Out of the Deeps (a reworking of The Kraken Wakes) by John Wyndham.
Title: Out of the Deeps (a reworking of The Kraken Wakes).
Author: John Wyndham.
Genre: Literature, fiction, science fiction, alien fiction.
Country: England, U.K.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1953.
Summary: In the midst of the Cold War, a new war slowly and covertly engulfs the planet. It starts with fireballs raining down from the sky and crashing into the oceans' deeps. Then ships begin sinking mysteriously and later "sea tanks" emerge from the deeps to claim people. For journalists Mike and Phyllis Watson, what at first appears to be a curiosity becomes a global calamity. Helpless, they watch as humanity struggles to survive a slow and thorough alien invasion, as water-one of the compounds upon which life depends-is turned against them. Finally, as humanity flounders, sea levels begin their inexorable rise, and the hope of a human triumph begins to look less and less likely.
My rating: 7.5/10
My review:
♥ I'm a reliable witness, you're a reliable witness, practically all God's children are reliable witnesses in their own estimation-which makes it funny how such different ideas of the same affair get about.
♥ The situation thus remained unresolved. The non-Russian world was, by and large, divided sharply into two classes-those who believed every Russian pronouncement, and those who believed none. For the first class no question arose; the faith was firm. For the second, interpretation was less easy. Was one to deduce, for instance, that the whole thing was a lie? Or merely that when the Russians claimed to have accounted for twenty fireballs, they had only, in fact, exploded five or so?
♥ "Anyway, whether the Bocker theory is sheer hot-air or not, he's lost his main point. This bomb was not the amiable and sympathetic approach that he advocated."
Mallarby paused, and shook his head. "I've met Bocker several times. He's a civilized, liberal-minded man-with the usual trouble of liberal-minded men; that they think others are, too. He has an interested, inquiring mind. He has never grasped that the average mind when it encounters something new is scared, and says: "Better smash it, or suppress it, quick." Well, he's just had another demonstration of the average mind at work."
♥ "It doesn't look like an interplanetary war to me now, whatever it is," a voice remarked.
"That," remarked Bocker, "I would ascribe to two main causes. First, constipation of the imagination; and, secondly, the influence of the later Mr. H.G. Wells.
"One of the troubles about writing a classic is that it sets a pattern of thinking. Everybody reads it, with the result that everybody thinks he knows exactly the form which an interplanetary invasion not only ought to, but must, take. If a mysterious cylinder were to land close to London or Washington tomorrow, we should all of us immediately recognize it as a right and proper subject for alarm. It seems to have been overlooked that Mr. Wells was simply employing one of a number of devices that he might have used for a work of fiction, so one might point out that he did not pretend to be laying down a law for the conduct of interplanetary campaigns. And the fact that his choice remains the only prototype for the occurrence in so many minds is a better compliment to this skill in writing than it is to those minds' skill in thinking.
"There could be quite a large variety of invasions against which it would be no good to call out the marines. This one is much more difficult to come to grips with than Mr. Wells' Martians were. It still remain to be seen whether the weapons we shall have to face will be more or less effective than those he imagined."
♥ Then, by degrees, a feeling got about that this was not at all the way anyone had expected an interplanetary war to be; so very likely it was not an interplanetary war after all. From there, of course, it was only a step to deciding that it must be the Russians.
The Russians had all along encouraged, within their directorate, suspicion of capitalistic warmongers. When whispers of the interplanetary notion did in some way penetrate their curtain, they were countered by the statements that, (a) it was all a lie, a verbal smoke screen to cover the preparations of warmongers, (b) that it was true; and the capitalists, true to type, had immediately attacked the unsuspecting strangers with atom bombs, and, (c) whether it was true or not, the U.S.S.R. would fight unswervingly for Peace with all the weapons it possessed, except germs.
♥ "All got a strong dose of not-before-the-children this time," I said, as we finished. "And not altogether surprising, seeing the hell the advertisers would raise."
Phyllis said coldly: "Mike, this isn't a game, you know. After all, a big ship has gone down, and seven hundred poor people have been drowned. That is a terrible thing. I dreamed last night that I was shut up in one of those little cabins when the water came bursting in."
"Yesterday-" I began, and then stopped. I had been about to say that Phyllis had poured a kettle of boiling water down a crack in order to kill a lot more than seven hundred ants, but thought better of it. "Yesterday," I amended, "a lot of people were killed in road accidents, a lot will be today."
"I don't see what that has to do with it," she said.
She was right. It was not a very good amendment-but neither had it been the right moment to postulate the existence a menace that might think no more of us that we, of ants.
♥ I was sorry. I was worried, too, but it takes me differently.
Later, I found her staring out of the living room window. From where she stood, at the side of it, she had a view of the blue water stretching to the horizon.
"Mike," she said, "I'm sorry about this morning. The thing-this ship going down like that-suddenly got me. Until now this has been a sort of guessing game, a puzzle. Losing the bathyscope with poor Weisman and Trant was bad, and so was losing the naval ships. But this-well, it suddenly seemed to put it into a different category-a big liner full of ordinary, harmless men, women, and children peacefully asleep, to be wiped out in a few seconds in the middle of the night! It's somehow a different class of thing altogether. Do you see what I mean? Naval people are always taking risks doing their jobs-but these people on a liner hadn't anything to do with it. It made me feel that those things down there had been a working hypothesis that I had hardly believed in, and now, all at once, they had become horribly real. I don't like it, Mike. I suddenly started to feel afraid. I don't quite know why."
I went over and put my arm round her. "I know what you mean," I said. "I think it is apart of it-the thing is not to let it get us down."
She turned her head. "Part of what?" she asked, puzzled.
"Part of the process we are going through-the instinctive reaction. The idea of an alien intelligence here is intolerable to us, we must hate and fear it. We can't help it-even our own kind of intelligence when it goes a bit off the rails in drunks and crazies alarms us not very rationally."
"You mean I'd not be feeling quite the same way about it if I knew that it had been done by-well, the Chinese, or somebody?"
"Do you think you would?"
"I-I'm not sure."
"Well, for myself, I'd say I'd be roaring with indignation. Knowing that it was somebody hitting well below the belt, I'd at least have a glimmering of who, how, and why, to give me focus. As it is, I've only the haziest impressions of the who, no idea bout the how, and a feeling about the why that makes me go cold inside, if you really want to know."
She pressed her hand on mine. "I'm glad to know that, Mike. I was feeling pretty lonely this morning."
"My protective coloration isn't intended to deceive you, my sweet. It is intended to deceive myself."
♥ "The Queen Anne-Oh, God!" she said.
She searched for a handkerchief. "Oh, Mike. That lovely ship!"
I crossed to sit beside her. For the moment she was seeing simply the ship as we had last seen her, putting out from Southampton. A creation that had been somewhere between a work of art and a living thing, shining and beautiful in the sunlight, moving serenely out towards the high seas, leaving a flock of little tugs bobbing behind. But I knew enough of my wife to realize that in a few minutes she would be on board, dining in the fabulous restaurant, or dancing in the ballroom, or up on one of the decks, watching it happen, feeling what they must have felt there. I put both my arms around her, and held her close.
I am thankful that such imagination as I, myself, have is more prosaic, and seated further from the heart.
♥ That was the day on which argument stopped, and propaganda became unnecessary. Two of the four ships lost in the Cayman Trench disaster had succumbed to the bomb, but the end of the other two had occurred in a glare of publicity that routed the skeptics and the cautious alike. As last it was established beyond doubt that there was something-and a highly dangerous something, too-down there in the Deeps.
♥ When Phyllis said "our job" the words did not connote exactly what they would have implied a few days before. The job somehow changed quality under our feet. The task of persuading the public of the reality of the unseen, indescribable menace had turned suddenly into one of keeping up morale in the face of a menace which everyone now accepted to the point of panic.
♥ There was a satisfactory feeling that confidence was gradually being restored.
Perhaps the main stabilizing factor, however, emerged from a difference of opinion on one of the technical committees.
General agreement had been reached that a topedolike weapon designed to give submerged escort to a vessel could profitably be developed to counter the assumed mine form of attack. The motion was accordingly put that all should pool information like to help in the development of such a weapon.
The Russian delegates demurred. Remote control of missiles, they pointed out was, of course, a Russian invention in any case. Moreover, Russian scientists, zealous in the fight for Peace, had already developed such control to a degree greatly in advance of that achieved by the capitalist-ridden science of the West. It could scarcely be expected of the Soviets that they should make a present of their discoveries to warmongers.
The Western spokesman replied that, while respecting the intensity of the fight for Peace and the fervor with which it was being carried on in every department of Soviet science except, of course, the biological, the West would remind the Soviets that this was a conference of peoples faced by a common danger and resolved to meet it by cooperation.
The Russian leader responded frankly that he doubted whether, if the West had happened to possess a means of controlling a submerged missile by radio, such as had been invented by Russian engineers, they would care to share such knowledge with the Soviet people.
The Western spokesman assured the Soviet representative that since the West had called the conference for the purpose of cooperation, it felt in duty bound to state that it had indeed perfected such a means of control as the Soviet delegate had mentioned.
Following a hurried consultation, the Russian delegate announced that if he believed such a claim to be true, he wold also know that it cold only have come about through theft of the work of Soviet scientists by capitalist hirelings. And, since neither a lying claim, nor the admission of successful espionage showed that disinterest in national advantage which the conference had professed, his delegation was left with no alternative but to withdraw.
This action, with its reassuring ring of normality, exerted a valuable tranquilizing influence.
♥ "Darling, stop worrying that moon now, and come to bed."
"No soul-that's the trouble. I often wonder why I married you."
So I got up and joined her at the window.
"See?" she said. "'A ship, an isle, a sickle moon...' So fragile, so eternal-isn't it lovely?"
We gazed out, across the empty Plaza, past the sleeping houses, over the silvered sea.
"I want it. It's one of the things I'm putting away to remember," she said.
♥ "I brought you all here. I have shown very little imagination and consideration for your safety, I'm afraid."
Phyllis leaned forward. "You mustn't think like that, Dr. Bocker. None of us had to come, you know. You offered us the chance to come, and we took it. If-if the same thing had happened to me I don't think Michael would have felt that you were to blame, would you, Mike?"
"No," I said. I knew perfectly well whom I should have blamed-forever, and without reprieve.
♥ "So it looks as if the other motive might fit-simply that they find us-and perhaps other land creatures, if you recall the disappearance of goats and sheep on Saphira-good to eat. -Or even both: plenty of tribes have an old established custom of eating their enemies."
"You mean that they may have come sort of-well, sort of shrimping for us?" Phyllis asked, uneasily.
"Well, we land creatures let down trawls into the sea, and eat what they catch there. Why not a reverse process for intelligent sea creatures? But, of course, there again I am giving them a human outlook. That's what we all keep trying to o with our 'whys.' The trouble is we have all of us read too many stories where the invaders turn up behaving and thinking just like human beings, whatever their shape happens to be, and we can't shake loose from the idea that their behavior must be comprehensible to us. In fact, there is no reason why it should be, and plenty of reasons why it shouldn't."
♥ "They must provide defenses or else give the people the means to defend themselves," I said. "You can't preserve your economy in a place where everybody is scared stiff to go near the seaboard. You must somehow make it possible for people to work and live there."
"Nobody knows where they will come next, and you have to act quickly when they do," said Phyllis. "That would mean letting people have arms."
"Well, then, they should give them arms. Damn it, it isn't a function of the State to deprive its people of the means of self-protection."
"Isn't it?" said Phyllis, reflectively.
"What do you mean?"
"Doesn't it sometimes strike you as odd that all our governments who loudly claim to rule by the will of the people are willing to run almost any risk rather than let their people have arms? Isn't it almost a principle that a people should not be allowed to defend itself, but should be forced to defend its Government? The only people I know who are trusted by their Government are the Swiss, and, being landlocked, they don't come into this."
I was puzzled. The response was off her usual key. She was looking tired, too. "What's wrong, Phyl?"
She shrugged. "Nothing, except that at times I get sick of putting up with all the shams and the humbug, and pretending that the lies aren't lies, and the propaganda isn't propaganda. I'll get over it again. Don't you sometimes wish that you had been born into the Age of Reason, instead of the Age of Ostensible Reason? I think that they are going to let thousands of people be killed by these horrible things rather than risk giving them powerful enough weapons to defend themselves. And they'll have rows of arguments why it is best so. What do a few thousands, or a few millions of people matter? Women will just go on making the loss good. But Governments are important-one mustn't risk them."
"Darling-"
"There'll be token arrangements, of course. Small garrisons in important places, perhaps. Aircraft standing-by on call-and they will come along after the worst of it has happened-when men and women have been tied into bundles and rolled away by those horrible things, and girls have been dragged over the ground by their hair, like poor Muriel, and people have been pulled apart, like that man who was caught by two of them at once-then the airplanes will come, and the authorities will say they were sorry to be a bit late, but there are technical difficulties in making adequate arrangements. That' the regular kind of brush-off, isn't it?"
"But, Phyl, darling-"
"I know what you are going to say, Mike, but I am scared. Nobody's really doing anything. There's nor realization, no genuine attempt to change the pattern to meet it. The ships are driven off the deeps seas; goodness knows how many of these sea-tank things are ready to come and snatch people away. They say: 'Dear, dear! Such a loss of trade,' and they talk and talk and talk as if it'll all come right in the end if only they can keep on talking long enough. When anybody like Bocker suggests doing something he's just howled down and called a sensationalist, or an alarmist. How many people do they regard as the proper wastage before they must do something?"
"But they are trying, you know, Phyl-"
"Are they? I think they're balancing things all the time. What is the minimum cost at which the political setup can be preserved in present conditions? How much loss of life will the people put up with before they become dangerous about it? Would it be wise or unwise to declare martial law, and at what stage? On and on, instead of admitting the size of the danger and getting to work. Oh, I could-" She stopped suddenly. Her expression changed. "Sorry, Mike. I shouldn't have gone off the handle like that. I must be tired, or something." And she took herself off with a decisive air of not wanting to be followed.
♥ Europe remained an interested spectator. In the opinion of its inhabitants, it is the customary seat of stability. Hurricanes, tidal waves, serious earthquakes, et cetera, are extravagances divinely directed to occur in the ore exotic and less sensible parts of the earth, all important European damage being done traditionally by man himself in periodic frenzies. It was not, therefore, to be seriously expected that the danger would come any closer than Madeira-or, possibly, Rabat or Casablanca.
♥ Mr. Malenkov, interviewed by telegram, had said that although the intensified program of aircraft construction in the West was no more than a part of a bourgeois-fascist plan by warmongers that could deceive no one, yet so great was the opposition of the Russian people to any thought of war that the production of aircraft within the Soviet Union for the Defense of Peace had been tripled. Indeed, so resolutely were the Peoples of the Free Democracies determined to preserve Peace in spite of the new Imperialist threat, that war was not inevitable-though there was a possibility that under prolonged provocation the patience of the Soviet Peoples might become exhausted.
♥ "Some of us," he said, "some of us, though not the more sensible of us, have recently been celebrating a victory. To them I suggest that when the cannibal's fire is not quite hot enough to boil the pot, the intended meal may feel some relief, but he has not, in the generally accepted sense of the phrase, scored a victory. In fact, if he does not do something before the cannibal has time to build a better and bigger fire, he is not going to be any better off.
"Let us, therefore, look at this 'victory.' We, a maritime people who rose to power upon shipping which plied to the furthest corners of the earth, have lost the freedom of the seas. We have been kicked out of an element that we had made our own. Our ships are only safe in coastal waters and shallow seas-and who can say how long they are going to be tolerated even there? We have been forced by a blockade, more effective than any experience in war, to depend on air transport for the very food by which we live. Even the scientists who are trying to study the sources of our troubles must put to sea in sailing ships to do their work! Is this victory?
"What the eventual purpose of these coastal raids may have been, no one can say for certain. They may have been trawling for us as we trawl for fish, though that is difficult to understand; there is more to be caught more cheaply in the sea than on the land. Or it may even have been part of an attempt to conquer the land-an ineffectual and ill-informed attempt, but, for all that, rather more successful than our attempts to reach the Deeps. If it was, then its instigators are now better informed about us, and therefore potentially more dangerous. They are not likely to try again the same way with the same weapons, but I see nothing in what we have been able to do to discourage them from trying in a different way with different weapons.
"The need for us to find some way in which we can strike back at them is therefore not relaxed, but intensified.
"It may be recalled by some that when we were first made aware of activity in the Deeps I advocated that every effort should be made to establish understanding with them. That was not tried, and very likely it was never a possibility, but there can be no doubt that the situation which I had hoped we could avoid now exists-and is in the process of being resolved. Two intelligent forms of life are finding one another's existence intolerable. I have now come to believe that no attempt at rapprochement could have succeeded. Life in all its forms is strife; the better matched the opponents, the harder the struggle. The most powerful of all weapons is intelligence; any intelligent form dominates by, and therefore survives by, its intelligence: a rival form of intelligence must, but its very existence, threaten to dominate, and therefore threaten extinction.
"Observation has convinced me that my former view was lamentably anthropomorphic; I say now that we must attack as swiftly as we can find the means, and with the full intention of complete extermination. These things, whatever they may be, have not only succeeded in throwing us out of their element with ease, but already they have advanced to do battle with us in ours. For the moment we have pushed them back, but they will return, for the same urge drives them as drives us-the necessity to exterminate, or be exterminated. And when they come again, if we let them, they will come better equipped...
"Such a state of affairs, I repeat, is not victory..."
♥ "Most of the papers take that line," he said. "Why was I condemned to live in a democracy where every fool's vote is equal to a sensible man's? If all the energy that is put into getting votes could be turned to useful work, what a nation we could be!"
♥ "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 that 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. 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, balking at the newest hurdle."
♥ "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 full speed 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."
♥ 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 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.
♥ News reached us mainly by two channels: the private link with E.B.C., 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 honor to the traditions of its people.
♥ 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 leaned 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 way, fountains, lampposts, 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 till 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 slipslop 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.
♥ 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.
♥ Overnight the combined E.B.C. and B.B.C. transmitters abandoned all pretense 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 through 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 rumors 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.
♥ "We could make out somehow. It's 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 get at them!
"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 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's 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 that."
♥ Where to? We don't know yet. Somewhere warmer. Perhaps we shall find only bullets where we try to land, but even that will be better than slow starvation in bitter cold.
And Phyllis agrees. "We'll be taking 'a long shot, Watson; a very long shot!'" she says. "But, after all, what is the good of having been given so much luck if you don't go on using it?"
♥ Bocker shook his head. "'Oh ye of little faith!' This isn't Noah's world, you know. The twentieth century isn't a thing to be pushed over quite as easily as all that."
♥ "But, A.B.," Phyllis reminded him, "we just drank to 'Recovery.' Recovery?-with nine out of ten gone?"
He looked steadily at her, and nodded. "Certainly," he said, with confidence. "Five million can still be a nation. Why, damn it, there were no more of us than that in the time of the first Elizabeth. We made ourselves count then, and, by God, we can do it again. But it'll mean working-that's why I'm here. There's a job for you two.
.."Now, imagine a country which is nothing but small groups and independent communities scattered all over the place. All communications gone, nearly all of them barricaded off for defense, scarcely anyone with any idea of what may be going on even a mile or two outside his area. Well now, what have you got to do to get a condition like that into working order again? First, I think, you've got to find a way into these tight, isolated pickets so that you can break them up. To do that you have first to establish some kind of central authority, and then to let the people know that there is a central authority-and give them confidence in it. You want to start parties and groups who will be the local representatives of the central authority. And how do you reach them? Why, you just start talking to them and telling them-by radio.
"You find a factory, and start it working on turning out small radio receivers and batteries that you can drop from the air. When you can, you begin to follow that up with receiver-transmitter sets to give you two-way communication with the larger groups first, and then the smaller ones. You break down the isolation, and the sense of it. One group begins to hear what other groups are doing. Self-confidence begins to revive. There's a feeling of a hand at the helm again to give them hope. They begin to feel there's something to work for. Then one lot begins to co-operate with, and trade with, the lot next door. And then you have started something indeed. It's a job our ancestors had to do with generations of men on horseback-by radio we ought to be able to make a thundering good start on it in a couple of years. But there will have to be staff-there'll have to be people who know how to put across what might be put across. So, what do you say?"
♥ We went on sitting there, and finally Phyllis spoke again. "I was just thinking-Nothing is really new, is it? Once upon a time there was a great plain, covered with forests and full of wild animals. I expect some of our ancestors used to live there, and hunt there, and make love there. Then, one day, the water came up and drowned it all-and there was the North Sea.
"I think we have been here before. And we got through that time."