"You'll be able to afford it, old chap, should you live to be a hundred," I told him. "It was nearly all your doing, yours and Geoff's, that we won our fight."
The waiter brought a bottle of Piper Heidsieck '43. The Colonel stood up to propose the first toast.
"Gentlemen and Marion, I give you ex-Sergeant Henry Johnson. There is only one thing we can say of him: greater love hath no man, that a man lay down his life for his friends."
We drank standing. The waiter popped up with a second bottle. We resumed our seats, and Alec said, "The next is mine. I drink to the good green earth, and the race of men who live on it. Maybe they don't go about slopping over with gratitude for its beauty, but I think they appreciate it just the same, and I'm damned glad we saved it for 'em!"
Half-laughing, we drank that one, and many more. I drank to my Jaguar, now a deep red color and never to be identified with the sinister black car which flew out of Manchester that night so long ago. Doctor John drank to Jerry Wolfe, who first discovered the abominable race of beast-folk. Geoff toasted our army of rogues.
They all drank to our happiness, Marion's and mine. Then we called for a fifth bottle, and drank a tall glass down in memory of our victory, total and forever final, over the beast-folk of the silver land. I twirled my glass and stared at it, my eyes unfocused slightly, and I mused on them.
The usurpers....
Sir Lawrence Hockling, to give him his human name, had been as good as his word. Within a day, all through the land, the aliens had begun to decamp in disgust. As messengers raced behind the veil to tell their brothers the sad news, the exodus spread, first through the great centers of population, London and Birmingham and Sheffield, Cardiff and Liverpool, and thence into the countryside until all England was touched by this incredible mass desertion of a world, the beasts relinquished their stolen bodies and retreated into their own dimension. Well within my time limit of three days, the flight was completed. Some twenty-seven thousand robots were abandoned in the withdrawal.
Yet these puppets, these husks, had not died. They had become brainless, true; incapable of performing the simplest acts of caring for themselves; but they lived on. It was more horrible than their deaths would have been, I thought ... and yet there was a ray of hope. I had talked it over with my friends, and they agreed there was a chance of its coming true.