The Complete Short Stories

At last they stopped near the UN post at the harbour in East Beirut. Dr Edwards sprinted to the radio shack, and Ryan unstrapped his blue helmet. In a sense he shared the blame for this uncontrolled explosion of violence. The rats in the war laboratory had been happy pulling a familiar set of levers — the triggers of their rifles and mortars — and being fed their daily pellets of hate. Ryan’s dazed dream of peace, like an untested narcotic, had disoriented them and laid them open to a frenzy of hyperactive rage…

Ryan, good news!’ Dr Edwards hammered on the windscreen, ordering the driver to move on. ‘Christian commandos have retaken the Stadium!’

‘And my sister? And Aunt Vera?’

‘I don’t know. Hope for the best. At least the UN is back in action. With luck, everything will return to normal.’

Later, as he stood in the sombre storeroom below the concrete grandstand, Ryan reflected on the ominous word that Dr Edwards had used. Normal…? The lights of the photographers’ flashes illuminated the bodies of the twenty hostages laid against the rear wall. Louisa and Aunt Vera rested between two UN observers, all executed by the Royalists before their retreat. The stepped concrete roof was splashed with blood, as if an invisible audience watching the destruction of the city from the comfort of the grandstand had begun to bleed into its seats. Yes, Ryan vowed, the world would bleed The photographers withdrew, leaving Ryan alone with Louisa and his aunt. Soon their images would be scattered across the ruined streets, pasted to the blockhouse walls.

‘Ryan, we ought to leave before there’s a counterattack.’ Dr Edwards stepped through the pale light. ‘I’m sorry about them — whatever else, they were your sister and aunt.’

‘Yes, they were.’

‘And at least they helped to prove something. We need to see how far human beings can be pushed.’ Dr Edwards gestured helplessly at the bodies. ‘Sadly, all the way.’

Ryan took off his blue helmet and placed it at his feet. He snapped back the rifle bolt and drove a steel-tipped round into the breech. He was only sorry that Dr Edwards would lie beside Louisa and his aunt. Outside there was a momentary lull in the fighting, but it would resume. Within a few months he would unite the militias into a single force. Already Ryan was thinking of the world beyond Beirut, of that far larger laboratory waiting to be tested, with its millions of docile specimens unprepared for the most virulent virus of them all.

‘Not all the way, doctor.’ He levelled the rifle at the physician’s head. ‘All the way is the whole human race.’

1989

Dream Cargoes

Across the lagoon an eager new life was forming, drawing its spectrum of colours from a palette more vivid than the sun’s. Soon after dawn, when Johnson woke in Captain Galloway’s cabin behind the bridge of the Prospero, he watched the lurid hues, cyanic blues and crimsons, playing against the ceiling above his bunk. Reflected in the metallic surface of the lagoon, the tropical foliage seemed to concentrate the Caribbean sunlight, painting on the warm air a screen of electric tones that Johnson had only seen on the nightclub faades of Miami and Vera Cruz.

He stepped onto the tilting bridge of the stranded freighter, aware that the island’s vegetation had again surged forward during the night, as if it had miraculously found a means of converting darkness into these brilliant leaves and blossoms. Shielding his eyes from the glare, he searched the 600 yards of empty beach that encircled the Prospero, disappointed that there was no sign of Dr Chambers’ rubber infaltable. For the past three mornings, when he woke after an uneasy night, he had seen the craft beached by the inlet of the lagoon. Shaking off the overlit dreams that rose from the contaminated waters, he would gulp down a cup of cold coffee, jump from the stern rail and set off between the pools of leaking chemicals in search of the American biologist.

It pleased Johnson that she was so openly impressed by this once barren island, a left-over of nature seven miles from the north-east coast of Puerto Rico. In his modest way he knew that he was responsible for the transformation of the nondescript atoll, scarcely more than a forgotten garbage dump left behind by the American army after World War II. No one, in Johnson’s short life, had ever been impressed by him, and the biologist’s silent wonder gave him the first sense of achievement he had ever known.

Johnson had learned her name from the labels on the scientific stores in the inflatable. However, he had not yet approached or even spoken to her, embarrassed by his rough manners and shabby seaman’s clothes, and the engrained chemical stench that banned him from sailors’ bars all over the Caribbean. Now, when she failed to appear on the fourth morning, he regretted all the more that he had never worked up the courage to introduce himself.