Help me get ’em into the agony wagon, will you?”
“We’ll do more than that,” Timberlane promised. “If you’re going back to Wokha, as I presume you must be, we’ll act as escort to each other, just in case there are any more of these happy fellows perched up on the ridges.”
“Done. You’ve gotten yourself company, and don’t think I don’t need it. I’m still trembling like a leaf.
Tonight you must come on over to the PX and we’ll drink to life together. Suit you, Sergeant?”
As they loaded the two bodies, still warm, into the ambulance, Pilbeam lit himself another cigarette. He looked Timberlane in the eyes.
“There’s one consolation,” he said. “This one really is a war to end war. There won’t be anyone left to fight another.”
Charley was the first to arrive in the PX that evening. As he entered the low building, exchanging the hum of insects for the hum of the refrigeration plant, he saw Jack Pilbeam sitting over a glass at a corner table.
The American rose to meet him. He was dressed now in neatly creased olive drabs, his face shone, he looked compact and oddly more ferocious than he had done standing by the dying jungle. He eyed Charley’s Infantop flash with approval.
“What can I get you to drink – Charley, isn’t it? I’m way ahead of you.”
“I don’t drink.” He had long since learned to deliver the phrase without apology; he added now, with a sour smile, “I kill people, but I don’t drink.”
Something – perhaps the mere fact that Jack Pilbeam was American, and Charley found Americans easier to talk to than his own countrymen – made him add the explanation that carried its own apology. “I was eleven when your nation and mine detonated those fatal bombs in space. When I was nineteen, shortly after my mother died – it was a sort of compensation, I suppose – I got engaged to a girl called Peggy Lynn. She wasn’t in good health and she had lost all her hair, but I loved her… We were going to be engaged. Well, of course, we got medically examined and were told we were sterilized for life, like everyone else… Somehow that killed the romance.”
“I know what you mean.”
“Perhaps it was just as well. I had two sisters to look after anyway. But from then on, I started not to want anything…”
“Religious?”
“Yes, though it’s mainly a sort of self-denial.”
Pilbeam’s were clear and bright eyes that looked more attractive than his rather tight mouth. “Then you should get through the next few decades okay. Because there’s going to be a lot of self-denial needed. What happened to Peggy?”
Charley looked at his hands. “We lost touch. One fine spring day, she died of leukaemia. I heard about it later.”
After drinking deep, Pilbeam said, “That’s life, as they always say about death.” His tone robbed the remark of any facetiousness it might have had.
“Although I was only a kid, I think the – Accident sent me quietly mad,” Charley said, looking down at his boots. “Thousands – millions of people were mad, in a secretive way. Some not so secret, of course. And they’ve never got over it, though it’s twenty years ago. I mean, though it’s twenty years ago, it’s still present.
That’s why this war’s being fought, because people are mad… I’ll never understand it: we need every young life we can get, yet here’s a global war going on… Madness!”
With a sombre face, Pilbeam saw that Charley drew out a cigarette and lit it; it was one of the tobacco-free brands and it crackled, so fiercely did Charley draw on it.
“I don’t see the war like that,” Pilbeam said, ordering up another Kentucky Bourbon. “I see it as an economic war. This may be because of my upbringing and training. My father – he’s dead now – he was senior sales director in Jaguar Records Inc., and I could say ‘consumer rating’ right after I learnt to say
‘Mama’. The economy of every major nation is in flux, if you can have a one-way flux. They are suffering from a fatal malady called death, and up till now it’s irremediable – though they’re working on it. But one by one, industries are going bust, even where there’s the will to keep them going. And one day soon, the will is going to fail.”