Greybeard

by Brian W Aldiss

  “Stop it, Algy. I know we’re all sterile as well as you do. We knew that when we got married, seventeen years ago. I don’t want to hear it once more.”

  When he spoke, his voice was so changed that she turned and looked at him.

  “Don’t think I want to hear it again, either. But you see how every day reveals the wretched truth all over again. The misery always comes hot and new. We’re over forty now, and there’s scarcely anyone younger than we. You only have to walk through Oxford to see how old and dusty the world is getting. And it’s now that youth is passing that the lack of replenishment is really being felt — in the marrow.”

  She gave him another measure of gin, and set a glass down on the table for herself. He looked up at her with a wry smile.

  “Perhaps it’s the death of my mother makes me talk like this. I’m sorry, Martha, particularly when we don’t know what’s become of your father. All the while I’ve been so busy living my life, Mother’s been living hers. You know what her life’s been like! She fell in love with three useless men, my father, Keith Barratt, and this Irishman, poor woman! Somehow I feel we should have done more to help her.”

  “You know she enjoyed herself in her own way. We’ve said all this before.”

  He wiped his brow and head on a handkerchief; his smile was more relaxed.

  “Maybe that’s what happens when the mainspring of the world snaps: everyone is doomed forever to think and say what they thought and said yesterday.”

  “We don’t have to despair, Algy. We’ve survived years of war, we’ve come through waves of puritanism and promiscuity. We’ve got away from London, where they are in for real trouble, now that the last authoritarian government has broken down. I know Cowley isn’t any bed of roses, but Croucher is only a local phenomenon; if we can survive him, things may get better, become more settled. Then we can get somewhere permanent to live.”

  “I know, my love. We seem to be going through an interim period. The trouble is, there have been a number of interim periods already, and there will be more. I can’t see how stability can ever be achieved again. There’s just a road leading downhill.”

  “We don’t have to be involved in politics. DOUCH(E) doesn’t require you to mix in politics to make your reports. We can just find somewhere quiet and reasonably safe for ourselves, surely?”

  He laughed. He stood up and looked genuinely amused. Then he stroked her hair with its grey and brown streaks and drew his chair closer.

  “Martha, I’m mad about you still! It’s a national failing to think of politics as something that goes on in Parliament. It isn’t; it’s something that goes on inside us. Look, love, the United National Government has broken apart, and thank God for it. But at least its martial law kept things going and wheels turning. Now it has collapsed, millions of people are saying, ‘I have nothing to save for, no sons, no daughters. Why should I work?’ and they’ve stopped work. Others may have wanted to work, but you can’t carry on industry like that. Disorganize one part effectively, and it all grinds to a halt. The factories of Britain stand empty. We’re making nothing to export. You think America and the Commonwealth and the other countries are going to go on sending us food free? Of course not, especially when a lot of them are harder hit than we are! I know food is short at present, but next year, believe me, there’s going to be real famine. Your safe place won’t exist then, Martha. In fact, there may only be one safe place.”

  “Abroad?”

  “I meant working for Croucher.”

  She turned away frowning, not wishing to voice again her distrust of the local dictator.

  “I’ve got a headache, Algy. I shouldn’t be drinking this gin. I think I must go and lie down.”

  He took her wrist.

  “Listen to me, Martha. I know I’m a devil to live with just now, and I know you don’t want to sleep with me just now, but don’t stop listening to me or the last line of communication will be cut. We may be the final generation, but life’s still precious. I don’t want us to starve. I have made an appointment to see Commander Croucher tomorrow. I’m offering to co-operate.”

  “What?”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not? How many people did he massacre in the centre of Oxford last week? Over sixty, wasn’t it? And the bodies left lying there for twenty-four hours so that people could count and make sure. And you — ”

  “Croucher represents law and order, Martha.”

  “Madness and disorder!”

  “No. The commander represents as much law and order as we have any right to expect, considering the horrible outrage we have committed on ourselves. There’s a military government in the Home Counties centred on London, and one of the local gentry has set up a paternalistic sort of community covering most of Devon. Apart from them and Croucher, the country is slipping rapidly into anarchy. Have you thought what it must be like farther up in the Midlands, and in the North, in the industrial areas? What do you think is going to happen up there?”

  “They’ll find their own little Crouchers soon enough.”

  “Right! And what will their little Crouchers do? March ’em down south as fast as they can.”

  “And risk the cholera?”

  “I only hope the cholera stops them! Quite honestly, Martha, I hope this plague wipes out most of the population. If it doesn’t stop the North, then Croucher had better be strong, because he’ll have to be the one to stop them. Have another gin. Here’s to Bonnie Prince Croucher! We’ll have to defend a line across the Cotswolds from Cheltenham to Buckingham. We should be building our defences tomorrow. It would keep Croucher’s troops busy and out of the centre of population where they can spread infection. He’s got too many soldiers; the men join his army rather than work in the car factories. They should be put on defence at once. I shall tell Croucher when I see him...”

  She lurched away from the table and went to swill her face under the cold tap. Without having dried it, she rested by the open window, looking at the evening sun trapped in the shoddy suburban street.

  “Croucher will be too busy defending himself from the hooligans in London to guard the north,” she said. She didn’t know what either of them was saying. The world was no longer the one into which she had been born; nor was it even the one in which — ah, but they had been young and innocent then! — they had married; for that ceremony was distant in space as well as time, in a Washington they idealized because they had then been idealists, where they had talked a lot of being faithful and being strong... No, they were all mad. Algy was right when he said they had committed a horrible outrage on themselves. She thought about the expression as she stared into the street, no longer listening as Timberlane embarked on one of the long speeches he now liked to make.

  Not for the first time, she reflected on how people had grown fond of making rambling monologues; her father had fallen into the habit in recent years. In a vague way, she could analyze the reasons for it: universal doubt, universal guilt. In her own mind the same monologue rarely stopped, though she guarded her speech. Everyone spoke endlessly to imaginary listeners. Perhaps they were all the same imaginary listener.

  It was really the generation before hers that was most to blame, the people who were grown-up when she was born, the millions who were adults during the nineteen-sixties and seventies. They had known all about war and destruction and nuclear power and radiation and death — it was all second nature to them. But they never renounced it. They were like savages who had to go through some fearful initiation rite. Yes, that was it, an initiation rite, and if they had come through it, then perhaps they might have grown up into brave and wise adults. But the ceremony had gone wrong. Too frenzied by far, it had not stopped short at circumcision; the whole organ had been lopped off. Though they wept and repented, the outrage had been committed: all they could do was hop about with their deformity, alternately boasting about and bemoaning it.

  Through her misery, peering between the seams of her headache, she saw a windrush
with Croucher’s yellow X on its sides swing around the corner and prowl down the street. Windrushes were the locally manufactured variety of hovercraft, a family-sized model now largely appropriated by the military. A man in uniform craned his neck out of the blister, staring at house numbers as he glided down the street. When it drew level with the Timberlane flat, the machine stopped and lowered itself to the ground in a dying roar of engines.

  Frightened, Martha summoned Timberlane over to the window. There were two men in the vehicle, both wearing the yellow X on their tunics. One climbed out and walked across the street.

  “We’ve nothing to fear,” Timberlane said. He felt in his pocket for the little 7.7 mm. automatic with which DOUCH(E) had armed him. “Lock yourself in the kitchen, love, just in case there’s trouble. Keep quiet.”

  “What do they want, do you think?”

  There was a heavy knocking on the door.

  “Here, take the gin bottle,” he said, giving her a taut grin. The bottle passed between them, all there was time to exchange. He patted her behind as he pushed her into the kitchen. The knocking was repeated before he could get down to the door.

  A corporal was standing there; his mate leaned from the blister of the windrush, half whistling and rubbing his lower lip on the protruding snout of his rifle.

  “Timberlane? Algernon Timberlane? You’re wanted up at the barracks.”

  The corporal was an undersized man with a sharp jaw and patches of dark skin under his eyes. He would be only in his early fifties — youngish for these days. His uniform was clean and pressed, and he kept one hand near the revolver at his belt.

  “Who wants me? I was just going to have my supper.”

  “Commander Croucher wants you, if you’re Timberlane. Better hop in the windrush with us.” The corporal had a big nose, which he rubbed now in a furtive fashion as he summed up Timberlane.

  “I have an appointment with the commander tomorrow.”

  “You’ve got an appointment with him this evening, mate. I don’t want any argument.”

  There seemed no point in arguing. As he turned to shut the door behind him, Martha appeared. She spoke direct to the guard.

  “I’m Mrs Timberlane. Will you take me along too?”

  She was an attractive woman, with a rich line to her, and a certain frankness about her eye that made her appear younger than she was. The corporal looked her over with approval.

  “They don’t make ’em like you anymore, lady. Hop up with your husband.”

  She silenced Timberlane’s attempt at protest by hurrying ahead to climb into the windrush. Impatiently, she shook off the corporal’s hand and swung herself up without aid, ignoring the man’s swift, instinctive glance at the thigh she showed.

  They toured by an unnecessarily long way to the Victorian pseudocastle that was Croucher’s military headquarters. On the first part of the way she thought in anguish to herself, Isn’t this one of the archetypal situations of the last century — and the twentieth really was the Last Century — the unexpected peremptory knocking at the door, and the going to find someone there in uniform waiting to take you off somewhere, for reasons unknown? Who invented the situation, that it should be repeated so often? Perhaps this is what happens after an outrage — unable to regenerate, you just have to go on repeating yourself. She longed to say some of this aloud; she was generalizing in the rather pretentious way her father had done, and generalizing is a form of relief that gains its maximum effect from being uttered aloud; but a look at Timberlane s face silenced her. She could see he was excited.

  She saw the boy in his face as well as the old man.

  Men! she thought. There was the seat of the whole sickness. They invented these situations. They needed them — torturer or tortured, they needed them. Friend or enemy, they were united in an algolagnia beyond woman’s cure or understanding.

  The instant that imperious knocking had sounded at the door, their hated little flat had turned into a place of refuge; the dripping kitchen tap, whistling into its chipped basin, had turned into a symbol of home, the littered pieces of jigsaw a sign of a vast intellectual freedom. She had whispered a prayer for a safe return to the fragmented beach of Acapulco as she hastened down to join her husband.

  Now they moved three feet above ground level, and she tasted the chemistries of tension in her bloodstream.

  In the September heat the city slept. But the patient was uneasy in its slumber. Old cartons and newspaper heaved in the gutters. A battery-powered convertible lay with its nose nestling in a shattered shop front. At open windows, people lolled, heavy sunlight filling their gasping mouths. The smell of the patient showed that blood poisoning had set in.

  Before they had gone far, their expectation of seeing a corpse was satisfied, doubly. A man and woman lay together in unlikely attitudes on the parched grass of St Clement’s roundabout. A group of starlings fluttered around their shoulders.

  Timberlane put an arm about Martha and whispered to her as he had when she was a younger woman.

  “Things will be a lot worse before they’re better,” the beak-nosed corporal said to nobody in particular. “I don’t know what’ll happen to the world, I’m sure.” Their passage sent a wave of dust washing over the houses.

  At the barracks, they sailed through the entrance gate and disembarked. The corporal marched them towards a distant archway. The heat in the central square lay thick; they pressed through it, in at a door, along a corridor, and up into cooler quarters. The corporal conferred with another man, who summoned them into a farther room, where a collection of hot and weary people waited on benches, several of them wearing cholera masks.

  They sat there for half an hour before being summoned. Finally they were led into a spacious room furnished in a heavy way that suggested it had once been used as an officers’ mess. Occupying one half of it were a mahogany table and three trestle tables. Men sat at these tables, several of them with maps and papers before them; only the man at the mahogany table had nothing but a notebook before him; he was the only man who did not seem idle. The man at the mahogany table was Commander Peter Croucher.

  He looked solid, fleshy, and hard. His face was big and unbeautiful, but it was the face of neither a fool nor a brute. His sparse grey hair was brushed straight back in furrows; his suit was neat, his whole aspect businesslike. He was little more than ten years older than Timberlane; fifty-three or four, say. He looked at the Timberlanes with a tired but appraising look.

  Martha knew his reputation. They had heard of the man even before the waves of violence had forced them to leave London. Oxford’s major industry was the production of cars and GEMs (Ground Effect Machines), particularly the windrush. Croucher had been personnel manager at the largest factory. The United National Government had made him Deputy District Officer for Oxfordshire. On the collapse of the government, the district officer had been found dead in mysterious circumstances, and Croucher had taken over the old controls, drawing them in tighter.

  He spoke without moving. He said, “No invitation was issued for you being here, Mrs Timberlane.”

  “I go everywhere with my husband, Commander.”

  “Not if I say not. Guard!”

  “Sir.” The corporal marched forward with a parody of army drill.

  “It was an infringement, you bringing this woman in here, Corporal Pitt. Supervise her immediate removal at once. She can wait outside.”

  Martha started to protest. Timberlane silenced her, pressing her hand, and she allowed herself to be led away. Croucher got up and came around his table.

  “Timberlane, you’re the only DOUCH(E) man in the territory under my control. Dissuade your mind that my motives towards you are ulterior. That’s the reverse of the truth. I want you on my side.”

  “I shall be on your side if you treat my wife properly.”

  Croucher gestured to show how poorly he regarded the remark. “What can you offer me in any way advantageous to me?” he asked. The involved semi-literacy of his spee
ch added to his menace, in Greybeard’s estimation.

  “I’m well informed, Commander. I have an idea that you must defend Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire from the Midlands and the North, if your forces are strong enough. If you could lend me a map.

  Croucher held up a hand.

  “Look, I’d better cut you down to size a bit, my friend. Just for the record, I don’t need any half-baked intellectual ideas from self-styled pundits like yourself. See these men here, sitting at these tables? They have the mutual benefit of performing my thinking for me, thus utilizing advantageously one of the advantages of having a terra firma in a university city like Oxford. The old Town versus Gown battle has been fought and decided, Mr Timberlane, as you’d know if you hadn’t been knocking about in London for so long. I decided and implemented it. I rule all Oxford for the benefit of one and all. These blokes are the cream of the colleges that you are seeing here, all very high-flown intellects. See that gink at the end, with the shaky hands and the cracked specs? He’s the University Chichele Professor for War, Harold Biggs. Down there, that’s Sir Maurice Rigg, one of the all-time greats at history, I’m told. So kindly infer that I’m asking you about DOUCH(E), not how you’d run operations if you were in my shoes.”

  “Not doubt one of your intellectual ginks can tell you about DOUCH(E).”

  “No, they can’t. That’s why it was compulsory that you come here. You see, all the data I’ve got about DOUCH(E) is that it’s some sort of an intelligence unit with its headquarters in London. London organizations are suspect with me just now, for obvious reasons. Unless you wish to be mistaken for a spy, et cetera, perhaps you ought to set my mind in abeyance about what you intend doing here.”