The Wanderer

He sloshed his way back to the bar, the water steadying if impeding him, and gathered three fresh bottles in the crook of his left arm, and on his way back grabbed up the two floating brooms.

The skiff was waiting. He tossed in the brooms, put in the bottles carefully, and then laid his upper body across the boat and grasped the opposite gunwale. He almost blacked out then, but the water was cold on his crotch and he jumped up clumsily and wriggled and pulled until he was in, face down on the wet wood. Then he did black out. His last kick caught the doorframe and sent the skiff moving out and away.

Richard Hillary trudged through the dying twilight ten yards to the side of a road noisy with cars. The cars were moving slowly, almost bumper to bumper, in three lanes abreast so that there was no room at all for traffic in the opposite direction. No use to try for a lift, the cars were all packed with people — and if an empty place should turn up, it would immediately be taken by someone with more obvious claim to it or simply someone nearer the road. Besides, he was walking almost as fast as the cars were moving, rather faster than the majority of the pedestrians.

Cars and folk on foot and he were all somewhere beyond Uxbridge, moving northwest. It had been a relief when the glaring sun had gone down, though every sign of time passing momentarily speeded up the walkers and pushed the vehicles closer together.

Never had Richard experienced such a revolutionary disaster, neither in his life nor in the flow of events around him — not even in the bombing raids remembered from childhood — and all in six hours. First the bus turning north out of the little street flood at Brentford…the driver mum to passengers’ protests except for a reiterated “Traffic Authority orders!"…wireless reports of the larger flood in the heart of London, of the American flying saucer seen in New Zealand and Australia and called a planet…the wireless choked by static just as someone began to recite a list of “civilian directives"…people frantically wondering how to get in touch with families, and he feeling both wounded and relieved that in his own case there was no one who mattered very much. Then the bus stopping at West Middlesex Hospital, with the information that it had been commandeered to move patients…more unsuccessful protests…advice to move northwest by foot, “away from the water"…the refusal to believe…wandering briefly around the grounds of a new brick university…cars and white-faced refugees in greater and greater numbers from the east…the helicopter scattering paper thriftily…a fresh-inked sheet that read only: “WESTERN MIDDLESEX MOVE TO CHILTERN HILLS. HIGH WATER EXPECTED TWO HOURS AFTER MIDNIGHT.” Finally, joining a northwest trek that grew and grew — becoming part of a dazed and trudging mob.

Richard judged he had been walking about two hours. He was tired; his chin was tucked against his chest, his gaze fixed on his muddy boots. There had been clear signs of recent flooding in a low stretch just overpassed: turbid pools and grass plastered flat. He had no idea of exactly where he was, except that he was well past Uxbridge and had crossed the Colne and the Grand Junction Canal, and that he could see hills far ahead.

The twilight was strangely bright. He almost walked into a clump of people who had halted and were staring back over his head. He turned around to see what they were looking at and there, riding low in the eastern sky, he saw at last the agent of their disaster, looking at least as big as the moon might look in dreams. It was mostly yellow, but with a wide purple bar running down its middle and from the ends of the bar two sharply curving purple arms going out to make a great D. He thought, D for danger, D for disaster, D for destruction. The thing might be a planet, but it didn’t look beautiful — it looked like a garish insignia of the sort you might see in a bomb factory.

He found himself thinking of how safe the Earth had swung in all its loneliness for millions of years, like a house to which no stranger ever comes, and of how precarious its isolation had really always been. People get eccentric and selfish and habit-ridden when they’re left long alone, it occurred to him.

But why, he asked himself angrily, when there finally is a murderous intrusion from the ends of the universe, should it look like nothing but a cheap screaming advertisement on a circular hoarding?

Then a flickering afterthought: D for Dai. He remembered that the tides at Avonmouth have a vertical range of forty feet at full moon, and he wondered fleetingly how his friend was faring.