A sea-fog was obliterating the sweep of the coastline. Eerily, it encoiled itself around the tree roots and telephone poles; carrying with it the stale stench of excreted diesel oil.

The man with the suitcase paused, every now and then, as if listening for something. Each time he did so, tentacles of panic toyed with his spinal nerves and tormented him with pulses of terror that dried the saliva upon his lips. If there had been someone around in whom he might have confided he could not have enunciated clearly enough to convey information.

Although he knew that the Atlantic tide was flushing itself over the broad expanse of sand somewhere ahead, he couldn’t hear it because through his head ran paroxysms of rapid dialogue that were purely internal. They came from unknown voices which rose in anguished argument within his cranium. So he paused, trying to steady himself by grasping one of the telephone poles, and tried to separate what he imagined from that which was real.

Where was the helicopter? Why wasn’t it There? Could it possibly be landed in such a choke of soiled fog? Could it successfully be manoeuvred so that the pilot could not only find him and pick him up, but get him to the docks before it was too late? He didn’t dare try and supply himself with the answer; so he clawed at the valise with an aching hand — almost raw from friction — and broke into a run.

His name was Huckman — Alex Jed Huckman, Professor of Genetic Engineering at the University of Syracuse, New York State.

And he hadn’t meant to go to the ship at all. The decision had been a last minute U-turn, impelled by a surge of frantic deduction that had occurred in his sleep … a series of stifling nightmares that had jammed respiration entirely. He would awake with lungs screaming for mercy until, using conscious force, he could re-induce breathing in a spate of uncontrolled gasps.

These dreams all ended the same way … in violent, seething concentric rings of cloud that curdled from internal upheaval, before changing the entire night sky and bringing the roof of the Earth to ground level, brilliant as an erupting star, until nothing existed.

But ghosted onto these nightmares were other dreams, strange and alien impressions of what seemed another world — a world in which human beings sparked themselves abruptly into life. They had unfamiliar names, these people … Trell and Kelda, Eagle and Krand. In Huckman’s demented mind they didn’t belong anywhere, at any rate in his shrivelling world. Indeed, they seemed infinitely far away; mere children, as yet, pushing eagerly at adulthood though somehow haunted and afraid. And if Huckman himself sensed some personal link with them he was not aware of the nature of it; he was too obsessed with his own survival to ask himself, at each dread awakening, about their origin, about the era in which they might live, about the bond between such distant dreampeople and himself. He felt only that they were there to mock him, to point the finger, to name the game.

And on waking from his last tormented spasm of sleep, Huckman saw these human images as if they were gathered at the end of the bed … till they faded away and left him utterly alone in his terror. Thus he had been left gazing into nothingness and into the hollow of obliteration.

For the effigies phantomed onto his mind were extinguished by the impact of the immediate Truth: the final solution of the nuclear age.

Tearing at his lungs so that he might breathe, he’d prised himself from within the sheets and leapt for the radio-telephone. Through this instrument he had drivelled and pleaded like a whipped spaniel until he’d made the connection he so despairingly placed. Once patched-through to the man he sought he’d managed to control his voice and get the promise of last-ditch aid.

Reeling, he’d stumbled out into the night, with random items of clothing stuffed feverishly into his suitcase.

Now, as he groped for the next phone-pole, he notionally witnessed the first of the mushroom-clouds before it was even there. The mirage induced paralysis and for a while he could not move.

Huckman tried to step-up the sensitivity of his eyes in a frantic attempt to penetrate the fog. To him it was an organic substance, an amorphous creature nurturing a conspiracy to prevent the expected helicopter from finding him in time.

Huckman didn’t give a damn if, in taking unheard-of risks in zero visibility, the pilot, along with the rest of the occupants, foundered in an effort to arrive at the agreed rendezvous … a pick-up point arranged by radio-telephone with Huckman’s top person in the Air Force at the eleventh hour.

Then, with lungs at bursting-point, Huckman held his breath. He was confronted with a total miracle: for somewhere out there was the distinctive throb of an approaching helicopter; and, as if to compound the impossible, a patch of fog cleared momentarily because a gust of sea-wind dispersed it.

Seemingly the gust was Huckman’s salvation. Ironically, such a fragmentary shear of wind could have utterly changed the entire future of Man. Huckman, once aboard a strange submarine known as
Kasiga
could have dialled-up the combination-lock of all
Kasiga
meant and pervert the very project he himself had implemented — thus turning the entire enterprise into a means of keeping Alex Jed Huckman alive and kicking.

Instead, the gust caught under the blades of the rotor, causing the pilot to lose control for three vital seconds.

The machine slid sidelong to the sound of screams from within. A blade crisply parted Huckman’s head from his body with precision; then the rotors slammed in a desperate spiral of sand and twisted metal. The ensuing explosion wrought total disintegration of machine and occupants alike.

And the chaotic contents of Huckman’s suitcase were scattered across a great spread of sand.

The contents included an embossed metal code-key.

It was the only one in existence.

The code-key was left there, marooned upon a sand-dune, to rust and corrode into oblivion for centuries to come.

Minus Fourteen

The huge husk is still moving. Inching along a few hundred feet below the surface it noses through muddy clumps of algae. Like some gigantic maverick that lives, it slinks in disgrace as if terrified of discovery.

Molluscs and barnacles — all mutated into monstrous boils that totally distort the streamlining — cling to the hull and enshroud it to the thickness of a whale’s hide. No evidence of the metal structure would be visible to a submerged intruder.

There are no such intruders.

Its progress has been braked gradually for some time by eerie tentacles of cloying seaweed … conscious seaweed that knows. Via pustule warts that act like nerve-centres this new plant informs the coral of a sinister invader. The coral responds by scouring the submarine’s unwelcome keel, clawing at it as if to arrest
Kasiga’s
progress. But because of the vessel’s colossal mass, momentum still carries it forward. Seemingly, nothing can stop it.

Like other ships she has decks honeycombing her interior. But she is not like other ships. Her decks, once lavishly illuminated and air-conditioned, are now in darkness. The extent of the dereliction suggests the obscene. Such elaborate technology seems grotesque when so overgrown with malignant fungus.

Yet her hull remains intact. How is this feasible? — when her entrails are so ravaged by age and corrosion? For whom was she really built? When does she date from? Under what circumstances was she launched, and why?

At first there seem to be no clues. Certainly she is no tomb; for there are no bodies. Somehow they have been extracted. Were there still some intelligent Being to explore her, such a being would eventually discover why. One section bears the embossed legend — still just discernible — ‘Air Lock Ejector Chute’ … a route to a clean finale as each life became extinguished, even to the last.

Out of the darkness there suddenly speaks a human voice — vastly amplified, and proliferated throughout the ship via hundreds of rusted speakers. Though shrilly distorted, most of them work. But how? Given the fact that the human voice can be preserved on magnetic tape, how can the machines run in so fetid an environment?

The voice is authoritative, yet at the same time offensively protective. The protectiveness in no way masks the implied menace in every word. It speaks thus:

‘To all passengers. Rationing today is at scale G. First sitting in the E Deck dining rooms will commence at 1200 hours. Fresh water is now at minimal permitted level of a third of a litre per person to last the remainder of the day. I do not have to remind you of the consequences to any individual who attempts to obtain additional water illicitly. Please proceed in an orderly manner to the dining rooms now …’ The terse communique is followed by the glum tolling of a recorded dinner gong. Its timbre does not whet the appetite.

Yet it has been doing this, to the bowels of an empty ship, for over three hundred years.

— Or is the ship really as empty as she seems?

The world above and beyond the ocean appears to this imaginary Intelligence to be rich in brilliantly coloured vegetation. The air is sweet; for the year is 2293 A.D. Naturally the exotic plant life is much different from its progenitors — due to the very high incidence of mutation. But only a human remnant from the Twentieth Century would be aware of such changes.

Is Man extinct?

Who is there to comment on the extravagant plumage of healthy birdlife descended from the thrush, the hawk, and — in particular — the swallow, now a vivid spectacle of gold and blue and nearly twice the size of any known ancestral variant? Put that question to the gods of the universe. They alone know …

To claim that this exotic new world challenges paradise is unrealistic. The ozone layer has thinned significantly, though not critically. Earth would not, in fact, sustain the overload of mammal life that was once expected of it; for although the vegetation lying in the green belts is prolific, there are huge expanses of desert in which only the new insects live. These have adapted; but in appearance they must surely be self-repugnant. Ugliness in nature mirrors itself because the demands made on evolution emphasize the crude environment in which it occurs. The environment in the sombre valleys where continents are gradually tearing themselves apart is subject to bleeding … Lava of a new type, chemically changed through surface damage to the Earth’s crust, oozes from cracks in the rocks and demands outrageous self-protection in the species which contend with it. Thus, the spiders, their bodies virtually concreted against heat, have squared themselves off like military tanks, huge creatures in permanent agony from the difficulties endured when trying to move limbs despite their tarmac coating. They cannot last for long; the heat near these radioactive volcanoes is prodigious, yet the spiders cannot move fast enough to flee and adapt to better things. So they melt in the very cauldron for which they modified themselves.

But these deserts must be viewed in perspective, in the context of a newly-flowering planet whose decontaminated belts support so eloquently the glittering coverlet of exotic life. Three hundred years in the progress of a planet is equivalent to a few heartbeats in the reign of prehistory’s Man; yet the evolved species of mammals would present few disappointments to zoologists of earlier times.

Take the new horses. They are best described as exquisite cartoons of their forebears. They move with a lithe, spritely grace; they are smaller in size, no larger than an Exmoor pony. But they are sweetly curved, almost erotic in appearance as they are triumphant in their emergence from the threat of extinction. The world is a worthwhile place for the existence of these beasts alone. But they must stay where the air is richest in oxygen. This is by no means evenly distributed throughout the globe; for end to end in the vast expanses of desert waste there is no photosynthesis … only the neo-algae can release oxygen and they are not generous with it. Instead, they hold themselves below surface in the shallow lakes and, with a race-cunning implanted in their genetic code, expend the minimum of energy in their high-wire efforts to survive.

There are, however, the monkeys. These, oddly, have not changed. It is as if evolution, revolted by the brief and costly experience of its highest mammal yet, has jammed. The common African monkey does not, however, survive in Africa itself, where the Rift Valley has opened out into a blazing canal of oily flame. Somehow this species has emigrated; and we are forced to the conclusion that the monkey was taken, by artificial means, to lands it did not inhabit through choice. But we are not in a position to ask the reason why. No one exists to ask the question. It is unimaginable, but it is true. It is best explained by the gods who control the order of the universe itself. We can only assume that they are, in some way, communicating with each other on the subject of the progress or otherwise of each of the billion planets contained in each galaxy. Earth, of course, is one of the least important by now. It has failed — at least for the present.

But only a few light-years away and concealed by the vast dust-cloud that obliterates the centre of the Galaxy from Earth’s position on the rim of the Milky Way, other planets thrive and show promise. On these, radio telescopes are unable to view the outcome of Mankind’s technological shambles because the stellar gasses concealing them impede any form of radio or television contact. Nevertheless, these worlds were developing in the back of beyond all the time and their occupants — for the most part — kept their fingers off the button. They must take priority.

But even low-priority planets like Earth are receiving attention. Solar rays are reviving a seemingly hopeless case. Though that branch of evolution which had produced Man can never again resume from its starting point, this is still not a dead planet in the sense of a dying star. Warmth exists.

Resolutely the animals, only a few of them totally unaltered, continue to thrive, adapting to ever-varying diets and learning new rules in the game of eat and be eaten. There are different predators to watch out for; there is new prey for the carniverous species to hunt down and savage. Although the order of things has not yet stabilized — so that sudden outbreaks of new virus-plagues wipe out an entire strain at a stroke — this instability comprises, as it always did, an experimental laboratory, where adaptive organisms are generated to make up the difference.

Thus, ironically, though the green belts are more ideal than ever before for the supporting of human life, homo sapiens is absent from this, Nature’s hot-house.

But on board the ship there are archive tapes — voices, recorded by some clandestine means over three hundred years ago. They are preserved intact, with no one to hear them.

It is, of course, senseless. In a world stripped of human beings, there is — perfectly accessible — a secret museum whose exhibits are tortured human utterances, hoarse through shortage of water, petrified from the thought of extinction.

The gods who run the universe would have their work cut out to account for the lunacy of anyone planning for this; anticipating the day when the last two mortals of the Twentieth Century were to discuss, before concealed microphones, the manner of their impending death.

Yet it is apt. Insanity led to the demise of the human species. Is it to be supposed that there was any limit to such lunacy? — in which an escape ship might be wired for sounds never to be played back?

And did the experimenters who thought of this elaboration on fear and horror realize that in bugging the victims, they themselves were conducting an experiment the results of which they could not possibly learn?

Yet they are there — the tapes. And they were made at a time when this festering monster of a submarine was not a nacelle encrusted with unfamiliar life forms, but a sleek escape machine … a yellow submarine in which members of some selected breed could lie low, and reproduce their kind, and wait in the hollow hope that the radioactivity outside might drop sufficiently and in time for meaningful existence to go on.

You have to be more than slightly out of your mind, when you’re planning to rig events in the future which you yourself can’t witness, to wait for the species to reduce its numbers to the last man before you arrange for the automatic bugging of its total extinction. Or did the architects of the submerged colossus known as
Kasiga
foster the hope that an equally dedicated attempt to perpetuate humanity might somehow be running in parallel with theirs, and do somewhat better? Nearer the mark, perhaps. For an urgent call by automatic radio … ‘This is
Kasiga
and we are dying’ … this, on the face of it, would have made more sense. For all that, it would have been fruitless. Noah’s Ark had no sister ship and rescue was not forthcoming. Moreover, the custodians of the universe have evidently felt disinclined to dispatch a flying saucer to so dismal a fiasco. UFOs are in short supply.

The scene, then, of over three hundred years ago, at the time when the last two passengers aboard
Kasiga
contemplated their loneliness and death, is clearly illustrated by what is on those tapes. You don’t need video (why did they omit that?) to reconstruct the event. The soiled shell of the ancient craft is surprisingly revealing in the detail of its collapse. The picture may have faded from the jigsaw but the pieces inevitably fit.

Hawkridge staggered across to where Slazenger had slumped. ‘There’s no water.’

Slazenger managed, ‘There must be places where no one looked for it.’

‘There are not.’ In fact, Tony Hawkridge was thorough by nature. Though he had known he was good as dead, he’d taken the elevator located at Centre Station and ridden to the deepest passenger deck. From there, he had used the engine-room companionway, each step negotiated in agony, and penetrated the lowest crew area. His sole thought was that one of the stricken might have concealed illicit supplies somewhere down there, only to forget about them in his dementia.

The search revealed nothing except the peculiarly ordered state of the ship. It was as if the very lack of food and fluid served to heighten a collective obsession for hygiene. It had been preached from the beginning and would apply right to the end. The dead were ejected, by means of the vacuum device, the moment they became so much debris. Tony Hawkridge knew that he would commit himself to the departure chamber and leave a dying ship free from his own germs. It was senseless, but it had to be.

The travelators that ran the entire length of the vessel were still in excellent order. Hawkridge stepped on J-Deck conveyor and the belt began to run for the last time. As it started, so the entire tunnel that housed it became lit end to end.

You never got used to the immense proportions of this floating death-palace. You remembered, well enough, how it had been, not all that long ago, when it was teeming with men and women and their children … people who had never thought of volunteering for such a voyage, but who were selected by computer as being a cross-section of the culture from which they were to flee. Each of them had been virtually kidnapped without explanation, often without regard to their feelings for those they left behind. Next thing they knew they were incarcerated in a madman’s dream. From this dream there would be no awakening. It is positively against the rules of survival to surface a submarine and make your exit to the sickening tune of the Mega-Deathmarch … Strontium-90 emission at densities of the order of 200 Rems in the atmosphere kills more efficiently than any known virus. It achieves homicide as painfully as does an attack of rabies. While Caesium-137 is taking care of the tissue for keeps, Radio-Strontium is annihilating the bone marrow and transforming blood into something quite different. An ejection tube direct to the ocean is merciful enough compared with that.

Other books

Return of the Home Run Kid by Matt Christopher

A Fey Harvest by Sumida, Amy

Savage Chains: Shattered (#3) (Men in Chains) by Caris Roane

The Describer's Dictionary: A Treasury of Terms & Literary Quotations by Grambs, David

Seaward by Susan Cooper

Miss Goodhue Lives for a Night by Kate Noble

Lord of Hawkfell Island by Catherine Coulter

Machine God: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller by Mars Dorian

Four Wheeled Hero by Malcolm Brown

The Odyssey of Ben O'Neal by Theodore Taylor