Brian Aldiss - Greybeard

“Hey, not so fast!” Timberlane cried, spreading his hands in protest. “I don’t want a job. I’ve got a job saving any kids I can find lurking in these hills.”

“This is a real job, not a vacation for gun-toting nursemaids. The most responsible job ever thought up. I back my hunches, and I’m certain you are the sort of guy that would suit. I can fix it so’s you fly back to the U.S. with me tomorrow.”

“Oh no, I’ve got a girl back in England I’m very fond of, and I’m due for leave at the end of next week. I’m not volunteering, thanks all the same for the compliment.”

Pilbearn stopped and faced Timberlane.

“We’ll fly your girl out to Washington. Money’s no bother, believe me. At least let me tell you about the deal. You see, sociologically and economically, we live in very interesting times, provided you can be detached enough to view it in that light. So a universities study group with corporation and government backing has been set up to study and record what goes on. You won’t have heard of the group — it’s new and it’s being kept out of the news. It calls itself Documentation of Universal Contemporary History — DOUCH for short. We need recruits to operate in all countries. Come back to my billet and meet Bill Dyson, who’s i/c the project for S.E. Asia, and we’ll give you the dope.”

“This is crazy. I can’t join. You mean you’d fly Martha out of England to meet me?”

“Why not? You know the way England is going — way back into the darkness, under this new government and wartime conditions. You’d both be better off in America for a while, while we trained you. That’s a big consideration, isn’t it?” He caught the look on Timberlane’s face and added, “You don’t have to make up your mind at once.”

“I can’t… How long do I have to think about it?”

Pilbeam looked at his watch and scratched his skull with a fingernail. “Till we’ve got another drink down our throats, shall we say?”

On the dusty airstrip at Kohima, two men shook hands.

“I feel bad about leaving like this, Charley.”

“The C.O. must feel even worse.”

“He took it like a lamb. What sort of blackmail Pilbeam used, I’ll never know.”

A moment of awkward silence, then Charley said, “I wish I was coming with you. You’ve been a good friend.”

“Your country needs you, Charley, don’t kid yourself.” But Charley only said, “I might have been coming with you if I’d been good enough.”

Embarrassed, Timberlane climbed the steps to the plane and turned to wave. They took a last look at each other before he ducked inside.

The orbit jet blasted off through the livid evening, heading on a transpolar parabola for the opposite side of the globe. The sun bumped over the western lip of the world, while far below them the land was tawny with a confusion of dark and light.

Jack Pilbeam, Algy Timberlane, and Bill Dyson sat together, talking very little at first. Dyson was a thick-set individual, as tough-looking as Pilbeam was scholarly, with a bald head and a genial smile. He was as relaxed as Pilbeam was highly strung. Although no more than ten years senior to Timberlane, he gave the impression of being a much older man.

“It’s our job, Mr. Timberlane, to be professional pessimists in DOUCH,” he said. “With reference to the future, we may only permit ourselves to be hard-headed and dry-eyed. You have to face up to the fact that if vital genes have been knocked out of the human reproductive apparatus, the rest of the apparatus may never have the strength to build them back up again. In which case, young men like you and this reprobate Pilbeam represent the ultimate human generation. That’s why we need you; you’ll record the death throes of the human race.”

“Sounds to me as if you want journalists,” Timberlane said.

“No, sir, we require steady men with integrity. This is not a scoop, it’s a way of life.”

“Way of death, Bill,” Pilbeam corrected.

“Bit of both. As the Good Book reminds us, in the midst of life we are in death.”

“I still don’t see the object of the project if the human race is going to become extinct,” Timberlane said. “Whom will it help?”

“Good question. Here’s what I hope’s a good answer. It will help two sorts of people. Both groups are purely hypothetical. It will help a small group we might imagine in, say, America thirty or forty years from now, when the whole nation may have broken up in chaos; suppose they establish a little settlement and find that they are able to bear children? Those children will be almost savages — feral children, severed from the civilization to which they rightly belong. DOUCH records will be a link for them between their past and their future, and will give them a chance to think along right lines and construct a socially viable community.”

“And the second group?”

“I imagine you are not a very speculative man, Mr. Timberlane. Has it ever crossed your mind that we are not alone in this universe? I don’t mean just the Creator; it’s difficult to imagine he would make any human company except Adam. I mean the other races who live on the planets of other stars. They may one day visit Earth, as we have visited the Moon and Mars. They will seek an explanation for our ‘lost civilization’, just as we wonder about the Martian lost civilization of which Leatherby’s expedition found traces. DOUCH will leave them an explanation. If the explanation also packs a moral they can use, so much the better.”

“There’s a third hypothetical group,” Pilbeam said, leaning forward. “That’s the one that sends the prickles down my spine. Maybe I read too much of my father’s science fiction at too early an age. But if man is going to tumble off his ecological niche, maybe some creature lurking around right now will climb up and take his place in a couple of hundred years — when the place is properly aired.”

He laughed. With quiet humour, Dyson said, “Could be, Jack. Statistics on how the Big Accident affected the larger primates is hard to come by. Maybe the grizzlies or the gorillas have already started along a favourable mutational line.”

Timberlane was silent. He did not know how to join in this sort of conversation. The whole thing was still unreal to him. When he said good-bye to Charley Samuels, the look of dismay on his friend’s face had shaken him almost as much as the C.O.’s instant co-operation with Childsweep. He peered down through the window. Far below, cumulus made a tumbled bed of the Earth. He was in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Down below in that tenebrific world, a million years’ doubtful dynasty was coming to an end, with the self-immolation of the reigning house. He was not sure how he would relish recording its death throes.

There were mild autumnal sunshine and a military escort to greet them at Bolling Field. Half an hour — to Pilbeam’s sore irritation — passed in the Inspection Block before Health and Security checks cleared them. They were driven with their kit by electric truck to a little grey private bus which awaited them outside. On its side were painted the letters DOUCH.

“Looks good,” Timberlane exclaimed. “Now for the first time I believe I’m not the victim of some elaborate hoax.”

“Didn’t think you’d find yourself putting down in Peking, did you?” Dyson said, grinning his comfortable grin.

“And be sure never to climb into a bus labelled OICH or DUCA, however canned you are,” warned their military escort, helping Timberlane with his bags. “They stand for Oriental Integration and Cultural Habitation or something like it, and DUCA is a flamboyant organization run by the Post and standing for Department of Unified Child Assistance. They keep awful busy, even without any actual children to assist. Washington is a rash of initials and organizations — and disorganization — right now. It’s like living up to here in alphabet soup. Jump in, fellows, and we’ll go see a traffic jam or two.”