On The Beach

"Would you move, if it was at your own discretion?"

"I haven't decided that," the captain said again. "I can't see that there's a great deal to be gained. Nearly forty per cent of my ship's company have got themselves tied up with girls in Melbourne-married, some of them. Say I was to move to Hobart. I can't take them along, and they can't get there any other way, and if they could there's nowhere there for them to live. It seems kind of rough on the men to separate them from their women in the last few days, unless there was some compelling reason in the interest of the naval service." He glanced up, grinning. "Anyway, I don't suppose they'd come. Most of them would probably jump ship."

"I suppose they would. I think they'd probably decide to put the women first."

The American nodded. "It's reasonable. And there's no sense in giving orders that you know won't be obeyed."

"Could you take your ship to sea without them?"

"Why, yes-just for a short run. Hobart would be a short trip, six or seven hours. We could take her there with just a dozen men, or even less. We wouldn't submerge if we were as short-handed as that, and we couldn't cruise for any length of time. But if we got her there, or even to New Zealand-say to Christchurch-without a full crew we could never be effective, operationally." He paused. "We'd be just refugees."

They sat in silence for a time. "One of the things that's been surprising me," the grazier said, "is that there have been so few refugees. So few people coming down from the north. From Cairns and Townsville, and from places like that."

"Is that so?" the captain asked. "It's just about impossible to get a bed in Melbourne-anywhere."

"I know there have been some. But not the numbers that I should have expected."

"That's the radio, I suppose," Dwight said. "These talks that the Prime Minister's been giving have been kind of steadying. The A.B.C.'s been doing a good job in telling people just the way things are. After all, there's not much comfort in leaving home and coming down here to live in a tent or in a car, and have the same thing happen to you a month or two later."

"Maybe," the grazier said. "I've heard of people going back to Queensland after a few weeks of that. But I'm not sure that that's the whole story. I believe it is that nobody really thinks it's going to happen, not to them, until they start to feel ill. And by that time, well, it's less effort to stay at home and take it. You don't recover from this once it starts, do you?"

"I don't think that's true. I think you can recover, if you get out of the radioactive area into a hospital where you get proper treatment. They've got a lot of cases from the north in the Melbourne hospitals right now."

"I didn't know that."

"No. They don't say anything about that over the radio. After all, what's the use? They're only going to get it over again next September."

"Nice outlook," said the grazier. "Will you have another whisky now?"

"Thank you, I believe I will." He stood up and poured himself a drink. "You know," he said, "now that I've got used to the idea, I think I'd rather have it this way. We've all got to die one day, some sooner and some later. The trouble always has been that you're never ready, because you don't know when it's coming. Well, now we do know, and there's nothing to be done about it. I kind of like that. I kind of like the thought that I'll be fit and well up till the end of August and then-home. I'd rather have it that way than go on as a sick man from when I'm seventy to when I'm ninety."

"You're a regular naval officer," the grazier said. "You're probably more accustomed to this sort of thing than I would be."

"Will you evacuate?" the captain asked. "Go someplace else when it gets near? Tasmania?"

"Me? Leave this place?" the grazier said. "No, I shan't go. When it comes, I'll have it here, on this verandah, in this chair, with a drink in my hand. Or else in my own bed. I wouldn't leave this place."

"I'd say that's the way most folks think about it, now that they've got used to the idea."

They sat on the verandah in the setting sun till Moira came to tell them that tea was ready. "Drink up," she said, "and come in for the blotting paper, if you can still walk."

Her father said, "That's not the way to talk to our guest."

"You don't know our guest as well as I do, Daddy. I tell you, you just can't get him past a pub. Any pub."

"More likely he can't get you past one." They went into the house.