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Summary
Chapter 7: Conference
The University community gathers for a conference. After an encouraging speech by Beadley and a few words on organisation, Dr Vorless, a professor of sociology, explains that the community will have to adapt new rules to survive. Later, Bill and Josella discuss the new life that awaits them and agree to 'marry'.

Chapter 8: Frustration
Bill is woken by what appears a fire and is knocked unconscious. He awakes, bound and locked in a room. He learns that Coker, the man who had been arguing in front of the University, had captured several of the University group and plans on using them to keep some blind people alive longer. For a few days, he works with his party, finding food for them. Then they succumb to a disease.

Chapter 9: Evacuation
Bill tries to find Josella but fails. He returns to the University and finds an address, Tynsham Manor, where the party had been intending to go. He also finds Coker who had had the same problems as Bill and now realises his plan had been wrong. They agree to drive together to Tynsham.

Chapter 7, Conference,
The theme of the conference is how the numbing catastrophe of the blinding of the world might not produce a complete end of human survival.

The speech to the assembled people, “from somber eyes as he waited for the murmuring to die down, … spoke in a pleasant, practiced voice and with a fireside manner."

"Many of us here," he began, "must still be feeling numbed under this catastrophe. The world we knew has ended in a flash. Some of us may be feeling that it is the end of everything. It is not. But to all of you I will say at once that it can be the end of everything-if we let it. "Stupendous as this disaster is, there is, however, still a margin of survival. It may be worth remembering just now that we are not unique in looking upon vast calamity. Whatever the myths that have grown up about it, there can be no doubt that somewhere far back in our history there was a Great Flood. Those who survived that must have looked upon a disaster comparable in scale with this and, in some ways, more formidable. But they cannot have despaired; they must have begun again-as we can begin again. "Self-pity and a sense of high tragedy are going to build nothing at all. So we had better throw them out at once, for it is builders that we must become.