Greybeard

IV. Washington

In the first dreary days at Sparcot, when the rabble cast up there were forming into a community and the disease-ridden summer broke into a rain-swept autumn, Charley Samuels had not realized for some while that he knew the big man with the high bald head and growing beard. It was a time when everyone was more alert for enemies than friends.

Charley arrived at Sparcot some days after the Timberlanes, and in a dejected state of mind. His father had owned a small bookshop in a South Coast town. Ambrose Samuels was a man of glooms and tempers. When he was in his most smiling mood, he would read aloud to Mrs. Samuels, the boy Charley, and his two sisters, Ruth and Rachel. He read to them from the thousands of obsolete theological books with which the second floor of the old shop was stocked, or from the works of obsolete and morose poets which sold no better than the theology.

Much of this dead stock thus inevitably passed into Charley’s mind. He could quote it at any later time of life, without knowing who wrote it or when, remembering only that it came from what his father had designated “a gilt-tooled thirty-two-mo” or a “tree’d calf octavo”.

It was a lie. When Charley was eleven, an alarming shock of fate set the thought of death in his heart for ever. In his eleventh year, came the radiation sickness — the result of that deliberate act men called The Accident. His father died of cancer a year later.

The shop was sold. Mrs. Samuels took her children to live in her home town, where she got a secretarial post. Charley went to work when he was fifteen. His mother died three years later.

He took a series of unskilled jobs while trying to act as father to his sisters. That had been in the late eighties and early nineteen-nineties. Compared with what was to come, it was — morally and economically — a fairly stable time. But work became harder to get. He saw his sisters established in good jobs while he was unemployed.

It was the outbreak of war that had the final shaping of him. He was twenty-nine. This madness added to madness, as nations bled themselves fighting over the few children who survived, decided him that there had to be something higher than man if all creation was not a mockery. Only in religion, it seemed to him, lay an antidote to despair. He had himself baptized into the Methodist church — a step that would have enraged his father.

To avoid being called to fight in the war, Charley joined the Infantop Corps, a semi-international branch of Childsweep, dedicated to saving life rather than taking it. At once, he had been swept away from Rachel and Ruth and plunged into the thick of the global struggle. It was then he met Algy Timberlane.

With the revolution and Britain’s retirement from the war in 2005, Charley returned to look after his sisters again. He found to his horror that Ruth and Rachel had taken to prostitution and were prospering. It was all done very discreetly, and they still worked in the afternoon at a nearby shop. Charley closed down part of his mind, settled in with them, and defended them where and when he could.

He became the glorified chucker-out of their thriving establishment. For under the Coalition and later the United governments, hard times came with a vengeance. The world was crumbling into senescence and chaos. But what the sisters supplied remained a necessity. They flourished until the cholera stalked through England.

Charley prised his sisters away from their stricken town and headed into the country with them. Rachel and Ruth did not protest; they had seen enough from their vantage point to scare them. A client dying on the stairs precipitated them into the little car Charley bought with his war savings.

Outside the town, the car expired. They found a nylon stocking rammed into the oil sump. They began to walk, carrying their bundles on their backs on a road that led — though they did not know it — to Sparcot. Many other refugees went by that way.

It was a gruesome exodus. Among the genuine travellers were bandits who set upon their fellows, cut their throats, and took their belongings. Another robber went that way; it crept through the blood, burst out on the brow, was interested only in taking life. It stole up on Ruth in the first night and on Rachel in the third, and left them face upwards in the mounds of humus over which Charley raised crosses made with sticks from the dusty hedgerows.

When he limped into the doubtful shelter of Sparcot (helping a woman called Iris whom he would find strength to marry eighteen months later), Charley was a man turned in on himself. He had no wish to interest himself in the world again. In his wounded heart, the sudden dread had found a permanent billet.

Both he and Timberlane had changed so much that it was not surprising recognition was only gradual. In that first Sparcot year of 2029, they had not seen each other for over a quarter of a century — since 2001, when the war still engulfed the world and they were both in the Infantop Corps. Then they had been operating overseas, combing the shattered valleys of Assam…

Of their patrol, only two survived. Those two, as from old habit, walked in single file. The man in the rear, Corporal Samuels, carried a natterjack, the light nuclear gun, various packs filled with provisions, and a can of water. He moved somnambulistically, stumbling as they walked down the wooded hillside.

Before him, a child’s head jogged, hanging upside down and regarding him with a sightless eye. The child’s left arm swung against the thigh of the man over whose broad back it lay. This was a boy child, a child of the Naga tribe, delicately built, shaven of head, and perhaps nine years old. He was unconscious; the flies that buzzed incessantly about his eyes and about the wound on his thigh did not trouble him.

He was carried by Sergeant Timberlane, a bronzed young man of twenty-six. Timberlane wore a revolver, had various pieces of equipment strapped about him, and carried a tall stick with which he helped himself along as he followed the path leading down to the valley bottom.

The dry season ruled Assam. The trees, which were no more than nine feet high, stood as if dead, their leaves limp. The river in the valley bottom had dried out, leaving a sandy chaung along which wheeled vehicles and GEM’s could move. The dust the vehicles had disturbed had settled on the trees on either side of the chaung, whitening them until they bore the appearance of a disused indoor television lot. The chaung itself dazzled in the bright sun.

Where the trees ceased to grow, Timberlane stopped, hoisting the wounded child more firmly on to his shoulder. Charley bumped into him.

“What’s the matter, Algy?”, he asked, coming back into weary wakefulness. As he spoke, he stared at the child’s head. Because it had been shaved, the hair showed only as fine bristles; little flies crawled like lice among the bristles. The boy’s eyes were as expressionless as jelly. Upside down, a human face is robbed of much of its meaning.

“We’ve got visitors.” The tone of Timberlane’s voice brought Charley instantly back on to the alert. Before they went over the mountain, they had left their sectional hovercraft below a small cliff, hidden from the air under a camouflage net. Now a tracked ambulance of American design was parked below the cliff. Two figures stood beside it, while a third investigated the hovercraft.

This tiny tableau, embalmed in sunlight, was broken by the sudden chatter of a machine-gun. Without thinking, Timberlane and Charley went flat on their stomachs. The Naga boy groaned as Timberlane rolled him aside and swept binoculars up to his eyes. He ranged his vision along the shabby hillside to their left, where the shots had come from. Crouching figures sprang into view, their khaki dark against dusty white shrubs, their outlines hardening as Timberlane got them in focus.

“There they are!” Timberlane said. “Probably the same bastards we ran into on the other side of the hill. Get the natterjack up, Charley, and let’s settle them.”

Beside him, Charley was already assembling their weapon. Down in the chaung, one of the three Americans had been hit by the first burst of machine-gun fire. He sprawled in the sand. Moving painfully, he pulled himself along into the shadow of the ambulance. His two companions were concealed behind bushes. Of a sudden, one of them burst from cover and ran towards the ambulance. The enemy gun opened up again. Dust flicked round the running figure. He swerved, tumbled head over heels, and pitched out of sight among the dusty foliage.

“Here goes!” Charley muttered. The dust on his face, most of it turned into mud by sweat, crinkled as he slapped the barrel of the natterjack into place. He gritted his teeth and pulled the firing lever. A little nuclear shell went whistling over the scrubby hillside.

“And another, fast as you can,” Timberlane muttered, kneeling over the natterjack and feeding in a magazine. Charley switched over to automatic, and kept the lever squeezed for a burst. The shells squeaked like bats as they headed for the target. On the hillside, little brown figures scampered for safety. Timberlane brought up his revolver and aimed at them, but the range was too great for accuracy.

They lay and watched the pall of smoke settle across the slope. Someone out there was screaming. It looked as if only two of the enemy had escaped, beating a retreat over the brow of the hill.

“Can we chance going down?” Charley asked. “I don’t think they’ll bother us. They’ll have had enough.” They dismantled the gun, shouldered up the child, and continued warily down the slope. As they approached the waiting vehicles, the surviving member of the ambush came to meet them. He was a willowy man of no more than thirty, with dark eyebrows that almost met in the middle and fair hair cropped close. He came forward with a pack of cigarettes extended towards them.

“You boys came along in very good time. I’m obliged for the neat way you received my reception committee.”

“It’s a pleasure,” Timberlane said, shaking the man’s hand and taking a cigarette. “We first got acquainted with that little section over the other side of the hill, at Mokachandpur, where they shot up the rest of our fellows. They’re very personal enemies. We were only too glad to have the chance of another pot at them.”

“You’re English, I guess. I’m American, name Jack Pilbeam, Special Detachment attached to Fifth Corps. I was on my way through when we saw your craft and stopped to see if everything was okay.”

They introduced themselves all round, and Timberlane laid the unconscious boy in the shade. Pilbeam beat the dust out of his uniform and went with Charley to look to his companions.

For a moment Timberlane squatted by the boy, laying a leaf over his thigh wound, wiping the dust and tears from his face, brushing the flies away. He looked at the thin brown body, felt its pulse. The fold of his mouth grew ugly, and he seemed to stare through the fluttering rib cage, through the earth, into the bitter heart of life. He found no truth there, only what he recognized as an egotistical lie, born of his own heart: “I alone loved children dearly enough!”

Aloud, he said — speaking mainly to himself — “There were three of them over the hill. The other two were a pair of girls, sisters. Pretty kids, wild as mountain goats, no abnormalities. Girls got killed when the shells were slinging about, blown to bits before our eyes.”

“More are getting killed than saved,” Pilbeam said. He was kneeling by the crumpled figure in the shadow of the ambulance. “My two buddies are both done for — well, they weren’t really buddies. I’d only met the driver today, and Bill was just out from the States, like me. Guess that doesn’t make it hurt any less. This bastard war, why the hell do we fight when the world’s way down on its reservoir of human life already? Help me get ’em into the agony wagon, will you?”

“We’ll do more than that,” Timberlane promised. “If you’re going back to Wokha, as I presume you must be, we’ll act as escort to each other, just in case there are any more of these happy fellows perched up on the ridges.”

“Done. You’ve gotten yourself company, and don’t think I don’t need it. I’m still trembling like a leaf. Tonight you must come on over to the PX and we’ll drink to life together. Suit you, Sergeant?”

As they loaded the two bodies, still warm, into the ambulance, Pilbeam lit himself another cigarette. He looked Timberlane in the eyes.

“There’s one consolation,” he said. “This one really is a war to end war. There won’t be anyone left to fight another.”

Charley was the first to arrive in the PX that evening. As he entered the low building, exchanging the hum of insects for the hum of the refrigeration plant, he saw Jack Pilbeam sitting over a glass at a corner table. The American rose to meet him. He was dressed now in neatly creased olive drabs, his face shone, he looked compact and oddly more ferocious than he had done standing by the dying jungle. He eyed Charley’s Infantop flash with approval.

“What can I get you to drink — Charley, isn’t it? I’m way ahead of you.”

“I don’t drink.” He had long since learned to deliver the phrase without apology; he added now, with a sour smile, “I kill people, but I don’t drink.” Something — perhaps the mere fact that Jack Pilbeam was American, and Charley found Americans easier to talk to than his own countrymen — made him add the explanation that carried its own apology. “I was eleven when your nation and mine detonated those fatal bombs in space. When I was nineteen, shortly after my mother died — it was a sort of compensation, I suppose — I got engaged to a girl called Peggy Lynn. She wasn’t in good health and she had lost all her hair, but I loved her… We were going to be engaged. Well, of course, we got medically examined and were told we were sterilized for life, like everyone else… Somehow that killed the romance.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Perhaps it was just as well. I had two sisters to look after anyway. But from then on, I started not to want anything…”

“Religious?”

“Yes, though it’s mainly a sort of self-denial.”

Pilbeam’s were clear and bright eyes that looked more attractive than his rather tight mouth. “Then you should get through the next few decades okay. Because there’s going to be a lot of self-denial needed. What happened to Peggy?”

Charley looked at his hands. “We lost touch. One fine spring day, she died of leukaemia. I heard about it later.”

After drinking deep, Pilbeam said, “That’s life, as they always say about death.” His tone robbed the remark of any facetiousness it might have had.

“Although I was only a kid, I think the — Accident sent me quietly mad,” Charley said, looking down at his boots. “Thousands — millions of people were mad, in a secretive way. Some not so secret, of course. And they’ve never got over it, though it’s twenty years ago. I mean, though it’s twenty years ago, it’s still present. That’s why this war’s being fought, because people are mad… I’ll never understand it: we need every young life we can get, yet here’s a global war going on… Madness!”

With a sombre face, Pilbeam saw that Charley drew out a cigarette and lit it; it was one of the tobacco-free brands and it crackled, so fiercely did Charley draw on it.

“I don’t see the war like that,” Pilbeam said, ordering up another Kentucky Bourbon. “I see it as an economic war. This may be because of my upbringing and training. My father — he’s dead now — he was senior sales director in Jaguar Records Inc., and I could say ‘consumer rating’ right after I learnt to say ‘Mama’. The economy of every major nation is in flux, if you can have a one-way flux. They are suffering from a fatal malady called death, and up till now it’s irremediable — though they’re working on it. But one by one, industries are going bust, even where there’s the will to keep them going. And one day soon, the will is going to fail.”

“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 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—”

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,” Pilbeam said. “There might have been a way of escape from our Earthborn madness in the stars. My old man was a great believer in space travel, used to read all the literature. A great optimist by nature — that’s why failure came so hard to him. I was telling your friend Charley, Dad killed himself last month. I’m still trying to come to terms with it.”

“It’s always a hard thing, to get over a father’s death. You can’t help taking it personally. It’s a — well, a sort of insult, when it’s someone that was dear to you and full of life.”

“You sound as if you know something about it.”

“Something. Like thousands of other people, my father committed suicide too. I was a child at the time. I don’t know whether that makes it better or worse… You were close to your old man?”

“No. Maybe that’s why I kick against it so hard. I could have been close. I wasted the opportunity. To hell with it, any way.” A katabatic wind was growing, pouring down from the higher slopes above the camp. They walked with their hands in their pockets. In silence, Pilbeam recalled how his father had encouraged his idealism. “Don’t come into the record business, son,” he had said. “It’ll get by without you. Join Childsweep, if you want to.” Pilbeam joined Childsweep when he was sixteen, starting somewhere near the bottom of the organization.

Childsweep’s greatest achievement was the establishment of three Children’s Centres, near Washington, Karachi, and Singapore. Here the world’s children born after the Accident were brought, where parental consent could be won, to be trained to live with their deformities and with the crisis-ridden society in which they found themselves.

The experiment was not an unqualified success. The shortage of children was acute — at one time, there were three psychiatrists to every child. But it was an attempt to make amends. Pilbeam, working in Karachi, was almost happy. Then the children became the subject of an international dispute. Finally war broke out. When it developed into a more desperate phase, both the Singapore and the Karachi Children’s Centres were bombed from orbital automatic satellites and destroyed. Pilbeam escaped and flew back to Washington with a minor leg wound, in time to learn of his father’s suicide.

After a minute’s silence, Pilbeam said, “I didn’t drag you out into the night air to mope but to put a proposition to you. I have a job for you. A real job, a life’s job. I have the power to fix it with your Commanding Officer if you agree—”

“Hey, not so fast!” Timberlane cried, spreading his hands in protest. “I don’t want a job. I’ve got a job — saving any kids I can find lurking in these hills.”

“This is a real job, not a vacation for gun-toting nursemaids. The most responsible job ever thought up. I back my hunches, and I’m certain you are the sort of guy that would suit. I can fix it so’s you fly back to the U.S. with me tomorrow.”

“Oh no, I’ve got a girl back in England I’m very fond of, and I’m due for leave at the end of next week. I’m not volunteering, thanks all the same for the compliment.”

Pilbearn stopped and faced Timberlane. “We’ll fly your girl out to Washington. Money’s no bother, believe me. At least let me tell you about the deal. You see, sociologically and economically, we live in very interesting times, provided you can be detached enough to view it in that light. So a universities study group with corporation and government backing has been set up to study and record what goes on. You won’t have heard of the group — it’s new and it’s being kept out of the news. It calls itself Documentation of Universal Contemporary History — DOUCH for short. We need recruits to operate in all countries. Come back to my billet and meet Bill Dyson, who’s i/c the project for S.E. Asia, and we’ll give you the dope.”

“This is crazy. I can’t join. You mean you’d fly Martha out of England to meet me?”

“Why not? You know the way England is going — way back into the darkness, under this new government and wartime conditions. You’d both be better off in America for a while, while we trained you. That’s a big consideration, isn’t it?” He caught the look on Timberlane’s face and added, “You don’t have to make up your mind at once.”

“I can’t… How long do I have to think about it?”

Pilbeam looked at his watch and scratched his skull with a fingernail. “Till we’ve got another drink down our throats, shall we say?”

On the dusty airstrip at Kohima, two men shook hands. “I feel bad about leaving like this, Charley.”

“The C.O. must feel even worse.”

“He took it like a lamb. What sort of blackmail Pilbeam used, I’ll never know.”

A moment of awkward silence, then Charley said, “I wish I was coming with you. You’ve been a good friend.”

“Your country needs you, Charley, don’t kid yourself.”

But Charley only said, “I might have been coming with you if I’d been good enough.”

Embarrassed, Timberlane climbed the steps to the plane and turned to wave. They took a last look at each other before he ducked inside.

The orbit jet blasted off through the livid evening, heading on a transpolar parabola for the opposite side of the globe. The sun bumped over the western lip of the world, while far below them the land was tawny with a confusion of dark and light.

Jack Pilbeam, Algy Timberlane, and Bill Dyson sat together, talking very little at first. Dyson was a thick-set individual, as tough-looking as Pilbeam was scholarly, with a bald head and a genial smile. He was as relaxed as Pilbeam was highly strung. Although no more than ten years senior to Timberlane, he gave the impression of being a much older man.

“It’s our job, Mr. Timberlane, to be professional pessimists in DOUCH,” he said. “With reference to the future, we may only permit ourselves to be hard-headed and dry-eyed. You have to face up to the fact that if vital genes have been knocked out of the human reproductive apparatus, the rest of the apparatus may never have the strength to build them back up again. In which case, young men like you and this reprobate Pilbeam represent the ultimate human generation. That’s why we need you; you’ll record the death throes of the human race.”

“Sounds to me as if you want journalists,” Timberlane said.

“No, sir, we require steady men with integrity. This is not a scoop, it’s a way of life.”

“Way of death, Bill,” Pilbeam corrected.

“Bit of both. As the Good Book reminds us, in the midst of life we are in death.”

“I still don’t see the object of the project if the human race is going to become extinct,” Timberlane said. “Whom will it help?”

“Good question. Here’s what I hope’s a good answer. It will help two sorts of people. Both groups are purely hypothetical. It will help a small group we might imagine in, say, America thirty or forty years from now, when the whole nation may have broken up in chaos; suppose they establish a little settlement and find that they are able to bear children? Those children will be almost savages — feral children, severed from the civilization to which they rightly belong. DOUCH records will be a link for them between their past and their future, and will give them a chance to think along right lines and construct a socially viable community.”

“And the second group?”

“I imagine you are not a very speculative man, Mr. Timberlane. Has it ever crossed your mind that we are not alone in this universe? I don’t mean just the Creator; it’s difficult to imagine he would make any human company except Adam. I mean the other races who live on the planets of other stars. They may one day visit Earth, as we have visited the Moon and Mars. They will seek an explanation for our ‘lost civilization’, just as we wonder about the Martian lost civilization of which Leatherby’s expedition found traces. DOUCH will leave them an explanation. If the explanation also packs a moral they can use, so much the better.”

“There’s a third hypothetical group,” Pilbeam said, leaning forward. “That’s the one that sends the prickles down my spine. Maybe I read too much of my father’s science fiction at too early an age. But if man is going to tumble off his ecological niche, maybe some creature lurking around right now will climb up and take his place in a couple of hundred years — when the place is properly aired.”

He laughed. With quiet humour, Dyson said, “Could be, Jack. Statistics on how the Big Accident affected the larger primates is hard to come by. Maybe the grizzlies or the gorillas have already started along a favourable mutational line.”

Timberlane was silent. He did not know how to join in this sort of conversation. The whole thing was still unreal to him. When he said good-bye to Charley Samuels, the look of dismay on his friend’s face had shaken him almost as much as the C.O.’s instant co-operation with Childsweep. He peered down through the window. Far below, cumulus made a tumbled bed of the Earth. He was in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Down below in that tenebrific world, a million years’ doubtful dynasty was coming to an end, with the self-immolation of the reigning house. He was not sure how he would relish recording its death throes.

There were mild autumnal sunshine and a military escort to greet them at Bolling Field. Half an hour — to Pilbeam’s sore irritation — passed in the Inspection Block before Health and Security checks cleared them. They were driven with their kit by electric truck to a little grey private bus which awaited them outside. On its side were painted the letters DOUCH.

“Looks good,” Timberlane exclaimed. “Now for the first time I believe I’m not the victim of some elaborate hoax.”

“Didn’t think you’d find yourself putting down in Peking, did you?” Dyson said, grinning his comfortable grin.

“And be sure never to climb into a bus labelled OICH or DUCA, however canned you are,” warned their military escort, helping Timberlane with his bags. “They stand for Oriental Integration and Cultural Habitation or something like it, and DUCA is a flamboyant organization run by the Post and standing for Department of Unified Child Assistance. They keep awful busy, even without any actual children to assist. Washington is a rash of initials and organizations — and disorganization — right now. It’s like living up to here in alphabet soup. Jump in, fellows, and we’ll go see a traffic jam or two.”

But somewhat to Timberlane’s disappointment, they kept to the east of the grey river he had glimpsed as they came in to land, and crawled into the part of town Pilbeam informed him was Anacostia. They pulled up in a trim street of new white houses before a block he was told was home. It proved to be swarming with decorators and echoing with the sound of carpenters.

“New premises,” Pilbeam explained. “Up until a month ago, this was a home for mentally deranged juvenile delinquents. But that’s one problem this so-called Accident has abolished entirely. We’ve run clean out of delinquents! It’ll make us a good HQ, and when you see the swimming pool, you’ll realize why delinquency in this country was almost a profession!”

He flung open the door of a spacious room. “You’ve got bedroom and toilet off through that door there. You share shower facilities with the guy next door, who happens to be me. Right down the corridor is the bar, and by God if they don’t have that to rights by now, and with a pretty girl at the alert behind it, there’s going to be hell raised. See you across a martini in ten minutes, eh?”

The DOUCH training course was planned to last for six weeks. Although it was in a high degree of organization, the system remained chaotic, owing to the disorder of the times.

Internally, all big cities were in the toils of labour problems; the conscription of strikers into the armed forces had served only to spread trouble to those bodies. The war was not a popular one, and not only because the enthusiasm of youth was missing.

Externally, the cities were under enemy bombardment. The so-called “Fat Choy” raids were the enemy’s speciality: detection-baffled missiles that dropped in from spatial orbits, disintegrating above ground and scattering “suitcases” of explosive or incendiaries. It was the first time the American population had experienced aerial attack on their home ground. While many city dwellers evacuated themselves to smaller towns or country areas — only to straggle back later, preferring the risk of bombardment to an environment with which they had little sympathy — many country folk entered the cities in search of higher wages. Industry complained loudly; but as yet it was agriculture that was hardest hit, and Congress was busily passing laws that would enable it to order men back to the land.

The one happy feature of the whole war was that the enemy’s economy was a deal more insecure than America’s; the number of Fat Choys had noticeably decreased over the last six months. As a result, the hectic night life of the wartime capital had accelerated.

Timberlane was able to see a good deal of this night life. The DOUCH officials had good contacts. Within a day, he was supplied with all necessary documents enabling him to survive in the local rat race: stamped passport, visa, alien curfew exemptions, police file card, clothing purchase permit, travel warrant within the District of Columbia, and vitamin, meat, vegetable, bread, fish, and candy ration cards. In every case except that of the travel warrant, the restrictions seemed liberal to all but the local inhabitants.

Timberlane was a man who only rarely indulged in self-examination. So he never asked himself how strongly his decision to throw in his lot with DOUCH was influenced by their promise to reunite him with his girl friend. It was a point on which he never had to press Dyson.

Within four days, Martha Broughton was flown out of the little besieged island off the continent of Europe and delivered to Washington.

Martha Broughton was twenty-six, Timberlane’s age. Not only because she was among the youngest of the world’s women but because she carried her good looks with an easy air, she attracted attention wherever she went. At this time, she boasted a full crop of fine ash-blond hair, which she wore untamed to shoulder length. One generally had to be well-acquainted with her to notice that her eyebrows were painted on; she had no eyebrows of her own.

At the time of what Washington circles referred to euphemistically as the Big Accident, Martha was six. She had fallen ill with the radiation sickness; unlike many of her little contemporaries, she had survived. But her hair had not; and the baldness which had accompanied her throughout all her schooldays, in subjecting her to taunts against which she had readily defended herself, had been instrumental in sharpening her wit. By her twenty-first birthday, a fuzz covered her skull; now her beauty would not have been despised in any age. Timberlane was one of the few people outside her family who knew of the internal scars that were the unique mark of her own age.

Pilbeam and Timberlane showed her to a women’s hostel a couple of blocks from the new DOUCH headquarters.

“You’re having an effect on Algy already,” Martha told Pilbeam. “His long English a’s are eroding; he told the taxi driver to pahss another car, instead of parss. What’s next to go?”

“Probably the English middle class inhibition against kissing in public,” Timberlane said.

“My God, if you call me public, I’m getting out of here,” Pilbeam said good-naturedly. “I can take a hint as well as anyone — and a drink. You’ll find me down in the bar when you want me.”

“We won’t be long, Jack.”

“We won’t be very long, Jack,” Martha amended.

As the door closed, they put their arms about each other and stood with their lips together, feeling the other’s warmth through mouth and body. They remained like that, kissing and talking, for some while. Finally he stood back on the other side of the room, cupped his chin in his hand in a judicious gesture, and admired her legs.

“Ah, the cute catenary curve of your calves!” he exclaimed.

“Well, what a lovely transatlantic greeting,” Martha said. “Algy, this is wonderful! What a marvellous thing to happen! Isn’t it exciting? Father was furious that I so much as contemplated coming — preached me a long sermon in his dee-eepest voice about the flightiness of young womanhood—”

“And no doubt admires you madly for sticking to your guns and coming! Though if he suspects the American male will be after you, he’s right.”

She opened her night bag, setting bottles and brushes out on the dressing-table, and never taking her eyes off him. As she sat down to attend to her face, she said, “Any fate is better than death! And what is going on here? And what is DOUCH, and why have you joined, and what can I do to help?”

“I’m being trained here for six weeks. All sorts of courses — boy, these fellows really know how to work! Contemporary history, societics, economy, geopolitics, a new thing they call existentietics, functional psychology — oh, and other things, and practical subjects, such as engine maintenance. And twice a week we drive out to Rock Creek Park for lessons in self-defence from a judo expert. It’s tough but I’m enjoying it. There’s a dedicated feeling about here that gives everything meaning. I’m out of the war, too, which means life again makes a little sense.”

“You look well on it, honey. And are you going to practise self-defence on me?”

“Other forms of wrestling perhaps; not that. No, I suspect you are out here for one very good reason. But we’ll ask Jack Pilbeam about that. Let’s go and join him — he’s a hell of a good chap; you’ll like him.”

“I do already.”

Pilbeam was in one corner of the hostel bar, sitting close with an attentive redhead. He broke away reluctantly, swung his mack off the back of a chair, and came towards them, saluting as he did so. “All play and no work makes Jack a dull boy,” he said. “Where do we take the lady now, and is it anywhere we can take a friendly redhead?”

“Having restored the ravages of travel, I’m in your hands,” Martha said.

“And she doesn’t mean that literally,” Timberlane added.

Pilbearn bowed. “I have the instructions, the authority, and the inclination, to take you anywhere in Washington, and to wine and dine you as long as you are here.”

“I warn you, darling, they play hard as well as work hard. DOUCH will do its best for us before dumping us down to record the end of the world.”

“I can see you need a drink, you grumpy man,” Pilbeam said, forcing his smile a little. “Let me just introduce the redhead, and then we will move along to a show and a bottle. Perchance we could jemmy our way into the Dusty Dykes show. Dykes is the Slouch Comedian.”

The redhead joined the party without too great a feigning of reluctance, and they moved into town. The blackouts which had afflicted the cities of other nations in earlier wars did not worry Washington. The enemy had the city firmly in its missile sights, and no lighting effects would change the situation. The streets were a blaze of neon as the entertainment business boomed. Flashing signs lit the faces of men and women with the stigmata of illness as they pushed into cabarets and cafés. Black market food and drink were in plentiful supply; the only shortage seemed to be parking spaces.

These hectic evenings became part of a pattern of fierce work and relaxation into which the DOUCH personnel fitted. It was only on her third night in Washington, when they were sitting in the Trog and watching the cabaret that included Dusty Dykes — the comedian for whom Pilbeam failed to acquire tickets on the first night — that Martha managed to put her question to Pilbeam.

“Jack, you give us a wonderful time. I wish I could seem to do something in return. Is there something I can do? I don’t see really why I was invited out here.”

Without ceasing to caress the wrist of the dark and green-eyed beauty who was his date for the night, Pilbeam said, “You were invited to keep one Algy Timberlane company — not that he deserves any such good fortune. And you have sat in on several of his lectures. Isn’t that enough? Relax, enjoy yourself. Have another drink. It’s patriotic to over-consume.”

“I am enjoying myself. I’d just like to know if there is anything I can do.”

Pilbeam winked at his green-eyed friend. “You’d better ask Algy that, honey baby.”

“I’m terribly persistent, Jack. I do want an answer.”

“Go and ask Bill Dyson — it’s really his pigeon. I’m just the DOUCH playboy — Warm Douche, they call me. And I may have to be off on my travels again, come Wednesday.”

“Oh, cherry pie, but you said — ” the green-eyed girl protested. Pilbeam laid a cautionary finger on her lustrous lips. “Shhh, my sweetie — your Uncle Sam must come before your Uncle Jack. But tonight, believe me, Uncle Jack comes first — metaphorically speaking, you understand.”

The lights dimmed, there was a drum roll followed by an amplified hiccup. As silence fell, Dusty Dykes floated in on an enormous dollar note and climbed down on to the floor. He was an almost menacingly ordinary little man, wearing a creased lounge suit. He spoke in a flat, husky voice.

“You’ll see I’ve abandoned my old gimmick of not having a gimmick. It’s not the first time this country’s economy has taken me for a ride. Good evening, ladies and gentiles, and I really mean that — it may be your last. In New York, where I come from — and you know state tax is so high there I needed a parachute to get away — they are very fond of World End parties. You rub two moralities together: the result’s a bust. You rub two busts together: the result is always a titter. The night Senator Mulgravy went, it was a twitter.” At this, there was a round of applause. “Oh, some of you have heard of senators? Friends told me when I arrived — friends are the people who stand you one drink and one afternoon — they told me Washington D.C. was politically uneducated. Well, they didn’t put it like that, they just said nobody went to photograph the African bronzes in the White House any more. I said, remember, it isn’t the men of the state that counts, it’s the state of the men. At least they’re no poorer than a shareholder in the contraceptive industry.”

“I can’t hear what he’s saying — or else I can’t understand it,” Martha whispered.

“It doesn’t sound particularly funny to me either,” Timberlane whispered.

With his arm round his girl friend’s shoulder, Pilbeam said, “It’s not meant to be funny. It’s meant to be slouch — as they call it.”

Nevertheless, he was grinning broadly, as were many other customers. Noticing this, Dusty Dykes, shook a cautionary finger. It was his only gesture. “Smiling won’t help it,” he said. “I know you’re all sitting there naked under your clothes, but you can’t embarrass me — I go to church and hear the sermon every Sunday. We are a wicked and promiscuous nation, and it gives me as much pleasure as the parson to say so. I’ve no objection to morality, except that it’s obsolete.

“Life gets worse every day. In the High Court in California, they’ve stopped sentencing their criminals to death — they sentence them to life instead. Like the man said, there’s no innocence any more, just undetected crime. In the State of Illinois alone, there were enough sex murders last month to make you all realize how vicarious your position is.

“The future outlook for the race is black, and that’s not just a pigment of my imagination. There were two sex criminals talking over business in Chicago the other day. Butch said, ‘Say, Sammy, which do you like best, murdering a woman or thinking about murdering a woman?’ ‘Shucks, I don’t know, Butch, which do you prefer?’ ‘Thinking about murdering a woman, every time!’ ‘Why’s that, then? ‘That way you get a more romantic type of woman.’”

For some minutes more the baby-faced little man stood there under the spot in his slept-in suit, making his slept-in jokes. Then the light cut off, he disappeared, and the house lights rose to applause.

“More drinks,” Pilbeam said.

“But he was awful!” Martha exclaimed. “Just blue!”

“Ah, you have to hear him half a dozen times to appreciate him — that’s the secret of his success,” Pilbeam said. “He’s the voice of the age.”

“Did you enjoy him?” Martha asked the green-eyed girl.

“Well, yes, I guess I did. I mean, well, he kind of made me feel at home.”

Twice a week, they went over to a small room in the Pentagon, where a blond young major taught them how to programme and service a POLYAC computer. These new pocket-sized computers would be fitted in all DOUCH recording trucks.

Timberlane was setting out for one of the POLYAC sessions when he found a letter from his mother awaiting him in his mail. Patricia Timberlane wrote irregularly. This letter, like most of them, was mainly filled with domestic woes, and Timberlane scanned it without a great deal of patience as his taxi carried him over the Potomac. Near the end, he found something of more interest.

It was a telling phrase, Timberlane thought soberly. In Washington, the perpetual earthquake ground on day and night, and would grind, until all was reduced to dust, if the gloomy DOUCH predictions were fulfilled. It revealed itself not only in the constant economic upheavals, the soup queues down-town, and the crazy sales as the detritus of fallen financial empires was thrown on to the market, but in the wave of murders and sexual crimes which the law found itself unable to check. This wave rose to engulf Martha and Timberlane.

The morning after the letter from Patricia Timberlane arrived, Martha appeared early in Timberlane’s room. Clothes lay scattered over the carpet — they had been out late on the previous evening, attending a wild party thrown by an Air Strike buddy of Bill Dyson’s.

Wearing his pyjama trousers, Timberlane stood shaving himself in semi-gloom. Martha went over to the window, pulled the curtains back, and turned to face him. She told him about the flowers that had been delivered to her at the hostel.

He squinted at her and said, “And you say you got some yesterday morning, too?”

“Yes, just as many — crates full of orchids, the same as this morning. They must have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.” He clicked off the spiteful buzz of his razor and looked at her. His eyes were dull and his face pale.

“Kind of slouch, eh? I didn’t send them to you.”

“I know that, Algy. You couldn’t afford them. I have looked at the price of flowers in the shops — they’re dear in the first place, and they carry state tax, entry tax, purchase tax, and what the hostel matron calls GDT, General Discouragement Tax, and goodness knows what else. That’s why I destroyed yesterday’s lot — I mean, I knew they weren’t from you, so I burnt them and meant to say no more about it.”

“You burnt them? How? I’ve not seen a naked flame on anything bigger than a cigar lighter since I got here.”

“Don’t be so dumb, darling. I pushed them all down the disposal chute, and anything that goes down there gets burnt in the basement of the hostel. Now this morning, another lot, again with no message.”

“Maybe the same lot, with love from the fellow in the basement.”

“For God’s sake, don’t go slouch on me, Algy!”

They laughed. But next morning, another bank of flowers arrived at the hostel for Miss Martha Broughton. Timberlane, Pilbeam, and Martha’s matron came to look at them.

“Orchids, roses, chincherinchees, violets, summer crocus — whoever he is, he can afford to get very sentimental,” Pilbeam said. “Let me assure you, Algy, old man, I didn’t send these to your girl friend. Orchids is one thing you can’t slap on a DOUCH expense account.”

“I am frankly worried, Miss Broughton, honey,” the matron said. “You must take care of yourself, especially as you are a stranger to this country. Remember now, there are no more girls about under twenty. That was the age older men used to go for. Now it’s the twenties-thirties group must watch out. Those older men, who are the rich men, have always been used to — well, to making hay while the sun shines. Now that the sun is going down — they will be more anxious to get at the last of the hay. Do you take my meaning?”

“Dusty Dykes himself couldn’t have put it better. Thanks for the warning, Matron. I’ll watch my step.”

“Meanwhile, I’ll phone a florist,” Pilbeam said. “There’s no reason why you shouldn’t pick up a cool couple of thousand from this slob’s amorousness. Small change is mighty useful.” Pilbeam was due to leave Washington the next day. The order had come through Dyson for him to go to another theatre of war — this time, central Sarawak. As he put it himself, he could do with the rest. During the afternoon, he was down in town collecting more kit and an inoculation when the Fat Choy alert sounded. He phoned through to Timberlane, who was then attending a lecture on propaganda and public delusion.

“Thought I’d tell you I’m likely to be delayed by this raid, Algy,” Pilbeam. said. “You and Martha better go on to the Thesaurus without me and get the drinks moving, and I’ll meet you there as soon as I can. We can eat there if we have to, though the Babe Lincoln down the block gives you less synthetics.”

“It’s chiefly calorie intake I’m having to watch,” Timberlane said, patting his waist line.

“See how your sensuality output reacts this evening — I’ve met a real scorcher here, Algy, name of Coriander and as plastic as funny putty.”

“I can’t wait. Is she married or single?”

“With her energy and talent, could be both.”

They winked at each other’s images in the vision screens and cut off.

Timberlane and Martha caught a prowling taxi-cab into town after dark. The enemy attack consisted of two missiles, one of which broke into suitcases over the now almost derelict slaughter and marshalling yards, while the other, causing more damage, broke over the thickly populated Cleveland Park suburb. On the sidewalks, police uniforms seemed to predominate over service uniforms; the Choy had served to make a lot of people stay at home, and as a result the streets were clearer than usual.

At the Thesaurus, Timberlane climbed out and inspected the façade of the club. It was studded with groups of synonyms in bas-relief — Chosen Few, Prime, Picked Bunch, Crême of the Cream, Elite, Salt of the Earth, Top Drawer, Pick of the Pops, Best People. Smiling, he turned to pay the cabby.

“Hey, you!”, he yelled. The taxi, with Martha in it, swerved out into traffic, squealed round a private car, and sped down a side street. Timberlane ran into the road. Brakes and tyres whined behind him. A big limousine bucked to a stop inches from his legs, and a red face was thrust from the driver’s window and began to curse him. A crunching noise sounded from behind, and the red face turned towards the rear to curse even more ferociously. As a cop came running up, Timberlane grabbed his arm.

“My girl’s been kidnapped. Some chap just drove off with her.”

“Happens all the time. You sure have to watch them.”

“She was made away with!”

“Go and tell it to the sergeant, Mac. Think I haven’t got troubles? I’ve got to get this tin real estate rolling again.” He jerked a thumb at an approaching prowl car. Biting his lip, Timberlane made his way towards it.

At eleven o’clock that night, Dyson said, “Come on, Algy, we’re doing no good here. The police’ll phone us if they get a lead. We must go and find a bite to eat before my stomach falls apart.”

“It must have been that devil that sent her the flowers,” Timberlane said, by no means for the first time. “Surely the flower shop could give the police a lead.”

“They got no change from the manager of the flower store. If only you recalled the taxi number.”

“All that I can remember is that it was mauve and yellow, with the words Antelope Taxis across the boot. Hell, you’re right, Bill — let’s go and get a bite to eat.”

As they left the police station, the superintendent said sympathetically, “Don’t worry, Mr. Timberlane. We’ll have your fiancée tracked down by morning.”

“What makes the man so confident?” Timberlane asked grumpily, as they climbed into Dyson’s car.

Although both Dyson and Jack Pilbeam, who had been down at the station earlier, had done all they could, he felt unfairly eager to annoy them. He felt so vulnerable in what was, however much he liked it, a strange country. Trying to button down his emotions, he remained silent as he and Dyson went to a nearby all-night stall and wolfed down hamburgers with chillies and mustard; the hamburgers were synthetic but good.

“Thank God for chillies,” Dyson said. “They could put a bit of fire into sawdust. I’ve often wondered if chillies aren’t the things the scientists are really looking for in all their megabuck’s worth of research into a way of restoring our poor old shattered genes.”

“Could be,” Timberlane assented. “Bet you they invent synthetic chillies first.” He got to bed after a final nightcap and fell asleep at once. When he woke next morning, he phoned the police station straight away, but they had nothing new to offer him. Moodily, he washed and dressed for breakfast, and went down the hall to collect his mail from the mail slot.

A hand-delivered letter awaited him in the rack. He tore it open to find a sheet of paper bearing the words: “If you want your girl back, take a look in God’s Sufferance Press. Go alone, for her sake. Then call off the cops.” Suddenly, he wanted no breakfast. He almost ran to the hall phone booth and thumbed through the appropriate volume of the phone directory. There it was, under an old-style non-vision number: God’s Sufferance Press, and its address. Should he ring first or go straight round? He hated the feeling of indecision that flooded him. He dialled and got the disconnected tone.

Hurrying back to his room, he wrote a hasty note to Pilbeam, giving the address to which he was going, and left it on the pillow of his unmade bunk. He pocketed his revolver.

He walked down to the end of the street, picked up a taxi from the regular rank, and told the driver to take it as fast as he could. Once over the Anacostia bridge, they hit tight traffic, as the capital moved in to do its day’s work. Even swamped as it was by wartime congestion, Washington kept its beauty; as they filtered past the Capitol, the sward about it now peppered with emergency office buildings, and swung westwards along Pennsylvania Avenue, the white stone caught a flush from the clear sky. The permanence and proportion of the buildings gave Timberlane a little reassurance.

Later, as they headed north, the impression of dignity and justice was broken. Here the unsettlement of the times found expression. Name- and sign-altering was in full swing. Property changed hands rapidly, office furniture vans and military lorries delivered or removed furniture. And there were other buildings standing unaccountably silent and empty. Sometimes a whole street seemed deserted, as if its inhabitants had fled from a plague. In one such street, Timberlane noticed, stood the travel offices of overseas airlines and the tourist bureaux of Denmark, Finland, Turkey; the shutters were up; private travel had closed down for the duration, and the big airliners were under United Nations’ charge, flying medical aid to war victims.

Some districts showed evidence of suitcase damage, though an attempt had been made to cover the desolation with large advertisement hoardings. Like all the great cities of the world, this one, behind its smile, revealed the rotting cavities that nobody was able to fill.

“Here’s your destination, bud, but it don’t look like anyone’s going to be home,” the taxi-driver said. “Do you want me to wait around?”

“No, thank you.” He paid the man, who saluted and drove off.

The home of the God’s Sufferance Press was a drably pretentious five-storey building dating from the turn of the previous century. FOR SALE notices were plastered over its windows. The iron folding gates giving access to the main swing door were secured in place with a strong chain and padlock. By the name plates in the porch, Timberlane saw how the Press had occupied itself. It was mainly a religious publisher catering for children, issuing such periodicals as The Children’s Sunday Magazine, The Boys’ Bugle, Girls’ Guidance, more popular lines such as Bible Thrills, Gospel Thrills, Holy Adventures, and the educational line, Sufferance Readers. A torn bill slid across the porch and wrapped itself round Timberlane’s leg. He turned away. On the opposite side of the road, a large block of flats rose. He surveyed their windows, trying to see if anyone was watching him. As he stood there, several people hurried by without looking at him.

There was a side alley flanked by a high wall. He went down it, treading through rubbish. He slid one hand to his revolver, and held it ready for action in his pocket. With pleasure, he felt a primitive ferocity grow in his chest; he wanted to smash somebody’s face in. The alley led to a waste lot at the back. In the middle distance, framed between two shoulders of wall, an old black man with round shoulders flew a kite, leaning dangerously back to watch its course over the rooftops.

Before Timberlane reached the lot, he came on a side door into the Press. It had been broken open; two of the little squares of glass in its upper half were shattered, and it stood ajar. He paused against the wall, remembered procedure for army house-to-house fighting, kicked the door open, and ran through it for cover.

In the gloom, he peered cautiously about. Not a movement, or a whisper of movement. Silence. The Big Accident had decimated the rat population. It had been almost as hard on cats, and human hunger for meat had probably accounted for most of the rest of the feline population; so that if rats came back, they would be more difficult than ever to check. But as yet this gaunt building obviously needed no cat.

He was in a broken-down store. An ancient raincoat on a peg spoke mutely of desertion. Piles of children’s religious reading stood about gathering dust, their potential purchasers either dead or forever unborn and unconceived. Only the footprints across the floor to an inner passage were new.

He followed the prints across the room, into the passage, and along it to the main hall, conscious of the sound of his own footsteps. Above grimy swing doors, through which dim figures could be seen passing in the street, was a bust and an inscription in marble: “Suffer The Little Children and Let Them Come To Me.”

“They suffered all right,” Timberlane said to himself grimly. He started a search downstairs, growing less cautious as he went along. Stagnation lay here like a malediction. Standing under the blind eyes of the founder, he looked up the stairs. “I’m here, you bastards. Where are you?” he shouted. “What have you done with Martha?” The noise of his own voice shocked him. He stood frozen as it echoed up the elevator shaft into the regions above. Then he took the steps two at a time, gun out before him with the safety catch off.

At the top, he paused. Still the silence. He walked reverberatingly down the corridor and threw open a door. It slammed back on its hinges, knocking over an ancient blackboard and easel. This was some kind of editorial room, by the look of it. He stared out of the window down on to the waste lot; he looked for the old negro flying a kite, recalling him almost as one recalls a friend. The old man had gone, or could not be seen. Nobody could be seen, not a human, not a dog.

God, this is what it’s like to be left alone in the world, he sub-vocalized. And another thought followed: Better get used to it now, youngster; one day you may be left alone in the world.

He was not a particularly imaginative man. Although for almost all the years of his life he had been confronted with the knowledge of the extinction mankind had unleashed upon itself, the optimism of youth helped him to believe either that conditions would right themselves naturally (nature had recovered from so many outrages before) or that one of the lines of research being pursued in a score of countries would turn up a restorative (surely a multi-billion-dollar-a-year programme could not be entirely wasted). The level-headed pessimism of the DOUCH project had brought his wishful thinking to a standstill.

He saw in sober fact that his kind might have reached the end of its time. Year by year, as the living died, the empty rooms about him would multiply, like the cells of a giant hive which no bees visited, until they filled the world. The time would come when he would be a monster, alone in the rooms, in the tracks of his search, in the labyrinth of his hollow footsteps.

Over the room, as over the face of an inquisitor, was written his future. Its wound was inescapable, for he had found it for himself. He opened his mouth, to cry or suck in air, as though someone had flung him under a cascade. Only one thing, one person, could make that future tolerable.

He ran out into the corridor, flaying the echoes again. “It’s me — Timberlane! Is anyone here, for God’s sake?”

And a voice near at hand called, “Algy, oh, Algy!”

She lay in a composing room among a litter of broken and discarded flongs. Like the rest of the building, it bore every sign of a long desertion. Her captors had tied her to the supports of a heavy metal bench on which lay discarded galleys of lead type, and she had been unable to break free. She estimated she had been lying there since midnight.

“You’re all right? Are you all right?” Timberlane kept asking, rubbing her bruised arms and legs after he had wrenched apart the plastic straps that bound her.

“I’m perfectly all right,” Martha said, beginning to weep. “He was quite a gentleman, he didn’t rape me! I suppose I am very lucky. He didn’t rape me.”

Timberlane put his arms round her. For minutes they crouched together on the littered floor, glad in the sensible warmth and solidity of each other’s bodies.

After a while, Martha was able to tell her story. The taxi-driver who had whipped her away from the front of the Thesaurus Club had driven her only a few blocks into a private garage. She thought she might be able to identify the spot. She remembered that the garage had a motor boat stored overhead. She was frightened, and fought the taxi-driver when he tried to pull her out of the car. Another man appeared, wearing a white handkerchief over his face. He carried a chloroform-impregnated pad. Between them, the men forced the pad over Martha’s nose and mouth, and she became unconscious.

She roused to find herself in another car, a larger one. She thought they were travelling through a suburb or semi-country; there were trees and low-lying houses flashing by outside, and another girl lying inertly by her side. Then a man in the front seat saw she was rousing, leant over, and forced her to breathe more chloroform.

When Martha woke again, she was in a bedroom. She sprawled over a bed, lying against the girl who had been in the car with her. They both roused and tried to pull themselves together. The room they were in was without windows; they thought it was a large room partitioned into two. A dark woman entered and led Martha into another room. She was brought before a man in a mask, and allowed to sit on a chair. The man told her that she was lucky to be chosen, and that there was no need to be frightened. His boss had fallen in love with her, and would treat her well if she would live with him; the flowers had been sent to her as a token of the honesty of his intentions. Angry and frightened though she was, Martha kept quiet at this point.

She had then been taken to the “boss” in a third room. He wore a domino. His face was thin, and deficient in chin. His jaw looked grey in the bright light. He rose when Martha entered and spoke in a gentle husky voice. He told her he was rich and lonely, and needed her company as well as her body. She asked how many girls he required to overcome his loneliness; he said huffily that the other girl was for a friend of his. He and his friend were shy men, and had to resort to this method of introduction; he was not a criminal, and he had no intention of harming her.

Very well, Martha had said, let me go. She told him she was engaged to be married. The man sat in a swivel-chair behind a table. Chair and table stood on a dais. The man moved very little.

He looked at her for a long while in silence, until she became very sick and scared. What chiefly scared her was her belief that this man was in an obscure way scared of her, and would go to considerable lengths to alter this situation.

“You should not get married,” he said at last. “You can’t have babies. Women don’t have babies any more, now that radiation sickness is so fashionable. Men used to hate those beastly little bawling ugly brats so much, and now their secret dreams have been fulfilled, and women can be used for nice things. You and I could do nice things.

“You’re lovely, with those legs and breasts and eyes of yours. But you’re only flesh and blood, like me. A little thing like a scalpel could cut right into you and make you unfit for nice things. I often say to my friends, ‘Even the loveliest girl can’t stand up to a little scalpel.’ I’m sure you’d rather do nice things, a girl like you, eh?”

Martha repeated shakily that she was going to get married. Again he sat in silence, not moving. When he spoke again it was with less interest, and on a different tack. He said he liked her attractive foreign accent. He had a large bombproof shelter underground, stocked with two years’ supplies of food and drink. He had a private plane. They could winter in Florida, if she would sign an agreement with him. They could do nice things.

She told him he had ugly thumbs and fingers. She would have nothing to do with anyone with hands like that.

He rang a bell. Two men ran in and seized Martha. They held Martha while the man in the domino came down off his dais and kissed her and ran his hands under her clothes and over her body. She struggled and kicked his ankle. His mouth trembled. She called him a coward. He ordered her to be taken out. The two men dragged her back into the bedroom and held her down on the bed, while the other girl cried in a corner. In outrage, Martha screamed as loudly as she could. The men put her out with another chloroformed pad.

When she came back to her senses, it was the cold air of night that roused her. She was being hustled into the deserted Sufferance Press building and tied to the bench.

She had been frightened and sick all night. When she heard someone below, she had not dared to call out until Timberlane had uttered his name, fearing the kidnappers had come back for her.

“That vile, loathsome creature! I’d tear his throat out if I got hold of him… Darling — you’re sure that’s all he did to you?”

“Yes — in an obscure way, I felt he’d got the thrill he was after — something in my fear he needed — I don’t know.”

“He was a maniac, whoever he was,” Timberlane said, pressing her close to him, running his hands through her hair. “Thank God he was mad the way he was and did you no real harm. Oh my darling, it’s like a miracle to have you again. I’ll never let you go.”

“All the same, I shouldn’t stay too close, love, until I’ve had a bath,” she said, laughing shakily. Having told her tale, something of her normal composure was back. “You must have been in a state when you saw the taxi speeding away with me, poor darling.”

“Dyson and Jack were a great help. I left a note for Jack at the billet in case I ran into trouble. The police’ll get this slimy little pervert. The details you have should be enough to track him down.”

“Do you think so? I’m sure I’d be okay on an identification parade, if they’d let me look at their thumbs. I keep wondering — I’ve been wondering all night — whatever happened to the other girl. What happens if you give in to a man like that, I don’t know.”

Suddenly she burst into tears and wrapped her arms about Timberlane’s waist. He helped her to her feet, and they sat side by side on frames in which leaden sentences were set backwards on and upside down. He put his arm round her and wiped her face with his handkerchief. Her painted eyebrows had come off, smeared across her forehead; licking the handkerchief, he cleaned their remains away.

Having her so close, seeing her, helping her restore herself, he broke into a flurry of words. “Listen, Martha, when I was kicking my heels down at the police station last night, I put your question to Bill Dyson — you know, about why they had gone to the trouble of flying you over here from England. At first he tried to kid me that it was just because he and Jack were sentimentalists. I wouldn’t wear that, so he came out with the truth. He said it was a DOUCH regulation. At the end of this course, they’re going to put me back in England, and if things get as bad as they expect, I shall be on my own, cut off from their support.

“Currently, they’re predicting the rise of authoritarian régimes in Britain and America at the cessation of hostilities. They think international communications will soon be a thing of the past. Survival will be tough, and will grow steadily tougher, as Bill pointed out with some relish. So DOUCH require me — and the Japanese, German, Israeli and other operators in training — to be married to what they call ‘a native’ — a girl who has been brought up in the local ways, and will therefore have inbred knowledge of local conditions. As Dyson put it, ‘Environmental know-how is a survival factor’.

“There’s a lot more to it, but the essence of it is that they wanted you around so that I would not get too interested in any girl I met here and wreck my bit of the project. If I married an American girl, I would be dropped like a hot potato.”

“We always knew they were thorough.”

“Sure. While old Bill was talking, I saw what the future was going to be like. Have you ever really looked ahead, Martha? I never have. It’s a lack of courage, perhaps, just as I’ve heard mother say her generation never looked ahead when they heard more nuclear bombs were being made and detonated. But these Americans have looked ahead. They have seen how difficult survival is going to be. They have survival broken down into figures, and the figures for Great Britain show that if present trends continue, in between fifteen and twenty years’ time, only 50 per cent of the population will still be living. Britain’s particularly vulnerable because we are so much less self-supporting than the States. The point is — all my DOUCH training is directed towards setting me with the DOUCH truck in that doubtfully privileged 50 per cent. And in their materialistic way, they’ve grasped something that I’m sure my religious pal, Charley Samuels in Assam, would endorse — that the one possible thing that will make that funereal future tolerable is the right sort of partner.” He broke off.

Martha was laughing with a sound like suppressed sobs.

“Algernon Timberlane, you poor lost soul, this is a dickens of a place to propose to a girl!”

Nettled, he said, “Am I really so damned funny?”

“Men always have to spell things out to themselves. Don’t worry, it’s something I love. You remind me of father, honey, except that you’re sexy. But I’m not laughing at your conclusions, really I’m not. I came to the same conclusion long ago in my heart.”

“Martha, I love you desperately, I need you desperately. I want to marry you just as soon as possible, and I never want us to be apart again, whatever happens.”

“My sweet, I love you and need you just as much. Why else do you think I came out to America? I’ll never leave you, never fear.”

“I do fear. I fear mightily! When I thought I was alone in this morgue just now, I had a vision of what it will be like to grow old in a world grown old. We can’t stop growing old, but at least let’s do it together and make it tolerable.”

“We will, we will, darling! You’re upset. Let’s get out of here. I think I can walk now, if you give me your arm.”

He held away from her, grinning, with his hands behind his back. “Are you sure you don’t want a good look at my thumbs first, before you commit yourself?”

“I’ll take a rain check on them, as Jack would say. Walk me as far as the window just to see how I make out. Oh, my legs — I thought I’d die, Algy…” As she hobbled across the dirty floor on Timberlane’s arm, Fat Choy sirens began to scream across the city. Their hollow voices came distantly, but from all round. The world was making itself felt again. Mingling with them came the lower note of police car sirens. They got to the window, cobwebbed behind narrow bars. Timberlane wrestled it open and peered out, his face tight between twin lances of iron.

He was in time to see two police cars slide up to the sidewalk below. Doors opened, uniformed men poured out. Among them, stepping from the rear car, was Jack Pilbeam. Timberlane shouted and signalled. The men looked up.

“Jack!” he bellowed down. “Can you put off your travels for twenty-four hours? Martha and I need a best man!”

Right thumb raised above his head, Pilbeam disappeared from view. Next moment, the sound of his footsteps came echoing up the forsaken stairwell.