Brett Halliday
Count Backwards To Zero
Chapter 1
The first two days out of Southampton, rain was incessant. But gradually, as the Queen Elizabeth II swung south into warmer waters, the sea began to smooth out and the weather improved. This was the big ship’s final westward crossing of the year. For the next few months she would be cruising out of Miami, and that was her present destination.
Dr. Quentin Little, in a corner of the first-class bar, hadn’t noticed the changes in the weather. He had eaten nothing since leaving England. He was drinking vodka gimlets.
“Waiter,” he said, indicating his empty glass.
“Yes, sir.”
Little looked at his watch, staring at the figures until what they were telling him succeeded in penetrating through the vodka haze. With a ballpoint pen, he made a calculation on a soggy cocktail napkin.
He had seventy-one hours to live.
The waiter turned at the bar. A dark-haired girl spoke to him, picked the gimlet off his tray and brought it across to Little. Her name was Anne Blagden. She was amazingly pretty, with an enthusiastic style and the figure of a very good gymnast or ballet dancer. She was an American, in her mid-twenties, and in spite of her striking good looks, Little was beginning to find her a bit of a pest. He didn’t want or need conversation. All he wanted was to sit exactly where he was and blot out seventy-one hours. Drinking and going to the bathroom now and then — that was program enough.
“Dr. Little,” Anne said firmly, “we have crossed the fortieth parallel. The weather has broken at last. Come out in the sun and talk to me. It’s permitted to take our drinks.”
“I don’t like the glare on deck. I don’t feel like talking to anybody.”
He reached for his glass, but she moved it away.
“You don’t want to show up in Miami looking like a mushroom. Everybody there believes in the year-round tan. They’ll think you’re a security risk.”
“Anne, go away, please. Torment somebody else.”
“Look around. All you see is couples. Elderly couples. You and I are the only unattached people in the bar, so we have to torment each other.”
He sighed and stood up. “I wonder when you Americans are going to learn some manners.”
“Never, I hope.” She picked up the napkin on which he had worked out his limited life expectancy. “You don’t want to leave secret formulas lying around.”
He corrected her. “Formulae. In my specialty there are no longer any secrets. Only money.”
“Seriously.”
“I’m quite serious. Give the Eskimos money enough and a few high-school textbooks and they can make their own atomic explosion. They don’t need us.”
She frowned at the blurred marks on the napkin. “Seventy-one hours till what?”
“I was scribbling,” he said wearily.
He blinked like an owl as they came into the sunlight. The atmospheric pressure seemed to change, and for an instant he almost lost his balance. Anne steered him to an unoccupied deck chair and watched critically as he lowered himself.
“You’re in fantastically poor shape, Doctor. You’re no argument for the healthful properties of vodka.”
“As I’ve been telling you,” he said, “I oppose physical exercise. I don’t really like the way fresh air tastes.”
He put on a badly smeared pair of wraparound dark glasses, and settled back. Now the sky was a less intense and disturbing color.
“Did you remember my drink?”
She put it in his hand. By tilting the glass carefully, he managed to drink without sitting up. For a moment, feeling the sun’s warmth through his clothes, he was able to forget the minutes ticking away.
Anne had stretched out beside him with an erotic wriggle, tipped her face to the sun and closed her eyes. To do justice to the sudden cruiselike weather, she was wearing a sleeveless jersey and very abbreviated shorts. A narrow strip of flesh showed above the top of the shorts. Suddenly, for some inexplicable reason, Little felt like laying his hand palm down against her young and somehow vulnerable stomach. He hadn’t been stirred by this kind of impulse for a long time.
Her eyes opened. She smiled at him.
“Now let’s talk.”
“About what?”
“I’m not very good at mental arithmetic, but I just figured it out. In seventy-one hours we dock in Miami.”
She rolled on one hip and said in a rush, “You’re being so damn taciturn and British, it’s ridiculous! Didn’t you ever hear of Dr. Freud? He said it helps to talk about it. I know I’m being a bit of a menace—”
“Which is putting it mildly.”
“Quentin, maybe this isn’t an accident. I know you don’t believe in astrology—”
“My God.”
“A brainy scientist like you, of course not. You don’t believe in anything you can’t see with a microscope. That’s where we’re different. When I took science in high school I could never see anything under that damn thing. I couldn’t get it adjusted. If I hadn’t been on this boat you would have said just two words the whole trip. ‘Another gimlet.’”
“Another gimlet, please. Three words.”
“And what am I doing here, have you asked yourself? The only reason I didn’t fly is that the horoscope in one of the London papers said Gemini people should stay out of airplanes for a few weeks.”
“That astrologer gets a subsidy from the Cunard Line. They told him the Queen wasn’t fully booked.”
“I believe it. Regardless. I’ve had some bad luck with men lately, but that doesn’t mean I’ve sworn off completely. I dropped into the bar the first night to look the situation over, and what did I find? Ecch. There was only one halfway interesting-looking man, and he was very English and aloof, in addition to being smashed on vodka gimlets.”
Little finished his drink and summoned a hovering steward. “Another gimlet, please. Tell Harry it’s for Dr. Little, and to use a touch more lime juice in this one.”
“You won’t die of scurvy, that’s one thing,” Anne remarked. “Malnutrition, but not scurvy. Quentin, reticence is a fine character trait, but honestly. You’ve got a great new job, and let’s assume it’s the kind of work you like. They didn’t have to twist your arm to take it, did they? You ought to be striding up and down or challenging people to a spirited game of badminton. When an unaffiliated chick sits down beside you and indicates shyly that she’d like to make friends, you ought to respond. After the way you’ve been snapping at me, I think it’s heroic of me to persevere. You know you don’t drink this much normally — how could you hold a job? You’re worrying about something. Tell me. I’ll put my chin in my hand and make soothing suggestions.”
“I do think the human race is on the point of packing it in. I wouldn’t say I was exactly worrying about it.”
She touched his wrist. “The human race is going to make out OK. This isn’t generalized existentialist angst. It’s something specific. What’s going to happen in seventy-one hours? I mean, why should a British atomic physicist be carrying a gun in his pocket?”
“Anne, for the love of God,” Little said irritably, “if you keep nipping at my heels I’m going to fold you up in a deck chair and drop you in the Atlantic.” He looked around. “I’m thirsty. What’s keeping the steward?”
Anne plunged into the pool. She had changed into one of the skimpiest and most attractive bathing costumes Little had seen outside the pages of the popular picture magazines. She swam two lengths of the pool in a smooth, effortless crawl, came out dripping, adjusted the bottom portion of her bikini and plunged in again.
Little had already noticed that he wasn’t the only man at poolside who was being pleasantly agitated by the sight of Anne Blagden in her miniscule bathing suit. Most of the others, as Anne had observed, had their wives with them. Little, at 42, was the youngest man there, but he was also — to face facts — the ugliest, the least prepossessing. Nevertheless, when Anne came out of the pool again, Little was the man she would drop down beside. He found the prospect amazingly agreeable. Considering his predicament, the fact that he could be thinking along these lines was amazing enough.