then, from Godhavn, north of Godthaab on the west Greenland coast, a message told of icebergs in unprecedented numbers and often of unusual size. Investigating expeditions were flown from American Arctic bases, and confirmed the report. The sea in the north of Baffin Bay, they announced, was crammed with icebergs.

'At about Latitude 77, 6oş West,' one of the fliers wrote, 'we found the most awesome sight in the world. The glaciers which run down from the high Greenland Ice-Cap were calving. I have seen icebergs formed before, but never on anything like the scale it is taking place there. In the great ice-cliffs, hundreds of feet high, cracks appear suddenly. An enormous section tilts out, falling and turning slowly. When it smashes into the water the spray rises up and up in great fountains, spreading far out all around. The displaced water comes rushing back in breakers which clash together in tremendous spray while a berg as big as a small island slowly rolls and wallows and finds its balance. For a hundred miles up and down the coast we saw splashes starting up where the same thing was happening. Very often a berg had no time to float away before a new one had crashed down on top of it. The scale was so big that it was hard to realize. Only by the apparent slowness of the falls and the way the huge splashes seemed to hang in the air — the majestic pace of it all — were we able to tell the vastness of what we were seeing.'

Just so did other expeditions describe the scene on the east coast of Devon Island, and on the southern tip of Ellesmere Island. In Baffin Bay the innumerable great bergs jostled slowly, grinding the flanks and shoulders from one another as they herded on the long drift southward, through the Davis Strait, and out into the Atlantic.

Away over on the other side of the Arctic Circle, Nome announced that the southward flow of broken pack-ice had further increased.

The public received the information in a cushionly style. People were impressed by the first magnificent photographs of icebergs in the process of creation, but, although no iceberg is quite like any other iceberg, the generic similarity is pronounced. A rather brief period of awe was succeeded by the thought that while it was really very clever of science to know all about icebergs and climate and so on, it did not seem to be much good knowing if it could not, resultantly, do something about it.

Tuny, at a chance meeting with Phyllis, summed the attitude up: 'I'm sure things like that must be frightfully interesting if one happens to be the kind of person who finds just being interested in things enough. What seems to me so feeble is that having found out all this they don't stop them doing it.'

'Well,' said Phyllis, 'stopping icebergs is probably pretty difficult —'

'I don't mean stopping icebergs, I mean stopping the Russians from making icebergs.'

'Oh,' said Phyllis, 'are they? — making them, I mean?'

'But of course! Just look at it logically,' Tuny told her. 'You don't get things like this suddenly happening for no reason at all. The Russians always seem to think they have more rights in the Arctic than anyone else although they were years after other people in getting to the North Pole, and I expect they're now claiming that they discovered it some time in the nineteenth century because they don't seem to be able to bear the thought that anybody else ever discovered anything, and — where was I?'

'I was wondering why they should be making icebergs,' Phyllis said.

'Oh, yes. Well, that's all part of their general policy. I mean, everyone knows that their idea is to make trouble everywhere they can. And look at the wretched summer we've been having; things cancelled one after another, and now they're saying that Wimbledon may have to be washed out altogether. And the whole thing is due to these icebergs they keep on sending into our Gulf Stream. The scientists all know that, but nobody does anything about it. People are beginning to get fed-up with evasiveness, I can tell you. They want a strong line, and a clean-out that will stop this kind of thing. It's been allowed to go on much too long already. Surely they can blow them up, or something.'

'The Russians, or the icebergs?' asked Phyllis.

'Well, I meant the icebergs. If they just blow them up and show the Russians it isn't going to work, they'll probably stop it.'

'But — er — are you quite sure the Russians are responsible for them?' Phyllis said.

Tuny regarded her closely.

'I must say,' she remarked, 'it seems to me very odd indeed how concerned some people seem to be to justify the Russians on every possible occasion.' And shortly afterwards they parted.

Meanwhile, the interchange of Notes across the North Pole continued. Neither side particularized on the steps taken to deal with the offence in its own area, but the State Department admitted that its area of fog was, when undisturbed by wind, now greater than before; the Kremlin was less committal, but claimed no resounding successes.

The dreary summer passed into a drearier autumn. There seemed to be nothing anybody could do about it but accept it with a grumbling philosophy.

At the other end of the world spring came. Then summer, and the whaling season started — in so far as it could be called a season at all when the owners who would risk ships were so few, and the crews ready to risk their lives fewer still. Nevertheless, some could be found ready to damn the bathies, along with all other perils of the deep, and set out. At the end of the Antarctic summer came news, via New Zealand, of glaciers in Victoria Land shedding huge quantities of bergs into the Ross Sea, and suggestions that the great Ross Ice-Barrier itself might be beginning to break up. Within a week came similar news from the Weddell Sea. The Filchner Barrier there, and the Larsen Ice-Shelf were both said to be calving bergs in fantastic numbers. A series of reconnaissance flights brought in reports which read almost exactly like those from Baffin Bay, and photographs which might have come from the same region. Again the more sober illustrated weeklies ran rotogravure views of great masses plunging into seas already dotted for miles with gleaming bergs, and produced studies of individual bergs above such captions as 'Nature's Majesty: With Gothic pinnacles aspiring, a new Everest of the sea sets out upon her lonely voyage. The menacing beauty of this berg freshly calved by the David Glacier in the Ross Sea, is romantically caught by the camera. In many parts of the Antarctic coastline the production of such bergs has been so extensive that ice-shelves hitherto regarded as permanent have been shattered by their fall, and open water now replaces the frozen sea.'

The attitude of polite patronage towards Nature, and the reception, with well-bred congratulatory restraint, of the clever turns she put on to edify and amuse the human race might have continued unruffled for some months longer than it did, but for the urchin quality of Dr Bocker.

The Sunday Tidings, which had for some years been pursuing a policy of intellectual sensationalism, had never found it easy to maintain its supply of material. The stuff of mere emotional sensationalism, as used by its cheaper and less dignified contemporaries, lay thickly all around, easily malleable into shapes attractive to the constant human passions. Intellectual sensationalism, however, was a much more tricky business. In addition to avoiding the suggestion of sensationalism for sensationalism's sake, it required knowledge, research, careful timing, and, if possible, some literary ability. Inevitably, therefore, its policy was subject to lamentable gaps during which it could find nothing topical on its chosen level to disclose. It must, one fancies, have been a council of desperation over a prolonged hiatus of the kind which induced it to open its columns to Bocker.

That the Editor felt some apprehension over the result was discernible from his italicized note preceding the article in which he disclaimed, on grounds of fairmindedness, any responsibility for what he was now printing in his own paper.

With this auspicious beginning, and under the heading: The Devil and the Deeps, Bocker led off:

'Never, since the days when Noah was building his Ark, has there been such a well-regimented turning of blind eyes as during the last year. It cannot go on. Soon, now, the long Arctic night will be over. Observation will again be possible. Then, the eyes that should never have been shut must open….'

That beginning I remember, but without references I can only give the gist and a few recollected phrases of the rest.

'This,' Bocker continued, 'is the latest chapter in a long tale of futility and failure stretching back to the sinkings of the Yatsushiro, and the Keweenaw, and beyond. Failure which has already driven us from the seas, and now threatens us on the land. I repeat, failure.

'That is a word so little to our taste that many think it a virtue to claim that they never admit it. But blind stupidity is not one of the virtues; it is a weakness, and in this case it is a dangerous weakness, masked by a false optimism. All about us are unrest, inflating prices, whole economic structures changing — and, therefore, a way of life that is changing. All about us, too, are people who talk about our exclusion from the high seas as though it were some temporary inconvenience, soon to be corrected. To this smugness there is a reply; it is this:

'For over five years now the best, the most agile, the most inventive brains in the world have wrestled with the problem of coming to grips with our enemy — and they are still no closer to a solution than when they began. There is, on their present findings, nothing at all to indicate that we shall ever be able to sail the seas in peace again

'With the word "failure" so wry in our mouths it has apparently been policy to discourage any expression of the connexion between our maritime troubles and the recent developments in the Arctic and Antarctic. It is time for this attitude of "not before the children" to cease. I do not know, and I do not care, what kind of pressure has been preventing our more percipient men from pointing out this connexion; there are always cliques and factions anxious to keep the public in the dark "for its own good" — a "good" that is seldom far from the interests of the faction advocating it.

'I do not suggest that the root problem is being neglected; far from it. There have been, and are, men wearing themselves out to find some means by which we can locate and destroy the enemy in our Deeps. What I do say is that with them still unable to find a way, we now face the most serious assault yet.

'It is an assault against which we have no defences. It is not susceptible of direct attack. It can be checked only by our discovery of some means of destroying its High Command, in the Deeps.

'And what is this weapon to which we can oppose no counter?

'It is the melting of the Arctic ice — and a great part of the Antarctic ice, too.

'You think that fantastic? Too colossal? It is not, it is a task which we could have undertaken ourselves, had we so wished, at any time since we released the power of the atom.

'Because of the winter darkness little has been heard lately of the patches of Arctic fog. It is not generally known that, though two of them existed in the Arctic spring, by the end of the Arctic summer there were eight, in widely separated areas. Now, fog is caused, as you know, by the meeting of hot and cold currents of either air or water. How does it happen that eight novel, independent warm currents can suddenly occur in the Arctic?

'And the results? Unprecedented flows of broken ice into the Bering Sea, and into the Greenland Sea. In these two areas particularly, the pack-ice is hundreds of miles north of its usual spring maximum. In other places, the north of Norway, for instance, it is further south. And we ourselves had an unusually cold, wet winter.

'And the icebergs? We have all read a lot about them and seen a lot of pictures of them lately. Why? Obviously because there are a great many more icebergs than usual, but the question that no one has publicly answered is, why should there be more icebergs?

'Everyone knows where they are coming from. Greenland is a large island — greater than nine times the size of the British Isles. But it is more than that. It is also the last great bastion of the retreating ice-age.

'Several times the ice has come south, grinding and scouring, smoothing the mountains, scooping the valleys on its way until it stood in huge ramparts, dizzy cliffs of glass-green ice, vast slow-crawling glaciers, across half Europe. Then it went back, gradually, over centuries, back and back. The huge cliffs and mountains of ice dwindled away, melted, and were known no more — except in one place. Only in Greenland does that immemorial ice still tower nine thousand feet high, unconquered yet. And down its sides slide the glaciers which spawn the icebergs. They have been scattering their icebergs into the sea, season after season, since before there were men to know of it; but why, in this year, should they suddenly spawn ten, twenty times as many? There must be a reason for this. There is.

'If some means, or some several means, of melting the Arctic ice were put into operation, a little time would have to pass before its effects became mensurable. Moreover, the effects would be progressive; first a trickle, then a gush, then a torrent.

'I have seen "estimates" which suggest that if the polar ice were melted the sea-level would rise by one hundred feet. To call that an "estimate" is a shocking imposition. It is no more than a round-figure guess. It may be a good guess, or it may be widely wrong, on either side. The only certainty is that the sea-level would indeed rise.

'In this connexion I draw attention to the fact that in January of this year the mean sea-level at Newlyn, where it is customarily measured, was reported to have risen by two and a half inches.'

'Oh, dear!' said Phyllis, when she had read this. 'Of all the pertinaceous stickers-out-of-necks! We'd better go and see him.'

It did not entirely surprise us when we telephoned the next morning to find that his number was not available. When we called, however, we were admitted. Bocker got up from a desk littered with mail, to greet us.

'No earthly good your coming here,' he told us. 'There isn't a sponsor that'd touch me with a forty-foot pole.'

'Oh, I'd not say that, A. B., Phyllis told him. 'You will very likely find yourself immensely popular with the sellers of sandbags and makers of earth-shifting machinery before long.'

He took no notice of that. 'You'll probably be contaminated if you associate with me. In most countries I'd be under arrest by now.'

'Terribly disappointing for you. This has always been discouraging territory for ambitious martyrs. But you do try, don't you?' she responded. 'Now, look, A. B.,' she went on, 'do you really like to have people throwing things at you, or what is it?'

'I get impatient,' explained Bocker.

'So do other people. But nobody I know has quite your gift for going just beyond what people are willing to take at any given moment. One day you'll get hurt. Not this time because, luckily, you've messed it up, but one time certainly.'

'If not this time, then probably not at all,' he said. He bent a thoughtful, disapproving look on her. 'Just what do you mean, young woman, by coming here and telling me I "messed it up"?'

'The anti-climax. First you sounded as if you were on the point of great revelations, but then that was followed by a rather vague suggestion that somebody or something must be causing the Arctic changes — and without any specific explanation of how it could be done. And then your grand finale was that the tide is two and a half inches higher.'

Bocker continued to regard her. 'Well, so it is. I don't see what's wrong with that. Two and a half inches is a colossal amount of water when it's spread over a hundred and forty-one million square miles. If you reckon it up in tons —'

'I never do reckon water in tons — and that's part of the point To ordinary people two and a half inches just means a very slightly higher mark on a post. After your build-up it sounded so tiddly that everyone feels annoyed with you for alarming them — those that don't just laugh, and say: "Ha! ha! These professors!"'

Bocker waved his hand at the desk with its load of mail.

'Quite a lot of people, have been alarmed — or at least indignant,' he said. He lit a cigarette. 'That was what I wanted. You know well enough how it has been since the beginning of this business. At every stage the great majority, and particularly the authorities, have resisted the evidence as long as they could. This is a scientific age — in the more educated strata. It will therefore almost fall over backwards in disregarding the abnormal, and it has developed a deep suspicion of its own senses. Vast quantities of evidence are required before a theory based on scanty knowledge can be dislodged. Very reluctantly the existence of something in the Deeps was belatedly conceded. There has been equal reluctance to admit all the succeeding manifestations until they couldn't be dodged. And now here we are again, baulking at the newest hurdle.

'Ever since this business in the Arctic began, a number of people have been well aware of what must be going on — though not, of course, of how it is being done — but for one reason or another, not excluding Governmental pressure, they have been keeping quiet about it. I have myself.'

'That — er — doesn't sound quite — true to form,' I suggested.

He grinned briefly, and then went on:

'I misjudged it. Several of us did. When the purpose of the thing was clear, I doubted it. "This time," I said to myself, "they really have bitten off more than they can chew." There wasn't any point in alarming people unnecessarily. Things are bad enough already. So, as long as it was possible to hope that the attempt on the ice was going to fail, it was better to say nothing in public. A sort of semi-voluntary censorship.'

'But the Americans —?'

'Same attitude — if anything a bit more so. Business is their national sport, and, like most national sports, semi-sacred. A still bigger slump than they have been having since the shipping troubles started wouldn't help anyone. So we all watched and waited.

'We've not been altogether idle, though. The Arctic Ocean is deep, and even more difficult to get at than the others, so there was some bombing where the fog-patches occurred, but the devil of it is there's no way of telling results.

'Also, a group of us put it to the Admiralty that there were only two ways the things could be getting into the Arctic. They wouldn't be using the Bering Sea route past Alaska because that would give them something like a couple of thousand miles in shallow water. So they must be coming up our way, between Rockall and Scotland. By cutting through one ridge south of the Faeroes they could have fairly deep water right the way up to the Polar Basin. Now, by that route there are two narrow passes they would have to use. We and the Norwegians got together over that, and between us we put down quite a lot of bombs east of Jan Mayen Island, and another lot further north, between Greenland and Spitsbergen. They may have done something, but, again, you can't tell. At best it can only have meant a bit of delay, because the trouble still went on, and new fog-patches started up.

'In the middle of all this the Muscovite, who seems to be constitutionally incapable of understanding anything to do with the sea, started making trouble. The sea, he appeared to be arguing, was causing a great deal of inconvenience to the West; therefore it must be acting on good dialectically materialistic principles, and I have no doubt that if he could contact the Deeps he would like to make a pact with their inhabitants for a brief period of dialectical opportunism. Anyway, he led off, as you know, with accusations of aggression, and then in the back-and-forth that followed began to show such truculence that the attention of our Services became diverted from the really serious threat to the antics of this oriental clown who thinks the sea was only created to embarrass capitalists.

'Thus, we have now arrived at a situation where the "bathies", as they call them, far from falling down on the job as we had hoped, are going ahead fast, and all the brains and organizations that should be working flat out at planning to meet the emergency are congenially fooling around with those ills they have, and ignoring others that they would rather know not of. There are times when one fails to see why God thought it necessary to devise the ostrich.'

'So you decided that the time had come to force their hands by — er — blowing the gaff?' I asked.

'Yes — but not alone. This time I have the company of a number of eminent and very worried men. Mine was only the opening shot at the wider public on this side of the Atlantic. My weighty companions who have not already lost their reputations over this business are working more subtly. As for the American end, well, just take a look at Life and Collier's this next week. Oh, yes, something is going to be done.'

'What?' asked Phyllis.

He looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, then shook his head slightly.

'That, thank God, is someone else's department — at least, it will be when the public forces them to admit the situation.'

'But what can they do?' Phyllis repeated.

He hesitated. Then he said: 'This is between ourselves. Not a word of it have you heard from me. The only possible thing that I can see for them to do is to organize salvage. To make sure that certain things and people are not lost. That, I have no doubt, they will start to do immediately the reality of the danger has been accepted. The rest will have to take their chance — and I'm afraid that for most of us it won't be much of a chance.'

'Like preparations for a war — move great works of art and important people away to safe places?' suggested Phyllis.

'Exactly — almost too exactly.'

Phyllis frowned. 'Just what do you mean by that, A. B.?'

He shook his head. 'That they will think in terms of ordinary war — and I don't trust the sense of values that will operate. Art treasures? Yes, no doubt they will try to preserve them, but at the cost of what else? Call me a Philistine, if you like, but Art really only became Art in the last two centuries. Essentially, before that, it was furniture for improving one's home. Well, we seemed to get along all right although we lost the Cro-Magnon art for some thousands of years, but should we have done so if it had been the knowledge of fire that we had lost?

'And "important people"? Who is important? Some Norman, or pre-Norman, blood must run in the veins of every Englishman of three generations' standing, but I have no doubt that those who can trace it back by a list of names on paper will be considered to have prior claims to survival. Certain eminent intellectuals are likely to be tolerated, too, on the strength of honours earned in the days when they had fresh ideas. How many will be among the elite because they still have ideas, remains to be seen. As for the ordinary man, much his wisest course would be to enlist in a regiment with a famous name. There'll be a use for him.'

'Come off it, A.B. It's many years now since you even looked like a cynical undergraduate,' said Phyllis.

Bocker grinned, and then wiped the grin off just as suddenly:

'All the same, it is going to be a very bloody business,' he said, seriously.

'What I want to know —' Phyllis and I began, simultaneously.

'Your turn, Mike,' she offered.

'Well, mine is; how do you think the thing's being done? Melting the Arctic seems a pretty formidable proposition.'

'There've been a number of guesses. They range from an incredible operation like piping warm water up from the tropics, to tapping the Earth's central heat — which I find just about as unlikely.'

'But you have your own idea?' I suggested, for it seemed improbable that he had not.

'Well, I think it might be done this way. We know that they have some kind of device that will project a jet of water with considerable force — the bottom sediment that was washed up into surface currents in a continuous flow pretty well proved that. Well then, a contraption like that, used in conjunction with a heater, say an atomic reaction pile, ought to be capable of generating a quite considerable warm current. The obvious snag there is that we don't know whether they have atomic fission or not. So far, there's been no indication that they have — unless you count our presenting them with at least one atomic bomb that didn't go off. But if they do have it, I think that might be an answer.'

'They could get the necessary uranium?'

'Why not? After all, they have forcibly established their rights, mineral and otherwise, over more than two-thirds of the world's surface. Oh, yes, they could get it, all right, if they know about it.'

'And the iceberg angle?'

'That's less difficult. In fact, there is pretty general agreement that if one has a vibratory type of weapon that can cause a ship to fall to pieces, there ought to be no great difficulty in causing a lump of ice — even a considerable sized lump of ice — to crack.'

'And nobody knows of anything we can do about it?'

'It boils down to this, we simply don't think the same way. When you consider it, practically all our strategy of defence or attack is based on our ability to deliver or resist missiles of one kind or another — whereas they don't seem to be interested in missiles at all; at least, you could scarcely call a pseudo-coelenterate a missile. Another thing, and this is one of those that keeps the backroom boys stumped, is that they don't use iron or any ferrous metals — which knocks out a whole range of possible magnetic approaches.

'In war, you have at least a rough idea of the way your enemy must be thinking, so you can put up appropriate counter-thoughts, but with these brutes it's nearly always some slant we haven't explored. If they drove those sea-tanks with any kind of engine known to us we could have picked them up well offshore, and destroyed them — but whatever does make them go, it obviously isn't an engine in our sense of the term, at all. The answer, as with the coelenterates, is probably up some biological avenue that we simply haven't discovered to exist, so how the devil do we start understanding it, let alone produce an opposing form? We've only got the weapons we know — and they're not the right ones for this job. Always the same fundamental trouble — how the hell do you find out what is going on five miles down?'

'Suppose we can't find a way of hindering the process, how long do you think it'll take before we are in real trouble?' I asked him.

He shrugged. 'I've absolutely no idea. As far as the glaciers and the ice-cap are concerned, it presumably depends on how hard they work at it. But directing warm currents on pack-ice would presumably show only small results to begin with and then increase rapidly, very likely by a geometrical progression. Worse than useless to guess, with no data at all.'

'Once this gets into people's heads, they're going to want to know the best thing to do,' Phyllis said. 'What would you advise?'

'Isn't that the Government's job? It's because it's high time they thought about doing some advising that we have blown the gaff, as Mike put it. My own personal advice is too impracticable to be worth much.'

'What is it?' Phyllis asked.

'Find a nice, self-sufficient hilltop, and fortify it,' said Bocker, simply.

The campaign did not get off to the resounding start that Bocker had hoped. In England, it had the misfortune to be adopted by the Nethermore Press, and was consequently regarded as stunt territory wherein it would be unethical for other journalistic feet to trespass. In America it did not stand out greatly among the other excitements of the week. In both countries there were interests which preferred that it should seem to be no more than a stunt. France and Italy took it more seriously, but their governments' political weight in world councils was lighter. Russia ignored the content, but explained the purpose; it was yet another move by cosmopolitan-fascist warmongers to extend their influence in the Arctic.

Nevertheless, official indifference was slightly breached, Bocker assured us. A Committee on which the Services were represented had been set up to inquire and make recommendations. A similar Committee in Washington, D.C., also inquired in a leisurely fashion until it was brought up sharply by the State of California.

The average Californian was not greatly worried by a rise of a couple of inches in the tide-level; he had been much more delicately stricken. Something was happening to his climate. The average of his seaboard temperature had gone way down, and he was having cold, wet fogs. He disapproved of that, and a large number of Californians disapproving makes quite a noise. Oregon, and Washington, too, rallied to support their neighbour. Never within the compass of their statistical records had there been so cold and unpleasant a winter.

It was clear to all parties that the increased flow of ice and cold water pouring out of the Bering Sea was being swept east-ward by the Kuro Siwo current from Japan, and patent to at least one of the parties that the amenities of the most important State in the Union were suffering gravely. Something must be done.

In England the spur was applied when the April spring-tides overflowed the Embankment wall at Westminster. Assurances that this had happened a number of times before and was devoid of particular significance were swept aside by the triumphant we-told-you-so of the Nethermore Press. A hysterical Bomb-the-Bathies demand sprang up on both sides of the Atlantic, and spread round the world. (Except for the intransigent sixth.)

Foremost, as well as first, in the Bomb-the-Bathies movement, the Nethermore Press inquired, morning and evening: 'what is the bomb for?'

'Billions have been spent upon this Bomb which appears to have no other destiny but to be held up and shaken threateningly, or, from time to time, to provide pictures for our illustrated papers. Having made it, we were too scared to use it in Korea; now, it seems, we are too scared to use it on the Bathies. The first reluctance was understandable, the present one is unforgivable. The people of the world, having evolved and paid for this weapon, are now forbidden to use it against a menace that has sunk our ships, closed our oceans, snatched men and women from our very shores, and now threatens to drown us. Procrastination and ineptitude has from the beginning marked the attitude of the Authorities in this affair…' and so on, with the earlier bombings of the Deeps apparently forgotten by writers and readers alike.

'Working up nicely now,' said Bocker when we saw him next.

'It seems pretty silly to me,' Phyllis told him, bluntly. 'All the same old arguments against the indiscriminate bombing of Deeps still apply.'

'Oh, not that part,' Bocker said. 'They'll probably drop a few bombs here and there with plenty of publicity and no results. No, I mean the planning. We're now in the first stage of stupid suggestions like building immense levees of sandbags, of course; but it is getting across that something has got to be done.'

It got across still more strongly after the next spring-tides. There had been strengthening of the sea defences everywhere. In London the riverside walls had been reinforced and topped for their whole length with sandbags. As a precaution, traffic had been diverted from the Embankment, but the crowds turned out to throng it and the bridges, on foot. The police did their best to keep them moving, but they dawdled from one point to another, watching the slow rise of the water, waving to the crews of passing tugs and barges which presently were riding above the road-level. They seemed equally ready to be indignant if the water should break through, or disappointed if there were an anti-climax.

They were not disappointed. The water lapped slowly above the parapet and against the sandbags. Here and there it began to trickle through on to the pavements. Firemen, Civil Defence, and Police watched their sections anxiously, rushing bags to reinforce wherever a trickle enlarged, shoring up weak-looking spots with timber struts. The pace gradually became hotter. The bystanders began to help, dashing from one point to another as new jets started up. Presently there could be little doubt what was going to happen. Some of the watching crowd withdrew, but many of them remained, in a wavering fascination. When the breakthrough came, it occurred in a dozen places on the north bank almost simultaneously. Among the spurting jets a bag or two would begin to shift, then, suddenly, came a collapse, and a gap several yards wide through which the water poured as if over a weir.

From where we stood on top of an EBC van parked on Vauxhall Bridge we were able to see three separate rivers of muddy water pouring into the streets of Westminster, filling basements and cellars as they went, and presently merging into one flood. Our commentator handed over to another, perched on a Pimlico roof. For a minute or two we switched over to the BBC to find out how their crew on Westminster Bridge was faring. We got on to them just in time to hear Bob Humbleby describing the flooded Victoria Embankment with the water now rising against New Scotland Yard's own second line of defences. The television boys didn't seem to be doing too well; there must have been a lot of bets lost on where the breaks-through would occur, but they were putting up a struggle with the help of telephoto lenses and portable cameras.

From that point on, the thing got thick and fast. On the south bank water was breaking into the streets of Lambeth, Southwark, and Bermondsey in a number of places. Up river it was seriously flooding Chiswick; down river Limehouse was getting it badly, and more places kept on reporting breaks until we lost track of them. There was little to be done but stand by for the tide to drop, and then rush the repairs against its next rise.

The House outquestioned any quiz. The replies were more assured than assuring.

The relevant Ministries and Departments were actively taking all the steps necessary, claims should be submitted through Local Councils, priorities of men and material had already been arranged. Yes, warnings had been given, but unforeseen factors had intruded upon the hydrographers' original calculations. An Order in Council would be made for the requisition of all earth-moving machinery. The public could have full confidence that there would be no repetition of the calamity; the measures already put in hand would insure against any further extension. Little could be done beyond rescue-work in the Eastern Counties at present, that would of course continue, but the most urgent matter at the moment was to ensure that the water could make no further inroads at the next high-tides.

The requisition of materials, machines, and manpower was one thing; their apportionment, with every seaboard community and low-lying area clamouring for them simultaneously, quite another. Clerks in half a dozen Ministries grew pale and heavy-eyed in a welter of demands, allocations, adjustments, redirections, misdirections, subornments, and downright thefts. But somehow, and in some places, things began to get done. Already, there was great bitterness between those who were chosen, and those who looked like being thrown to the wolves.

Phyllis went down one afternoon to look at progress of work on the riverside. Amid great activity on both banks a superstructure of concrete blocks was arising on the existing walls. The sidewalk supervisors were out in their thousands to watch. Among them she chanced upon Bocker. Together they ascended to Waterloo Bridge, and watched the termite-like activity with a celestial eye for a while.

'Alph, the sacred river — and more than twice fives miles of walls and towers,' Phyllis observed.

'And there are going to be some deep but not very romantic chasms on either side, too,' said Bocker. 'I wonder how high they'll go before the futility comes home to them.'

'It's difficult to believe that anything on such a scale as this can be really futile, but I suppose you are right,' said Phyllis.

Bocker waved a hand at it.

'The basis of all this is an assurance by that old fool Stackley, who is a geographer who knows damn-all about oceans, that the overall rise cannot be more than ten or twelve feet at the most. Heaven knows what he bases it on: a desire to create full employment, by the look of it. Some departments have accepted that as the authentic dope. They seem to think they can muddle through this thing as they muddle through their wars. Others, thank God, have a bit more sense. However, this isn't being interfered with because it is felt that some kind of show is necessary for morale.'

'I've had to speak to you about this undergraduate attitude before, A. B.,' said Phyllis. 'What is being done that's useful?'

'Oh, they're working out plans,' Bocker said, with deliberate vagueness.

They continued to regard the medley of men and machinery down below for a time.

'Well,' Bocker remarked, at length, 'there must be at least one figure among the shades who is getting a hell of a good laugh out of this.'

'Nice to think there's even one,' Phyllis said. 'Who?'

'King Canute,' said Bocker.

We were having so much news of our own at that time that the effects in America found little room in newspapers already straitened by a paper shortage. Newscasts, however, told that they were having their own troubles over there. California's climate was no longer Problem Number One. In addition to the difficulties that were facing ports and seaboard cities all over the world, there was bad coastline trouble in the south of the United States. It ran almost all the way around the Gulf from Key West to the Mexican border. In Florida, owners of real estate began to suffer once again as the Everglades and the swamps spilt across more and more country. Across in Texas a large tract of land north of Brownsville was gradually disappearing beneath the water. Still worse hit were Louisiana, and the Delta. The enterprise of Tin Pan Alley considered it an appropriate time to revive the plea: 'River, Stay 'Way from My Door,' but the river did not — nor, over on the Atlantic coast, did other rivers, in Georgia and the Carolinas.

But it is idle to particularize. All over the world the threat was the same. The chief difference was that in the more developed countries all available earth-shifting machinery worked day and night, while in the more backward it was sweating thousands of men and women who toiled to raise great levees and walls.

But for both the task was too great. The more the level rose, the further the defences had to be extended to prevent outflanking. When the rivers were backed up by the incoming tides there was nowhere for the water to go but over the surrounding countryside. All the time, too, the problems of preventing flooding from the rear by water backed up in sewers and conduits became more difficult to handle. Even before the first serious inundation which followed the breaking of the Embankment wall near Blackfriars, in October, the man in the street had suspected that the battle could not be won, and the exodus of those with wisdom and the means had already started. Many of them, moreover, were finding themselves forestalled by refugees from the eastern counties and the more vulnerable coastal towns elsewhere.

Some little time before the Blackfriars breakthrough a confidential note had circulated among selected staff, and contracted personnel such as ourselves, at EBC. It had been decided as a matter of policy in the interests of public morale, we learnt, that, should certain emergency measures become necessary, etc., etc., and so on, for two foolscap pages; with most of the information between the lines. It would have been a lot simpler to say: 'Look. The gen is that this thing's going to get serious. The BBC has orders to stay put, so for prestige reasons we'll have to do the same. We want volunteers to man a station here, and if you care to be one of them, we'll be glad to have you. Suitable arrangements will be made. There'll be a bonus, and you can trust us to look after you if anything does happen. How about it?'

Phyllis and I talked it over. If we had had any family, we decided, the necessity would have been to do the best we could by them — in so far as anyone could possibly know what might turn out to be best. As we had not, we could please ourselves. Phyllis summed up for staying on the job.

'Apart from conscience and loyalty and all the proper things,' she said. 'Goodness knows what is going to happen in other places if it does get really bad. Somehow, running away seldom seems to work out well unless you have a pretty good idea of what you're running to. My vote is for sticking, and seeing what happens.'

So we sent our names in, and were pleased to find that Freddy Whittier and his wife had done the same.

After that, some clever departmentalism made it seem as if nothing were happening for a while. Several weeks passed before we got wind of the fact that EBC had leased the top two floors of a large department-store near Marble Arch, and were working all-out to have them converted into as near a self-supporting station as was possible.

'I should have thought,' said Phyllis, when we acquired this information, 'that somewhere higher, like Hampstead or Highgate, would have been better.'

'Neither of them is quite London,' I pointed out. 'Besides, EBC probably gets it for a nominal rent for announcing each time: "This is the EBC calling the world from Selvedge's." Goodwill advertising during the interlude of emergency.'

'Just as if the water would just go away one day,' she said.

'Even if they don't think so, they lose nothing by letting EBC have it,' I pointed out.

By that time we were becoming highly level-conscious, and I looked the place up on the map. The seventy-five foot contour line ran down the street on the building's western side.

'How does that compare with the arch-rival?' wondered Phyllis, running her finger across the map.

Broadcasting House appeared to be very slightly better off. About eight-five feet above mean sea-level, we judged.

'H'm,' she said. 'Well, if there is any calculation behind our being on the top floors, they'll be having to do a lot of moving upstairs, too. Gosh,' she added, glancing over to the left of the map. 'Look at their television-studios! Right down on the twenty-five foot level. There'll be a lot of helter-skelter back to Ally-Pally, I should think.'

In the weeks just before the breakthrough London seemed to be living a double life. Organizations and institutions were making their preparations with as little ostentation as possible. Officials spoke in public with an affected casualness of the need to make plans 'just in case', and then went back to their offices to work feverishly on the arrangements. Announcements continued to be reassuring in tone. The men employed on the jobs were for the most part cynical about their work, glad of the overtime pay, and curiously disbelieving. They seemed to regard it as a stunt which was working nicely to their benefit; imagination apparently refused to credit the threat with any reality outside working hours. Even after the breakthrough, alarm was oddly localized with those who had suffered. The wall was hurriedly repaired, and the exodus was still not much more than a trickle of people. Real trouble came with the next spring-tides.

There was plenty of warning this time in the parts likely to be most affected. The people took it stubbornly and phlegmatically. They had already had experience to learn by. The main response was to move possessions to upper storeys, and grumble loudly at the inefficiency of authorities who were incapable of saving them the trouble involved. Notices were posted giving the times of high-water for three days, but the suggested precautions were couched with such a fear of promoting panic that they were little heeded.

The first day passed safely. On the evening of the highest water a large part of London settled down to wait for midnight and the crisis to pass, in a sullenly bad-tempered mood. The buses were all off the streets, and the Underground had ceased to run at eight in the evening. But plenty of people stayed out, and walked down to the river to see what there was to be seen from the bridges. They had their show.

The smooth, oil surface of the river crawled slowly up the piers of the bridges and against the retaining walls. The muddy water flowed upstream with scarcely a sound, and the crowds, too, were almost silent, looking down on it apprehensively. There was no fear of it topping the walls; the estimated rise was twenty-three feet, four inches, which would leave a safety margin of four feet to the top of the new parapet. It was pressure that was the source of anxiety.

From the north end of Waterloo Bridge where we were stationed this time, one was able to look along the top of the wall, with the water running high on one side of it, and, to the other, the roadway of the Embankment, with the street lamps still burning there, but not a vehicle or a human figure to be seen upon it. Away to the west the hands on the Parliament clock-tower crawled round the illuminated dial. The water rose as the big hand moved with insufferable sloth up to eleven o'clock. Over the quiet crowds the note of Big Ben striking the hour came clearly downwind.

The sound caused people to murmur to one another; then they fell silent again. The hand began to crawl down, ten past, a quarter, twenty, twenty-five, then, just before the half-hour, there was a rumble somewhere upstream; a composite, crowd-voice sound came to us on the wind. The people about us craned their necks, and murmured again. A moment later we saw the water coming. It poured along the Embankment towards us in a wide, muddy flood, sweeping rubbish and bushes with it, rushing past beneath us. A groan went up from the crowd. Suddenly there was a loud crack and a rumble of falling masonry behind us as a section of the wall, close by where the Discovery had formerly been moored, collapsed. The water poured through the gap, wrenching away concrete blocks so that the wall crumbled before our eyes and the water poured in a great muddy cascade on to the roadway….

Before the next tide came the Government had removed the velvet glove. Following the announcement of a State of Emergency came a Standstill Order, and the proclamation of an orderly scheme of evacuation. There is no need for me to write here of the delays and muddles in which the scheme broke down. It is difficult to believe that it can have been taken seriously even by those who launched it. An unconvincing air seemed to hang over the whole affair from the beginning. The task was impossible. Something, perhaps, might have been done had only a single city been concerned, but with more than two-thirds of the country's population anxious to move on to higher ground, only the crudest methods had any success in checking the pressure, and then not for long.

But, though it was bad here, it was still worse elsewhere. The Dutch had withdrawn in time from the danger areas, realizing that they had lost their centuries-long battle with the sea. The Rhine and the Mass had backed up in flood over square miles of country. A whole population was trekking southward into Belgium or south-east into Germany. The North German Plain itself was little better off. The Ems and the Weser had widened out, too, driving people southward from their towns and farms in an increasing horde. In Denmark every kind of boat was in use ferrying families to Sweden and the higher ground there.

For a little time we managed to follow in a general way what was happening, but when the inhabitants of the Ardennes and Westphalia turned in dismay to save themselves by fighting off the hungry, desperate invaders from the north, hard news disappeared in a morass of rumour and chaos. All over the world the same kind of thing must have been going on, differing only in its scale. At home, the flooding of the Eastern Counties had already driven people back on the Midlands. Loss of life was small, for there had been plenty of warning. Real trouble started on the Chiltern Hills where those already in possession organized themselves to prevent their being swamped by the two converging streams of refugees from the east and from London.

Within London, too, the same pattern was taking shape on a smaller scale. The dwellers in the Lea Valley, Westminster, Chelsea, Hammersmith, left their homes for the most part belatedly and reluctantly, but as the water continued to rise and forced them to move the obvious direction to take was towards the heights of Hampstead and Highgate, and as they approached those parts they began to encounter barricades in the streets, and, presently, weapons. Where they were stopped they looted, and searched for weapons of their own. When they had found them they sniped from upper windows and rooftops until they drove the defenders off their barricades and could rush them.

To the south, similar things were happening at Sydenham and Tooting Bec. Districts which were not yet flooded began to catch the panic. Although at high tide the water barely reached the fifteen foot contour as yet, the orderly mood which the Government had striven to maintain was broken. It was largely succeeded by the conviction that position was going to be nine points of survival, and the wise thing to do was to make sure of that position as soon as possible. The dwellers on the high ground took the same view, reinforced by determination to defend themselves and their property.

Over the untouched parts of Central London a mood of Sunday-like indecision hung for several days. Many people, not knowing what else to do, still tried to carry on as nearly as usual. The police continued to patrol. Though the Underground was flooded plenty of people continued to turn up at their places of work, and some kinds of work did continue, seemingly through habit or momentum, then gradually lawlessness seeped inwards from the suburbs and the sense of breakdown became inescapable. Failure of the emergency electric supply one afternoon, followed by a night of darkness, gave a kind of coup de grace to order. The looting of shops, particularly foodshops, began, and spread on a scale which defeated both the police and the military.

We decided it was time to leave the flat and take up our residence in the new EBC fortress.

From what the short-waves were telling us there was little to distinguish the course of events in the low-lying cities anywhere — except that in some the law died more quickly. It is outside my scope to dwell on the details; I have no doubt that they will be described later in innumerable official histories.

EBC's part during those days consisted largely in duplicating the BBC in the reading out of Government instructions hopefully intended to restore a degree of order: a monotonous business of telling those whose homes were not immediately threatened to stay where they were, and directing the flooded-out to certain higher areas and away from others that were said to be already overcrowded. We may have been heard, but we could see no visible evidence that we were heeded. In the north there may have been some effect, but in the south the hugely disproportionate concentration of London, and the flooding of so many rails and roads, ruined all attempts at orderly dispersal. The numbers of people in motion spread alarm among those who could have waited. The feeling that unless one reached a refuge ahead of the main crowd there might be no place at all to go was catching — as also was the feeling that anyone trying to do so by car was in possession of an unfair advantage. It quickly became safer to walk wherever one was going — though not outstandingly safe at that. It was best to go out as little as possible.

The existence of numerous hotels, and a reassuring elevation of some seven hundred feet above normal sea-level were undoubtedly factors which influenced Parliament in choosing the town of Harrogate, in Yorkshire, as its seat. The speed with which it assembled there was very likely due to the same force as was motivating many private persons — the fear that someone else might get in first. To an outsider it seemed that a bare few hours after Westminster was flooded, the ancient institution was performing with all its usual fluency in its new home. Questions were being asked regarding the Bomb-the-Bathies policy in the Arctic, and whether it was not an observed fact that the extensive use of hydrogen and other fissile-material bombs in that region was hastening the disintegration of the icefields without producing any patently deterrent effects on the originators of the trouble? Were we not, in fact, working there to our own disadvantage?

The First Lord thought this was probably so. The House had taken the decision to bomb, against expert advice.

In answer to a further question the Foreign Secretary stated that a cessation of bombing now by our forces would make little difference since his information was that the Russians were delivering a greater weight of bombs in their sector than we were in ours — or, rather, than our American Allies were, with ourselves. Asked the reason for this sudden Kremlin rightabout, he replied:

'From sources which it would be unwise to disclose we understand that the Russians are showing a greater appreciation of the situation than they have hitherto. It appears that floods in Karelia and the marshes south of the White Sea are extensive, and growing worse rapidly. Further to the east lies an inlet of the Arctic Sea called the Gulf of Ob. To the south of it stretches an immense area of marshland now in the process of inundation. If the rise in the water-level continues it is likely that we shall see the formation in Central Russia of a great inland sea, possibly larger than Hudson Bay — a feature doubtless more familiar to members of this House than is the Gulf of Ob.'

We began to hear a lot of Harrogate and district, and it became obvious that a great deal of preparation had been done in the area. For one thing, our own centre of EBC administration was established there in a resuscitated military camp, though, according to our informants at such a distance from the town that the only leisure occupation was to spy by telescope upon the arch-rival concern situated similarly, but on the other side of a valley.

As for ourselves, we began to shake down into a routine. Our living-quarters were on the top floor. Offices, studios, technical equipment, generators, stores, etc., on the floor beneath. A great reserve of diesel-oil and petrol filled large tanks in the basement, whence it was pumped as necessary. Our aerial systems were on roofs two blocks away, reached by bridges slung high over the intervening streets. Our own roof was largely cleared to provide a helicopter landing, and to act as a rainwater catchment. As we gradually developed a technique for living there we decided it was pretty well found.

Even so, my recollection is that nearly all spare time in the first few days was spent by everyone in transferring the contents of the provision department to our own quarters before it should disappear elsewhere.

There seems to have been a basic misconception of the role we should play. As I understand it, the idea was that we were to preserve, as far as possible, the impression of business as usual, and then, as things grew more difficult, the centre of EBC would follow the administration by gradual stages to Yorkshire. This appears to have been founded upon the assumption that London was so cellularly constructed that as the water flowed into each cell it would be abandoned while the rest carried on much as usual. As far as we were concerned bands, speakers, and artists would all roll up to do their stuff in the ordinary way until the water lapped our doorsteps — if it should ever reach as far — by which time they would presumably have changed to the habit of rolling up to the Yorkshire station instead. The only provision on the programme side that anyone had made for things not happening in this naive fashion was the transfer of our recorded library before it became actually necessary to save it. A dwindling, rather than a breakdown, was envisaged. Curiously, quite a number of conscientious broadcasters did somehow manage to put in their appearances for a few days. After that, however, we were thrown back almost entirely upon ourselves and the recordings. And, presently, we began to live in a state of siege.

I don't propose to deal in detail with the year that followed. It was a drawn-out story of decay. A long, cold winter during which the water lapped into the streets faster than we had expected. A time when armed bands were roving in search of untouched food-stores, when, at any hour of the day or night, one was liable to hear a rattle of shots as two gangs met. We ourselves had little trouble; it was as if, after a few attempts to raid us, word had gone round that we were ready to defend, and with so many other stores raidable at little or no risk we might as well be left until later.

When the warmer weather came there were noticeably fewer people to be seen. Most of them, rather than face another winter in a city by now largely plundered of food and beginning to suffer epidemics from lack of fresh water and drainage, were filtering out into the country, and the shooting that we heard was usually distant.

Our own numbers had been depleted, too. Out of the original sixty-five we were now reduced to twenty-five, the rest having gone off in parties by helicopter as the national focus became more settled in Yorkshire. From having been a centre we had declined to the state of an outpost maintained for prestige.

Phyllis and I discussed whether we would apply to go, too, but from the description of conditions that we prised out of the helicopter pilot and his crew the EBC Headquarters sounded congested and unattractive, so we decided to stay for a while longer, at any rate. We were by no means uncomfortable where we were, and the fewer of us that were left in our London eyrie, the more space and supplies each of us had.

In late spring we learnt that a decree had merged us with the arch-rival, putting all radio communication under direct Government control. It was the Broadcasting House lot that were moved out by a swift airlift since their premises were vulnerable while ours were already in a prepared state, and the one or two BBC men who stayed came over to join us.

News reached us mainly by two channels: the private link with EBC, which was usually moderately honest, though discreet; and broadcasts which, no matter where they came from, were puffed with patently dishonest optimism. We became very tired and cynical about them, as, I imagine, did everyone else, but they still kept on. Every country, it seemed, was meeting and rising above the disaster with a resolution which did honour to the traditions of its people.

By midsummer, and a cold midsummer it was, the town had become very quiet. The gangs had gone; only the obstinate individuals remained. They were, without doubt, quite numerous, but in twenty thousand streets they seemed sparse, and they were not yet desperate. It was possible to go about in relative safety again, though wise to carry a gun.

The water had risen further in the time than any of the estimates had supposed. The highest tides now reached the fifty-foot level. The flood-line was north of Hammersmith and included most of Kensington. It lay along the south side of Hyde Park, then to the south of Piccadilly, across Trafalgar Square, along the Strand and Fleet Street, and then ran northeast up the west side of the Lea Valley; of the City, only the high ground about St Paul's was still untouched. In the south it had pushed across Barnes, Battersea, Southwark, most of Deptford, and the lower part of Greenwich.

One day we walked down to Trafalgar Square. The tide was in, and the water reached nearly to the top of the wall on the northern side, below the National Gallery. We leant on the balustrade, looking at the water washing around Landseer's lions, wondering what Nelson would think of the view his statue was getting now.

Close to our feet, the edge of the flood was fringed with scum and a fascinatingly varied collection of flotsam. Further away, fountains, lamp-posts, traffic-lights, and statues thrust up here and there. On the far side, and down as much as we could see of Whitehall, the surface was as smooth as a canal. A few trees still stood, and in them sparrows chattered. Starlings had not yet deserted St Martin's church, but the pigeons were all gone, and on many of their customary perches gulls stood, instead. We surveyed the scene and listened to the slip-slop of the water in the silence for some minutes. Then I asked:

'Didn't somebody or other once say: "This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper?"'

Phyllis looked shocked.' "Somebody or other!" she exclaimed. 'That was Mr Eliot!'

'Well, it certainly looks as if he had the idea that time,' I said.

'It's the job of poets to have the idea,' she told me.

'H'm. It might also be that it is the job of poets to have enough ideas to provide a quotation for any given set of circumstances, but never mind. On this occasion let us honour Mr Eliot,' I said.

Presently Phyllis remarked: 'I thought I was through a phase now, Mike. For such a long time it kept on seeming that something could be done to save the world we're used to — if we could only and out what. But soon I think I'll be able to feel: "Well, that's gone. How can we make the best of what's left?" — all the same, I wouldn't say that coming to places like this does me any good.'

'There aren't places like this. This is — was — one of the uniques. That's the trouble. And it's a bit more than dead, but not yet ready for a museum. Soon, perhaps, we may be able to feel, "Lo! All our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre" — soon, but not quite yet.'

'You seem to be on unusually happy terms with other people's Muses to-day. Whose was that?' Phyllis inquired.

'Well,' I admitted, 'I'm not sure whether you would class her as a muse at all — more, perhaps, of a bent. Mr Kipling's.'

'Oh, poor Mr Kipling. Of course he had a Muse, and she probably played a jolly good game of hockey, too.'

'Cat,' I remarked. 'However, let us also honour Mr Kipling.'

There was a pause. It lengthened.

'Mike,' she said, suddenly, 'let's go away from here — now.'

I nodded. 'It might be better. We'll have to get a little tougher yet, darling, I'm afraid.'

She took my arm, and we started to walk westward. Halfway to the corner of the Square we paused at the sound of a motor. It seemed, improbably, to come from the south side. We waited while it drew closer. Presently, out from the Admiralty Arch swept a speedboat. It turned in a sharp arc and sped away down Whitehall, leaving the ripples of its wake slopping through the windows of august Governmental offices.

'Very pretty,' I said. 'There can't be many of us who have accomplished that in one of our waking moments.'

Phyllis gazed along the widening ripples, and abruptly became practical again.

'I think we'd better see if we can't find one of those,' she said. 'It might come in useful later on.'

The rate of rise continued to increase. By the end of the summer the level was up another eight or nine feet. The weather was vile and even colder than it had been at the same time the previous year. More of us had applied for transfer, and by mid-September we were down to sixteen.

Even Freddy Whittier had announced that he was sick and tired of wasting his time like a shipwrecked sailor, and was going to see whether he could not find some useful work to do. When the helicopter whisked him and his wife away, they left us reconsidering our own position once more.

Our task of composing never-say-die material on the theme that we spoke from, and for, the heart of an empire bloody but still unbowed was supposed, we knew, to have a stabilizing value even now, but we doubted it. Too many people were whistling the same tune in the same dark. A night or two before the Whittiers left we had had a late party where someone, in the small hours, had tuned-in a New York transmitter. A man and a woman on the Empire State Building were describing the scene. The picture they evoked of the towers of Manhattan standing like frozen sentinels in the moonlight while the glittering water lapped at their lower walls was masterly, almost lyrically beautiful — nevertheless, it failed in its purpose. In our minds we could see those shining towers — they were not sentinels, they were tombstones. It made us feel that we were even less accomplished at disguising our own tombstones; that it was time to pull out of our refuge, and find more useful work. Our last words to Freddy were that we would very likely be following him before long.

We had still, however, not reached the point of making definite application when he called us up on the link a couple of weeks later. After the greetings he said:

'This isn't purely social, Mike. It is disinterested advice to those contemplating a leap from the frying-pan — don't!'

'Oh,' I said, 'what's the trouble?'

'I'll tell you this. I'd have an application in for getting back to you right now — if only I had not made my reasons for getting out so damned convincing. I mean that. Hang on there, both of you.'

'But —' I began.

'Wait a minute,' he told me.

Presently his voice came again.

'Okay. No monitor on this, I think. Listen, Mike, we're overcrowded, underfed, and in one hell of a mess. Supplies of all kinds are right down, so's morale. The atmosphere's like a lot of piano-strings. We're living virtually in a state of siege here, and if it doesn't turn into active civil war in a few weeks it'll be a miracle. The people outside are worse off than we are, but seemingly nothing will convince them that we aren't living on the fat of the land. For God's sake keep this under your hat, but stay where you are, for Phyl's sake if not for your own.'

I thought quickly.

'If it's as bad as that, Freddy, and you're doing no good, why not get back here on the next helicopter. Either smuggle aboard — or maybe we could offer the pilot a few things he'd like?'

'All right. There certainly isn't any use for us here. I don't know why they let us come along. I'll work on that. Look for us next flight. Meanwhile good luck to you both.'

'Good luck to you, Freddy, and our love to Lynn — and our respects to Bocker, if he's there and nobody's slaughtered him yet.'

'Oh, Bocker's here. He's now got a theory that it won't go much over a hundred and twenty-five feet, and seems to think that's good news.'

'Well, considering he's Bocker, it might be a lot worse. 'Bye. We'll be looking forward to seeing you.'

We were discreet. We said no more than that we had heard the Yorkshire place was already crowded, so we were staying. A couple who had decided to leave on the next flight changed their minds, too. We waited for the helicopter to bring Freddy back. The day after it was due we were still waiting. We got through on the link. They had no news except that it had left on schedule. I asked about Freddy and Lynn. Nobody seemed to know where they were.

There never was any news of that helicopter. They said they hadn't another that they could send.

The cold summer drew into a colder autumn. A rumour reached us that the sea-tanks were appearing again for the first time since the waters had begun to rise. As the only people present who had had personal contact with them we assumed the status of experts — though almost the only advice we could give was always to wear a sharp knife, and in such a position that it could be reached for a quick slash by either hand. But the sea-tanks must have found the hunting poor in the almost deserted streets of London, for presently we heard no more of them. From the radio, however, we learnt that it was not so in some other parts. There were reports soon of their reappearance in many places where not only the new shore-lines, but the collapse of organization made it difficult to destroy them in effectively discouraging numbers.

Meanwhile, there was worse trouble. Overnight the combined EBC and BBC transmitters abandoned all pretence of calm confidence. When we looked at the message transmitted to us for radiation simultaneously with all other stations we knew that Freddy had been right. It was a call to all loyal citizens to support their legally elected Government against any attempts that might be made to overthrow it by force, and the way in which it was put left no doubt that such an attempt was already being made. The thing was a sorry mixture of exhortation, threats, and pleas, which wound up with just the wrong note of confidence — the note that had sounded in Spain and then in France when the words must be said though speaker and listener alike knew that the end was near. The best reader in the service could not have given it the ring of conviction.

The link could not, or would not, clarify the situation for us. Firing was going on, they said. Some armed bands were attempting to break into the Administration Area. The military had the situation in hand, and would clear up the trouble shortly. The broadcast was simply to discourage exaggerated rumours and restore confidence in the Government. We said that neither what they were telling us, nor the message itself inspired us personally with any confidence whatever, and we should like to know what was really going on. They went all official, curt, and cold.

Twenty-four hours later, in the middle of dictating for our radiation another expression of confidence, the link broke off, abruptly. It never worked again.

Until one gets used to it, the situation of being able to hear voices from all over the world, but none which tells what is happening in one's own country, is odd. We picked up enquiries about our silence from America, Canada, Australia, Kenya. We radiated at the full power of our transmitter what little we knew, and could later hear it being relayed by foreign stations. But we ourselves were far from understanding what had happened. Even if the H.Q.'s of both systems, in Yorkshire, had been overrun, as it would appear, there should have been stations still on the air independently in Scotland and Northern Ireland at least, even if they were no better informed than ourselves. Yet, a week went by, and still there was no sound from them. The rest of the world appeared to be too busy keeping a mask on its own troubles to bother about us any more — though one time we did hear a voice speaking with historical dispassion of 'l'ecroulement de l'Angleterre'. The word ecroulement was not very familiar to me, but it had a horribly final sound….

The winter closed in. One noticed how few people there were to be seen in the streets now, compared with a year ago. Often it was possible to walk a mile without seeing anyone at all. How those who did remain were living we could not say. Presumably they all had caches of looted stores that supported them and their families; and obviously it was no matter for close enquiry. One noticed also how many of those one did see had taken to carrying weapons as a matter of course. We ourselves adopted the habit of carrying them — guns, not rifles — slung over our shoulders, though less with any expectation of needing them than to discourage the occasion for their need from arising. There was a kind of wary preparedness which was still some distance from instinctive hostility. Chance-met men still passed on gossip and rumours, and sometimes hard news of a local kind. It was by such means that we learnt of a quite definitely hostile ring now in existence around London; how the surrounding districts had somehow formed themselves into miniature independent states and forbidden entry after driving out many who had come there as refugees; how those who did try to cross the border into one of these communities were fired upon without questions.

'It's going to be bad later on,' was the opinion of most of those I spoke to. 'Just now pretty well all those who are left still have a few cases of this and that stowed away, and the chief worry is stopping the other fellow from finding out where it is. But later on the worry is going to be the other way round; finding out where the chaps who do have some left are hiding it — and that's going to be nasty.'

In the New Year the sense of things pressing in upon us grew stronger. The high-tide mark was now close to the seventy-five foot level. The weather was abominable, and icy cold. There seemed to be scarcely a night when there was not a gale blowing from the south-west. It became rarer than ever to see anyone in the streets, though when the wind did drop for a time the view from the roof showed a surprising number of chimneys smoking. Mostly it was wood smoke, furniture and fitments burning, one supposed; for the coal stores in power-stations and railway yards had all disappeared the previous winter.

From a purely practical point of view I doubt whether anyone in the country was more favoured or as well found as our group. The food originally supplied together with that acquired later made a store which should last sixteen people for some years. There was an immense reserve of diesel-oil, and petrol, too. Materially we were better off than we had been a year ago when there were more of us. But we had learnt, as had many before us, about the bread-alone factor, one needed more than adequate food. The sense of desolation began to weigh more heavily still when, at the end of February, the water lapped over our doorsteps for the first time, and the building was filled with the sound of it cascading into the basements.

Some of the party grew more worried.

'It can't come very much higher, surely. A hundred feet is the limit, isn't it?' they were saying.

It wasn't much good being falsely reassuring. We could do little more than to repeat what Bocker had said; that it was a guess. No one had known, within a wide limit, how much ice there was in the Antarctic. No one was quite sure how much of the northern areas that appeared to be solid land, tundra, was in fact simply a deposit on a foundation of ancient ice; we just had not known enough about it. The only consolation was that Bocker now seemed to think for some reason that it would not rise above one hundred and twenty-five feet — which should leave our eyrie still intact. Nevertheless, it required fortitude to find reassurance in that thought as one lay in bed at night, listening to the echoing splash of the wavelets that the wind was driving along Oxford Street.

One bright morning in May, a sunny, though not a warm morning, I missed Phyllis. Enquiries eventually led me on to the roof in search of her. I found her in the south-west corner gazing towards the trees that dotted the lake which had been Hyde Park, and crying. I leant on the parapet beside her, and put an arm round her. Presently she stopped crying. She dabbed her eyes and nose, and said:

'I haven't been able to get tough, after all. I don't think I can stand this much longer, Mike. Take me away, please.'

'Where is there to go? — if we could go,' I said.

'The cottage, Mike. It wouldn't be so bad there, in the country. There'd be things growing — not everything dying, like this. There isn't any hope here — we might as well jump over the wall here if there is to be no hope at all.'

I thought about it for some moments.

'But even if we could get there, we'd have to live,' I pointed out, 'we'd need food and fuel and things.'

'There's — ' she began, and then hesitated and changed her mind. 'We could find enough to keep us going for a time until we could grow things. And there'd be fish, and plenty of wreckage for fuel. We could make out somehow. It'd be hard — but, Mike, I can't stay in this cemetery any longer — I can't.

'Look at it, Mike! Look at it! We never did anything to deserve all this. Most of us weren't very good, but we weren't bad enough for this, surely. And not to have a chance! If it had only been something we could fight — ! But just to be drowned and starved and forced into destroying one another to live — and by things nobody has ever seen, living in the one place we can't reach!

'Some of us are going to get through this stage, of course — the tough ones. But what are the things down there going to do then? Sometimes I dream of them lying down in those deep dark valleys, and sometimes they look like monstrous squids or huge slugs, other times as if they were great clouds of luminous cells hanging there in rocky chasms. I don't suppose that we'll ever know what they really look like, but whatever it is, there they are all the time, thinking and plotting what they can do to finish us right off so that everything will be theirs.

'I dream about that sea-bottom; the great wide plains down there where it is always always raining teeth and scales and bits of bone and shells and millions and millions of tiny plankton creatures, on and on for centuries. There are ranges of mountains rising out of the plains, and in some places huge precipices split by winding gullies, and the things down below send the sea-tanks in regiments across the plains, and the regiments break into strings which go into the gullies, and come winding up in search of us in long, long processions; out of the gullies into the shallow water, and then through the towns which have gone under the sea, still searching for us and hunting us.

'Sometimes, in spite of Bocker, I think perhaps it is the things themselves that are inside the sea-tanks, and if only we could capture one and examine it we should know how to fight them, at last. Several times I have dreamt that we have found one and managed to discover what makes it work, and nobody's believed us but Bocker, but what we have told him has given him an idea for a wonderful new weapon which had finished them all off.

'I know it all sounds very silly, but it's wonderful in the dream, and I wake up feeling as if we had saved the whole world from a nightmare — and then I hear the sound of the water slopping against the walls in the street, and I know it isn't finished; it's just going on and on and on

'I can't stand it here any more, Mike. I shall go mad if I have to sit here doing nothing any longer while a great city dies by inches all round me. It'd be different in Cornwall, anywhere in the country. I'd rather have to work night and day to keep alive than just go on like this. I think I'd rather die trying to get away than face another winter like last.'

I had not realized it was as bad as that. It wasn't a thing to be argued about.

'All right, darling,' I said. 'We'll go.'

Everything we could hear warned us against attempting to get away by normal means. We were told of belts where everything had been razed to give clear fields of fire, and there were booby-traps and alarms, as well as guards. Everything beyond those belts was said to be based upon a cold calculation of the number each autonomous district could support. The natives of the districts had banded together and turned out the refugees and the useless on to lower ground where they had to shift for themselves. In each of the areas there was acute awareness that another mouth to feed would increase the shortage for all. Any stranger who did manage to sneak in could not hope to remain unnoticed for long, and his treatment was ruthless when he was discovered — survival demanded it. So it looked as though our own survival demanded that we should try some other way.

The chance by water, along inlets that must be constantly widening and reaching further, looked better. Our search for a speedboat had been disappointing. We had discovered nothing better than the fibre-glass dinghy. Into that I began to stow supplies that I hoped might at least serve to buy us safe transit.

We delayed a little in the hope that the weather would turn warmer, but by late June we gave up the hope, and set out up-river.

But for the luck of our finding that sturdy little motor-boat, the Midge, I don't know what would have happened to us. I rather think we should have tried up-river again, and quite likely got ourselves shot. The Midge, however, changed the whole outlook. The following day, we took her back to London. Navigation of the more deeply flooded streets was a strain. Only unreliable memories could tell us whether the lamp-standards ran in the middle of the street, or at the sides, and we went cautiously, in constant alarm lest we should hole the boat upon one of them. Shallower parts we could take faster. At Hyde Park Corner we hove-to a couple of hours, waiting for the tide, and then ran safely up into Oxford Street on the flood.

An uneasy feeling that some of the others might wish to get away, too, and press to come with us now that we had more room, turned out to be baseless. Without exception they considered us crazy. Most of them contrived to take one of us aside at some time or another to point out the wilful improvidence of giving up warm, comfortable quarters to make a certainly cold and probably dangerous journey to certainly worse and probably intolerable conditions. They helped to fuel and store the Midge until she was inches lower in the water, but not one of them could have been bribed to set out with us.

Our progress down the river was cautious and slow, for we had no intention of letting the journey be more dangerous than was necessary. Our main recurrent problem was where to lay up for the night. We were sharply conscious of our probable fate as trespassers, and also of the fact that the Midge with her contents was tempting booty. Our usual anchorages were in the sheltered streets of some flooded town. Several times when it was blowing hard we lay up in such places for several days. Fresh water, which we had expected to be the main problem, turned out not to be difficult; one could almost always find some still in the tanks in the roof-spaces of a partly submerged house. Overall, the trip which used to clock at 268.8 (or .9) by road took us slightly over a month to make.

Round the corner and into the Channel the white cliffs looked so normal from the water that the flooding was hard to believe — until we looked more closely at the gaps where the towns should have been. A little later, we were right out of the normal, for we began to see our first icebergs.

We approached the end of the journey with caution. From what we had been able to observe of the coast as we came along there were often encampments of shacks on the higher ground. Where the land rose steeply there were often towns and villages where the higher houses were still occupied though the lower were submerged. What kind of conditions we might find at Penllyn in general and Rose Cottage in particular, we had no idea.

I took the Midge carefully into the Helford River, with shot-guns lying to hand. Here and there a few people on the hillsides stopped to look down at us, but they neither shot, nor waved. It was only later that we found they had taken her to be one of the few local boats that still had the fuel to run.

We turned north from the main river. With the water now close on the hundred-foot level the multiplication of waterways was confusing. We lost our way half a dozen times before we rounded a corner on an entirely new inlet and found ourselves looking up a familiar steep hillside at the cottage above us.

People had been there, several lots of them, I should think, but though the disorder was considerable the damage was not great. It was evidently the consumables they had been after chiefly. The standbys had vanished from the larder to the last bottle of sauce and packet of pepper. The drum of oil, the candles, and the small store of coal were gone, too.

Phyllis gave a quick look over the debris, and disappeared down the cellar steps. She re-emerged in a moment and ran out to the arbour she had built in the garden. Through the window I saw her examining the floor of it carefully. Presently she came back.

'That's all right, thank goodness,' she said.

It did not seem a moment for great concern about arbours.

'What's all right?' I inquired.

'The food,' she said. 'I didn't want to tell you about it until I knew. It would have been too bitterly disappointing if it had gone.'

'What food?' I asked, bewilderedly.

'You've not much intuition, have you, Mike? Did you really think that someone like me would be doing all that bricklaying just for fun? I walled-off half the cellar full of stuff, and there's a lot under the arbour, too.'

I stared at her. 'Do you mean to say —? But that was ages ago! Before the flooding even began.'

'But not before they began sinking ships so fast. It seemed to me it would be a good thing to lay in stores before things got difficult, because it quite obviously was going to get difficult later. I thought it would be sensible to have a reserve here, just in case. Only it was no good telling you, because I knew you'd just get stuffy about it.'

I sat down, and regarded her.

'Stuffy?' I inquired.

'Well, there are some people who seem to think it is more ethical to pay black-market prices than to take sensible precautions.'

'Oh,' I said. 'So you bricked it in yourself?'

'Well, I didn't want anybody local to know, so the only way was to do it myself. As it happened, the food airlift was much better organized than one could have expected, so we didn't need it, but it will come in useful now.'

'How much?' I asked.

She considered. 'I'm not quite sure, but there is a whole big vanload here, and then there's all the stuff we've got in the Midge, too.'

I could see, and do see, several angles to the thing, but it would have been churlishly ungrateful to mention them just then, so I let it rest, and we busied ourselves with tidying up and moving in.

It did not take us long to understand why the cottage had been left unoccupied. One had only to climb to the crest to see that our hill was destined to be an island. Four months later it became one.

Here, as elsewhere, there had been first the cautious retreat as the water started to rise, and, later, the panicky rush to stake a claim on the high ground while there was still room there. Those who remained, and still remain, are a mixture of the obstinate, the tardy, and the hopeful who are continually thinking that the water will not come much further. A feud between those who stayed and those who went is well established. The uplanders will allow no newcomer into their strictly rationed territory: the lowlanders carry guns and set traps to discourage raids upon their fields. It is said, though I do not know with how much truth, that conditions here are good compared with Devon and other places further east, since a large part of the population, once it took to flight, decided to keep on towards the lusher areas beyond the moorlands. There are fearful tales about the guerilla warfare between starving bands that goes on in Devon, Somerset, and Dorset, but here one hears shooting only occasionally, and only on a small scale.

The thoroughness of our isolation, beyond occasional bits of hearsay, has been one of the difficult things to bear. The radio set which might have told us something of how the rest of the world, if not our own country, was faring, failed a few weeks after we reached here, and we have neither the means of testing it, nor of replacing the necessary parts.

Luckily, our island offers little temptation, so we have not been molested. The people about here grew enough food last summer to keep themselves going with the help of fish, which are plentiful. Also, our status is not entirely that of strangers, and we have been careful to make no demands or requests. I imagine we are supposed to be existing on fish and what stores we brought aboard the Midge — and that what is likely to be left of those by now would not justify the trouble of a raid on us. It might have been a different story had the crops been poorer last summer

I started this account at the beginning of November. It is now the end of January. The water continued to rise slightly, but since about Christmastime there has been no increase that we can measure. We are hoping that it has reached its limit. There are still icebergs to be seen in the Channel, but it seems to us that they are fewer than they were.

There are still not infrequent raids by sea-tanks, sometimes singly, but more usually in fours or fives. As a rule, they are more of a nuisance than a danger, for the people living close to the water post watchers to give the alarm. The sea-tanks avoid any climbing, and seldom venture more than a quarter of a mile from the water's edge; when they find no victims they soon go away again.

By far the worst thing we have had to face has been the bitter cold of the winter. Even making allowance for the difference in our circumstances, we think that it has been a great deal colder than last. Our inlet has been frozen over for many weeks, and in calm weather the sea itself freezes well out from the shore. But mostly it is not calm weather; for days on end there have been gales when everything is covered with ice from the spray carried inland. We are lucky to be sheltered from the full force of the south-west, but it is bad enough.

We have now quite decided that when the summer comes we must try to get away. Possibly we could last out here another winter, but it would leave us less well provisioned, and less fit to face a journey that will have to be made sometime. We may, we hope, be able to find in what is left of Plymouth, or Devonport, fuel to replace that which we used in coming here; but, in any case, we intend to rig a mast so that if we are warned-off, or if there is no fuel to be found, we shall be able to continue southward under sail when our present supplies give out.

Where to? We don't know yet. Somewhere warmer, where it will be easier to grow things and start again. Perhaps we shall find only bullets where we try to land, but even that will be better than slow starvation in bitter cold.

Phyllis agrees. 'We shall be taking "a long shot, Watson; a very long shot!" ' she says. 'But, after all, what is the good of, our having been given so much luck already if we don't go on using it?'

May 24th

I amend the foregoing. We shall not be going south. This MS. will not be left here in a tin box On the chance of somebody finding it some day, as I had intended; it will go with us. Perhaps it may even be read by a number of people after all, for this is what has happened:

We had the Midge pulled up on shore, and were working to get her ready for the journey. Phyllis was painting, and I still had the engine apart, trying to get the valve-timing back right, when a dinghy came tacking into our inlet, with only one man aboard her. As he came closer I recognized him as a local whom I used to see about when times were normal, and had come across once or twice since. I did not know his name. But there was nothing to bring anyone up the inlet except us. I took a look at the gun, just to make sure it was handy. He kept on on a tack that brought him a little above us, and then turned into the wind.

'Ahoy, there!' he hailed. 'Your name Watson?' We told him it was. 'Good,' he called. 'Got a message for you.'

He shortened his sheet, put the rudder over, and ran straight towards us. Then he dropped his sail and let the dinghy run right on to the heather. He jumped out, pulled her up a bit, and then turned to us.

'Michael and Phyllis Watson? Used to be with EBC?' he asked.

We admitted it, wonderingly.

'They been putting your names out on the wireless,' he said.

We stared at him blankly. At last:

'Who — who has?' I said, unsteadily.

'Council for Reconstruction they call themselves,' he told us. 'They've been putting out a broadcast every night for a week or ten days now. Every time they end up with a list of people they're trying to find. Your names were among 'em last night — "believed to be in the neighbourhood of Penllyn, Cornwall" — so I reckoned you'd better know about it.'

'But — but who are they? What do they want?' I asked him.

He shrugged. 'Some party that's trying to straighten this lot out a bit. Good luck to 'em, I say, whoever they are. It's more than time somebody did.'

Phyllis went on staring at him. She was looking a little pale.

'Does that mean it's — all over?' she said.

The man looked at her and then turned to regard the water spread over former fields, the new inlets that reached back into the land, the abandoned homes washed through by every tide.

'No,' he said, decisively, 'that's not what it means. But trying to make the best of it is going to be a lot better than just putting up with it.'

'But what is it about us? What do they want?' I asked.

'They just said they want you in London — if you think you can make it safely. If you can't, you're to stand by for instructions later on. They give lists of names of people that they want to go to London, or Malvern, or Sheffield, or one or two other places — not many for London, but yours was.'

'They don't say anything about what it's for?'

He shook his head. 'There's not really a lot they have said yet, but they're going to be dropping small radio-sets with batteries soon, and later on some transmitters, too. For the present they're telling people to form groups for local government until communications get working properly.'

Phyllis and I looked thoughtfully at one another for some moments.

'I think I can see what we're going to be wanted for,' I said.

She nodded. We let the idea sink in for a bit, then I turned back to the man.

'Come on,' I said, nodding towards the cottage. 'There's a bottle or two up there that I've been keeping in case of something special. This seems to be it.'

Phyllis linked her arm in mine, and we went up the hill together.

'We want to know more about it,' I said, putting down my half-empty glass.

'There's not much yet,' he repeated. 'But what there is sounds like the turn all right, at last. Remember that fellow Bocker? They had him on talking a night or two ago — and a bit more cheerful than he used to be, too. Giving what he called a general survey of the position, he was.'

'Tell us,' said Phyllis, beside me. 'Dear A. B. being cheerful ought to have been worth hearing.'

'Well, the main things are that the water's finished rising — could've told him that ourselves, near six months ago, but I suppose there'll be people some places that haven't heard of it yet. A big lot of the best land's gone under, but all the same he reckons that if we get organized we ought to be able to grow enough, because they think the population's down to between a fifth and an eighth of what it was — could be even less.'

'All that?' said Phyllis, staring at him incredulously. Surely—?'

'Sounded as if we've been pretty lucky round here compared with most parts,' the man told her. 'Pneumonia, mostly, he said, it was. Not much food, you see; no resistance, no medical services, no drugs, and three hellish winters — it's taken 'em off like flies.'

He paused. We were silent, trying to grasp the scale of it, and what it would mean. I got little beyond telling myself the obvious — that it was going to be a very different world from the old one. Phyllis saw a little further:

'But shall we even get a fair chance to try?' she said. 'I mean, the Bathies are still there. Suppose they have something else that they've not used yet —?'

The man shook his head. He gave a twisted grin of satisfaction.

'Oh, he talked about them, too, Bocker did. Reckons that this time they've really had it.'

'How?' I asked.

'According to him, they've got hold of some kind of thing that'll go down in the Deeps. It puts out ultra-something — not ultra-violet; a sort of noise, only you can't hear it.'

'Ultrasonics?' I suggested.

'That's it. Sounds queer to me, but he says the waves it puts out'll kill under water.'

'It's right enough,' I told him. 'There were a whole lot of people working on that four or five years ago. The trouble was to get a transmitter that'd go down there.'

'Well, he says they've done it now — and who do you think? — the Japs. They reckon they've cleared a couple of small Deeps already. Anyway, the Americans seem to think it works all right, 'cause they're making some, too, to use round the West Indies way.'

'But they have discovered what Bathies are… What they look like?' Phyllis wanted to know.

He shook his head. 'Not so far as I know. All Bocker said was that a lot of jelly stuff came up, and went bad quickly in the sunlight. No shape to it. Not the pressure to hold the things together, see? So what a Bathy looks like when it's at home is still anybody's guess — and likely to stay that way.'

'What they look like when they're dead is good enough for me,' I said, filling up the glasses once more. I raised mine. 'Here's to empty Deeps, and free seas again.'

After the man had left, we went out and sat side by side in the arbour, looking out at the view that had changed so greatly. For a little time neither of us spoke. I took a covert glance at Phyllis; she was looking as if she had just had a beauty treatment.

'I'm coming to life again, Mike,' she said.

'Me, too,' I agreed. 'Though it isn't going to be a picnic life,' I added.

'I don't care. I don't mind working hard when there's hope. It was having no more hope that was too much for me.'

'It's going to be a very strange sort of world, with only a fifth or an eighth of us left,' I said, meditatively.

'There were only five million or so of us in the first Elizabeth's time — but we counted,' she said.

We sat on. There was planning, as well as the reorientation, to be done.

'As soon as we can get the Midge ready?' I asked. 'I think we've still more than enough fuel to take us that far.'

'Yes. As soon as we can,' she told me.

She went on sitting, with her elbows on her knees and her chin on her hands, looking far away. It was getting chilly again as the sun sank. I moved closer and put my arm round her.

'What is it?' I asked.

'I was just thinking…. Nothing is really new, is it, Mike? Once upon a time there was a great plain, covered with forests and full of wild animals. I expect our ancestors hunted there. Then one day the water came in and drowned it all — and there was the North Sea….

'I think we've been here before, Mike…. And we got through last time…'