The Unbegotten (14 page)

He fell silent, but he was leaning forward in his chair, as if beseechingly.

And Joyce leaned forward, too.

‘Let her go, Sap,' she urged. ‘Let her go and don't have her followed.' When Palfrey did not immediately respond, she leaned forward and began to pour out coffee, matter of fact and yet very intent at the same time. ‘She comes and goes in a kind of space craft which we can't follow no matter how we try. She may come in a rocket fired from the other side of the world, not from space, but we couldn't follow that, either. If you let the girl go and keep faith with her, there is some kind of chance. If you don't, there isn't.'

She handed Palfrey his coffee and added, ‘Let her go, Sap. I beg you to.'

 

 

Palfrey thought: The simple truth is that the girl Azran is the only contact we have with the man she calls the Master, and if I let her go, we'll lose all contact. On the other hand if I keep her, I might throw away any possibility of coming to terms. And he thought: Talk of coming to terms is all very well but I doubt if the Master intends to – this has all the hallmarks of an ultimatum of such overwhelming force that we can't really reject it without disaster.

And letting Azran go
might
strengthen the slender thread of contact.

He studied the set faces in front of him, sensed a measure of condemnation in Joyce's –
in Joyce's
– and of despair in Maddern's, for Maddern did not expect to have his way. From the beginning of this affair Palfrey had faced a choice in which the wrong decision could lead to disaster and he was facing the ultimate choice now.

Abruptly, he said, ‘We'll let her go.'

Maddern sprang to his feet in obvious relief. Joyce actually moved across and kissed Palfrey on the cheek. Another change came to her, swift as light, a mood of unmistakable excitement. The idea that these two knew each other returned, in spite of Joyce's explanation, and another thought followed, that whether they were old acquaintances or not, it would be a good thing for them to spend some time together.

‘The quicker we start, the better,' Maddern enthused.

‘It certainly will be. Joyce, why don't you go down to Middlecombe with him?' Palfrey suggested.

There was no doubt at all of the pleasure in her eyes or the deep satisfaction in Maddern's.

‘I'll need twenty minutes to arrange the duty rota and to get a few things together,' Joyce said. ‘I must fly!'

And she practically flew out of the room!

Palfrey and Maddern found themselves laughing. They did not sober until Palfrey took Maddern to the Operations Room, where reports were still coming in. Here, the full force of the danger struck savagely. The total number of areas now affected was one thousand and forty-one, and the places from which they came were shown with little redheaded pins on an enormous wall map. A small man with a big head brought a different report, ‘No trace at all of the unidentified craft which destroyed the helicopter, sir.'

‘I was afraid of that,' Palfrey said, and thought: Letting Maddern go really seems the only hope.

As they stood by the giant computer a card came out of one of the mouths; the operator who picked it up said, ‘Kelepur, near Benares, India.' Then his voice sharpened. ‘There's been some trouble there, sir. A family planning clinic has been attacked and set on fire and the nurses in charge and all the staff have been killed.'

 

Lal Singh was an elderly doctor who had studied in Bombay under the British Raj. Even early in his life his experiences and his work harassed and troubled him and made him sick to the heart. For he lived, and brought up his small family, in the country town of Kelepur. In this almost exclusively Hindu area, the winters were blessedly cool, especially at night, but the summer heat was always to be dreaded.

What he most feared was the poverty, the near-famine, and the masses of children, many of whom were born to only a few years of gnawing hunger pains, each day their bony limbs and skeleton frames becoming thinner and thinner.

Kelepur was far, in miles, from any big city.

About a hundred miles to the north was the great city of Benares, on the sacred Ganges, where one might wash away sins and be blessed by the Gods, but where one could never heal the body. Few of the people of Kelepur had made the pilgrimage, but all longed to. The villagers sole diet was a little rice and some wheat, one scant meal a day, at most. They lived in tiny huts, not truly houses, in the shadow of the Palace of the Maharajah of Kelepur. There were several wells, each worked by men or boys and a donkey. There were sacred cows roaming the streets, there were Hindu Temples and a Buddhist shrine, and there was a market where everything the people needed could be bought or bartered for. The food, the gay cottons, the rare silks for the few wealthy, the alloy for their beautiful ornaments came from Benares, and the ebony for the local carvings came from Bengal.

And there were the carpets.

The Maharajah's Palace had been converted into a carpet factory, where most of the women wove the wool and the goats' hair and the cotton fibres into carpets of rare beauty and design. Kelepur carpets, once all hand woven, were now made partly on old-fashioned machines from Birmingham, in England, and from Russia. So there was some wealth, some trade in the district, for the sheep and the goats were reared locally, and a local cotton crop was used increasingly for clothing and sheeting for export to the West.

But for one thing, Kelepur could have been quite wealthy; certainly there would have been little poverty but for that one thing – the children.

They spawned, it seemed, as the minutes passed. Always babies and more babies and more babies still. The women who bore the children grew old in a generation. Their looks failed them and their flesh and their wombs wasted away. As soon as they could serve any purpose their children worked – at cotton picking, at wool-gathering, in the oven-hot factories, or tending the sheep and the goats.

And they died.

Once, Lal Singh took a census of the children and checked how many were alive a year later to the day. Of every hundred, sixty-nine survived. There was the great ghat where all bodies were burned and it seemed that the funeral pyre never really died. At times it was almost impossible to buy the wood with which to make the fire hot enough to burn the skeletal bodies.

The middle-aged and the old died too – often of starvation.

Many years ago, Lal Singh had said to himself, in tones of great despair, ‘If only there were not the children. Not so many children.'

One summer day an American doctor with a team of social workers spent a few days in Kelepur, and for the first time, Lal Singh heard of contraception. It seemed to him one of the most wonderful discoveries ever made by man. He was asked if he would help to run a clinic to teach the people about birth control, and gladly he accepted. First, he had to learn himself. Next, he had to overcome his own and his women nurses' reluctance to discuss sex. Then he had to call a few men together and talk to them, while the nurses talked to the women.

Most of the women reacted in one way – with pure joy.

Most of the men reacted suspiciously.

But Lal Singh won support from the Maharajah and from some of the city leaders, until women began to come to the clinic and be fitted with the contraceptive which could work miracles and yet not disturb the men or deny them pleasure . . . and there was so very little pleasure in Kelepur.

Gradually the clinic became a rival to the temples as a place of culture, gossip and even worship. And gradually the birthrate began to go down. There were fewer to feed, and those who were fed lived longer and were in better health, so that they would work harder. Gradually, the town of Kelepur flourished, and was far better in nearly every way than any other district on its borders. There was more water for grass and the sheep grew plumper, their wool was finer; the goats were sleeker and their hair was longer. The cotton was stronger and the linens became of better quality. Lal Singh, delighted with the way things were going, began to talk to leaders of bordering constituencies, and they began to heed.

Moreover, the provincial government not only gave the clinic its blessing but actually provided a little in the way of funds. Even the government of All India, in Delhi, approved the project and provided help – not enough, but still help. Lal Singh, nearly seventy years old, was as happy as a man could be, and the people loved him.

They loved him, that was, until the day when the young wives no longer bore children.

Even at its best, the attempt at population control had been only partly successful; the birthrate was down but many young women had three or four children before they were twenty, and families of seven and eight were by no means rare. The clinic, which looked after the pre-natal needs of the mothers, began to nonce that fewer and fewer mothers-to-be came for help. At first this caused little comment, but before long some priests began to say that there was a curse upon the land.

What else but a curse had made the women barren?

And without children there would be no one to do the work or look after the old, when their lives were near-spent.

A curse, the priests cried. The gods of their fathers had turned their faces upon the people and these faces would be turned away while the clinic of Lal Singh survived. Now, with all the deep-laid prejudices revealed again, the clinic was shunned.

The birthrate fell and fell, until at last there was no woman here with child.

And on that day a radio newscast from Benares told of the way the curse lay upon the world.

So, incited by a priest, the men and the youths took up their sticks and picked up stones and carried petrol and paraffin towards the clinic. The priest who organised the raid was very shrewd, and he had them link together in a cordon through which no one could escape.

Lal Singh first saw them when they were only a hundred yards away. He caught his breath as he stared out of the narrow window in the clinic made of wood and corrugated sheets. Then he turned and hurried to the wards, where there were still some babies and their mothers, and all the nurses. The women looked so old. Their hair was grey and straggly, the bone jutted out of their cheeks, their necks were scrawny and all their skin shiny.

He called out to them in desperation.

‘You must go home! We are in trouble. Go, hide yourselves, do not come back to this place until you know that all is safe.'

They turned, gathered up their few possessions and hurried out of the back door towards the arid land between them and the town. Lal Singh drew his river-washed dhoti about him so that he could move more freely. He went out through the front door, and his sparse hair was stirred by a hot wind. Behind the leaders of the attackers were the people, hundreds of them, spread out in a long, limp line beneath the burning sun.

Lal Singh saw how far the line stretched and knew that the nurses and the patients would be attacked. He put his hands upwards in despairing appeal to the gods and to men, and as he did so the avengers of the children who had never been born began to run forward.

Lal Singh stood erect and still as an Old Testament prophet, until they fell upon him and beat him savagely about the head and face and shoulders and felled him to his knees and slew him.

 

Palfrey heard the story in detail as he came back from seeing Joyce and Maddern to the lift. It brought a strange, new feeling of hurt and of despair. Chance had made him meet Lai Singh, many years ago. Now the old were dying and there were fewer, so many fewer newborn. It felt lonely to be here without Joyce. He felt a stirring of an unfamiliar emotion and suddenly asked himself, ‘Can I be jealous?'

As he passed the Observation Room, he saw a young girl operator glance round, notice him, and beckon. He went through, as the girl whispered, ‘It's Mr. Stefan, sir. Stefan Andromovitch.'

‘I'll take the call here,' Palfrey said, hurrying to a hood-covered telephone. He had a mental picture of a giant of a man, his oldest friend, who was second in command of Z5. Andromovitch was stationed in Moscow and was as free from domination of the Kremlin, as he – Palfrey – was free from domination from Whitehall.

There was only a moment's delay, before Andromovitch said, ‘Hallo, Sap. I am very glad I caught you in. How are you?'

After a long pause, Palfrey said, ‘Horrified. And terrified. And baffled. Have you found some affected areas, too?'

‘Yes,' Andromovitch answered soberly. ‘Very many, I fear. Russia has, I am told, become aware of the situation and the authorities have been endeavouring to find out how the areas are contaminated.'

‘Is there the slightest indication of how it's been done?' Palfrey asked, without much hope.

‘No,' answered the Russian. ‘The one unusual factor is that mystery aircraft, rockets or capsules, have been found in some places. Whenever they have been approached they've caught fire. So far no useful information has come from analysing the ashes. But at least we were not taken by surprise,' Andromovitch went on. ‘A security blanket was put down at once, directly word came. Most of our commune authorities believed there were official experiments. No one reported and no one complained in case they were suspected of being anti-government.' He paused again, only to go on, ‘More affected areas are being reported every few minutes! I have promised to talk with you and then see the Presidium. They hope you have some information, Sap.'

‘It's painfully little,' Palfrey said.

‘But there is some?' Andromovitch was obviously desperately anxious.

‘I've sent Joyce to see what she can find out,' Palfrey said, with great care. ‘I can't give details, but a doctor in Devon has made at second-hand, contact with a man who calls himself the Master. And we've had the same rocket-cum-capsule situation as you. It's just possible the doctor will give us a lead.'

‘I shall report what you have told me,' promised Andromovitch. ‘If there is any clue at all which we can help to follow up, be sure we will give it priority.' After a pause, he went on, ‘I've never known the Soviet leaders so disturbed. They seem to realise that this could really be the end for humankind.'

‘And it could be,' Palfrey insisted, feeling as if the very admission made him a lunatic.

‘It
can't
be,' said Andromovitch in a strangled voice.

Palfrey said, ‘Can you come over here?'

‘I think I should stay in Moscow,' Andromovitch told him. ‘Sap, could you come here, to Moscow?'

Startled, Palfrey said, ‘Would it help?'