As these characters serve mainly to establish the narrative frame, or context, they are not seen again, except insofar as Tallis has written himself into the script's final scene, foreknowing his death (but misimagining his grave to lie at the desert farm he rents, rather than in a proper cemetery 30 miles (50 km) away in Lancaster).

The story then advances to a time 100 years after the catastrophic events of World War III, which characters in the book refer to as "the Thing", when nuclear and chemical weapons eventually destroyed most of human civilisation.

During the conversation the arch-vicar reveals that there is a minority of "hots" who do not express an interest in the post-World War III style of reproduction, but they are severely punished to keep them in line.

In exchange for his life, Dr. Poole agrees to do what he can as a botanist to help increase their crops yields, but about a year later he escapes with Loola in search of the community of "hots" that is rumoured to exist north of the desert.

The script—and the novel—end with Dr. Poole and Loola in the desert north of Los Angeles, breaking their trek by a tombstone which bears the author's name of Tallis, the dates 1882–1948, and three lines from the antepenultimate verse of Percy Bysshe Shelley's elegy on the death of John Keats.

Lest Loola find it sad, Dr. Poole, happily possessed of a duodecimo Shelley, reads her the poem's penultimate verse: That Light whose smile kindles the Universe That Beauty in which all things work and move That Benediction, which the eclipsing Curse Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love, Which through the web of being blindly wove By man and beast and earth and air and sea, Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.