“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 cliche 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 of 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,”
