“I’ll tell you what changed.” He shook the boot at her. “Modern medicine arrived. Everything had a cure. Malaria was wiped out along with all the other diseases that had been killing people young and keeping the population down. Death control arrived. Old people lived longer. More babies lived who would have died, and now they grow up into old people who live longer still. People are still being fed into the world just as fast — they’re just not being taken out of it at the same rate. Three are born for every two that die. So the population doubles and doubles — and keeps on doubling at a quicker rate all the time. We got a plague of people, a disease of people infesting the world. We got more people who are living longer. Less people have to be born, that’s the answer. We got death control — we got to match it with birth control.”
“I still don’t see how you can when people still think it has something to do with killing babies.”
“Stop with the dead babies!” Sol shouted, and heaved the boot the length of the room. “There are no babies involved in this — alive or dead — except in the pointed heads of the idiots who repeat what they have heard without understanding a word of it. Present company excepted,” he added in a not too sincere voice. “How can you kill something that never existed? We’re all winners in the ovarian derby, yet I never heard anyone crying about the — if you will excuse the biological term — the sperm who were the losers in the race.”
“Sol — what on earth are you talking about?”
“The ovarian derby. Every time an egg is fertilized there are a couple of million sperm swimming along, racing along trying to do the job. Only one of them can win the derby, since the very instant fertilization takes place all the rest of them are out in the cold. Does anyone give a damn about the millions of sperm that don’t make it? The answer is no. So what are all the complicated rhythm charts, devices, pills, caps and drugs that are used for birth control? Nothing but ways of seeing that
“When you put it that way, I guess they don’t. But if it is that simple how come nothing was ever done before this?”
Sol breathed a long and tremulous sigh and gloomily retrieved the boot and went back to polishing it.
“Shirl,” he said, “if I could answer that they would probably make me President tomorrow. Nothing is ever that simple when it comes down to finding an answer. Everyone has got their own ideas and they push them and say to hell with everyone else. That’s the history of the human race. It got us on top, only now it is pushing us off. The thing is that people will put up with any kind of discomfort, and dying babies, and old age at thirty as long as it has always been that way. Try to get them to change and they fight you, even while they’re dying, saying it was good enough for grandpa so it’s good enough for me. Bango, dead. When the UN sprayed the houses with DDT in Mexico — to kill the mosquitoes who carried malaria that killed the people — they had to have soldiers hold the people back so they could spray. The locals didn’t like that white stuff on the furniture, didn’t look good. I saw it myself. But that was the rarity. Death control slid into the world mostly without people even knowing it. Doctors used better and better drugs, water supplies improved, public health people saw to it that diseases didn’t spread the way they used to. It came about almost naturally without hardly being noticed, and now we got too many people in the world. And something has to be done about it. But doing
“Yet it does seem an intrusion of privacy, Sol. Telling people they can’t have any children.”
“Stop it! We’re almost back to the dead babies again! Birth control doesn’t mean no children. It just means that people have a choice how they want to live. Like rutting, unthinking, breeding animals — or like reasoning creatures. Will a married couple have one, two or three children — whatever number will keep the world population steady and provide a full life of opportunity for everyone? Or will they have four, five or six, unthinking and uncaring, and raise them in hunger and cold and misery? Like that world out there,” he added, pointing out of the window.
“If the world is like that — then everyone must be unthinking and selfish, like you say.”
“No — I think better of the human race. They’ve just never been told, they’ve been born animals and died animals, too many of them. I blame the stinking politicians and so-called public leaders who have avoided the issue and covered it up because it was controversial and what the hell, it will be years before it matters and I’m going to get mine now. So mankind gobbled in a century all the world’s resources that had taken millions of years to store up, and no one on the top gave a damn or listened to all the voices that were trying to warn them, they just let us overproduce and overconsume, until now the oil is gone, the topsoil depleted and washed away, the trees chopped down, the animals extinct, the earth poisoned, and all we have to show for this is seven billion people fighting over the scraps that are left, living a miserable existence — and still breeding without control. So I say the time has come to stand up and be counted.”
Sol pushed his feet into the boots, laced them up and tied them. He put on a heavy sweater, then took an ancient, moth-eaten battle jacket from the wardrobe. A row of ribbons drew a line of color across the olive drab, and under them were a sharpshooter’s medal and a technical-school badge. “It must have shrunk,” Sol said, grunting as he struggled to close it over his stomach. Then he wrapped a scarf around his neck and shrugged into his ancient, battered overcoat.
“Where are you going?” Shirl asked, baffled.
“To make a statement. To ask for trouble as our friend Andy told me. I’m seventy-five years old and I reached this venerable state by staying out of trouble, keeping my mouth shut and not volunteering, just like I learned in the Army. Maybe there were too many guys in the world like me, I don’t know. Maybe I should have made my protest a lot earlier, but I never saw anything I felt like protesting about — which I do now. The forces of darkness and the forces of light, they’re meeting today. I’m going to join with the forces of light” He jammed a woolen watch cap down over his ears and stalked to the door.
“Sol, what on earth are you talking about? Tell me, please,” Shirl begged, not knowing whether to laugh or to cry.
“There’s a rally. The Save Our Babies nuts are marching on City Hall, trying to lick the Emergency Bill. There’s another meeting, of people in favor of the bill, and the bigger the turnout there, the better. If enough people stand up and shout they might be heard, maybe the bill will get through Congress this time. Maybe.”
“Sol…” she called out, but the door was closed.
Andy brought him home, late that night, helping the two ambulance men carry the stretcher up the stairs. Sol was strapped to the stretcher, white faced and unconscious, breathing heavily.
“There was a street fight,” Andy said, “almost a riot when the march started. Sol was in it. He got knocked down. His hip is broken.” He looked at her, unsmiling and tired, as the stretcher was carried in.
“That can be very serious with old people,” he said.
5
There was a thin crust of ice on the water, and it crackled and broke when Billy pushed the can down through it. As he climbed back up the stairs he saw that another rusted metal step had been exposed. They had dipped a lot of water out of the compartment, but it still appeared to be at least half full.
“There’s a little ice on top, but I don’t think it can freeze all the way down solid,” he told Peter as he closed and dogged shut the door. “There’s still plenty of water there, plenty.”
He measured the water carefully every day and locked the door on it as though it were a bank vault full of money. Why not? It was as good as money. As long as the water shortage continued they could get a good price for it, all the D’s they needed to keep warm and eat well.
“How about that, Pete?” he said, hanging the can from the bracket over the seacoal fire. “Did you ever stop to think that we can eat this water? Because we can sell it and buy food, that’s why.”
Peter squatted on his hams, staring fixedly out the door, and paid no attention until Billy shouted to him and repeated what he had said. Peter shook his head, unhappily.
“Whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame,” he intoned. “I have explained to you, Billy, we are approaching the end of all material things. If you covet them you are lost…”
