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Man, and for ‘Us’ read ‘the world,’ this Earth which once was ours. Yes, there have been strange years, but never a one as strange as this.
    “A penance? The ultimate penance? Or has Old Ma Nature finally decided to give us a hand? Perhaps she’s stood off, watching us try our damnedest for so damned long to exterminate ourselves, and now She’s sick to death of the whole damned scene. ‘OK,’ She says, ‘have it your own way.’ And She gives the nod to Her Brother, the Old Boy with the scythe. And He sighs and steps forward, and—
    “And it is a plague of sorts; and certainly it is DOOM; and a fire that rages across the world and devours all…Or will that come later? The cleansing flame from which Life’s bright phoenix shall rise again? There will always be the sea. And how many ages this time before something gets left by the tide, grows lungs, jumps up on its feet and walks…and reaches for a club?
    “ When did itbegin?
    “I remember an Irish stoker who came into a bar dirty and drunk. His sleeves were rolled up and he scratched at hairy arms. I thought it was the heat. ‘Hot? Damned right, sur,’ he said, ‘an’ hotter by far down below—an’ lousy!’ He unrolled a newspaper on the bar and vigorously brushed at his matted forearm. Things fell onto the newsprint and moved, slowly. He popped them with a cigarette. “’Crabs, sur!’ he cried. ‘An’ Christ!—they suck like crazy!’
    “ When?
    “There have always been strange years—plague years, drought years, war and wonder years—so it’s difficult to pin it down. But the last twenty years…they have been strange. When, exactly !Who can say? But let’s give it a shot. Let’s start with the 70s—say, ’76?—the drought.
    “There was so little water in the Thames that they said the river was running backwards. The militants blamed the Soviets. New laws were introduced to conserve water. People were taken to court for watering flowers. Some idiot calculated that a pound of excreta could be satisfactorily washed away with six pints of water, and people put bricks in their WC cisterns. Someone else said you could bathe comfortably in four inches of water, and if you didn’t use soap the resultant mud could be thrown on the garden. The thing snowballed into a national campaign to ‘Save It!’—and in October the skies were still cloudless, the earth parched, and imported rainmakers danced and pounded their tom-toms at Stonehenge. Forest and heath fires were daily occurrences and reservoirs became dustbowls. Sun-worshippers drank Coke and turned very brown….
    “And finally it rained, and it rained, and it rained. Wide-spread flooding, rivers bursting their banks, gardens (deprived all summer) inundated and washed away. Millions of tons of water, and not a pound of excreta to be disposed of. A strange year, ’76. And just about every year since, come to think.
    “’77, and stories leak out of the Ukraine of fifty thousand square miles turned brown and utterly barren in the space of a single week. Since then the spread has been very slow, but it hasn’t stopped. The Russians blamed ‘us’ and we accused ‘them’ of testing a secret weapon.
    “’79 and ’80, and oil tankers sinking or grounding themselves left, right and center. Miles-long oil slicks and chemicals jettisoned at sea, and whales washed up on the beaches, and Greenpeace, and the Japanese slaughtering dolphins. Another drought, this time in Australia, and a plague of mice to boot. Some Aussie commenting that ‘The poor ’roos are dying in their thousands—and a few aboes, too….’ And great green swarms of aphids and the skies bright with ladybirds.
    “Lots of plagues, in fact. We were being warned, you see?
    “And ’84! Ah—1984! Good old George!
    “He was wrong, of course, for it wasn’t Big Brother at all. It was Big Sister—Ma Nature Herself. And in 1984 She really started to go off the rails. ’84 was half of India eaten by locusts and