‘Good,’ he said; ‘makes me feel safe.’ And he laughed in a very Maori way, his chest heaving and expelling deep throaty noises. It sounded like the kind of laugh that would be shared amongst friends and directed outwards at other people.
‘I’m the one’s been doing all the talking,’ he went on, after a pause, becoming more assertive; ‘how about you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well. Job? Family? All that.’
The chance to strike back was there, and I took it.
‘I’m a research scientist. My wife left me last year. We had an eight-year-old boy. He drowned…in an accident. She blamed me. So, no, no family. My parents died when I was a kid. No brothers or sisters. I didn’t have anybody to go looking for.’
He lifted his hat and sat up, staring at me.
‘Nobody?’
‘Nobody.’
‘Hell. I’m sorry, man.’
It looked and sounded like genuine sympathy, and I was taken unawares again. He accepted what I told him without question, and seemed to be affected by it as though he’d known me for ages.
I covered my confusion by giving an account of what happened to me since Saturday, describing the crashed plane but not my escape from the research centre or Perrin being dead in there, and only giving the briefest summary of our research in terms which I hoped he wouldn’t understand. And whilst I was telling this, I was trying to cope with the way Lance Corporal Apirarna Maketu had pushed his naïve pity onto me like a condescending social worker—and I’d known a few—looming into a personal crisis for a bit of emotional indulgence, the voyeur at somebody else’s accident handing out pity like paper handkerchiefs. Luckily my isolation had spared me most of this during the worst times. Now, after everything I’d been through, I was faced with the casual presumption of this particular perfect stranger doing me the honour of being sorry for me. And in any case, all I had told him was that I had nobody to lose. If he pushed his flat nose into the implications of that, then he might realise it could be strength now, not something to be sorry about. He should consider that.
He interrupted me to ask what kind of research I did.
‘You use radioactive stuff?’
‘Well, yes. But I’m in biological science. I don’t know anything about radioactivity as such; that’s another area, that’s physical science.’
‘No theories about what’s happened, then?’
‘I don’t think it’s anything like a neutron bomb—’ ‘Nah.’ He shook his head. ‘Not so simple, is it?’
‘We have to get all the evidence together. There was a power surge, it knocked out electrical equipment, it stopped clocks, but it didn’t reverse the polarities or anything like that—’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, if you restart electrical equipment, generators, batteries, and so on, it still works. Radios still work but don’t pick up anything.’
‘Because nobody’s transmitting.’
‘Or because the ionosphere’s been mucked up, or the wavebands have been jammed by some force. What else do we know? It didn’t affect insects and worms below ground level, or anything beneath water, sea level—’
He sat up again, inspired, suddenly.
‘What about blokes down mines? Or in submarines?’
‘I doubt it. Rats and mice could have been underground and survived, but I haven’t seen any. My guess is that only small things escaped.’
‘We don’t know for sure, though.’
‘Submarines…it’s possible.’
My idea of a world magically disarmed by the Effect had been weakened by the survival of the lance corporal and his gun. The thought of fully manned nuclear missile submarines bursting through the level of the sea on panic red alerts was hard to take. But the universe was obviously in the mood for grotesque jokes.
He reached into the rucksack and produced a small compass.
‘Still points north,’ he said. ‘Course, it would, eh?’
‘Mm?’ I was musing on the submarine problem and thinking that people down mines would not have survived merely by being below ground level, because that would have saved people in basements and cellars, and there were quite a few all-night clubs in Auckland basements but no survivors in evidence.
‘You were on about reversal of polarities. What if it happened to the whole world? North and south poles, everything? We wouldn’t be any wiser, would we? This would still point north because this compass would have reversed its polarity as well. Same with the electrical stuff. How would we know?’
I stared at him. Was he really only a lance corporal? I nodded.
‘I think I once read about the earth’s magnetic field reversing itself millions of years ago,’ I said. ‘Maybe it could happen. I don’t know. But I doubt if it would affect electrical equipment or small magnets. The compass needle would point north, but only if you faced geographical south.’
He looked down.
‘Bang goes the Maketu theory. North’s still up there.’
I would have to watch my step; bright people could be dangerous. That much I did know.
Putting the compass away, he stood up and stretched. It was late afternoon now and the sky had cleared to a deep sea-green. The clouds had dissolved.
‘We’ll sort something out,’ he said. ‘What worried me was, I thought, what if it depends on me? If there’s something I’ve got to do, to make it all right? To make them come back.’ He darted me a forlorn look in which I recognised reassuring signs of self-doubt. ‘I’m not used to being on my own. Not much good at it.’
‘You seem to be doing alright to me,’ I replied, gesturing at his tent and jeep. He shrugged.
‘Basic training.’
I stood up. He looked around, then turned towards me and said more or less exactly what I wanted him to say.
‘What’s the plan, then?’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
‘The object is to sink the black,’ he said, ‘when everything else is down.’
Leaning over the pool table he drove the cue onto the white ball, sending it with a loud crack at the triangle of other balls. They scattered across the green baize. He lifted the cube of chalk and screeched it on the end of the cue.
‘You’re sure you don’t play?’
‘Positive.’
‘I never met anybody who didn’t play pool.’
‘We’ve both led sheltered lives, then.’
He laughed, and began to move round the table lining up shots and cursing when he missed. We were in the games room of a Turangi motel, having taken over a two-room unit for the night. Apirana, for some reason, didn’t want to drive down to Waiouru and stay at the army camp. ‘It’s only crummy barracks,’ he said. After the trauma of last Saturday he had stayed dutifully at Waiouru for two days, then abandoned the camp and driven down to Hawke’s Bay and up beyond Gisborne in search of his relatives. And finding nothing, had come back.
The sun was setting and the darkness gathered in the room. I sat by the open ranch slider doors looking north, the sun on my face. I had noticed that Apirana was left-handed.
‘You’ve never been to Auckland?’ I asked.
‘Nope.’ He tapped the cue ball gently and it missed its target. ‘Been to Singapore, though.’ The ball missed again. ‘Whaka—nui!’ This, I gathered, was his swear word. He put the cue down and came and sat in one of the aluminium chairs on the patio, holding a glass of beer. ‘Too dark in there.’
After a pause, I took a deep breath and said, ‘The reason I asked, was…because when I first saw you today, I could have sworn I’d seen you somewhere before.’
His face was turned towards the sun and the light was being absorbed into his features and reflected from the bone beneath the skin, pale almond under coffee. His eyes were almost closed.