Greybeard (18 page)

He became the glorified chucker-out of their thriving establishment. For under the Coalition and later the United governments, hard times came with a vengeance. The world was crumbling into senescence and chaos. But what the sisters supplied remained a necessity. They flourished until the cholera stalked through England.

Charley prized his sisters away from their stricken town and headed into the country with them. Rachel and Ruth did not protest; they had seen enough from their vantage point to scare them. A client dying on the stairs precipitated them into the little car Charley bought with his war savings.

Outside the town, the car expired. They found a nylon stocking rammed into the oil sump. They began to walk, carrying their bundles on their backs on a road that led — though they did not know it — to Sparcot. Many other refugees went by that way.

It was a gruesome exodus. Among the genuine travellers were bandits who set upon their fellows, cut their throats, and took their belongings. Another robber went that way; it crept through the blood, burst out on the brow, was interested only in taking life. It stole up on Ruth in the first night and on Rachel in the third, and left them face upward in the mounds of humus over which Charley raised crosses made with sticks from the dusty hedgerows.

When he limped into the doubtful shelter of Sparcot (helping a woman called Iris, whom he would find strength to marry eighteen months later), Charley was a man turned in on himself. He had no wish to interest himself in the world again. In his wounded heart the sudden dread had found a permanent billet.

Both he and Timberlane had changed so much that it was not surprising recognition was only gradual. In that first Sparcot year of 2019, they had not seen each other for almost twenty years — since 2001, when the war still engulfed the world and they were both in the Infantop Corps. Then they had been operating overseas, combing the shattered valleys of Assam...

Of their patrol, only two survived. Those two, from old habit, walked in single file. The man in the rear, Corporal Samuels, carried a natterjack, the light nuclear gun, various packs filled with provisions, and a can of water. He walked somnambulistically, stumbling as they walked down the wooded hillside.

Before him a child’s head jogged, hanging upside down and regarding him with a sightless eye. The child’s left arm swung against the thigh of the man over whose broad back it lay. This was a boy child, a child of the Naga tribe, delicately built, shaven of head, and perhaps nine years old. He was unconscious; the flies that buzzed incessantly about his eyes and about the wound on his thigh did not trouble him.

He was carried by Sergeant Timberlane, a bronzed young man of twenty-six. Timberlane wore a revolver, had various pieces of equipment strapped about him, and carried a tall stick with which he helped himself along as he followed the sandy path leading down to the valley bottom.

The dry season ruled Assam. The trees, which were no more than nine feet high, stood as if dead, their leaves limp. The river in the valley bottom had dried out, leaving a sandy chaung along which wheeled vehicles and GEMs could move. The dust the vehicles had disturbed had settled on the trees on either side of the chaung, whitening them until they bore the appearance of a disused indoor television lot. The chaung itself dazzled in the bright sun.

Where the trees ceased to grow, Timberlane stopped, hoisting the wounded child more firmly onto his shoulder. Charley bumped into him.

“What’s the matter, Algy?” he asked, coming back into weary wakefulness. As he spoke, he stared at the child’s head. Because it had been shaved, the hair showed only as fine bristles; little flies crawled like lice among the bristles. The boy’s eyes were as expressionless as jelly. Upside down, a human face is robbed of much of its meaning.

“We’ve got visitors.” The tone of Timberlane’s voice brought Charley instantly back onto the alert.

Before they went over the mountain, they had left their sectional hovercraft below a small cliff, hidden from the air under a camouflage net. Now a tracked ambulance of American design was parked below the cliff. Two figures stood beside it, while a third investigated the hovercraft.

This tiny tableau, embalmed in sunlight, was broken by the sudden chatter of a machine gun. Without thinking, Timberlane and Charley went flat on their stomachs. The Naga boy groaned as Timberlane rolled him aside and swept binoculars up to his eyes. He ranged his vision along the shabby hillside to their left, where the shots had come from. Crouching figures sprang into view, their khaki dark against dusty white shrubs, their outlines hardening as Timberlane got them in focus.

“There they are!” Timberlane said. “Probably the same bastards we ran into on the other side of the hill. Get the natterjack up, Charley, and let’s settle them.”

Beside him, Charley was already assembling their weapon. Down in the chaung, one of the three Americans had been hit by the first burst of machine-gun fire. He sprawled in the sand. Moving painfully, he pulled himself along into the shadow of the ambulance. His two companions were concealed behind bushes. Of a sudden, one of them burst from cover and ran towards the ambulance. The enemy gun opened up again. Dust flicked around the running figure. He swerved, tumbled head over heels, and pitched out of sight among the dusty foliage.

“Here goes!” Charley muttered. The dust on his face, most of it turned into mud by sweat, crinkled as he slapped the barrel of the natterjack into place. He gritted his teeth and pulled the firing lever. A little nuclear shell went whistling over the scrubby hillside.

“And another, fast as you can,” Timberlane muttered, kneeling over the natterjack and feeding in a magazine. Charley switched over to automatic, and kept the lever squeezed for a burst. The shells squeaked like bats as they headed for the target. On the hillside, little brown figures scampered for safety. Timberlane brought up his revolver and aimed at them, but the range was too great for accuracy.

They lay and watched the pall of smoke settle across the slope. Someone out there was screaming. It looked as if only two of the enemy had escaped, beating a retreat over the brow of the hill.

“Can we chance going down?” Charley asked.

“I don’t think they’ll bother us. They’ll have had enough.” They dismantled the gun, shouldered up the child, and continued warily down the slope. As they approached the waiting vehicles, the surviving American came to meet them. He was a willowy man of no more than thirty, with dark eyebrows that almost met in the middle and fair hair cropped close. He came forward with a pack of cigarettes extended towards them.

“You boys came along in the nick of time. Thanks for the neat way you received my reception committee.”

“It’s a pleasure,” Timberlane said, shaking the man’s hand and taking a cigarette. “We first got acquainted with that little section over the other side of the hill, at Mokachandpur, where they shot up the rest of our fellows. They’re very personal enemies. We were only too glad to have the chance of another pot at them.”

“You’re English, I guess. My name’s Jack Pilbeam, Special Detachment attached to Fifth Corps. I was on my way through when we saw your craft and stopped to see if everything was okay.”

They introduced themselves all around, and Timberlane laid the unconscious boy in the shade. Pilbeam beat the dust out of his uniform and went with Charley to look to his companions.

For a moment Timberlane squatted by the boy, laying a leaf over his thigh wound, wiping the dust and tears from his face, brushing the flies away. He looked at the thin brown body, felt its pulse. The fold of his mouth grew ugly, and he seemed to stare through the fluttering rib cage, through the earth, into the bitter heart of life. He found no truth there, only what he recognized as an egotistical lie, born of his own heart: I alone loved children dearly enough!

Aloud he said, speaking mainly to himself, “There were three of them over the hill. The other two were a pair of girls, sisters. Pretty kids, wild as mountain goats, no abnormalities. Girls got killed when the shells were slinging about, blown to bits before our eyes.”

“More are getting killed than saved,” Pilbeam said. He was kneeling by the crumpled figure in the shadow of the ambulance. “My two buddies are both done for — well, they weren’t really buddies. I’d only met the driver today, and Bill was just out from the States, like me. But that doesn’t make it hurt any less. This stinking war, why the hell do we fight when the world’s way down on its reservoir of human life already? Help me get ’em into the agony wagon, will you?”

“We’ll do more than that,” Timberlane promised. “If you’re going back to Wokha, as I assume you must be, we’ll act as escort to each other, just in case there are any more of these happy fellows perched up on the ridges.”

“Done. You’ve got yourself some company, and don’t think I don’t need company myself. I’m still trembling like a leaf. Tonight you must come on over to the PX and we’ll drink to life together. Suit you, Sergeant?”

As they loaded the two bodies, still warm, into the ambulance, Pilbeam lit himself another cigarette. He looked Timberlane in the eyes.

“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 pressed 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 leukemia. 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!”

Pilbeam sombrely watched Charley draw out a cigarette and light it; it was one of the new 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 learned 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 to 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 someday 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 LA.” 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. “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 broke; more than broke — obsolete. Suddenly wilted and died. Why? Because their market was the adolescent trade. 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?