Craig Harrison - The Quiet Earth

In order to dismiss such a thought I would have had to find an area inside myself which could resist it with unquestioning assurance. It was useless to speculate about other people. I had to answer from within my own resources and with scientific objectivity because it was a serious problem demanding a high degree of careful assessment.

In the end my resources had proved inadequate and I had been unable to resist the most adverse conclusion.

The irony was that I should have reached this crisis as a result of a cold scientific problem, after all the years of apparently much greater turmoil stemming from the disaster of my own life. But the two fitted together inextricably, like the paired molecules chained inside the DNA spirals. It seemed strange that at this precise moment, I could not remember exactly how. The links seemed numb, nerves paralysed at the root by some local anaesthetic.

Well. It was all irrelevant now. I wondered if, at the moment of being obliterated or transmuted by the Effect, Perrin had been vouchsafed any sudden revelation to compensate for the waste of his life. His world had always been so orderly. Did he have a final instant of surprise?

The door leading to the corridor on the other side of the lab was unlocked. That was odd. I walked along the corridor under the dim emergency lighting. There was a thin glow of brighter light from beneath one of the research supervisor’s rooms. It was Perrin’s room. I paused, then pushed open the door. The lights were switched on but of course the room was deserted. Perrin must have stayed behind late on Friday to put through an extra programme; yes, there were computer printout sheets on his desk. He often worked late, sometimes until the early hours of the morning; it was easy to lose track of time inside the unit when there were no windows to remind you of day or night. And my absence would have meant extra work for the senior staff. A glance at the programme heading surprised me; he’d been trying my suggestion for B12 on a high frequency waveband. That was very much a shot in the dark. What was he doing? He had seemed very noncommittal when I’d proposed trying high frequencies only a few weeks ago. Yet curiously I felt I knew about this. The surprise was not as strong as it should have been. Perhaps I’d suspected him without really admitting it to myself.

A sudden thump inside me bounced my heart against my ribs like a physical blow. What if—

I threw down the computer sheets and ran out of the room, down the corridor, along to the left, then down more steps and round another corner past the DANGER: RADIATION signs, and there was the steel security door leading to the radiation unit with the spokes of the radioactivity warning light above the door shining a dull red. That meant a danger level of radiation in the plutonium storage area and in the experimental chamber; not a high level, but enough to cause mild radiation sickness after exposures of longer than a few hours. I stared at the warning light, then ran to the door and looked through the small pane of thick armoured glass inset into the solid steel. I could see into the experimental chamber. All the emergency lighting was on and Perrin was sitting at the panel of the remote control handling device, his arms extended so that his hands were buried inside the thick gloves of the device.

He was peering at the screen in front of him. Perrin was there!

I shouted. Not his name, or any recognisable noise; just a yell of sheer relief and excitement bursting the suffocation out of my lungs and throat.

Then I did a stupid thing. Without thinking, operating the manual control, I swung open the door into the radiation unit. Bells clanged the alarm. A series of dull slamming noises reverberated throughout the whole wing of the research centre. The air conditioning stopped. The whole of Research 2 Secure Unit was now automatically sealed off from the outside world to prevent any radiation leak.

I scarcely noticed; it didn’t register. Striding through the doorway I called to Perrin, and stopped. Then I walked slowly towards him. He was quite dead.

The Geiger counters above the control panel were stuttering erratically. Whatever animal or specimen he had been handling inside the glass box with the spastic armatures and clamps of the metal extensions to the gloves had vanished. The transformers and circuit breakers on the sound modulator had gone into overload and tripped, as though a surge of energy had been pushed back into the main power supply, and there was still a faint smell of burned insulation material in the air, along with hints of a more hideous disintegration.

I did not touch the body. The eyes were open. A reflection in the screen gazed out with the same vacancy, grey fixed on bone-white. He must have died before the Effect had struck, or he would not be here. Electrocution? No sign of that. The radioactivity wasn’t strong enough to kill. Natural causes, then; a heart attack? No expression on the face. No clue. What happened? For God’s sake, what ?

For minutes I stared round the room, in a daze. A bile lump of frustration and rage churned inside my stomach. Damn, damn, damn . I kicked the remote control device. And again, and again. Then I retched on the solid bitterness coming up my gullet to meet the smell in the room. Out. I went to the door, wrenched it open, blundered back into the corridor, slammed the door and vomited, leaning on the wall and hearing the spatter on the concrete floor. Sour tendrils of saliva swung from my mouth. My eyes streamed again. I destroyed Perrin in my mind ten times over for being arrogant and devious, for being so clever and stupid all at once, for shunting me off on leave so he could try my idea out, for being here, for being dead when he should have been alive, and finally for stinking in his deathness like any putrescent piece of rotting offal.

I staggered back along the corridor and sat down on the steps leading to the laboratory, wiping my face on the sleeve of my white coat.

It was about ten minutes before I realised that I was dead, too.

The whole research unit was designed so that any radiation would be confined to the section I had just entered. If the door between that section and the rest of the unit was opened by manual override whilst the danger level sign was at red, the exterior doors from the unit would seal themselves shut. The air conditioning would stop and metal panels and grilles would close over the ducts. I was now trapped inside the unit with about thirty-six hours’ supply of air and no hope of getting out.

My identity card was useless for operating the doors. The two heavy steel doors by which I had entered could now only be opened from the outside by the security controller. They would have extended their core of titanium steel reinforcing rods out into the thick ferroconcrete wall in a complex locking system. All the walls were impenetrable. Even the waste pipes from the sinks and toilets ran laterally through the walls for a metre before they too encountered metal seals which blocked their exit to the outside main drain in an emergency. There were no windows and the ceilings and floors were ferroconcrete layers.

In an emergency there were several ways of getting out. You could wait for clearance, when the security controller would override the emergency locks from the outside. There was telephonic contact. There was even a hand-cranked device for setting off bells and sirens on the outside of the building, in case of total power failure. That was the worst-option situation. Everything had been thought of. The system was infallible.

I walked slowly back to the laboratory and sat down in a swivel chair. What could I do? I had my rifle and clip of bullets, but shooting the locks off the doors, or even emptying the bullets and stuffing the locks with cordite, was wishful thinking. There were no conventional locks.