The Anti-Death League

by Kingsley Amis

"Roger. Out."

  During this, Hunter had been leaning against the doorpost of the vehicle drinking from his water-container, which did not contain only water. He picked out Churchill from the group of S1 officers sitting in a semicircle on the grass by the bunker, and stared at the back of his neck for some time. Then he settled down in a comfortable hollow in the ground a few yards away and took a paperback novel from his haversack. He had difficulty in finding his place in this and in remembering the main trend of the plot. Finally he started again at the beginning, but after a few minutes put the book aside and picked up his water-container. He sat in the hollow slowly drinking this down and smoking while O'Neill talked on and Leonard kept quiet in his car.

  Eventually the briefing ended and Isaacs went through some weapon drill with one of the rifles. Hunter took some of this in, but soon began to feel drowsy. He had not time to fall asleep, however, when the group at the bunker began to break up. He got to his feet.

  Churchill saw him at once and the two hurried towards each other.

  "It's come, has it?"

  "Yes," said Hunter. "Bad news."

  Churchill's mouth opened a little and closed again. "I see."

  "Would you like a drink?"

  "Yes."

  He took the container from Hunter and drank what was there.

  "Thanks."

  "What are you going to do now?"

  "I'm going to see the Colonel and ask for a short pass on compassionate grounds. I told him a bit about this yesterday. Will you drive me to Lucy's?"

  "Of course."

  "I'll see you at your jeep in a few minutes."

  As Hunter moved away, Leonard turned in the seat of his car and caught his eye.

  "How's he taking it?"

  "I don't know," said Hunter. "I can't tell."

  "I'm sure he's a good brave lad. It'll bring out the best in him."

  "I expect so. I hope it brings out the best in her too."

  "Hullo, Padlock. Fox calling. No sign of Optimus. I say again, no sign of Optimus. Over."

  "Hullo, Fox," said Leonard into his microphone. "Roger. Out."

  He looked up, knuckling the sweat off his dark upper lip. His earlier animation had departed.

  "I can't think where he's got to," he said accusingly. "Has he stopped for a kip or what? The defense detachment ought to have spotted him fifteen or twenty minutes ago."

  "Don't worry, he'll turn up. I'll see you later."

  "Hullo, George," Leonard was saying as Hunter left him.

  "I'm sorry I've been so long, Max," said Churchill when he appeared. "I had to clear this with Venables as well. I've got until oh-nine-hundred hours tomorrow."

  "Good."

  Hunter reversed his jeep out of the line of vehicles and they moved slowly down the rough track up which the convoy had crawled a couple of hours earlier. At first the soil was covered only in thin grass, with outcroppings of grey rock here and there, but presently ferns and low bushes appeared, and by the time they had joined a metaled road, a single carriageway with passing places, they were in wooded country. The greens of the foliage were very brilliant and the undergrowth dense for England. At one point a small stream ran down among rocks. Churchill looked out of the window at it and said,

  "I knew this was going to happen."

  "No you didn't, James. You thought it might happen and now it has. It's nothing to do with anything else that's happened. The fact that you know about some things can't cause other things to happen. Don't make patterns out of coincidences. All pattern-making is bad."

  "The other night you said you agreed with me. About the node."

  "I said I saw what you meant. I didn't want to argue with you then. I don't now, either. I just think that reading significances into things makes them worse, not better."

  "I'd sooner do that than concentrate on… And I'm not creating a pattern, I'm recognizing the pattern that's been there all along. The over-all pattern. It's an evil one. It's got death in it, you see."

  "You mustn't talk like that. The whole thing is totally random. All chance. Nothing and nobody behind it or in it or anywhere at all."

  "I know there's nobody there. But there are such things as patterns, even when we know nobody willed them. Runs of bad luck, as I said. And a system that runs itself is still a system. You don't have to believe in a weather god to find a climate unbearable."

  "Your job is to find a way of making this bearable. Never mind about whether it ought to be bearable."

  "Yes, I'm going to try. I don't want to talk any more now."

  When they arrived, Lucy came out of the drawing-room and kissed them both. She had been crying.

  "How is she?" asked Churchill.

  "She's taking it very well. At least I think she is. She hasn't said anything. She's lying down at the moment."

  "Right. Thanks for the lift, Max."

  When Churchill had gone, Lucy said, "Come and have a drink."

  "Thank you, I do rather fancy one."

  They sat down side by side on a couch in the drawing-room. Hunter had never seen the place before when it was not littered with bottles of gin, bottles of tonic, bowls of melting ice and overflowing ashtrays. With the sunlight slanting in and the furniture in slightly unfamiliar positions, the room looked as if it had turned over a new leaf. In view of what had happened, perhaps this might turn out to be so.

  "How bad is the news? Are there any details?"

  "It's cancer." Lucy spoke more hoarsely than usual. "That's as much as they say they know. She's to go in tomorrow to be operated on and to have treatment."

  "Good. They're getting on with it, then."

  "Max, what causes these things?"

  "Nobody knows. There are plenty of theories."

  "Can it be caused by what happens to you? You know, the kind of life you have?"

  "That's probably one of the theories."

  "She told me last night she thought it might be, if she turned out to have it, perhaps it was because of her life before she met James, and he came along just too late. Wouldn't that be awful?"

  Her eyes filled with tears. Hunter put his arm round her.

  "No more awful than what we know has happened," he said.

  "Why did it have to happen to her?"

  "It happens to bad people too. It's pure luck of the draw, love."

  "What sort of chance do you think she's got?"

  "Oh, pretty good, I should say, where she's got it. They can…"

  "Yes. Can you stay to lunch?"

  "I'd like to, but I'll have to go back to this absurd exercise they're having. It'll be finished by this evening. I'll come over then if I can."

  "Do try. Nobody else is coming."

  They had another drink, in almost total silence, and then Hunter said he must go. With Lucy's permission he refilled most of his water-container from a nearby bottle and topped it up with a little water. He was going to turn down her offer of an unopened half-bottle in addition when he found that jettisoning his luncheon rations-sandwiches of smoked salmon and of chicken liver pâté- made just the right-shaped space in his haversack. On his way out he stopped at the foot of the stairs and listened. He could hear nothing.

  When he was still three or four miles short of the assembly point on his way back, a monstrous vibrating clamor filled his ears and seemed to make his jeep tremble in sympathy. He looked out and up and saw that one of the helicopters was matching his speed and course at treetop height. After half a minute or so, its crew presumably satisfied by a close inspection of the white cross painted on the hood-an emblem common to all vehicles on the exercise- the machine sheered off.

  A little later, Hunter caught up with a file of men in battle order trudging ill-naturedly along the side of the road. He pulled up alongside the NCO at their head.

  "What's going on, Sergeant?"

  "Don't know, sir. Sergeant-major got a message over the walkie-talkie… Okay, lads, take it easy a minute."

  Muttering, the men sat down on the verg
e or leaned against the grassy bank beyond it. It was clear that they had done a lot of swearing up until the moment of Hunter's arrival, and would do more as soon as he was gone, at the latest.

  "But what's it all about?"

  "Don't know, sir. We've got a rendezvous fixed somewhere in this wood along here. The sergeant-major said something about carrying out a sweep of the area. Looks like it'll take us all day, sir."

  "Whose orders are these?"

  "Captain Leonard's, sir."

  The muttering swelled. Phrases became distinguishable.

  "I see. Well, I'll make sure there's a hot meal laid on for everybody as soon as they get back to camp."

  "Thanks very much, sir."

  As Hunter drove on, his eyes, which had become rather glazed over in the preceding hour or two, brightened again. When he had put a few bends between himself and the party on foot, he stopped again and drank from his water-container. At the junction with the track that led up to the assembly point he was waved down by a corporal standing on the verge.

  "You'd better not go all the way up, sir. They're shooting one of those things off in a minute. Everybody who's not officially allowed in the bunker has got to keep this side of the ridge."

  "Thank you, I'll manage."

  Hunter took the jeep another couple of hundred yards until he reached a point where, by engaging four-wheel drive, he was able to move it off the track. He got out and clambered up between bushes to the lip of the depression in which the bunker lay. It was in fact almost immediately below him and quite near enough for him to make out Venables and Isaacs standing together at one end. The tank Hunter had noticed earlier was to be seen at the far end of the valley, presumably unoccupied.

  In the bunker, matters seemed to be coming to a head. An officer stood on the fire-step in the aiming position. O'Neill appeared and took up a position beside him. Everybody became quite still. After some consideration, Hunter dropped down behind a hummock and peered over the top of it. A moment later he heard O'Neill's voice, high-pitched and clear.

  "Fire."

  There was the sharp knocking bang of an ordinary rifle cartridge, and then what might almost have been a small piece of the sun came into being across the valley where the tank was. During the instant it was there, everything in that direction went vague and overcast. A bolster of warmish air struck Hunter quite hard in the face. Finally a very low-pitched tearing noise, like a short extract from a peal of thunder, pressed against his ears, and a balloon of dark grey smoke expanded rapidly outwards and upwards from the target area.

  Voices could be heard from the bunker. The officer who had fired ejected the spent round from the breech of his rifle. O'Neill started lecturing again. Hunter watched the smoke for a minute or two, during which time it grew only slightly thinner. Nothing of any substance seemed about to happen next. After his years of training, Hunter was able to recognize without difficulty the opening moments of one of those long delays, rendered absolutely featureless by the impossibility of forecasting how as well as when they will end, which make up so much of Service life. He waited until the smoke had cleared enough to give him a view of the blackish and reddish patch of earth where the tank had been, folded and furrowed as if an oversized plow with a very blunt colter had been briefly at it. Then he went back down the ridge and got into his jeep and drove it to the assembly point.

  Here there was a scene of some animation. One party of men under a sergeant was arriving, another leaving. The morale of both parties seemed closely similar to that of the one Hunter had met on the road. Two walkie-talkie sets were in simultaneous operation; a third was being dismembered by a couple of signalers. A motorcyclist was trying to start his machine. Somebody was backing his jeep out of the line of transport, hooting at a group who stood in his path. A helicopter rose from behind the ridge, where it had presumably been sheltering while the shot was taken, and began to approach. Another appeared farther off.

  At the center of all this was Leonard, sweating a great deal, talking to two NCOs in alternation, walking jerkily from one of the functioning walkie-talkies to the other, finally running to his car and shouting into his microphone.

  When the helicopters had landed and things were a little calmer, Hunter went up to Ross-Donaldson, who looked interested but not involved.

  "Whence all the panic?"

  "It's an obvious case of group emotion and the force of the example of authority working in push-pull. The Services afford an almost uniquely favorable environment for this effect. Evidently, it's by no means confined to our own era. There's been a series on historic paraneurotic débâcles in the Military Quarterly, beginning with the failure of that Athenian night-operation on the heights above Syracuse."

  Hunter lit a cigarette. "What went wrong this time?"

  "Leonard was expecting this Best person to arrive in the vicinity for purposes of espionage, supposedly. I expect you know about that."

  "I did hear something, yes."

  "Everybody seems to have done. Well, Best hasn't arrived. According to Leonard he should have been spotted something like two hours ago. So he's got to be found, it appears. For which purpose men are being taken out of the cordon and the defense detachment and grouped for a sweep. A simple enough concept, you'd have thought, but unexpectedly intractable in practice."

  "I see he's getting the whirlybirds on to it," said Hunter, nodding in the direction of Leonard, who was talking and gesticulating to the helicopter pilots.

  "Quite useless. Over most of the exercise area the cover's good enough for even an inexperienced solitary man to hide from the air. The only exception is this valley-which incidentally looks like an infilled glacial lake, wouldn't you agree?-and its immediate approaches, and if he'd got so far he'd have been picked up by ground observation. Would you care for a hand of piquet?"

  "Very much."

  They went over to Ross-Donaldson's jeep, which proved to be carrying a number of supernumerary stores. Within a short time two folding chairs in moss-colored canvas and unvarnished wood, a small card-table and a green and white golfing umbrella with an extending shaft had been unloaded and erected. They took their seats. Ross-Donaldson brought out two new packs of cards from his haversack and unsealed them.

  "This is nice," said Hunter.

  "I'm glad you like it. Champagne?"

  "Thank you."

  At a nod from his master, Ross-Donaldson's batman went and fetched from the jeep a metal cylinder about the size of an eight-inch naval shell, and two silver tankards. The cylinder turned out to be a thermos container and to have in it a very well-chilled magnum of Krug 1955. This was opened and poured.

  "Mm," said Ross-Donaldson, sipping. "Perhaps a little too cold."

  "It seems just right to me."

  "Well, the situation will improve if we merely replace the lid lightly on it instead of clamping it down. Shall we just play a short game and then see how matters stand? I shouldn't like to predict how long it'll take Leonard and his comitadji to carry out their evolutions. Cut."

  "They've only got a bit over a mile to walk once they start, haven't they? It shouldn't take them all night. What do you think, a florin a point?"

  "Right. It's rather broken country, though, and he hasn't really got enough men for the job, so he'll have to zig-zag them. Leaving one."

  "If you ask me," said Hunter abstractedly, "Best has slipped back through the cordon. Or if he hasn't already, he won't have much trouble doing it now, with the cordon thinned down to give Leonard his sweep party. Point of five."

  "Not good. My feeling exactly. Do you think this Best really is a spy? You know him better than anybody, I suppose."

  "Tierce to a knave. I simply couldn't say. Brian certainly seems to think so."

  "Not good. How much is that worth, in your view?"

  Hunter hesitated. "Oh, quite a lot. He strikes me as pretty competent."

  "I've known you to treat him as if you thought he was a bit of a joke."

  "Only as a man. I don'
t expect a Security officer to make much of a score as regards ordinary intelligence and so on."

  "Don't you? I see. What else have you got?"

  "Sorry. Three knaves. But I don't know much about Security."

  "Do you think most people around the place look on Leonard as pretty competent?"

  "As far as I know, yes. What do you feel about him in that way?"

  Another rifle-shot and summarized thunderclap made Hunter start violently, though without causing him to spill his drink. Ross-Donaldson remained unmoved.

  "Have some more champagne," he said when Hunter had recovered himself. "Now where were we? Not good."

  "Oh dear. And now I suppose I've got to lead."

  At the end of the short game Hunter was just over four hundred points down.

  "I don't believe you know the odds properly," said Ross-Donaldson. "And your memory, if I may say so, is appalling."

  "A great advantage in most of the dealings of life, though not, admittedly, at piquet. Shall we go on?"

  Ross-Donaldson took a Service notebook from his top jacket pocket. That makes just… three hundred and forty-eight pounds eleven shillings you owe me so far this month. I think I'll stroll over and see if anything's happening. Help yourself while I'm gone."

  The sun, the champagne, and the contents of his water-container had made Hunter agreeably muzzy. The game had bored him, though not actively. He wished he had made it a hundred pounds a point instead of a florin. Even that, however, might not have sharpened his interest by anything like one hundred thousand per cent. Pouring more champagne, he decided that life was divided into wishing something was at stake when nothing was and wishing nothing was when something was.

  A quarter of an hour went by in this sort of way. Then Ross-Donaldson came back.

  "No result as yet," he said. "They've finished one sweep and have started another at right angles to the first. Two more helicopters have arrived. There's an argument raging over the air because the pilots won't go as low as Leonard wants them to."

  "Where is he?"

  "Out in the field at the head of his troops."

  "You know," said Hunter thoughtfully, "if Best is hiding there'd be one very effective way of bringing him into the open."