Greybeard

After a minute’s silence, Pilbeam said, “I didn’t drag you out into the night air to mope but to put a proposition to you. I have a job for you. A real job, a life’s job. I have the power to fix it with your Commanding Officer if you agree -“

“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?”