Craig Harrison - The Quiet Earth

I was going to go on living.

It took another two hours to get out. The iron reinforcing rods which had been set inside the concrete had been bent and broken and were sticking out at odd angles, but I had to twist them aside even further and use a hacksaw from the lab toolkit to amputate several of them before there was a space big enough for me to slide through. Even then it was a squeeze.

Before leaving, I went to Perrin’s office and checked his papers. I was so exhausted that I hardly had the energy to search very closely, and the emergency lights were growing dimmer by the minute, closing the whole place in what would be the final all-time darkness. However, I found the small metal box in which he kept his personal papers and confidential notes. It might contain some answers. I carried it through the shadow-growing laboratory feeling uneasy and increasingly uncertain about the nature of some of the shapes in far corners. I realised I’d been talking to myself too much, not merely swearing in irritation, but reassurances spoken for my own sake, with taunts directed towards an incoherent feeling of malice which the building seemed to generate. This malice appeared to have grown and to be present in the air like static electricity. Perhaps it was all a result of my weakening concentration. I hurried to the shattered washroom and pushed the metal box out. It fell with a thud onto the grass below.

When I squeezed out, feet first, slowly, trying not to get cut on prongs of steel or serrated concrete, it must have looked as if the building, squatting there in the twilight, was extruding a live object created inside itself by unimaginable processes. I finally dropped onto the grass, smeared with blood and peculiarly humiliated; peculiar, since there was nobody to observe all the squirming and slithering. I stood up from the grass, inhaled the warm air scented with earth and plants, and it was like being re-created. By myself. No witnesses. Only the stars.

The southern sky with its vast spread of starlight was pulsing and flickering with intense energy over the dead city in the distance and the empty countryside. I arched my neck back and stared up, overcome with the magnificence of the display. It was incredibly beautiful. It seemed that at any moment the stars would make some kind of sound. I felt that I would hear them. The ringing echoes of the explosion were still inside my ears and I could sense the resonance of that sound wave expanding outwards, my own message of existence. I had blasted my way out of a tomb. There ought to be some response to a pulsation like that, a recognition of my evolutionary skill. My uniqueness demanded an answer. There would be one, somewhere.

I was swaying with fatigue beneath this mute, deaf brilliance, nearly fainting. With a great effort I groped on the ground for the metal box, found it, and stumbled to the car park.

There was a secluded block of private motel units across the road, used by scientists attending research conferences. I drove there, broke in, found an unused room, and after carrying in the shotgun and a few essentials from the car and locking the doors, I slumped onto the bed and straight away fell asleep and unconscious.

There were no dreams. I woke feeling hungry. It must have been about midday, hot and bright again. There was enough cold water for a shower. I dressed in fresh clothes. Yesterday’s were torn and stained, and I had acquired a set of bruises and scratches. My cut fingers were healing, though. After eating a large quantity of the food I had brought from Thames, I took the gun and walked around exploring the motel and the area nearby. I soon felt tired, so I went back to the room, moved everything of importance in from the car, parked it beneath some trees, then locked myself in the motel and lay down to sleep again. My brain seemed to want to run low and repair circuits. I didn’t know what to do.

There was nothing on any radio wavebands. I tried several times. In the middle of the night I woke up, tried the radio, ate more food, drifted back into sleep. It was more like a coma than sleep. My first thought the next day was about time. I had to calculate that it must be Tuesday. It was important to keep a check.

I examined Perrin’s box but it was securely locked and impossible to break into. It would have to wait. The food was nearly all gone, so I drove back to the nearest shops and stocked up. The smell of decaying food in the melted freezers was becoming very powerful, a putrid compound of meat, ice-cream, fish fingers and blue-vein cheese. Luckily there were still no signs of a resurgence of rats. I was dreading encounters with rats or rabid dogs. When I’d looted all the provisions I wanted, I returned to the fastness of my motel unit. The absence of noise and people seemed less unnerving out in the countryside, and it was good when a fresh breeze sprang up and made reassuring sounds as it rushed through the trees.

I went out in the early evening and looked at the stars again, still intrigued by the memory of their effect on me. I pondered the thought that they were beautiful, and scanned the panorama now, head back, eyes wide. Planets, clusters of radio stars, the hydrogen of broken galaxies and remote blurs of mist which were themselves huge spiral nebulae: all this had always yawned up there above my indifference to it. I’d never believed there could be any purpose in those atoms churning in a vacuum, blurting and speckling across nothing. But nor had I ever previously felt that the sight was beautiful. Normally I tried to avoid using such words. It had been part of my scientific training to avoid them; or rather, part of my own discipline of mind. Did it now matter that I should experience such a feeling, admit it, and transmit that response outward? I lowered my head from the vertigo which came from the draining of blood from a brain not prone to any form of mystical confusion. For a moment, the impression of falling upwards had nearly floated me onto my back on the grass. The air rushed around. I steadied myself.

Answers? Not in the stars. There was still the enigma here, the planet gone dead. It stretched out to expose its deadness to the lights pointing down from the dark.

Perhaps all this had happened countless times out there; it could be part of the nature of all processes. Even most of those star-images were points at the end of nothing. The light entering my retina was ages old, a message from objects which had ceased to exist an unimaginably long time ago; millions of messages from death, extinction, space now empty. The glittering diamond display up there was an illusion, covering the most colossal irony with its apparent hardness, eternity and brilliance. It represented the past. Yet at the moment its radiation passed into my eyes it was the only reality I could know of those objects. What reliance could you place on all those lights with the annihilation of their origins racing at the speed of dark behind the end of each beam? Could that be beautiful?

Somebody had once written, the universe is not only stranger than we know it is stranger than we can know. I remembered feeling sorry for physicists when I read that. They saw everything as a model of their own confusion. A hundred years ago Michelson and Morley had demolished classical physics; the Fitzgerald Contraction had proved there was no possibility of measurable objective single truth in the universe, all was relative, subjective, multiplex. Einstein had theorised about curved space. His equations had been questioned and then the radio astronomers had found massive problems with the whole new structure of ideas. The physicists had developed a death wish. They had no clear notion of what would happen when they exploded the first atomic bomb. Some of them believed it might set off a chain reaction with the hydrogen in atmospheric water vapour which would destroy the whole planet. But they went ahead anyway. Now they spent their time arguing about black holes, and about particles which went backwards in time. All suicidal, nihilistic ideas. A subjective and relativistic universe moulded by neuroses.