(About the robots that they left behind, my hunch was right; for they are learning to take care of themselves, to walk and speak and act decently, and many have even begun to read and think again. When I consider this, I am inclined to go to my knees in thanks. What might have happened...!)
For a while I could not realize that my wild bluff had actually worked. I kept expecting a trick, a wholesale re-invasion of our world by the ogres. Even yet it is hard to comprehend. I suppose the only explanation is that all created things hate and fear death: in their fashion, the usurpers were just as scared of dying as the humblest human, and must have decided that the vicarious pleasures of earth weren't worth it.
Selfish fear gripped them, selfish deadly fear of murder in the dark. They shrugged themselves out of their stolen bodies, and abandoned the world they had hoped to conquer. The simplest of weapons, the easiest to employ, had done our work for us in a manner beyond our most optimistic dreams. The simplest weapon ... fear.
Marion and I were married, of course, a year ago. The delirious happiness of our marriage has not cooled for me. Some day, perhaps, my feeling will have calmed to a steady, staid, cozy sort of affection; but not yet. Not for a long time yet.
I bought a little bookshop in Bury St. Edmunds, and took in Geoff and Alec as partners. It's the proper life for a quartet of reformed crusaders like the three of us and Marion. Peaceful, contemplative, and yet stimulating. We like it. And we like being together.
John is back on the seas as ship's doctor, the Colonel is laired up at the Albany, and Arold lives in Kirkcudbright, swilling great vats of Scotch whisky, I have no doubt. One day soon we must all get together for a grand reunion....
But a man cannot walk through fire without being burnt; and as there cannot be many such conflagrations as that through which I groped and fled and sought my way, it is only natural that my mind carries even yet a few scars of the burning. I do not expect—I dare not hope—that they will ever be wholly healed.
In certain moods, usually on dreary days when the sky is overcast and the sun is hidden, or sometimes at night when the great yellow hunter's moon rides in a black sky, the horror of the usurpers comes upon me with fresh and lurid obsession, more appalling than ever it was in the weeks of my hectic and headlong warfare. Then I go out into the streets or wander on the moorlands and fight with my hallucinations. A thousand times I tell myself that they are gone, that the world is clean and inviolate again; and a thousand times I hear in reply the hideous laughter of the fear that lives forever at the bottom of my soul.
I walk past a tavern, and see its door swing open, and catch a glimpse of the barman; and he seems to me in that moment to be, not a jovial red-faced fellow, but a twisting writhing monster shot with vivid lights and fringed with rippling pseudopods. A friend comes up behind to clap me on the shoulder, and I dread to turn and look at him, for fear of what he may be. I hear a snatch of speech from a wireless set, and the soft cultured voice emanates, I believe in a sudden jolt of panic, from the lips of a marionette-creature controlled by a hellish and malevolent incubus.