The Anti-Death League

by Kingsley Amis

  Screwing up his face and making faint trumpeting noises, Jagger searched his pockets. Finally he produced the piece of paper in question and vainly tried to flatten it out on his thigh.

  "Quite a nice piece," he said, "in a rather unshaped colloquial vein. But the unshaped part's deliberate, of course. How long did you spend on it?"

  "About twenty minutes."

  "I'd have said longer. There's been pains taken, I can tell that. Still, what I'm on about is that, whereas there are a number of illiteracies in spelling, the punctuation is correct all through. Now that's odd, you see. For every twenty people who can spell there's hardly one who can punctuate. Pretty well everyone who can punctuate can spell as a matter of course. So our man isn't really semi-illiterate, he's just pretending to be. Why should he do that? To give the impression that any old potato-peeler or boot-polisher might have written the thing. Right. Now Leonard says he's certain the writer's one of the inner ring, the S1 Group, who's got a fit of the horrors about what he's got to do in Operation Apollo. From some points of view that's a fair enough deduction. But it just struck me that it isn't a necessary one. If you base your reasoning on your subject-matter, your mode of approach and suchlike, you don't quite see what you'd expect to see. You'd expect a fellow who was against the Apollo caper to be going on about men. Generals. Politicians. Scientists. People, that's to say, not the Father Almighty. A bit subtle, that, perhaps, but after all we are dealing with poetry. So I'm looking for an educated man who quite likely isn't in the S1 Group. Then I hear friend Deering telling Leonard that the camp search party turned up a typewriter, and I recall you, as officer in charge, reporting that nothing significant was found, and the typewriter's obviously significant, whatever it was significant of, and I've got you. Mind you, there was plenty of other stuff-you were about when the rifle was pinched, you put Leonard on to Best, you don't like Best, et cetera. But the typewriter was what clinched it for me. Which reminds me. You still haven't said how you let the bloody thing get found."

  Hunter laughed silently. "That's very straightforward," he said. "I was pissed when I hid it and I'd already forgotten where by the time I got into bed. Like wiping a slate."

  "Mm." Jagger topped up his glass. "The only other thing I'd like you to tell me, that's if you feel like it, is your motive. No. Not your motive. Scrub that. I know your motive. Your occasion. What started you off on your poem and your notes?"

  There was a long and virtually total silence. Eventually Hunter said,

  "I've never been particularly keen on having to think about things. And on things that make you think about things. You know, like music and all that. Love's another one. I joined the Army specially to get away from them. I will say it worked jolly well for a time. But then quite recently I suddenly found I'd fallen in love with somebody in a more completely disastrous fashion than ever before. At first sight, too. I got as drunk as I could to try to put it behind me. No good. Then the somebody's best friend went and died, and I decided I'd better cry out before I was hurt, when somebody else was hurt, in fact. Hence the poem. Then the iove thing nearly turned out my way, but it didn't at all when it came to it, because the somebody was thinking of the dead friend. That really got me down. Hence the Anti-Death League. Then a friend of mine fell in love and his girl got cancer, as you heard. That more or less finished me off. Hence the rifle and the priory. As a way of voicing some sort of objection. Plus a bit of revenge thrown in."

  "It wasn't very practical," said Jagger. "Any of it."

  "No, it wasn't. But sometimes you've got to be impractical and illogical and a bit useless, because the only alternative is to do nothing at all, and that would be simply offensive. You just can't let things like this go sliding past without any kind of remark, as if nobody noticed or cared. It won't do."

  After another silence, Jagger said,

  "How do you feel about it now?"

  "A good question. It embarrasses me slightly, I think. It didn't altogether work the way I'd expected it to. On me, that is. I keep feeling I've gone too far in some way."

  "Then you don't really see yourself rushing off some fine morning and dynamiting Westminster Abbey?"

  "No, not really. Far too repetitive, for one thing."

  "See you stick to that. If you get up to any more of your tricks you might land me in some bad trouble."

  "Any…"

  "Yes," said Jagger, nodding vigorously. "That's right. You've got it. I'm not going to do anything about it. On account of several considerations. Consideration one. You saved my life just now. I take very kindly to that type of thing. Consideration two. It just so happens I've got it in for God the Father Almighty a bit on my own account. He took my daughter off me the year before last. Thing called disseminated L.E. A disease of the connective tissue. There's not a lot to see, except a red rash on the face that gets worse in the light, so she couldn't go out in the sun. Twenty, she was. Engaged. All that. You know, Hunter, if you ever get round to properly setting up your League you could do worse than rope me in. You can always find me via the Ministry."

  "Are you serious?"

  "As serious as you."

  "Yes. Are there any other considerations?"

  "Yes, there's consideration three, which is much more important than the other two. The case is closed. It's better all round that it stays closed. Even if Best recovers we wouldn't bring any charge against him. He was mad at the time of what he's supposed to have done. The real thing, though, is that to have the whole business stirred up all over again might just conceivably interfere with the tremendous success we've had with Operation Apollo."

  "Had?" said Hunter. "Aren't you being a bit previous?"

  "Oh no. It's succeeded already, old lad. I got the news about an hour ago, just before old Deering started cutting up. I'm afraid I can't say any more. You may find out what I'm talking about in due course. Anyway, we're all highly delighted at the way things have gone. Well. What are you going to do with yourself when this place packs up? I'll tell you what I think you ought to do. Do you mind? I think you ought to get out of the buggering Army and find yourself a nice, decent, steady young somebody and settle down with the somebody. It's been done before now."

  Hunter picked up the ewer and filled Jagger's glass.

  "You know about style," he said. "But settle down? And throw away the marvelous career I've just opened up for myself? No. I'm going to decide on somewhere nasty, somewhere really very nasty indeed, and get myself sent there. It was being shot at like that that put the idea into my head. I didn't know what it was like before. I found it most interesting in some way I can't quite put my finger on for the moment."

  "Sooner you than me. I didn't enjoy myself on that roof one bit, I don't mind telling you. Well…"

  After a couple of abortive tries and a bit of shrieking Jagger heaved a loudly ticking watch out of his top pocket and looked at it, then glared at it. He urged himself to his feet.

  "Christ," he muttered, "I'll have to run if I'm going to get fed."

  "Off tonight, are you?"

  "No, I've got a date up at that loony place. It's quite a way, isn't it?"

  "Forgive my curiosity, but who's your date with?"

  "If anyone wants to know, that fellow Mann, to ask after Best, but really those two pieces in leather who served you your coffee. I ran into them on their way out. I'm afraid I must have spent a bit of time chatting them up when I should have been finding out if you and Leonard needed a hand inside there. Sorry."

  "That's all right. You should have an entertaining evening."

  "You never know. I suppose you wouldn't fancy changing your mind and coming along to make up the number?"

  "No thanks. The setting would be wrong, somehow."

  "I see what you mean." Jagger's face became animated. "Here," he said, tapping Hunter on the shoulder, "imagine Leonard not telling us about those two when we were all discussing whether Best was mad or not. Any fellow who dresses women up in that rig-out must be off his trolley. A
nyway, you'd think it worth a mention. But Leonard didn't, even though he told me later he had noticed them when he went up to the place for lunch the other day. I pressed him and got him to admit it did strike him at the time as a bit unusual."

  "I'm afraid he's rather uninstructed in some ways."

  "Now then, you let him be. He's one of the best, is Brian Leonard. He's got first-class stuff in him. The only trouble is, he doesn't seem to get much luck. And that reminds me, my old Max. In the next couple of days you've got the chance of being a real good pal to our Brian. He's going to need one."

  "How much do you know about the psychology of the Chinese?" asked Ross-Donaldson.

  Leonard hesitated. He was still in a state of unrelieved gloom and foreboding at the ever-present thought of the way he had allowed Deering to steal secrets from under his nose. Bewilderment had been added when he arrived in response to Ross-Donaldson's unexpected summons to find that the latter had had his outer office cleared and an armed guard placed on its door. Leonard's breakfast of eggs bonne femme felt as if it had not quite completed its journey to his stomach.

  "Only what I learned in the basic training they give us," he said finally. "I've never done a course on it or anything."

  "No. Well, at the risk of covering familiar ground, let me just place the relevant point, which is that they suffer from an unusually wide schemata-data divergence. In practical terms, and as regards their attitudes to the West, this means that their ideology teaches them to despise us and think us stupid, while empirically they're forced into continual ad hoc respect for our efficiency and cunning. Consequently, any project aimed at deceiving them must contain elements of apparent stupidity and elements of apparent cunning in highly critical proportions delicately balanced. Let's just examine those sets of elements in turn as they appear in the project you and I have been concerned with over the past weeks.

  "First, the elements of apparent stupidity. At the outset, ostensibly in sole charge of Security arrangements for a uniquely secret Operation, we find you, an inexperienced officer working without assistants. When, later, assistants must obviously be furnished to watch Dr. Best, they're men of tested and proven incompetence. The Chinese agent, Deering, finds no difficulty whatever in becoming your servant, in which position he has at least putative access to your secret files. Your training for this project, by stressing the importance of supposed subtlety and encouraging you to keep those files in the most exposed place possible, ensured that that putative access had the best chance of becoming actual. To a Chinese mind, of course, and to lots of others as well, that supposed subtlety would appear as real stupidity. It was hardly expected that you yourself would train Deering in a highly unsophisticated method of getting at your files, but after some discussion it was agreed that this worked out substantially on the credit side. Finally, there was the almost unbelievable stroke of good fortune whereby you began to concentrate your efforts on Dr. Best, a dangerous man, certainly, but one totally unconnected with the business in hand.

  "So far, so incorrigibly, predictably, imperialistically stupid. Now as to… You look tired, Leonard. Would you care for a cup of tea?"

  Leonard thought of asking for sherry instead, then just nodded.

  "Milk and sugar?"

  "Milk. No sugar."

  Left alone, Leonard sat there without moving, hardly thinking. Until Ross-Donaldson came back, he spent his time wanting to be with Lucy.

  "What department do you belong to?" he asked without much curiosity.

  "Its name would mean nothing to you. It was set in being for this project alone and will shortly be disbanded. I'd like to fill in the other side of the picture now if I may. I hope I'm not boring you."

  "No."

  "Right. We've covered satisfactorily the elements of apparent stupidity. Now as to the elements of apparent cunning. The prime concern here was lavishness, the unstinting expenditure of time, energy and money on the pretense that this unit was created as a training establishment and briefing center for the use in war of tactical atomic weapons of a reasonably mature sort in unprece-dentedly far-forward areas. Here, incidentally, we achieved a rather elegant bonus. It'll do the Chinese High Command quite a durable bit of good to believe, or at the lowest to wonder whether, the British Army can dispose of nuclear hand-guns at infantry-section level. In fact, of course, the so-called NHW-17, or rather its ammunition, is far too expensive and troublesome to produce for its warlike employment to be practicable.

  "I was referring to lavishness in the expenditure of time, energy and money. Of these, money was probably the most important as, in the Eastern mind, a guarantee of genuineness. You perhaps recall from your training a famous World War I case in which Turkish Intelligence, having had certain fake Allied battle plans put in their way, became convinced of their authenticity largely on the grounds that a considerable sum in current notes had fallen into their hands under the same cover. The cost of the physical Security arrangements here was immense by Chinese standards, from the building of Hut D4 to the installing of closed-circuit television. So much outlay on a cover, on a deception, plus our apparent willingness to sacrifice, if need be, the secrecy of the NHW-17, must convince them that what lay behind the cover was genuine. The depth of our cunning was underwritten by the costliness of our deception."

  Here the tea arrived, brought in by a corporal whom Leonard remembered as having done far more than his fair share of swearing on the day of Exercise Nabob. The man glanced at him several times with an incipient grin that told of vicarious triumph. Nobody outside could have known just what Leonard was going through, but anybody with more than a week's service would have known that he was going through something.

  "Right," said Ross-Donaldson when the door of the outer office had shut. "All this means, in the simplest terms, that when the Chinese get the word from Deering that they stand to lose a million men in the third week of their invasion of the Indian sub-continent, and two and a half million in the fourth week, they're going to take him seriously. The peculiar horror of the weapon behind the cover, the weapon we were supposedly going to use on them as soon as they were over the Himalayas in substantial numbers, was an additional guarantee of authenticity: Western inhumanity, imperialist savagery and so forth. In fact, the horror was designed purely to horrify. Operation Apollo was impracticable from the start. Millions of non-combatants would have died in the sub-continent alone. But that was yet another guarantee of authenticity: capitalist indifference to Asian suffering.

  "The aim of the project, as you must see by now, was to frighten them off. For which purpose, clearly, they had to know all about the weapon behind the cover. It was your job, Leonard, to be seen trying hard and in vain to prevent the escape of that information. You succeeded admirably. Twelve days ago sufficient details of the weapon behind the cover left England on their way to Peking. Earlier than we'd counted on. We were very pleased with ourselves. But recently a couple of snags developed."

  Ross-Donaldson paused and looked at Leonard for some moments as if he very much wanted to see him clearly. For the first time since Leonard had known him he seemed at something of a loss. At length he said,

  "I suppose this must be something of a shock to you, Leonard. I'm sorry. I think too that to some extent you've suffered at my hands. In the general interest of distracting you from looking in the wrong, that's to say the right, direction I had to introduce you to a red herring or so. And I'm afraid I amused myself at your expense a couple of times. Perhaps you didn't notice. It seems to me now that I fell unduly under the sway of Hunter."

  "Max is a splendid officer."

  "Sufficiently gallant, it appears, but not a healthy influence, unfortunately. Would you like another cup of tea?"

  "No, thank you. Tell me the rest. What were these snags you mentioned?"

  "Two. One concerned the onward transmission of the information. We couldn't watch it all along the line for fear of being caught watching. It got as far as Albania and promptly vanished. You know w
hat the Albanians are. If it had stuck there we were in trouble. We were still looking for evidence of its arrival in China when snag number two developed. The rifle. That disturbed me a great deal, I'm afraid. There were two possible deductions. One was that our screening processes were at fault and Best was an agent after all, which would have meant that the vital information had indeed got stuck somewhere and Peking was still interested in the rifle. At this late date that would have been nothing short of disastrous. Jagger was inclined to that explanation at one stage. I tended to take the other view, the one that turned out to be correct, that Best was just a lunatic set on some paranoiac form of self-expression. But that was hardly more comforting. From the Chinese point of view the incident would look very suspicious. It didn't fit into any pattern. God knows what sort of pattern they might have made it fit into, and how long it would have taken them. I was disturbed so severely that I had to send for Jagger. I owe you an apology, Leonard, for being rather short with you yesterday morning. I held you responsible. Not that you weren't.

  "At any rate, things could have been worse. You and the others got rid of Best in good smart style. And any residual suspicions about the affair, if the opposition ever get to hear of it, will be more than offset by the splendid performance last evening, complete with fatal casualty, which they'll certainly get to hear of. Not even a Chinese could doubt that that was authentic."

  Ross-Donaldson leaned back in his chair, smoothed his paunch, and smiled. Then he turned authoritative.

  "I can now inform you," he said, dropping his voice, "that the project has succeeded. The information went through after all. The invasion is canceled. They're early signs, I gather, but unmistakable. We've won, Leonard. No Operation Apollo. No war. Well? Aren't you pleased?"