Greybeard (30 page)

“I’ll see you later,” he said. She had no reason not to believe him.

Lying on top of the desk, sprawling over a chaotic bed of papers, brochures, and files, was a teddy bear. It was a special teddy bear. It wore a black eyeshade and a wee tartan kilt and sporran. It carried bagpipes under one arm. It was a Jock Bear, the best-selling line of Sofftoys — in the days when Sofftoys sold.

Ignoring the malevolence of its one-eyed gaze, Arthur Timberlane swept the bear onto the floor and picked a bunch of letters from his desk. He sat in the deserted factory reading them, huddled in his little office on the ground floor, while outside the lorries rumbled along the Staines road towards central London. He did not remove his overcoat.

All the letters told the same story. The one that hit hardest came from his most valued representative, old Percy Pargetter, who had travelled for the firm since the late forties and worked on sales commission alone before Arthur changed that. Percy was a good representative. He was coming to see Arthur in the morning; meanwhile, he made the situation clear. Nobody was buying his toys; the retailers and the wholesale trade had cut purchases to absolute zero because their outlets were clogged; the customer was not interested in Sofftoys anymore. Even his oldest friends in the trade now winced when they saw Percy’s face at the door. Percy thought some dreaded rival must somehow have scooped the market in baby toys.

“But who, who?” Arthur asked himself in anguish. From the trade and financial papers, he knew that conditions in the toy trade were bad generally. That was all he knew. Finance and industry fluctuated between boom and slump, but there was nothing new in that, except that the fluctuations had become more violent in the last six months. He spread the letters back on his desk, shaking his head over them.

He had done all that could be done, at least until Moxan came up with their wretched report. Working with Keith, he had cut production to a minimum, had postponed until nearer Christmas the puppet-film series that would advertise Jock Bear on ICV, had cancelled deliveries, had squeezed creditors, had cut overtime, had killed the contract with Straboplastics, had shelved their plans for the Merry Mermaid Rattle. And had dropped the idea of moving house...

He went to a metal file and turned up the last letter from Moxan, checking the name of Gaylord K Cottage — not, he thought sourly, that it was a name one would normally forget; Cottage was the bright young man who was in charge of Moxan’s investigation into the reasons for Sofftoys’ slump. Arthur looked at his watch. No, it was not late. He might still catch Cottage at his desk.

The phone rang at Moxan’s end for some while. Arthur sat listening to it and to the traffic beyond his office. Finally a grumpy voice came onto the line and asked what Arthur wanted. The vision cleared and a shabby round face peered out at Arthur. It was the night porter; at Arthur’s insistence, he agreed to ring Cottage’s extension number and switch the call through.

Cottage came on the line almost at once. He sat at a desk in an empty room with his jacket off. A hank of hair swung over his brow; his tie sagged under one ear. Arthur hardly took in his appearance beyond realizing that he looked less debonair than on his visits to Sofftoys. When he spoke, to Arthur’s relief he sounded less the unsympathetic and chromium-plated young man than he had done at their last meeting.

“Your report’s up in Process, Mr Timberlane,” he said. “The slight delay was beyond our control. I am full of apologies that we didn’t get it to you earlier, but you see — oh God, the thing’s a bloody bust! Look, Mr Timberlane, I must talk to someone about this. You’d better listen before complete government censorship clamps down.”

He stared keenly at Arthur. Either the colour on the line was bad or he was very pale.

Inside his blue serge coat, Arthur felt small and cold.

“I’m listening, but I don’t know what you mean about censorship, Mr Cottage. Of course I feel very sympathetic about your personal troubles, but — ”

“Oh, this isn’t just personal, friend, not by a long chalk. Look, let me light a cigarette...” He reached for a pack on his desk, lit up and inhaled, then said, “Look, your firm’s bust, flat, finished! You can’t have it plainer than that, can you? Your fellow director, Keith Barratt, was it, was all wrong when he said he thought you’d been scooped by another toy firm. We’ve done our research, and you’re all in the same boat, every firm from the biggest to the smallest. The figures prove it. The fact is, nobody’s buying kiddy toys.”

“But these summer season slumps come and — ”

Cottage waved a hand in front of him, sneering as he did so.

“Take it from me, this is no seasonal slump, Mr Timberlane, nothing approaching it. This is something much bigger. I’ve spoken to some of the other chaps here. It isn’t only the toy industry. Know Johnchem, the firm that specializes in a whole range of infant products from prepared strained foods to skin powders? They’re customers of ours. Their figures are worse than yours, and they’ve got ten times your overhead! Radiant, the pram and baby carriage people — they’re in the same boat.”

Arthur shook his head as if doubting the truth of what he heard. Cottage leaned forward until his nose blurred out of focus.

“You know what it means,” he said, pressing his cigarette down into an ashtray, billowing smoke from his lungs into the screen. “It means one thing — ever since that accident with the van Allen belts a year ago last May, there haven’t been any kids born at all. You can’t sell because you’ve got no consumers.”

“I don’t believe it! I can’t believe it!”

Cottage was fumbling stupidly in his pocket and playing with his cigarette lighter.

“Nobody will believe it until they get it officially, but we’ve checked with the General Register Office at Somerset House, and with the General Registry up in Edinburgh. They haven’t given a thing away — but from what they didn’t say, our figures help us to draw the correct conclusions. Our overseas connections all report the same thing. Everywhere it’s the same thing — no kids!”

He spoke almost gloatingly, leaning forward with his eyes slitted against the lights of the visiphone.

Arthur switched off the vision. He could not bear to look at Cottage or to let Cottage see him. He held his head in his hands, dimly aware of how cold he was, of how he trembled.

“It’s a general bust,” he said. “The end of the world.”

He felt the coarseness of his cheeks.

“Not quite as bad as that,” Cottage said from the blank screen. “But I’ll bet you a flyer that we’ll not see normal trading conditions again till 1987.”

“Five years! It’s as bad as the end of the world. How can I keep afloat for five years? I’ve got a family. Oh, what can I do? Jesus Christ...” He switched off as Cottage began to launch into another dose of bad news, and sat staring at the litter on the desk without seeing it. “It’s the end of the bloody lousy world. Oh Christ... Bloody failure, bloody...”

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 onto the floor beside Jock Bear, he made his way out of the factory and around 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 doorbell 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 living room. “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 worldwide 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 armchair, 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 sex cells. The stillbirths, 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 percent. Unfortunately, of the seven Australian children mentioned by Bishop Aitken, six have died since christening.”