Nevil Shute - On The Beach

"You were up late last night?" he asked.

She nodded. "And the night before."

"I’d say you might try going to bed early, once in a while.’’

"What’s the use?" she demanded. "What’s the use of anything now?" He did not try to answer that, and presently she asked, "Why is Peter joining you in Scorpion, Dwight?"

"He’s our new liaison officer," he told her.

"Did you have one before him?"

He shook his head. "We never had one before,"

"Why have they given you one now?"

"I wouldn’t know," he replied. "Maybe we’ll be going for a cruise in Australian waters. I’ve had no orders, but that’s what people tell me. The captain seems to be about the last person they tell in this navy."

"Where do they say you’re going to, Dwight?"

He hesitated for a moment. Security was now a thing of the past though it took a conscious effort to remember it; with no enemy in all the world there was little but the force of habit in it.

"People are saying we’re to make a little cruise up to Port Moresby," he told her. "It may be just a rumour, but that’s all I know."

"But Port Moresby’s out, isn’t it?"

"I believe it is. They haven’t had any radio from there for quite a while."

"But you can’t go on shore there if it’s out, can you?"

"Somebody has to go and see, sometime," he said. "We wouldn’t go outside the hull unless the radiation level’s near to normal. If it’s high I wouldn’t even surface. But someone has to go and see, sometime." He paused and there was silence in the starlight, in the garden. "There’s a lot of places someone ought to go and see," he said at last. "There’s radio transmission still coming through from someplace near Seattle. It doesn’t make any sense, just now and then a kind of jumble of dots and dashes. Sometimes a fortnight goes by, and then it comes again. It could be somebody’s alive up there, doesn’t know how to handle the set. There’s a lot of funny things up in the Northern Hemisphere that someone ought to go and see."

" Could anybody be alive up there?"

"I wouldn’t think so. It’s not quite impossible. He’d have to be living in an hermetically sealed room with all air filtered as it comes in and all food and water stored in with him some way. I wouldn’t think it practical."

She nodded. "Is it true that Cairns is out, Dwight?"

"I think it is—Cairns and Darwin. Maybe we’ll have to go and see those, too. Maybe that’s why Peter has been drafted into Scorpion. He knows those waters."

"Somebody was telling Daddy that they’ve got radiation sickness in Townsville now. Do you think that’s right?"

"I don’t really know—I hadn’t heard it. But I’d say it might be right. It’s south of Cairns."

"It’s going to go on spreading down here, southwards, till it gets to us?"

"That’s what they say."

"There never was a bomb dropped in the Southern Hemisphere," she said angrily. "Why must it come to us? Can’t anything be done to stop it?"

He shook his head. "Not a thing. It’s the winds. It’s mighty difficult to dodge what’s carried on the wind. You just can’t do it. You’ve got to take what’s coming to you, and make the best of it. "

"I don’t understand it," she said stubbornly. "People were saying once that no wind blows across the equator, so we’d be all right. And now it seems we aren’t all right at all..."

"We’d never have been all right," he said quietly. "Even if they’d been correct about the heavy particles—the radioactive dust—which they weren’t, we’d still have got the lightest particles carried by diffusion. We’ve got them now. The background level of the radiation here, today, is eight or nine times what it was before the war."

"That doesn’t seem to hurt us," she retorted. "But this dust they talk about. That’s blown about on the wind, isn’t it?"

"That’s so," he replied. "But no wind does blow right into the Southern Hemisphere from the Northern Hemisphere. If it did we’d all be dead right now."

"I wish we were," she said bitterly. "It’s like waiting to be hung."

"Maybe it is. Or maybe it’s a period of grace."

There was a little silence after he said that. "Why is it taking so long, Dwight?" she asked at last. "Why can’t the wind blow straight and get it over?"

"It’s not so difficult to understand, really," he said. "In each hemisphere the winds go around in great whorls, thousands of miles across, between the pole and the equator. There’s a circulatory system of winds in the Northern Hemisphere and another in the Southern Hemisphere. But what divides them isn’t the equator that you see on a globe. It’s a thing called the Pressure Equator, and that shifts north and south with the season. In January the whole of Borneo and Indonesia is in the northern system, but in July the division has shifted away up north, so that all of India and Siam, and everything that’s to be south of that, is in the southern system. So in January the northern winds carry the radioactive dust from the fall-out down into Malaya, say. Then in July that’s in the southern system, and our own winds pick it up and carry it down here. That’s the reason why it’s coming to us slowly."

"And they can’t do anything about it?"

"Not a thing. It’s just too big a matter for mankind to tackle. We’ve just got to take it."

"I won’t take it," she said vehemently. "it’s not fair. No one in the Southern Hemisphere ever dropped a bomb, a hydrogen bomb or a cobalt bomb or any other sort of bomb. We had nothing to do with it. Why should we have to die because other countries nine or ten thousand miles away from us wanted to have a war? It’s so bloody unfair."

"It’s that, all right," he said. "But that’s the way it is."

There was a pause, and then she said angrily. "It’s not that I’m afraid of dying, Dwight. We’ve all got to do that sometime. It’s all the things I’m going to have to miss..."

She turned to him in the starlight. "I’m never going to get outside Australia. All my life I’ve wanted to see the Rue de Rivoli. I suppose it’s the romantic name. It’s silly, because I suppose it’s just a street like any other street. But that’s what I’ve wanted, and I’m never going to see it. Because there isn’t any Paris now, or London, or New York."

He smiled at her gently. "The Rue de Rivoli may still be there, with things in the shop windows and everything. I wouldn’t know if Paris got a bomb or not. Maybe it’s all there still, just as it was, with the sun shining down the street the way you’d want to see it. That’s the way I like to think about that sort of place. It’s just that folks don’t live there anymore."

She got restlessly to her feet. "That’s not the way I wanted to see it. A city of dead people... Get me another drink, Dwight."

Still seated, he smiled up at her. "Not on your life. It’s time you went to bed."

"Then I’ll get it for myself." She marched angrily into the house. He heard the tinkle of glass and she came out almost immediately, a tumbler more than half full in band with a lump of ice floating in it. "I was going home in March," she exclaimed. "To London. It’s been arranged for years. I was to have six months in England and on the Continent, and then I was coming back through America. I’d have seen Madison Avenue. It’s so bloody unfair."

She took a long gulp at her glass, and held it away from her in disgust. "Christ, what’s this muck I’m drinking?"

He got up and took the glass from her and smelled it.

"That’s whisky," he told her.

She took it back from him and smelled it herself. "So it is," she said vaguely. "It’ll probably kill me, on top of brandy." She lifted the glass of neat liquor and tossed it down, and threw the ice cube out upon the grass.