On the Beach

by Nevil Shute

  “I suppose they would. I think they’d probably decide to put the women first.”

  The American nodded. “It’s reasonable. And there’s no sense in giving orders that you know won’t be obeyed.”

  “Could you take your ship to sea without them?”

  “Why, yes—just for a short run. Hobart would be a short trip, six or seven hours. We could take her there with just a dozen men, or even less. We wouldn’t submerge if we were as short-handed as that, and we couldn’t cruise for any length of time. But if we got her there, or even to New Zealand—say to Christchurch; without a full crew we could never be effective, operationally.” He paused. “We’d be just refugees.”

  They sat in silence for a time. “One of the things that’s been surprising me,” the grazier said, “is that there have been so few refugees. So few people coming down from the north. From Cairns and Townsville, and from places like that.”

  “Is that so?” the captain asked. “It’s just about impossible to get a bed in Melbourne—anywhere.”

  “I know there have been some. But not the numbers that I should have expected.”

  “That’s the radio, I suppose,” Dwight said. “These talks that the Prime Minister’s been giving have been kind of steadying. The A.B.C.’s been doing a good job in telling people just the way things are. After all, there’s not much comfort in leaving home and coming down here to live in a tent or in a car, and have the same thing happen to you a month or two later.”

  “Maybe,” the grazier said. “I’ve heard of people going back to Queensland after a few weeks of that. But I’m not sure that that’s the whole story. I believe it is that nobody really thinks it’s going to happen, not to them, until they start to feel ill. And by that time, well, it’s less effort to stay at home and take it. You don’t recover from this once it starts, do you?”

  “I don’t think that’s true. I think you can recover, if you get out of the radioactive area into a hospital where you get proper treatment. They’ve got a lot of cases from the north in the Melbourne hospitals right now.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “No. They don’t say anything about that over the radio. After all, what’s the use, They’re only going to get it over again next September.”

  “Nice outlook,” said the grazier. “Will you have another whisky now?”

  “Thank you, I believe I will.” He stood up and poured himself a drink. “You know,” he said, “now that I’ve got used to the idea I think I’d rather have it this way. We’ve all got to die one day, some sooner and some later. The trouble always has been that you’re never ready, because you don’t know when it’s coming. Well, now we do know, and there’s nothing to be done about it. I kind of like that. I kind of like the thought that I’ll be fit and well up till the end of August and then—home. I’d rather have it that way than go on as a sick man from when I’m seventy to when I’m ninety.”

  “You’re a regular naval officer,” the grazier said. “You’re probably more accustomed to this sort of thing than I would be.”

  “Will you evacuate?” the captain asked. “Go some place else when it gets near, Tasmania?”

  “Me? Leave this place?” the grazier said. “No, I shan’t go. When it comes, I’ll have it here, on this verandah, in this chair, with a drink in my hand. Or else in my own bed. I wouldn’t leave this place.”

  “I’d say that’s the way most folks think about it, now that they’ve got used to the idea.”

  They sat on the verandah in the setting sun till Moira came to tell them that tea was ready. “Drink up,” she said, “and come in for the blotting paper, if you can still walk.”

  Her father said, “That’s not the way to talk to our guest.”

  “You don’t know our guest as well as I do, Daddy. I tell you, you just can’t get him past a pub. Any pub.”

  “More likely he can’t get you past one.” They went into the house.

  There followed a very restful two days for Dwight Towers. He handed over a great bundle of mending to the two women, who took it away from him, sorted it, and busied themselves over it. In the hours of daylight he was occupied with Mr. Davidson upon the farm from dawn till dusk. He was initiated into the arts of crutching sheep and of shovelling silage up into a cart and distributing it in the paddocks; he spent long hours walking by the bullock on the sunlit pastures. The change did him good after his confined life in the submarine and in the mother ship; each night he went to bed early and slept heavily, and awoke refreshed for the next day.

  On the last morning of his stay, after breakfast, Moira found him standing at the door of a small outside room beside the laundry, now used as a repository for luggage, ironing boards, gum boots, and junk of every description. He was standing at the open door smoking a cigarette, looking at the assortment of articles inside. She said, “That’s where we put things when we tidy up the house and say we’ll send it to the jumble sale. Then we never do.”

  He smiled. “We’ve got one of those, only it’s not so full as this. Maybe that’s because we haven’t lived there so long.” He stood looking in upon the mass with interest. “Say, whose tricycle was that?”

  “Mine,” she said.

  “You must have been quite small when you rode around on that.”

  She glanced at it. “It does look small now, doesn’t it? I should think I was four or five years old.”

  “There’s a Pogo stick!” He reached in and pulled it out; it squeaked rustily. “It’s years and years since I saw a Pogo stick. There was quite a craze for them at one time, back home.”

  “They went out for a time, and then they came back into fashion,” she said. “Quite a lot of kids about here have Pogo sticks now.”

  “How old would you have been when you had that?”

  She thought for a moment, “It came after the tricycle, after the scooter, and before the bicycle. I should think I was about seven.”

  He held it in his hands thoughtfully. “I’d say that’s about the right age for a Pogo stick. You can buy them in the shops here, now?”

  “I should think so. The kids use them.”

  He laid it down. “It’s years since I saw one of those in the United States. They go in fashions, as you say.” He glanced around. “Who owned the stilts?”

  “My brother had them first, and then I had them. I broke that one.”

  “He was older than you, wasn’t he?”

  She nodded. “Two years older—two and a half.”

  “Is he in Australia now?”

  “No. He’s in England.”

  He nodded; there was nothing useful to be said about that. “Those stilts are quite high off the ground,” he remarked. “I’d say you were older then.”

  She nodded. “I must have been ten or eleven.”

  “Skis.” He measured the length of them with his eye. “You must have been older still.”

  “I didn’t go skiing till I was about sixteen. But I used those up till just before the war. They were getting a bit small for me by then, though. That other pair were Donald’s.”

  He ran his eye around the jumbled contents of the little room. “Say,” he said, “there’s a pair of water-skis!”

  She nodded. “We still use those—or we did up till the war.” She paused. “We used to go for summer holidays at Barwon Heads. Mummy used to rent the same house every year …” She stood in silence for a moment, thinking of the sunny little house by the golf links, the warm sands, the cool air rushing past as she flew behind the motor boat in a flurry of warm spray. “There’s the wooden spade I used to build sand castles with when I was very little …”

  He smiled at her. “It’s kind of fun, looking at other people’s toys and trying to think what they must have looked like at that age. I can just imagine you at seven, jumping around on that Pogo stick.”

  “And flying into a temper every other minute,” she said. She stood for a moment looking in at the door thoughtfully. “I never would let Mummy giv
e any of my toys away,” she said quietly. “I said that I was going to keep them for my children to play with. Now there aren’t going to be any.”

  “Too bad,” he said. “Still, that’s the way it is.” He pulled the door to and closed it on so many sentimental hopes. “I think I’ll have to get back to the ship this afternoon and see if she’s sunk at her moorings. Do you know what time there’d be a train?”

  “I don’t, but we can ring the station and find out. You don’t think you could stay another day?”

  “I’d like to, honey, but I don’t think I’d better. There’ll be a pile of paper on my desk that needs attention.”

  “I’ll find out about the train. What are you going to do this morning?”

  “I told your father that I’d finish harrowing the hill paddock.”

  “I’ve got an hour or so to do around the house. I’ll probably come out and walk around with you after that.”

  “I’d like that. Your bullock’s a good worker, but he doesn’t make a lot of conversation.”

  They gave him his newly mended clothes after lunch. He expressed his thanks for all that they had done for him, packed his bag, and Moira drove him down to the station.

  There was an exhibition of Australian religious paintings at the National Gallery; they arranged to go and see that together before it came off; he would give her a ring. Then he was in the train for Melbourne, on his way back to his work.

  He got back to the aircraft carrier at about six o’clock. As he had supposed, there was a pile of paper on his desk, including a sealed envelope with a security label gummed on the outside. He slit it open and found that it contained a draft operation order, with a personal note attached to it from the First Naval Member asking him to ring up for an appointment and come and see him about it.

  He glanced the order through. It was very much as he had thought that it would be. It was within the capacity of his ship to execute, assuming that there were no mines at all laid on the west coast of the United States, which seemed to him to be a bold assumption.

  He rang up Peter Holmes that evening at his home near Falmouth. “Say,” he said, “I’ve got a draft operation order lying on my desk. There’s a covering letter from the First Naval Member, wants me to go and see him. I’d like it if you could come on board tomorrow and look it over. Then I’d say you’d better come along when I go to see the Admiral.”

  “I’ll be on board tomorrow morning, early,” said the liaison officer.

  “Well, that’s fine. I hate to pull you back off leave, but this needs action.”

  “That’s all right, sir. I was only going to take down a tree.”

  He was in the aircraft carrier by half past nine next morning, seated with Commander Towers in his little office cabin, reading through the order. “It’s more or less what you thought it was going to be, sir, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “More or less,” the captain agreed. He turned to the side table. “This is all we’ve got on the minefields. This radio station that they want investigated. They’ve pinpointed that in the Seattle area. Well, we’re all right for that.” He raised a chart from the table. “This is the key minefield chart of the Juan de Fuca and Puget Sound. We should be safe to go right up to Bremerton naval yard. We’re all right for Pearl Harbor, but they don’t ask us to go there. The Gulf of Panama, San Diego, and San Francisco—we’ve got nothing on those at all.”

  Peter nodded. “We’ll have to explain that to the Admiral. As a matter of fact, I think he knows it. I know that he’s quite open to a general discussion of this thing.”

  “Dutch Harbor,” said the captain. “We’ve got nothing on that.”

  “Would we meet any ice up there?”

  “I’d say we would. And fog, a lot of fog. It’s not so good to go there at this time of year, with no watch on deck. We’ll have to be careful up around those parts.”

  “I wonder why they want us to go there.”

  “I wouldn’t know. Maybe he’ll tell us.”

  They pored over the charts together for a time. “How would you go?” the liaison officer asked at last.

  “On the surface along Latitude Thirty, north of New Zealand, south of Pitcairn, till we pick up Longitude One-twenty. Then straight up the longitude. That brings us to the States in California, around Santa Barbara. Coming home from Dutch Harbor we’d do the same. Straight south down One-six-five past Hawaii. I guess we’d take a look in at Pearl Harbor while we’re there. Then right on south till we can surface near the Friendly Islands, or maybe a bit south of that.”

  “How long would that mean that we should be submerged?”

  The captain turned and took a paper from the desk. “I was trying to figure that out last night. I don’t suppose that we’d stay very long in any place, like the last time. I make the distance around two hundred degrees, twelve thousand miles submerged. Say six hundred hours cruising—twenty-five days. Add a couple of days for investigations and delays. Say twenty-seven days.”

  “Quite a long time under water.”

  “Swordfish went longer. She went thirty-two days. The thing is to take it easy, and relax.”

  The liaison officer studied the chart of the Pacific. He laid his finger on the mass of reefs and island groups south of Hawaii. “There’s not going to be much relaxing when we come to navigate through all this stuff, submerged. And that comes at the end of the trip.”

  “I know it.” He stared at the chart. “Maybe we’ll move away towards the west a trifle, and come down on Fiji from the north.” He paused. “I’m more concerned about Dutch Harbor than I am of the run home,” he said.

  They stood studying the charts with the operation order for half an hour. Finally the Australian said, “Well, it’s going to be quite a cruise.” He grinned. “Something to tell our grandchildren about.”

  The captain glanced at him quickly, and then broke into a smile. “You’re very right.”

  The liaison officer waited in the cabin while the captain rang the Admiral’s secretary in the Navy Department. An appointment was made for ten o’clock the following morning. There was nothing then for Peter Holmes to stay for; he arranged to meet his captain next morning in the secretary’s office before the appointment, and he took the next train back to his home at Falmouth.

  He got there before lunch and rode his bicycle up from the station. He was hot when he got home, and glad to get out of uniform and take a shower before the cold meal. He found Mary to be very much concerned about the baby’s prowess in crawling. “I left her in the lounge,” she told him, “on the hearth rug, and I went into the kitchen to peel the potatoes. The next thing I knew, she was in the passage, just outside the kitchen door. She’s a little devil. She can get about now at a tremendous pace.”

  They sat down to their lunch. “We’ll have to get some kind of a play pen,” he said. “One of those wooden things, that fold up.”

  She nodded. “I was thinking about that. One with a few rows of beads on part of it, like an abacus.”

  “I suppose you can get play pens still,” he said. “Do we know anyone who’s stopped having babies—might have one they didn’t want?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t. All our friends seem to be having baby after baby.”

  “I’ll scout around a bit and see what I can find,” he said.

  It was not until lunch was nearly over that she was able to detach her mind from the baby. Then she asked, “Oh, Peter, what happened with Commander Towers?”

  “He’d got a draft operation order,” he told her. “I suppose it’s confidential, so don’t talk about it. They want us to make a fairly long cruise in the Pacific. Panama, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Dutch Harbor, and home, probably by way of Hawaii. It’s all a bit vague just at present.”

  She was uncertain of her geography. “That’s an awfully long way, isn’t it?”

  “It’s quite a way,” he said. “I don’t think we shall do it all. Dwight’s very much against going into the Gulf of Panama
because he hasn’t got a clue about the minefields, and if we don’t go there that cuts off thousands of miles. But even so, it’s quite a way.”

  “How long would it take?” she asked.

  “I haven’t worked it out exactly. Probably about two months. You see,” he explained, “you can’t set a direct course, say for San Diego. He wants to keep the underwater time down to a minimum. That means we set course east on a safe latitude, steaming on the surface till we’re two-thirds of the way across the South Pacific, and then go straight north till we come to California. It makes a dog-leg of it, but it means less time submerged.”

  “How long would you be submerged, Peter?”

  “Twenty-seven days, he reckons.”

  “That’s an awfully long time, isn’t it?”

  “It’s quite long. It’s not a record, or anywhere near it. Still, it’s quite a time to be without fresh air. Nearly a month.”

  “When would you be starting?”

  “Well, I don’t know that. The original idea was that we’d get away about the middle of next month, but now we’ve got this bloody measles in the ship. We can’t go until we’re clear of that.”

  “Have there been any more cases?”

  “One more—the day before yesterday. The surgeon seems to think that’s probably the last. If he’s right we might be cleared to go about the end of the month. If not—if there’s another one—it’ll be some time in March.”

  “That means that you’d be back here some time in June?”

  “I should think so. We’ll be clear of measles by the tenth of March whatever happens. That means we’d be back here by the tenth of June.”