by Nevil Shute
“We can call through the loud hailer,” he said. “Get as close inshore as we can manage, and call through the loud hailer.”
“Could you hear them if they answer?”
“Not so well as we can talk. We’ve got a microphone hooked up beside the hailer, but you’d have to be very close to hear a person calling in reply. Still, it’s something.”
She glanced at him. “Has anybody been into the radioactive area before, Dwight?”
“Why, yes,” he said. “It’s okay if you’re sensible, and don’t take risks. We were in it quite a while while the war was on, from Iwo Jima to the Philippines and then down south to Yap. You stay submerged, and carry on as usual. Of course, you don’t want to go out on deck.”
“I mean — recently. Has anyone been up into the radioactive areas since the war stopped?”
He nodded. “The Swordfish — that’s our sister ship — she made a cruise up in the North Atlantic. She got back to Rio de Janeiro about a month ago. I’ve been waiting for a copy of Johnny Dismore’s report — he’s her captain — but I haven’t seen it yet. There hasn’t been a ship across to South America for quite a while. I asked for a copy to be sent by teleprinter, but it’s low priority on the radio.”
“How far did she get?”
“She got all over, I believe,” he said. “She did the eastern states from Florida to Maine and went right into New York Harbor, right on up the Hudson till she tangled with the wreck of the George Washington Bridge. She went to New London and to Halifax and to St. John’s, and then she crossed the Atlantic and went up the English Channel and into the London River, but she couldn’t get far up that. Then she took a look at Brest and at Lisbon, and by that time she was running out of stores and her crew were in pretty bad shape, so she went back to Rio.” He paused. “I haven’t heard yet how many days she was submerged — I’d like to know. She certainly set a new record, anyway.”
“Did she find anyone alive, Dwight?”
“I don’t think so. We’d certainly have heard about it if she did.”
She stared down the narrow alleyway outside the curtain forming the cabin wall, the running maze of pipes and electric cables. “Can you visualize it, Dwight?”
“Visualize what?”
“All those cities, all those fields and farms, with nobody, and nothing left alive. Just nothing there. I simply can’t take it in.”
“I can’t, either,” he said. “I don’t know that I want to try. I’d rather think of them the way they were.”
“I never saw them, of course,” she observed. “I’ve never been outside Australia, and now I’ll never go. Not that I want to, now. I only know all those places from the movies and the books — that’s as they were. I don’t suppose there’ll ever be a movie made of them as they are now.”
He shook his head. “It wouldn’t be possible. A camera-man couldn’t live, as far as I can see. I guess nobody will ever know what the Northern Hemisphere looks like now, excepting God.” He paused. “I think that’s a good thing. You don’t want to remember how a person looked when he was dead — you want to remember how he was when he was alive. That’s the way I like to think about New York.”
“It’s too big,” she repeated. “I can’t take it in.”
“It’s too big for me, too,” he replied. “I can’t really believe in it, just can’t get used to the idea. I suppose it’s lack of imagination. I don’t want to have any more imagination. They’re all alive to me, those places in the States, just like they were. I’d like them to stay that way till next September.”
She said softly, “Of course.”
He stirred. “Have another cup of tea?”
“No, thanks.”
He took her out on deck again; she paused on the bridge rubbing a bruised shin, breathing the sea air gratefully. “It must be the hell of a thing to be submerged in her for any length of time,” she said. “How long will you be underwater for this cruise?”
“Not long,” he said. “Six or seven days, maybe.”
“It must be terribly unhealthy.”
“Not physically,” he said. “You do suffer from a lack of sunlight. We’ve got a couple of sunray lamps, but they’re not the same as being out on deck. It’s the psychological effect that’s worst. Some men — good men in every other way — they just can’t take it. Everybody gets kind of on edge after a while. You need a steady kind of temperament. Kind of placid, I’d say.”
She nodded, thinking that it fitted in with his own character. “Are all of you like that?”
“I’d say we might be. Most of us.”
“Keep an eye on John Osborne,” she remarked. “I don’t believe he is.”
He glanced at her in surprise. He had not thought of that, and the scientist had survived the trial trip quite well. But now that she had mentioned it, he wondered. “Why — I’ll do that,” he said. “Thanks for the suggestion.”
They went up the gangway into Sydney. In the hangar of the aircraft carrier there were still aircraft parked with folded wings; the ship seemed dead and silent. She paused for a moment. “None of these will ever fly again, will they?”
“I wouldn’t think so.”
“Do any aeroplanes fly now, at all?”
“I haven’t heard one in the air for quite a while,” he said. “I know they’re short of aviation gas.”
She walked quietly with him to the cabin, unusually subdued. As she got out of the boiler suit and into her own clothes her spirits revived. These morbid bloody ships, these morbid bloody realities! She was urgent to get away from them, to drink, hear music, and to dance. Before the mirror, before the pictures of his wife and children, she made her lips redder, her cheeks brighter, her eyes sparkling. Snap out of it! Get right outside these riveted steel walls, and get out quick. This was no place for her. Into the world of romance, of make-belief and double brandies! Snap out of it, and get back to the world where she belonged!
From the photograph frames Sharon looked at her with understanding and approval.
In the wardroom he came forward to meet her. “Say,” he exclaimed in admiration, “you look swell!”
She smiled quickly. “I’m feeling lousy,” she said. “Let’s get out of it and into the fresh air. Let’s go to that hotel and have a drink, and then go up and find somewhere to dance.”
“Anything you say.”
He left her with John Osborne while he went to change into civilian clothes. “Take me up on to the flight deck, John,” she said. “I’ll throw a screaming fit if I stay in these ships one minute longer.”
“I’m not sure that I know the way up to the roof,” he remarked. “I’m a new boy here.” They found a steep ladder that led up to a gun turret, came down again, wandered along a steel corridor, asked a rating, and finally got up into the island and out on to the deck. On the wide, unencumbered flight deck the sun was warm, the sea blue, and the wind fresh. “Thank God I’m out of that,” she said.
“I take it that you aren’t enamoured of the navy,” he observed.
“Well, are you having fun?”
He considered the matter. “Yes, I think I am. It’s going to be rather interesting.”
“Looking at dead people through a periscope. I can think of funnier sorts of fun.”
They walked a step or two in silence. “It’s all knowledge,” he said at last. “One has to try and find out what has happened. It could be that it’s all quite different to what we think. The radioactive elements may be getting absorbed by something. Something may have happened to the half-life that we don’t know about. Even if we don’t discover anything that’s good, it’s still discovering things. I don’t think we shall discover anything that’s good, or very hopeful. But even so, it’s fun just finding out.”
“You call finding out the bad things fun?”
“Yes, I do,” he said firmly. “Some games are fun even when you lose. Even when you know you’re going to lose before you start. It’s fun just playing them.”
&
nbsp; “You’ve got a pretty queer idea of fun and games.”
“Your trouble is you won’t face up to things,” he told her. “All this has happened, and is happening, but you won’t accept it. You’ve got to face the facts of life someday.”
“All right,” she said angrily, “I’ve got to face them. Next September, if what all you people say is right. That’s time enough for me.”
“Have it your own way.” He glanced at her, grinning. “I wouldn’t bank too much upon September,” he remarked. “It’s September plus or minus about three months. We may be going to cop it in June for all that anybody knows. Or, then again, I might be buying you a Christmas present.”
She said furiously, “Don’t you know?”
“No, I don’t,” he replied. “Nothing like this has ever happened in the history of the world before.” He paused, and then he added whimsically, “If it had, we wouldn’t be here talking about it.”
“If you say one word more I’m going to push you over the edge of that deck.”
Commander Towers came out of the island and walked across to them, neat in a double-breasted blue suit. “I wondered where you’d got to,” he remarked.
The girl said, “Sorry, Dwight. We should have left a message. I wanted some fresh air.”
John Osborne said, “You’d better watch out, sir. She’s in a pretty bad temper. I’d stand away from her head, if I were you, in case she bites.”
“He’s been teasing me,” she said. “Like Albert and the lion. Let’s go, Dwight.”
“See you tomorrow, sir,” the scientist said. “I’ll be staying on board over the week-end.”
The captain turned away with the girl, and they went down the stairs within the island. As they passed down the steel corridor towards the gangway he asked her, “What was he teasing you about, honey?”
“Everything,” she said vaguely. “Took his stick and poked it in my ear. Let’s have a drink before we start looking for a train, Dwight. I’ll feel better then.”
He took her to the same hotel in the main street. Over the drinks he asked her, “How long have we got, this evening?”
“The last train leaves Flinders Street at eleven-fifteen. I’d better get on that, Dwight. Mummy would never forgive me if I spent the night with you.”
“I’ll say she wouldn’t. What happens when you get to Berwick? Is anybody meeting you?”
She shook her head. “We left a bicycle at the station this morning. If you do the right thing by me I won’t be able to ride it, but it’s there, anyway.” She finished her first double brandy. “Buy me another, Dwight.”
“I’ll buy you one more,” he said. “After that we’re getting on the train. You promised me that we’re going dancing.”
“So we are,” she said. “I booked a table at Mario’s. But I shuffle beautifully when I’m tight.”
“I don’t want to shuffle,” he said. “I want to dance.”
She took the drink he handed her. “You’re very exacting,” she said. “Don’t go poking any more sticks in my ear — I just can’t bear it. Most men don’t know how to dance, anyway.”
“You’ll find me one of them,” he said. “We used to dance a lot back in the States. But I’ve not danced since the war began.”
She said, “I think you live a very restricted life.”
He managed to detach her from the hotel after her second drink, and they walked to the station in the evening light. They arrived at the city half an hour later, and walked out into the street. “It’s a bit early,” she said. “Let’s walk.”
He took her arm to guide her through the Saturday evening crowds. Most of the shops had plenty of good stock still in the windows but few were open. The restaurants and cafés were all full, doing a roaring trade; the bars were shut, but the streets were full of drunks. The general effect was one of boisterous and uninhibited lightheartedness, more in the style of 1890 than of 1963. There was no traffic in the wide streets but for the trams, and people swarmed all over the road. At the corner of Swanston and Collins Streets an Italian was playing a very large and garish accordion, and playing it very well indeed. Around him, people were dancing to it. As they passed the Regal cinema a man, staggering along in front of them, fell down, paused for a moment upon hands and knees, and rolled dead drunk into the gutter. Nobody paid much attention to him. A policeman, strolling down the pavement, turned him over, examined him casually, and strolled on.
“They have quite a time here in the evenings,” Dwight remarked.
“It’s nothing like so bad as it used to be,” the girl replied. “It was much worse than this just after the war.”
“I know it. I’d say they’re getting tired of it.” He paused, and then he said, “Like I did.”
She nodded. “This is Saturday, of course. It’s very quiet here on an ordinary night. Almost like it was before the war.”
They walked on to the restaurant. The proprietor welcomed them because he knew her well; she was in his establishment at least once a week and frequently more often. Dwight Towers had been there half a dozen times, perhaps, preferring his club, but he was known to the head-waiter as the captain of the American submarine. They were well received and given a good table in a corner away from the band; they ordered drinks and dinner.
“They’re pretty nice people here,” Dwight said appreciatively. “I don’t come in so often, and I don’t spend much when I do come.”
“I come here pretty frequently,” the girl said. She sat in reflection for a moment. “You know, you’re a very lucky man.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You’ve got a full-time job to do.”
It had not occurred to him before that he was fortunate. “That’s so,” he said slowly. “I certainly don’t seem to get a lot of time to go kicking around on the loose.”
“I do,” she said. “It’s all I’ve got to do.”
“Don’t you work at anything? No job at all?”
“Nothing at all,” she said. “Sometimes I drive a bullock round the farm at home, harrowing the muck. That’s all I ever do.”
“I’d have thought you’d have been working in the city someplace,” he remarked.
“So would I,” she said a little cynically. “But it’s not so easy as that. I took honours in history up at the Shop, just before the war.”
“The Shop?”
“The university. I was going to do a course of shorthand and typing. But what’s the sense in working for a year at that? I wouldn’t have time to finish it. And if I did, there aren’t any jobs.”
“You mean, business is slowing down?”
She nodded. “Lots of my friends are out of a job now. People aren’t working like they used to, and they don’t want secretaries. Half of Daddy’s friends — people who used to go to the office — they just don’t go now. They live at home, as if they were retired. An awful lot of offices have closed, you know.”
“I suppose that makes sense,” he remarked. “A man has a right to do the things he wants to do in the last months, if he can get by with the money.”
“A girl has a right to, too,” she said. “Even if the things she wants to do are something different to driving a bullock round the farm to spread the dung.”
“There’s just no work at all?” he asked.
“Nothing that I could find,” she said. “And I’ve tried hard enough. You see, I can’t even type.”
“You could learn,” he said. “You could go and take that course that you were going to take.”
“What’s the sense of that, if there’s no time to finish it, or use it afterwards?”
“Something to work at,” he remarked. “Just as an alternative to all the double brandies.”
“Work just for the sake of working?” she inquired. “It sounds simply foul.” Her fingers drummed restlessly upon the table.
“Better than drinking just for the sake of drinking,” he observed. “Doesn’t give you a hangover.”
She said irri
tably, “Order me a double brandy, Dwight, and then let’s see if you can dance.”
He took her out upon the dance floor, feeling vaguely sorry for her. She was in a prickly kind of mood. Immersed in his own troubles and occupations, it had never occurred to him that young, unmarried people had their own frustrations in these times. He set himself to make the evening pleasant for her, talking about the films and musicals they both had seen, the mutual friends they had. “Peter and Mary Holmes are funny,” she told him once. “She’s absolutely nuts on gardening. They’ve got that flat upon a three years’ lease. She’s planning to plant things this autumn that’ll come up next year.”
He smiled. “I’d say she’s got the right idea. You never know.” He steered the conversation back to safer subjects. “Did you see the Danny Kaye movie at the Plaza?”
Yachting and sailing were safe topics, and they talked around those for some time. The floor show came on as they finished dinner, and amused them for a while, and then they danced again. Finally the girl said, “Cinderella. I’ll have to start and think about that train, Dwight.”
He paid the bill while she was in the cloakroom, and met her by the door. In the streets of the city it was quiet now; the music was still, the restaurants and cafés were now closed. Only the drunks remained, reeling down the pavements aimlessly or lying down to sleep. The girl wrinkled her nose. “They ought to do something about all this,” she said. “It never was like this before the war.”
“It’s quite a problem,” he said thoughtfully. “It comes up all the time in the ship. I reckon a man has a right to do the things he wants to when he goes ashore, so long as he doesn’t go bothering other people. Some folks just have to have the liquor, times like these.” He eyed a policeman on the corner. “That’s what the cops here seem to think, in this city, at any rate. I’ve never seen a drunk arrested yet, not just for being drunk.”
At the station she paused to thank him and to wish him good night. “It’s been a beaut evening,” she said. “The day, too. Thanks for everything, Dwight.”
“I’ve enjoyed it, Moira,” he said. “It’s years since I danced.”
