Greybeard

by Brian Wilson Aldiss

  Clutching him tightly, she asked him why he had remained in hiding when they had looked for him before.

  He had no way of explaining, though he blurted out something about a girl and a game of hide-and-seek. It had been a game; when his father opened the summerhouse door and looked in, it remained a desperate game. He wanted his father to find him and embrace him. He did not know why he crouched behind the garden chairs, half-fearing discovery.

  Stiff with pins and needles, he remained where he was when the door closed again. He had overheard the conversation between his parents, a secret conversation more terrible for being mainly incomprehensible. It told him that there existed a tremendous threatening world with which no one — not even his father — could come to terms; and that they lived not among solid and certain things but in a crumbling pastry world. Guilty and afraid, he hid from his knowledge behind the chairs, anxious to be found, scared of the finding.

  “It was naughty and cruel of you, Algy, do you hear? You knew I would be worried with the river so near. And you are not to play with strangers — I told you before, they sometimes have sicknesses about which you know nothing. You heard us calling you — why didn’t you come out immediately?”

  He answered only with sobs.

  “You frightened Mummy very much, and you are a naughty boy. Why don’t you say something? You’re never going to play here again, do you understand? Never!”

  “I shall see Martha Broughton again, sha’n’t I?”

  “No. We’re not going to live here, Algy. Daddy’s not going to buy the house, and you’re coming home and going straight to bed. Do you understand?”

  “It was a game, Mummy!”

  “It was a very nasty game.”

  Only when they were in the car and driving back to Twickenham did Algy cheer up and lean over from the back seat to stroke his father’s head. “Daddy, when we get home, would you do some of those card tricks to cheer us up with?” he asked.

  “You’re going to bed as soon as you get home,” Arthur Timberlane said, unmoved.

  While Patricia was upstairs, seeing that Algy got into bed as soon as possible, Arthur walked moodily about before the television. The colour reception was bad this evening, giving the three gentlemen sitting round a BBC table the genial hues of apoplectics. They were all, one of them with considerable pipemanship, being euphoric about world conditions.

  Their bland voices only infuriated Arthur. He had no faith in the present government, though it had replaced, less than a year ago, the previous pro-bomb government. He had no faith in the people who supported the government. The shuffle only demonstrated people’s fatuous belief in a political cure for a human condition, Arthur thought.

  Throughout the nineteen sixties and seventies, a period representing most of his adult life, Arthur had prided himself on remaining unscared by the dangers of nuclear warfare. “If it comes to the point — well, too bad, but worrying isn’t going to stop it coming”: that had been his commonsense man-in-the-street approach to the whole thing. Politicians, after all, were paid to worry about such matters; he was better occupied fighting his way up Sofftoys Ltd., which he joined in the sixties as a junior traveller.

  The bomb tests were on and off in turn, as the Communist countries and the Western ones played their incomprehensible game of ideology; nobody kept count of the detonations, and one grew bored with the occasional scares about increasing radiation in the northern hemisphere and overdoses of strontium in the bones of Lapp reindeer or the teeth of St. Louis schoolchildren.

  With a sort of rudimentary space travel developing in the sixties and seventies, and Mars, Venus, Mercury, and Jupiter being examined, it had seemed only natural that the two leading powers should announce that they were conducting a series of 46 “controlled” nuclear detonations in space. The American “rainbow bomb” in the early sixties proved to be the first of many. People — even scientists — grumbled, but the grumbles went unheeded. And most people felt it must be safer to activate the bombs beyond Earth’s atmosphere.

  Well, it had not been safer. Man had acted in ignorance before; this time the ignorance exacted a high price. The van Allen belts, those girdles of radiation encircling the Earth, and in some parts much wider than the diameter of the Earth, were thrown into a state of violent activity by the nuclear blasts, all of which were in the multimegaton range. The belts had pulsated, contracting and then opening again, and then again contracting to a lesser degree. Visually, the effect of this perturbation was small, apart from some spectacular displays of aurora borealis and australis down into even equatorial latitudes. Vitally, the disturbance was much greater. The biosphere received two thorough if brief duckings in hard radiation.

  Long-term results of this ducking could not as yet, barely a year later, be predicted. But the immediate results were evident. Although most of the world’s human population went down with something like a dose of influenza and vomiting, most of them recovered. Children suffered most severely, many of them — depending on how much they had been exposed — losing their hair or their nails, or dying, as Frank Timberlane died. Most of the women pregnant at the time of the disturbance had borne miscarriages. Animals, and in particular those mammals most exposed to an open sky, had suffered similarly. Reports from the dwindling game reserves of Africa suggested that the larger wild animals had been severely hit. Only the musk ox of Greenland and the hardy reindeer of Scandinavia’s north (where earlier generations of the creature had presumably reached some sort of immunity to cosmic and other fast-travelling particles) seemed to be almost entirely unaffected. A high percentage, some authorities put the figure at 85 per cent, of domestic dogs and cats had been stricken; they developed mange or cancer, and had to be put down.

  All of which pointed to a moral that they should have learnt long before, Arthur thought: never trust a bunch of lousy politicians to do your thinking for you. Obviously they should have had sense enough to explode their ruddy bombs on the moon.

  As he bent down and switched the wall TV set off, letting the three bland men whirl away into darkness, Patricia came down into the room. She carried a shirt and a pair of pants due for a dip in the washing-machine.

  “Algy’s miserable. I’ve got him into bed but he wants you to go up and see him,” she said.

  “I’m not going up to see him. I’ve had enough of him for today.”

  “He wants you, Arthur. He loves you.”

  “I’m angry with him still, hiding from me like that. No, I’m not particularly angry. But you’ve been at him, haven’t you, upsetting him and telling him we wouldn’t be going to live at Mayburn?”

  “Someone had to tell him sometime, Arthur. I didn’t think you’d have the courage to.”

  “Oh, don’t let’s bicker like this, Patty, darling. You know I’m upset still about poor little Frank dying.”

  “First it’s the firm, then it’s Frank! Really, Arthur, you must think I don’t fret about the same things, but someone has to keep the house and things going.”

  “Don’t let’s quarrel. Everything’s miserable enough as it is.”

  “I’m not quarrelling, I’m telling you.”

  He looked forlornly at her, pursed up his face, and shook his head, uncertain whether to be pathetic or defiant, and achieving an ineffectual mixture of the two. “I only wanted a bit of comfort, else I wouldn’t have spoken.”

  “Pity you did, then,” she said sharply. “I can’t bear you when you make that foolish face at me, Arthur, I really can’t.” She walked over to the wall and switched the big screen on again. “Why don’t you go up and say good night to Algy? He wants a bit of comfort too.”

  “I’m going out. I’m sick of everything.”

  He marched into the hall and struggled into his heavy blue serge overcoat. She turned her eyes away from the pathos of his struggle, thinking that anything she said would only provoke an argument. As he opened the front door, she called, “Don’t forget that Edgar and Venice will be round in about half an
hour.”

  “I’ll see you later,” he said. She had no reason not to believe him.

  * * *

  Lying on the desk, sprawling over a chaotic bed of papers, brochures, and files, was a teddy bear. It was a special teddy bear. It wore a black eyeshade and a wee tartan kilt and sporran. It carried bagpipes under one arm. It was a Jock Bear, the best-selling line of Sofftoys — in the days when Sofftoys sold.

  Ignoring the malevolence of its one-eyed gaze, Arthur Timberlane swept the bear on to the floor and picked a bunch of letters from his desk. He sat in the deserted factory reading them, huddled in his little office on the ground floor, while outside the lorries rumbled along the Staines road towards central London. He did not remove his overcoat.

  All the letters told the same story. The one that hit hardest came from his most valued representative, old Percy Pargetter, who had travelled for the firm since the late forties and worked on sales commission alone before Arthur changed that. Percy was a good representative. He was coming to see Arthur in the morning; meanwhile, he made the situation clear. Nobody was buying his toys; the retailers and the wholesale trade had cut purchases to absolute zero because their outlets were clogged; the customer was not interested in Sofftoys any more. Even his oldest friends in the trade now winced when they saw Percy’s face at the door. Percy thought some dreaded rival must somehow have scooped the market in baby toys.

  “But who, who?” Arthur asked himself in anguish. From the trade and financial papers, he knew that conditions in the toy trade were bad generally. That was all he knew. Finance and industry fluctuated between boom and slump, but there was no thing new in that, except that the fluctuations had become more violent in the last six months. He spread the letters back on his desk, shaking his head over them.

  He had done all that could be done, at least until Moxan came up with their wretched report. Working with Keith, he had cut production to a minimum, had postponed until nearer Christmas the puppet film series that would advertise Jock Bear on ICV, had cancelled deliveries, had squeezed creditors, had cut overtime, had killed the contract with Straboplastics, had shelved their plans for the Merry Mermaid Rattle. And had dropped the idea of moving house…

  He went to a metal file and turned up the last letter from Moxan, checking the name of Gaylord K. Cottage — not, he thought sourly, that it was a name one would normally forget; Cottage was the bright young man who was in charge of Moxan’s investigation into the reasons for Sofftoys’ slump. Arthur looked at his watch. No, it was not late. He might still catch Cottage at his desk.

  The phone rang at Moxan’s end for some while. Arthur sat listening to it and to the traffic beyond his office. Finally a grumpy voice came on to the line and asked what Arthur wanted. The vision cleared and a shabby round face peered out at Arthur. It was the night porter; at Arthur’s insistence, he agreed to ring Cottage’s extension number and switch the call through.

  Cottage came on the line almost at once. He sat at a desk in an empty room with his jacket off. A hank of hair swung over his brow, his tie sagged under one ear. Arthur hardly took in his appearance beyond realizing that he looked less debonair than on his visits to Sofftoys. When he spoke, to Arthur’s relief, he sounded less the unsympathetic and chromium-plated young man than he had done at their last meeting.

  “Your report’s up in Process, Mr. Timberlane,” he said. “The slight delay was beyond our control. I am full of apologies that we didn’t get it to you earlier, but you see — oh God, the thing’s a bloody bust! Look, Mr. Timberlane, I must talk to someone about this. You’d better listen before complete government censorship clamps down.”

  He stared keenly at Arthur. Either the colour on the line was bad or he was very pale. Inside his blue serge coat, Arthur felt small and cold. “I’m listening, but I don’t know what you mean about censorship, Mr. Cottage. Of course I feel very sympathetic about your personal troubles, but—”

  “Oh, this isn’t just personal, friend, not by a long chalk. Look, let me light a cigarette…” He reached for a packet on his desk, lit up and inhaled, then said, “Look, your firm’s bust, flat, finished! You can’t have it plainer than that, can you? Your fellow director — Keith Barrett, was it? — was all wrong when he said he thought you’d been scooped by another toy firm. We’ve done our research, and you’re all in the same boat, every firm from the biggest to the smallest. The figures prove it. The fact is, nobody’s buying kiddy toys.”

  “But these summer season slumps come and—”

  Cottage waved a hand in front of him, sneering as he did so.

  “Take it from me, this is no seasonal slump, Mr. Timberlane, nothing approaching it. This is something much bigger. I’ve spoken to some of the other chaps here. It isn’t only the toy industry. Know Johnchem, the firm that specializes in a whole range of infant products from prepared strained foods to skin powders? They’re customers of ours. Their figures are worse than yours, and they’ve got ten times your overheads! Radiant, the pram and baby carriage people — they’re in the same boat.”

  Arthur shook his head as if doubting the truth of what he heard. Cottage leant forward until his nose blurred out of focus.

  “You know what it means,” he said, pressing his cigarette down into an ashtray, billowing smoke from his lungs into the screen. “It means one thing — ever since that accident with the van Allen belts a year ago last May, there haven’t been any kids born at all. You can’t sell because you’ve got no consumers.”

  “I don’t believe it! I can’t believe it!”

  Cottage was fumbling stupidly in his pocket and playing with his cigarette lighter. “Nobody will believe it until they get it officially, but we’ve checked with the General Register Office at Somerset House, and with the General Registry up in Edinburgh. They haven’t given a thing away — but from what they didn’t say, our figures help us to draw the correct conclusions. Our overseas connections all report the same thing. Everywhere it’s the same thing — no kids!”

  He spoke almost gloatingly, leaning forward with his eyes slitted against the lights of the visiphone. Arthur switched off the vision. He could not bear to look at Cottage or to let Cottage see him. He held his head in his hands, dimly aware of how cold he was, of how he trembled. “It’s a general bust,” he said. “The end of the world.” He felt the coarseness of his cheeks.

  “Not quite as bad as that,” Cottage said from the blank screen. “But I’ll bet you a fiver that we’ll not see normal trading conditions again till 1987.”

  “Five years! It’s as bad as the end of the world. How can I keep afloat for five years? I’ve got a family. Oh, what can I do? Jesus Christ…” He switched off as Cottage began to launch into another dose of bad news, and sat staring at the litter on the desk without seeing it. “It’s the end of the bloody lousy world. Oh Christ… Bloody failure, bloody…”

  He felt in his pocket for cigarettes, found only a pack of cards, and sat staring hopelessly at it. Something rose in his throat like a physical blockage; a salt tingle made him screw up his eyes. Dropping the cards on to the floor beside Jock Bear, he made his way out of the factory and round to his car, without bothering to drop the latch of the door behind him. He was crying.

  A convoy of military vehicles rumbled along the Staines road. He threw the car into gear and grasped the steering wheel as it bounded forward towards the road.

  * * *

  Patricia had hardly poured Venice and Edgar their first drink when the front-door bell sounded. She went through to find Keith Barratt smiling on the doorstep. He bowed gallantly to her.

  “I was driving by the factory and saw Arthur’s car parked in the yard, so I thought you might like a bit of company, Pat,” he said. “This bit of company, to be exact.”

  “Venny and Edgar Harley are here, Keith,” she said, using a loud voice so that what she said could be heard in the livingroom. “Do come in and join us.”

  Keith winced, spread his hands in resignation, and said in exaggerated
ly refined tones, “Oh, but absolutely delighted, Mrs. Timberlane.”

  When he had been provided with a drink, he raised it and said to the company, “Well, here’s to happier days! The three of you look a bit gloomy, I must say. Have a bad trip, Edgar?”

  “There is some reason for gloom, I should say,” Edgar Harley said. He was a tubby man, the sort of man on whom tubbiness sits well. “I’ve been telling Venny and Pat about what I turned up in Australia. I was in Sydney dining next to Bishop Aitken the night before last, and he was complaining about a violent wave of irreligion sweeping Australia. He claimed that the churches had only christened a matter of seven children — seven! — during the last eighteen months, in the whole of Australia.”

  “I can’t say that makes me feel too desperately suicidal,” Keith said, smiling, settling himself on the sofa next to Patricia.

  “The bishop had it wrong,” Venice said. “At this conference Edgar went to, they told him the real reason for the lack of christenings. You’d better tell Keith, Ed, since it affects him and there will be an official announcement anyway at the weekend.”

  With a solemn face, Edgar said, “The bishop had no babies to christen simply because there are no babies. The contraction of the van Allen belts brought every human being in contact with hard radiation.”

  “We knew that, but most of us have survived,” Keith said. “How do you mean this affects me personally?”

  “Governments have kept very quiet, Keith, while they try to sort out just what damage this — er, accident has caused. It’s a tricky subject for several reasons, the chief one being that the effects of exposure to different types of radioactive emissions are not clearly understood, and that in this case, the exposure is still going on.”