stood facing each other; but knowing what he was getting at I made no reply. The old man saw that I knew and nodded an affirmative. “Oh, yes, Julian. In the long ago era of sailing ships, men from the west would sometimes come across cannibal tribes in the South Sea islands, and these savage people had a term for the enemies they roasted for food. The called them—or the flesh they ate off them—‘long pig,’ because that’s how we taste, apparently. Now I don’t know if they ever tried ‘short pig,’ if you get my meaning, but what could be more tender or pure than—”
“—Yes, I do understand, Henry.” I cut him short. “There’s no need to torture yourself any further!”
“But what horrified me most,” he continued, as if he hadn’t heard me at all, “wasn’t the thought of those monsters at their repast, not but wondering what the young men who fathered those babies—what they themselves, or for that matter the mothers—could be living on in the twisted tower! For what other source of … food could there possibly be in that dreadful place? And what kind of inhuman, bestial people could bring themselves to do something as terrible as that?”
Henry could barely stifle his soul-wrenching sobbing as he turned away from me, staggering and yet seeming more determined than ever; windmilling his arms and only just managing to maintain his balance, as he went splashing along the drowned, rusty tracks.
I caught up with the old man, caught his arm to steady his before he could trip and hurt himself, and said, “There are all kinds of men, Henry. Most men couldn’t do that, I think, but as for those who can … what choice do they have? They could reap what they have sown, as it were—if in this case you’ll excuse such a metaphor—and eat or starve in the absence of any other choices, and that’s all. But you know, some men, women too, are very adaptable; and in desperate times and situations the survival instinct in people such as these will quickly surface, and they’ll soon become inured, accustomed to … to whatever. Yes, that kind of person can get used to almost anything.”
But yet again I don’t think he’d heard a single word that I had said. And instead of scolding me for my logical approach to what he’d told me—however sickening, disgusting that approach must have seemed to him, if indeed he had heard anything at all of it—he once again began to babble about his youngest daughter, Dawn:
“You’ve never seen a girl so lovely, Julian. Only thirteen years old when the world went to hell … growing up almost entirely underground, in that dark, damp basement we called home. What chance for poor Dawn, eh? … Never had a boyfriend, never knew a man … her dark-eyed, raven-haired beauty wasted in the gloom of a cellar. And all she ever saw of the outside world on those occasions, those very rare occasions, when, at her pleading, I would take her into the light of day, was the sullen sky and the shattered city … But we could never stay for long … not even crouching in the rubble … there were terrible things in the poisoned sky—the Shantaks, I’ve heard them called, and the faceless Gaunts—and it was never very long before they’d glide into view scouring the land as they searched … searched for … what else but us! … For mankind’s scattered remnants! … For what few human beings remained!
“But by Dawn … she was everything to me … as her mother before her, and her poor sister. But they were taken, all three … and what have I now—what’s left for me?—except the top of a measure … of some small measure … of revenge?”
It seemed to me the old man was waiting for an answer, and so I shrugged and obliged him, saying, “But it appears there’s nothing much left for you, Henry, except your small measure of revenge. So you’ll do what you have to—and for that matter, so will I.”
“So will you?”
I nodded and said, “Well, there’s nothing much left for me, either! So just like you, I’ll do what I have to … ” And I had to bite my tongue as I almost added, “to survive.”
The shoggoth light ahead of us was very much brighter now, and in order to change the subject I pointed it out to my companion. “Look there, it’s almost daylight up front! As daylight used to be, I mean.”
“I see it,” he answered, as his sobbing gradually subsided. “Another fifteen to twenty minutes and we’ll be there. Piccadilly Circus … or ground zero, if you prefer.”
“Hmm!” I said. “But I always thought that term described a point on the ground directly beneath the explosion—not above it.”
He was obviously surprised. “Quite right, yes. But since we both know what I meant, why nitpick?” Then, looking at me sideways and slyly, “By the way, you really have got it all figured out, haven’t you?”
“Most of it,” I nodded. “But I still don’t know, can’t see, how you’ve been able in the circumstances to build any kind of device powerful enough to make all of this worthwhile. I mean, you’d need a laboratory, and the know-how, and the materials.”
Henry returned my nod. “Very good,” he said, “Very clever. But don’t I remember saying that you had no idea who or what I am or was? I’m sure I do.”
“Ah!” I said. “So this is what you were getting at. Except you never did get around to telling me. So then, Henry, who and what were you?”
“I am, as you know, Henry Chattaway,” he replied. “But what you don’t know is that I have an almost entire alphabet of letters after my name, that I’ve twice been put forward as a candidate for a Nobel prize in physics, and that … ” For this was the one thing I had most wanted to know, but hadn’t dared to ask him outright in case it gave me away. And:
“Well, why shouldn’t I tell you?” he said, as the man-made cavern or excavation that was the main Piccadilly Circus Underground station gradually came into view up front. “For it’s too late now to do anything else but see it through: the last of my dreams come true on this long last night.”
And as we climbed up from the tracks onto the platform and I returned his small heavy suitcase to him, he continued: “Julian, I was the top man—or rather, not to make too much of it, one of them—on PFDP, the Plasma Fusion Drive Project. Similar in its way to the Manhattan Project, it was very hush-hush, even though no one in the scientific community gave it a snowflake’s chance in hell, even as a theory … what, abundant energy from next to nothing? You may recall that one hundred years ago the same dream had given birth to the bombs that put an abrupt end to the Second World War … not so much a dream as a nightmare, as it happened—at least until someone began speculating about the possible benefits: that perhaps nuclear power could provide cheap energy for the entire world, which, of course, never really worked out. The fuel was dirty, dangerous, and had safety problems; the mutations and fatal diseases that followed on inevitably from the errors and accident were hideous, while some of the infected radioactive regions remain hot even to this day.
“Well, history repeats, Julian. Plasma Fusion was the next best hope for cheap energy, far better and cheaper and so much easier to produce … why, men might even go to the stars with it—if it worked! But it didn’t, or rather it did, except even the smallest, most cautious of tests warned of a Pandora’s Box effect. Only let it loose, and it would initiate a chain reaction with anything it could touch and fuse with. That’s the only and best explanation I can give to a layman, especially in what little time we have left. But enough: we stopped working on it, and the world authorities—every single one of them who recognized the awesome power of this thing—signed up to a strictly monitored ban on any further experimentation … simply because they could not afford not to!”
While Henry talked, his voice gradually falling to a whisper, we had proceeded from the amazingly and relatively pristine platform
