Game Control (8 page)

1975
didn't sell well in 1976. How many copies of
The Limits to Growth
and
The Population Bomb
now yellowed in Oxfam outlets? These gremlins had squealed that civilization was finished ever since it had started. They were a waste and an irritant, but they were decorative.

  Should they remain in self-important think-tanks competing over who could concoct the most gruesome scenario for the year 2000, Wallace was content to let them hand-wring their lives away. Another sort of dread merchant, however, he could not conscionably ignore.

  Because Calvin Piper had never been all talk. To give credit where due, the man was bright, effective and fantastically well connected. He was a seducer. His ideas, in their extremity, had a sensual thrill. He would never be satisfied with predicting disaster—he would help make it happen.

  Wallace might have relaxed when Calvin was fired, reduced back to the Bacon spoiling on the walls of his Karen lair, unemployed. Wallace knew better. The very appearance of inactivity over at that cottage gave him chills. Calvin could not bear to be still; he did not have the spiritual sophistication. Released from the constraints of bureaucracy, Calvin was less demoted than unleashed. Why, that scoundrel had had no visible means of support for the last six years. But look at him: his slacks were linen, his shoes kid and outside the A-frame undoubtedly sat his new four-wheel-drive. What, pray, was he living on? Wallace may have dwelt in the realms of the ancestors for most of the day, but he was still aware that it was on the detail level that you found people out.

  It was late enough for Wallace, who liked to be in bed by nine o'clock, to make his exit, but he did not want to appear to be fleeing because Calvin had arrived. Wallace might be repelled but he certainly wasn't frightened. And there was one woman creeping over to his side of the house who stood out from the rest, if only because of her outfit. Long hem, high

neck: she was hiding. Brown hair sloped either side of her face as she tiptoed towards the veranda, hoping to make it the distance of the living room without being caught. When he looked closely, he thought her rather prettier than much of the Lycra-nippled competition, but she did not have the conviction to match. That was half the game with beauty, keeping your head high, and she stared at her sensible shoes. Beauty was deception, and you had to have the shyster's smooth sleight of hand to pull it off. This one thought of herself as ordinary; consequently, she was. Wallace didn't think about these things any more, though as the theory fell to hand like the drop of an apple there must have been a time when he thought of little else.

  He almost left her alone, so apparent was her desperation to be overlooked, but were she allowed to achieve what she thought she wanted—solitude—she would be miserable. More, he couldn't resist a woman whose instinct with Calvin Piper on stage was to sneak in the opposite direction.

  'Pardon—' At his hand on her sleeve, she jumped. 'Have you a clue where I might get a spot of tea?'

  She stumbled through something about the kitchen, leaving him in no doubt that contact with another human being was the most fearsome thing that had ever happened to her.

  He returned with his cup to find her on the veranda as if they had an assignation. 'Astonishing sky, isn't it?' A moan of assent. About her frantic desire that he should go away he had no illusion. But winning her from a bogus trip to the loo was a snap. 'Sorry,' he introduced, after an unencouraging but obligatory exchange about where she was from and where she lived. 'I'm Wallace Threadgill. And yourself?'

  That was all it took. She stopped leaning over the railing and gaping dolefully at the Jasper Johns Equatorial skyscape and faced him with keen reassessment. 'Eleanor Merritt.' Though she needn't, she shook hands, and he was struck by the fact that now, far from wishing he would disappear, she was suddenly worried he might leave.

  'And what brings you to this blithe bacchanalia?'

  She laughed, dry. 'Awful, aren't they. I always promise myself I won't go. And then the alternative is staying home…'

'What's wrong with home?'

  'Malicious furniture.' Her eyes kept darting to his face, then back over the rail.

  'I'm surprised you're not attending to our charming ersatz host. Funny, you'd never know, would you, that this wasn't his house? And how high are the chances that he and his whole band of cronies weren't even invited?'

  'Some people are very—comfortable, socially.' A diplomat. 'I'm not. I like to think I've improved, but I doubt it. Every time I walk into a party I feel thirteen: dressed like a ninny, terrified of dancing and wishing I'd brought a book.'

  'How does such a shy creature come to be in Africa?'

  'Family planning,' she groaned.

  'Ah.' That explained the shift.

  'And you—you're the heretic.'

  He smiled. 'Quite. And how long have you—?'

  'Nearly twenty years. I was with the UNFPA before Pathfinder, and the Peace Corps before that.'

  'Peace Corps I could have predicted.'

  She stood more upright. 'Everyone finds the Peace Corps so hilarious. That we're a sad little sort. But it's done some fine—'

  'Look at you. You're already getting
kali
.'

  'I just don't think it's fair—'

  'Perhaps you and I are such natural enemies that we should acknowledge irreconcilable differences and skip the fisticuffs.' He made a motion as if to part.

  'No, please—' She touched his arm. 'I have always wanted to talk to you. More than ever now.'

  'Why? Are you questioning your faith?'

  'Let's say my convictions have been challenged. They are not bearing up well.'

  'But you have a life's work to defend. No doubt you believe in its merit and conduct it conscientiously. But in my experience, your kind find my message unsettling. They listen only just so long as it takes to invent all the reasons I'm a hairbrain. They march off with their fences built even higher than before, having learned nothing. I'm a little tired of wasting my time. It's more than likely we have little to say to one another.'

  'I'm not afraid of information.'

  'Then you are a brave young lady. The entire population industry is mortified by information. That's why they make it up. So they can live safely in their fairy-tale future, where we are all balancing tiptoe on one leg in the remaining three square inches apportioned to us, packed on all sides by the seething, copulating ruck, fallen angels on the head of a pin. But look around you.' He waved his hand at the Ngong Hills as a voluptuous breeze ruffled her soft brown hair; indeed, from here there was not a glimmer of human habitation in sight.

  'My confidence in what I do has been shaken,' she admitted. 'We've had so little effect.'

  'Large families will persist. But you can make people ashamed of their children, just as Jesuits made women ashamed of their breasts. You see, I don't simply believe that population programmes are inadequate; I believe they are evil.'

  'That's going a bit far.'

  'Let me tell you a story,' Threadgill intoned, leading her to a porch chair and seating himself at an instructive angle.

  'I was Kenyan-born,' he began, 'but educated in Britain. It was the late sixties, when horrors were foretold for the land that I still cared for very much. You may remember, in those days it was to be thirty-three billion by the turn of the next century—and isn't it intriguing that twenty years later the same prophets are now saying fourteen? So I enrolled in Oxford's new Population Studies programme, and went from there to work for the Population Reference Bureau in DC. My life was numbers. We ran the profession's first computer simulations, and when the zeros trilled off perforated sheets my blood would pound. Money pumped into the field and I could travel. Reports with their daunting digits stacked my desk. At night my colleagues and I would gather at exclusive clubs and loudly compare the multiple nightmares sponsored by our competing organizations. Everywhere we went, our lapels flashed ZPG.

  'My work was going well and I was important. Yet the better it went, the more my soul was sick. I drank heavily. My relations with women were frantic and short-lived, and I was careful not to beget children. I began to develop health prob

lems—I was pre-ulcerous and probably an alcoholic. Inside I was heavy, and though I was free to see the sights of the world the earth was a bleak and hopeless coal to me, and showed itself in dark pieces. Every new country appeared distraught and degraded, perched on a precipice, about to fall apart.

  'One day I was walking out of the Kenyatta Centre, during one of those costly conferences we were so fond of. I ran into a young Luhya I did not know, with his small son. He was angry and accosted me. "You are the enemy of the smile on this child's face!" he cried. The boy looked at me, and he had supernatural eyes. I realized the man was right, that my work was all about preventing his son's conception. I was relieved that his parents had prevailed over my reports. I wasn't sure of myself then, as you are not now, and until I was sure again I would cast my ZPG pin in the gutter.

  'I entered into a different sort of research, the kind where you are not given the answers before you begin. I was astonished at what I found. Most of all, I was amazed that the facts I uncovered were easily available to everyone, and I became appalled by a conspiracy of despair, a pact of gloom to which I had signed my own name.

  'Because the holocaust of the population explosion is a myth. That we are all dropping into a fetid cesspool is a myth. Life on earth, historically, has done nothing but improve. And the profusion of our species is not a horror but a triumph. We are a thriving biological success story. There is no crisis of "carrying capacity"—since the Second World War, the species has only been better fed. Per capita calorie production continues to rise. Incidence of famine over the last few hundred years has plummeted. Arable land is on the increase. Pollution levels are declining. Resources are getting cheaper. The only over-population I uncovered was in organizations like the one I worked for, which were a scandal.

  'Yet when I attempted to publish these findings, I was turned away from every journal and publisher I approached. I finally found one feisty university press. But that spelt the end of me. Once word was out I had parted with orthodox demography, I lost my funding. I became a clown for my

fellows. There is nothing so absurd to a Western academic as an optimist.

  'I lost my livelihood, but I inherited the earth. The illness with which I had been afflicted lifted. I felt no more need for alcohol, tobacco or the flesh of dead animals. When I went abroad, even poor countries appeared lush, whole and at peace. Their people were fruitful. It was my society that had sickened me. My society that hated its own children. And now I have recovered and know boundless joy.

  'So I returned to Kenya. Since then I have been working with game parks to encourage their utilization by the Masai, for I believe setting man's persistence against Nature's to be a mistake. It was pointless, you understand, to pursue a position with university population programmes or family planning donors when my purpose would be their destruction. Recently, I have been offered a contract by the World Health Organization, helping with their sero-prevalence research. A dreadful disease stalks the land. These doctors need Swahili speakers who know the people and the country well. I know little of medicine, but I am grateful to be of any assistance I can.'

  'Mmm.' Eleanor seemed to nudge herself out of a queasy trance. 'There's a lot of money in AIDS right now.'

  'You have lived far too long in the company of those who profit from suffering.'

  'I didn't mean that's why you—'

  'Please. This issue is grave to me. The money is quite irrelevant.'

  Eleanor picked flakes of varnish pensively off the arm of her chair. He could see she disagreed with everything he said. 'If "orthodox demography" is a lie,' she said at last, 'why do most people believe that population growth is a threat, except you and a straggle of your disciples?'

  'If I were to use your way of thinking, I would say money. The population conspiracy is based entirely around this "explosion" hypothesis, and without its ranks of whole organizations are unemployed. But the idea preceded its institutions. And "over-population" has taken hold on the common man, who has no apparent vested interest in these unwieldly "charities".
Why
?' He leaned forward and fisted his

hand. 'Self-hatred. Copious quantities of people are therefore intrinsically repellent. Have you noticed the metaphors that population biologists enjoy? Oh, the politic will say humans breed "like rabbits", but give them a few drinks and the bunnies turn to rats. The literature is strewn with allusions to flies, maggots, cancers.'

  'Why, if Westerners find one another's company grotesque, would they choose to live in New York City?'

  'Density is in the interests of the species. It promotes competition, which begets invention. The more of us there are, the cleverer we get. And if crowding does become as desperate as the Cassandras predict, you can bet the solutions will be nothing short of spectacular. We are magnificent creatures. Why, the rise of population and urbanization in Europe made the Industrial Revolution possible. How can you proceed from a history like that to claiming that population growth is economically oppressive?'

  She twirled her empty wine glass. 'If the field's reasoning is so illogical, what motivates the US to pour so much money into Third World fertility decline?'

  'Because there is only one thing an American hates more than himself and that is anyone else. You remember the early days, when African governments were convinced that family planning programmes were racist?'

  'The genocide superstition.'