Greybeard

“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 offever? 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 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 -“