The Last Day

by Andrew Hunter Murray

  Warwick raised her hands in mock supplication. “Forgive me. We appreciate how busy you are. You studied at Oxford, did you not?”

  Hopper’s muscles bunched involuntarily. She’d been right. They’d come because of the letter. “Many years ago. Yes.”

  “You knew Edward Thorne, is that correct?”

  “I . . . yes, I did.” Warwick remained silent. “Not very well. He taught me for a year.”

  “He seems to recall that you were friends.”

  “He taught me. I wouldn’t say we were friends.” There it was, the first lie of the meeting. Or her first, at any rate.

  “Well, I’m afraid I have some bad news. He’s seriously unwell. He’s in hospital at the moment. We visited to see if there was anything we can do for him, and he asked to speak to you. We’re here to ask if you’re willing to come and see him. Any days you take will of course not be deducted from your annual leave.”

  “That’s what you’ve spent your helicopter fuel on?” She could feel herself growing angry, now the shock was past. Angry with Thorne for getting her into this, and angry at these strangers crashing into her new life and trying to drag her back to London.

  “He was one of the most important men in the country for many years, Dr. Hopper. We wouldn’t deny him a favor in his final days.” Somewhere in there she detected another lie. Convincingly told, but a lie nonetheless. “And the British government can still manage to get a helicopter airborne. Just about.” Warwick chuckled at her own witticism. The man by her side did not.

  They hadn’t had a helicopter to spare last year, Hopper remembered, when that boy Drax had lost a foot in an accident in the loading bay. They had radioed the mainland for a medical evac, and received only excuses. Drax had worsened. In the end, Donaghy had administered an injection to carry him off. They’d wrapped his body in a cheap plastic sheet and thrown him over the side.

  Warwick kept talking. “I’m sure you think our sudden arrival a little overdramatic, but Dr. Thorne’s case is urgent, and important to us.”

  “I wasn’t aware Thorne’s reputation had recovered so far,” Hopper said. “When I last saw him, he was being sacked from Oxford as a liability. And he was only there after being sacked by the prime minister.”

  Warwick ignored her and spoke a fraction louder. “You’re also overdue for leave. You didn’t return to London on the last boat.”

  “There isn’t much compelling me to return.” So they’d looked through her personnel file for her leave history.

  “You really should. Progress all the time.” There was that smile again.

  “Why didn’t you phone ahead?”

  “Well, Miss Hopper . . .”

  “Doctor.”

  “Forgive me, Dr. Hopper. Dr. Thorne only mentioned he wanted to see you last night, which is when we decided we’d come and collect you ourselves. And his life is drawing rapidly to a close.” The man, Blake, had not taken his eyes off Hopper since she had sat down, and a muscle in his face flickered as his colleague spoke.

  “I’m busy here. I was under the impression our work was supported by government.”

  “Of course it is. But Dr. Thorne expressed a strong interest in seeing you.” Warwick shrugged. “Many people would treat it as an honor.”

  “I don’t.” Hopper felt the woman’s surprise, quickly masked. “My work won’t allow me to visit him, and frankly, I don’t know why he would want to see me anyway. I can hardly believe I made much of an impact on his life.”

  Warwick shrugged. “We can’t compel you to come, of course.”

  “No. He, of all people, will understand that work comes first.”

  Warwick sighed and spread her hands. “We did our best.” Her tone brightened. “Your position here is up for renewal next year, isn’t it?” She sifted the papers in front of her and studied one. Upside down, Hopper recognized her employment contract as Warwick continued. “It would seem wiser to take a few days from your work now than to run the risk of losing a permanent place. If what you’re doing here is so very important.”

  So they did want her back in England, badly enough to threaten her job. And her work was about the only thing that still mattered to her. Hopper sat back.

  “How soon could I return here?”

  Warwick looked relieved. “There’s a maintenance boat coming out in a week. That’s wonderful news, Dr. Hopper. Do you have anywhere to stay in London?” She had already assumed Hopper’s acquiescence.

  “Yes.” Another lie. She’d think of somewhere.

  “Good.” Warwick looked at her colleague and nodded. “We’ll leave as soon as you’re ready.”

  “I’ll have to finish a few things here, hand over some notes to my colleagues.”

  “I thought you were the only scientific officer here.”

  “There are experiments they can keep running in my absence.”

  “How soon will that be dealt with?”

  “A few hours.”

  Warwick looked at her watch, a dainty timepiece dwarfed by her large wrist. “Could you get it done by ten o’clock? Time really is of the essence.” Her tone had shifted again, to that of a hostess determined to accommodate a difficult houseguest.

  “All right.”

  “I’m sure Dr. Thorne will be very grateful you’ve made the effort.” There, again, a smile where there had been none, and then nothing at all.

  FOUR

  Harv was lingering in the doorway, his arms above the frame, a little crescent of his torso showing below his shirt.

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “I don’t know. A week, maybe.”

  “It’ll be boring without you here, Hop. I’ll miss you.”

  She couldn’t help smiling, despite the lump in her throat. “Yeah. I tried to explain that to the grim civil servants, but they seemed to think some things are more important than how entertained you are.”

  “Very disappointing when people take that attitude.” He stood there, balancing on the thin metal rim of the frame, wedging the door open with his foot as he watched her pack.

  A lot of people mistook Harv for a tough man, because of his size. She supposed he must be tough, really; he was comfortably over six foot, and broad with it. Even so, she had never seen him actually in a fight, so all she had to go on was his conversation. He was funnier than his looks suggested, and more thoughtful. His hair was long, dense, and black, barring one gray forelock.

  For her first year on the rig, they had hardly spoken. She had hardly spoken to anyone, in fact: she was not long out of her marriage, out of everything, in an emotional state she could have stayed in for good without distress. The troops, and the crew of the power station, had shown no interest in acquiring new friends. They were perfectly happy not to know anything more about her than her surname.

  Then, one meal, she and Harv had found something in common. It was nothing really—a book they’d both read—but it had been enough.

  She hadn’t intended it, certainly hadn’t planned it, but about a year ago they’d drifted together one night, after a party the soldiers had thrown, some birthday or something. They’d got through a couple of bottles of the homemade alcohol the squaddies distilled. It was appalling stuff, the bottles inadequately cleaned, the sour alcohol fighting to drown out the tang of metal, but it had had its effect on them both and they’d ended up in bed.

  She had avoided him for a long time after that. But since another such party a few months ago, they had slept together perhaps a dozen more times. Her desire for some bare minimum of intimacy, emotional and physical, occasionally overpowered her desire to keep apart from everyone, Harv included. And Harv was alive to her need for solitude. He never imposed his own demands, simply adjusted to hers, and was willing to talk only when she wanted it. He was her closest—her only—friend on the rig.

  She turned back from t
he wardrobe to her small canvas bag, throwing a few more shirts in.

  “So, let me get this straight. Edward Thorne himself, great national hero et cetera, and your old college tutor, writes you this mysterious letter. Now he’s dying . . .”

  “Apparently.”

  “And he wants to see you.”

  “That’s what they said.”

  “Did they say why?”

  She thought of the letter she’d burned, of the urgent words. “I don’t know, Harv. I have no idea. I hardly knew him.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. I don’t know him, I’m not interested in seeing him, and I hate London. And I don’t like this woman either.” Warwick’s comment was still playing in her ear: You’re an observer, then. Not a doer. It rankled all the more for her suspicion that it was true.

  Harv shrugged. “But you’re going anyway.”

  “Guess so.” She didn’t want to tell him any more.

  He shifted, levering the door further open with his foot, unoffended by her terseness. “You all right after this morning? The boat?”

  “Not really.” She kept thinking of the two smaller bodies hunched together, how the sinking would have ruined that tableau, jumbling the remains beyond sense until the bone worms had their way with them. But she didn’t want him to see how much it had affected her, so she kept folding.

  “Where did it come from, would you estimate?” He was clearly trying to move her away from the upsetting scene onto a question of fact. She was grateful for it.

  “One of the Americas, most likely. Although I couldn’t tell you which one.”

  Given where they’d located the ship, it was almost impossible to tell where it had sailed from. The old current system had collapsed, of course, and the dominant new current that kept Britain and western Europe cool flowed from the north, several hundred miles east. But the countercurrent that would have brought the fishing boat toward them was fed from enough other sources that it could have come from anywhere west or southwest of here. She listened to herself and laughed.

  “Some fucking ocean scientist I am. Got it narrowed down to two full continents for you. That specific enough?”

  He shrugged. “You’ll work it out. If anyone will, you will.”

  “I’ve got a lot of it worked out, Harv. It just doesn’t seem to be making much difference to anyone.”

  “Don’t talk like that. It’s important work you’re doing.”

  For a second she disliked him for attempting to cheer her up; wanted only to be alone, savoring the feeling of failure and the sensation that none of her work would make a difference in the end. Then she mastered herself. She’d been slipping into that mind-set a lot lately.

  “Thanks. Anyway, you’d better go. Haven’t you got soldiering to be doing? Underlings to shout at?”

  Harv grinned again. “Oh, sure. It’s all go here.” He crossed the room and hugged her tight. “Take care of yourself in London. Seriously. And call anytime if you want to talk.”

  She hugged him back for a second, then disengaged. “I will. Back in a week.”

  The door clanged shut behind him. She turned to pack the rest of her few things, her smile fading, and as she did, caught a glimpse of herself in the scale-pocked mirror above the sink.

  She was thirty-four years old; had spent nearly fifteen of those years as a scientist. Life on the rig was starting to make her weather-beaten; her work was probably leaving its mark too. Her career, at first gilded, had been marked by a decade of sheer difficulty, and a fog of official indifference. No children, no parents, no close connections, barring a semi-relationship with a soldier. Apart from her brief and ill-starred marriage, her whole adult life had been spent fleeing intimacy, and was now approaching its perfect expression: life in a cell on a floating rig, barely tethered to the sea.

  And now Thorne, the man who had driven her here, had returned to her life as he was dying. The man whose work had built the rotten state she had escaped. She realized she had repeated to Harv her own lie to Warwick. What had she said again? Ah, yes. I hardly knew him.

  FIVE

  As Hopper packed, her eye fell on the little globe she’d kept, one of the presents David had given her on their wedding day as a joke, and she couldn’t help her thoughts turning to the whole Slow again.

  When the Earth had finally stopped turning, thirty years ago, there had been no single moment of epiphany, no final report of the time and date. The exact moment of the Stop was lost in the chaos of events. It took a fortnight for most people to realize the sun’s new place in the sky was its final home.

  It was hardly unexpected. The initial discovery that the Earth’s orbit had started winding down had come almost a decade earlier. The Stop was merely the final confirmation that the Earth and the sun were now in almost perfect lockstep, as the moon was with the Earth.

  The first day of slowing had been five years before Hopper was born, but she’d read several histories. It had come in late May 2020.

  That day, shortly before noon, a series of catastrophic, inexplicable failures in GPS occurred across the planet. Online maps crumpled. Satellites missed messages from the ground, were reduced to multimillion-dollar ornaments barreling across the sky, winking down in sly acknowledgment of some big cosmic joke. Defense systems bucked in ways baffling and unnerving to their operators.

  The failures threw cities, ports, flights into gridlock. Shipping deliveries were suddenly disarrayed; planes circled helpless above the world’s airports.

  Charges were leveled against a broad and incompatible range of suspects: the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans, anti-Western hackers, antidevelopment Westerners, Apple, Google, Davos, Goldman Sachs. None of the explanations accounted for the fact that every country in the world had been affected by the disaster.

  The next day, an underground laboratory beneath the forests of Germany—home to a device called a ring laser gyroscope, which measured the planet’s spin—confirmed the Earth had added 0:144 seconds to the 86,400 making up a day. The planet’s GPS systems, so brilliant and exact, had collapsed in the face of even this tiny imprecision.

  The next day, the planet had gained twice as much again. The following day, three times as much as that.

  The problems of the first day were patched. The internet still worked, after all; the filigree of undersea cables wrapping the planet remained unharmed. Paper maps were dug out of storage. Sailors began using old navigational tools once again. The world assumed the problem would be solved, that the sextants could be discarded before long. This was a glitch.

  And yet it kept happening, the deceleration increasing just a little each day.

  The search for a cause in the heavens had begun immediately. It had long been known that the Earth’s rotation was slowed down fractionally by the friction of the moon’s pull, and the loss of momentum as the Earth’s oceans crashed into its continents. The rate of slowing had been tiny, milliseconds per century. But it was real: so it followed that a change thousands of times larger must be caused by something in the skies. The world’s observatories adjusted their focus, looking for any near-Earth objects that might explain the deceleration.

  Countless theories were proposed and tested—the Milky Way’s spin slowing down, a black hole, the region of the galaxy the planet was passing through. One by one, they were junked. The search was made harder by the very symptoms under investigation: the slowing of the planet’s spin had thrown all celestial calculations out of kilter. One astronomer compared the hunt to going fishing by sticking one’s head into the ocean with a flashlight in one’s mouth.

  For months, nothing was found. There seemed to be no scapegoat. The anger turned temporarily inward—a few anti-science marches took place, a few observatories were torched—but by that point, most people were transferring their attention to other problems.

  Eventually, the cause was d
iscovered. A white dwarf star, a rare celestial creature the size of the Earth but two hundred thousand times as dense, loosed from its own star system by a supernova explosion, now free to barrel through space disrupting everything in its path. It was traveling at two thousand kilometers per second through this part of the Milky Way, its trajectory and enormous gravity dragging the Earth slowly backward, its path as perfect as if it had been designed by some malign heavenly committee. It was already millions of kilometers away by the time it was spotted, speeding from the wreckage, its damage done.

  Hopper often wondered what might have happened had they found the rogue star in time—whether they would have made some hopeless attempt to blow it out of the sky, to cancel the end of the world. It didn’t matter now.

  The final flare of interest in the heavens had come with the uncertainty over whether the Earth would stop spinning completely—meaning it would experience one day and night each year as it circled the sun—or whether it would simply drift into lockstep, as the moon was with the Earth, always showing the sun the same face.

  There had been a final flourish of international cooperation when it seemed the world might end up with six-month days and nights—promises of food supplies shipped back and forth, a grand new planetary bargain, a dawning era of global collaboration as never seen before. And then it had become clear that the alternative was far likelier. The new barriers of daylight and darkness were being established in perpetuity.

  Overnight, alliances that had lasted centuries collapsed. The relationships shared at half a planet’s distance, the web of connections promoting ideology above latitude: all came to an abrupt stop. Geography became the only factor affecting a nation’s prospects. Australia’s national interests were now diametrically opposed to those of Britain. Pakistan and India were shocked into rapprochement.

  Different nations adjusted to the news at different speeds. The two Koreas reached a fragile accord just six months before they were plunged into darkness for the last time, and weeks before the governments of both nations ceased to function. There were no tearful reunions, no hauling down of flags. By the time of the Stop, plenty of nations had stopped hauling flags up in the first place.