Greybeard

by Brian W Aldiss

  God, this is what it’s like to be left alone in the world, he subvocalized. 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 that 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 around 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 motorboat 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, leaned over, and forced her to breathe more chloroform.

  When Martha woke again, she was in a bedroom. She was 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 anymore, now that radiation sickness is so fashionable. Men used to hate those 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 bomb-proof shelter underground, stocked with a two-year supply 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 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 and upside down. He put his arm around 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 regimes 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 fifteen or twenty years only fifty percent 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 fifty percent. 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 around. 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.

  Chapter Five

  The River: Oxford

  They had raised a mast and a sheet, and were carried forward by a light wind. Since their night flight from Swifford Fair, their progress had been slow. They had been hindered at an old and broken lock; a boat had foundered there and blocked the navigable stream, and no doubt would continue to do so until the spring floodwater broke it up. They unloaded the boats there, pushing or carrying them and their few possessions to a point where they could safely launch them again.

  The country here was particularly wild and inhospitable. Pitt thought he saw gnomes peering at them from bushes. All four of them thought they saw stoats climbing in the trees, finally deciding that the animals were not stoats but pine martens, an animal hardly ever seen in those parts since the Middle Ages. With bow and arrow they killed two of the creatures that afternoon, eating their flesh and preserving their fine pelts, when they were forced to make a camp in the open, under trees. Wood for burning lay about in plenty, and they huddled together between two fires; but it was an ill night for them all.

  Next day, when they were under way again, they were fortunate enough to see a peddler fishing on the bank. He bought Pitt’s little rowing boat from them, giving them money and two sails, one of which they used that night to make themselves a tent. The peddler offered them tinned apricots and pears, but since these must have been at least a dozen years old, and were very expensive, they did not buy. The little old man, made garrulous by solitude, told them he was on his way to join Swifford Fair, and that he had some medicines for Dr Bunny Jingadangelow.

  After they left the peddler, they came to a wide sheet of water, patched with small islands and banks of rushes. Under the drab sky, it appeared to stretch on forever, and they could not see their proper course through it. This lake was a sanctuary for wildlife; dippers, moor hens, and an abundance of duck moved over or above its surface. In the clear waters beneath their centreboard, many shoals of fish were visible.

  They were in no mood to appreciate the natural attractions. The weather had turned blustery; they did not know in which direction they should sail. Rain, galloping over the face of the water, sent them scurrying for shelter under the spare sail. As the showers grew heavier and the breeze failed, Greybeard and Charley rowed to one of the islands, and there they made camp.

  It was dry under the sail, and the weather had turned milder, but a sense of depression settled on them as they watched shawls of water and cloud embrace the landscape. Greybeard husbanded a small fire into life, which set them all coughing, for the smoke would not disperse. Their spirits recovered only when Pitt appeared, shrunken, withered, weathered, but triump
hantly bearing a pair of fine beavers on his back. One of the beavers was a giant, four feet long from whiskers to tail. Pitt reported a colony of them only a hundred yards away; the few that were about had shown no fear of him.

  “I’ll catch another pair in the morning for breakfast,” he said. “If we’ve got to live like savages, let’s live as well as savages.”

  Although he was not a man ever to grumble extensively, Pitt found few consolations in their way of life. Whatever his success as a trapper of animals — and he derived satisfaction from outwitting and slaying them — he saw himself as a failure. Ever since he had proved himself unable to kill Greybeard, a dozen years before, he had lived an increasingly solitary life; even his gratitude to Greybeard for sparing him was tempered with the thought that but for him he might now be controlling his own body of soldiers, the remains of Croucher’s command. He nourished this grievance inside himself, though he knew there was no real substance in it. Earlier experience should have convinced him that he could never fulfil the proper duty of a soldier.

  As a child, Jeff Pitt used to make his way through the outskirts of the great city in which he lived to a stretch of common land beyond the houses. This land merged with moorland, and was a fine place for a boy to roam. From the tops of the moors, where only an occasional hawk rode the breezes, you could look down onto the maze of the city, with its chimneys, its slatey factory roofs, and the countless little millipedes that were its houses. Jeff used to take his friend Dicky onto the common; when the weather was fine, they would go there every day of their school holidays. Jeff owned a large, rusty bike, inherited from one of his elder brothers; Dicky had a white mongrel dog called Snowy. Snowy enjoyed the common as much as the boys did. All this was in the early nineteen-seventies, when they were in short trousers and the world was at peace.