Journey in Hope (Chapter 13)
Now I was really on my own, I could not shut out the sense of loneliness. It came upon me as it had on that day when we had split up to search for Michael Beadley—only with double the force…. Until then I had always thought of loneliness as something negative—an absence of company, and, of course, something temporary…. That day I had learned that it was much more. It was something which could press and oppress, could distort the ordinary and play tricks with the mind. Something which lurked inimically all around, stretching the nerves and twanging them with alarms, never letting one forget that there was no one to help, no one to care. It showed one as an atom adrift in vastness, and it waited all the time its chance to frighten and frighten horribly—that was what loneliness was really trying to do; and that was what one must never let it do….

To deprive a gregarious creature of companionship is to maim it, to outrage its nature. The prisoner and the cenobite are aware that the herd exists beyond their exile; they are an aspect of it. But when the herd no longer exists, there is, for the herd creature, no longer entity. He is a part of no whole, a freak without a place. If he cannot hold on to his reason, then he is lost indeed: most utterly and most fearfully lost, so that he becomes no more than the twitch in the limb of a corpse.

P174 Kindle

Cenobite
noun
A member of a religious group living together in a monastic community

World Narrowing (Chapter 15)
Up there,” I went on, “up there there were—and maybe there still are—unknown numbers of satellite weapons circling round and round the Earth. Just a lot of dormant menaces, touring around, waiting for someone, or something, to set them off. What was in them? You don’t know; I don’t know. Top-secret stuff. All we’ve heard is guesses—fissile materials, radioactive dusts, bacteria, viruses…Now suppose that one type happened to have been constructed especially to emit radiations that our eyes would not stand—something that would burn out or at least damage the optic nerve.”

Josella gripped my hand. “Oh no, Bill! No, they couldn’t…. That’d be—diabolical…. Oh, I can’t believe——Oh no, Bill!”

“My sweet, all the things up there were diabolical…. Do you doubt that if it could be done, someone would do it?…Then suppose there were a mistake, or perhaps an accident—maybe such an accident as actually encountering a shower of comet debris, if you like—which starts some of these things popping….

“Somebody begins talking about comets. It might not be politic to deny that—and there turned out to be so little time, anyway.

“Well, naturally these things would have been intended to operate close to the ground, where the effect would be spread over a definitely calculable area. But they start going off out there in space, or maybe when they hit the atmosphere—either way, they’re operating so far up that people all round the world can receive direct radiations from them….

“Just what did happen is anyone’s guess now. But one thing I’m quite certain of—that somehow or other we brought this lot down on ourselves…. And there was that plague, too: it wasn’t typhoid, you know….

“I find that it’s just the wrong side of coincidence for me to believe that out of all the thousands of years in which a destructive comet could arrive, it happens to do so just a few years after we have succeeded in establishing satellite weapons—don’t you? No, I think that we kept on that tightrope quite a while, considering the things that might have happened—but sooner or later the foot had to slip.”

“Well, when you put it that way——” murmured Josella. She broke off and was lost in silence for quite a while. Then she said: “I suppose, in a way, that should be more horrible than the idea of nature striking blindly at us. And yet I don’t think it is. It makes me feel less hopeless about things because it makes them at least comprehensible. If it was like that, then it is at least a thing that can be prevented from happening again—just one more of the mistakes our very great grandchildren are going to have to avoid. And, oh dear, there were so many, many mistakes! But we can warn them.”

Pgs 209 - 210 Kindle