ALPHA, BETA, GAMMA.

By Anthony Toole.

Silent. Deserted. Wierd. Crags, hillsides, screes, lake shore that he remembered crowded and noisy with tourists, now incongruously quiet.

The scenery also was strange. The mountain shapes had not changed, but their colours were unreal. During the years he had walked and climbed in Wasdale, he had grown used to its moods, which altered with the hour, and the ways in which a cloud or a sudden beam of sunlight would transform an eternal scene into a sequence of shifting images, the colours of which would exist for no more than an instant, and be gone forever, before they had time to register in the mind.

But this was different. Large areas of bleached grass, interspersed with patches of luxuriant green. Wintry, leafless trees and bushes standing over the flowers of high summer. The flowers. He focused the binoculars on a patch of colour some twenty yards from the van. The windows distorted the view a little, but he could still make out the twisted stalks, the shrunken or elongated leaves, the blossoms, some minuscule, others enlarged and mis-shapen. Had he not known otherwise, he would have assumed them to have belonged to different species.

Slowly, he swung round, the binoculars still held to his eyes, and picked out places he had known well in earlier years: the Screes, Scafell, Great Gable, Yewbarrow. In two years, none had felt the pressure of boots. Many more years, almost certainly decades would pass before they would do so again.

The sudden “Beep, beep,” from the dashboard called his thoughts back to the helicopter that hovered high above him. They must be wondering why he had stopped. Conversation was impossible. Only the most rudimentary signals could pass, without misinterpretation, through the ionised atmosphere of the valley. He activated the “O.K.” signal, and waited for a few seconds until the acknowledgement came through.

He switched off the receiver and pressed his face against the windscreen. High against the sky, the tiny dot of the helicopter sped away southward. He started the van and crawled along the road by the lake shore.

A few black-headed gulls glided over the water or stalked the boulders. Oblivious of inevitable death, they had simply flown, without hindrance, over the military cordon, to return to the lakeside swamps in which generations of them had struggled from the egg.

Two years. The inquiry had lasted almost as long, but had yet drawn no conclusions, publicly, at least. Rumour was plentiful, and fertile with speculation. Sabotage. Melt-down of reactor core. A stunt by environmentalists that had gone sadly wrong. Perhaps it was that combination of insignificant factors that defied the astronomical chances against a disaster. The result was not in dispute. Sellafield devastated. Land sterile within a five-mile radius of the plant. Nearly eight hundred people treated for possible radiation damage. It was amazing that, so far, only a couple of dozen had died. A hundred square miles, a sector from the Eden to the Esk, sealed off from the public. Were it not for the barrier of the mountains, a far greater area would have been contaminated. A small amount of radiation had blown over into Borrowdale, but its front no longer appeared to be advancing.

But invisible clouds still seeped from the wreckage, and the prevailing winds scattered these over the slopes of the Calder and Wasdale valleys, with occasional gusts straying into Eskdale and Ennerdale. The effects of these winds, and the burden they carried, had to be monitored, from time to time, both by instruments set up for that purpose, and by sample-taking visits every few months. The last visit had been in March, six months earlier. Summer had passed, in Wasdale, without a single tourist.

He stopped the van at Wasdale head. Even when he had come here in the depths of winter, there had always been cars here, and people in boots and climbing breeches, their backs supporting heavy rucksacks, setting out for, or returning from a day of adventure on Gable, Pillar, Scafell or some other rocky excrescence on the roof of England. Now, only a rusting piece of farm machinery lay in the car park, backed by the hotel, and the farm buildings that had once housed human and animal life.

Eating the frugal lunch he had been given, he thought of the many other meals he had taken here. Often, his clothes had been sodden and steaming from a day of heavy rain. At other times, he had sat on the grass, his eyes closed to the evening sun, as he recalled great moments of a day on the high crags, crags on which an adventurous spirit had once been awakened to face the twentieth century, when it would cross the world to attack the highest and most dangerous mountains. He felt some remorse, and perhaps even a trace of anger when he considered that the spirit would find no more sustenance in this place of glory. But his feelings were tempered by resignation. Acceptance was the only adequate response. And there were still other mountains and other crags.

He stood up and climbed over the seat. It took several minutes to pull on his protective suit. He fastened the helmet, checked the oxygen supply and unlocked the inner door. He pulled the door shut after him, to seal the cab, then opened the outer door and stepped out onto the turf, closing this door also. Only the thin suit separated him from the air that would, in a matter of hours, cause irreversible biological damage, and would kill him in perhaps two or three days.

He went to the side of the van and opened a door. From behind this, he drew out a small spade and a rucksack containing bottles for the water and bags for the soil samples he was to take. He set off, as briskly as his suit allowed, in the direction of Mosedale.

The suit made him sweat uncomfortably, particularly when he had to move uphill. He dug spadefuls of earth at various predetermined points around the sides of the valley, and placing each in a labelled bag, returned the bag to the rucksack. From each spring that trickled from the hill slopes, he filled a bottle, and placed this also in the sack. This task completed, he went across to the monitoring station that had been set up after the accident, and removed the tapes on which the radiation levels had been recorded, day by day, since the last visit. These tapes, he replaced with new ones. Having assured himself that the equipment was working properly, he closed the box once more. He returned to the van, put the rucksack into the cupboard, and took out another. This was for the samples from the Great Gable – Lingmell end of the valley.

He strode past the churchyard, in which lay the bodies of many who had ended their lives searching for adventure above Wasdale. He paused for a few minutes to read, again, the inscriptions on some of the tombstones. One, in particular, caught his attention:

“One moment stood they as the angels stand, high in the lofty eminence of air...”

Sad, but far from despairing. Yet he could only despair that the places of the angels were now dusted with plutonium, man’s deadliest creation, aptly named after the God of Hell.

He continued along the track, past the deserted farm, and up toward Sty Head. He carried out the same procedures as he had in Mosedale, and in an hour, was returning to the van. The helicopter would be flying over soon, for the 2 o’clock check. After that, he would take samples around Brackenclose and the lower slopes of Scafell, before leaving Wasdale.

Nearing the church, he paused at a gateway leading through a stone wall into a field. He did not know why he stopped. Something had caught his attention. A movement, perhaps. He looked over the gate. Nothing. He turned and walked on, then came back to the gate and looked again. In a far corner, shaded by the wall, and camouflaged by its dull, green colour, stood a tent. The breeze was light, but sufficient to swell the walls and cause some flutter of the door flaps. He opened the gate and approached the tent.

A guy-line had broken from one side, but otherwise, the tent looked to have been erected recently. Beneath the flysheet, on one side, were two pairs of shoes, a butane stove and assorted billy-cans. On the other side, were a few empty meat and soup tins, and a polythene bag of rubbish. He lifted the door flaps and looked inside. At the far end was a large rucksack. The space between this and the door was occupied entirely by two down-filled sleeping bags. An exercise book lay on one of the sleeping bags. He dropped his spade and samples, and crawled into the tent. He sat down, picked up the book, and opened it. There was writing on only the first half-dozen pages. With some difficulty, because of his gloved hands, he turned the pages and read. When he came to the end of the writing, he closed the book and stared out of the tent for several minutes, unmoving.

“Damn,” he muttered. Then louder, “Damn, damn, damn.”

He crawled out of the tent, still clutching the book, and resumed his interrupted walk towards the van.

He put his samples into the cupboard, along with those he had collected earlier. Then he glanced through the book once more, before placing that alongside the samples.

His schedule now required him to await the arrival of the helicopter, and send an automatic radio signal, activated by a switch on the outside of the van, to indicate that everything was all right. To minimise contamination, he was not to re-enter the van until his work was completed.

He sat on the grass and allowed his eyes to wander across the hills and the sky. But nothing that they saw registered in his mind.

Who were they? He had not come across either of their names before. Someone must have realised they were missing. The protests had all been noisy affairs, often violent and usually ill-tempered, but always well publicised. Though there was no hint of anger or dissent in the scribblings he had read, he was in no doubt that he was sole witness to a protest. Yet the futility of its silence was beyond understanding. What could they have hoped to gain?

They had dodged the cordon, coming in over the mountains from Langdale. They had climbed on the crags for three sunny days in June, becoming ever more fatigued and ill. Then, they had decided to make a last ascent of Scafell before succumbing to the radiation.

From the tone of the last page in the diary, he would not have been surprised if they had found that task beyond their strength. The final lines held in them brief echoes of Captain Scott, but they would never achieve heroic immortality. They would either become official secrets, or be officially destroyed. And two bodies would be left to crumble into the dust on England’s highest peak.

He watched the helicopter swing in over the screes and across the lake, holding an altitude of about 4000 feet. When its flight path brought it over the road, it turned and came toward him up the valley. In a minute, it was hovering high above him. He waited until he saw the light flash on the side of the van, then he pressed the switch. Communication was completed in a few seconds, and the helicopter moved away towards its next rendezvous, somewhere above the Calder. It would return in two hours to escort him out of the valley.

As soon as the machine vanished over Yewbarrow, he unbuttoned his suit and threw it onto the ground. He took a deep breath. The poison carried by that breath was undetectable. Yet it smelled strange. In fact, it had no smell. That was its strangeness. Over many years, he had grown used to the smell of the mountains, a scent, sometimes quite heady, but more often barely noticeable, which was a blend of damp and dust, decay and growth, death and life. Impalpable yet ever present. But now, there was nothing. He could only describe it as dead.

He walked over to the stile at the side of the road, and clambered over it, then hurried across the field and the bridge over the river. He was breaking all the rules. Inadequate footwear. Only a light sweater for warmth. Failure to inform others of his intended route.

He pressed on up the slope, becoming breathless. He was no longer in proper condition for this sort of activity. He slowed down, but continued upward. He felt a tickle in his lungs, but did not know whether this was due to his lack of fitness or to the minuscule dust particles that were, even now, irradiating the cells of his body, tearing up the nucleic acid molecules until they would be beyond repair.

He turned the slope above Brackenclose, which nestled in tranquility among the trees. No tents in the campsite. The lake shimmering in sun and a light breeze. He turned his back on the view and began the steep section. This was loose and slippery, and he found progress difficult because of his smooth-soled shoes, which caused him frequently to fall.

Exhausted, and feeling slightly sick, he reached Hollow Stones, and paused for a rest. He need hurry no more. He could easily avoid detection among the boulders and crags that lay between here and the summit.

While regaining his breath, he gazed around at the crags and the rocky slopes, but saw nothing that might hold his attention.

The screes above Hollow Stones were bad, but he progressed slowly up them to the foot of Lord’s Rake. Scrambling up the gully, he recalled the times he had climbed it when it was snowbound, kicking steps into a hard, white crust, while gripping the ice axe that bit a fraction of an inch into its surface. Today, however, it was uncomfortably hot. He was tired, and the nausea was making him careless.

He slipped a few times, but managed to hold on while rocks he had disturbed went clattering down between the walls. At the top of the gully, a breath of air refreshed him with its coolness. He looked over to the face of the Pinnacle that towered above. There were plenty of places where they could have ended things quickly, when their sickness grew unbearable. Perhaps he ought to search for the bodies around the bottom of the crags, but had probably a couple of days in which to do that.

He climbed up Deep Ghyll and out onto the summit plateau. He sat on a rock that overlooked the top of the Pinnacle, and glanced at his watch. He would rest here for a while before crossing over to Scafell Pike.

He heard nothing at first, but in the distance, saw the tiny speck of the helicopter moving up the valley like a giant dragonfly. Then a slight breeze brought the almost imperceptible whirr to his ears. The helicopter slowed down and hovered in the air high above the car park.

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