Treasure there was none, or at least not to my eyes at that in first meeting. Two objects only lay on the cloth-covered lining of the grey metal safe. One of them was a yellow box, an electronic-looking instrument complete with a dial with a pointer and a short rod on the end of a curled cable like that on a telephone. It seemed to me from much past acquaintance that the box was probably a Geiger counter, and when I lifted it out and pressed an on-off switch, it rewarded me with slow irregular unurgent clicks. A Geiger counter indeed, with few Geigers to count. Technically, a Geiger counter counted high-speed particles emitted by the decay of radioactive material. The short rod contained a tube invented long ago by physicists Geiger and Müller. A high-energy particle, entering the tube, ionized the gas inside, which allowed the gas to conduct electricity, thus creating a pulse of current which in turn caused the click.
Lying beside the Geiger counter, the only other thing hidden away was a single fawn folder, the sort used universally in offices to help with filing.
The folder, when I lifted it out in its turn, contained roughly twenty sheets of paper, nearly all in different sizes, with and without formal headings, and all in foreign scripts, most of which I didn’t recognise. There were combinations of letters-with-numbers on almost every page, whatever the language, and it was those that I recognised positively and with alarm. A few sheets were stapled together in pairs and two seemed to be lists of addresses, though as they were written in a script I thought might be Arabic, I couldn’t read any of them.
I put the folder back in the safe, but left the door open, and went thoughtfully outside again into the sun. The cattle turned their heads to watch me. Several of them mooed, several more made slopping pats of steaming waste. As a day’s entertainment, they were hardly a riot.
Counting, I found I had four exposures left on my reel of film. I changed my mind and took one view of the cattle, including in it as many different breeds as I could find grouped in one place. Then I went back to the safe, to sort out which three of the papers in the folder were most worth immortality.
Trying to assess them all carefully out in bright daylight made the choice no easier, but in the end I settled on four of them, photographing two separately, and the last two, side by side. The film ran out after that last exposure, and to my frustration the automatic rewind stopped and stuck at the place where I had cleaned off the mud. There was no way of knowing if any pictures at all had survived, though I didn’t think it mattered enormously if they were ruined. However, to save it from any further rain, I tied the camera by its strap to a convenient beam near the safe, high up and out of reach of cows.
I wondered, as I put the papers back in the folder and the folder back in the safe, whether or not I should leave everything locked in as I had found it; and I did so chiefly to keep the papers away from the cows, some of whom had come after me with so much curiosity that they were crowding the doorway and trying to push themselves and their big heads inside. I shooed them out again, but in a strange way I was glad of their company, and was not as lonely as I would have been without them.
The day seemed endless, and nobody came.
Twelve hours of darkness. A long time until dawn.
I slept in brief patches, uncomfortably, and woke finally in the early grey light to the sole comfort that in the setting sun’s rays the evening before, I had seen a gleam which had proved to be an empty soup can wedged into the ruins of one of the houses, and although it was misshapen and filled with dusty debris, it made a better milk carton than the camera case.
The cows had given me supper, and also an early breakfast, and then they moved off in a herd as if of one mind towards the runway, where they put their heads down to the grass, and kept it both fertilised and short.
When the sun rose it was three days since Kris and I had flown out of Grand Cayman.
The eye of Hurricane Odin, after travelling north-west for three days at 7 miles an hour, might at that moment, I thought, be raising gales and storm surges along the Cayman shores. It wasn’t reasonable, I told myself, to expect anyone in those circumstances to come looking for foolhardy aviators who had most certainly crashed at sea.
I put together a rough low seat of timbers in a place that would afford shadow when the sun was highest, and sat there to give my still bare feet a respite. Cuts, scratches and insect bites round my ankles itched abominably and refused to heal. I went through a long morning of self-pitying depression, unable to believe I would have to spend much more time there and unwilling in consequence to start building a bearable way to live.
I thought of my grandmother who, apart from any anxiety she might have had if anyone had told her I was missing, would certainly have issued brisk and bracing instructions along the lines of, ‘Perry, build yourself a house, filter some drinking water, weave some sandals, look for coconuts, keep a log of the days, go for a swim, don’t mope.’
She had never complained, neither when her legs stopped working, nor ever since. She had taught me always simply to bear as best I could whatever could not possibly be put right; and in that category she had included my lack of father or mother.
She wouldn’t think much of my spinelessness on Trox. Her presence sat with me at midday in the patch of shade, sympathetic but unforgiving. It was my grandmother therefore who prodded me that afternoon into walking to the other end of the runway, shoes or no shoes, and I came across a way down to a white sandy beach there, from which I swam, pitting my diminished strength against still heavy rough surf, but feeling clean and refreshed afterwards.
Down that end of the island there was a veritable forest of snapped-off hardwood trees as well as uprooted coconut palms and the stripped remains of what I guessed were broad-leaved banana trees. By scavenging I found two viable coconuts and, still attached to its stalk, a full grown ripe mango: a feast.
But the blue sky remained empty, and no one came.
By the next morning even the grey tossing sea had returned to Caribbean blue.
To pass the dragging time, I took the folder of papers out of the safe, and in the sun sat staring at each one separately, trying to make even the smallest sense of languages I couldn’t read. The nearest I came to recognition was a paper I guessed to be in Greek, on account of the symbols Omega and Pi.
All the papers were scattered with numbers, and where numbers occurred they were written in the script known as Latin, or otherwise ordinary English.
Eventually, letting ideas drift, I thought that some of the bunch might be an inventory, a stock-taking, of round-the-world species and quantities, possibly of the mushrooms that had once grown in the now blown-away sheds.
Fine, I thought, but why the Geiger counter?
I replaced the folder and spent an idle hour listening to irregular but fairly frequent clicks as I walked around the dead village raising live evidence of radiation.
I expected the counter to count since background radiation was all around us all the time, a combination from naturally occurring radioactive material in the earth’s crust and ‘cosmic rays’, high-energy particles arriving from outer space emitted by the sun about ten minutes and ninety-three million miles ago.
But there seemed to be rather a high count rate near to the bases of the blown-away houses. High count rates were not unusual. Residents of Aberdeen, the Granite City of Scotland, experience a higher background than normal as granite contains many radioactive atoms. I looked around me and tried to remember what my pal in Miami had said: ‘Constructed of bird droppings, guano, coral and limestone rock.’ Were bird droppings radioactive? No, I thought not.