Brian Aldiss - Greybeard

“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?