I found a little rill and cupped my hand to catch the water. The liquid was muddy and flecked with black soot — the stream was polluted by the burnt flesh of trees and animals, I surmised — but my thirst was so great that I had no choice but to drink it down, in great, dirty handfuls.
“Well,” I said, and my voice was reduced to a croak by the smoke and my exertions, “this is a damned fine fist of things. Man has been present in the Palaeocene for less than a year… and, already — this!”
Nebogipfel was stirring. He tried to get his arms under him; but he could barely lift his face from the sand. He had lost his face-mask, and the huge, soft lids of his delicate eyes were encrusted with sand. I felt touched by an odd tenderness. Once again, this wretched Morlock had been forced to endure the devastation of War among humans — among members of my own, shoddy race — and had suffered as a consequence.
As gently as if I were lifting a child, I lifted him from the sand, turned him over, and sat him up; his legs dangled like lengths of string. “Take it easy, old man,” I said. “You’re safe now.”
His blind head swiveled towards me, his functioning eye leaking immense tears. He murmured liquid syllables.
“What?” I bent to hear. “What are you saying?”
He broke into English. “…not safe…”
“What?”
“We are not safe here — not at all…”
“But why? The fire can’t reach us now.”
“Not the fire… the radiations… Even when the glow is finished… in weeks, or months, still the radiative particles will linger… the radiations will eat into the skin… It is not a safe place.”
I cupped his thin, papery cheek in my hand; and at that moment — burned, thirsty beyond belief — I felt as if I wanted to chuck it all in, to sit on that ruined beach, regardless of fires, Bombs and radiative particles: to sit and wait for the final Darkness to close about me. But some lingering bits of strength coalesced around my concern at the Morlock’s feeble agitation.
“Then,” I said, “we will walk away from here, and see if we can find somewhere we can rest.”
Ignoring the pain of the cracked skin of my own shoulders and face, I slipped my arms under his limp body and picked him up.
It was late afternoon by now, and the light was fading from the sky. After perhaps a mile, we were far enough from the central blaze that the sky was clear of smoke, but the crimson pillar above the Carolinum crater illuminated the darkling sky, almost as steadily as the Aldis lamps which had lit up the London Dome.
I was startled by a young Pristichampus who came bursting from the forest’s rim. The yellow-white mouth of the beast was gaping wide as it tried to cool itself, and I saw that it dragged one hind leg quite badly; it looked as if it was almost blind, and quite terrified.
Pristichampus stumbled past us and fled, screeching in an unearthly fashion.
I could feel clean sand under my bare feet once more, and I could smell the rich brine of the Sea, a vapor which began the job of washing the stink of smoke and ash out of my head. The ocean remained placid and immovable, its surface oily in the Carolinum light, despite all the foolishness of Humanity; and I pledged my gratitude to that patient body — for now the Sea had cradled me, saving my life even as my fellow humans had blown each other to bits.
This reverie of walking was broken by a distant call.
“Ha-llooo…”
It came drifting along the beach, and, perhaps a quarter-mile away ahead of me, I made out a waving figure, walking towards me.
For a moment I stood there, quite unable to move; for I suspect that I had assumed, in some morbid recess of my soul, that all the members of the Chronic Expeditionary Force must have been consumed by the atomic explosion, and that Nebogipfel and I had been once more left alone in time.
The other chap was a soldier who had evidently been far enough away from the action to remain unscathed, for he was dressed in the trooper’s standard jungle-green twill shirt, riflegreen felt hat and trousers with anklets. He carried a light machinegun, with leather ammunition pouches. He was tall, wire-thin, and red-haired; and he seemed familiar. I had no idea how I looked: a frightful mess, I imagine, with scorched and blackened face and hair, white-staring eyes, naked save for my trousers, and with the inhuman bundle of the Morlock in my arms.
The trooper pushed back his hat. “This is all a fine pickle, isn’t it, sir?” He had the clipped, Teutonic accent of the North-East of England.
I remembered him. “Stubbins, isn’t it?”
“That’s me, sir.” He turned and waved up the beach. “I’ve been map-making up that way. Was six or seven miles away when I saw Jerry coming over the water. As soon as I saw that big column of flame go up — well, I knew what was what.” He looked towards the encampment site uncertainly.
I shifted my weight, trying to hide my fatigue. “But I shouldn’t go back to the encampment yet. The fire’s still burning — and Nebogipfel warns of radiative emissions.”
For answer, I lifted the Morlock a little.
“Oh, him.” Stubbins scratched the back of his head; the short hairs there rasped.
“There’ll be nothing you can do to help, Stubbins — not yet.”
He sighed. “Well then, sir, what are we to do?”
“I think we should carry on up the beach a little way, and find somewhere to shelter for the night. I expect we’ll be safe — I doubt that any Palaeocene animal will be unwise enough to interfere with men tonight, after all that — but we perhaps should build a fire. Do you have matches, Stubbins?”
“Oh, yes, sir.” He tapped his breast pocket, and a box rattled. “Don’t you worry about that.”
“I won’t.”
I resumed my steady walking along the beach, but my arms were aching uncommonly, and my legs seemed to be trembling. Stubbins noted my distress, and with silent kindness, he hung his machine-gun from his broad back, and lifted the unconscious Morlock from my arms. He had a wiry strength, and did not find, it seemed, Nebogipfel a burden.
We walked until we found a suitable hollow in the forest’s fringe, and there we made our camp for the night.
[12]
The Aftermath of the Bombing
The morning dawned fresh and clear.
I woke before Stubbins. Nebogipfel remained unconscious. I walked down to the beach and to the fringe of the Sea. The sun was rising over the ocean before me, its warmth already strong. I heard the clicks and trills of the forest fauna, busy already with their little concerns; and a smooth black shape — I thought it was a ray — glided through the water a few hundred yards from land.
In those first moments of the new day, it was as if my Palaeocene world was as vigorous and unscarred as it had been before the arrival of Gibson and his Expedition. But that pillar of purple fire still guttered from the central wound in the forest, reaching up through a thousand feet or more. Clots of flame — bits of melted rock and soil — hurled themselves along the flanks of that pillar, following glowing parabolic paths. And over it all there lingered still an umbrella-shaped cloud of dust and steam, its edges frayed by the action of the breeze.
We breakfasted on water and the flesh of nuts from the palms. Nebogipfel was subdued, weakened, and his voice was a scratch; but he counseled Stubbins and me against returning to the devastated camp site. For all we knew, he said, the three of us might have been left alone, there in the Palaeocene, and we must think of our survival into the future. Nebogipfel argued that we should migrate further away — several miles, he said — and set up camp in some more equable spot, safe from the radiative emissions of the Carolinum.