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all of Africa down with a mutant strain of beriberi. ’84 was the year of the poisoned potatoes and sinistral periwinkles, the year it rained frogs over wide areas of France, the year the cane-pest shot sugar beet right up to the top of the crops.
    “And not only Ma Nature but Technology, too, came unstuck in ’84. The Lake District chemically polluted—permanently; nuclear power stations at Loch Torr on one side of the Atlantic and Long Island on the other melting down almost simultaneously; the Americans bringing back a ‘bug’ from Mars (see, even a real Martian invasion); oil discovered in the Mediterranean, and new fast-drilling techniques cracking the ocean floor and allowing it to leak and leak and leak—and even Red Adair shaking his head in dismay. How do you plug a leak two hundred fathoms deep and a mile long? And that jewel of oceans turning black, and Cyprus a great white tombstone in a lake of pitch. ‘Aphrodite Rising From The High-Grade.’
    “Then ’85 and ’86; and they were strange, too, because they were so damned quiet! The lull before the storm, so to speak. And then—
    “Then it was ’87, ’88 and ’89. The American space-bug leaping to Australia and New Zealand and giving both places a monstrous malaise. No one doing any work for six months; cattle and sheep dead in their millions; entire cities and towns burning down because nobody bothered to call out the fire services, or they didn’t bother to come…. And all the world’s beaches strewn with countless myriads of great dead octopuses, a new species (or a mutant strain) with three rows of suckers to each tentacle; and their stink utterly unbearable as they rotted. A plague of great, fat seagulls. All the major volcanoes erupting in unison. Meteoric debris making massive holes in the ionosphere. A new killer cancer caused by sunburn. The common cold cured!—and uncommon leprosy spreading like wildfire through the Western World.
    “And finally—
    “Well, that was ‘When.’ It was also, I fancy, ‘Where’ and ‘How.’ As to ‘Why’—I give a mental shrug. I’m tired, probably hungry. I have some sort of lethargy—the spacebug, 1 suppose—and I reckon it won’t be long now. I had hoped that getting this down on paper might keep me active, mentally if not physically. But….
    “ Why?
    “Well, I think I’ve answered that one, too.
    “Ma Nature strikes back. Get rid of the human vermin. They’re lousing up your planet! And maybe that’s what gave Her the idea. If fire and flood and disease and disaster and war couldn’t do the trick, well, what else could She do? They advise you to fight fire with fire, so why not vermin with vermin?”
    “They appeared almost overnight, five times larger than their immediate progenitors and growing bigger with each successive hatching; and unlike the new octopus they didn’t die; and their incubation period down to less than a week. The superlice. All Man’s little body parasites, all of his tiny, personal vampires, growing in the space of a month to things as big as your fist. Leaping things, flying things, walking sideways things. To quote a certain Irishman: ‘An’ Christ—they suck like crazy!’
    “They’ve sucked, all right. They’ve sucked the world to death. New habits, new protections—new immunities and near-invulnerability—to go with their new size and strength. The meek inheriting the Earth? Stamp on them and they scurry away. Spray them with lethal chemicals and they bathe in them. Feed them DDT and they develop a taste for it. ‘An’ Christ—they suck like crazy!’
    “And the whole world down with the creeping, sleeping sickness. We didn’t even want to fight them! Vampires, and they’ve learned new tricks. Camouflage…. Clinging to walls above doors, they look like bricks or tiles. And when you go through the door…. And their bite acts like a sort of LSD. Brings on mild hallucinations, a feeling of well-being, a kind of euphoria. In the cities,