Villiers Touch

by Brian Garfield

  In the next hour the road took him past the edge of the mountains; he took a fast, paved side road toward the high country, and by four-fifteen was climbing through long gentle meadows hip-deep in yellow grass. Dark spots on the hills were beef cattle, slowly browsing.

  The sky was vast, cobalt blue, serrated at its edges by jagged peaks of crystalline clarity. He had forgotten how beautiful this country was—back East he always got to thinking of Arizona in Eastern stereotypes, as if it were all desert, sand and cactus. Easy to forget about the high country, the grass and hills and those high peaks where the snow hadn’t melted in a thousand years. The road lanced up the center of a valley, and he didn’t meet another car in twenty miles, and when he did, it was a pickup truck driven by an Apache Indian. Out here you didn’t have to prove anything to anybody, and you could leave your doors wide open. No use for the horn on your car.

  This was Judd’s land now; he had been on Judd property for miles. The barbed-wire fences ran gleaming along both sides of the road, shiny wire and orange-painted steel posts, fading ahead of him with perspective, two parallel lines joining at infinity. At five thousand feet on this plateau it was cool enough to turn off the temperature control and throw the windows open to the wind. He pushed the car up to eighty and enjoyed himself.

  In the back of his mind he was thinking about Judd. Lewis Downey had said he was in excellent health; it was the kind of thing he would say if he suspected the phone was tapped, and a man in Judd’s position always had to assume his phones were tapped; that was the way of the modern world, and Hastings had no liking for it. Maybe I ought to retire out here and hang out my shingle. Country lawyer. He grinned at the hills and breathed deep of the crystal air; it tasted as if no one had ever breathed it before. It made him think of the times he and Diane had spent out here, holidaying, visiting the old man. Diane had no affinity for the outdoors; her visits here had always been designed solely to please her father. But Hastings recalled long walks along the grasshills with Judd, jeep and helicopter rides across the vast acres, and now and then there had been the feeling he was as close to Judd as Diane was—and closer, in some ways.

  The road lifted him now toward the summit of a long hill topped by a deep-green stand of planted cottonwoods. Inside the barbed wire a graded landing strip ran along with a lonely windsock and three parked crop-dusting planes. To make a landing, he remembered, you had to buzz the field first to chase the whiteface cattle off. Judd’s operation used jeeps and planes to do its cowboying.

  Lewis Downey was standing by the front gate, a trim neat man with salt-and-pepper hair and a good tan, dressed in light slacks and a short-sleeved shirt. When he recognized Hastings he waved and opened the wire gate. Hastings drove in, wheels rumbling on the steel-slatted cattleguard, and stopped just inside. Downey latched the gate shut and got into the car; it was a quarter-mile ride up to the house. “Hi.”

  Hastings said, “You’re looking fit.”

  “This country’s good for you.” Downey propped his right arm in the open window. “Have a good trip?”

  “Any air strip you survive is a good trip. Look, we’re not on the phone now. How is he?”

  “Improving. But better prepare for a shock when you see him.”

  He shot a brief sidewise glance at Downey, but the man’s cheeks revealed nothing. He didn’t seem particularly happy to see Hastings, but Hastings was no longer a member of the family; Judd had no real obligation to him; and Downey was a man who liked to keep things neat and exact, he didn’t like complexities and muddles. He was efficient, brainy, assiduously neat and clean—otherwise unassuming and capable of immense diffidence. A superb private secretary. And like a good butler, he knew his place. He volunteered nothing.

  There was no point in pumping him; Hastings would learn from Judd as much as Judd wanted him to know, and he’d never elicit any more than that from Downey.

  The house was not especially large. It was single-story adobe, built around a quadrangular patio in the Spanish style, with exposed whole-log beam ends protruding from under the eaves. They approached it up a blacktopped drive that crossed a sloping grass meadow. Here and there were blocks of salt; gnats and flies swarmed around warm piles of cattle dung; the thick brown backs of steers swayed above the rippling tall grass. Beyond the summit, timbered peaks reared tier upon jagged tier.

  Downey said, “Those cattle pens are new since you were here last. The one off to the left is full of seventy-dollar cows, and the little one in back of it’s full of one ten-thousand-dollar bull. Funny when you think about it—it’s the cow that does the work, giving birth.”

  Russ pulled up by the house and switched the engine off. The hot steel pinged with contraction. He heard cows lowing and saw a buzzard swoop silently across the treetops on motionless wings. Getting out of the car, Hastings was amazed by the loud crunch of his own shoes. Sweat rolled freely along his face but the heat was dry and not unpleasant.

  The big front door swung open and Elliot Judd came forward, smiling warmly.

  The old man emerged from the house with his hand outstretched and his thin lips creased back in a welcoming smile. “Russ, I’m glad to see a human face.”

  The fragile old hand felt as if it would crumble to powder within Hastings’ fist. “How are you, Dad?”

  “Still taking nourishment.”

  “You look fine,” he lied.

  The painful smile twitched. “Like a battery—it looks just the same whether it’s fresh or all used up. By God, I am glad to see you, Russ.”

  Hastings tried to keep his smile steady. His breath was caught up in his throat. The old man had lost an alarming amount of weight. The skin hung in brittle folds from the gaunt, scored face. His color had turned to a cyanotic blue and his spidery hands, once firm and powerful, shook with the palsy of age or illness—they were mottled with small brown-blue spots. But Judd’s commanding features were dignified, if anything, by pain; the eyes were still fiercely blue against the dark skin. He was a tough old man whose pride, not arrogant, was the kind that took itself for granted, like a high-caste Brahmin’s. He managed to wear a white tennis visor and a disreputable herringbone Harris tweed sport jacket without looking at all ridiculous.

  Downey went by them, taking Hastings’ suitcase into the house. The old man tugged at the flap of skin that sagged beneath his jaw. “Let’s not stand here all day staring at each other like two strange dogs off their home ground. Come inside and let’s relax.” He turned, not quite steady on the balls of his feet, and led the way, talking over his shoulder: “I talked to Diane a few days ago. A regular damn tycoon I raised there—I guess she’s doing fine with her art, and I suppose it’s what she thinks she wants. But I wish I’d made more of a woman of her. No disloyalty meant to my own blood, Russ, but I’ve always taken it for granted the break-up was more her fault than yours.”

  “I wouldn’t say that, exactly.”

  It was only a few steps, but by the time they entered the big front room the old man was trying to conceal the fact that he was breathing hard. Hastings felt uneasy alarm. Judd pressed a buzzer and waved toward a chair. He sounded hoarse when he said, “I know all about Women’s Liberation and all the rest of that Carrie Nation crap, but nothing’s convinced me yet that women are biologically designed to excel as hunter-gatherers. Physically we’re still a tool-making species of apes, and any woman who tries to hunt with the men has something wrong with her. Know what I’m driving at?”

  “Sure. I’m almost old-fashioned enough to agree with you.”

  The old man grinned at him. A chicken-necked old Indian woman, her parchment face as wrinkled as a prune, rustled into the room in response to Judd’s ring. Covered by a long severe black dress that was buttoned up to the chin, she carried a drink on a silver platter. Hastings scented it and watched the old woman walk out. “Always the best Scotch in this house,” he said. “Aren’t you joining me?”

  “Not now,” Judd replied. “Diane’s got a wire down in her somewhe
re, that’s certain—and I don’t imagine she’ll find any real kind of satisfaction until she gets over trying to prove she’s better than a man.”

  “Back in New York things never seem that clear-cut.”

  “I know. That’s why it pays to live out here, where you can strip away the fog and see through to the core of things.” The old man, still on his feet, kept tugging at his chin. “Russ, I’m glad you came. I’ve had it in mind for a month to call you and ask you to come down.”

  “About Diane?”

  “No. That’s over and done with—I couldn’t handle her, and neither could you. Maybe someone else can, but it’s not up to us to meddle, is it? No, it’s something else.”

  Hastings watched him with full attention. The old man sat down where he could see out through the huge plate-glass window, across the rolling miles of grass. “Russ, nowadays this country’s full of young squirts just burning to save the world from villains like me. Are you one of them?”

  “I guess that depends on what you mean. I’m no radical.”

  “Maybe you ought to be. It’s taken me three-quarters of a century to learn some things I should have known by instinct from birth.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When a man gets as rich as I am, he gets to thinking there’s nothing left to buy but personal comforts—privacy, luxuries, people to do for him. But it’s a terrible mistake. There is, after all, something important he can buy. He can buy, or at least try to buy, survival for his species.”

  “Sounds ambitious.”

  “You’re skeptical—that’s good.” Judd smiled at him. “The beginning of wisdom is knowing where to look for it, Russ, and you won’t find it in Wall Street. It’s right here. Look out there—what do you see? Virgin land. Four thousand square miles inside my fence, and a National Forest backing up on it. Outside of Alaska, it’s one of the biggest tracts of its kind in the country.”

  He had to wait to get his breath before he spoke again: “I thought it was a virtue to build things. I was wrong. I’ve spent my whole damn life building things that have strangled our cities with traffic, killed thousands of people on the highways, poisoned the air and polluted the water. Destroying this planet of ours not for the betterment of man but for the profit of corporate industry. Well, we’ve always thought we were carrying on the American dream—the pioneer builder. But it’s become a nightmare, the pioneer heroes have become criminal rapists. We’ve killed off the animals, chopped down the trees, grazed off the grass, furrowed the earth into dust bowls, and filled the air and water with poisons. You can’t breathe anywhere anymore—there isn’t a river I know of where a man can feel safe drinking the water. This world’s not fit to live in any more.”

  “I’ve given it all my attention these past months, Russ, and I’ve satisfied myself I’m not just an old fogy demented by a senile obsession. I’ve put huge teams of trained men to studying this thing, at great expense, and the findings terrify me. We’re getting closer and closer to a catastrophe that can’t be reversed. It could happen in a dozen ways. A big pesticide spill in ocean areas where marine organisms produce most of our oxygen. An oil spill in the Arctic, to melt the ice cap. But even if that kind of thing can be held off, there isn’t enough air and soil and water left to absorb our poisons. We carry smoke in our lungs and strontium 90 in our bones and DDT in our flesh and poison iodine 131 in our thyroids. We’ve burned so much fuel the carbon dioxide content of the earth’s atmosphere has increased by ten percent—and if it goes up another four percent the oxygen balance of the atmosphere will collapse. Every living thing on the face of the earth will die. We could reach that point within eighteen years. Am I boring you, Russ? Never mind—do an old man a courtesy, hear me out.”

  Hastings watched him, unblinking, listening to the painful voice, the frequent pauses for breath, watching the fiery glitter of the old eyes, like the last bright coals in a dying bed of ashes.

  “I’ve talked to the engineers. They think we’ll solve everything with our marvelous technology. We won’t. Technology never saved a society. The most technologically advanced nation in Europe produced the most irresponsible tyranny we’ve ever seen—and when we get as overpopulated and regimented as Germany we’ll do the same thing, count on it.”

  He paused; the silence ran on while Hastings put his glass down and put his hands in his pockets. When the old man resumed, he seemed at first to have lost the thread of his thought.

  “Back in twenty-nine,” Judd said, “I knew the country was in for a spectacular bust. Bloated up and ready to pop. I liquidated my stocks and put the money in short-term municipals and land and cash in my own vault. When the panic came, I waited for it to hit bottom, and then I stepped in and bought up blue-chips—oil, utilities, telephone, the things the country had to have, no matter how panicky the market got.

  “Every day from my office window I could see the breadlines outside the public kitchens, men without jobs sitting like corpses in the parks, long lines standing outside the employment offices along Sixth Avenue. I gave jobs to as many of them as I could, and I thought my responsibility ended there. Maybe, in those times, it did. In any ordinary world—one that isn’t threatened with complete extinction—you need hardship. An environment of savage conflict produces one thing—it produces leadership. The Depression produced the last real generation of leaders we’ve had in this country. Today even courage has become suspect. We can’t afford to fight our enemies; we’ve got to learn to live with them on penalty of nuclear extinction, and that destroys the meaning of courage—do you suppose Roosevelt could have held this country together in forty-two if the Japanese had been armed with nuclear missiles?”

  Hastings, expressionless, watched the quixotically gaunt face; the old man went on: “We haven’t got leaders with the guts to do what has to be done. I know this much, Russ—nothing worth a hoot in hell will ever be preserved for mankind unless we can stabilize the numbers of our species. I’m glad I’m old—I’d rather sit under a nuclear blast than see what’s going to happen in the next thirty years, when we’ll have twice as many people as we’ve got now. We’re going to have suffering the like of which no man has ever experienced. Right now, today, in the past twenty-four hours, ten thousand people have starved to death on this earth. If all the food in the world were evenly distributed today, every human being alive would go hungry. Is it any wonder it’s the Cubas and the North Vietnams, and not the United States, that are producing leadership?”

  Judd made a half-turn in his chair so that his gaunt face picked up light from the window; it looked remotely savage. He spoke in a whisper. “What happens to the quality of human life, even in this rich country, when we’ve tripled the population of the earth, Russ?”

  Then his head wheeled, and he leveled a bony finger. “You are the last generation that can save us, Russ. You, not your kids or your grandkids. For them it will be all over but the burying.”

  He drew a ragged breath. His eyes stared, defiant, and he went on more gently: “We spend two thousand dollars on military hardware for every dollar we spend on population control. If we keep doing it, you’ll have no grandchildren, Russ. The race of man will be dead.”

  Hastings stirred. “You’re a very wise old bird.”

  “I’m just a crusty old fart with his eyes open to see. Now I had better tell you why I’ve inflicted this impassioned speech on you—I confess I’ve rehearsed it for some time. I’m going to ask you to do something, Russ, so pay attention now.” He eased himself back in his chair, heartbreakingly feeble. “My personal fortune,” he said, “is larger than the national budgets of some small countries. I’m putting it to use. I’ve set up trusts here and in Canada and Australia and several other foreign parts—because frankly I don’t trust America to survive—to work toward the rigid enforcement of population control throughout the world. I have not contributed to organizations that seek to control the conception of unwanted children, because we have got to prevent births of children whether the
y are wanted or not. Governments are going to have to prohibit childbearing by law, not by individual choice. I’m pessimistic, I don’t think it’s going to work, but it’s the only chance we have.

  “At the same time, I’ve set up a trust to operate the land we’re standing on—about twenty-five million acres. It’s set up to maintain this land as a perpetual wilderness. No tree cutting, no digging for minerals, no construction of any buildings aside from the replacement of worn-out structures on the same sites. The place will become an inviolable park when I die. I don’t trust the National Park people—they’re subject to lobbyists, and they’d throw it wide open the minute somebody discovered gold here—and so I’m keeping it in private hands. It’s to be a completely private park. No trespassing.”

  “What?”

  The old man’s creased mouth had stretched into a strict, stern smile. “A few years ago,” he murmured, “the last time I was in New York, I rented a bicycle and pedaled my way through Central Park. It was a Monday morning, and the park was reasonably deserted. Do you know what I saw?”

  “I can imagine.”

  “Yes. The excrement of a thousand human savages. The leavings of a population of mindless animals who’d had their Sunday outing in the sun, and left their spoor behind. There wasn’t a square yard of grass that wasn’t covered with broken glass, crumpled napkins, bent beer cans, torn newspapers, spilled mustard, discarded condoms and brassieres, crushed sunglasses, bloody sanitary napkins, paper plates, half-pint whiskey bottles. All right. I believe the parks weren’t put there for savages to defile. They don’t deserve the use of it. I don’t suppose there’s any way to prevent the wildlife here from being stunned by a periodic sonic boom, but short of that I want this land untouched by human beings. The time is going to come when people will need to know there’s an untouched wilderness like this still on the map of the United States. The public parks will soon be so mobbed with campers and picnickers there won’t be room left to see the landscape, and I refuse to let that happen here. They won’t get in here, they’ll never see it with their own eyes, but they’ll know it’s here, Russ, and I believe that’s pricelessly important.”