On the Beach (2 page)

The naval officer nodded. “I’ll scout around a bit today and see what I can find. You don’t mind what they cost?”

The farmer shook his head. “So long as they’re good wheels, to give no trouble. Good tyres, that’s the main thing—last the time out. Like those you’ve got.”

The officer nodded. “I’ll have a look for some today.”

“Taking you a good bit out of your way.”

“I can slip up there by tram. It won’t be any trouble. Thank God for the brown coal.”

The farmer turned to where the separator was still running. “That’s right. We’d be in a pretty mess but for
the electricity.” He slipped an empty churn into the stream of skim milk deftly and pulled the full churn away. “Tell me, Mr. Holmes,” he said. “Don’t they use big digging machines to get the coal? Like bulldozers, and things like that?” The officer nodded. “Well, where do they get the oil to run those things?”

“I asked about that once,” Peter said. “They distil it on the spot, out of the brown coal. It costs about two pounds a gallon.”

“You don’t say!” The farmer stood in thought. “I was thinking may be if they could do that for themselves, they might do some for us. But at that price, it wouldn’t hardly be practical …”

Peter took the milk and cream billies, put them in the trailer, and set off for home. It was six-thirty when he got back. He had a shower and dressed in the uniform he had so seldom worn since his promotion, accelerated his breakfast, and rode his bicycle down the hill to catch the 8.15 in order that he might explore the motor dealers for the wheels before his appointment.

He left his bicycle at the garage that had serviced his small car in bygone days. It serviced no cars now. Horses stood stabled where the cars had been, the horses of the business men who lived outside the town, who now rode in in jodhpurs and plastic coats to stable their horses while they commuted up to town in the electric train. The petrol pumps served them as hitching posts. In the evening they would come down on the train, saddle their horses, strap the attaché case to the saddle, and ride home again. The tempo of business life was slowing down and this was a help to them; the 5.3 express train from the city had been cancelled and a 4.17 put on to replace it.

Peter Holmes travelled to the city immersed in speculations about his new appointment, for the paper
famine had closed down all the daily newspapers and news now came by radio alone. The Royal Australian Navy was a very small fleet now. Seven small ships had been converted from oil burners to most unsatisfactory coal burners at great cost and effort; an attempt to convert the aircraft carrier
Melbourne
had been suspended when it proved that she would be too slow to allow the aircraft to land on with safety except in the strongest wind. Moreover, stocks of aviation fuel had to be husbanded so carefully that training programmes had been reduced to virtually nil, so that it now seemed inexpedient to carry on the Fleet Air Arm at all. He had not heard of any changes in the officers of the seven minesweepers and frigates that remained in commission. It might be that somebody was sick and had to be replaced, or it might be that they had decided to rotate employed officers with the unemployed to keep up seagoing experience. More probably it meant a posting to some dreary job on shore, an office job in the Barracks or doing something with the stores at some disconsolate, deserted place like Flinders Naval Depot. He would be deeply disappointed if he did not get to sea, and yet he knew it would be better for him so. On shore he could look after Mary and the baby as he had been doing, and there was now not so long to go.

He got to the city in about an hour and went out of the station to get upon the tram. It rattled unobstructed through streets innocent of other vehicles and took him quickly to the motor dealing district. Most of the shops here were closed or taken over by the few that remained open, the windows still encumbered with the useless stock. He shopped around here for a time, searching for two light wheels in good condition that would make a pair, and finally bought wheels of the same size from two makes of motor cycle, which would make complications with the
axle that could be got over by the one mechanic still left in his garage.

He took the tram back to the Navy Department, carrying the wheels tied together with a bit of rope. In the Second Naval Member’s offices he reported to the secretary, a paymaster lieutenant who was known to him. The young man said, “Good morning, sir. The Admiral’s got your posting on his desk. He wants to see you personally. I’ll tell him that you’re here.”

The Lieutenant-Commander raised his eyebrows. It seemed unusual, but then in this reduced navy everything was apt to be a bit unusual. He put the wheels down by the paymaster’s desk, looked over his uniform with some concern, picked a bit of thread off the lapel of his jacket, and tucked his cap under his arm.

“The Admiral will see you now, sir.”

He marched into the office and came to attention. The Admiral, seated at his desk, inclined his head. “Good morning, Lieutenant-Commander. You can stand easy. Sit down.”

Peter sat down in the chair beside the desk. The Admiral leaned over and offered him a cigarette out of his case, and lit it for him with a lighter. “You’ve been unemployed for some time.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Admiral lit a cigarette himself. “Well, I’ve got a seagoing appointment for you. I can’t give you a command, I’m afraid, and I can’t even put you in one of our own ships. I’m posting you as liaison officer in U.S.S.
Scorpion.”

He glanced at the younger man. “I understand you’ve met Commander Towers.”

“Yes, sir.” He had met the captain of
Scorpion
two or three times in the last few months, a quiet, soft spoken man
of thirty-five or so with a slight New England accent. He had read the American’s report upon his ship’s war service. Towers had been at sea in his atomic powered submarine on patrol between Kiska and Midway when the war began, and opening his sealed orders at the appropriate signal he submerged and set course for Manila at full cruising speed. On the fourth day, somewhere north of Iwojima, he came to periscope depth for an inspection of the empty sea, as was his routine in each watch of the daylight hours, and found the visibility to be extremely low, apparently with some sort of dust; at the same time the detector on his periscope head indicated a high level of radioactivity. He attempted to report this to Pearl Harbor in a signal, but got no reply; he carried on, the radioactivity increasing as he neared the Philippines. Next night he made contact with Dutch Harbor and passed a signal in code to his admiral, but was told that all communications were now irregular, and he got no reply. On the next night he failed to raise Dutch Harbor. He carried on upon his mission, setting course around the north of Luzon. In the Bahntang Channel he found much dust and the radioactivity far above the lethal level, the wind being westerly, Force Four to Five. On the seventh day of the war he was in Manila Bay looking at the city through his periscope, still without orders. The atmospheric radioactivity was rather less here, though still above the danger level; he did not care to surface or go up on to the bridge. Visibility was moderate; through the periscope he saw a pall of smoke drifting up above the city and formed the opinion that at least one nuclear explosion had taken place there within the last few days. He saw no activity on shore from five miles out in the bay. Proceeding to close the land, he grounded his ship unexpectedly at periscope depth, being then in the main channel where
the chart showed twelve fathoms; this reinforced his previous opinion. He blew his tanks and got off without difficulty, turned round, and went out to the open sea again.

That night he failed again to raise any American station, or any ship that could relay his signals. Blowing his tanks had used up much of his compressed air, and he did not care to take in the contaminated air in that vicinity. He had been submerged by that time for eight days; his crew were still fairly fit, though various neuroses were beginning to appear, born of anxiety about conditions in their homes. He established radio contact with an Australian station at Port Moresby in New Guinea; conditions there appeared to be normal, but they could not relay any of his signals.

It seemed to him that the best thing he could do would be to go south. He went back round the north of Luzon and set course for Yap Island, a cable station under the control of the United States. He got there three days later. Here the radioactive level was so low as to be practically normal; he surfaced in a moderate sea, blew out the ship with clean air, charged his tanks, and let the crew up on the bridge in batches. On entering the roads he was relieved to find an American cruiser there. She directed him to an anchorage and sent a boat; he moored ship, let the whole crew up on deck, and went off in the boat to put himself under the command of the captain of the cruiser, a Captain Shaw. Here he learned for the first time of the Russo-Chinese war that had flared up out of the Russo-N.A.T.O. war, that had in turn been born of the Israeli-Arab war, initiated by Albania. He learned of the use of cobalt bombs by both the Russians and the Chinese; that news came deviously from Australia, relayed from Kenya. The cruiser was waiting at Yap to rendezvous
with a Fleet tanker; she had been there for a week and in the last five days she had been out of communication with the United States. The captain had sufficient bunker fuel to get his ship to Brisbane at her most economical speed, but no further.

Commander Towers stayed at Yap for six days while the news, such as it was, grew steadily worse. They did not succeed in making contact with any station in the United States or Europe, but for the first two days or so they were able to pick up news broadcasts from Mexico City, and that news was just about as bad as it could be. Then that station went off the air, and they could only get Panama, Bogota, and Valparaiso, who knew practically nothing about what was going on up in the northern continent. They made contact with a few ships of the U.S. Navy in the South Pacific, most of them as short of fuel as they were themselves. The captain of the cruiser at Yap proved to be the senior officer of all these ships; he made the decision to sail all U.S. ships into Australian waters and to place his forces under Australian command. He made signals to all ships to rendezvous with him at Brisbane. They congregated there a fortnight later, eleven ships of the U.S. Navy, all out of bunker fuel and with very little hope of getting any more. That was a year ago; they were there still.

The nuclear fuel required for U.S.S.
Scorpion
was not available in Australia at the time of her arrival, but it could be prepared. She proved to be the only naval vessel in Australian waters with any worth-while radius of action, so she was sailed to Williamstown, the naval dockyard of Melbourne, being the nearest port to the headquarters of the Navy Department. She was, in fact, the only warship in Australia worth bothering about. She stayed idle for some time while her nuclear fuel was
prepared till, six months previously, she had been restored to operational mobility. She then made a cruise to Rio de Janeiro carrying supplies of fuel for another American nuclear submarine that had taken refuge there, and returned to Melbourne to undergo a fairly extensive refit in the dockyard.

All this was known to Peter Holmes as the background of Commander Towers, U.S.N., and it passed quickly through his mind as he sat before the Admiral’s desk. The appointment that he had been offered was a new one; there had been no Australian liaison officer in
Scorpion
when she had made her South American cruise. The thought of Mary and his little daughter troubled him now and prompted him to ask, “How long is this appointment for, sir?”

The Admiral shrugged his shoulders slightly. “We could say a year. I imagine it will be your last posting, Holmes.”

The younger man said, “I know, sir. I’m very grateful for the opportunity.” He hesitated, and then he asked, “Will the ship be at sea for much of that time, sir? I’m married, and we’ve got a baby. Things aren’t too easy now, compared with what they used to be, and it’s a bit difficult at home. And anyway, there’s not so long to go.”

The Admiral nodded. “We’re all in the same boat, of course. That’s why I wanted to see you before offering this posting. I shan’t hold it against you if you ask to be excused, but in that case I can’t hold out much prospect of any further employment. As regards sea time, at the conclusion of the refit on the fourth” he glanced at the calendar “—that’s in a little over a week from now—the ship is to proceed to Cairns, Port Moresby, and Port Darwin to report upon conditions in those places, returning to Williamstown. Commander Towers
estimates eleven days for that cruise. After that we have in mind a longer cruise for her, lasting perhaps two months.”

“Would there be an interval between those cruises, sir?”

“I should think the ship might be in the dockyard for about a fortnight.”

“And nothing on the programme after that?”

“Nothing at present.”

The young officer sat in thought for a moment, revolving in his mind the shopping, the ailments of the baby, the milk supply. It was summer weather; there would be no firewood to be cut. If the second cruise began about the middle of February he would be home by the middle of April, before the weather got cold enough for fires. Perhaps the farmer would see Mary right for firewood if he was away longer than that, now that he had got him the wheels for his trailer. It should be all right for him to go, so long as nothing further went wrong. But if the electricity supply failed, or the radioactivity spread south more quickly than the wise men estimated … Put away that thought.

Mary would be furious if he turned down this job and sacrificed his career. She was a naval officer’s daughter born and brought up at Southsea in the south of England; he had first met her at a dance in
Indefatigable
when he was doing his sea time in England with the Royal Navy. She would want him to take this appointment …

He raised his head. “I should be all right for those two cruises, sir,” he said. “Would it be possible to review the situation after that, I mean, it’s not so easy to make plans ahead—at home—with all this going on.”