Greybeard

by Brian Wilson Aldiss

“There’s one consolation,” he said. “This one really is a war to end war. There won’t be anyone left to fight another.”

  Charley was the first to arrive in the PX that evening. As he entered the low building, exchanging the hum of insects for the hum of the refrigeration plant, he saw Jack Pilbeam sitting over a glass at a corner table. The American rose to meet him. He was dressed now in neatly creased olive drabs, his face shone, he looked compact and oddly more ferocious than he had done standing by the dying jungle. He eyed Charley’s Infantop flash with approval.

  “What can I get you to drink — Charley, isn’t it? I’m way ahead of you.”

  “I don’t drink.” He had long since learned to deliver the phrase without apology; he added now, with a sour smile, “I kill people, but I don’t drink.” Something — perhaps the mere fact that Jack Pilbeam was American, and Charley found Americans easier to talk to than his own countrymen — made him add the explanation that carried its own apology. “I was eleven when your nation and mine detonated those fatal bombs in space. When I was nineteen, shortly after my mother died — it was a sort of compensation, I suppose — I got engaged to a girl called Peggy Lynn. She wasn’t in good health and she had lost all her hair, but I loved her… We were going to be engaged. Well, of course, we got medically examined and were told we were sterilized for life, like everyone else… Somehow that killed the romance.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Perhaps it was just as well. I had two sisters to look after anyway. But from then on, I started not to want anything…”

  “Religious?”

  “Yes, though it’s mainly a sort of self-denial.”

  Pilbeam’s were clear and bright eyes that looked more attractive than his rather tight mouth. “Then you should get through the next few decades okay. Because there’s going to be a lot of self-denial needed. What happened to Peggy?”

  Charley looked at his hands. “We lost touch. One fine spring day, she died of leukaemia. I heard about it later.”

  After drinking deep, Pilbeam said, “That’s life, as they always say about death.” His tone robbed the remark of any facetiousness it might have had.

  “Although I was only a kid, I think the — Accident sent me quietly mad,” Charley said, looking down at his boots. “Thousands — millions of people were mad, in a secretive way. Some not so secret, of course. And they’ve never got over it, though it’s twenty years ago. I mean, though it’s twenty years ago, it’s still present. That’s why this war’s being fought, because people are mad… I’ll never understand it: we need every young life we can get, yet here’s a global war going on… Madness!”

  With a sombre face, Pilbeam saw that Charley drew out a cigarette and lit it; it was one of the tobacco-free brands and it crackled, so fiercely did Charley draw on it.

  “I don’t see the war like that,” Pilbeam said, ordering up another Kentucky Bourbon. “I see it as an economic war. This may be because of my upbringing and training. My father — he’s dead now — he was senior sales director in Jaguar Records Inc., and I could say ‘consumer rating’ right after I learnt to say ‘Mama’. The economy of every major nation is in flux, if you can have a one-way flux. They are suffering from a fatal malady called death, and up till now it’s irremediable — though they’re working on it. But one by one, industries are going bust, even where there’s the will to keep them going. And one day soon, the will is going to fail.”

  “I’m sorry,” Charley said. “I don’t quite grasp what you mean. Economics is not my field at all. I’m just—”

  “I’ll explain what I mean. God! I may as well tell you: my old man died last month. He didn’t die — he killed himself. He jumped from a fifty-second floor window of Jaguar Records Inc. in up-town L.A.” His eyes were brighter; he drew down his brows as if to hood them, and put one clenched fist with slow force down on the table before them. “My old man… he was part of Jaguar. He kept it going, it kept him going. In a way, I suppose he was a very American sort of man — lived for his family and his job, had a great range of business associates… To hell with that. What I’m trying to say — God, he wasn’t fifty! Forty-nine, he was.

  “Jaguar went bust; more than bust — obsolete. Suddenly wilted and died. Why? Because their market was the adolescent trade — they sold Elvis and Donnie and Vince, and the other pop singers. It was the kids, the teens, that bought Jaguar records. Suddenly — no more kids, no more teens. The company saw it coming. It was like sliding towards a cliff. Year after year, sales down, diminishing returns, costs up… What do you do? What in hell can you do, except sweat it out?

  “There are other industries all round you just as badly hit. One of my uncles is an executive with Park Lane Confectionery. They may hang on a few more years, but the whole lot is going unstable. Why? — Because it was the under-twenties consumed most of their candies. Their market’s dead — unborn. A technological nation is a web of delicately balanced forces. You can’t have one bit rotting off without the rest going too. What do you do in a case like that? You do what my old man did — hang on for as long as you can, then catch a down draught from the fifty-second floor.”

  Charley said gently, envying Pilbeam his slight drunkenness as he sipped his Bourbon. “You said something about someone’s will going to fail.”

  “Oh, that. Yup — my father and his pals, well, they go on fighting while there’s a chance left. They try to salve what’s salvable for their sons. But us — we don’t have sons. What’s going to happen if this curse of infertility doesn’t wear off ever? We aren’t going to have the will to work if there’s nobody to—”

  “Inherit the fruits of our labours? I’ve already thought of that. Perhaps every man has thought of it. But the genes must recover soon — it’s twenty years since the Accident.”

  “I guess so. They’re telling us in the States that this sterility will wear off in another five or ten years’ time.”

  “They were saying the same thing when Peggy was alive… It’s a cliché of the British politicians, to keep the voters quiet.”

  “The American manufacturers use it to keep the voters buying. But all the time the industrial system’s going to pox — sorry, Freudian slip; I’ve had too much to drink, Charley, and you must excuse me — the system’s going to pot under them. So we have to have a war, keep up falling production, explain away shortages, conceal inflation, deflect blame, tighten controls… It’s a hell of a world, Charley! Look at the guys in here — all buying death on the credit system and richly, ripely, aware of it…”

  Charley gazed about the colourful room, with its bar and its groups of smiling, greying soldiers. The scene did not appear to him as grim as Pilbeam made it sound; all the same, it was even betting that in each man’s heart was the knowledge of an annihilation so greedy that it had already leapt forward and swallowed up the next generation. The irony was that over this sterile soldiery hung no threat of nuclear war. The big bombs were obsolete after only half a century of existence; the biosphere was too heavily laden with radiation after the Accident of 1981 for anyone to chance sending the level higher. Oh, there were the armies’ strategic nuclear weapons, and the neutrals protested about them all the time, but wars had to be fought, and they had to be fought with something, and since the small nuclear weapons were in production, they were used. What were several fewer species of animals compared with a hundred-mile advance and another medal on another general?

  He cut off his thoughts, ashamed of their easy cynicism. Oh Lord, though I die, let me live! He had lost the thread of Pilbeam’s discourse. It was with relief that he saw Algy Timberlane enter the canteen.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Timberlane said, gratefully accepting a Bourbon and ginger on ice. “I went into the hospital to look at that kid we brought in from Mokachandpur. He’s in a feverish coma. Col. Hodson has pumped him full of mycetinin, and will be able to tell if he will pull through by morning. Poor little fellow is badly wounded — they may have to amputate that leg o
f his.”

  “Was he all right otherwise? I mean — not mutated?” Pilbeam asked.

  “Physically, in normal shape. Which will make it all the worse if he dies. And to think we lost Frank, Alan, and Froggie getting him. It’s a damn shame the two little girls got blown to bits.”

  “They would probably have been deformed if you had got hold of them,” Pilbeam said. He lit a cheroot after the two Englishmen had refused one. His eyes looked more alert, now that Timberlane had joined the party. He sat with his back straighter and talked in a more tightly controlled way. “Ninety six point four per cent of the children we have picked up on Operation Childsweep have external or internal deformities. Before you came in, Charley and I were on the stale old subject of the madness of the world. There’s the brightest and best example this last twenty years affords us — the Western World spent the first fifteen years of it legally killing off all the little monstrosities born of the few women who weren’t rendered out-and-out sterile. Then our — quote — advanced thinkers — unquote — got the idea that the monstrosities might, after all, breed and breed true, and restore a balance after one generation. So we go in for kidnapping on an international scale.”

  “No, no, you can’t say that,” Charley exclaimed. “I’d agree that the legal murder of — well, call them monstrosities—”

  “Call them monstrosities? Without arms or legs, without eyeholes in their skulls, with limbs like those bloated things in Salvador Dali’s paintings!”

  “They were still of the human race, their souls were still immortal. Their legal murder was worse than madness. But after that we did come to our senses and start free clinics for the children of backward races, where the poor little wretches would get every care—”

  Pilbeam laughed curtly. “Apologies, Charley, but you’re telling me history I had a hand — a finger in. Sure, you have the propaganda angle off pat. But these so-called backward races — they were the ones who didn’t do the legal murder! They loved their horrors and let them live. So we came round to thinking we needed their horrors, to prop our future. I told you, it’s an economic war. The democracies — and our friends in the Communist community — need a new generation, however come by, to work in their assembly lines and consume their goods… Hence this stinking war, as we quarrel over what’s left! Heck, a mad world, my masters! Drink up, Sergeant! Let’s have a toast — to the future generation of consumers — however many heads or assholes they have!”

  As Timberlane and Pilbeam laughed, Charley rose. “I must be going now,” he said. “I’ve a guard duty at eight tomorrow morning, and I have to get my kit cleaned. Good night, gentlemen.”

  The other two filled up their glasses when he had gone, instinctively settling more closely together.

  “Bit of a weeping Jesus, isn’t he?” Pilbearn asked.

  “He’s a quiet fellow,” Timberlane said. “Useful to have around when there’s any trouble, as I discovered today. That’s one thing about these religious boys — they reckon that if they are on God’s side, then the enemy must be on the devil’s, and so they have no qualms about giving it to ’em hot and strong.”

  Pilbeam regarded him half smiling through a cloud of cigar smoke. “You’re a different type.”

  “In some ways. I’m trying to forget there will be a funeral service for our boys tomorrow — Charley’s trying to remember.”

  “There’ll be a burial in our lines for my buddy and the driver. It’ll delay my getting away.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  “Yup, going back to the States. Get a GEM down to Kohima, then catch an orbit jet home to Washington, D.C. My work here is done.”

  “What is your work, Jack, or should I not ask?”

  “Right now, I’m on detachment from Childsweep, recruiting for a new world-wide project.” He stopped talking and focused more sharply on Timberlane. “Say, Algy, would you mind if we took a turn outside and got a little of that Assamese air to my sinuses?”

  “By all means.” The temperature had dropped sharply, reminding them that they were almost ten thousand feet above sea level. Instinctively they struck up a brisk pace. Pilbeam threw down the end of his cheroot and ground it into the turf. The moon hung like an undescended testicle low in the belly of the sky. One night bird emphasized the stillness of the rest of creation.

  “Too bad the Big Accident surrounded the globe with radiations and made space travel almost impossible,” Pilbeam said. “There might have been a way of escape from our Earthborn madness in the stars. My old man was a great believer in space travel, used to read all the literature. A great optimist by nature — that’s why failure came so hard to him. I was telling your friend Charley, Dad killed himself last month. I’m still trying to come to terms with it.”

  “It’s always a hard thing, to get over a father’s death. You can’t help taking it personally. It’s a — well, a sort of insult, when it’s someone that was dear to you and full of life.”

  “You sound as if you know something about it.”

  “Something. Like thousands of other people, my father committed suicide too. I was a child at the time. I don’t know whether that makes it better or worse… You were close to your old man?”

  “No. Maybe that’s why I kick against it so hard. I could have been close. I wasted the opportunity. To hell with it, any way.” A katabatic wind was growing, pouring down from the higher slopes above the camp. They walked with their hands in their pockets. In silence, Pilbeam recalled how his father had encouraged his idealism. “Don’t come into the record business, son,” he had said. “It’ll get by without you. Join Childsweep, if you want to.” Pilbeam joined Childsweep when he was sixteen, starting somewhere near the bottom of the organization.

  Childsweep’s greatest achievement was the establishment of three Children’s Centres, near Washington, Karachi, and Singapore. Here the world’s children born after the Accident were brought, where parental consent could be won, to be trained to live with their deformities and with the crisis-ridden society in which they found themselves.

  The experiment was not an unqualified success. The shortage of children was acute — at one time, there were three psychiatrists to every child. But it was an attempt to make amends. Pilbeam, working in Karachi, was almost happy. Then the children became the subject of an international dispute. Finally war broke out. When it developed into a more desperate phase, both the Singapore and the Karachi Children’s Centres were bombed from orbital automatic satellites and destroyed. Pilbeam escaped and flew back to Washington with a minor leg wound, in time to learn of his father’s suicide.

  After a minute’s silence, Pilbeam said, “I didn’t drag you out into the night air to mope but to put a proposition to you. I have a job for you. A real job, a life’s job. I have the power to fix it with your Commanding Officer if you agree—”

  “Hey, not so fast!” Timberlane cried, spreading his hands in protest. “I don’t want a job. I’ve got a job — saving any kids I can find lurking in these hills.”

  “This is a real job, not a vacation for gun-toting nursemaids. The most responsible job ever thought up. I back my hunches, and I’m certain you are the sort of guy that would suit. I can fix it so’s you fly back to the U.S. with me tomorrow.”

  “Oh no, I’ve got a girl back in England I’m very fond of, and I’m due for leave at the end of next week. I’m not volunteering, thanks all the same for the compliment.”

  Pilbearn stopped and faced Timberlane. “We’ll fly your girl out to Washington. Money’s no bother, believe me. At least let me tell you about the deal. You see, sociologically and economically, we live in very interesting times, provided you can be detached enough to view it in that light. So a universities study group with corporation and government backing has been set up to study and record what goes on. You won’t have heard of the group — it’s new and it’s being kept out of the news. It calls itself Documentation of Universal Contemporary History — DOUCH for short. We need recruits to op
erate in all countries. Come back to my billet and meet Bill Dyson, who’s i/c the project for S.E. Asia, and we’ll give you the dope.”

  “This is crazy. I can’t join. You mean you’d fly Martha out of England to meet me?”

  “Why not? You know the way England is going — way back into the darkness, under this new government and wartime conditions. You’d both be better off in America for a while, while we trained you. That’s a big consideration, isn’t it?” He caught the look on Timberlane’s face and added, “You don’t have to make up your mind at once.”

  “I can’t… How long do I have to think about it?”

  Pilbeam looked at his watch and scratched his skull with a fingernail. “Till we’ve got another drink down our throats, shall we say?”

  * * *

  On the dusty airstrip at Kohima, two men shook hands. “I feel bad about leaving like this, Charley.”

  “The C.O. must feel even worse.”

  “He took it like a lamb. What sort of blackmail Pilbeam used, I’ll never know.”

  A moment of awkward silence, then Charley said, “I wish I was coming with you. You’ve been a good friend.”

  “Your country needs you, Charley, don’t kid yourself.”

  But Charley only said, “I might have been coming with you if I’d been good enough.”

  Embarrassed, Timberlane climbed the steps to the plane and turned to wave. They took a last look at each other before he ducked inside.

  The orbit jet blasted off through the livid evening, heading on a transpolar parabola for the opposite side of the globe. The sun bumped over the western lip of the world, while far below them the land was tawny with a confusion of dark and light.

  Jack Pilbeam, Algy Timberlane, and Bill Dyson sat together, talking very little at first. Dyson was a thick-set individual, as tough-looking as Pilbeam was scholarly, with a bald head and a genial smile. He was as relaxed as Pilbeam was highly strung. Although no more than ten years senior to Timberlane, he gave the impression of being a much older man.