The final problem was pulling the trigger. In theory it seemed easy, but it was hard to arrange properly. I had to be as far away as possible. I decided to descend into the concrete bunker of the radiation unit. The air pressure of the blast might damage my eardrums. It took ages to fix a long reel of twine from behind the steel door of the unit, up the stairs, along the corridor and into the washroom. I had to make sure that the tension of the string would be strong enough. There was no way of testing it. There would only be one chance.
At long last, I slipped the loop of string over the trigger and retreated to the radiation unit. Perrin’s corpse sat in front of the screen still staring at whatever had gone beyond the clutch of the mechanical arms in the glass box.
‘Here goes,’ I said, evenly, to myself. I left the steel door ajar about six inches and crouched down with my hands raised and palms covering my ears, holding the string up in my right hand. Then I pulled. Nothing happened. I tugged. Still nothing. Maddened, I took my hand away from my ear and heaved hard on the string.
There was an enormous, thunderous explosion. It banged down the corridors in a push and suck of blast, whacking the door against my knees, thumping vibrations inside my lungs and ears. The door drew back. Gulping air, I got up and hauled it open. At the top of the stairs I met a cloud of dust. Down near the washroom part of a chair had been blown out across the corridor, and the air tasted of cement and plaster. The lights in the washroom had gone out and one or two had failed in the corridor, so it was hard to see anything. I scarcely dared look. There was the spattering sound of water from a broken pipe or tap. Pieces of concrete and twisted metal on the floor made me stumble. The air was stirring. A draught!
A black mark extended along the pale concrete wall beneath where the sinks had been. I kicked the rubble away and knelt down, my hands groping in the half-light.
There was a hole in the wall, about a metre long and slightly less than a third of a metre high at its widest point.
I put my head down and craned my neck sideways. I could see part of the car park, and a tree against the indigo of the evening sky. The sun had set. The air on my face was warm and thick, like scented blood.
I was going to go on living.
CHAPTER TEN
It took another two hours to get out. The iron reinforcing rods which had been set inside the concrete had been bent and broken and were sticking out at odd angles, but I had to twist them aside even further and use a hacksaw from the lab toolkit to amputate several of them before there was a space big enough for me to slide through. Even then it was a squeeze.
Before leaving, I went to Perrin’s office and checked his papers. I was so exhausted that I hardly had the energy to search very closely, and the emergency lights were growing dimmer by the minute, closing the whole place in what would be the final all-time darkness. However, I found the small metal box in which he kept his personal papers and confidential notes. It might contain some answers. I carried it through the shadow-growing laboratory feeling uneasy and increasingly uncertain about the nature of some of the shapes in far corners. I realised I’d been talking to myself too much, not merely swearing in irritation, but reassurances spoken for my own sake, with taunts directed towards an incoherent feeling of malice which the building seemed to generate. This malice appeared to have grown and to be present in the air like static electricity. Perhaps it was all a result of my weakening concentration. I hurried to the shattered washroom and pushed the metal box out. It fell with a thud onto the grass below.
When I squeezed out, feet first, slowly, trying not to get cut on prongs of steel or serrated concrete, it must have looked as if the building, squatting there in the twilight, was extruding a live object created inside itself by unimaginable processes. I finally dropped onto the grass, smeared with blood and peculiarly humiliated; peculiar, since there was nobody to observe all the squirming and slithering. I stood up from the grass, inhaled the warm air scented with earth and plants, and it was like being re-created. By myself. No witnesses. Only the stars.
The southern sky with its vast spread of starlight was pulsing and flickering with intense energy over the dead city in the distance and the empty countryside. I arched my neck back and stared up, overcome with the magnificence of the display. It was incredibly beautiful. It seemed that at any moment the stars would make some kind of sound. I felt that I would hear them. The ringing echoes of the explosion were still inside my ears and I could sense the resonance of that sound wave expanding outwards, my own message of existence. I had blasted my way out of a tomb. There ought to be some response to a pulsation like that, a recognition of my evolutionary skill. My uniqueness demanded an answer. There would be one, somewhere.
I was swaying with fatigue beneath this mute, deaf brilliance, nearly fainting. With a great effort I groped on the ground for the metal box, found it, and stumbled to the car park.
There was a secluded block of private motel units across the road, used by scientists attending research conferences. I drove there, broke in, found an unused room, and after carrying in the shotgun and a few essentials from the car and locking the doors, I slumped onto the bed and straight away fell asleep and unconscious.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
There were no dreams. I woke feeling hungry. It must have been about midday, hot and bright again. There was enough cold water for a shower. I dressed in fresh clothes. Yesterday’s were torn and stained, and I had acquired a set of bruises and scratches. My cut fingers were healing, though. After eating a large quantity of the food I had brought from Thames, I took the gun and walked around exploring the motel and the area nearby. I soon felt tired, so I went back to the room, moved everything of importance in from the car, parked it beneath some trees, then locked myself in the motel and lay down to sleep again. My brain seemed to want to run low and repair circuits. I didn’t know what to do.
There was nothing on any radio wavebands. I tried several times. In the middle of the night I woke up, tried the radio, ate more food, drifted back into sleep. It was more like a coma than sleep. My first thought the next day was about time. I had to calculate that it must be Tuesday. It was important to keep a check.
I examined Perrin’s box but it was securely locked and impossible to break into. It would have to wait. The food was nearly all gone, so I drove back to the nearest shops and stocked up. The smell of decaying food in the melted freezers was becoming very powerful, a putrid compound of meat, ice-cream, fish fingers and blue-vein cheese. Luckily there were still no signs of a resurgence of rats. I was dreading encounters with rats or rabid dogs. When I’d looted all the provisions I wanted, I returned to the fastness of my motel unit. The absence of noise and people seemed less unnerving out in the countryside, and it was good when a fresh breeze sprang up and made reassuring sounds as it rushed through the trees.
I went out in the early evening and looked at the stars again, still intrigued by the memory of their effect on me. I pondered the thought that they were beautiful, and scanned the panorama now, head back, eyes wide. Planets, clusters of radio stars, the hydrogen of broken galaxies and remote blurs of mist which were themselves huge spiral nebulae: all this had always yawned up there above my indifference to it. I’d never believed there could be any purpose in those atoms churning in a vacuum, blurting and speckling across nothing. But nor had I ever previously felt that the sight was beautiful. Normally I tried to avoid using such words. It had been part of my scientific training to avoid them; or rather, part of my own discipline of mind. Did it now matter that I should experience such a feeling, admit it, and transmit that response outward? I lowered my head from the vertigo which came from the draining of blood from a brain not prone to any form of mystical confusion. For a moment, the impression of falling upwards had nearly floated me onto my back on the grass. The air rushed around. I steadied myself.