Free On the Beach by Nevil Shute

snapshots, one at a bathing place with the family seated on a spring-board, perhaps at a lake shore. Another was apparently taken on a lawn, perhaps the lawn before his home, for a long car showed in the background and a portion of a white wooden house. She stood examining them with interest; they looked nice people. It was hard, but so was everything these days. No good agonising about it.
    She changed, leaving her outer clothes and her bag on the bunk, scowled at her appearance in the little mirror, and went out and down the corridor to find her host. He came forward to meet her. “Well, here I am,” she said. “Looking like hell. Your submarine will have to be good, Dwight, to make up for this.”
    He laughed, and took her arm to guide her. “Sure, it’s good,” he said. “Best in the U.S. Navy. This way.” She repressed the comment that it was probably the only one in the U.S. Navy; no sense in hurting him.
    He took her down the gangplank to the narrow deck and up on to the bridge, and began explaining his ship to her. She knew little of ships and nothing about submarines, but she was attentive and once or twice surprised him with the quick intelligence of her questions. “When you go down, why doesn’t the water go down the voice pipe?” she asked.
    “You turn off this cock.”
    “What happens if you forget?”
    He grinned. “There’s another one down below.”
    He took her down through the narrow hatchways into the control-room. She spent some time at the periscope looking around the harbour and got the hang of that, but the ballasting and trim controls were beyond her and shewas not much interested. She stared uncomprehending at the engines, but the sleeping and messing quarters intrigued her, so did the galley. “What happens about smells?” she asked. “What happens when you’re cooking cabbage under water?”
    “You try not to have to do it,” he told her. “Not fresh cabbage. The smell hangs around for quite a while. Finally the deodoriser deals with it, as the air gets changed and re-oxygenated. There wouldn’t be much left after an hour or two.”
    He gave her a cup of tea in the tiny cubicle that was his cabin. Sipping it, she asked him, “Have you got your orders yet, Dwight?”
    He nodded. “Cairns, Port Moresby, and Darwin. Then we come back here.”
    “There isn’t anybody left alive in any of those places, is there?”
    “I wouldn’t know. That’s what we’ve got to find out.”
    “Will you go ashore?”
    He shook his head. “I don’t think so. It all depends upon the radiation levels, but I wouldn’t think we’d land. Maybe we won’t even go outside the hull. We might stay at periscope depth if the conditions are really bad. But that’s why we’re taking John Osborne along with us, so we’ll have somebody who really understands what the risks are.”
    She wrinkled her brows. “But if you can’t go out on deck, how can you know if there’s anyone still living in those places?”
    “We can call through the loud hailer,” he said. “Get as close inshore as we can manage, and call through the loud hailer.”
    “Could you hear them if they answer?”
    “Not so well as we can talk. We’ve got a microphonehooked up beside the hailer, but you’d have to be very close to hear a person calling in reply. Still, it’s something.”
    She glanced at him. “Has anybody been into the radioactive area before, Dwight?”
    “Why, yes,” he said. “It’s okay if you’re sensible, and don’t take risks. We were in it quite a while, while the war was on, from Iwojima to the Philippines and then down south to Yap. You stay submerged, and carry on as usual. Of course, you don’t want to go out on deck.”
    “I mean—recently. Has anyone been up into the radioactive areas since the war stopped?”
    He nodded. “The
Swordfish
—that’s our sister ship—she made a cruise up in the North Atlantic. She got back to Rio de Janeiro about a month ago. I’ve been waiting for