over the sunlit dunes. The sand was now an almost liquid bronze in the late afternoon. A desert sea had flowed through Manhattan and congealed around these huge towers. The ravages of a century’s hostile climate had split the Appalachians and sprung this ransom from their hidden lodes.
Already McNair was thinking hard, deciding how best they could gather in this golden crop. Rather than disturb the surface with spade and shovel or with a mechanised dragline, they needed a modified combine harvester, which they could then drive across the dunes, its specially slatted blades scooping up just the precious topsoil.
McNair stared back at the huge buildings, at the giant piers of the concrete expressways and overpasses. True, he had been surprised by the brute size of the suspension bridge across the narrows, and by the vast dimensions of the old United States and the Nimitz. But already McNair’s pugnacity had returned, and he had every intention of meeting this great continent on his own terms. The years of training at the marine engineering school in the Glasgow shipyards would not be wasted. The skills needed to resurrect this dormant giant, to wake its railroads, dams and bridges, its mines and industries, were very much those that lay in his own hands. The computer men and communications wizards could come later, when the basic clockwork was ticking soundly.
During the past century the small American colony in Scotland had almost been assimilated into the local community, but McNair had always known that he would one day return to the United States. He needed its size and scale to find his real talents, which he was certain were far beyond those of a mere ship’s engineer. He came from a family whose roots lay in the great technologies of America’s past – one of his ancestors had worked on the NASA team that put Neil Armstrong on the Moon.
When the vacancy on the Apollo was posted McNair had been serving as second engineer aboard a bulk coal carrier on the Murmansk-Newcastle run. No one else was interested, but McNair volunteered without thinking, even though he would not be part of the inland expedition. Now, having propelled the Apollo across the Atlantic, he was ready to step ashore and start things moving.
The gold was a lucky bonus, a signal to him to back his own obsessions to the end. The fossil fuels, coal, gas and oil, might have run out here, but America always had something unexpected up its sleeve. McNair cared nothing for the gold’s ornamental or monetary value, except in the eyes of others. With the gold they could buy coal, bauxite, timber and iron ore from the rag-tag nations in southern Africa and South America.
McNair gazed confidently at the empty city, reminding himself that the principal mission of the Apollo expedition was to investigate the small but significant increase in atmospheric radioactivity which had been detected over the American continent in recent years. Perhaps the core of one of the old nuclear power stations had begun to leak dangerously, or a decaying war-head in some forgotten weapons silo had reached critical mass. Whatever the reason, the possibilities excited him. He thought of the two physicists, Ricci and Anne Summers, heads lost among their Geiger counters. But if only they could harness that dormant nuclear power they would really rouse a sleeping giant, start nothing less than a third industrial revolution…
For Orlowski, who was standing by the stern rail, one eye warily on Captain Steiner, this first sight of the empty skyscrapers of Manhattan prompted far more ambiguous feelings. He had never wanted to come on the expedition in the first place. After three successful but rigorous years opening up the new Arctic coalfields on Novaya Zemlya he had been looking forward to a comfortable desk at the Moscow headquarters of the Energy Resources Ministry. He remembered the post of expedition leader being circulated in the office newsletter, but had dismissed it out of hand. No one but a fool would want to spend six months wandering around the barren north American continent, a forgotten wilderness as distant as Patagonia.
There was some concern now over these leaks of radioactivity – small clouds of fall-out had recently drifted across the North Atlantic – but the few reconnaissance expeditions during the past fifty years had reported back nothing of value, a land long since stripped by a greedy nation of all its coal and oil. In fact, the Fleming expedition twenty years earlier had ended in disaster, its members perishing of thirst in the great salt wastes of Tennessee after inexplicably leaving their planned itinerary. The rescue mission four months later had found an abandoned camp outside Memphis, a trail of skeletons gnawed by lizards and gophers.
For obvious reasons it was then decreed that any future expeditions would be headed by a political leader, whose main job would be to keep a tight rein on the impulsive scientists. Anyone, Orlowski decided, other than Gregor Orlowski. But annoyingly some faceless rival at the Ministry had discovered his American antecedents. His great-grandparents had returned from Philadelphia to the original family home in the Ukraine on board the very first emigrant boat, changed their name back from Orwell to Orlowski and rapidly reassimilated themselves into Russian life.
Before he could protest, Orlowski found himself at the dockside in Plymouth, England, in charge of this apparently professional but in fact very strange team. At times, as they crossed the Atlantic, Orlowski had felt that he was supervising a crew of sleepwalkers. Like himself, every member of the expedition had American ancestry, but unlike himself none of them had made any real effort to assimilate themselves into their readopted nations. From the day they sailed he was convinced that they had each smuggled some secret cargo aboard – long experience as an expedition leader had given him a sharp nose for illicit alcohol, black market electric batteries, an overweight suitcase lined with coal briquettes.
However, it soon became clear that their reasons for joining the expedition had little to do with its scientific mission, and that the real contraband was their collective fantasy of America. The discovery of the young stowaway, Wayne, had acted as the catalyst – all these private escapees had soon come out into the open, united by their shared dream of ‘freedom’ (the last great illusion of the twentieth century), the same conviction that they would make a new life and fulfil themselves that must have been felt by their distant forbears when they were herded through the immigration pens of Ellis Island.
Yet what could they conceivably find in that landscape of ash and clinker, in those empty cities that required more fuel to run them in a day than the whole planet now consumed in a month? Probably none of them knew – with the single exception of Steiner, standing on the bridge of his sinking ship with his quiet, good-humoured smile. No real captain tried to sink his ship, and Orlowski was sure that Steiner had deliberately ruptured the bows of the Apollo across the submerged statue. The scattered American communities in Western Europe still offered a small reward for the whereabouts of the statue, but Steiner’s motives would be more complex.
Orlowski thought of the hours which the Captain and his young stowaway spent going through the old Time and Look magazines, almost drugged by the lavish advertisements. Then there had been the embarrassing matter of the christening of the ship – officially Survey Vessel 299. Orlowski had proposed the E. F. Schumacher, but far from supporting him everyone had howled him down. At Steiner’s prompting they unanimously accepted Wayne’s suggestion, the Apollo. A sentimental gesture, an invitation to think big instead of small, to shoot for the moon, which Orlowski had tolerated, slightly moved himself by the thought that in a way they were duplicating Armstrong’s voyage. But the terrain of America would be as desolate as the Moon’s. He would have to watch everything, all kinds of psychological mischief could be hatched up here.
Yes, he decided, they would quickly establish the source of the nuclear leaks, radio the full findings to the monitoring station at Stockholm and then return to Europe at the first opportunity, leaving to a larger and better-equipped expedition the task of neutralising the danger.
Meanwhile he would make the most of the enforced time here, collect a few souvenirs (through the strange gold light over the Brooklyn shore he could actually see an old Exxon gasoline sign, worth a good few roubles) for Valentina and the girls. And travellers’ tales, useful at Ministry cocktail parties. This brooding, ancient landscape
