It is just a year since we drove the usurpers out of England.
(About the robots that they left behind, my hunch was right; for they
are learning to take care of themselves, to walk and speak and act
decently, and many have even begun to read and think again. When I
consider this, I am inclined to go to my knees in thanks. What _might_
have happened...!)
For a while I could not realize that my wild bluff had actually
worked. I kept expecting a trick, a wholesale re-invasion of our world
by the ogres. Even yet it is hard to comprehend. I suppose the only
explanation is that all created things hate and fear death: in their
fashion, the usurpers were just as scared of dying as the humblest
human, and must have decided that the vicarious pleasures of earth
weren't worth it.
Selfish fear gripped them, selfish deadly fear of murder in the dark.
They shrugged themselves out of their stolen bodies, and abandoned
the world they had hoped to conquer. The simplest of weapons, the
easiest to employ, had done our work for us in a manner beyond our most
optimistic dreams. The simplest weapon ... fear.
Marion and I were married, of course, a year ago. The delirious
happiness of our marriage has not cooled for me. Some day, perhaps, my
feeling will have calmed to a steady, staid, cozy sort of affection;
but not yet. Not for a long time yet.
I bought a little bookshop in Bury St. Edmunds, and took in Geoff
and Alec as partners. It's the proper life for a quartet of reformed
crusaders like the three of us and Marion. Peaceful, contemplative, and
yet stimulating. We like it. And we like being together.
John is back on the seas as ship's doctor, the Colonel is laired up at
the Albany, and Arold lives in Kirkcudbright, swilling great vats of
Scotch whisky, I have no doubt. One day soon we must all get together
for a grand reunion....
* * * * *
But a man cannot walk through fire without being burnt; and as there
cannot be many such conflagrations as that through which I groped and
fled and sought my way, it is only natural that my mind carries even
yet a few scars of the burning. I do not expect--I dare not hope--that
they will ever be wholly healed.
In certain moods, usually on dreary days when the sky is overcast
and the sun is hidden, or sometimes at night when the great yellow
hunter's moon rides in a black sky, the horror of the usurpers comes
upon me with fresh and lurid obsession, more appalling than ever it was
in the weeks of my hectic and headlong warfare. Then I go out into the
streets or wander on the moorlands and fight with my hallucinations. A
thousand times I tell myself that _they_ are gone, that the world is
clean and inviolate again; and a thousand times I hear in reply the
hideous laughter of the fear that lives forever at the bottom of my
soul.
I walk past a tavern, and see its door swing open, and catch a glimpse
of the barman; and he seems to me in that moment to be, not a jovial
red-faced fellow, but a twisting writhing monster shot with vivid
lights and fringed with rippling pseudopods. A friend comes up behind
to clap me on the shoulder, and I dread to turn and look at him, for
fear of what he may be. I hear a snatch of speech from a wireless set,
and the soft cultured voice emanates, I believe in a sudden jolt of
panic, from the lips of a marionette-creature controlled by a hellish
and malevolent incubus.
So at last I take my terror home to Marion, and lose it in her arms....