bleached, and Traven would wake at night and find the sepulchral figure sitting there, arms resting at its sides, in the shadows that crossed the concrete floor. At these moments he would often see his wife and son watching him from the dunes. As time passed they came$1oser, and he would sometimes find them only a few yards behind him.

  Patiently Traven waited for them to speak to him, thinking of'the great blocks whose entrance was guarded by the seated figure of the dead archangel, as the waves broke on the distant shore and the burning bombers fell through his dreams.

  Deep End

  They always slept during the day. By dawn the last of the townsfolk had gone indoors and the houses would be silent, heat curtains locked across the windows, as the sun rose over the deliquescing salt banks. Most of them were elderly and fell asleep quickly in their darkened chalets, but Granger, with his restless mind and his one lung, often lay awake through the afternoons, while the metal outer walls of the cabin creaked and hummed, trying pointlessly to read through the old log books Holliday had salvaged for him from the crashed space platforms.

  By six o'clock the thermal fronts would begin to recede southwards across the kelp flats, and one by one the air-conditioners in the bedrooms switched themselves off. While the town slowly came to life, its windows opening to the cool dusk air, Granger strode down to breakfast at the Neptune Bm, gallantly doffing his sunglasses to left and right at the old couples settling themselves out on their porches, staring at each other across the shadow-filled streets.

  Five miles to the north, in the empty hotel at Idle End, Holliday usually rested quietly for another hour, and listened to the coral towers, gleaming in the distance like white pagodas, sing and whistle as the temperature gradients cut through them. Twenty miles away he could see the symmetrical peak of Hamilton, nearest of the Bermuda Islands, rising off the dry ocean floor like a fiat-topped mountain, the narrow ring of white beach still visible in the sunset, a scurh-line left by the sinking ocean.

  That evening he felt even More reluctant than usual to drive down into the town. Not only would Granger be in his private booth at the Neptune, dispensing the same mixture of humour and homily - he was virtually the only person Holliday could talk to, and inevitably he had come to resent his dependence on the older man - but Holliday would have 58

  his final interview with the migration officer 'and make the decision which would determine his entire future.

  In a sense the decision had already been made, as Bullen, the migration officer, realized on his trip a month earlier. He did not bother to press Holliday, who had no special skills to offer, no qualities of character or leadership which would be of use on the new worlds. However, Bullen pointed out one small but relevant fact, which Holliday duly noted and thought over in. the intervening month.

  'Remember, Holliday,' he warned him at the end of the interview in the requisitioned office at the rear of the sheriff's cabin, 'the average age of the settlement is over sixty. in ten years' time you and Granger may well be the only two left here, and if that lung of his goes you'll be on your own.'

  He paused to let this prospect sink in, then added quietly:

  'All the kids are leaving on the next trip- the Merryweathers'

  two boys, Torn Juranda (that lout, good riddance, Holliday thought to himself, look out Mars) - do you realize you'll literally be the only one here under the age of fifty ?'

  'Katy Summers is staying,' Holliday pointed out quickly, the sudden vision of a white organdy dress and long straw hair giving him courage.

  The migration officer had glanced at his application list and nodded grudgingly. 'Yes, but she's just looking after her grandmother. As soon as the old girl dies Katy will be off like a flash. After all, there's nothing to keep her here, is there ?'

  , 'No,' Holliday had agreed automatically.

  There wasn't now. For a long wtaile he mistakenly believed there was. Katy was his own age, twenty-two, the only person, apart from Granger, who seemed to understand his determination to stay behind and keep watch over a forgotten Earth. But the grandmother died three days after the migration officer left, and the next day Katy had begun to pack. In some insane way Holliday had assumed that she would stay behind, and what worried him was that all his assumptions about himself might be based on equally false premises.

  Climbing off the hammock, he went on to the terrace and looked out at the phosphorescent glitter of the trace minerals x59

  in the salt banks stretching away from the hotel. His quarters were in the pent-house suite on the tenth floor, the only heat-sealed unit in the building, but its steady settlement into the ocean bed had opened wide cracks in the load walls which would soon reach up to the roof. The ground floor had already disappeared. By the time the next floo' went - six months at the outside - he would have been forced to leave the old pleasure resort and return to the town. Inevitably, that would mean sharing a chalet with Granger.

  A mile away, an engine droned. Through the dusk Holliday saw the migration officer's helicopter whirling along towards the hotel, the only local landmark, then veer offonce Bullen identified the town and circle slowly towards the landing strip.

  Eight o'clock, Holliday noted. His interview was at 8.30

  the next morning. Bullen would rest the night with the Sheriff, carry out his other duties as graves commissioner and justice of the peace, and then set offafter seeing Holliday on the next leg of his journey. For twelve hours Holliday was free, still able to make absolute decisions (or, More accurately, not to make them) but after that he would have committed himself. This was the migration officer's last trip, his final circuit from the deserted cities near St Helena up through the Azores and Bermudas and on to the main Atlantic ferry site at the Canaries. Only two of the big launching platforms were still in navigable orbit - hundreds of others were continuously falling out of the sky - and once they came down Earth was, to all intents, abandoned. From then on the only people likely to be picked up would be a few military communications personnel.

  Twice on his way into the town Holliday had to lower the salt-plough fastened to the front bumper of the jeep and ram back the drifts which had melted across the wire roadway during the afternoon. Mutating kelp, their genetic shifts accelerated by the radiophosphors, reared up into the air on either Side of the road like enormous cacti, turning the dark salt-banks into a white lunar garden. But this evidence of the encroaching wilderness only served to strengthen 60

  Holliday's need to stay behind on Earth. Most of the nights, when he wasn't arguing with Granger at the Neptune, he would drive around the ocean floor, climbing over the crashed launching platforms, or wander with Katy Summers through the kelp forests. Sometimes he would persuade Granger to come with them, hoping that the older man's expertise- he had originally been a marine biologist- would help to sharpen his own awareness of the bathypelagic flora, but the original sca bed was buried under the endless salt hills and they might as well have been driving about the Sahara.

  As he entered the Neptune - a low cream and chromium saloon which abutted the landing strip and had formerly served as a passenger lounge when thousands of migrants from the Southern Hemisphere were being shipped up to the Canaries - Granger called to him and rattled his cane against the window, pointing to the dark outline of the migration officer's helicopter parked on the apron fifty yards away.

  'I know,' Holliday said in a bored voice as he went over with his drink. 'Relax, I saw him coming.'

  Granger grinned at him. Holliday, with his intent serious face under an unruly thatch of blond hair, and his absolute sense of personal responsibility, always amused him.

  'Tou relax,' Granger said, adjusting the shoulder pad under his Hawaiian shirt which disgulscd his sunken lung.

  (He had lost it skin-diving thirty years earlier.) 'I'm not going to fly to Mars next week.'

  Holliday stared sombrely int°his glass. 'I'm not either.'

  He looked up at Granger's wry saturnine face, then added sardonically. 'Or didn't you know ?'

  Granger roared, tapping the window with his cane as if to dismiss the helicopter. 'Seriously, you're not going ? You've made up your mind ?'

  'Wrong. And right. I haven't made up my mind yet - but at the same time I'm not going. You appreciate the distinction ?'

  'Perfectly, Dr Schopenhauer.' Granger began to grin again. He pushed away his glass. 'You know, Holliday, your T9--11

  161

  trouble is that you take yourself too seriously. You don't realize how ludicrous you are.'

  'Ludicrous ? Why ?' Holliday asked guardedly.

  'What does it matter whether you've made up your mind or not ? The only thing that counts now is to get together enough courage to head straight for the Canaries and take off into the wide blue yonder. For heaven's sake, what are you staying for ? Earth is dead and buried. Past, present and future no longer exist here. Don't you feel any responsibility to your own biological destiny ?'

  'Spare me that.' Holliday pulled a ration card from his shirt pocket, passed it across to Granger, who was responsible for the stores allocations. 'I need a new pump on the lounge refrigerator. 3o-watt Frigidaire. Any left ?'

  Granger groaned, took the card with a snort of exasperation.

  'Good God, man, you're just a Robinson Crusoe in reverse, tinkering about with all these bits of old junk, trying to fit them together. You're the last man on the beach who decides to stay behind after everyone else has left. Maybe you are a poet and dreamer, but don't you realize that those two species are extinct now ?'

  Holliday stared out at the helicopter on the apron, at the lights of the settlement reflected against the salt hills that encircled the town. Each day they moved a little nearer, already it was difficult to get together a weekly squad to push them back. In ten years' time his position might well be that of a Crusoe. Luckily the big water and kerosene tanks ....

  giant cylinders, the size ofgasometers - held enough for fifty years. Without them of course, he would have had no choice.

  'Let's give me a rest,' he said to Granger. 'You're merely trying to find in me a justification for your own enforced stay.

  Perhaps I am extinct, but I'd rather cling to life here than vanish completely. Anyway, I have a hunch that one day they'll be coming back. Someone's got to stay behind and keep alive a sense of what life here has meant. This isn't an old husk we can throw away when we've finished with it. We were born here. It's the only place we really remember.'

  Granger nodded slowly. He was about to speak when a brilliant white arc crossed the darkened window, then soared out of sight, its point of impact with the ground lost behind one of the storage tanks.

  Holliday stood up and craned out of the window.

  'Must be a launching platform. Looked like a big one, probably one of the Russians'.' A long rolling crump reverberated through the night air,' echoing away among the coral towers. Flashes of light flared up briefly. There was a series of smaller explosions, and then a wide diffuse pall of steam fanned out across the northwest.

  'Lake Afianric,' Granger commented. 'Let's drive out there and have a look. It may have uncovered something interesting.'

  Half an hour later, a set of Granger's old sample beakers, slides and mounting equipment in the back seat, they set off in the jeep towards the southern tip of Lake Atlantic ten miles away.

  It was here that Holliday discovered the fish.

  Lake Afiantic, a narrow ribbon of stagnant brine ten miles in length by a mile wide, to the north of the Bermuda Islands, was all that remained of the former Atlantic Ocean, and was, in fact, the sole remnant of the oceans which had once i:overed two-thirds of the Earth's surface. The frantic mining of the oceans in the previous century to provide oxygen for the atmospheres of the new planets had made their decline swift and irreversible, and with their death had come climatic and other geophysical changes which ensured the extinction of Earth itself. As the%xygen extracted electro-lyrically from sea-water was compressed and shipped away, the hydrogen released was discharged into the atmosphere.

  Eventually only a narrow layer of denser, oxygen-containing air was left, little More than a mile in depth, and those people remaining on Earth were forced to retreat into the ocean beds, abandoning the poisoned continental tables.

  At the hotel at Idle End, Holliday spent uncounted hours going through the library he had accumulated of magazines and books about the cities of the old Earth, and Granger often described to him his own youth when the seas had been half-x63

  full and he had worked as a marine biologist at the University of Miami, a fabulous laboratory unfolding itself for him on the lengthening beaches.

  'The seas are our corporate memory,' he often said to Holliday. 'In draining them we deliberately obliterated our own pasts, to a large extent our own self-identifies. That's another reason Why you should leave. Without the sea, life is insupportable. We become nothing More than the ghosts of memories, blind and homeless, flitting through the dry chambers of a gutted skull.'

  They reached the lake within half an hour, worked their way through the swamps which formed its banks. In the dim light the grey salt dunes ran on for miles, their hollows cracked into hexagonal plates, a dense cloud of vapour obscuring the surface of the water. They parked on a low promontory by the edge of the lake and looked up at the great circular shell of the launching platform. This was one of the larger vehicles, almost three hundred yards in diameter, lying upside down in the shallow water, its hull dented and burnt, riven by huge punctures where the power plants had torn themselves loose on impact and exploded off across the lake. A quarter of a mile away, hidden by the blur, they could just see a cluster of rotors pointing up into the sky.

  Walking along the bank, the main body of the lake on their right, they moved nearer the platform, tracing out its riveted C G G P markings along the rim. The giant vehicle had cut enormous grooves through the nexus of pools just beyond the fip of the lake, and Granger waded through the warm water, searching for specimens. Here and there were small anemones and starfish, stunted bodies twisted by cancers. Web-like algae draped themselves over his rubber boots, their nuclei beading like jewels in the phosphorescent light. They paused by one of the largest pools, a circular basin 3o0 feet across, draining slowly as the water poured out through a breach in its side. Granger moved carefully down the deepening bank, forking specimens into the rack of beakers, while Holliday stood on the narrow causeway between the pool and the lake, looking up at the dark over64

  hang of the space platform as k loomed into the darkness above him like the stem of a ship.

  He was examining the shattered air-lock of one of the crew domes when he suddenly saw something move across the surface of the deck. For a moment he imagined that he had seen a passenger who had somehow survived the vehicle's crash, then realized that it was merely the reflection in the aluminized skin of a ripple in the pool behind him.

  He turned around to .ee Granger, ten feet below him, up to his knees in the water, staring out carefully across the pool.

  'Did you throw something?' Granger asked.

  Holliday shook his head. 'No.' Without thinking, he added: 'It must have been a fish jumping.'

  'Fish ? There isn't a single fish alive on the entire planet.

  The whole zoological class died out ten years ago. Strange, though.'

  Just then the fish jumped again.

  For a few moments, standing motionless in the half-light, they watched it together, as its slim silver body leapt frantically out of the tepid shallow water, its short glistening arcs carrying it to and fro across the pool.

  'Dog-fish,' Granger muttered. 'Shark family. Highly adaptable- need to be, to have survived here. Damn it, it may well be the only fish still living.'

  Holliday moved down the bank, his feet sinking in the oozing mud. 'Isn't the water too salty?'

  Granger bent down and scooped up some of the water, sipped it tentatively. 'Saline, but comparatively dilute.' He glanced over his shoulder at the';take. 'Perhaps there's continuous evaporation off the lake surface and local condensation here. A freak distillation couple.' He slapped Holliday on the shoulder. 'Holliday, this should be interesting.'

  The dog-fish was leaping frantically towards them, its two-foot body twisting and flicking. Low mud banks were emerging all over the surface of the pool; in only a few places towards the centre was the water More than a foot deep.

  Holliday pointed to the breach in the bank fifty yards away, gestured Granger after him and began to run towards it.

  65

  Five minutes later they had effectively dammed up the breach. Holliday returned for the jeep and drove it carefully through the winding saddles between the pools. He lowered the ramp and began to force the sides of the fish-pool in towards each other. After two or three hours he had narrowed the diameter from a hundred yards to under sixty, and the depth of the water had increased to over two feet.

  The dog-fish had ceased to jump and swam smoothly just below the surface, snapping at the countless small plants which had been tumbled into the water by the jeep's ramp.

  Its slim white body seemed white and unmarked, the small fins trim and powerful.

  Granger sat on the bonnet of the jeep, his back against the windshield, watching Holliday with admiration.

  'You obviously have hidden reserves,' he said ungrudgingly.

  'I didn't think you had it in you.'

  Holliday washed his hands in the water, then stepped over the churned mud which formed the boundary of the pool. A few feet behind him the dog-fish veered and lunged.

  'I want to keep it alive,' Holliday said matter-offactly.

  'Don't you see, Granger, the fishes stayed behind when the first amphibians emerged from the seas two hundred million years ago, just as you and I, in turn, are staying behind now.

 

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