Craig Harrison - The Quiet Earth

I swivelled slowly in the chair, gazing at all the scientific equipment. The absurdity of what had happened was unbelievable. I had come a long way on a hot sunny afternoon, as the sole survivor of God knows what, to trap myself in this fail-safe technological tomb surrounded by the products of centuries of intellectual research. And now I would die here like any Stone Age cretin mouldering away amongst a heap of toys and trinkets. Idiotic. But fitting. Perrin’s metabolism has already started down the journey. We go together, even our stench sealed off from the world. Will anyone ever force a way in and wonder what happened? Or is everything extinct now?

What the hell. No point in waiting. Get it over with quickly. There are poisons in the chemical store.

I stood up and went out into the corridor at the far end of the lab. The third door down led to a small room lined with shelves of medical chemicals in hundreds of different coloured bottles and containers. My knowledge of these things was vague. Even during the worst crises, I had never resorted to tranquillisers. Joanne had been fond of magic potions and tablets. And the doctors had prescribed every latest corrective-behavioural pill and injection for Peter. Child, what we did to you.

There are no means for me to make amends. No life after death. For you, not much before death either. I only did what I believed to be right and it was not easy.

My eyes ran along the shelves and fixed on a squat bottle. The memory of long-ago chemistry lessons returned, not very clearly, only a dim recollection of a warning and the curiosity aroused by the warning. An idea. My mind seized on it, coming back to life.

I raced out into the corridor and along to the washroom. There, neat and clean, were the three metal sinks whose outlet pipes ran down into the concrete wall. The far ends of those pipes would now be firmly sealed with metal caps where they joined the main drain. The concrete wall was about twenty-five centimetres thick here, and the outlet pipes ran along the inside of the wall for a metre.

I began to run back to the lab, but slowed to a quick walk. Must conserve oxygen. I have plenty of time if I think and keep calm.

There was an adjustable spanner in a bag of tools which we used for fixing models and repairing clamp stands. I got it, went back to the washroom and grovelled under the end sink until I had unfastened the S-bend from the wall pipe. Water and slime slopped out. Then I dried the mouth of the pipe which projected from the wall.

Yes. It might just work. Well, I’d die trying. I had nothing to lose.

Ten minutes later I had found half a dozen Pyrex beakers ranging in size from 500 ml to a litre capacity, tipped their contents into a bucket (not down the sinks, their pipes had to stay empty) and carefully cleaned and dried them. Then I paused to think. I was going to have to mix guesswork with memory. And be very careful, and very lucky.

I heaved acid containers out of the chemical store and fetched some acid-proof gloves from the lab. With great delicacy I poured out measures of acid into a jug which was marked in cc. units on the side: I transferred these measures into each Pyrex beaker in turn. The fumes hovered above the liquid, bitter and sharp, mixing with the vomit bile in my mouth and throat. I coughed away from the bench, knowing that any drop of moisture could explode the acids in the beakers.

It took two hours to make the mixture. But finally I had, at a rough reckoning, about a litre of highly explosive, extremely dangerous nitroglycerine. I slumped into a chair and tried to work out the next move.

How could I detonate it? My plan was to pour the nitroglycerine into the waste pipe which led to the wall from the sink unit. Normally the liquid would simply flow out into the drain. Now, because of the emergency blocks, it would fill the pipe inside the wall and I would have—I hoped—a ready-made bomb powerful enough to blow a hole in the concrete. But it needed a detonator.

Of course: the bullets in my rifle! I emptied the clip and moved to the other end of the lab. Then I patiently rigged up a contraption that, when the gun was fired, would explode and detonate the nitroglycerine. With luck.

Another two hours had passed. I was feeling lightheaded; was the oxygen running out already? Perhaps it was just fatigue and hunger.

I picked up the first jug of nitroglycerine and carefully, slowly, walked out and down the corridor and into the washroom. Kneeling beneath the sink unit I placed the lip of the pourer to the edge of the pipe leading to the wall and trickled the yellow liquid into the pipe. It went in soundlessly. When I had poured it all, I put the jug down and lay back on the floor, taking several deep, slow breaths, aching with tension. Then I crawled up and walked back to the laboratory to get the second jug.

As I was carrying it out, I put my foot on one of the fallen plastic molecules from the DNA model, and I almost fell. The jug lurched, the nitroglycerine slopped, and I felt death. Luckily I was moving so lethargically that I regained control and froze. ‘ Hard luck ,’ I said out loud, kicking the molecule away.

When I had poured the second lot of explosive into the pipe I brought the rifle into the washroom and used three heavy clamp stands from the lab to hold it so that it pointed down into the pipe with the metal detonator tube right inside the pipe and hopefully dipping into the nitroglycerine. To make sure the rifle would not drag back when the trigger was pulled I jammed a metal chair between the stock of the gun and the sink, and bound them with tape.

The final problem was pulling the trigger. In theory it seemed easy, but it was hard to arrange properly. I had to be as far away as possible. I decided to descend into the concrete bunker of the radiation unit. The air pressure of the blast might damage my eardrums. It took ages to fix a long reel of twine from behind the steel door of the unit, up the stairs, along the corridor and into the washroom. I had to make sure that the tension of the string would be strong enough. There was no way of testing it. There would only be one chance.

At long last, I slipped the loop of string over the trigger and retreated to the radiation unit. Perrin’s corpse sat in front of the screen still staring at whatever had gone beyond the clutch of the mechanical arms in the glass box.

‘Here goes,’ I said, evenly, to myself. I left the steel door ajar about six inches and crouched down with my hands raised and palms covering my ears, holding the string up in my right hand. Then I pulled. Nothing happened. I tugged. Still nothing. Maddened, I took my hand away from my ear and heaved hard on the string.

There was an enormous, thunderous explosion. It banged down the corridors in a push and suck of blast, whacking the door against my knees, thumping vibrations inside my lungs and ears. The door drew back. Gulping air, I got up and hauled it open. At the top of the stairs I met a cloud of dust. Down near the washroom part of a chair had been blown out across the corridor, and the air tasted of cement and plaster. The lights in the washroom had gone out and one or two had failed in the corridor, so it was hard to see anything. I scarcely dared look. There was the spattering sound of water from a broken pipe or tap. Pieces of concrete and twisted metal on the floor made me stumble. The air was stirring. A draught!

A black mark extended along the pale concrete wall beneath where the sinks had been. I kicked the rubble away and knelt down, my hands groping in the half-light.

There was a hole in the wall, about a metre long and slightly less than a third of a metre high at its widest point.

I put my head down and craned my neck sideways. I could see part of the car park, and a tree against the indigo of the evening sky. The sun had set. The air on my face was warm and thick, like scented blood.