We said we thought it might be a good idea.
By now we were nearing the hotel. After a drink at the bar I decided to turn in. Sick at heart I took one last look out over the sea before I climbed into bed. Unpleasant emotions seemed inseparable from this damned place. I lay there thinking about Lena. I could remember the tears and the smile which followed them.
What the devil did the Australian mean by saying there was nothing? Not even the dead and the dying? I little realized that I had become separated from Helena Summers by much more than death.
I was wakened the following morning by the phone burring in my ears. It was John saying he was going out to Pearl City, that the climate seemed to have changed back just as suddenly as it had shifted yesterday. I asked him why, but he didn’t know. When I came down to breakfast in the coffee shop I found the blue-eyed naval officer waiting for me. We sat down together. I ordered a stack of wheatcakes and coffee. He ordered coffee.
‘I’m afraid we owe you a very sincere apology. Yesterday we didn’t know where we were, not that we’re much better today. But we can see things a bit more clearly now.’
Then he went on to tell me, rather haltingly, much the same as John had already guessed, that radio communications from Britain, apparently still covering the normal radio waveband, had convinced them Britain had somehow managed to stay out of the war. This had made for a peculiar situation so far as we were concerned. They had thought the best thing was to do nothing and say nothing. I said both John and I had appreciated what the situation must look like and we quite understood his position. He became less embarrassed but no less worried. I told him I had a close friend in Los Angeles and could he tell me anything of what had happened there. He looked about him, to see whether anybody was listening, and then said, ‘We can’t understand it, we just can’t understand it. We’ve sent planes over and—well, there’s nothing there, nothing at all.’
I asked if this could be some strange new development in war technique. Yet even as I asked the question I realized it was absurd. The officer shook his head. He looked tired and old and I could see the situation was quite beyond him.
‘It may sound horrible. If it had been war, the kind we expected, I would at least have understood what was going on. It looks like a nightmare, as if we were all dreaming. I keep hoping I’ll waken up. That sounds kinda silly.’
‘Don’t you think we ought to stop trying to understand it, at any rate for the time being. Perhaps we ought to get back to the way we were when we were kids. We all took the world the way we found it. Only later as we grew up did we try to make sense of it.’
‘Yes, I suppose so. But at my time of life it isn’t easy to learn new tricks. You get set in your ways as the years roll past. You see I had a son and daughter-in-law and two kids in Los Angeles.’
We shook hands sadly and he left.
For the next two days I sat in my room writing as hard as I could go. I wanted to get all the old, more normal, stuff down before my standards of judgement became distorted by this strange new world. I knew John and his colleagues would seek me out as soon as the next move was decided. As I say, I was given two days’ grace. I emerged from my room only for meals. My fingers grew stiff with writing, always writing, twelve hours a day.
John appeared at last late on the second day. He had not eaten at lunchtime so I went with him back to the restaurant, although I had already had dinner. I asked for the news.
‘Fragmentary in the extreme. The balance of opinion still favours war of some sort. Nobody can fit the facts together. It seems quite certain that Los Angeles really has ceased to exist. We don’t know much about the rest of the States. In Britain it seems to be just as normal as it is here. There’s some activity in Europe, although it doesn’t look normal there either. From Russia there’s as big a blackout as there is from the American mainland.’
I waited. It was an old trick with John, the dramatic pause.
‘Back home they’re in just the same mess. We managed to get a message through. They wanted news, saying they’re just as much in the dark as we are.’
‘I had the old naval chap in again this morning. He doesn’t like it at all.’
‘The devil is that everything is so normal here. It’s only the outside communications that are crazy.’
‘Could it be some sort of hoax, some ridiculous psychological experiment, connected with the military programme? To determine the population reaction.’
‘Well, if it is, we shall soon know. You remember the Australian. He told us a plane was coming in from Fiji, one that might manage to get through to Britain in one hop? It’s here now, it came in yesterday evening, and it’s the only really long-range plane in the islands. So they’ve decided to send it over the States. It can get to somewhere in the region of Denver or Chicago and still manage to get back here to the islands. The military people have commandeered it. After a bit of argument I’ve got the two of us included on the trip. I’ve given them the idea I might come up with some explanation of what’s going on.’ John ran his hand through his hair and added, ‘Some hopes.’
At breakfast the following morning I realized a strange thing had happened in the preceding days, the days in which I had been shut away in my room. From the beginning, from the moment the war rumours first spread, smiles had disappeared, there had been less talk, less laughter, fewer vehicles on the street. Now there was an almost complete silence. Everybody spoke quietly, as if someone or something was listening to what was being said. In these islands of sunshine it was weird and unnerving.
We got to the airport at about nine o’clock. I would say about forty persons, mostly service officers, were already assembled there. I looked around for Art Clementi, hoping to straighten out the misunderstanding and embarrassment of our last meeting, but he wasn’t there.
‘Looks as though we’re taking a very light load,’ I said.
‘To give as big a range as possible.’
A few minutes later we climbed up an old-fashioned ramp into the rear door of the plane. An Australian girl smiled at us as we enplaned. A few minutes later we were in the air.
We settled down in our seats. The hostess brought us quite large glasses of fresh orange juice. It was a welcome change from the inevitable coffee.
‘Australian idea,’ said John. ‘Genuine stuff, not artificial muck.’
‘What’s been going on the last two days?’
‘I got involved in two things. Damn queer, both of them. I was out at the university, at the seismic department. On the face of it not very exciting. Simple equipment and so on. I’m not familiar with the details of that business so I had to accept what they told me.’
‘And what the devil did they tell you?’
‘Well, the general background of seismic disturbances—you know there are always slight earth movements going on all the time—has gone up enormously in the last four days.’
‘I didn’t notice any earthquake.’
‘Oh, this was below the subjective threshold. But it was much above the usual noise level by several orders of magnitude.’
‘Maybe there’s been a big earthquake somewhere, a long way off.’
‘It couldn’t be just one earthquake, it wouldn’t last long enough. More like a succession of them. And even that doesn’t fit the pattern properly. From a single earthquake, particularly a big one, you get a pretty clean-cut record. This stuff is all confused, it looked like real random noise.’
‘What could be doing it?’
‘Nobody has the slightest idea. It isn’t very dramatic, not like the other things, but I thought I’d mention it. Often it’s the non-spectacular things that lead you in the right direction.’
‘You said there was something else, two things you’d been looking at.’