Greybeard

“They suffered all right,” Timberlane said to himself grimly. He started a search downstairs, growing less cautious as he went along. Stagnation lay here like a malediction. Standing under the blind eyes of the founder, he looked up the stairs. “I’m here, you bastards. Where are you?” he shouted. “What have you done with Martha?” The noise of his own voice shocked him. He stood frozen as it echoed up the elevator shaft into the regions above. Then he took the steps two at a time, gun out before him with the safety catch off.

At the top, he paused. Still the silence. He walked reverberatingly down the corridor and threw open a door. It slammed back on its hinges, knocking over an ancient blackboard and easel. This was some kind of editorial room, by the look of it. He stared out of the window down on to the waste lot; he looked for the old negro flying a kite, recalling him almost as one recalls a friend. The old man had gone, or could not be seen. Nobody could be seen, not a human, not a dog.

God, this is what it’s like to be left alone in the world, he sub-vocalized. And another thought followed: Better get used to it now, youngster; one day you may be left alone in the world.

He was not a particularly imaginative man. Although for almost all the years of his life he had been confronted with the knowledge of the extinction mankind had unleashed upon itself, the optimism of youth helped him to believe either that conditions would right themselves naturally (nature had recovered from so many outrages before) or that one of the lines of research being pursued in a score of countries would turn up a restorative (surely a multi-billion-dollar-a-year programme could not be entirely wasted). The level-headed pessimism of the DOUCH project had brought his wishful thinking to a standstill.

He saw in sober fact that his kind might have reached the end of its time. Year by year, as the living died, the empty rooms about him would multiply, like the cells of a giant hive which no bees visited, until they filled the world. The time would come when he would be a monster, alone in the rooms, in the tracks of his search, in the labyrinth of his hollow footsteps.

Over the room, as over the face of an inquisitor, was written his future. Its wound was inescapable, for he had found it for himself. He opened his mouth, to cry or suck in air, as though someone had flung him under a cascade. Only one thing, one person, could make that future tolerable.

He ran out into the corridor, flaying the echoes again. “It’s me — Timberlane! Is anyone here, for God’s sake?” And a voice near at hand called, “Algy, oh, Algy!”

She lay in a composing room among a litter of broken and discarded flongs. Like the rest of the building, it bore every sign of a long desertion. Her captors had tied her to the supports of a heavy metal bench on which lay discarded galleys of lead type, and she had been unable to break free. She estimated she had been lying there since midnight.

“You’re all right? Are you all right?” Timberlane kept asking, rubbing her bruised arms and legs after he had wrenched apart the plastic straps that bound her.

“I’m perfectly all right,” Martha said, beginning to weep. “He was quite a gentleman, he didn’t rape me! I suppose I am very lucky. He didn’t rape me.”

Timberlane put his arms round her. For minutes they crouched together on the littered floor, glad in the sensible warmth and solidity of each other’s bodies.

After a while, Martha was able to tell her story. The taxi-driver who had whipped her away from the front of the Thesaurus Club had driven her only a few blocks into a private garage. She thought she might be able to identify the spot. She remembered that the garage had a motor boat stored overhead. She was frightened, and fought the taxi-driver when he tried to pull her out of the car. Another man appeared, wearing a white handkerchief over his face. He carried a chloroform-impregnated pad. Between them, the men forced the pad over Martha’s nose and mouth, and she became unconscious.

She roused to find herself in another car, a larger one. She thought they were travelling through a suburb or semi-country; there were trees and low-lying houses flashing by outside, and another girl lying inertly by her side. Then a man in the front seat saw she was rousing, leant over, and forced her to breathe more chloroform.