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 radio-phosphors, 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 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 sea 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.
, You relax,’ Granger said, adjusting the shoulder pad under his Hawaiian shirt which disguised 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 into 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 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 .30-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 of gasometers — 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 north-west.
‘Lake Atlantic,’ 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 Atlantic, 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 covered 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 oxygen extracted electrolytically 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-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-identities. 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.