October the First Is Too Late

Chapter Six: Agitato

The personal crowded out the general. My first thought was of Lena. I was dry in the throat. I began rushing around with the others, in the hope of finding John or one of his friends. I couldn’t really believe the news was true but it didn’t need to be true to be frightening. Of course I knew there was a bad situation in south-eastern Asia. Yet I hadn’t remotely credited it could blow up into a major war, if that was what this really was. Then I remembered war always seems to come as a surprise to civilians, at any rate it had in 1914. At last I ran into Art Clementi.

‘Is there any truth…’ I began.

‘Can’t say yet. But something serious seems to have happened. A few of us are going over to Pearl City. We can probably manage to tuck you in if you want to come along. John’s going, the Brass want him down there.’

I packed my things as quickly as I could. In a sense, rushing over to Pearl City was a form of panic, a desire to do something, to avoid sitting still and waiting. That’s the way terror got you, you just ran aimlessly around in any direction.

It was only when I walked with my bag out to the car park that I found John. I was glad to see he didn’t look too worried.

‘I find this very difficult to believe. Something’s happened all right but it must have become exaggerated. We’d better go over and find out exactly what it is.’

Scarcely a word was spoken on the journey to Hailo airport. Nobody said very much there either. We all got on to the plane in silence. It put down for a short stop in the island of Maui and then went on to Honolulu. A big station wagon was waiting for us. There was very little traffic on the road as we made our way to the naval base. Then came a hold-up when it was found that neither John nor I was an American citizen. After a delay, in which I suppose a number of phone calls were put through, we were separated from the others and told that a car would be made available to take us to a downtown hotel. After the best part of an hour a car did appear and we made away in it. In the car John said, ‘I told Art we would go to the Waikiki.’

We got rooms at the hotel. I tried to ring Los Angeles but found all lines engaged. Then I lay flat out on my bed in a quite blank state of mind. I had a call from John on the house phone at about six o’clock suggesting we meet downstairs in the bar for a drink. It seemed as good an idea as anything else. After the drink we went to dinner in the hotel restaurant.

‘I wonder if I could have a talk with you chaps?’ The speaker was an Australian. We told him to pull up a chair. Clearly he had finished dinner. We were only half-way through the main course. We introduced ourselves, and took stock of our new acquaintance. It struck me I had become far more suspicious, far less free and easy, in the last few hours. I felt as if I was on some kind of an assignment. The Australian had an athletic look about him. His manner was pleasant and open.

‘I heard you talking and realized you were a couple of Britishers.’

The clans were certainly drawing together. Our exclusion at Pearl City and now this.

‘How about a walk on the beach when you’ve finished, I’ll be in the bar.’

Then he was gone.

Not long afterwards Art Clementi appeared. We naturally wanted to know the news:

‘It looks bad, real bad. There’s no doubt the west coast has been attacked.’

We tried to get more out of him but either he knew nothing more or he wouldn’t say. It was all very odd. It was also odd that Clementi went off without eating dinner with us. He excused himself by saying he had already eaten but I knew from the way he looked at the food that this couldn’t be so. What the hell did it mean, the contrast between this frigidity and the uproarious welcome we had received only the other day in California?

We got the beginnings of an answer from our Australian acquaintance. He waited until we were well away on the beach before he would talk. The man was a QANTAS pilot. He had been on a regular flight from Honolulu to the United States. As he approached the international airport at Los Angeles a message had come through directing him to return.

‘There was something crook about it.’

‘In what way?’

‘It didn’t look right. In fact it was all wrong, just as wrong as it bloody well could be.’

‘Things wouldn’t look very pretty after a nuclear attack.’

I had told John nothing of Helena Summers. In the poor light I don’t suppose they could have seen my distress.

‘That’s just it. If I could have seen a lot of damage, a lot of smoke, I wouldn’t have been surprised.’

‘There must have been smoke.’

‘Well, there wasn’t. It was a clear day. Of course I was nearly fifty miles out to sea. Yet as far as I could tell there was nothing.’

We stopped in astonishment. The surf broke loudly, not far away on our right. We waited for the rippling noise to die away.

‘Nothing?’

‘Not a bloody thing. I could see the whole Los Angeles basin. And I tell you there wasn’t a bloody thing there.’

‘I tried to ring Los Angeles this afternoon. They told me all the lines were engaged, so there must be something there.’

‘Do you think they’d tell you if there wasn’t?’

‘Didn’t you get any signals from the control tower?’

‘Not a damn thing. Not a peep. I thought the radio must be out of action. We couldn’t pick up anything, not from San Francisco either, or from the control stations to the east. I told the wireless operator to keep trying. He did a big search over the whole shortwave band. Do you know what he came up with?’

‘If the war’s really started all long-range stuff will be off the air. Local TV stations and news stations will be on, probably.’

‘Well, I’ll tell you this. I got the control back here, exactly as usual. And I got some shortwave stuff from Britain. And that was it, nothing anywhere else.’

‘You got the usual British channels?’

‘As far as I could tell. We’re a long way off here. So I only got odd snatches. As far as we could judge it was about what was to be expected in a normal way.’

We walked on for a while before John said, ‘Could that be the trouble do you think? It seems incredible but if Britain’s really on the air in any normal way she hasn’t been attacked.’

‘It could be.’

‘Did you get anything from the west, the other way?’

‘From Fiji, nothing from Sydney.’

It didn’t make sense, except perhaps for one ray of light.

‘Do you think they imagine we’ve gone neutral? If Britain is more or less normally on the air that’s what it looks like.’

‘I’d thought of that,’ answered John. ‘It would fit. If they think we’ve ratted on them it would be natural enough for them to treat us pretty distantly. Yet it seems fantastic. British policy and American policy are in it together. I would have thought we couldn’t keep out even if we wanted to.’

We headed back to the hotel. I asked, ‘What are you going to do? With your plane? Go back to Australia?’

The pilot paused for a moment. ‘I’ve given quite a bit of thought to that. I’m supposed to be on a through flight Los Angeles to London, with a refuelling stop in Canada. I suppose if I insist they’ll let me take off as long as I agree to keep over Canadian territory all the way.’

‘Isn’t that the natural thing to do?’

‘I suppose so. But I’m leery about it. I can’t say exactly why, but I’d prefer it if I could go right through in one hop.’

‘I thought the new planes could pretty well do that, at any rate from California. Can’t you make it with a light load?’

‘I’ve got one of the old jobs.’

‘Pity, because we ought to be getting back home—at any rate if the atmosphere doesn’t get warmer around here.’

‘Day after tomorrow we have a long-distance plane coming through. It could make the trip. I’ll have a word with the captain if you like.’

We said we thought it might be a good idea.

By now we were nearing the hotel. After a drink at the bar I decided to turn in. Sick at heart I took one last look out over the sea before I climbed into bed. Unpleasant emotions seemed inseparable from this damned place. I lay there thinking about Lena. I could remember the tears and the smile which followed them.

What the devil did the Australian mean by saying there was nothing? Not even the dead and the dying? I little realized that I had become separated from Helena Summers by much more than death.

I was wakened the following morning by the phone burring in my ears. It was John saying he was going out to Pearl City, that the climate seemed to have changed back just as suddenly as it had shifted yesterday. I asked him why, but he didn’t know. When I came down to breakfast in the coffee shop I found the blue-eyed naval officer waiting for me. We sat down together. I ordered a stack of wheatcakes and coffee. He ordered coffee.

‘I’m afraid we owe you a very sincere apology. Yesterday we didn’t know where we were, not that we’re much better today. But we can see things a bit more clearly now.’

Then he went on to tell me, rather haltingly, much the same as John had already guessed, that radio communications from Britain, apparently still covering the normal radio waveband, had convinced them Britain had somehow managed to stay out of the war. This had made for a peculiar situation so far as we were concerned. They had thought the best thing was to do nothing and say nothing. I said both John and I had appreciated what the situation must look like and we quite understood his position. He became less embarrassed but no less worried. I told him I had a close friend in Los Angeles and could he tell me anything of what had happened there. He looked about him, to see whether anybody was listening, and then said, ‘We can’t understand it, we just can’t understand it. We’ve sent planes over and—well, there’s nothing there, nothing at all.’

I asked if this could be some strange new development in war technique. Yet even as I asked the question I realized it was absurd. The officer shook his head. He looked tired and old and I could see the situation was quite beyond him.

‘It may sound horrible. If it had been war, the kind we expected, I would at least have understood what was going on. It looks like a nightmare, as if we were all dreaming. I keep hoping I’ll waken up. That sounds kinda silly.’

‘Don’t you think we ought to stop trying to understand it, at any rate for the time being. Perhaps we ought to get back to the way we were when we were kids. We all took the world the way we found it. Only later as we grew up did we try to make sense of it.’

‘Yes, I suppose so. But at my time of life it isn’t easy to learn new tricks. You get set in your ways as the years roll past. You see I had a son and daughter-in-law and two kids in Los Angeles.’

We shook hands sadly and he left.

For the next two days I sat in my room writing as hard as I could go. I wanted to get all the old, more normal, stuff down before my standards of judgement became distorted by this strange new world. I knew John and his colleagues would seek me out as soon as the next move was decided. As I say, I was given two days’ grace. I emerged from my room only for meals. My fingers grew stiff with writing, always writing, twelve hours a day.

John appeared at last late on the second day. He had not eaten at lunchtime so I went with him back to the restaurant, although I had already had dinner. I asked for the news.

‘Fragmentary in the extreme. The balance of opinion still favours war of some sort. Nobody can fit the facts together. It seems quite certain that Los Angeles really has ceased to exist. We don’t know much about the rest of the States. In Britain it seems to be just as normal as it is here. There’s some activity in Europe, although it doesn’t look normal there either. From Russia there’s as big a blackout as there is from the American mainland.’

I waited. It was an old trick with John, the dramatic pause.

‘Back home they’re in just the same mess. We managed to get a message through. They wanted news, saying they’re just as much in the dark as we are.’

‘I had the old naval chap in again this morning. He doesn’t like it at all.’

‘The devil is that everything is so normal here. It’s only the outside communications that are crazy.’

‘Could it be some sort of hoax, some ridiculous psychological experiment, connected with the military programme? To determine the population reaction.’

‘Well, if it is, we shall soon know. You remember the Australian. He told us a plane was coming in from Fiji, one that might manage to get through to Britain in one hop? It’s here now, it came in yesterday evening, and it’s the only really long-range plane in the islands. So they’ve decided to send it over the States. It can get to somewhere in the region of Denver or Chicago and still manage to get back here to the islands. The military people have commandeered it. After a bit of argument I’ve got the two of us included on the trip. I’ve given them the idea I might come up with some explanation of what’s going on.’ John ran his hand through his hair and added, ‘Some hopes.’

At breakfast the following morning I realized a strange thing had happened in the preceding days, the days in which I had been shut away in my room. From the beginning, from the moment the war rumours first spread, smiles had disappeared, there had been less talk, less laughter, fewer vehicles on the street. Now there was an almost complete silence. Everybody spoke quietly, as if someone or something was listening to what was being said. In these islands of sunshine it was weird and unnerving.

We got to the airport at about nine o’clock. I would say about forty persons, mostly service officers, were already assembled there. I looked around for Art Clementi, hoping to straighten out the misunderstanding and embarrassment of our last meeting, but he wasn’t there.

‘Looks as though we’re taking a very light load,’ I said.

‘To give as big a range as possible.’

A few minutes later we climbed up an old-fashioned ramp into the rear door of the plane. An Australian girl smiled at us as we enplaned. A few minutes later we were in the air.

We settled down in our seats. The hostess brought us quite large glasses of fresh orange juice. It was a welcome change from the inevitable coffee.

‘Australian idea,’ said John. ‘Genuine stuff, not artificial muck.’

‘What’s been going on the last two days?’

‘I got involved in two things. Damn queer, both of them. I was out at the university, at the seismic department. On the face of it not very exciting. Simple equipment and so on. I’m not familiar with the details of that business so I had to accept what they told me.’

‘And what the devil did they tell you?’

‘Well, the general background of seismic disturbances—you know there are always slight earth movements going on all the time—has gone up enormously in the last four days.’

‘I didn’t notice any earthquake.’

‘Oh, this was below the subjective threshold. But it was much above the usual noise level by several orders of magnitude.’

‘Maybe there’s been a big earthquake somewhere, a long way off.’

‘It couldn’t be just one earthquake, it wouldn’t last long enough. More like a succession of them. And even that doesn’t fit the pattern properly. From a single earthquake, particularly a big one, you get a pretty clean-cut record. This stuff is all confused, it looked like real random noise.’

‘What could be doing it?’

‘Nobody has the slightest idea. It isn’t very dramatic, not like the other things, but I thought I’d mention it. Often it’s the non-spectacular things that lead you in the right direction.’

‘You said there was something else, two things you’d been looking at.’

‘Right. Signals from the rocket have stopped. Art Clementi’s boys are getting a blank record.’

‘How long did you expect to go on getting a signal before the rocket got too far away from the Earth?’

‘Oh, for several weeks more. The natural interpretation is that a small meteorite has hit something in the electronics. It was a rush job so we couldn’t take every precaution we would have liked to have done. Yet it’s queer to find the signals stopping only a few minutes before the war was announced.’

Several officers and the pilot came to talk to John during the flight. It struck me as odd how much status depends on the social situation. War had reduced us to persons of no account. The present situation, with all its weird implications, taking one as far as the shifting frontiers of science or even beyond that, made John a commanding figure. He was the most distinguished scientist available for consultation. On his coat tails, almost literally, I managed to get into the cockpit as the plane approached the American mainland.

There were a lot of us jammed in there. Yet I could see a great deal more than was possible from an ordinary passenger seat. I gathered it was the Los Angeles basin ahead. The air was completely clear. There was nothing of the banks of brown smog I had seen when we came in from New York two weeks ago. Was it only two weeks ago? It needed no more than the most casual glance to see there was no city here.

‘Take a look along the Sierra Madre. Look for the Observatory.’

We were coming lower now, to an altitude of about ten thousand feet I guessed. There were mountains below us, heavily wooded. I noticed there were no fire-rides. We flew immediately above their crests, sharp and jagged. The trees covered the very topmost point. If this was Mount Wilson, there was no observatory here. We left the mountains and came back to the flatter land by the coast, dropping down still further, to only a few thousand feet. It was then we caught brief glimpses of habitation in the woods. The woods were now covering places where only two weeks before there had been great sprawling boulevards, streaming with traffic, swarming with humanity.

But there were signs of life below us and this lifted our spirits to an astonishing degree. The trouble was we couldn’t land the plane. An enormous runway was needed for that and no such thing as a runway was to be seen in the wilderness below us. We came low enough to notice a few cultivated patches of land and this was all. Whoever was down there was keeping out of sight.

The itch to get to the ground was overwhelming, I think, to everybody on the plane. Since we had plenty of fuel we did the obvious thing of heading east, into the American mainland. Sooner or later we all felt it must be possible to find an airstrip. Two weeks ago every town of any appreciable size had its airport, with runways extended for the new jets. The day was so clear that even after we climbed back to forty thousand feet we could still see the ground below quite well.

As we flew on we all kept a sharp lookout for towns and roads. We saw neither in the usual sense. There was an occasional rough track through the mountains. Now and again we thought there were further signs of primitive inhabitations. Whether or not there were houses we couldn’t say. Further east, and ever further, we went. The search for a place to land was becoming fruitless. We tried Phoenix, or what used to be Phoenix, then Albuquerque, then at last we were over the central plains. We came down very low over Denver. It wasn’t entirely easy to be sure we had located the correct place. There were no radio beacons to guide us. All navigation had to be done with the compasses, and even by the old-fashioned method of simply looking down on to the ground. Denver was a good place to look for. The big sudden rise of the Rockies lies only thirty miles or so to the west. That landmark was quite unmistakable, so all we had to do was to fly on a north-south line until the crew felt convinced they had found the right place. Once again we came low, to a thousand feet or so. Below us there were open grasslands. There were no signs of growing crops. Manifestly, the vegetation was in a natural state, a natural ecology.

With the present light load the plane was expected to have a range of between eight and nine thousand miles. So far, we had done about three thousand. Perhaps it would have been wise to have turned back. Yet the desire to find a landing spot was so strong in all of us that we felt impelled to make one more try, in the direction of Chicago. We wouldn’t have a great deal to spare in the matter of range, but by taking a more direct route back to Hawaii the pilot thought he would be all right.

We picked up a powerful tail wind. Quite strong radio signals were coming in now from the east, probably of European origin. We found nothing at Chicago, except endless lakes and woods. Then came the critical discussion, to go on or to go back. The big advantage of going back was we knew exactly where we were going. The disadvantage was that we didn’t have a great deal in hand in the way of range. We would have to fight the head wind, although this wouldn’t matter too much as long as we found a reasonably direct route. The advantage of going on was that radio-guidance systems seemed to be working more or less normally somewhere to the east. And we still had the tail wind so range would be no problem that way. Besides it was manifestly desirable to establish actual physical communication with whatever it was that lay to the east.

Truth to tell, I think everybody wanted to take a look at New York. It was much the same story as we flew over the Appalachians in the fading light. But there were far more signs of life here, far more primitive shacks, it seemed. It all looked as America might have looked around the year 1800. Darkness came on. We saw little more, except twice there were flickering lights below us, fairly obviously camp fires. Then we were out over the Atlantic.

By now we were back in our seats. The stewardess served us with a meal. There wasn’t much conversation, and what there was of it was pretty terse. John and I sat silently, each immersed deeply in his own thoughts. The irrational feeling swept over me that somehow the plane had become a world closed in on itself, that it would go on and on flying for ever. We had frequent reports from the pilot, however, to say that radio communication ahead was entirely normal. But perhaps this was just another monstrous deception? Emotionally, I felt we must go on and on until at last we came to our starting point, back in Hawaii; that we would find everything wiped clean even on the islands, just as it was on the American mainland.

I saw John looking repeatedly at his watch. Like me, like all of us, he was finding the passage of time excruciatingly slow. We had still three hours more to go before the next stage in the drama would unfold itself.

In retrospect I am not sure whether the innocence of my mind was an advantage or not. To build any rational explanation of what had happened, of what I had seen, was utterly beyond me. So I was left only with monstrous images and grotesque explanations.

After an age, in which every ten minutes seemed stretched to an hour, as it does in childhood, the little speakers above our heads crackled. The pilot’s voice came over to say we had just passed the west coast of Ireland, that we would be landing at London airport in about three-quarters of an hour. Even the harshness of the speakers failed to conceal the relief, the emotional tones, in his voice.

All the evidence was that London airport was working normally. From the tilt of the fuselage you could see we were coming down now. The moon was shining on banks of clouds below us. Then we were down to the clouds and into them. These were the clouds that hang so frequently over the British Isles, blotting out the sun, giving the grey skies I knew so well. The clouds were astonishingly thin, the layer couldn’t have been thicker than a few hundred feet. We broke suddenly below it. There on the ground was a multitude of lights. The sheer normality of it, the roads we could now pick out, set up a sharp reaction. I returned quickly to my seat and lay back feeling I might be sick. It wasn’t airsickness, rather that of faintness. Then I saw we were going down to the ground at last. The landing wasn’t a good one, there was a big bump as the wheels hit, but at least we were down. Within a few seconds I felt all right again.

As we taxied along the runway I had the odd thought that maybe I had been dreaming. Perhaps I had snoozed away the whole of a perfectly normal flight. It was hard to believe otherwise as the pilot manœuvred the plane into its final resting spot.

There was an unconscionably long delay before steps appeared and the rear door was opened. We stood up, collected our belongings, and waited in the aisle in precisely the usual fashion. The people ahead began to move slowly. A minute later I was in the open air. We were shepherded by a girl into a waiting bus. There was another delay and then the crew joined us.

I expected to be taken to the usual assembly hall, or waiting hall, or whatever they called it, prior to immigration and customs. But the bus came to a gate that led off the airfield. The gate was opened. While we were halted two policemen got in. Away over on my right, in the distance, I had the impression of an airport crowded with thousands on thousands of people. It was as if they were waiting there, in the hope of seeing planes coming in to land. Soon we were at a traffic light that led out on to the highway. Then we were speeding into London. Here too, as in Honolulu, there was very little traffic. It was a fair guess that we had been brought this way to avoid the crowds, perhaps to avoid reporters and television cameras. Quite evidently, I had not been dreaming.