World's End

ON THE BEACH (320 pp.)--Nevil Shute--Morrow ($3.95).

The small powers--Albania and Egypt --started the last of all wars, but the big powers finished it. A-bombs H-bombs, massive cobalt bombs obliterated the industrial cities of East and West. The winds carried radioactive dust to hamlet and farm, from Scandinavian fiord to Pacific island. A vast silence fell over the Northern Hemisphere. And now the dust is coming south, covering the earth as uniformly as a bandage wrapped with slow deliberation around an orange. Scientists estimate that it will take about nine months to envelop the Southern Hemisphere from the equator to the pole. Then the earth will be merely another dead planet following its lonely orbit around the sun.

This is the situation as Author Nevil Shute (Pied Piper, The Breaking Wave) opens his 21st novel. To U.S. Commander Dwight Towers, who has brought his atom-powered submarine safely to port in Melbourne, the death in the north has no meaning. He still dreams of returning from duty to his wife and children in Mystic. Conn. A young Australian couple, Peter and Mary Holmes, use habit as an escape from the horror to come; they go on as they always have--sailing, giving parties, worrying when their small daughter has a sore throat or fever. Moira Davidson at first seems to drink too much, but a Platonic relationship with Commander Towers soon settles her into the resigned-to-fate mold of the others.

There are two fragments of hope. A scientist named Jorgensen believes that radioactivity may be decreasing in the icefields of the arctic, holding out a promise of human survival in the polar regions. And a radio transmitter near Seattle has been intermittently sending a meaningless jumble of signals. Commander Towers takes his submarine north to get the answers. He proves Jorgensen wrong, and finds that the Seattle transmission is caused by a freak mechanical accident. He returns to Australia and death.

There is a grisly fascination to Author Shute's story of mankind's last days. Yet his characters seem curiously bloodless despite their courage and stoicism. It is difficult to believe that men and women would die as these do--without panic, self-seeking, sexual frenzy, or apocalyptic evangelism. But then it is also difficult to believe in the end of the world.

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