Craig Harrison - The Quiet Earth

‘Stay there! Keep back!’ I shout. ‘I’ll fire.’

He doesn’t seem to hear. Slowly he advances down the corridor directly at me.

‘Apirana! For God’s sake!’ My hands wobble. ‘Stop!’ At the last moment he knows, I can see in his face he knows I’m going to shoot, maybe a fraction of a second before I know, myself, I will do it.

The gun jerks back as I pull the trigger. The explosion seems to hit him in the chest with the force of a hammer, sending him sprawling away against the wall. He turns, one hand on his chest, the other flat on the wall; then he goes down suddenly onto his knees and forward on his face.

I lower the gun. A shuddering comes over me, making my arms flick around uncontrollably. The gun drops, unfixing itself from the tightness of my fingers. As I walk towards him, he pushes himself up with his left hand, half sideways, lifting his face, his legs making useless crawling movements on the carpet. His eyes fix on my shoes. The dazed expression pulls back to a sudden hatred, his lips gather, and with a huge effort he spits viciously at my shoes. It is all blood, gleaming down his chin and out of the sides of his mouth as he spits, then rolls over onto his back in one movement. His hands hold deep red liquid on his chest.

I crouch by him. He looks directly up towards me. For a moment his eyes widen, as if amazed, the black shining surrounded by yellowish white. Then he says, ‘Hemi. You’re dead, Hemi.’

The eyes slip sideways. A rush of darkness comes from his mouth.

There is a finely furnished modern hotel room lined with soft carpet and velvet curtains. The corpse of a young Samoan woman is lying on the bed. The door leading to the room has been smashed by machine-gun bullets and the corridor beyond is gouged with bullet scars and littered with dozens of cartridge cases, bits of wood and metal, broken glass, and the body of a young Maori. Each object is a part of an enormous mystery.

I lean against the wall. So strange, that I should kill him. I don’t understand it. Here I am, staring down at him, shaking my head and speaking his name over and over: Apirana .

We were the survivors of millions. How could it happen?

I look down, dazed, at my shoes. There are glistening flecks of spittle and blood on them. When I try to unfasten the laces my hands can’t do it, but I have to take the shoes off, so I rip the laces out and hurl the shoes away. Why do people die with their eyes open? What do they see?

Now he knows. Don’t you? He tricked me. Gave me that gun. Knew I would do it. Finally, he decided, he saw the way out, he knew how it had to be ended. I thought I could break him down by flinging a few words out of the dark at him. But he used me to cancel all that. To pay it back, and escape.

When I drove to Coromandel, to Thames, I remember thinking, What if they are counting on this? As I checked in at the motel at Thames and paused at the bottom of the stairs holding the iron rail that vibrated, I was wondering if I had been even more skilfully manoeuvred than I would have believed, into going up this staircase with the bottle of sleeping pills clinking in my pocket. The alternative, of course, was that it would never have occurred to them that I would have the guts to do anything remotely like this.

The spiral of the iron handrail curving round reminded me of the ribonucleic chains, the resonance of proteins that could be vibrated apart, and the genetic sleep in every one in a million that could be shaken awake; the survival mechanism. Near the top of the stairs I had lifted my head to look at the great scatter of starlight over the Coromandel Peninsula, thinking of spiral nebulae and how immensely important our research was, in the pattern of the universe, how worthwhile, at a distance; and I’d stumbled and nearly fallen. When I clutched the handrail I thought: If the universe wanted to stop me, it had its chance there. Then the absurdity made me laugh as I entered the motel room and locked the door. The self-destroyer doesn’t want to die by accident.

I am very methodical. My work has made me believe that almost nothing can happen by accident.

I remember: what? Holding the bottle of sleeping pills and wondering if this was a mistake. To make myself know why I had decided to do this I would have to force my mind to betray itself, to break down the last remnants of the instinct for survival at any cost. I had no idea how hard that would be, how much terror it could make. It would be terminal.

Now I arrive at it again. I have to cheat a far worse, more imbecile, senseless, existence. But it will still not be easy, unless I comprehend, at least a part, a fragment.

It does not take long to break open Perrin’s metal box. I carry it to the dining room on the top floor and tip all the papers out onto a table. There are thin card folders, memos stamped with security numbers, minutes of secret meetings. And a small diary, entries written in a biro scrawl like the secretions of an insect. It is all about bureaucratic scheming, mostly financial. Perhaps written to justify himself in case he fell dead some day. I flick from page to page. Then I see what might be my name. Smoothing the book open, I take it closer to the window. The sun is dissolving the clouds over the harbour, the shadows of the clouds sliding quickly across the water. I look down at the diary.

…difficult decision but have advised D-G it would be best to withhold such information from Hobson as it might jeopardise the entire project. In the early days not much was known about the effects of radioactive isotopes on chromosomes, and precautions were somewhat haphazard.

The tests show no abnormalities in the children of any other staff members and the consensus would seem to be that infantile autistic symptoms of the kind manifest in the Hobson child cannot be linked with any certainty to radioactive genetic damage to the male parent. Dr Franklin is the only dissenting opinion; from his research into immunology he believes that genetic alteration rather than damage has taken place. This seems academic to me and in any case incapable of proof. The consequences are equally unfortunate.

I move away from the window. Chairs and tables push against me. I sit down and fix the book flat on a table under my hands. After a while I move my hands aside and stare down at the pages again.

We are a relatively small unit and the departure or defection of any staff member would be a serious setback. I would regard Hobson’s psychological and neurological condition as demanding particular scrutiny in view of this. Have given assurances to D-G on basis of Report 7A/42.

The pages seem to turn themselves as though the light is splitting them apart and fastening them down. Later I see only this reference, jotted amongst notes about research grants:

Re. Hobson child, it now seems that syndrome includes self-destructive behaviour characteristic of lethal factors in genetic mutants even at basic cellular level.

I look out of the window. It may be afternoon by now, a bright day with a blue sky and violently glittering water. I close Perrin’s book. If anyone was here, I could hand it to them and could say, very clearly: Yes, I killed him.

A carbon copy of Report 7A/42 is in one of the folders, a thin piece of almost transparent paper. It is packed with the usual psychological jargon. I am peculiarly calm, but the process of decoding the jargon and seeing what it means has a shocking effect. The sentences spill out like maggots from the paper, coming alive, unfolding themselves as I read, spilling over the edges. I think I even hear a rustling noise, and I stop, and it goes and then returns, like the whispering which once surrounded me in the empty spaces of the great room full of light. And I go on reading.