I retreated; and knew it to be a retreat, off the plant – swaddled roof, burrowing through the brambles and damaged branches back to the floor of my hidden copse. I folded up the ladder and put it back in it’s corner before returning to the cage to see how all my little friends were doing within. The cage was damaged in a couple of places and the evil birds had found their way within to the bounty of berries that I had spent years nurturing. I did not begrudge the birds a meal; the cage was now hard to see, the way the brambles had passed beyond it’s limit. I harvested spinach, tomatoes butternut and fruit; I had lived out of tins, I felt, for quite long enough. I didn’t quite know what my tall blond friends in their metallic blue tracksuits were actually doing; and I wasn’t in much of a hurry to find out. I did not argue right if way with people nine feet tall; and that all of them, twelve or more; were nine feet and taller I viewed with tender care. The valley was, I felt, quite big enough for everybody, and I was quite content to stay in my house until they went to wherever they were going; hopefully some distance away from where my house was hidden within the broken forest. I let my fire go out, cooking on the embers and remembering that smoke was the surest giveaway of any hideout. I had the solar panels, wind turbine, inverter and batteries; my next meal would be cooked on dancing electrons and the smoke and ashes could rest. Or gas; methane from the bio-digester; I had both options, as the panels, digester and wind turbine carried on anyway. The wind turbine, hidden within the copse, was protected from the fierce winds, but often enough was static in the wind shadow. Many of the old appliances wouldn’t work as intended again; those to do with communication; television and cellular phones had no main purpose; and no signal, although they were interesting toys. I wondered then if the radio, a compact and powerful transceiver, might have something to report; and I addressed it with this in mind. I unplugged the microphone first; it was a Vox unit, and I didn’t want my breathing broadcast across the valley, not with those tall blond people passing by. Please, pass by, leave that heap of broken trees alone, really, there is nothing of interest within, that was my breath even as I poked and pried and heard what the airwaves had to say. No carrier. No signal; not even the hiss to suggest that there were hand-held units in the vicinity; and this across the useful range of the device. I had often enough picked up the signal from cellular phones with this transceiver; and the conversations were not as encrypted as the Clergy had us believing. Nothing. My tall blond friends, then, had other means of communication; or possibly they were not communicating; or mayhaps they had nothing to say that would make my eavesdropping worthwhile. I settled down behind the closed curtains, content with the darkness. I had become used to darkness over the past few months, hiding in my forest keep against the ague of a nauseous world. I brooded on what I had seen; the whole view, not just the few individuals who had sent me scurrying for the safety of my rabbit hole. Rabbits are wise, and they know who to trust. In my present circumstances, this was nobody at all. The wave; the crystal wave, interested me at the time, possibly more than the tall blonds. From what I had seen, the wave was a mile high above the top of the hill, and although I could only see the leading edge of the wave, there was nothing to suggest that it got smaller as it went north. It was, I felt, a lot of water, and I wondered if there was any left in the oceans of the world for the greedy rays of sunlight to suck up. I also wondered, somewhat morbidly, how long it would take that unnatural glacier to melt; if it ever did. I supposed that the meltwater would be channeled in a safe fashion along the stream beds in the area; or at least I hoped that this would happen. I speculated on the possibility that it might thaw as fast as it had frozen, and these lucubrations made me distinctly uncomfortable. However, logic came to my aid; and I calculated that temperatures well beyond a thousand degrees Fahrenheit were needed to thaw that monster of ice; so it wasn’t likely to happen; unless there was a volcanic eruption in those lava hills where the ice rested. This wandering of my mind; this meaningless wool gathering, made me even more uncomfortable than before. For the hill’s were of lava; and had come from volcanoes once active in this place; that time over five hundred million years before. But there was indeed a chance, with the ague of the hill’s around me, that the ancient vents might be forced open again. Meanwhile, as I was frightening myself with unlikely and futile speculations, so extreme as to barely warrant calculation, something else was happening; something that I never saw, never knew and only pieced together later, as that spectacularly remote chance paid off, and the rank outsider of probability romped home to take yet another golden trophy. I was dissecting granadillas from the vine and listening to the wind, picking up again as night came closer, wondering if the panels had packed enough charge in the batteries to be useful; for the first time in several months. The wind picked up, the hollow spiral of thunder from a ground strike uncomfortably close by, then once again came the rain, settled, almost quiet, persistent and set for, I supposed, another few months falling. The evidence was there; and the new rain that fell under the New Moon; and the huge rise in sea level; all was evidence that I have fitted together to draw the conclusions that seemed to be self-evident truth at the time, although they spoke of a system of chance that shattered the mind, and all the laws of chance, to contemplate. It was the second near-hit in but a couple of months; and, like the first, its effects were cataclysmic. The second asteroid, it might have been a comet or some such thing, was large, but nowhere near as huge as the first one. I guess that it was about six hundred miles in diameter, not really big enough to throw the Earth; or either moon, about. But it came from the deep darkness, to swing into a degrading orbit around the Earth; and there it melted. After all, the super-hot layer above the Earth is four and a half thousand degrees Fahrenheit; more than enough to melt a ball of ice even if it was six hundred miles wide. It melted; vaporised; and drifted slowly downward, filtering through the atmosphere to come down, heavily, as rain. There were times, frequent and painful times, when we would look up at the merciless blue skies and petition, fervently and passionately, for rain. These requests, apparently had been stacked up, then delivered upon during a dark four month period. It was a wet and sodden period. Fortunately a lot of plants had hooked themselves firmly into the ground and held on in the face of grave odds against them. This tenacity helped prevent total erosion of the soil. Significant amounts of soil were lost, undoubtedly to enrich the vital nature of the deeper ocean. The seas became very much less salty in this time; and the sea level rise almost four and a half thousand feet. I know this, as my little hidden forest keep was at six millipedes; six thousand feet above the old sea level; and when I go onto the roof and have a look around the vastly changed landscape, I can see the ocean to the south east, huge and unanswerable at high tide. During low tide, it withdraws almost to the limit of my field glasses’ range; but the huge, sticky mud beach remains. It is vast, a sea of mud that goes on to the horizon; the slope of land there is quite shallow, so the intertidal region stretches for something like fifteen miles in places. These orders to view were few and far between, as the cloak of rain was solid, rain heavy and dark in the cold. It was a solid veil that hid many secrets, and the silence, but for wind, rain and thunder, was a tangible thing. I had been relatively undisturbed for the duration of the rain; and although it was raining, the sky was often quite clear; this made me realise that this was “new” water, coming to Earth from space, and not really ordinary cloud-borne precipitation. The solar panels were charging the batteries through the twelve kilo volt amp inverter, but I hesitated to use a lot of current for fear of generating a signal that those tall blond people could detect, so when I used power, it was at short intervals not at the same time each day or night. With the sun in the sky I rapidly came to the conclusion that the sidereal day had lengthened significantly. This was slightly annoying, as I could no longer use my various timepieces. To get any idea of the correct time, I had to add ninety-seven minutes at least onto the clock each day. Finally, I put a sundial into the lift beneath the clear solar panels; this gave me a better idea of the time during the day, though the sundial hours were four minutes longer than they had previously been. The calendar was also hopelessly out of whack; days, weeks, months and years in a meaningless morass. I finally decided that it was time for a complete new chronological system anyway; one a bit more in tune with the two moons and the period around the sun; which I didn’t have much hope of calculating. I did determine that the old moon, showing a different face each full moon, took thirty days, of twenty-five and a half hours each, to turn about through her cycle. The New Moon; well, that was something different and entirely new, and I was soon learning to dread a full New Moon; seldom visible. It was during that full moon that the tides became very bad, and the storms were worse. When both moons rode together at full, the world seemed to go berserk, and the heightened tides came nearly to the bottom of the street, weeded and damaged and unknown to wheeled vehicles. This was nearly five miles higher than normal; and I decided that I was not so keen on a house on the beach. I measured the transit of the New Moon; and thereby received my first bit of really bad news. The first transit that I measured was ninety-four days, the second was ninety-eight, and the third transit was eighty-nine days. It seemed that the Earth’s new companion was not in a stable orbit; and this was not good. In fact, it was very bad news; but I temporised at this point. I suppose I was making a mistake; I hoped that I was making a mistake; that I was not measuring the transit accurately. I hoped so, as I knew well enough that I was very impatient and often cut corners with ninety day projects. However, the system that I was using was fairly fail-safe, and apart from sleeping through a day; or not seeing the moon because of cloud, I just didn’t see how I could be making a mistake. Nevertheless astronomy, even local stuff like a new moon, wasn’t really my thing. I was more interested in new plants; and there were plenty of these. It was as if all of the factors acting on the tired old Earth were having distinct and powerful effects on plants and animals. I didn’t take much interest in animals; I never did; and there wasn’t really much to see in that respect during the early days; but the birds and plants were limping back from the brutal strafing that had just passed. There were more plants now; many more and much larger than before. My tiny forest was hidden a sea of new green, saplings reaching up, vines and grasses and meadow flowers taking back that which had been taken from them in the building of the suburb. The profile of the land around me had been gentled by that mist of green; the rubble of broken houses and other buildings fading into the rampant green. The roads and other lines that had defined the suburb and surrounding squatter camps have faded away; but I knew that they were still there beneath that living layer. I didn’t go out much; and I didn’t cross the old property line unless my reasons were urgent, as going out meant getting wet. Most of the goods I could borrow from the shops were getting a bit mature for my taste, unless wrapped up in plastic or glass. Clothes on the racks in the ruined shops were also beginning to show their true colours, and took quite a lot of washing before being brought into service. Tins, some of them, were still good, but the smell in the shops put me off, and my trips for resources were as quick and clinical as I could manage. My expeditions to look at and bring home new and strange plants lasted longer but did not go far. I was by that time very concerned about the possibility of coming home and finding other people in residence. It wasn’t very likely, as I had seen very few people since the coming of the New Moon, but it was nevertheless a chance that I did not want to take, as everything that I needed to be comfortable – more than just survival, was in the old house. One of the resources that I was eager to find was cement; a very useful commodity, but it was also a very perishable resource, and I didn’t actually want it on hand until I was ready to use it. Cement was also not one of the most portable resource, especially as there were effectively no flat roads for wheeled barrows and carts. I determined that I had to plan well, and execute my groundwork, in advance of the difficult task of going out and stealing tonnes of cement. These local journeys took time, and energy; and patience, but I did not let them dominate my resources. I was too interested in what the tired old Earth; and the New Moon, were doing, and how the changes I had seen and noted were going to influence life hereafter. It was an interesting; absorbing and slightly amusing problem; especially if a chap had my somewhat broad sense of humour. For a start, I could not see things going back to “normal”; whatever that had ever been. Numbers came to mind, numbers of people; I supposed that the entire human population could be numbered in thousands. I also didn’t see that those who were left setting up shop as they had done before. The old petroleum economy had, I recalled, been firmly discouraged. I supposed that wind and solar electricity would be useful as a startup for something new; but then I realised that I was very tired and I did not want a huge, intereactive society full of braggadocios trying to impress each other. I did not see myself taking part in, or trying to rebuild, something like that. I had experienced it once, and that was quite enough. I found that, apart from the dearth of intelligent conversation, I was enjoying the solitude. Nobody had called me out for months to fix a stove or a plug socket; and I didn’t mind at all. I made sure that I had enough exercise; with cutting firewood and planting new, interesting plants, I had enough to do; and I spent my spare time writing and reading, as I had before. I would often go out at night and view the strange skies, seeking answers that hadn’t been there before; and were not there now. I had found and repaired a bicycle, with the fatuous intention of looking further afield for resources, but had quickly discovered that this wasn’t a very good idea. On my first trip out, following the morass of potholes where the main road had once been, I had come to the northern frontier of what I saw was now an island. To the north, maybe five miles from my house, the land falls away sharply; and this low-lying land, a good five hundred yards lower down, was awash with turbid water. I had made my way over onto the higher ground beside the road, and surveyed the land below with my field glasses; the water went around the higher ground all the way to the railway tracks due west of my position. I knew that to the southwest the coast was clear and visible, and the mountain to the east was often partially cut off during high tide. But to the north of where I stand; this bit of ocean was clearly here all the time; and it was quite likely that I was on an island barely two hundred by fifty miles, if I remember my contour lines correctly, and if the configuration of the land hadn’t changed. I knew that to the west of the ground that I was on, the whole escarpment fell away; if I went west for far enough, I would probably come to another permanent patch of brine. I supposed that this was all to the good, but I felt a tiny bit cut off about the whole thing. I decided then that I needed to know big the island was, and what towns within its coastline were still intact; I could see that the big city to the north, on its fabulous and mythical bed of gold, had likely sunk into the vast chasm created by faults and years of mining, if it wasn’t already below the level of the new sea. Whatever it’s situation, I would not be harvesting it’s bounty in the foreseeable future. I needed, I realised, an aerial vehicle of some sort, since I had lost my batman suit some time ago. I also saw, feeling the breeze riffling my hair at something less than ninety knots, that anything that flew here would be at the mercy of the wind, no kind thing. There was not only the wind to consider; I had gone on this mission during a break in the clouds and storms, but that they were on their way back I could see; and nothing would fly through those conditions on their way. It was on me to get home, as rapidly as convenient, should I care to miss the hailstones on their way. I had noted when trying to ride my new bicycle, that going against the wind wasn’t an option. I had set out during a lull in the wind before dawn, but the wind was definitely more than I could cope with. I didn’t see my way clear using a hang-glider, for instance; and there was the detail that I have not spent much time at the controls of any aircraft recently. I returned home, chastened and discreet; I remembered the tall blond people wearing blue tracksuits, and although I have never seen them since, I didn’t quite put them down as a delusion or hallucination just yet. I suppose that they might be observing from a safe distance; but I didn’t feel the need to get in touch with them; or anybody else; just yet. I remembered then the crystal wave; the piece of massive ice that had stood on the crest of the hill next to me; it was very much smaller than before, and I had seen no trace of it on the low ground below the escarpment. I supposed that months of rain and nearly warm sunlight; and the sea below, had all taken their toll on the little ice cube; but I was glad to see that it wasn’t the leading edge of a mammoth glacier, or part of the northern ice come down for a quick visit. I kept the bicycle, although I could not ride it back home, and made my way across the green and verdant slopes, back to the little forest within where was my hidden forest keep; hidden from all eyes; for now.