Transit

FIFTEEN

After those first few hectic days there came a period of relative calmness, a time of adjustment—and rest. They needed it. They needed it badly. They only realized how much strain they had been under in retrospect, when they had time to develop a routine for the normal processes of living; when they found that they even had time to spare—time off from the struggle for survival.

The only really significant event that occurred on the day after the incident at the pool was that Tom and * Avery, out hunting, found the home of a whole colony of rabbitypes. The creatures lived underground as does the terrestrial rabbit, but they could also swim and climb I trees. Their colony had been established in the banks of the stream that was Camp Two’s water supply. It was about half a mile inland; and for fifty yards or more, the ground was riddled with innumerable rabbitype holes. The animals were even less intelligent than their terrestrial counterparts. The two men soon found that—the easiest way to catch them was to knock them out of the trees with stones. They could be stunned with quite small stones; and a smooth hunting formula was soon developed.

Instead of looking for rabbitypes on the ground, they scanned the tree tops. When one was found containing what Tom began to call bobtail fruit, Avery would station himself by the trunk, and Tom—who had a better aim—would let fly at the creatures with pebbles he had gathered for the purpose on the sea-shore. If he missed or merely startled the rabbitype, it would invariably begin to climb down the tree. As it had to descend backwards, gripping the trunk with the short claws on all six feet, all Avery had to do was pick it off and kill it by swinging its head sharply against the tree. If Tom scored a hit, whoever was nearest to where it fell from the tree would dive on it before it had time to regain its senses.

With a meat supply so easily assured, the two men felt that they had solved one of the major problems of existence. If necessary, they could live quite well off rabbi-types and fruit for an indefinite period.

Although Avery was consumed with curiosity about the kind of world to which they had been brought, exploration was held in abeyance for a while. His original impatience was tempered by the growing conviction that their stay—if not actually permanent—was going to be quite a long one. Exploration could wait. It could wait until they had learned more about their immediate environment, until they had become more confident and efficient in the art of survival. Avery was particularly anxious to avoid any encounter with the ‘golden people’ until—well, until it was no longer avoidable. Sooner or later there would have to be a meeting; but as experience so far had done nothing to convince him that the outcome would be harmonious, he felt it would be wise to avoid a possible clash until he, Tom, Mary and Barbara had become a more efficient group and therefore a better potential fighting unit.

After a day or two, they fell into a routine that enabled them to do most of the necessary work in the mornings, thus leaving the afternoons and evenings free for relaxation or ‘optional tasks’.

Perched as it was on top of a sort of rocky pill-box, Camp Two gave them a great feeling of security. However, they continued to maintain watches throughout the night. Although the camp would be hard to attack, it was certainly not impregnable; and they did not intend being taken by surprise. But instead of having a fixed rota and fixed times for the watches, they developed a fairly informal system. If someone wanted to go to bed early, he, she—or both—did so; and the other or others stayed up late and were then relieved by whoever had had the most sleep. Sometimes the men kept watches alone; but more often the watches were kept by pairs. It was more enjoyable, it made the time pass more quickly and there was less danger of the watch going to sleep.

Avery was fascinated by what he privately called the psychological mechanics of the group. They had started off as four complete strangers, yet within three days they had neatly divided themselves into two pairs. For, without doubt, he and Barbara now enjoyed a ‘special relationship’ just as Tom and Mary did. Special was, perhaps, an inadequate word. It was not love, but it was not without love—the kind of love that, like invention, was the child of necessity. In such a group as theirs, each depended upon and drew strength from the others; but there was a special kind of dependency that did not seem overtly to have much to do with sex, yet it could only exist between a man and a woman. It was not love and it was not marriage; but under the circumstances it was, possibly, a near relation of both love and marriage.

At times, during the first couple of weeks, he wondered whether Tom and Mary had actually made love. Sexual intercourse, coitus, copulation were the clinical terms—but, somehow, they could not quite fit the lovemaking that was possible between Tom and Mary. Looking at them in the mornings, Avery could detect no outward sign, no subtle change, to indicate that their intimacy had achieved what was obviously its ultimate and logical end. For the time being, he decided, their need was more spiritual than physical. They clung to each other because they were alone, because they had been abandoned on a strange world under an alien sky, because they were Babes in the Wood…. ,

Such, at least, were his own feelings in his relationship with Barbara. Sometimes, in the quiet of the night, he would feel her stir against him, would feel her pressing close, would know that she was awake and would sense the stirring of desire. Inevitably his own body would react, and he would become ashamed. He would become ashamed because he was in the thrall of ridiculous and Quixotic allegiances. He would become ashamed because he felt that the act of love would itself be an act of betrayal—of Christine. He was, he knew, thinking, feeling, reacting like the clean-cut, monosyllabic hero of romantic fiction.

The reality had died fifteen years ago, and fifteen years ago the myth had been born. Sick with grief, he had indulged in the masochism of fostering it. He had built Christine up into a legend. In death, she was more beautiful than in life. In death, her love grew stronger— more possessive. He had violated her in the worst of all possible ways, for he had turned her memory into his private sickness.

Intellectually, he knew all this; yet he could not let go. Intellectually, he knew that he had raised the memory of Christine to be a barrier between him and all normal, human relationships. And now he could not break the barrier down.

It was stupid because, in the sense of absolute loyalty, he had already betrayed Christine—if betrayal was the right word. He betrayed her when he held out a hand to Barbara. He betrayed her when, as Tom and Mary did, they began to exchange private smiles and gestures. He betrayed her every night that he and Barbara lay down together. What, then, did the final betrayal matter? Nothing but good could come of it, for surely Christine’s ghost would be laid.

But still he could not bring himself to do what his and Barbara’s body wanted. He knew—or thought he knew —that it would not mean more than he wanted it to mean for Barbara. She had already told him that she was by no means a virgin; and he had gathered that life in the hot-house world of television cameras and synthetic drama had produced the inevitable crop of synthetic romances and tailor-made passions But, hating himself, pitying Barbara and pleading with a non-dimensional Christine, he still could not make love.

Barbara made no complaint, she was patient, she was tender. At times she was even strangely maternal. And he hated himself all the more. He was perverse, and he knew that he was desperately trying to make a virtue out of perversity….

The normal daily routine at Camp Two began shortly after dawn. Early morning, they had discovered, was one of the best times of the day. Usually, there was still a touch of coolness in the air, but the promise of growing heat lay behind it. Early morning, when the air was clear and still and the sea rolled gently like a flexible mirror, was a time that seemed to taste like wine. Whoever was last on watch would be preparing breakfast, and whoever had been resting would take the canvas bucket to the stream and get the morning supply of water.

Breakfast was a time for turning over plans and projects—mostly ambitious ones that would either never be fulfilled or not for a long time. They were going to build a boat, they were going to design furniture for the camp, some day they might even build a house. Breakfast was a time when fantasy and reality blended into a heady mixture with the wine-sharp air.

Afterwards—and there was no need to hurry, because there were no trains to catch, no offices, studios or classrooms to go to, no appointments to be kept—afterwards, the task formula was thrown into gear. ‘Housework’ for Mary and Barbara: tidying the tents, airing the sleeping bags, doing any washing or mending, dumping the refuse and so on. While these domestic chores were in progress, Avery and Tom would collect more wood for the evening fire and would then set off on a hunting, fishing or fruit-collecting expedition—or, as it frequently turned out, a combined operation. So far their fishing was confined to the stream—a matter of string and bent pins, which was not terribly successful, or tickling, at which Tom developed an effective technique. The fish they caught, never more than about two and a half pounds in weight, tasted rather like inferior salmon. There were plans for deep sea fishing—but that, of course, required a boat—and something more sophisticated than bent pins.

It was Tom who first put forward the idea of making extra weapons. The ‘armoury’ with which they had been supplied consisted of two hatchets, four knives and a gun. As Tom pointed out, none of them could be expected to be effective for ever—particularly the gun; there were only thirty-four rounds of ammunition left. And it was quite possible that, in time, the hatchets and some of the knives would be lost or broken. The idea was to develop alternatives while they still had a full complement, so that any future loss would not be a catastrophe.

The first type of weapon they tried to make was a javelin. They had a go at making several on the style of those used by the golden people. But the results could hardly be regarded as an unqualified success.

Hard, straight wood was fairly easy to find. They cut it with hatchets, shaped it with knives, smoothed it with pieces of coarse rock. They toughened the ends by charring them slightly in the fire. They even tried to make blades out of rock. But somehow they could not get the knack of javelins. The balance was wrong, or the points were not tough enough, or they could not devise a satisfactory way of binding a flinty spike of rock to the shaft. After a time they abandoned the javelin project.

Then Avery had a better idea. He and Tom were getting adept at using the hatchets in various unorthodox ways. Tom had even managed to kill a fairly small but disproportionately aggressive ‘ape/bear’ by throwing the hatchet so that the blade buried itself in the unfortunate animal’s neck. Partly because of this incident, it occurred to Avery that the manufacture of throwing hatchets might be a better solution to the problem of weapons than either persevering with javelins or attempting ambitious mechanisms like cross-bows.

His design was simple. It was planned round the best kind of stone they could find in reasonable supply on the beach. This was a heavy, grey, metallic rock which was fairly plentiful and which could be worked without too much difficulty. They chipped it into roughly rectangular shape, about three inches by six inches, and about an inch thick at its widest part. The handle of the hatchet was made of a sturdy piece of hardish wood split, dried, then bound tightly together with leather thongs, so that the two-ledged hatchet head was set securely between the two halves of the handle and bound on either side. The thongs were of ‘cured’ rabbitype skin.

This type of weapon was even more successful than they had hoped. Later, Tom added a further refinement by sharpening the head end of the handle into a spike.

After considerable practice, they even developed throwing techniques that enabled them to choose between a cutting impact or a piercing impact.

They made eight such tomahawks—a task which took more than a fortnight—then they taught Mary and Barbara how to use them. After that, they began to feel a little more optimistic about the outcome of any violent encounter with the golden people. Provided it did not take place in open country, the tomahawks could be every bit as lethal as javelins or cross-bows. But their effective range was not much more than about twenty-five yards.

When the routine tasks of the morning had been accomplished, when lunch had been eaten and the heat of the day was strong enough to discourage strenuous exertion, they settled down to relax—sometimes individually, sometimes jointly.

Short siestas came in fashion. They were usually followed by a swim in the sea. Avery and Tom had explored their little bay carefully. The water was shallow— never more than five feet deep—up to about forty yards from the shore, where the sandy ledge fell away sharply and there was really deep water. In order to remind themselves of the danger, they made a couple of wooden buoys, attached by spare tent rope to heavy stones on the sea-bed. It was all right provided the swimmers kept to the shore side of the buoys.

Apart from crabs, which were painful rather than dangerous, the only vicious type of marine life that seemed to venture into the bay was a beautiful, iridescent rainbow fish that looked completely harmless—but packed a considerable voltage in the long, slender antennae that grew from its head. Avery was the first person to encounter the fish. He chased it playfully, expecting it to dart away. It didn’t. It turned and charged.

The shock almost paralysed him, but fortunately Barbara was near to help him ashore. After that, everyone gave the occasional rainbow fish that ventured into their territory plenty of room.

Since no one had swimming suits, they at first tried to improvise with underwear. It was more trouble than it was worth. Presently, they cast all inhibitions aside and began to swim naked. Presently, their bodies grew lean and muscular and brown….

Mary was an obsessional diarist. Back on Earth she had been keeping diaries for more than ten years. The thoughtful and inscrutable They who had transported them to this place had not forgotten Mary’s diaries, her most treasured possessions. Nor had They neglected to provide her with a new five-year diary.

Avery tried to read some significance into the fact that it was a five-year diary. But so was Mary’s last one— which proved nothing.

However, when she was discovered bringing her diary up to date one afternoon, Mary was promptly elected camp historian. Her entries were now no longer merely a private record, they became the official records of the group.

The first entry read: Somehow got myself tangled up in a mad sort of dream with three perfect strangers. Hope it ends soon. I’m terribly afraid. She had made this entry on the evening of the first day.

But now they were no longer perfect strangers. The dream had become a reality, while Earth itself had receded into a dream stature. The fear remained, but it was smaller. And, too, it was offset by companionship, growing confidence and the subtle, tranquillizing magic of sky and land and sea….

On Earth Barbara had been an avid reader of mystery novels. Her trunk contained about fifty assorted paperbacks—most of which she had read before in ‘the other life’, and all of which were by authors she liked. Now, she read them again and again—and so did the others— these stories of a fantastic world of cities, shops, theatres, restaurants, flats, country houses and impossible people.

The plots and the people no longer mattered. It was the background that they liked to read about. Unfortunately, in most of the stories there was so little of the kind of background they wanted. But imagination came to their rescue. If a restaurant in Soho was mentioned, each of them, in his or her own way, would re-create the set vividly, would joyfully invent the decor, furnishings, menu, the head waiter’s name—even the private life of the restaurateur.

Eventually, this elaborate extension of fiction became a game which they played with each other, half jokingly, half seriously. Tom, who had been car-crazy, would give pronouncements on the kind of cars owned or used by the characters. Barbara would itemize their wardrobes, Mary would deliver expertise on their tastes in entertainment, Avery would develop their lives and actions far outside the terms of the novel.

They called it the Inquest Game. It was more than a game. It was a mechanism for creating transient realities out of permanent illusions…

So time passed, and slowly they began to adjust to a totally new way of life. Time passed, and each in turn made startling discoveries:

Despair was giving way to exhilaration….

Regret for things past was shrinking before the satisfaction of things achieved….

And loneliness was receding like a morning mist…