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→"As usual." Collins shrugged. He was a young man, twenty years younger than John, and still had the cynical indifference of youth to the unfortunate. "I've looked at a few scratches and sewn up a few cuts; all I can do, really." He sipped at his tea. "How's the new generation?"

→"Thanks." John rubbed his eyes and wondered if he should take another benzedrine tablet. He decided against it. The supply was getting low and he had driven himself too far as it was. He sipped at the hot brew, grimacing at the herbal tang, and felt brief regret at lost pleasures. "How is it going?"

→"Tea?"

→He started, blinking and feeling the sudden pounding of his heart as he surged upwards from the desk. Collins stood before him, a steaming jug in one hand and some thick, cracked china cups in the other.

→"John."

→Tiredness clawed at him and he almost yielded to it, resting his head on his folded arms and closing his eyes, letting his body relax and slump against the edge of the desk. Memories came swimming to the forefront of his consciousness—white-tiled corridors and polished floors, rows of neat white beds and attentive, neat, white nurses. The gleam of sterile steel and the glare of brilliant lights. Ranked ampules of drugs, the slender perfection of hypodermics, the miracle of modern surgery.

→He watched them file out, knowing that half of their expected children would carry the inheritance of their parents' gift of blindness, distorted bones, congenital disease as proved by the Wasserman and smear tests. And yet there was nothing he could do to prevent it. No doctor can cure a patient if the patient won't take the trouble to be cured. Even if he has the intent he still needs the essential drugs and medicines, and the drugs had vanished along with the thousand other needs of civilization when the alphabet bombs had drifted down from the sullen clouds.

→They didn't, of course; how could they? Drink plenty of milk—when a cow was something most of them had only heard of. Wash frequently —when there was no soap. Stay away from radioactive areas—when they didn't know the meaning of the word. Plenty of vegetables—nettles, lettuce, berries, some wizened fruit. All hard to gather. All hard to cook—and there were plenty of rusty cans still to be found—if you went into the radioactive areas. Don't drink too much—when it was their only pleasure. Rest—how?

→"Yes, doctor."

→"You'll get over that. Now this is what you must do. Drink plenty of milk, boil all water, wash frequently, eat plenty of vegetables, stay away from all radioactive areas, refrain from lifting heavy weights, don't wear tight clothing. Don't drink too much. Get plenty of rest. You understand?"

→"Sick, doctor."

→"How are you feeling?"

→Blood counts. Geiger tests. Tracer elements. Albumen reaction. Teeth and skin. Wasserman and smear. Test for diabetes, for cancer, for radiation sickness. Test for vitamin deficiency, for calcium lack, for malnutrition. He didn't have to test for intelligence.

→He sat at his desk and stared at the file of maternity cases Sally had sent in from the waiting room. They were all the same, dull-eyed, indifferent, without imagination or the subtle something which would inevitably have driven them from their tiny villages into the big cities. They accepted life as it came and already most of them were ridden with superstition. Tiredly he went through the routine, knowing that he could have been an African witch doctor, masked and mumbling incantations, for all the impression he was making.

→John wished that he had died with it.

→A man can lose a leg and he will live. A man can have his limbs severed, bis eyes taken out, his ears destroyed, his senses dulled and rendered useless, and still he can remain a reasoning, intelligent entity. But no nation can have the heart and guts ripped from it and hope to recover, to carry on as usual, to remain a close-knit unity. England was dead—but it was a long time dying.

→But it hadn't ended there.

→It had begun three years before, when the soughing whine of falling missiles had painted the night with flame and mushroom clouds of smoke. It had begun when London vanished in a cloud of radioactive glory, when Liverpool and Newcastle, Glasgow and Manchester, Bristol and Portsmouth and a dozen other big cities had glowed and slumped and ran into heaps of molten slag. It had begun within the space of twelve hours in which half the population had died with merciful swiftness and it had carried over for another seven days, during which three quarters of the remainder had spewed out their lives in uncontrollable vomiting.

→The procession to hell began.

→She flushed, a rising tide of red suffusing her sallow features and restoring for a moment something of her lost beauty. For a moment she clung to him; then, as habit and ingrained duty overcame desire, reached for the cards and began to call out names.