For a moment I thought he was babbling; then, meeting those sharp and shining eyes, I suspected this to be an odd social gambit – he wanted me to stay, for fear of loneliness, and thus had said the first thing that came into his mind. It was not till much later that I came to realize that this question of his, out of the blue, was the trigger for all that came after; that he had planned it that way, and with it, perhaps, the rest of my life. By such small beginnings – asmile, a shot, a single sentence such as ‘Follow me’ – is a man’s path determined; and sometimes we are lucky not to know it.
But all I did then was answer: ‘No. I was too young.’
I said it defensively, as my generation often did, though without much reason. Old people seem to forget how long ago was their war. I was eight years old when it ended; brave as a lion, no doubt, but youngish for that contest. Yet I had something more reputable to add.
‘But my father was killed in it.’
His intent eyes rested on mine. ‘How?’
‘He was taken prisoner in Hong Kong. Then he was killed on the Burma Road.’
‘We are wolves, wolves with the minds of men … I was in both those wars, once as a boy, once as a man.’ (That made him about seventy, at least.) ‘I was a mole in the first, a trench mole. And then a weed, drifting to and fro across the Atlantic, in the second. But never a man with a brain.’
He was looking at the ceiling now, his hands at the back of his head, regretting the past without rancour. I decided to give this only a few more moments. In the line of newspaper duty, I had heard old soldiers reminiscing before; they never needed an audience, even of one.
‘Wasted years,’ he murmured. ‘Wasted people … War is the most absurd game ever invented by the human mind, and sustained by human appetite. But I should not lecture you. Young men don’t make wars. They only fight them. Old men make wars – and survive them. They are immensely brave with other people’s sons. But this time, there will be no such pattern. They have not come to realize that, yet. But they had better!’
I said nothing. I had heard this kind of talk, a hundred times before, from well-meaning people; I believed in what they were saying, but not in their capacity to do anything about it. They would rally for peace; they would donate words and money and dogged patience and sometimes personal pride: and then somebody quite different would press a button, and they promptly fell apart. There had been people like that, by the million – so the books assured us – in 1914, in 1939. But at the first sound of the drum, the audience drifted away, and within an hour had picked up the step for war.
But old Shepherd was going on – and I realized that I had been wrong to think that he was recalling the past ‘without rancour’, for when his voice started again it was suddenly harsh and compelling.
‘They had better realize it,’ he said, ‘because next time, there aren’t going to be any men with brains, alive or dead. Babies with two heads and no legs, maybe. Men with bones already made of glue. Girls with a third breast.’ It was strange how these few words, in a thin bitter voice, could conjure up for me a whole inferno of unspeakable creatures. ‘But no people, as we know them. War won’t be a game any more. It will be global cooking – making a soup of humanity.’
Of course I agreed – who didn’t? – and his words, and particularly the last phrase, had found their mark, both in myself and also in Mary, who had stopped rubbing his feet and was staring at him, almost horror-struck. But mostly I agreed because of my father; I did not need anyone else’s nightmares. My strongest childhood memory had been of my mother learning of my father’s death, and – later and far worse – of the sort of death it had been. A surviving friend of his, with the best of intentions, had made a long journey to talk to her, had got maudlin drunk, and told her a detailed story.
‘They jest at scars, who never felt a wound’ was never true thereafter, in our small household. My father had been pulped to death by a Japanese sergeant trying out a new bamboo swagger-cane. He had died praying, and then screaming, and, at the end, only twitching. On that day, and ever afterwards, when I thought of war I thought of my father dying sweetly for his country in that forest clearing, broken and rebroken for as long as he moved, and then stamped into the ground like a bloody reed mat.
Sometimes, on a street corner, a smiling oriental face would jog my memory.
Because I felt thus strongly, I answered the old man offhand. ‘You don’t have to sell it to me! I don’t want to die, not in anyone’s quarrel.’
He reacted to my tone, frowning as Mary was frowning. ‘That’s not enough! You must want to live!’
‘Oh, I do, I do … Look, it’s getting late. I must go home.’
Mary said suddenly: ‘Don’t be such a smart alec.’ I didn’t think I deserved that, but I wasn’t going to tell either of them about my father. I got up without a word, and began to put on my coat.
‘Stay,’ said the old man, anxiously, as if some plan were going wrong. ‘I have more to tell you … About the end of the world … It has happened once already, I can prove it …’ He seemed to be wandering again, losing his grip; I realized that his wits ebbed and flowed like any other tide. ‘I can show you a sign … I will tell you my secret!’ I thought he was growing wilder still, but suddenly he calmed down, and his eyes grew lucid. ‘I will really tell you. And you are the last person I shall tell.’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t need to be told.’ Though he sounded sane enough, I thought he might be confusing a lot of different things, that this would turn out to be some sort of Mad Trapper story, the Hidden Treasure of Baffin Island in six instalments. There were scores of them current in the northland; they mostly featured a lost mine, and a man who came into town with a sackful of gold, then went back for more, never to be seen by mortal eye again. ‘You don’t have to tell me anything,’ I repeated. ‘Why not settle down and get some sleep?’
But Mary was frowning at me again, and the old man was pushing on, brushing aside all objections. ‘You need to know this! Not one person in the world has believed me, so far, except–’ he nodded to Mary, ‘perhaps you. But I shall try once more.’ He was looking at me steadily. ‘You are young, as well – young and good-hearted. Perhaps you will believe it, and perhaps you will do something about it.’ Half in and half out of my coat, I tried to interrupt again; but before I could get a word out, the old man asked quickly: ‘Do you know what the Dew Line is?’
I was ready to be irritable. ‘Of course I do.’
‘But do you know what it stands for?’
‘Distant Early Warning.’
‘Quite so … I can show you another sort of Dew Line. A very distant early warning. The earliest of all.’
This didn’t make any sense, but in spite of my resolve I asked: ‘You mean, you think there was a Dew Line before?’
‘I would not doubt it.’ For some reason his voice held a tinge of sarcasm. ‘But this is something different. A discovery …’ His voice was becoming charged with excitement, and his head lifted from the pillow. ‘I discovered something which proved that everything has happened before, that this is not our first time on earth …’ He saw my face, disbelieving, not ready to listen much longer, and he grew desperate. ‘I tell you, I can prove it! Ican prove it because of something I found up on Bylot Island, at the very top of Baffin. One of the most desolate places in the world! Scarcely habitable, even now! Scarcely visited! But it has been used before!’
‘Used?’
‘Used by skilled men, men of science!’
‘What did you find then?’
He nursed his secret for a moment more; long years, much mockery, had made him a jealous guardian. Then he said, calmly and quietly: ‘I found a colossal refrigerator. And it was full.’
The Great Ice Box
Who could have left, at such a moment? Not I. His bizarre words touched a number of chords; some of them had to do with my job, but getting a good story was not what made me stay and listen. It was already something deeper, and more impor
tant to me; something grounded in my own past, some need unfulfilled, some quest not yet undertaken. I felt, as strongly as I had ever felt before, that if I went away without hearing what he had to say – however strange, however nonsensical – I would never log my due ration of experience, I would never really catch up.
I had felt the same sort of thing, on a more light-hearted plane, in the past: the conviction that if I left a party early, I would lose something worthwhile; that if I didn’t kiss a certain person, I would be short of one girl for the rest of my life; even that if I missed a television show, I would miss it for ever.
Such things can scarcely ever be true; but I had the same feeling now, and this time it was not related to a significant meeting, a pretty girl, a classic performance. For some reason, I knew that a stage had been set for drama on a grand scale. I had been invited; if I walked out, I would be a traitor to my own future, and would mourn the fact for ever.
It was very late, on an Arctic night far from home; an apt moment for wayward fancy, a moment not to be trusted, not to be measured against the cold reason of broad daylight. But I did not hesitate. To do so would have been like edging away down a side alley of history, turning one’s back on the Battle of Waterloo, the murder of Caesar, the birth at Bethlehem … A web of such fantasies seemed to be brushing the inside of my skull. Common sense was overdue. I hung up my coat behind the door, on top of the shabby rucksack, and sat down in the armchair.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘You must explain.’
‘It’s a very long story.’
He was still sitting up in bed; he was not less eager than when he had made his last plea for me to listen, but his pale exhausted face showed what an effort it had been to capture my attention. Some doubt of his strength must have shown in my face, for he smiled gently, and said: ‘If Mary brings us some more coffee, I promise to last out the night.’
She was off in a moment, and back very soon, with the reheated coffee; silence ruled the room, and indeed the whole house, for when Mary returned, and shut the door behind her, she said: ‘I guess she’s gone to bed.’ There was only one enemy ‘she’ in our lives … The old man settled back again; Mary sat at the foot of the bed; I made myself as comfortable as I could in the wrecked armchair.
I was watching old Shepherd with close attention. He had changed notably; in particular he was no longer the man I had first seen in the hotel bar, using words like ‘Idiot’ and ‘Animal’, losing his temper, flogging a sodden brain and still failing to find the right phrase. Of course, over the last few hours the liquor had ebbed away, but this was more than a sobering-up. In some way he had been purified.
Pain seemed to have brought him to his senses, and his senses were delicate and subtle. A drunken babbling old man no longer lived in that frail body; he had been exorcized, and in his place was another man, old and wise, who had an important story to tell, and who could tell it skilfully, in exactly the way it should be told. Whether it was an effort for him, I did not know, any more than I knew how long he had to live. But if he knew how long, the knowledge might be the spur, the agent of precision.
His voice was thin and reedy, and sometimes it paused and sometimes it faltered. But one forgot the man, very soon. Like the best of the boxing referees, one hardly realized he was there at all. He did not come between us and the facts; the facts stood revealed under a naked light, on the very apron of a fantastic stage.
Nearly a quarter of a century earlier (said the old man) he had come to this part of the world for the first time. He had been, of all things, a ship’s doctor, for a company which ran small freighters from Liverpool and Bristol to the eastern seaboard of Canada and the United States. It was not a good company. Its ships were old, patched up, disgracefully staggering to and fro on their last sea legs. Always there came a day when they finally refused duty, and whenever and wherever that happened, they were sold as scrap or left to rot.
Shepherd’s last ship chose the port of Churchill, on the western side of Hudson Bay, for her everlasting graveyard. She had suffered a prolonged engine breakdown; winter caught her and she was iced in; the ancient hull failed under pressure, and began to fall to pieces at the quayside. There were claims and counter-claims, a bankruptcy, an insurance wrangle, a repudiation of liability; far from home, the crew was orphaned and abandoned. Most of them, cared for with that special public generosity which sailors can count on, all the way round the globe, found their way back to England. Shepherd stayed where he was.
He had been a doctor by accident; it was the most recent of many careers; he was fifty years of age; he could still, he felt, be anything or nothing. In the spring he began to wander, north and north-west, turning his hand to any odd job that came along – construction, prospecting, trapping, fishing, guiding; living with the Eskimos, or by himself, learning his way about. He was looking for something. As long as he did not know what it was, he need not acknowledge failure, and thus was happy.
‘Part of it was probably the so-called “lost mine”,’ he admitted, almost shamefacedly. ‘Or the hidden valley, like Shangri-La, when you climb a mountain, and descend a glacier, and find yourself suddenly in a secret garden of trees, grassland, flowers, temperatures of seventy and eighty degrees … There are many such legends. They persist and they do no harm.’
He did not find his fabulous lost mine; he never stumbled into Eden. Colder climates, harsher journeys, beckoned him again; the pride of manhood had then been very strong. He crossed the Hudson Strait into Baffin Island, and the shores of Foxe Basin. He pushed further northwards, sometimes with other wanderers, sometimes alone; by now he was an expert at staying alive in this hardest of countries. He passed the far-off spine of mountains which were the crown of Baffin. He reached the northern tip of the island. He joined some Eskimos in a whaleboat, crossing to Bylot Island. Then there was a quarrel, and he was alone again.
Bylot was then an empty land, most desolate, topped by the noble peak of Mount Thule, more than six thousand feet nearer Heaven. Somehow he wintered there, the worst winter of his life. When spring came, and he felt strong again, he began to look about him.
Throughout that long winter, he had constantly been attracted by a faraway mountain of ice, not part of Mount Thule, but towering by itself on the northern coast. It was one of several, like a line of distant white battlements. Their shapes were serenely perfect, as if they had been hand-sculptured – though the hand was Time itself, and the span of the hand might have been a million years. Shepherd set out to take a closer look; he lost his way in a three-day snow blizzard, and when the weather cleared, he was high above sea level and had reached the base of one of the ice castles – he was not sure which.
One wall of it seemed to have been eroded; there were climatic changes hereabouts which, over an enormous number of years, were doing unpredictable things in the Arctic. In this case, a slope of the ice-cap had melted, leaving bare a natural pathway leading to a breach in the ice wall. Shepherd took the curved pathway, because it was easier and he needed rest and shelter.
When he turned the last corner, he met a man.
‘Oh, a dead man,’ said Shepherd, answering my astonished look. ‘He was standing on guard before the breach in the ice wall; leaning back against one side of it, frozen there for ever.’
‘Was he an Eskimo?’ I asked. It was the first time I had interrupted.
‘No. Not an Eskimo. Very different, facially. He was small and dark. And naked.’
‘Naked? In that cold?’
‘This man did not need clothes … Have you ever seen an armadillo?’
‘Yes.’
Well, the small man had been like an armadillo; his skin was scaly, but perfectly armoured and jointed. He seemed to have been frozen, not by death but by horror or amazement; his eyes were narrowed, and his hand was up to protect them – as if he had seen some hideous burst of light on the far horizon. Shepherd had the clear impression that he had walked out of the breach in the wall, and straight into a sh
ock wave which, baulked by a mountain, could strike a man dead.
Or it might have been, he thought, some kind of selective weapon which took care of human beings, and also took care – in another sense – of their property. At any rate, the scaly man was dead, and the ice castle he guarded was intact.
Shepherd, whose nerves had been toughened by solitude, edged past the dead man and moved inside. He found himself in a small rock chamber which must have served as a kind of guardroom, for there were the scaly man’s companions – six of them, seated on a bench at a long table, frozen in the same bizarre way. They sat in graded attitudes of wakefulness, ranging from the man nearest the door, whose fists were on the table as if he had been rising in alarm, to the man furthest away, his head still sleepily sunk in his hands. Even the faces they showed were carefully graduated; the nearest man was full face, the last man in profile. It must all have happened in a few seconds of time. The man standing at the doorway, perhaps, had been the most alert of this unearthly crew.
It was not dark inside, though the guardroom was windowless; as Shepherd moved, something – probably his body heat – triggered an eerie glow from the floor, which was of some opaque material like roughened fibreglass. The same thing happened when he walked past the dead guards, and into the room beyond. But the room beyond was truly fantastic.
He found himself inside a vast hollow mountain of iced rock, an arched cathedral literally miles long. It was clear, immediately, what the place was; a huge refrigerator crammed with food. It was constructed on many floors; its bays stretched away into the darkness, though once again, as Shepherd walked forward, the floor lights came on in a thirty-foot circle all round him, and a corresponding light answered from the roof. The bays were so immense that he never reached the end even of one of them; he estimated them to be at least ten miles long. He guessed that the place was lit, and powered, by solar heat. There was a fleet of enormous trackless trolleys which began to move when he stepped on them; they moved in whichever direction he was facing. Whole storeys changed position, up or down, as soon as a hand was stretched out.
The Time Before This Page 6