“Nevertheless, we’re better off than many other parts of the world these days. Those of you who aren’t New Zealanders may well choose to stay. In fact, you may have to — there’s not much travel to the outside.”
Penny looked at Steve; his face was impassive.
“Most of you are members of CARP,” the colonel went on. “Or were. The programme no longer exists. Neither does the Commonwealth, in any meaningful sense. So if you do choose to return to Britain, or Australia, or Canada or wherever, it’ll be at the expense of the New Zealand Provisional Government. And at its convenience. In the meantime, you’ll be expected to aid our efforts in every way possible. God knows there’s enough work to be done.”
Terry Dolan was on his feet. “You mean to say you’re too bloody cheap to send us home to Australia?”
“To bloody poor,” Colonel Chase barked. “Aircraft and fuel are scarce, and no one flies unless it’s absolutely essential. I’m not sure I’d want to be in Australia in any case”
“Why the hell not?”
“They’ve lost their agriculture, just as we have, and they’ve more mouths to feed. There’s a coalition government in Canberra, but no one seems to obey it. We understand the cities are being evacuated, but there’s not much left in the countryside.”
“What about Britain?” asked Colin.
“We don’t really know. They’ve got a military government like ours, and they face the same problems we do, but on a greater scale. All of Europe seems to be in the same boat — too many people, and not enough food or energy, and the weather getting worse all the time.
“As for Canada and the US, they’ve very near collapse. The Canadians have lost their entire wheat crop. I think the Americans managed to save part of theirs, but they’re fighting a civil war that’s totally disrupted their economy. The federal government is being run by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but not very well.”
He paused. “We still have newspapers, of a sort. I’ll see that you get copies of them… Anyone here from Christchurch?”
“I’m from Dunedin,” Simon Partington said.
“You’ll be allowed a phone call in the morning. The phone system is open from 0900 to 1400 hours daily. I’m sure your family and friends will be overjoyed to know you’re safely home. Those of you from North Island can give us the names and addresses of your people, and we’ll have them notified by telegram.
“I haven’t much more to say. For the time being, you’re our guests here. Wellington will have to decide what’s to be done with you. Again, I’m sorry to offer you such poor hospitality and such depressing news. If it’s any consolation, your safe return is the best news we’ve had all year. God bless you all.”
He sat down in a nervous, rustling silence. Hugh stood up again.
“We’ve been given rooms on the second floor. I suggest we choose our quarters and plan on an early evening — Tommy tells me the lights go off at 2100 hours. At least there’ll be plenty of hot water, and I for one intend to soak in a tub for an hour or two.”
The sallow young man showed Penny and Steve into a second-floor room facing the river; apart from the dust on the furniture and a stale, unopened smell, the room might have been in Omaha or Honolulu.
“Too big,” Steve smiled when the young man left. “You could get lost in a room this size.” He’d grabbed an armful of magazines and newspapers in the lobby; dumping them on the bed, he began to undress. “Let’s take a shower.”
Under the hot, needle-sharp spray, Penny found herself looking at Steve’s body as if for the first time: it was hard, pale and very thin. His hands and feet, scarred with frostbite, looked like those of an old man, and his face looked older, too. His nose, sunburned almost purple, jutted like a beak from the lined, taut skin over his cheekbones; his lips were puffy and cracked. Her own body looked strange as well, the belly flatter than it had been in years, breasts beginning to sag, skin pale and dry and speckled with sores. It hadn’t mattered on the ice, but now her unattractiveness embarrassed her. With guilty relief, she stepped out of the shower and wrapped herself in a big towel.
Like a dull old married couple, they got into bed and started reading. Penny picked up a July issue of the Christchurch Times: it was just four tabloid pages, without photographs or advertisements.
“Didn’t Al say someone told him there was rioting in Auckland and Wellington?” she asked when she’d finished.
“Mmph.”
“Not a word about it in here. Just stuff about military regulations and how to save food and energy.”
Steve was engrossed in a magazine, but showed her the cover.
“Time Monthly. Monthly?”
“Look at the price,” Steve said. “Ten New Zealand dollars.” It was printed on pulp, even the cover, which showed a black-and-white photo of President Wood looking grim. “The only article in the science section is something about a ‘loyalty shakeout’ of what they call ‘renegade scientists’.”
They read more or less at random, gradually sifting out the events of the last seven months from masses of propaganda.
The disappearance of the earth’s magnetic field, back in January, had crippled the world: radio communications broke down, and both the ozone layer and the ionosphere disintegrated under the continuous bombardment of solar flares. International trade dwindled to a trickle. The industrial nations were convulsed by strikes, riots, even insurrections, all made worse by food shortages. It was some compensation, though, that military electronics systems were as deranged as civilian ones. Missiles died in their silos; the computers that ruled the armies went mad; bombers and fighters became dangerously unreliable. With each country absorbed in its own problems, none could risk war.
Then the icequake struck. Steve had been right — the tsunamis rose across the Southern Ocean, across the Pacific, and focussed their energies in the Aleutians and the Bering Strait between Alaska and Siberia. The north polar ice, only a few metres thick, shattered as the waves crashed repeatedly into the Arctic Ocean.
Not many Pacific coastlines escaped. From Lyttleton to Vladivostok to Los Angeles to Santiago, the tsunamis left little but wreckage and oil slicks (a million-tonne super-tanker, leaving the Alaskan oil port of Valdez fully laden, was carried ten kilometres inland before it broke up). No one knew how many died in the first two days after the tsunamis struck, but estimates ranged as high as three million. San Francisco had been especially hard hit. At the beginning of February deranged computers had failed to produce over fifty thousand unemployment cheques for the Bay Area. Riots had broken out, and by February 7 much of San Francisco, Oakland and Richmond was in flames. The tsunamis struck, carrying away the Golden Gate Bridge and flooding the rapid-transit tunnels under the bay. Thousands of people living on the low-lying lands around the bay were drowned or driven from their homes. The rest of the US west coast suffered as well. The Trident nuclear submarine base at Bangor, Washington, was destroyed; so were the naval facilities at San Diego and the missile pads at Vandenberg Air Force Base. A moderately severe earthquake a week later in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles compounded the disaster.