On the Beach

by Nevil Shute

  “Oh, I do!” She put her arms round him and kissed him. “It’s a lovely present. You must have had a fearful job with it on the tram. Thank you so much.”

  “That’s all right,” he said. He kissed her back. “I’m so glad you like it.”

  She went and fetched the baby from the house and put her in the pen. Then they got short drinks for themselves and sat on the lawn, the bars between them and the baby, smoking cigarettes and watching her reaction to the new environment. They watched her as she grasped one of the bars in a tiny fist.

  “You don’t think she’ll get up on her feet too soon, with that to hold on to?” her mother asked, worried. “I mean, she wouldn’t learn to walk without it for a longtime. If they walk too soon they grow up bandy-legged.”

  “I shouldn’t think so,” Peter said. “I mean, everyone has play pens. I had one when I was a kid, and I didn’t grow up bandy-legged.”

  “I suppose if she didn’t pull herself up on this she’d be pulling herself up on something else. A chair, or something.”

  When Mary took the baby away to give her her bath and make her ready for bed, Peter took the play pen indoors and set it up in the nursery. Then he laid the table for the evening meal. Then he went and stood on the verandah, fingering the red boxes in his pocket, wondering how on earth he was to give his other presents to his wife.

  Presently he went and got himself a whisky.

  He did it that evening, shortly before she went to take the baby up before they went to bed. He said awkwardly, “There’s one thing I want to have a talk about before I go off on this cruise.”

  She looked up. “What’s that?”

  “About this radiation sickness people get. There’s one or two things that you ought to know.”

  She said impatiently, “Oh, that. It’s not until September. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I’m afraid we’ll have to talk about it,” he said.

  “I don’t see why. You can tell me all about it nearer the time. When we know it’s coming. Mrs. Hildred says her husband heard from somebody that it isn’t coming here after all. It’s slowing down or something. It’s not going to get here.”

  “I don’t know who Mrs. Hildred’s husband has been talking to. But I can tell you that there’s not a word of truth in it. It’s coming here, all right. It may come in September, or it may come sooner.”

  She stared at him. “You mean that we’re all going to get it?”

  “Yes,” he said. “We’re all going to get it. We’re all going to die of it. That’s why I want to tell you just a bit about it.”

  “Can’t you tell me about it nearer the time? When we know it’s really going to happen?”

  He shook his head. “I’d rather tell you now. You see, I might not be here when it happens. It might come quicker than we think, while I’m away. Or I might get run over by a bus—anything.”

  “There aren’t any buses,” she said quietly. “What you mean is the submarine.”

  “Have it your own way,” he said. “I’d be much happier while I’m away in the submarine if I knew you knew about things more than you do now.”

  “All right,” she said reluctantly. She lit a cigarette. “Go on and tell me.”

  He thought for a minute. “We’ve all got to die one day,” he said at last. “I don’t know that dying this way is much worse than any other. What happens is that you get ill. You start feeling sick, and then you are sick. Apparently you go on being sick—you can’t keep anything down. And then, you’ve got to go. Diarrhoea. And that gets worse and worse, too. You may recover for a little while, but it comes back again. And finally you get so weak that you just—die.”

  She blew a long cloud of smoke. “How long does all this take?”

  “I didn’t ask about that. I think it varies with the individual. It may take two or three days. I suppose if you recover it might take two or three weeks.”

  There was a short silence. “It’s messy,” she said at last. “I suppose if everybody gets it all at once, there’s nobody to help you. No doctors, and no hospitals?”

  “I shouldn’t think so. I think this is a thing you’ve got to battle through with on your own.”

  “But you’ll be here, Peter?”

  “I’ll be here,” he comforted her. “I’m just telling you to cover the thousand to one chance.”

  “But if I’m all alone, who’s going to look after Jennifer?”

  “Leave Jennifer out of it for the moment,” he said. “We’ll come to her later.” He leaned towards her. “The thing is this, dear. There’s no recovery. But you don’t have to die in a mess. You can die decently, when things begin to get too bad.” He drew the smaller of the two red boxes from his pocket.

  She stared at it, fascinated. “What’s that?” she whispered.

  He undid the little carton and took out the vial. “This is a dummy,” he said. “These aren’t real. Goldie gave it me to show you what to do. You just take one of them with a drink—any kind of drink. Whatever you like best. And then you just lie back, and that’s the end.”

  “You mean, you die?” The cigarette was dead between her fingers.

  He nodded. “When it gets too bad—it’s the way out.”

  “What’s the other pill for?” she whispered. “That’s a spare,” he said. “I suppose they give it you in case you lose one of them, or funk it.”

  She sat in silence, her eyes fixed on the red box.

  “When the time comes,” he said, “they’ll tell you all about this on the wireless. Then you just go to Goldie’s and ask the girl for it, over the counter, so that you can have it in the house. She’ll give it to you. Everybody will be given it who wants it.”

  She reached out, dropping the dead cigarette, and took the box from him. She read the instructions printed on it in black. At last she said, “But, Peter, however ill I was, I couldn’t do that. Who would look after Jennifer?”

  “We’re all going to get it,” he said. “Every living thing. Dogs and cats and babies—everyone. I’m going to get it. You’re going to get it. Jennifer’s going to get it, too.”

  She stared at him. “Jennifer’s going to get this sort of—cholera?”

  “I’m afraid so, dear,” he said. “We’re all going to get it.”

  She dropped her eyes. “That’s beastly,” she said vehemently. “I don’t mind for myself so much. But that’s … it’s simply vile.”

  He tried to comfort her. “It’s the end of everything for all of us,” he said. “We’re going to lose most of the years of life that we’ve looked forward to, and Jennifer’s going to lose all of them. But it doesn’t have to be too painful for her. When things are hopeless, you can make it easy for her. It’s going to take a bit of courage on your part, but you’ve got that. This is what you’ll have to do if I’m not here.”

  He drew the other red box from his pocket and began to explain the process to her. She watched him with growing hostility. “Let me get this straight,” she said, and now there was an edge in her voice. “Are you trying to tell me what I’ve got to do to kill Jennifer?”

  He knew that there was trouble coming, but he had to face it. “That’s right,” he said. “If it becomes necessary you’ll have to do it.”

  She flared suddenly into anger. “I think you’re crazy,” she exclaimed. “I’d never do a thing like that, however ill she was. I’d nurse her to the end. You must be absolutely mad. The trouble is that you don’t love her. You never have loved her. She’s always been a nuisance to you. Well, she’s not a nuisance to me. It’s you that’s the nuisance. And now it’s reached the stage that you’re trying to tell me how to murder her.” She got to her feet, white with rage. “If you say one more word I’ll murder you!”

  He had never seen her so angry before. He got to his feet. “Have it your own way,” he said wearily. “You don’t have to use these things if you don’t want to.”

  She said furiously, “There’s a trick here, somewhere. You’re try
ing to get me to murder Jennifer and kill myself. Then you’d be free to go off with some other woman.”

  He had not thought that it would be so bad as this. “Don’t be a bloody fool,” he said sharply. “If I’m here I’ll have it myself. If I’m not here, if you’ve got to face things on your own, it’ll be because I’m dead already. Just think of that, and try and get that into your fat head. I’ll be dead.”

  She stared at him in angry silence.

  “There’s another thing you’d better think about,” he said. “Jennifer may live longer than you will.” He held up the first red box. “You can chuck these in the dustbin,” he said. “You can battle on as long as you can stand, until you die. But Jennifer may not be dead. She may live on for days, crying and vomiting all over herself in her cot and lying in her muck, with you dead on the floor beside her and nobody to help her. Finally, of course, she’ll die.

  Do you want her to die like that? If you do, I don’t.” He turned away. “Just think about it, and don’t be such a bloody fool.”

  She stood in silence. For a moment he thought that she was going to fall, but he was too angry now himself to help her.

  “This is a time when you’ve just got to show some guts and face up to things,” he said.

  She turned and ran out of the room, and presently he heard her sobbing in the bedroom. He did not go to her. Instead he poured himself a whisky and soda and went out on to the verandah and sat down in a deck chair, looking out over the sea. These bloody women, sheltered from realities, living in a sentimental dream world of their own! If they’d face up to things they could help a man, help him enormously. While they clung to the dream world they were just a bloody millstone round his neck.

  About midnight, after his third whisky, he went into the house and to their bedroom. She was in bed and the light was out; he undressed in the dark, fearing to wake her. She lay with her back to him; he turned from her and fell asleep, helped by the whisky. At about two in the morning he awoke, and heard her sobbing in the bed beside him. He stretched out a hand to comfort her.

  She turned to him, still sobbing. “Oh Peter, I’m sorry I’ve been such a fool.”

  They said no more about the red boxes, but next morning he put them in the medicine cupboard in the bathroom, at the back, where they would not be obtrusive but where she could hardly fail to see them. In each box he left a little note explaining that it was a dummy, explaining what she had to do to get the real ones. He added to each note a few words of love, thinking that she might well read it after he was dead.

  The pleasant summer weather lasted well on into March. In Scorpion there were no more cases of measles, and the work upon the submarine progressed quickly in the hands of dockyard fitters who had little else to do. Peter Holmes took down the second tree, cut it up and stacked the logs to dry out so that they could be burned the following year, and started to dig out the stumps to make the kitchen garden.

  John Osborne started up his Ferrari and drove it out upon the road. There was no positive prohibition upon motoring at that time. There was no petrol available to anybody because officially there was no petrol in the country; the stocks reserved for doctors and for hospitals had been used up. Yet very occasionally cars were still seen in motion on the roads. Each individual motorist had cans of petrol tucked away in his garage or in some private hiding place, provision that he had made when things were getting short, and these reserves were sometimes called upon in desperate emergency. John Osborne’s Ferrari on the road did not call for any action by the police, even when his foot slipped upon the unfamiliar accelerator on his first drive and he touched eighty-five in second gear in Bourke Street, in the middle of the city. Unless he were to kill anybody, the police were not disposed to prosecute him for a trifle such as that.

  He did not kill anybody, but he frightened himself very much. There was a private road racing-circuit in South Gippsland near a little place called Tooradin, owned and run by a club of enthusiasts. Here there was a three mile circuit of wide bitumen road, privately owned, leading nowhere, and closed to the public. The course had one long straight and a large number of sinuous turns and bends. Here races were still held, sparsely attended by the public for lack of road transport. Where the enthusiasts got their petrol from remained a closely guarded secret, or a number of secrets, because each seemed to have his own private hoard, as John Osborne hoarded his eight drums of special racing fuel in his mother’s back garden.

  John Osborne took his Ferrari down to this place several times, at first for practice and later to compete in races, short races for the sake of fuel economy. The car fulfilled a useful purpose in his life. His had been the life of a scientist, a man whose time was spent in theorising in an office or, at best, in a laboratory. Not for him had been the life of action. He was not very well accustomed to taking personal risks, to endangering his life, and his life had been the poorer for it. When he had been drafted to the submarine for scientific duties he had been pleasurably excited by the break in his routine, but in secret he had been terrified each time that they submerged. He had managed to control himself and carry out his duties without much of his nervous tension showing during their week of underwater cruising in the north, but he had been acutely nervous of the prospect of nearly a month of it in the cruise that was coming.

  The Ferrari altered that. Each time he drove it, it excited him. At first he did not drive it very well. After touching a hundred and fifty miles an hour or so upon the straight he failed to slow enough to take his corners safely. Each corner at first was a sort of dice with death, and twice he spun and ended up on the grass verge, white and trembling with shock and deeply ashamed that he had treated his car so. Each little race or practice run upon the circuit left him with the realisation of mistakes that he must never make again, with the realisation of death escaped by inches.

  With these major excitements in the forefront of his mind, the coming cruise in Scorpion ceased to terrify. There was no danger in that comparable with the dangers that he courted in his racing car. The naval interlude became a somewhat boring chore to be lived through, a waste of time that now was growing precious, till he could get back to Melbourne and put in three months of road racing before the end.

  Like every other racing motorist, he spent a lot of time endeavouring to track down further supplies of fuel.

  Sir David Hartman held his conference as had been arranged. Dwight Towers went to it as captain of Scorpion and took his liaison officer with him. He also took the radio and electrical officer, a Lieutenant Sunderstrom, to the conference because matters connected with the Seattle radio were likely to arise. C.S.I.R.O. were represented by the Director with John Osborne, the Third Naval Member was there with one of his officers, and the party was completed by one of the Prime Minister’s secretaries.

  At the commencement the First Naval Member outlined the difficulties of the operation. “It is my desire,” he said, “and it is the Prime Minister’s instruction, that Scorpion should not be exposed to any extreme danger in the course of this cruise. In the first place, we want the results of the scientific observations we are sending her to make. With the low height of her radio aerial and the necessity that she remains submerged for much of the time, we cannot expect free radio communication with her. For that reason alone she must return safely or the whole value of the operation will be lost. Apart from that, she is the only long range vessel left at our disposal for communication with South America and with South Africa. With these considerations in mind I have made fairly drastic alterations to the cruise that we discussed at our last meeting. The investigation of the Panama Canal has been struck out. San Diego and San Francisco also have been struck out. All these are on account of minefields. Commander Towers, will you tell us shortly how you stand in regard to minefields.”

  Dwight gave the conference a short dissertation on the mines and on his lack of knowledge. “Seattle is open to us, and the whole of Puget Sound,” he said. “Also Pearl Harbor. I’d say t
here wouldn’t be much danger from mines up around the Gulf of Alaska on account of the ice movements. The ice constitutes a problem in those latitudes, and the Scorpion’s no icebreaker. Still, in my opinion we can feel our way up there without unduly hazarding the ship. If we just can’t make it all the way to Latitude Sixty, well, we’ll have done our best. I’d say we probably can do most of what you want.”

  They turned to a discussion of the radio signals still coming from somewhere in the vicinity of Seattle. Sir Phillip Goodall, the Director of C.S.I.R.O., produced a synopsis of the messages monitored since the war. “These signals are mostly incomprehensible,” he said. “They occur at random intervals, more frequently in the winter than the summer. The frequency is 4.92 megacycles.” The radio officer made a note upon the paper in front of him. “One hundred and sixty-nine transmissions have been monitored. Of these, three contained recognisable code groups, seven groups in all. Two contained words in clear, in English, one word in each. The groups were undecipherable; I have them here if anyone wants to see them. The words were WATERS and CONNECT.”

  Sir David Hartman asked, “How many hours transmission, in all, were monitored?”

  “About a hundred and six hours.”

  “And in that time only two words have come through in clear? The rest is gibberish?”

  “That is correct.”

  The Admiral said. “I don’t think the words can be significant. It’s probably a fortuitous transmission. After all, if an infinite number of monkeys start playing with an infinite number of typewriters, one of them will write a play of Shakespeare. The real point to be investigated is this—how are these transmissions taking place at all. It seems certain that there is electrical power available there still. There may be human agency behind that power. It’s not very likely, but it could be so.”

  Lieutenant Sunderstrom leaned towards his captain and spoke in a low tone. Dwight said aloud, “Mr. Sunderstrom knows the radio installations in that district.”

  The Lieutenant said diffidently, “I wouldn’t say that I know all of them. I attended a short course on Naval Communications at Santa Maria Island about five years back. One of the frequencies that was used there was 4.92 megacycles.”