“I’m sorry,” Charley said. “I don’t quite grasp what you mean. Economics is not my field at all. I’m just -”
“I’ll explain what I mean. God! I may as well tell you: my old man died last month. He didn’t die – he killed himself. He jumped from a fifty-second floor window of Jaguar Records Inc. in up-town L.A.” His eyes were brighter; he drew down his brows as if to hood them, and put one clenched fist with slow force down on the table before them. “My old man… he was part of Jaguar. He kept it going, it kept him going. In a way, I suppose he was a very American sort of man – lived for his family and his job, had a great range of business associates… To hell with that. What I’m trying to say – God, he wasn’t fifty! Forty-nine, he was.
“Jaguar went bust; more than bust – obsolete. Suddenly wilted and died. Why? Because their market was the adolescent trade – they sold Elvis and Donnie and Vince, and the other pop singers. It was the kids, the teens, that bought Jaguar records. Suddenly – no more kids, no more teens. The company saw it coming. It was like sliding towards a cliff. Year after year, sales down, diminishing returns, costs up… What do you do? What in hell can you do, except sweat it out?
“There are other industries all round you just as badly hit. One of my uncles is an executive with Park Lane Confectionery. They may hang on a few more years, but the whole lot is going unstable. Why? –
Because it was the under-twenties consumed most of their candies. Their market’s dead – unborn. A technological nation is a web of delicately balanced forces. You can’t have one bit rotting off without the rest going too. What do you do in a case like that? You do what my old man did – hang on for as long as you can, then catch a down draught from the fifty-second floor.”
Charley said gently, envying Pilbeam his slight drunkenness as he sipped his Bourbon. “You said something about someone’s will going to fail.”
“Oh, that. Yup – my father and his pals, well, they go on fighting while there’s a chance left. They try to salve what’s salvable for their sons. But us – we don’t have sons. What’s going to happen if this curse of infertility doesn’t wear off ever? We aren’t going to have the will to work if there’s nobody to -”
“Inherit the fruits of our labours? I’ve already thought of that. Perhaps every man has thought of it. But the genes must recover soon – it’s twenty years since the Accident.”
“I guess so. They’re telling us in the States that this sterility will wear off in another five or ten years’
time.”
“They were saying the same thing when Peggy was alive… It’s a cliché of the British politicians, to keep the voters quiet.”
“The American manufacturers use it to keep the voters buying. But all the time the industrial system’s going to pox – sorry, Freudian slip; I’ve had too much to drink, Charley, and you must excuse me – the system’s going to pot under them. So we have to have a war, keep up falling production, explain away shortages, conceal inflation, deflect blame, tighten controls… It’s a hell of a world, Charley! Look at the guys in here – all buying death on the credit system and richly, ripely, aware of it…”
Charley gazed about the colourful room, with its bar and its groups of smiling, greying soldiers. The scene did not appear to him as grim as Pilbeam made it sound; all the same, it was even betting that in each man’s heart was the knowledge of an annihilation so greedy that it had already leapt forward and swallowed up the next generation. The irony was that over this sterile soldiery hung no threat of nuclear war. The big bombs were obsolete after only half a century of existence; the biosphere was too heavily laden with radiation after the Accident of 1981 for anyone to chance sending the level higher. Oh, there were the armies’