“Venny and Edgar Harley are here, Keith,” she said, using a loud voice so that what she said could be heard in the livingroom. “Do come in and join us.”
Keith winced, spread his hands in resignation, and said in exaggeratedly refined tones, “Oh, but absolutely delighted, Mrs. Timberlane.”
When he had been provided with a drink, he raised it and said to the company, “Well, here’s to happier days! The three of you look a bit gloomy, I must say. Have a bad trip, Edgar?”
“There is some reason for gloom, I should say,” Edgar Harley said. He was a tubby man, the sort of man on whom tubbiness sits well. “I’ve been telling Venny and Pat about what I turned up in Australia. I was in Sydney dining next to Bishop Aitken the night before last, and he was complaining about a violent wave of irreligion sweeping Australia. He claimed that the churches had only christened a matter of seven children seven! – during the last eighteen months, in the whole of Australia.”
“I can’t say that makes me feel too desperately suicidal,” Keith said, smiling, settling himself on the sofa next to Patricia.
“The bishop had it wrong,” Venice said. “At this conference Edgar went to, they told him the real reason for the lack of christenings. You’d better tell Keith, Ed, since it affects him and there will be an official announcement anyway at the weekend.”
With a solemn face, Edgar said, “The bishop had no babies to christen simply because there are no babies.
The contraction of the van Allen belts brought every human being in contact with hard radiation.”
“We knew that, but most of us have survived,” Keith said. “How do you mean this affects me personally?”
“Governments have kept very quiet, Keith, while they try to sort out just what damage this – er, accident has caused. It’s a tricky subject for several reasons, the chief one being that the effects of exposure to different types of radioactive emissions are not clearly understood, and that in this case, the exposure is still going on.”
“I don’t understand that, Ed,” Venice said. “You mean the van Allen belts are still expanding and contracting?”
“No, they appear to be stable again. But they made the whole world radioactive to some extent. There are different sorts of radiation, some of which entered our bodies at the time. Other sorts, long-lived radio-isotopes of strontium and cesium, for example, are still in the atmosphere, and soak into our bodies through the skin, or when we eat or drink or breathe. We cannot avoid them, and unluckily the body takes these particles in and builds them into our vital parts, where they may cause great damage to the cells. Some of this damage may not yet be apparent.”
“We ought to all be living in shelters in that case,” Keith said angrily. “Edgar, you put me off this drink. If this is true, why doesn’t the government do something, instead of just keeping quiet?”
“You mean why doesn’t the United Nations do something,” Patricia said. “This is a world-wide thing.”
“It is too late for anyone to do anything,” Edgar said. “It was always too late, once the bombs were launched. The whole world cannot go underground, taking its food and water with it.”
“So what you’re saying is that we’re not going to have just this temporary dearth of kids around, but we’re going to have lots of cases of cancer and leukaemia, I suppose?”
“That, yes, and possibly also a shortening of individual lives. It’s too early to tell. Unfortunately we know much less about the subject than we have pretended to know. It is a very complex one.”
Keith smoothed his unruly hair and looked ruefully at the women.
“Your husband has come back with a cheery bag of news,” he said. “I’m glad old Arthur isn’t here to listen in – he’s depressed enough as it is. I can see us having to give Jock Bear the push and turn to making crucifixes and coffins instead, eh, Pat?”
Edgar had pushed his drink aside and sat on the edge of his arm-chair, his eyes and stomach both rather prominent, as if he was winding himself up to say more. He looked about the comfortable commonplace room, with its Italian cushions and Danish lamps, and said, “The effects of radiation must always strike us as freakish, particularly in the present case, when we have been subjected to a wide spectrum of radiations of