Brian Aldiss - Greybeard

He cut off his thoughts, ashamed of their easy cynicism. Oh Lord, though I die, let me live!

He had lost the thread of Pilbeam’s discourse. It was with relief that he saw Algy Timberlane enter the canteen.

“Sorry I’m late,” Timberlane said, gratefully accepting a Bourbon and ginger on ice. “I went into the hospital to look at that kid we brought in from Mokachandpur. He’s in a feverish coma. Col. Hodson has pumped him full of mycetinin, and will be able to tell if he will pull through by morning. Poor little fellow is badly wounded — they may have to amputate that leg of his.”

“Was he all right otherwise? I mean — not mutated?” Pilbeam asked.

“Physically, in normal shape. Which will make it all the worse if he dies. And to think we lost Frank, Alan, and Froggie getting him. It’s a damn shame the two little girls got blown to bits.”

“They would probably have been deformed if you had got hold of them,” Pilbeam said. He lit a cheroot after the two Englishmen had refused one. His eyes looked more alert, now that Timberlane had joined the party. He sat with his back straighter and talked in a more tightly controlled way. “Ninety six point four per cent of the children we have picked up on Operation Childsweep have external or internal deformities. Before you came in, Charley and I were on the stale old subject of the madness of the world. There’s the brightest and best example this last twenty years affords us — the Western World spent the first fifteen years of it legally killing off all the little monstrosities born of the few women who weren’t rendered out-and-out sterile. Then our — quote — advanced thinkers — unquote — got the idea that the monstrosities might, after all, breed and breed true, and restore a balance after one generation. So we go in for kidnapping on an international scale.”

“No, no, you can’t say that,” Charley exclaimed. “I’d agree that the legal murder of — well, call them monstrosities—”

“ Call them monstrosities? Without arms or legs, without eyeholes in their skulls, with limbs like those bloated things in Salvador Dali’s paintings!”

“They were still of the human race, their souls were still immortal. Their legal murder was worse than madness. But after that we did come to our senses and start free clinics for the children of backward races, where the poor little wretches would get every care—”

Pilbeam laughed curtly. “Apologies, Charley, but you’re telling me history I had a hand — a finger in. Sure, you have the propaganda angle off pat. But these so-called backward races — they were the ones who didn’t do the legal murder! They loved their horrors and let them live. So we came round to thinking we needed their horrors, to prop our future. I told you, it’s an economic war. The democracies — and our friends in the Communist community — need a new generation, however come by, to work in their assembly lines and consume their goods… Hence this stinking war, as we quarrel over what’s left! Heck, a mad world, my masters! Drink up, Sergeant! Let’s have a toast — to the future generation of consumers — however many heads or assholes they have!”

As Timberlane and Pilbeam laughed, Charley rose.

“I must be going now,” he said. “I’ve a guard duty at eight tomorrow morning, and I have to get my kit cleaned. Good night, gentlemen.”

The other two filled up their glasses when he had gone, instinctively settling more closely together.

“Bit of a weeping Jesus, isn’t he?” Pilbearn asked.

“He’s a quiet fellow,” Timberlane said. “Useful to have around when there’s any trouble, as I discovered today. That’s one thing about these religious boys — they reckon that if they are on God’s side, then the enemy must be on the devil’s, and so they have no qualms about giving it to ’em hot and strong.”

Pilbeam regarded him half smiling through a cloud of cigar smoke.

“You’re a different type.”

“In some ways. I’m trying to forget there will be a funeral service for our boys tomorrow — Charley’s trying to remember.”

“There’ll be a burial in our lines for my buddy and the driver. It’ll delay my getting away.”

“You’re leaving?”

“Yup, going back to the States. Get a GEM down to Kohima, then catch an orbit jet home to Washington,

D.C. My work here is done.”

“What is your work, Jack, or should I not ask?”

“Right now, I’m on detachment from Childsweep, recruiting for a new world-wide project.” He stopped talking and focused more sharply on Timberlane. “Say, Algy, would you mind if we took a turn outside and got a little of that Assamese air to my sinuses?”

“By all means.”

The temperature had dropped sharply, reminding them that they were almost ten thousand feet above sea level. Instinctively they struck up a brisk pace. Pilbeam threw down the end of his cheroot and ground it into the turf. The moon hung like an undescended testicle low in the belly of the sky. One night bird emphasized the stillness of the rest of creation.

“Too bad the Big Accident surrounded the globe with radiations and made space travel almost impossible,” Pilbeam said. “There might have been a way of escape from our Earthborn madness in the stars. My old man was a great believer in space travel, used to read all the literature. A great optimist by nature that’s why failure came so hard to him. I was telling your friend Charley, Dad killed himself last month. I’m still trying to come to terms with it.”

“It’s always a hard thing, to get over a father’s death. You can’t help taking it personally. It’s a — well, a sort of insult, when it’s someone that was dear to you and full of life.”

“You sound as if you know something about it.”

“Something. Like thousands of other people, my father committed suicide too. I was a child at the time. I don’t know whether that makes it better or worse… You were close to your old man?”

“No. Maybe that’s why I kick against it so hard. I could have been close. I wasted the opportunity. To hell with it, any way.”

A katabatic wind was growing, pouring down from the higher slopes above the camp. They walked with their hands in their pockets.

In silence, Pilbeam recalled how his father had encouraged his idealism.

“Don’t come into the record business, son,” he had said. “It’ll get by without you. Join Childsweep, if you want to.”

Pilbeam joined Childsweep when he was sixteen, starting somewhere near the bottom of the organization. Childsweep’s greatest achievement was the establishment of three Children’s Centres, near Washington, Karachi, and Singapore. Here the world’s children born after the Accident were brought, where parental consent could be won, to be trained to live with their deformities and with the crisis-ridden society in which they found themselves.

The experiment was not an unqualified success. The shortage of children was acute — at one time, there were three psychiatrists to every child. But it was an attempt to make amends. Pilbeam, working in Karachi, was almost happy. Then the children became the subject of an international dispute. Finally war broke out. When it developed into a more desperate phase, both the Singapore and the Karachi Children’s Centres were bombed from orbital automatic satellites and destroyed. Pilbeam escaped and flew back to Washington with a minor leg wound, in time to learn of his father’s suicide.

After a minute’s silence, Pilbeam said, “I didn’t drag you out into the night air to mope but to put a proposition to you. I have a job for you. A real job, a life’s job. I have the power to fix it with your Commanding Officer if you agree—”