Greybeard

  “I think you misunderstand my attitude, sir. I wish to inform you about DOUCH(E); I am no spy. Although I was brought to you like a captive, I had an appointment through the patrols to see you tomorrow and offer you what help I could.”

  “I am not your dentist. You do not make an appointment with me — you crave an audience.” He rapped his knuckles on the table. “I cavil at your phoney attitude! Get wise to the reality of the situation — I can have you shot anywhere in the curriculum if I find you unconstructive.”

  Timberlane said nothing to that. In a more reasonable voice, Croucher said, “Now then, let’s have the lowdown what exactly DOUCH(E) is and how it functions.”

  “It is simply an academic unit, sir, although with more power behind it than academic units usually have. Can I explain in private? The nature of the unit’s work is confidential.”

  Croucher looked at him with raised eyebrows, turned and surveyed the jaded men at the trestle tables, flicked an eye at two guards.

  “I should not cavil at a change of scenery. I work long hours.”

  They moved into the next room. The guards came too. Although the room was small and hot, it was a relief to get away from the idle faces sitting by the tables. When Croucher gestured to one of the guards, the man opened a window.

  “What exactly is this ‘confidential work,’ precisely?” Croucher asked.

  “It’s a job of documentation,” Timberlane said. “As you know, it was in 1981 that the Accident occurred which sterilized man and most of the higher mammals. The Americans were first to realize the full implications of what was happening. In the nineties, various foundations collaborated in setting up DOUCH in Washington. There it was decided that in view of the unprecedented global conditions, a special emergency study group should be established. This group was to be equipped to function for seventy-five years, whether man eventually recovered his ability to procreate or whether he failed to do so and became extinct. Members were enlisted from all over the world and trained to interpret their country’s agonies objectively and record them permanently.

  “The group was called Documentation of Universal Contemporary History. The bracketed E means I’m one of the English wing. I joined the organization early, and was trained in Washington in ‘01. Back in those days, the organization tried to be as pessimistic as possible. Thanks to their realistic thinking, we can go on functioning as individuals even when national and international contacts have broken down.”

  “As has now happened. The President was eliminated by a bunch of crooks. The United States is in a state of anarchy. You know that?”

  “Britain too.”

  “Not so. We have no anarchy here, don’t know the meaning of the word. I know how to keep order, of that you can be quite convicted. Even with this plague on, we have no disorder and British justice prevails.”

  “The cholera is only just hitting its stride, Commander Croucher. And mass executions are not a manifestation of order.”

  Angrily, Croucher said, “Manifestations, hell! Tomorrow everyone in the Churchill Hospital will be shot. No doubt you will cry out about that also. But you do not understand. You must expunge the erroneous misapprehension. I have no wish to kill. All I want is to keep order.”

  “You must have read enough history to know how hollow that rings.”

  “It’s true! Chaos and civil war are absolutely deterrent to me! Listen to me, what you tell me of DOUCH(E) confirms what I had already been informed. You were not lying to me. So…”

  “Why should I lie to you? If you are the benefactor you claim to be, I have nothing to fear from you.”

  “Because if I was the madman you take me for, my main objective would be to kill any objective observers of my regime. The reverse is true — I visualize my job as to keep order, only that. Consequentially, I can utilize your DOUCH(E) setup. I want you here, recording. Your testimony is going to vindicate me and the measures I am forced to implement.”

  “Vindicate you before whom? Before posterity? There is no posterity. They died in addled sperm, if you remember.”

  They were both sweating freely. The guard behind them shuffled weary feet. Croucher brought a tube of peppermints from his pocket and slipped one into his mouth.

  He said, “How long do you keep on persevering with this DOUCH(E) job, Mr Timberlane?”

  “Till I die or get killed.”

  “Recording?”

  “Yes, recording and filming.”

  “For posterity?”

  After a moment of silence, Timberlane said, “All right, we both think we know where duty lies. But I don’t have to shoot all the poor old wrecks in the Churchill Hospital.”

  Croucher crunched his peppermint. The eyes in his ugly face stared at the floor as he spoke.

  “Here’s a nodule of information for you to record. For the last ten years, the Churchill has been devoted to one line of research and one only. The doctors and staff there include some expert biochemists. Their project and endeavour is trying to prolong life. They are not just studying ger — what do you call it, geriatrics; they are looking for a drug, a hormone; I am no medical specialist, and I don’t differentiate one from the other, but they are looking for a way to enable people such as me and you to live to be two hundred or two thousand years old. Impossible baloney! Waste an organization chasing phantoms! I can’t let that hospital run to waste, I want to utilize it for more productive purposes.”

  “The government subsidized the hospital?”

  “They did. The corrupt politicians of Westminster aspired to discover this elixir of life and immortality and perpetuate it for their own personal advantage. With that kind of nonsense we aren’t going to be bothered with. Life’s too short.”

  They stared at each other.

  “I will accept your offer,” said Timberlane, “though I cannot see how it will benefit you. I will record whatever you do at the Churchill. I would like documentary evidence that what you say about this longevity project is true.”

  “Documents! You talk like one of these clever fool dons in the other room. I respect learning, but not pedantry, get that straight. Listen, I’m evacuating the whole bunch of crooks out of that hospital, them and their mad ideas; I don’t believe in the past — I believe in the future.”

  To Timberlane it sounded only like an admission of madness. He said, “There is no future, remember? We killed it stone dead in the past.”

  Croucher unwrapped another peppermint; his thick lips took it from the palm of his hand.

  “Come to me tomorrow and I will show you the future. The sterility was not entirely total, you know. There was, there still are, a minimal trickle of children being born in odd corners of the world — even in Britain. Most of them are defectives — monstrosities beyond your conception.”

  I know what you mean. Do you remember the Infantop Corps during the war years? It was the British equivalent of the American Project Childsweep. I was on that. I know all about monstrosities. My feeling is that it would be sane to kill most of them at birth.”

  “A percentage of the local ones are not killed at birth, motherly love being such as it is.” Croucher turned to the guards, who were whispering behind him, and irritably ordered them to be silent. He continued, “I’m rounding up all these creatures, whatever they look like. Some of them are limbless. Sometimes they are without intelligence and unspeakably stupid. Sometimes they are born inside out, and then they die by degrees. Though we have got one boy who survives despite his whole digestive system — stomach, intestines, anus — being on the outside of his body in a sort of bag. It’s a supremely gruesome sight. Oh, we’ve got all sorts of miscellaneous half-human creatures. They will be incarcerated in the Churchill, for supervision. They are the future.” When Timberlane did not speak, he added, “Admitted, a frightening future, but it may be the only one. We must labour under the assertion that when these creatures reach adulthood, they will breed normal infants. We shall keep them and make them breed. Assure yourself it’s
better a world populated by freaks than a dead world.”

  Croucher eyed Timberlane challengingly, as if expecting him to disagree with this proposition. Instead, Timberlane said, “I’ll come and see you in the morning. You will place no censorship on me?”

  “You will have a guard with you to ensure security. Corporal Pitt, whom you met, has been detailed for the task. I do not want your reports falling into hostile hands.”

  “Is that all?”

  “No. I have to consider your own hands as hostile hands. Till you prove them otherwise, your wife will live here in these barracks as a token of your good will. You will billet here too. You’ll find the comfort will be more considerable than your flat was. Your belongings are already undergoing transportation to here from the flat.”

  “So you are just a dictator, like all the others before you!”

  “Be careful — I cannot stomach a stubborn mind! You will soon learn otherwise of me — you’d better! I want you as my conscience. Get that point clarified in your brain with all just momentum. You have seen I have surrounded myself with the intelligentsia; unfortunately, they superficially do what I say — at least to my face. Such a creed revolts me to my skin! I don’t want that from you; I want you to do what you have been trained for. Damn it, why should I bother with you at all when there’s plenty else to worry about? You must do as I say.”

  “If I am to be independent, I must retain my independence.”

  “Don’t go all highbrow on me! You must do as I say. I ask you to sleep here tonight, and that’s an order. Think this conversation over, talk with your wife. I saw immediately she was a fairly hirsute type. Remember, I offer you security, Timberlane.”

  “In this insanitary fort?”

  “You will be sent for in the morning. Guard, take this man away. Give him into Corporal Pitt’s keeping.”

  As they came up in a businesslike way to take Timberlane, Croucher coughed into a handkerchief, wiped his hand across his brow, and said, “One concluding point, Timberlane. I hope friendship will originate between us, as far as that’s possible. But if you cogitate trying to escape, I had better inform you that from tomorrow new restrictive orders are in operation throughout the area in my jurisprudence. I will stamp out the spread of plague at all costs. Anybody caught trying to move from Oxford in future will be shot, no questions asked. Barriers will be erected around the city at dawn. All right, guard, remove him. And expedite me a secretary and a pot of tea immediately.”

  Their quarters in the barracks consisted of one large room. It contained a washbasin, a gas ring, and two army beds with a supply of blankets. Their belongings arrived in fits and starts from a lorry downstairs. Other commandeered property arrived spasmodically, until they grew tired of the echo of army boots.

  A senile guard sat on a chair in the doorway, fingering a light machine gun and staring at them with the stony curiosity of the bored.

  Martha lay on one of the beds with a damp towel across her forehead. Timberlane had given her a full account of the talk with Croucher. They remained in silence, he sitting on his bed, resting his head heavily on his elbow, sinking slowly into a sort of lethargy.

  “Well, we’ve more or less got what we wanted,” Martha said. “We’re working for Croucher with a vengeance. Is he to be trusted?”

  “I don’t think that’s a question you can ask. He can be trusted as far as circumstances allow. He had a way of not seeming to take in all that I was saying — as if his mind was working all the time on another problem. Perhaps I got a glimpse of that problem when he visualized a world populated by monsters. Perhaps he felt he must have someone to rule over, even if it was only a — a collection of abnormalities.”

  His wife’s thoughts returned to a point they had reached earlier in the day.

  “Everyone is obsessed with the Accident, even if they do not show it immediately. We’re all sick with guilt. Perhaps that’s Croucher’s trouble, and he has to live with a vision of himself ruling over a twilight world of cripples and deformed creatures.”

  “His grip on the present seems stronger than that would imply.”

  “How strong is anyone’s grip on the present?”

  “It’s a pretty fleeting grip, as the cholera reminds us, but...”

  “Our society, our biosphere, has been sick for forty years now. How can the individual remain healthy in it? We may all be madder than we know.”

  Not liking the note in her voice, Timberlane went over and sat on the edge of her bed, saying strongly, “Anyhow, our immediate concern is with Croucher. It will suit the DOUCH scheme if we co-operate with him, so that’s what we will do. But I still can’t see why, at a time like this, he should want to encumber himself with me.”

  “I can think of a reason. He doesn’t want you. He’s after the truck.”

  He squeezed her hand. “It could be that. He might think that as we have come from London, I have recorded information he could use. Indeed I may have done. London is his best-organized enemy at present. I wonder how long they will leave the truck where it is now?”

  The DOUCH(E) truck was a valuable piece of equipment. When national governments broke down, as foreseen by the Washington foundation, the trucks became in themselves small DOUCH HQs. They contained full recording equipment, stores, and sundry supplies; they were fully armoured; an hour’s work would convert them into tracked vehicles; they ran on the recently perfected charge-battery system, and had an emergency drive that worked on petrol or any of the current petrol substitutes. This neat packet of technology, or rather Timberlane’s sample of it, had been left in its garage, below the flat in Iffley Road.

  “I have the keys still,” Timberlane said, “and the vehicle is shuttered down. They haven’t asked me for the keys.”

  Martha’s eyes were closed. She heard him, but she was too tired to reply.

  “We’re well placed here to observe contemporary history,” he said. “What DOUCH did not consider was that the vehicles might be an attraction to the history-makers. Whatever happens, we must not let the truck pass out of our control.”

  After a minute of silence, he added, “The vehicle must be our first concern.”

  With the sudden energy of fury she sat up on the bed. “Damn and blast the bloody vehicle,” she said. “What about me?”

  She slept fitfully throughout that stuffy night in the barracks. The silence was fractured by army boots stamping across a parade ground, by shouts, by the close vibrations of a mosquito, or by the surge of a windrush coming home. Her bed rumbled like an empty stomach when she turned in it.

  Night, it seemed to her, was a padded pin cushion — she almost had it in her hand, so closely did its warmth match the humidity of her palm — and into it, an infinite number of pins, went the sound effects of militant humanity. But each pin pierced her as well as the cushion. Towards morning the noises grew less frequent, though the heat bowl of the square outside remained unemptied. Then from a different quarter came the faint ring, long continued, of an alarm clock. Distantly, a cock crowed. She heard a town clock — Magdalen? — chime five. Birds quarrelled over the dawn in their guttering. Army noises slowly took over again. The clang of buckets and iron utensils from the cookhouse proclaimed that preparations for breakfast had begun. She slept, fading out on a tide of despair.

  Her sleep was deep and restorative.

  Timberlane was sitting, grey and unshaven, on the edge of his bed when she awoke. A guard came in with a breakfast tray, set it down, and departed.

  “How are you feeling, my love?”

  “I’m better this morning, Algy. But what a noise there was in the night.”

  “A lot of stretcher parties, I’m afraid,” he said, glancing out of the window. “We’re in one of the centres of infection here. I am prepared to give Croucher guarantees about my conduct if he’ll let us live away from here.”

  She went over to him, cupping his stubbly jaws in her hands. “You’ve come to a decision, then?”

  “I had las
t night. We took on a job with DOUCH(E). We are after history, and history is now being made here. I think we must trust Croucher; so we remain in Cowley to co-operate with him.”

  “You know I don’t question your decisions, Algy. But can we trust a man in his position?”

  “Let’s just say that a man in his position does not seem to have any reason to shoot us out of hand,” he said.

  “Perhaps a woman looks at these things differently, but let’s not allow DOUCH to take precedence over our safety.”

  “Look at it this way, Martha. In Washington we didn’t just take on obligations; we took on a way of thinking that makes sense when most human activities no longer do. That may have a lot to do with the way we have survived as a pair in London while all around us personal relationships were going to pot. We have a mission; we must serve it, or it won’t serve us.”

  “You put it like that and it sounds fine. Just let’s not fall into the trap of putting ideas before people, eh?”

  They turned their attention to the breakfast. It looked like soldiers’ rations; because tea was scarce, there was weak beer to drink; to eat, there were the inevitable vitamin pills that had established themselves as a national food since domestic animals were stricken, a grainy bread, and some fillets of a brown and nameless fish. Because whales and seals had almost vanished from the sea, and freak radiation effects seemed to have encouraged the growth of plankton and minute crustacea, fish had multiplied. Many farmers in coastal areas throughout the world had been forced to take to the seas when their livestock dwindled; so there was still a strip of fish to stretch across the cracked plates of the world.

  As they ate, Martha said, “This Corporal Pitt who is acting as combined jailer and bodyguard is a nice sort of man. If we must have someone sitting over us all the time, perhaps we could have him. Ask Croucher about it when you see him.”