World Without Children

VI

He was in a ‘copter with a rope ladder dangling from it, hovering just over the bedroom window of Luther’s apartment Art was inside, but he wouldn’t climb out onto the ladder. George was about to pull the ladder up and tie a wrench to it when Art’s red, wild-eyed face appeared.

Hurry, hurry! Art was climbing up the ladder, and now the window next door opened and a man was leaning out, with a gun in his hand.

George was paralyzed with fear. He saw the man fire, and when he looked down, Art’s face was white and a thin spray of blood was whipping away from his body in the wind of the rotors.

He’s hit, George thought. He’ll fall.

George tilted the ’copter downward, toward the canal, but he was too late. Art fell, and the blue water of the canal turned red …

No, that was silly. All that was over and done With; they had come out of that all right. It was the Beaux Arts Ball that he had to worry about. His voice was bellowing out of the concealed playback machine, and everyone was turning to stare at him. He looked down, and saw that his witch-doctor’s robe was gone. He was standing there in the devil suit.

All the others were shouting, “There he is! He’s the one!

He ran, but the crowd got in his way; he couldn’t move fast enough. And just behind him was the stocky man with the gun. He couldn’t get away, death was behind him, the gun-barrel rising, the finger tightening on the trigger—

Ugh!

He sat up, looking uncomprehendingly at the strange patterns of light and shadow around him. His head hurt, and he couldn’t raise his hands. Someone flashed a light in his eyes. Dazzled, he said, “What—who are you? What are you doing?”

A voice said, “Bien” Someone got up from beside his cot, and two men, one in a white jacket, left the room. He could see them briefly in the light of the corridor outside. Another man, in a guard’s uniform, shut the barred door with a clang, and went away.

There was an interval long enough for him to come fully awake, and discover that his wrists were manacled to the sides of the cot. Then two guards appeared at the door, unlocked it and entered. One of them removed the manacles and helped him to his feet. He tried to throw off the man’s arm, but found that he was too weak; too weak, in fact, to stand by himself.

They led him along the corridor and into a small, brightly lit room where there was a heavy chair, bolted to the floor. They sat him in it and strapped his wrists down.

A white-jacketed man at the side of the room was removing a hypodermic from a sterilizer. He turned, fitted the needle to the transparent shaft, depressed the plunger and thrust the needle through the covering membrane of a bottle. He stepped toward George.

George gripped the arms of the chair, remembering what Art had told him about truth serums. “They’re not infallible. If you have a strong, balanced personality, and if you think up a good cover story and stick to it, truth serums won’t make you tell the truth.

I was at the ball, he thought rapidly, but I had nothing to do with the plot. I haven’t seen Luther, Art or Morey since that party at Luther’s. I don’t know where they are. I don’t know where they are. I ran from the police because I seduced a woman at the ball, and her boyfriend was angry with me. I was afraid he had made trouble for me with the police. That’s not good, but it will have to do.

He felt the coolness of evaporating alcohol on his arm, then the cold stab of the needle. I was at the ball, he told himself, but I had nothing to do with the plot. I haven’t seen Luther, Art, or Morey …or Luther, or Morey…

He was beginning to feel drowsy. The words tripped over each other in his head, became hopelessly jumbled.

There was a timeless, drowsy interval; then he became aware that a hot rubber sheath was being removed from his arm. His body was stiff, and his hands and feet were numb.

He opened his eyes. The white-jacketed man was stuffing something that clicked into an oblong box. He stowed the box away in a clip at the side of a massive instrument board on wheels, and an attendant pushed it out of the room.

The man looked at George, flexing the fingers of one hand in the palm of the other. “You gave us a hard time,” he said. “But you talked.”

George kept his mouth shut, even when the guards came back, unstrapped and returned him to his cell.

Probably the man had been bluffing; they were hoping that he could be tricked into talking by making him believe that he already had.

But early the next morning, he was transferred to another, a larger cell. In it were Luther, Art and Morey.

Art said, “You knew where we were all going to be yesterday. If the truth drug didn’t get it out of you, all they had to do was put a lie detector on you and show you a map—point out one area after another until you responded. It wasn’t your fault, George.”

That was the way it had been done, all right, but the knowledge didn’t make him feel any better. He sat down on the empty cot, elbows on his knees.

“I shouldn’t have got caught, he said.

“Could’ve happened to any of us,” Morey assured him.

They were silent a while, and then George said, “Where are we, by the way?” “S. P. headquarters on the Place de Concorde. They’ll move us to Berne for the trials, I suppose.” Art shrugged. “If they decide to have any trials.”

The day dragged by, then another and another. On the fourth day, they were told they were going to be moved in the afternoon, but nothing happened. They had no news of the outside world; they could only speculate how the movement was going without them. All four of them had been up for interrogation several times, and they were afraid that at least one of them had given up names and addresses under the truth serum. There was no way of knowing. If the network they had carefully built up had been uncovered, there was no hope left. The conspiracy was too young to recover from such a blow.

By tacit consent, they did not talk about anything they had done before their arrest. But Art, one afternoon, began speculating about the future. He spoke of it as if it were a foregone conclusion, as if they were as good as dead.

He said, “It would be interesting to see it. After a few more centuries, I expect things will begin to go to pot in a small way. Things like new construction. The population’s steadily declining, and you know there won’t be any new generations, so why build? And after that, why repair? A little later on, I’d guess that suicide would begin to be a factor again. When they begin to realize that if there is any point to the whole bloody business, the human race will never have a chance to find it out… Not much room for altruism any more.

“We’re here, and we’re the last, and that’s all. After that, nothing but the big dark and the big cold. Besides, it isn’t going to be very pleasant later on, and people will begin to see that, too. There’s a bottom limit to the size of population that can support an industrial economy. They’ll pass it; going down. Then what? Back to the land? A mocked-up feudal system?

“But then the process will start to accelerate, I should think. Wars. Plagues. Natural catastrophes. Crop failures. Looters and bandits. Every man for himself. And at the end—”

He smiled bitterly. “None ‘of us would be alive to see that, anyhow. Women’s life-span is still longer than ours. It’ll end up as a world of women — women without men. Lord!” He shook his head. “That goes beyond my imagination. I can’t visualize it, and I don’t want to. The little that I can see scares me silly.”

He looked at them as if he had forgotten they were there. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to turn this into a wake.”

George thought a good deal about Golightly, and the rest of that stubborn, irrational, power-hungry crew. He found that he didn’t hate them, but it made him feel somehow betrayed to realize that these were the best rulers Earth had been able to produce. Good administrators, good practical politicians, as Art had said —but little men, jealous of their position, fearful of new ideas. If that was the best the human race could do, perhaps it deserved what it was getting.

He voiced something of this, and got the disagreement from Luther that he had hoped for.

“We can do better, George. We have done better. In a normal world, no matter how bad things get, at least they change. If we were bringing up a flock of children now, one of them would be a better candidate for World President than Golightly. But as it is, we’re stuck with just about three generations all told, and we have to make the best of it…” His voice trailed off; none of them wanted to pursue that thought.

On the morning of the eighth day, guards came to take them away.

George turned to Luther. “In case they separate us, and we don’t see each other again—”

Luther took his hand warmly. They gripped hands all around. There were tears in Art’s owlish eyes, and in Luther’s, and even a suspicious brightness in Morey’s. George found that his own vision was blurring a trifle.

The guards led them down the corridor to an outer office with a long desk and a bench. They were told to sit down, and then a printed document and a pen was placed in front of each of them.

George stared bewilderedly at his. It seemed to say:

In return for due consideration, I hereby waive all claim for damages resulting from my mistaken arrest and detention by the Security Police, and further agree to waive my right of suit for false arrest against the Security Police and the United Nations of the World. In witness whereof I set my seal.

He looked at the others, then at the guard who was standing on the other side of the table.

“Sign,” said the guard, “and you’ll be released.”

Art bent suddenly and began to scribble on his sheet. The others followed suit. Not daring to speak, they looked at each other as the signed papers were taken away. Then a guard led them off, each to a separate cubicle. In his, George found the clothes he had been wearing when he was arrested, and all the contents of his pockets neatly stacked. He put on the clothing, still dazed. The guard, not touching him now, led him out through another outer office, through a lobby, where the other three joined him, and then to the sunlight of the portico.

The sounds of traffic came up to them; ’copters droned past in the sky over their heads; they heard a strain of music from somewhere down the great ave—

The guard reappeared and touched George’s elbow. “I was asked to give you this, monsieur,” he said, and put a slip of paper into George’s hand. Then he bowed and went back inside.

George unfolded it slowly, read it twice.

It said:

Come and see me as soon as you can.

Hilda

There was an address below the signature.

George passed the note to Morey, and the other two looked ever his shoulders.

“I don’t get it,” said George inadequately.

“No more do I,” said Luther. “But—let’s go!”

They found her on a terrace Overlooking the Champs Elysees. Joe Krueger, grinning like a youngster, got up from the table and stood aside as they converged on Hilda.

She smiled up at them. “I’m so glad,” she said. “Now kiss me nicely, each of you, and then sit down … You there, Luther, in the easy chair, then Morey, Art and George.”

They said hello to Joe. They took the coffee Cups Hilda passed around. And they stared at her.

“Hilda,” said Luther finally, “you consummate witch, what in the world did you do?”

She smiled at them happily. “Well,” she said, “I managed to get to see Golightly. It wasn’t easy to do, even though I know his granddaughter quite well. I had to convince her first, you see … No, you don’t see. You will, in a minute, though. I told him that he couldn’t stop people from having children by throwing you in jail. I told him that women had been breaking the birth prohibition for the last seventy years, to my own knowledge, and probably longer. And I proved it to him—I showed him a doctor’s report that stated I had been a mother myself.”

They stared at her. George felt as if the last prop of his own personal universe had been knocked out from under him.

“You, Hilda?” said Luther incredulously.

“Oh, yes.” She looked back at them, not smiling now, and laid her hand on Joe Krueger’s sleeve. “This is my son, gentlemen—my youngest son. I have three.”

There was a shocked silence.

Joe said, “She brought me up in a private estate in the Berk-shires, with some help from my brothers, but alone most of the time. She nursed me, took care of me when I was sick, and taught me everything she could. For twenty years … My twentieth birthday was two months ago.”

Luther said, “Hilda, do I understand that you began this absolutely alone?”

She smiled, but it was a different smile from the one they knew. Her face had changed subtly, George thought; there was a calm patience and wisdom in it that Had never been there before—or that she had never allowed them to see.

Her eyes softened, and she said, “I don’t blame you, darlings, because you don’t know—you can’t know. Poor things, you run the world, but you don’t understand what keeps it going.

“Anyhow, I told Golightly all that, and I presented a chemical analysis of Joe’s blood. He hasn’t had the longevity treatment yet, you know; that showed in the test. And then I gave him some statistics Joe had dug up. You’d better tell that part, Joe.”

“I was curious to know whether the incidence of amnesia had gone up since the Last War,” said Joe. “I had an idea that Other people besides Hilda had thought of that dodge. So I checked. It was up, way up. There was even an article about it in the North American Journal of Psychology, not so many years ago.”

Art muttered something in an irritated voice.

“Art?” said Hilda.

“Nothing. I saw that article; I remember it now. It didn’t make any impression on me.”

“Or on anybody, apparently,” said Joe “—luckily for us members of the younger generation.” He grinned. “Then I looked up some population figures and drew curves. You couldn’t prove anything that way, but it was significant if you knew the answer to begin with. After the War, the line went downward fairly sharply for about the first century, and then it began to level off just a little more than anyone had expected. At a rough guess, there are several hundred million people alive today who were born after the birth prohibition!”

Inside the apartment, a fax machine chuckled to itself and then sounded a clear note. Luther jumped, and George started to rise.

Hilda said, “You get it, will you, Joe?” The young man—it was astonishing how young he seemed, now—smiled and went inside. He came out a moment later and handed the fax sheet to George.

George read, “ ‘The birth prohibition has been rescinded, it was revealed at 10 a. m. Greenwich time today, by an extraordinary session of the Executive Council meeting in Berne, president Golightly released the following statement:

“ ‘ “It has been proved to my satisfaction, and to the satisfaction of the highest medical authorities, that a clear danger of total sterility of the human race exists. Under these circumstances, grave though the decision is, I have no possible alternative but to revoke all penalties against giving birth.

” ‘ “We stand today at the crossroads of human destiny. On one hand we see the total extinction of our kind: on the other, a new and more glorious fulfilment. The centuries to come will be hard ones for some of us; they will bring many profound ‘ changes in our society, and many grave problems. But given the boundless courage of our people, and their unflinching determination to succeed—” ’ ”

“Does he say anything else?” asked Art.

“No. But here’s something about us. ‘Arthur Levinson, M. D., George Miller, Morey Stiles and Luther Wheatley, ringleaders of the so-called Committee Against Human Extinction, were released early this morning by the Paris division of the Security Police. In a special statement, S. P. chief Paul Krzewski characterized their activities as “sincere but premature,” and indicated that no charges would be pressed against any member of their organization.’ ”

Morey lit a cigar. “That’s about as much thanks as we’ll ever get,” he said.

“You weren’t finished, were you, Hilda?” Art asked. “I don’t quite see Golightly listening to reason, even with all that evidence.”

“No,” she said. “All that first part was just the preliminary. Then I called in his granddaughter—she was waiting outside. That was why I had to persuade her before I could do anything.”

“I begin to see the light,” said Art softly. “She’s a mother, too.”

“Of course. I’ve known it for years. As a matter of fact—this is rather funny, and something I didn’t know before—she told Golightly that his private secretary is her daughter.”

Her face grew pinker. She leaned her forehead on her hand for a moment. Her shoulders were shaking. “You should have seen his face!” she said.

They were all roaring with laughter, the tension in them dissolving to leave them weak and wonderfully relieved. It was several moments before George glanced at Hilda and saw that Joe was standing over her in an attitude of concern, his hand on her shoulder. Her head was still bent into her palm. George realized abruptly that she was no longer laughing, but crying.

He stood up and went around to her, feeling awkward. “Anything I can do?” he asked.

Hilda dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief and then looked up at them. “Just a touch of hysterics, I guess. I do feel like a fool. Only—I didn’t realize how scared I’d been.”

George squeezed her shoulder and went back to his place. Joe left the table again to bring in a bottle of Chablis and glasses; there was a pleasant interval of tinkling and gurgling, and when it was over, Hilda was her usual self again.

Luther raised his glass. “To Hilda.”

“Hilda, my dear,” said Art slowly, “would you mind telling me why you did it? I hope I don’t sound ungrateful, but—it wasn’t just to save our lives?”

Hilda hesitated a moment. No, Art.”

“I didn’t think so,” he said. “I’ve just now managed to picture you as a mother, and in that light I can see you doing almost anything else for us four, obtuse as you must have thought us— but not risking a hair of young Joe’s head.”

She smiled fondly at him. “I don’t really think you’re obtuse, Art. If I sounded that way, it was just feminist exaggeration. I suppose you’re thinking now that all your trouble and danger were for nothing, because we women have been breeding right along … but I don’t think that’s true.

“I think that’s the difference, the really fundamental difference, between men and women. We women endure—we plug along, doing the obvious things, keeping house and worrying about our men and bearing children and so on. And if we didn’t, Lord knows what would become of us all. But left to ourselves, we’re too conservative. Women felt this problem of children from the beginning, and solved it on their own level. But not completely, not satisfactorily. You four discovered the same problem intellectually only a few months ago, and look what you’ve done!”

She made little fists on the table for a moment. “I’ll confess that it was very hard for me to risk Joe. And I didn’t do it, finally, because of my fondness for you four. If it had been only that, I honestly don’t know what I should have done.

“But—well, perhaps an example will show you best. My oldest son, Edwin, wants to be a doctor, wants it more than anything. He’s fifty years old now—that’s a long time to wait for the one thing you want most in the world. But there are no medical schools, only research seminars and a few brush-up courses. There’s no place in the world now like the one where Art got his earliest training.’

“There will be,” promised Art.

“Of course. And a million other things … It isn’t particularly good for a child to be brought up in hiding, as Joe was.”

“No one could have done it any better than you, Hilda,” said Joe.

“Sweet,” she said; “but you all know I’m right.”

“Of course you are,” agreed Luther. “In fact, you’re so right that I’m a little afraid of you. It was much nicer when I thought you were pretty much a featherbrain.”

George said suddenly, “Joe, I never wangled you that introduction I promised you, did I?”

Joe’s eyes brightened. “To Clarke, the rocket man?”

“That’s the one. Luther, can you arrange it?”

“A pleasure. I didn’t know you were interested, Joe.”

“Yes,” said Hilda, a little regretfully, “I wish he weren’t.”

Joe looked uncomfortable. Morey spoke up unexpectedly: “You’ll have to face it, though. Hilda. This is one of the spheres where men take over.”

“That’s right,” said Morey, “that’s where they’ll have to go, the overflow, the extra population that’s had us all trembling in our socks the last three centuries. To the stars.” He pushed his chair back and sat looking out over the sunlit street, and the ’copters flashing in the sky. “That will make Golightly and me happy, at least, for the next few hundred years.” He smiled his unexpected, small-boy smile. “We can sit here and be as contrary and stubborn as we want. But we’ll be just a backwater, Hilda. It’s your Joe that’s going to be the human race.”

They drank to that, and afterward George found himself alone with Hilda for a moment before they left. She kissed him gently: there were no tingles up his spine. He felt warmly fond of her, and somehow at peace with himself.

The world was going to grow down to his size, he realized. He wouldn’t be The Child any more, not to everybody. In fact, the first colony on that far-off planet of Alpha Centauri might need a few older men around—men with a few centuries of solid experience under their belts. Now there was an idea!

Happily, he went down into the long afternoon.