nevertheless penetrates aft.

I hear all electricity has been cut off. Grass in Yorkshire.

_October 25_: F came aboard with the other scientists and immediately
wanted to know why we didnt set sail. I asked her if her work could be
carried on any more easily at sea. She shrugged her shoulders. I pointed
out that only rats leave a sinking ship and England was far from
overcome. She favored me with one of her fixed stares.

"You are dithery, Weener. Your epigrams have lost their jaunty air of
discovery and your face is almost green."

"You would not expect me to remain unaffected by the events around us,
Miss Francis."

"Wouldnt I?" she retorted incomprehensibly and went below to her
cabin-laboratory.

The Grass is reported in Essex and Hertfordshire. I understand there are
at least two other ships equipped for research and manned by English
scientists. It would serve F right if they perfected a counteragent
first.

October 26: Have ordered our accompanying ships to lie offshore, lest
they be boarded by fearcrazed refugees, for the Grass is now in the
vicinity of London and England is in a horrible state.

October 27: BBC transmitting from Penzance. Faint.

_101._ _November 3_: On board the _Sisyphus_ off Scilly. The last days
of England have passed. Heightening the horror, the BBC in its final
moments forwent its policy of soothing its listeners and urging calmness
upon them. Instead, it organized an amazing news service, using
thousands of pigeons carrying messages from eyewitnesses to the station
at Penzance to give a minutebyminute account of the end. Dispassionately
and detachedly, as though this were some ordinary disaster, announcer
after announcer went on the air and read reports; heartpiercing,
anticlimactic, tragic, trivial, noble and thoroughly English reports....

The people vented their futile rage and terror in mass pyromania.
Building after building, city after city was burned to the ground. But,
according to the BBC, the murderous frenzy of the Continent was not
duplicated. Inanimate things suffered; priceless art objects were kicked
around in the streets, but houses were carefully emptied of inhabitants
before being put to the torch.

These were the spectacular happenings; the emphatic events. Behind them,
and in the majority, were quieter, duller transactions. Churches and
chapels filled with people sitting quiet in pews, meditating; gatherings
in the country, where the participants look