'You could have saved it once,' Sarah said, turning to look directly at him. 'If you hadn't been so bloody careful. So bloody selfish!'
'It wasn't as simple as that.'
'Your generation and the generation before that could have done something. The seeds of all this ridiculous paranoia and xenophobia were there then. God—such a waste! This century could have been a century of Utopia. You and your mothers and fathers turned it into Hell.'
'It might look like that...'
'Darling, it was like that.'
He shrugged.
'And now you're getting out,' she said. 'Leaving the mess behind.
Your talk of "pragmatism" is so much bloody balls! You're as much an escaper as my poor daft old dad! Maybe more of one— and less pleasant, for that—because you might fucking succeed!'
They were driving through Stockwell. The sun was setting but no street lighting came on.
'You feel guilty because you're letting me down, don't you?' he said. 'That's what all this display is about, isn't it?'
'No. You're a good fuck. But I never cared much for your character, darling.'
'You'll have to go a long way to find a better one in these dark days.' He tried to say it as a joke, but it was evident he believed it.
'Selfish and opinionated,' she said. 'Pragmatism. Ugh!'
'I'll drop you off here then, shall I?'
He stopped the car. It sank on its cushion of air.
She peered out into the darkness.'Where's "here"?'
'Balham,' he said.
'Don't play games, darling. Let's get this over with. You were taking me all the way to Croydon, remember.'
'I'm a bit tired of your small-talk—darling.'
'All right.' She leaned back. 'I'll button my lip, I promise. I'll say nothing until we get to Croydon and then I'll give you a sweet "thank you".'
But he had made his decision. It wasn't malice. It was selfpreservation. It was for Josephine and the boys, and for the group.
He wasn't enjoying what he was doing.
'Get out of the car, Sarah.'
'You take me bloody home the way you said you would!'
'Out.'
She looked into his eyes. 'My God, Ryan...'
'Go on.' He pushed her shoulder, leaned over her and opened the door. 'Go on.'
'Jesus Christ. All right.' She picked up her handbag from the seat and got out of the car. 'It's something of a classic situation. But a bit too classic really. The sex war's hotted up in this part of the world.'
'That's your problem,' he said.
'I'm not likely to get out of this alive, Ryan.'
That's your problem.'
She took a deep breath. 'I won't tell anyone about your stupid spaceship idea, if that's what's worrying you. Who'd believe me, anyway?'
'I've got a family and friends to worry about, Sarah. They believe me.'
'You dirty shit.' She walked off into the darkness.
They must have been waiting for her all the time because she screamed—a high-pitched, ugly scream—she cried out for him to help her. Her second scream was cut short.
Ryan closed the door of the car and locked it. He started the engine and switched on the headlights.
He saw her face in the lights. It stuck out above the black mass of Antifems in their monklike robes.
It was only her face.
Her body lay on the ground, still clasping her handbag.
Her head was on the end of the pole.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Ryan lies in his bunk with his log-book and his stylus. He has been there for two days now. John comes in occasionally, but doesn't bother him, realising that he does not want to be disturbed. He lets Ryan get his own food when he wants to and looks after the running of the ship. To make sure that Ryan rests, he has even turned off the console in Ryan's cabin.
Ryan spends most of his time with the log-book. He removed it from the desk originally to make sure that John didn't come across it.
He reads over the first entry he made when he brought it back to the cabin.
What I did to Sarah can be justified, of course, in that she could have ruined this project. I had to be sure nothing wrecked it. The fact that we are all safe and aboard is evidence that I took the right precautions—trusting no one outside the group—making sure that everything was done with the utmost secrecy. We kept contact only with the Russian group—about the last outpost of rational humanity that we knew about.
Would I have done it in that way if she had not turned me down in such an unpleasant manner? I don't know. Considering the state of things at the time, I behaved no worse, no less humanely, than anyone else. You had to fight fire with fire. And if it—and certain other things—is on my conscience, at least it isn't on anyone else's conscience. The boys are clean. So is Josephine. So are most of the others...
He sighs as he reads the entry over. He shifts his body in the bunk.
'All right, old chap?'
John has come, as silently as ever, into the cabin. He looks a trifle tired himself.
'I'm fine.' Ryan closes the book quickly. 'Fine. Are you all right?'
'I'm coping very well. I'll let you know if anything crops up.'
'Thanks.'
John leaves. Ryan returns his attention to the log, turning the pages until he comes to a fresh one.
He continues writing: There is no doubt about it. I have blood on my hands. That's probably the reason I've been having bad dreams. Any normal, half-way decent man would. I took it on myself to do, at least. I didn't involve anyone else.
When we hijacked the Albion transport, I had hoped there would be no trouble. Neither would there have been, I think, if the crew had been all English. Incredible! I always knew the Irish were excitable, but that stupid fellow who tried to get the gun from me in mid-air deserved all he got. He must have been Irish. There's no other explanation. I was never a racialist, but one had to admit that there were certain virtues the English have which other races don't share. I suppose that is racialism of a sort. But not the unhealthy sort. I was horrified when I heard that the foreigners in the camps were being starved to death. I would have done something about it if I could. But by that time it had gone too far. Maybe Sarah was right.
Maybe I could have stopped it if I hadn't been so selfish. I always considered myself to be an enlightened man—a liberal man. I was known for it.
He stops again, staring at the wall.
The rot had set in before my day. H-bombs, nuclear radiation, chemical poisoning, insufficient birth control, mismanaged economics, misguided political theories. And then—panic.
And no room for error. Throw a spanner in the works of a society as sophisticated and highly tuned as ours was and—that's it.
Chaos.
They tried to bring simple answers to complicated problems. They looked for messiahs when they should have been looking at the problems. Humanity's old trouble. But this time humanity did for itself.
Absolutely.
It is odd, he thinks, that I will never know how it all turned out.
Just as well, of course, from the point of view of our kids. We left just in time. They were bombing each other to smithereens...
Another few days, he writes, and we wouldn't have made it. I timed it pretty well, all things considered.
*
Ryan had led the party out to London Airport where the big Albion transport was preparing to take off on its bombing mission over Dublin. They were all in military kit for Ryan was posing as a general with his staff.
They had driven straight out on to the runway and were up the steps and into the plane before anyone knew what had happened.
At gunpoint Ryan had told the pilot to take off.
Within quarter of an hour they were heading for Russia...
It had been over the landing strip on the bleak Siberian Plain that the Irishman—he must have been an Irishman—had panicked. How an Irishman had managed to remain under cover without revealing his evident racial characteristics, Ryan would never know.