Craig Harrison - The Quiet Earth

He reached into the rucksack and produced a small compass.

‘Still points north,’ he said. ‘Course, it would , eh?’

‘Mm?’ I was musing on the submarine problem and thinking that people down mines would not have survived merely by being below ground level, because that would have saved people in basements and cellars, and there were quite a few all-night clubs in Auckland basements but no survivors in evidence.

‘You were on about reversal of polarities. What if it happened to the whole world? North and south poles, everything? We wouldn’t be any wiser, would we? This would still point north because this compass would have reversed its polarity as well. Same with the electrical stuff. How would we know?’

I stared at him. Was he really only a lance corporal? I nodded.

‘I think I once read about the earth’s magnetic field reversing itself millions of years ago,’ I said. ‘Maybe it could happen. I don’t know. But I doubt if it would affect electrical equipment or small magnets. The compass needle would point north, but only if you faced geographical south.’

He looked down.

‘Bang goes the Maketu theory. North’s still up there.’

I would have to watch my step; bright people could be dangerous. That much I did know.

Putting the compass away, he stood up and stretched. It was late afternoon now and the sky had cleared to a deep sea-green. The clouds had dissolved.

‘We’ll sort something out,’ he said. ‘What worried me was, I thought, what if it depends on me? If there’s something I’ve got to do, to make it all right? To make them come back.’ He darted me a forlorn look in which I recognised reassuring signs of self-doubt. ‘I’m not used to being on my own. Not much good at it.’

‘You seem to be doing alright to me,’ I replied, gesturing at his tent and jeep. He shrugged.

‘Basic training.’

I stood up. He looked around, then turned towards me and said more or less exactly what I wanted him to say.

‘What’s the plan, then?’

‘The object is to sink the black,’ he said, ‘when everything else is down.’

Leaning over the pool table he drove the cue onto the white ball, sending it with a loud crack at the triangle of other balls. They scattered across the green baize. He lifted the cube of chalk and screeched it on the end of the cue.

‘You’re sure you don’t play?’

‘Positive.’

‘I never met anybody who didn’t play pool.’

‘We’ve both led sheltered lives, then.’

He laughed, and began to move round the table lining up shots and cursing when he missed. We were in the games room of a Turangi motel, having taken over a two-room unit for the night. Apirana, for some reason, didn’t want to drive down to Waiouru and stay at the army camp. ‘It’s only crummy barracks,’ he said. After the trauma of last Saturday he had stayed dutifully at Waiouru for two days, then abandoned the camp and driven down to Hawke’s Bay and up beyond Gisborne in search of his relatives. And finding nothing, had come back.

The sun was setting and the darkness gathered in the room. I sat by the open ranch slider doors looking north, the sun on my face. I had noticed that Apirana was left-handed.

‘You’ve never been to Auckland?’ I asked.

‘Nope.’ He tapped the cue ball gently and it missed its target. ‘Been to Singapore, though.’ The ball missed again. ‘ Whaka —nui!’ This, I gathered, was his swear word. He put the cue down and came and sat in one of the aluminium chairs on the patio, holding a glass of beer. ‘Too dark in there.’

After a pause, I took a deep breath and said, ‘The reason I asked, was…because when I first saw you today, I could have sworn I’d seen you somewhere before.’

His face was turned towards the sun and the light was being absorbed into his features and reflected from the bone beneath the skin, pale almond under coffee. His eyes were almost closed.

‘Lots of Maoris in Auckland,’ he said softly.

‘Didn’t you think we’d met somewhere?’

The face was expressionless.

‘They say we all look the same to the pakeha.’

‘I don’t think so.’

A pause. He drank his beer. It looked gold; it slid into his mouth. Then, placing the glass on the concrete floor, ‘How many Maoris did you know?’

‘One used to live near us, twenty years ago.’

‘What was his name?’

It was my turn to pause.

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Did you ever know?’

‘No.’

He didn’t move. His face was set like an Easter Island monolith against the sun on a hillside.

‘Anybody else?’ he asked quietly. My irritation began to increase.

‘A bloke at the supermarket. A mechanic at the garage. There weren’t many at university.’

‘No, I reckon not.’

It was obviously useless trying to get behind the mask he’d assumed. A sullen reticence had come over him, an apathetic weariness rather than defensive hostility. The shadows stretched across the grass towards us as the light faded. When I looked at his face again the dusk had gained such depth in the porch that only the whites of his eyes reflected glitterings of light.

‘So we can’t have met before,’ he said, finally.

‘But you did think you recognised me.’

A long sigh came from the gloom.

‘Yes.’

The eyes closed and cut out the last points of light, and the place where his face was seemed darker for a moment than the shadows behind and all around.

‘I was wondering what it might mean,’ he whispered.

I felt very calm; the admission reassured me, it justified my persistence, and even its obscurity blended easily into the mass of darkness. He had delayed, waited for the day to evaporate.

‘What do you think?’ I said. There was this calmness between us, as if we had settled into an awareness of our fixed situation on a planet that was moving, slowly but perceptibly turning its axis against the sun and taking us through space with some immense purpose.

He stood up, suddenly.

‘Don’t ask me,’ he said; ‘you’re the scientist .’ Pause.

‘It’s too dark. I’m going inside.’

Lying awake in the night I wondered why we should think that we could understand what was happening. We would have to pretend, perhaps, so that we would have something to do, to impose at least a surface of purpose on our actions. But after all, nobody had understood existence as it used to be; and here we were, hoping to unravel an even stranger set of trickery in a few days.

At school there had been an experiment in which a clear, highly saturated solution of a chemical could be made to transform itself suddenly into a dense white solid, a crystalline mass, merely by knocking the side of the jar in which it stood. The sudden disappearance of solid objects such as people and animals might be analogous, in reverse; perhaps the universe reached a point of saturation and then an instantaneous transformation took place to another dimension. It would be what we called, in jargon, a ‘major event anomaly’ or a ‘singularity occurrence’. Many experts no longer believed in the Darwinian theory of evolution; they said that the appearance of Homo sapiens was inexplicable, a sudden phenomenon for which science as we knew it could never find a cause. The ‘quantum leap’ wasn’t merely a ‘missing link’ but a random event, a quirk in the universe. We had discarded religious fables of creation. Sooner or later we would have to discard the evolutionary fables. If these experts were right, then a ‘major event (positive)’ could very well be annulled by a ‘major event (negative)’. A few apes had survived the first; we had survived the second. The lack of completeness was characteristic. No theory could account for a hundred per cent of any phenomenon.