On the Beach

by Nevil Shute

  “Not yet,” he said. “I’m going to get a sail boat when I’m home on my next leave.”

  He raised himself from the rail that they had been sitting on, and stood for a moment looking at the sunset glow.

  “I guess that’ll be next September,” he said quietly. “Kind of late in the season to start sailing, up at Mystic.”

  She was silent, not knowing what to say.

  He turned to her. “I suppose you think I’m nuts,” he said heavily. “But that’s the way I see it, and I can’t seem to think about it any other way. At any rate, I don’t cry over babies.”

  She rose and turned to walk with him down the jetty.

  “I don’t think you’re nuts,” she said.

  They walked together in silence to the beach.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Next morning, Sunday, everyone in the Holmeses’ household got up in pretty good shape, unlike the previous Sunday that Commander Towers had spent with them. They had gone to bed after a reasonable evening, unexcited by a party. At breakfast Mary asked her guest if he wanted to go to church, thinking that the more she got him out of the house the less likely he was to give Jennifer measles.

  “I’d like to go,” he said, “if that’s convenient.”

  “Of course it is,” she said. “Just do whatever you like. I thought we might take tea down to the club this afternoon, unless you’ve got anything else you’d like to do.”

  He shook his head. “I could use another swim. But I’ll have to get back to the ship tonight some time, after supper, maybe.”

  “Can’t you stay over till tomorrow morning?”

  He shook his head, knowing her concern about the measles. “I’ll have to get back tonight.”

  He went out into the garden directly the meal was over to smoke a cigarette, thinking to ease Mary’s mind. Moira found him there when she came out from helping with the dishes, sitting in a deck chair looking out over the bay. She sat down beside him. “Are you really going to church?” she asked.

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “Can I come too?”

  He turned his head, and looked at her in surprise. “Why, certainly. Do you go regularly?”

  She smiled. “Not once in a blue moon,” she admitted. “It might be better if I did. Maybe I wouldn’t drink so much.”

  He pondered that one for a moment. “Could be,” he said uncertainly. “I don’t know that that’s got a lot to do with it.”

  “You’re sure you wouldn’t rather go alone?”

  “Why, no,” he said. “I’d like your company.”

  As they left to walk down to the church Peter Holmes was getting out the garden hose to do some watering before the sun grew hot. His wife came out of the house presently. “Where’s Moira?” she asked.

  “Gone to church with the captain.”

  “Moira. Gone to church?”

  He grinned. “Believe it or not, that’s where she’s gone.”

  She stood in silence for a minute. “I hope it’s going to be all right,” she said at last.

  “Why shouldn’t it?” he asked. “He’s dinkum, and she’s not a bad sort when you get to know her. They might even get married.”

  She shook her head. “There’s something funny about it. I hope it’s going to be all right,” she repeated.

  “It’s no concern of ours, anyway,” he said. “Lots of things are going a bit weird these days.”

  She nodded, and started pottering about the garden while he watered. Presently she said, “I’ve been thinking, Peter. Could we take out those two trees, do you think?”

  He came and looked at them with her. “I’d have to ask the landlord,” he said. “What do you want to take them out for?”

  “We’ve got so little space for growing vegetables,” she said. “They are so expensive in the shops. If we could take those trees out and cut back the wattle we could make a kitchen garden here, from here to here” She indicated with her hands. “I’m sure we could save nearly a pound a week by growing our own stuff. And it’ld be fun, too.”

  He went to survey the trees. “I could get them down all right,” he said, “and there’s a nice bit of firewood in them. It ‘ld be green, of course, too green to burn this winter. We’d have to stack it for a year. The only thing is, getting out the stumps. It’s quite a big job, that.”

  “There are only two of them,” she said. “I could help—keep on nibbling at them while you’re away. If we could get them out this winter and dig the ground over, I could plant it in the spring and we’d have vegetables all next summer.” She paused. “Peas and beans,” she said. “And a vegetable marrow. I’d make marrow jam.”

  “Good idea,” he said. He looked the trees up and down. “They’re not very big,” he said. “It’ld be better for the pine if they came out.”

  “Another thing I want to do,” she said, “is to put in a flowering gum tree, here. I think that’ll look lovely in the summer.”

  “Takes about five years to come into bloom,” he said.

  “Never mind. A gum tree there would be just lovely, up against the blue of the sea. We could see it from our bedroom window.”

  He paused, considering the brilliance of the scarlet flowers all over the big tree against the deep blue sea, in the brilliant sunlight. “It’ld certainly be quite a sensation when it was in bloom,” he said. “Where would you put it, Here?”

  “A bit more over this way, here,” she said. “When it got big we could take down this holly thing and have a seat in the shade, here.” She paused. “I went to Wilson’s nurseries while you were away,” she said. “He’s got some lovely little flowering gum trees there, only ten and sixpence each. Do you think we could put in one of those this autumn?”

  “They’re a bit delicate,” he said. “I think the thing to do would be to put in two fairly close to each other, so that you’d have one if the other died. Then take out one of them in a couple of years’ time.”

  “The trouble is, one never does it,” she observed.

  They went on happily planning their garden for the next ten years, and the morning passed very quickly. When Moira and Dwight came back from church they were still at it. They were called into consultation on the layout of the kitchen garden. Presently Peter and Mary went into the house, the former to get drinks and the latter to get the lunch.

  The girl glanced at the American. “Someone’s crazy,” she said quietly. “Is it me or them?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “They won’t be here in six months’ time. I won’t be here. You won’t be here. They won’t want any vegetables next year.”

  Dwight stood in silence for a moment, looking out at the blue sea, the long curve of the shore. “So what?” he said at last. “Maybe they don’t believe it. Maybe they think that they can take it all with them and have it where they’re going to, some place. I wouldn’t know.” He paused. “The thing is, they just kind of like to plan a garden. Don’t you go and spoil it for them, telling them they’re crazy.”

  “I wouldn’t do that.” She stood in silence for a minute. “None of us really believe it’s ever going to happen—not to us,” she said at last. “Everybody’s crazy on that point, one way or another.”

  “You’re very right,” he said emphatically.

  Drinks came, and put a closure on the conversation, and then lunch. After lunch Mary turned the men out into the garden, thinking them to be infectious, while she washed the dishes with Moira. Seated in deck chairs with a cup of coffee, Peter asked his captain, “Have you heard anything about our next job, sir?”

  The American cocked his eye at him. “Not a thing. Have you?”

  “Not really. Something was said at that conference with P.S.O. that made me wonder if anything was in the wind.”

  “What was it that was said?”

  “Something about fitting us with new directional wireless of some kind. Have you heard anything?”

  Dwight shook his head. “We’ve got plenty of
radio.”

  “This is for taking a bearing—accurately. Perhaps when we’re submerged to periscope depth. We can’t do that, can we?”

  “Not with our existing equipment. What do they want us to do that for?”

  “I don’t know. It wasn’t on the agenda. It was just one of the backroom boys speaking out of turn.”

  “They want us to track down radio signals?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know, sir. How it came up was that they asked if the radiation detector could be moved to the forward periscope so that this thing could be put on the aft periscope. John Osborne said he was pretty sure it could, but he’d take it up with you.”

  “That’s right. It can go on the forward periscope. I thought they wanted to fit two.”

  “I don’t think so, sir. I think they want to fit this other gadget in its place on the aft one.”

  The American stared at the smoke rising from his cigarette. Then he said, “Seattle.”

  “What’s that, sir?”

  “Seattle. There were radio signals coming from some place near Seattle. Do you know if they’re still coming through?”

  Peter shook his head, amazed. “I didn’t know anything about that. Do you mean that somebody’s still operating a transmitter?”

  The captain shrugged his shoulders. “Gould be. If so, it’s somebody that doesn’t know how to send. Sometimes they make a group, sometimes a word in clear. Most times it’s just a jumble, like a child might make, playing at radio stations.”

  “Does this go on all the time?”

  Dwight shook his head. “I don’t think so. It comes on the air irregularly, now and then. I know they’re monitoring that frequency most of the time. At least, they were till Christmas. I haven’t heard since.”

  The liaison officer said, “But that must mean there’s somebody alive up there.”

  “It’s just a possibility. You can’t have radio without power, and that means starting up some kind of a motor. A big motor, to run a big station with global range. But—I don’t know. You’d think a guy who could start up an outfit of that size and run it—you’d think he’d know Morse code. Even if he had to spell it out two words a minute with the book in front of him.”

  “Do you think we’re going there?”

  “Could be. It was one of the points they wanted information on, way back last October. They wanted all the information on the U.S. radio stations that we had.”

  “Did you have anything that helped?”

  Dwight shook his head. “Only the U.S. Navy stations. Very little on the Air Force or the Army stations. Practically nothing on the civil stations. There’s more radio on the West Coast than you could shake a stick at.”

  That afternoon they strolled down to the beach and bathed, leaving Mary with the baby at the house. Lying on the warm sand with the two men, Moira asked, “Dwight, where is Swordfish now? Is she coming here?”

  “I haven’t heard it,” he replied. “The last I heard she was in Montevideo.”

  “She could turn up here, any time,” said Peter Holmes. “She’s got the range.”

  The American nodded. “That’s so. Maybe they’ll send her over here one day with mail or passengers. Diplomats, or something.”

  “Where is Montevideo?” asked the girl. “I ought to know that, but I don’t.”

  Dwight said, “It’s in Uruguay, on the east side of South America. Way down towards the bottom.”

  “I thought you said she was at Rio de Janeiro. Isn’t that in Brazil?”

  He nodded. “That was when she made her cruise up in the North Atlantic. She was based on Rio then. But after that they moved down into Uruguay.”

  “Was that because of radiation?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Peter said, “I don’t know that it’s got there yet. It may have done. They’ve not said anything upon the radio. It’s just about on the tropic, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right,” said Dwight. “Like Rockhampton.”

  The girl asked, “Have they got it in Rockhampton?”

  “I haven’t heard that they have,” said Peter. “It said on the wireless this morning that they’ve got it at Salisbury, in Southern Rhodesia. I think that’s a bit further north.”

  “I think it is,” said the captain. “It’s in the middle of a land mass, too, and that might make a difference. These other places that we’re talking about—they’re all on a coast.”

  “Isn’t Alice Springs just about on the tropic?”

  “It might be. I wouldn’t know. That’s in the middle of a land mass, too, of course.”

  The girl asked, “Does it go quicker down a coast than in the middle?”

  Dwight shook his head. “I wouldn’t know. I don’t think they’ve got any evidence on that, one way or the other.”

  Peter laughed. “They’ll know by the time it gets here. Then they can etch it on the glass.”

  The girl wrinkled her brows. “Etch it on the glass?”

  “Hadn’t you heard about that one?” She shook her head.

  “John Osborne told me about it, yesterday,” he said. “It seems that somebody in C.S.I.R.O is getting busy with a history, about what’s happened to us. They do it on glass bricks. They etch it on the glass and then they fuse another brick down on the top of it in some way, so that the writing’s in the middle.”

  Dwight turned upon his elbow, interested. “I hadn’t heard of that. What are they going to do with them?”

  “Put them up on top of Mount Kosciusko,” Peter said. “It’s the highest peak in Australia. If ever the world gets inhabited again they must go there some time. And it’s not so high as to be inaccessible.”

  “Well, what do you know! They’re really doing that, are they?”

  “So John says. They’ve got a sort of concrete cellar made up there. Like in the Pyramids.”

  The girl asked, “But how long is this history?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think it can be very long. They’re doing it with pages out of books, though, too. Sealing them in between sheets of thick glass.”

  “But these people who come after,” the girl said. “They won’t know how to read our stuff. They may be … animals.”

  “I believe they’ve gone to a lot of trouble about that. First steps in reading. Picture of a cat, and then CAT and all that sort of thing. John said that was about all that they’d got finished so far.” He paused. “I suppose it’s something to do,” he said. “Keeps the wise men out of mischief.”

  “A picture of a cat won’t do them much good,” Moira remarked. “There won’t be any cats. They won’t know what a cat is.”

  “A picture of a fish might be better,” said Dwight. “FISH. Or—say—a picture of a seagull.”

  “You’re getting into awful spelling difficulties.”

  The girl turned to Peter curiously. “What sort of books are they preserving? All about how to make the cobalt bomb?”

  “God forbid.” They laughed. “I don’t know what they’re doing. I should think a copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica would make a good kick-off, but there’s an awful lot of it. I really don’t know what they’re doing. John Osborne might know—or he could find out.”

  “Just idle curiosity,” she said. “It won’t affect you or me.” She stared at him in mock consternation. “Don’t tell me they’re preserving any of the newspapers. I just couldn’t bear it.”

  “I shouldn’t think so,” he replied. “They’re not as crazy as that.”

  Dwight sat up on the sand. “All this beautiful warm water going to waste,” he remarked. “I think we ought to use it.”

  Moira stood up. “Make the most of it,” she agreed. “There’s not much of it left.”

  Peter yawned. “You two go and use the water. I’ll use the sun.”

  They left him lying on the beach and went into the sea together. As they swam out she said, “You’re pretty fast in the water, aren’t you?”

  He paused, treading water beside her. “I used t
o swim quite a lot when I was younger. I swam for the Academy against West Point one time.”

  She nodded. “I thought you were something like that. Do you swim much now?”

  He shook his head. “Not in races. That’s a thing you have to give up pretty soon, unless you’ve got the time to do a lot of it, and keep in training.” He laughed. “I think the water’s colder now than when I was a boy. Not here, of course. I mean, in Mystic.”

  “Were you born in Mystic?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “I was born on Long Island Sound, but not at Mystic. A place called Westport. My Dad’s a doctor there. He was a Navy surgeon in the First World War, and then he got this practice in Westport.”

  “Is that on the sea?”

  He nodded. “Swimming and sailing and fishing. That’s the way it was when I was a boy.”

  “How old are you, Dwight?”

  “I’m thirty-three. How old are you?”

  “What a rude question! I’m twenty-four.” She paused. “Does Sharon come from Westport, too?”

  “In a way,” he said. “Her Dad’s a lawyer in New York City, lives in an apartment on West 84th Street, near the park. They have a summer home at Westport.”

  “So you met her there.”

  He nodded. “Boy meets girl.”

  “You must have married quite young.”

  “Just after graduation,” he replied. “I was twenty-two, an ensign on the Franklin. Sharon was nineteen; she never finished college. We’d made our minds up more than a year before. Our folks got together when they saw that we weren’t going to change, and they decided that they’d better stake us for a while.” He paused. “Her Dad was mighty nice about it,” he said quietly. “We could have gone on until we got some money somehow, but they thought it wasn’t doing either of us any good. So they let us get married.”

  “They gave you an allowance.”

  “That’s right. We only needed it three or four years, and then an aunt died and I got promoted, and we were all set.”

  They swam to the end of the jetty, got out, and sat basking in the sun. Presently they walked back to Peter on the beach, sat with him while they smoked a cigarette, and then went to change. They re-assembled on the beach carrying their shoes, drying their feet in leisurely manner in the sun and brushing off the sand. Presently Dwight started to put on his socks.