Mary, perhaps, was the reverse—superficially fragile, yet with the kind of inward reserves that might, in the end, permit her to endure a great deal. Physically she was not as attractive or as exciting as Barbara, but her personality was more subtle, more intriguing. Perhaps there would come a time, especially if they were stuck here for long—God damn it! there was almost certain to come such a time—when sex problems would be the most important factor affecting the success or failure of their bid for survival. Avery didn’t want any sex problems. He was even pretty sure that he didn’t want any sex relationships. He was afraid of them. And he had been afraid for a long time….
Suddenly, he realized that Tom was talking to him. ‘Daydreaming, old sport? You haven’t said a word in the last twenty minutes. You’re not going into a decline, I trust.’
‘Sorry, I was miles away That was a decent bit of meat, Tom. I’m glad you bagged it.’
‘Permission to hunt for some more?’
Avery smiled. ‘Yes, but not with the gun. We must try to keep that as a great deterrent.’
Mary stretched and sighed. She gazed up at the still clear sky, shading her eyes against the sun, which had apparently passed its zenith and was now fairly low over the sea. ‘What a gorgeous climate this is. It’s the one good thing about the whole situation I don’t feel like doing a thing this afternoon. I just want to lie back and luxuriate.’
‘No reason why you shouldn’t, I suppose,’ said Avery. ‘But Tom and I will have to go after some more driftwood. There still isn’t enough for a fence and a fire.’
‘It still strikes me as remarkably odd,’ observed Barbara, suppressing a yawn, ‘that we aren’t having fits of hysterics, gloom and despondency.’
‘Simultaneously?’ enquired Tom.
She laughed. ‘Or in sequence—according to taste. The trouble is, how does one behave in a situation like this? I’m sure it hasn’t been laid down in any book on etiquette. So I don’t know whether to scream or relax.’
‘There’ll be plenty of time for screaming,’ Avery assured her seriously, ‘when we have made ourselves as safe and secure as possible. At the moment, I suspect we are both traumatized and sedated.’
‘Big words,’ scoffed Barbara. ‘Big empty words. Meaning we don’t know a damn thing. Maybe it’s as well.’ There was silence for a minute or so. Silence wrapped in the even murmur of the sea.
At length, Avery said: ‘Well, let’s go after that wood. We want to get as much as possible before sunset.’ Barbara collected up the plates. ‘Please, sir, may we bathe while you’re away?’
Avery thought for a moment. ‘No,’ he said, ‘definitely not. I’ll think about it tomorrow. Hell, there’s far too much to think about, as it is.’
NINE
Sunset came with tropical suddenness. The evening meal was over—nothing but fruit, this time—and the fence, such as it was, was in position. One moment the world was still light and warm; and next moment, it seemed as if the sun had been completely swallowed by the sea. And a cool wind rustled through the trees, bearing with it an invisible tide of twilight and darkness.
The fence was less of a fence than a three foot high tangle of driftwood. It enclosed a few square yards containing two tents, four human beings and a fire. It enclosed a world within a world.
Avery looked at his companions in the firelight and wondered if they felt as lonely and exposed as he did. During the hours of daylight there had been so much to do, so much to think of doing, that there had been little opportunity for private thoughts and feelings. Daylight itself was a cloak of comfort; but now the cloak had been taken away, and there was a feeling of nakedness and fear.
The stars were coming out. Alien stars. Stars of another galaxy or perhaps just another part of Earth’s galaxy. What an arrogant way to describe it—Earth’s galaxy! It was related to the archaic thinking that had placed man at the fixed centre of the universe, sitting on a flat world, the one and only darling child of an anthropomorphic god.
But perhaps God had many children, and perhaps some of his children were adept at the manufacture of hypnotic crystals. And other things…
Anyway, the stars were no less beautiful for being unfamiliar stars. They shone without warmth, without compassion. But that was part of the beauty; for they were the ultimate in detachment. Hydrogen bombs, London winters, human hopes and fears—even interstellar abduction—were as nothing to those bright needle points of eternity.
Avery felt that it was going to be a long time before he could come to terms with his predicament. He could already accept it as a fact—in so far as any of the facts of recent experience had proved acceptable—but he could not yet accept it emotionally. London, evidently, was light-years away. That, in itself, meant nothing. It might just as well be a few hundred or a few thousand miles over the seaward horizon. Each was remote, in different ways, beyond the power of imagining.
What he could not accept was that, for all practical purposes, London both as a symbol and as a place had ceased to exist. Intellectually, he knew that the chances of seeing it—or Earth—again were very low. Yet the rattle of the Underground was still in his ears, the subtle throb of the city seemed to find an echo even in his pulse. He wondered what would happen to him if or when he abandoned hope—not a specific hope, but the curious, almost unformed hope that some day, once again, he would belong. For the first time, he was surprised to discover, mankind felt to him like a great family. It was an odd sensation, this knowledge of being a child, lost and far from home. But he was not entirely cut off from mankind; for he had the company of three people. Looking at them, he wondered what kind of confusions were whirling round in their heads.
Barbara had a bottle of whisky. In fact, Barbara had about six dozen bottles of whisky. Her cabin trunk had been lined with them just as Avery’s had been lined with cigarettes. Somehow, he had not thought that she would be a heavy drinker. It was not, as she had carefully explained when the bottle was produced, that she was an alcoholic or even ‘in a sordid state’. It was just that she had needed a crutch on which to lean in a world where she had had to endure an unending role as a TV immortal in a hospital that looked as if it would go on admitting imaginary patients until the entire population was neurotic, bed-ridden or both.
Barbara sat with Tom in front of the tent that he referred to brightly as ‘the girls’ dorm’. They each had tumblers—and the whisky. Mary and Avery sat less than a couple of yards away, but enough to make it a gap, outside ‘the men’s dorm’. Avery also nursed a whisky—a small one. But Mary had steadfastly refused to drink. She looked at Barbara somewhat anxiously. Barbara was on her third generous double, but so far there did not appear to be much effect. Tom, however, was looking rather melancholy. He had matched her, glass for glass.
For a little while, there had been a lull in the conversation. But the spell was broken when Avery threw a handful of wood on the fire and sent a shower of sparks up towards the sky.
Barbara let out a deep sigh, shook her head, then said abruptly: ‘We’re going to have to have a naming of names.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Avery was bewildered.
‘The flora and fauna, stupid. All those pretty pictures tell us what the animals and plants are like in these parts, and what they’re good—or bad—for. But they don’t have any names. I think it’s very important for animals to have names. Besides, how the hell do we talk about them if they don’t?’