Edmund Cooper - Transit

Suddenly, the tension was eased. And they all began to smile at the lovely ridiculous words. But their smiles were just a little too fixed. Looking at his companions, Avery saw firelight mirrored in the suspicious brightness of their eyes. Doubtless his own were just the same….

He held a hand out to Barbara. She took it. Tom and Mary were already leaning close together, drawing comfort from each other.

All I want is a room somewhere….

Avery sighed and surrendered himself to the echoes of a distant world. It was a wonderful and acutely painful luxury.

After those first few hectic days there came a period of relative calmness, a time of adjustment—and rest. They needed it. They needed it badly. They only realized how much strain they had been under in retrospect, when they had time to develop a routine for the normal processes of living; when they found that they even had time to spare—time off from the struggle for survival.

The only really significant event that occurred on the day after the incident at the pool was that Tom and * Avery, out hunting, found the home of a whole colony of rabbitypes. The creatures lived underground as does the terrestrial rabbit, but they could also swim and climb I trees. Their colony had been established in the banks of the stream that was Camp Two’s water supply. It was about half a mile inland; and for fifty yards or more, the ground was riddled with innumerable rabbitype holes. The animals were even less intelligent than their terrestrial counterparts. The two men soon found that—the easiest way to catch them was to knock them out of the trees with stones. They could be stunned with quite small stones; and a smooth hunting formula was soon developed.

Instead of looking for rabbitypes on the ground, they scanned the tree tops. When one was found containing what Tom began to call bobtail fruit, Avery would station himself by the trunk, and Tom—who had a better aim—would let fly at the creatures with pebbles he had gathered for the purpose on the sea-shore. If he missed or merely startled the rabbitype, it would invariably begin to climb down the tree. As it had to descend backwards, gripping the trunk with the short claws on all six feet, all Avery had to do was pick it off and kill it by swinging its head sharply against the tree. If Tom scored a hit, whoever was nearest to where it fell from the tree would dive on it before it had time to regain its senses.

With a meat supply so easily assured, the two men felt that they had solved one of the major problems of existence. If necessary, they could live quite well off rabbi-types and fruit for an indefinite period.

Although Avery was consumed with curiosity about the kind of world to which they had been brought, exploration was held in abeyance for a while. His original impatience was tempered by the growing conviction that their stay—if not actually permanent—was going to be quite a long one. Exploration could wait. It could wait until they had learned more about their immediate environment, until they had become more confident and efficient in the art of survival. Avery was particularly anxious to avoid any encounter with the ‘golden people’ until—well, until it was no longer avoidable. Sooner or later there would have to be a meeting; but as experience so far had done nothing to convince him that the outcome would be harmonious, he felt it would be wise to avoid a possible clash until he, Tom, Mary and Barbara had become a more efficient group and therefore a better potential fighting unit.

After a day or two, they fell into a routine that enabled them to do most of the necessary work in the mornings, thus leaving the afternoons and evenings free for relaxation or ‘optional tasks’.

Perched as it was on top of a sort of rocky pill-box, Camp Two gave them a great feeling of security. However, they continued to maintain watches throughout the night. Although the camp would be hard to attack, it was certainly not impregnable; and they did not intend being taken by surprise. But instead of having a fixed rota and fixed times for the watches, they developed a fairly informal system. If someone wanted to go to bed early, he, she—or both—did so; and the other or others stayed up late and were then relieved by whoever had had the most sleep. Sometimes the men kept watches alone; but more often the watches were kept by pairs. It was more enjoyable, it made the time pass more quickly and there was less danger of the watch going to sleep.

Avery was fascinated by what he privately called the psychological mechanics of the group. They had started off as four complete strangers, yet within three days they had neatly divided themselves into two pairs. For, without doubt, he and Barbara now enjoyed a ‘special relationship’ just as Tom and Mary did. Special was, perhaps, an inadequate word. It was not love, but it was not without love—the kind of love that, like invention, was the child of necessity. In such a group as theirs, each depended upon and drew strength from the others; but there was a special kind of dependency that did not seem overtly to have much to do with sex, yet it could only exist between a man and a woman. It was not love and it was not marriage; but under the circumstances it was, possibly, a near relation of both love and marriage.

At times, during the first couple of weeks, he wondered whether Tom and Mary had actually made love. Sexual intercourse, coitus, copulation were the clinical terms—but, somehow, they could not quite fit the lovemaking that was possible between Tom and Mary. Looking at them in the mornings, Avery could detect no outward sign, no subtle change, to indicate that their intimacy had achieved what was obviously its ultimate and logical end. For the time being, he decided, their need was more spiritual than physical. They clung to each other because they were alone, because they had been abandoned on a strange world under an alien sky, because they were Babes in the Wood…. ,

Such, at least, were his own feelings in his relationship with Barbara. Sometimes, in the quiet of the night, he would feel her stir against him, would feel her pressing close, would know that she was awake and would sense the stirring of desire. Inevitably his own body would react, and he would become ashamed. He would become ashamed because he was in the thrall of ridiculous and Quixotic allegiances. He would become ashamed because he felt that the act of love would itself be an act of betrayal—of Christine. He was, he knew, thinking, feeling, reacting like the clean-cut, monosyllabic hero of romantic fiction.

The reality had died fifteen years ago, and fifteen years ago the myth had been born. Sick with grief, he had indulged in the masochism of fostering it. He had built Christine up into a legend. In death, she was more beautiful than in life. In death, her love grew stronger— more possessive. He had violated her in the worst of all possible ways, for he had turned her memory into his private sickness.

Intellectually, he knew all this; yet he could not let go. Intellectually, he knew that he had raised the memory of Christine to be a barrier between him and all normal, human relationships. And now he could not break the barrier down.

It was stupid because, in the sense of absolute loyalty, he had already betrayed Christine—if betrayal was the right word. He betrayed her when he held out a hand to Barbara. He betrayed her when, as Tom and Mary did, they began to exchange private smiles and gestures. He betrayed her every night that he and Barbara lay down together. What, then, did the final betrayal matter? Nothing but good could come of it, for surely Christine’s ghost would be laid.

But still he could not bring himself to do what his and Barbara’s body wanted. He knew—or thought he knew —that it would not mean more than he wanted it to mean for Barbara. She had already told him that she was by no means a virgin; and he had gathered that life in the hot-house world of television cameras and synthetic drama had produced the inevitable crop of synthetic romances and tailor-made passions But, hating himself, pitying Barbara and pleading with a non-dimensional Christine, he still could not make love.