In retrospect Miranda recognised that she had never paused to think — deeply or otherwise — about much in particular before the night of the October War. That night had been the low point of her life; a demarcation between the recklessness and fecklessness of her youth and the damaged, scarred woman who had emerged, butterfly-like from her bruised and bloodied chrysalis. Before that night she had been searching for experiences, for ways of getting off her head, for ways of not being like everybody else. Ever since that night she had wanted desperately to belong, to believe in something greater than herself, to be somebody. She had gone back to college, shunned male company, allowed her Aunt and Uncle to ‘look after her’ and she had even made a half-hearted effort to reconnect with her parents. That had not worked out as well as it might but at least she was back on strained speaking terms with her mother and she was her father’s ‘little princess’ again.
In the week after the war she had been convinced the World would end; convinced that they would all live out what remained of their doomed, sad lives waiting for the radioactive cloud to poison the air and the soil, and for life to slowly, surely disappear from the face of the Earth. A lot of people had felt that way and honestly believed they were living at the end of time.
On the Beach syndrome…
But life had gone on as normal; there was no mass ‘die off’ in the states to the north or the east, just endless depressing, distressing reports on the TV and in the papers of the devastation in Seattle and Chicago, the obliteration of Buffalo and a score of other places, many she had never heard of, mostly around the Great Lakes and in the Mid-West. She had learned later that plumes of fallout had blown across great swathes of the United States — not California — but that in most places it had been possible to avoid the worst effects of the radiation blooms by simply staying inside, hunkering down until after a week to a fortnight, the all clear sounded. They said background radiation levels were several times higher than before the war; it depended who one listened to as to how much higher the levels really were and if it really mattered. Atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons since the 1945 war had already increased the background levels of the isotopes of Strontium-90, Caesium-137 and Iodine-131 to levels — up to tens of times their pre-Hiroshima levels — known to be harmful, especially to children. Bizarrely, the question was sometimes asked in San Francisco: ‘Had the war really made things that much worse?’
Intuitively, Miranda knew the war must have made things many times worse even though she did not begin to understand the miniscule amount of real science on the subject that had actually filtered out into the public domain. Although the military and the Atomic Energy Commission had installed radiation monitoring stations in city parks the best advice that the Governor’s Office in Sacramento had received was along the lines of; thus far ‘only a statistically insignificant incidence of additional illness or mortality (mainly cancers) can be attributed to the direct effects of radiation sickness, or the short-term effects of exposure to fallout.’ Which was fine and dandy so far as it went but not overly reassuring because nobody could agree what the long-term effects of the increased levels of background ionizing radiation — assumed to be between two to four times higher than pre-war — which had been recorded in and around the cities of San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego in the last year actually signified. The problem was complicated by the fact that in some places the geography and topography provided natural and man-made ‘radiation traps’ where the background contamination was much higher than the state-wide average. For example, sheltered mountain valleys seemed to ‘collect fallout’ and there were indications that soil erosion piled windblown contaminated soil into drifts against and underneath houses. The trouble was that the variations between and within the most comprehensive of the provisional statistical studies was so large, that it was very hard to draw any meaningful conclusions about where it was, or was not ‘safest’ to live and work. In the words of one eminent professor of physics at Caltech: ‘we are embarking upon a millennia-long experiment; at the end of it we will know everything there is to know about the physiological, developmental, and mutational effects of living with historically — that is, historically in terms of the time Man has been on Earth — elevated levels of ionizing radiation. In a hundred years time we may be able to speculate, in a partially informed fashion, in response to the pressing questions everybody wants to know the answers to now. But we will not really know what we have done to the future of our species, or to the myriad of other species with which we share this planet, for many hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.’
It was beginning to look as if Nevil Shute might have got it right.
Maybe in a hundred, or two hundred years the World might be a dead, lifeless sphere spinning through space, lonely in its devastation for all time.
They were all still living on the beach…
Dwayne John’s voice shattered Miranda’s darkling premonitions.
“Weren’t you at Johnny Seiffert’s place that one time?” He asked, his dark handsome face a mask of embarrassment and shame.
Miranda glared at him.
If looks killed…
Chapter 30
The United States Navy preferred its Polaris boats to depart at night or in the fog but that winter morning as the pre-dawn twilight spread across the iron grey, freezing waters of San Francisco Bay, and the ebb tide surged between the great rust red piers of the Golden Gate, the air was unnaturally clear and visibility was pin sharp half-way to the murky horizon. A cold wind blew in off the Pacific carrying spits of rain from the high clouds folding around the hills above Sausalito.
Commander Troy Simms, his navigation officer and two lookouts crowded into the small cockpit at the rounded top of the USS Sam Houston’s great streamlined shark fin sail as the submarine shouldered towards the shadows beneath the great bridge. Half a mile ahead the Forrest Sherman class destroyer the USS John Paul Jones was passing under the Golden Gate. Normally, a small patrol boat loitered in the waters around the bridge when one of Submarine Squadron Fifteen’s SSBNs left harbour; today the Navy wanted to make a statement and to make absolutely sure that no sleepy merchantman or idiot in a sailboat impeded the USS Sam Houston’s departure.
On the surface the big submarine handled like a water-logged garbage scow. Her curved flanks were designed to slip through the depths, not to manuever in a seaway. Even in the shelter of the Bay the boat had an appreciable roll, and when she met the open sea she would pitch gently but uncomfortably for submariners accustomed to months at sea without once being aware that the boat was actually moving.