Brian Aldiss: Greybeard

He felt in his pocket for cigarettes, found only a pack of cards, and sat staring hopelessly at it. Something rose in his throat like a physical blockage; a salt tingle made him screw up his eyes. Dropping the cards on to the floor beside Jock Bear, he made his way out of the factory and round to his car, without bothering to drop the latch of the door behind him. He was crying.

A convoy of military vehicles rumbled along the Staines road. He threw the car into gear and grasped the steering wheel as it bounded forward towards the road.

Patricia had hardly poured Venice and Edgar their first drink when the front-door bell sounded. She went through to find Keith Barratt smiling on the doorstep. He bowed gallantly to her.

“I was driving by the factory and saw Arthur’s car parked in the yard, so I thought you might like a bit of company, Pat,” he said. “This bit of company, to be exact.”

“Venny and Edgar Harley are here, Keith,” she said, using a loud voice so that what she said could be heard in the livingroom. “Do come in and join us.”

Keith winced, spread his hands in resignation, and said in exaggeratedly refined tones, “Oh, but absolutely delighted, Mrs. Timberlane.”

When he had been provided with a drink, he raised it and said to the company, “Well, here’s to happier days! The three of you look a bit gloomy, I must say. Have a bad trip, Edgar?”

“There is some reason for gloom, I should say,” Edgar Harley said. He was a tubby man, the sort of man on whom tubbiness sits well. “I’ve been telling Venny and Pat about what I turned up in Australia. I was in Sydney dining next to Bishop Aitken the night before last, and he was complaining about a violent wave of irreligion sweeping Australia. He claimed that the churches had only christened a matter of seven children seven! — during the last eighteen months, in the whole of Australia.”

“I can’t say that makes me feel too desperately suicidal,” Keith said, smiling, settling himself on the sofa next to Patricia.

“The bishop had it wrong,” Venice said. “At this conference Edgar went to, they told him the real reason for the lack of christenings. You’d better tell Keith, Ed, since it affects him and there will be an official announcement anyway at the weekend.”

With a solemn face, Edgar said, “The bishop had no babies to christen simply because there are no babies. The contraction of the van Allen belts brought every human being in contact with hard radiation.”

“We knew that, but most of us have survived,” Keith said. “How do you mean this affects me personally?”

“Governments have kept very quiet, Keith, while they try to sort out just what damage this — er, accident has caused. It’s a tricky subject for several reasons, the chief one being that the effects of exposure to different types of radioactive emissions are not clearly understood, and that in this case, the exposure is still going on.”

“I don’t understand that, Ed,” Venice said. “You mean the van Allen belts are still expanding and contracting?”

“No, they appear to be stable again. But they made the whole world radioactive to some extent. There are different sorts of radiation, some of which entered our bodies at the time. Other sorts, long-lived radio-isotopes of strontium and cesium, for example, are still in the atmosphere, and soak into our bodies through the skin, or when we eat or drink or breathe. We cannot avoid them, and unluckily the body takes these particles in and builds them into our vital parts, where they may cause great damage to the cells. Some of this damage may not yet be apparent.”

“We ought to all be living in shelters in that case,” Keith said angrily. “Edgar, you put me off this drink. If this is true, why doesn’t the government do something, instead of just keeping quiet?”

“You mean why doesn’t the United Nations do something,” Patricia said. “This is a world-wide thing.”

“It is too late for anyone to do anything,” Edgar said. “It was always too late, once the bombs were launched. The whole world cannot go underground, taking its food and water with it.”

“So what you’re saying is that we’re not going to have just this temporary dearth of kids around, but we’re going to have lots of cases of cancer and leukaemia, I suppose?”

“That, yes, and possibly also a shortening of individual lives. It’s too early to tell. Unfortunately we know much less about the subject than we have pretended to know. It is a very complex one.”

Keith smoothed his unruly hair and looked ruefully at the women.

“Your husband has come back with a cheery bag of news,” he said. “I’m glad old Arthur isn’t here to listen in — he’s depressed enough as it is. I can see us having to give Jock Bear the push and turn to making crucifixes and coffins instead, eh, Pat?”

Edgar had pushed his drink aside and sat on the edge of his arm-chair, his eyes and stomach both rather prominent, as if he was winding himself up to say more. He looked about the comfortable commonplace room, with its Italian cushions and Danish lamps, and said, “The effects of radiation must always strike us as freakish, particularly in the present case, when we have been subjected to a wide spectrum of radiations of comparatively mild dosage. It is our misfortune that mammals have proved most susceptible to them, and of mammals, man.

“Obviously it won’t mean anything to you if I go into it too deeply, but I’ll just say that just as the destructive force of radioactive material may concentrate on one kind or phylum of life, so its full fury may focus on a single organ — because, as I said, bodies have efficient mechanisms for capturing some of these materials. The human body captures radioactive iodine and uses it as natural iodine in the thyroid gland. A sufficient dosage will thus destroy the thyroid gland. Only in the present case, it is the gonads which are destroyed.”

“Sex rearing its ugly head,” Keith exclaimed.

“Perhaps for the last time, Keith,” Edgar said quietly. “The gonad, as you seem to know, is an organ that produces sexcells. The still-births, miscarriages, and monstrosities born since May last year show that the human gonads have collectively sustained serious damage from the radiation to which we have been and are still subjected.”

Venice stood up and began walking about the room.

“I feel as if I were going mad, Edgar. Are you sure of your facts? I mean this conference… You mean to say that no more babies will be born anywhere?”

“We can’t say yet. And the situation could improve in some unforeseen way next year, I suppose. The figures are hardly likely to be one hundred per cent. Unfortunately, of the seven Australian children mentioned by Bishop Aitken, six have died since christening.”

“This is terrible!” Venice stood in the middle of the room, clasping her forehead. “What seems so crazy to me is to think that half a dozen rotten bombs could do anything so — so catastrophic. It isn’t as if they let them off on Earth! How can these damned van Allen layers be so unstable?”

“A Russian Professor Zilinkoff suggested at the conference that the belts may indeed be unstable and easily activated by slight radioactive overloads from either the sun or the Earth. He suggested that the same contractions that have hit us now also took place at the end of the Cretaceous Era; it’s a bit fanciful, but it would explain the sudden extinction of the ancient orders of land, sea, and air dinosaurs. They died off because their gonads were rendered ineffective, as ours are now.”

“How long before we recover? I mean, we will recover?” Venice said.

“I hate to think I’m like a dinosaur,” Patricia said, conscious of Keith’s gaze upon her.