With a great effort I stand and pick up the torch.
‘Well,’ I say, ‘come on, we have a lot to do.’
He makes a visible effort himself to concentrate on the immediate moment and push back the confusion the past has begun to loosen and unravel within him. We re-enter the compressed dark of the inner core of the building to find the stairwell, me leading the way with the small beam of light. My hand trembles and the light is unsteady. I am afraid of being trapped again. We go down, along curving corridors, through doors, round and down.
In the lower service areas the light reveals bunches of cables, pipes, wires, ducts, the dead tendrils of the building’s nervous system. Without power the place is worse than useless. Control panels show that even the curtains over the windows upstairs are electrically operated. The spaceship is as dead and inert as the pyramids.
And there, in the basement, we find the Civil Defence emergency room, a hollow at the centre of the web of dead circuits, its emptiness holding back the pressure of all the layered tons of concrete. There are telephones, maps, charts; no answers, no signs of surprise. The torch beam seems to dim, as if the darkness is heavy enough to eat away its energy.
‘There should be an emergency generator,’ he mutters, searching along the walls with the flat of his hands, like a half-blind archaeologist looking for carvings. I hold the light, silent, as he stumbles around. Then I say, ‘There’s nothing here.’ And again, ‘Api, there’s nothing here. The torch won’t last much longer. If we lose this, we’ll never find our way out.’
He stops. I hear him sigh.
‘Yeah. Okay.’
We trace our way out of the maze, coming up from the catacombs. In the stairwell we climb up flight after flight, making for the top floor. The air pressure lessens. Finally, breathless, we emerge into a hot corridor patched with sun from skylights. A lettered panel says Cabinet Room. The door is unlocked. We go in. A circular table is set beneath a central light well, a roundel of blue sky above. The polished wood gleams. There are soft-upholstered swivel chairs arranged neatly around the table, facing clean blotters and ashtrays. The same vacancy. Traces of dust. A wall clock, gold hands stopped at 6.12; brand name, Omega.
The climb up here has made me light-headed. Absurdities present themselves with no resistance. I look at the round table and think of the court of King Arthur. An enchanted castle. Well; they’re all as far gone as that, now. I draw out a chair and sit down, resting the torch and gun on a blotter. Api saunters to the other side of the table and does likewise. The sky is Camelot. Specks of dust float through the column of sun. We say nothing. We seem to be still on the spaceship, machinery silent, in planetary orbit, moving very slightly, the sun mark edging perceptibly across the circle of the table. I remember stories about space journeys which might last ten, twenty, or even hundreds of years. And here, a jumble of history below; the marble floors and Ionic columns, the fleur-de-lys carpets, Victorian ironwork, ageing photographs, bits of Maori carving, concrete air-raid shelters; it’s an ark of museum pieces. The end of history; futile junk. So much human effort gone for nothing, all the odysseys, armadas, crusades, cathedrals, epics, symphonies, all heading for 6.12 am last Saturday, a huge perspective with every line focused on a hole in space. Omega. Full stop. The enormity is meaningless. I can feel nothing about it.
Api swivels in his chair, his arm extended, finger tracing an arc across the dust on the table top. His face is back in shadow.
‘This is all real, isn’t it?’ he asks suddenly.
‘As far as we know, yes.’
‘I mean, what if it’s a very good fake? Just like the real thing?’
‘And we wouldn’t be able to tell? Like the reversed polarity. Is that what you mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘What for? Why?’
‘To watch us. See what we do.’
I shake my head, taking the chance to make the denial I missed before.
‘We’re not that important.’
‘It may only be real to us.’ He taps the table.
I sigh.
‘You’re saying that we’re the odd ones out. That everybody else is safe in the real world and they’re wondering what happened to us. Because we’re missing from the real world. Is that it?’
‘Yes.’ The voice is soft behind the column of light. ‘Well, you know; people go missing. They just vanish. What happens to them?’
I can’t see it’s any use wasting time on this line of thinking, so I say, off-handedly, ‘If this is a replica world, then it’ll have enough anomalies to be detectable by the kind of scientific tests I’m going to run.’
‘You reckon?’ His voice is almost toneless.
‘Yes.’
‘It is important.’ He moves his arms from the tabletop so there is only the black submachine gun lying there with the sun fixed on it like a spotlight. ‘Either we find out what happened to them,’ he says, ‘and find how we can get them back…or we find out what we missed last Saturday…and how we can join them. The second way might be easier.’
I sit impassive. In a way I feel sorry for him because I can understand how he has missed drawing the correct conclusion from what has happened, in particular my description of the crashed plane in Auckland. There is something pitiful about his idea, and it relates to his childhood terror of being abandoned; a pathetic survival of the wish to ransack empty space for the people who ought to be there, to conjure them into existence, combined with the other deeper need to run to the crowd and be forgiven. That is all this means. And he still doesn’t know.
He makes a move to get up.
‘Do you mind if I ask something?’ I say, rather formally.
‘No. Go on.’
‘Why did you join the army?’
There is a short laugh.
‘Oh. Dunno really. Maybe I thought I was a real tough guy after all that. Or…maybe, nothing could be worse.’ He pauses. ‘And, like I said, I’m a bit dumb.’
He deliberately undermines the reply by the last phrase, using something we both know to be untrue to let me know that he will not answer my question, it’s forbidden territory. Perhaps he wants me to deduce that it’s all untrue, and hence an oblique warning: his toughness is an illusion, and there were worse experiences after that. It’s like the Maori warrior making a ritual scary face as you put a foot forward onto his ground and at the same time placing a stick at your feet which you may pick up if you want to go further. The snag being, that to pick it up, you have to lean over and expose your neck to danger.