II. Cowley

They had been lucky ever to get to Sparcot. During the last few days in Cowley, the factory suburb of Oxford, she had not thought they would escape at all. For that was the autumn of the dusty year 2018, when cholera lent its hand to the other troubles that plagued mankind.

Martha was almost a prisoner in the Cowley flat in which she and Greybeard - but in those days he was simply the forty-three-years-old Algernon Timberlane - had been forcibly installed.

They had driven to Oxford from London, after the death of Algy's mother. Their truck had been stopped on the borders of Oxfordshire; they found martial law prevailing, and a Commander Croucher in charge, with his headquarters in Cowley. Military police had escorted them to this flat; although they were given no choice in the matter, the premises proved to be satisfactory.

For all the trouble sweeping the country and the world, Martha's chief enemy at present was boredom. She sat doing endless jigsaws of farms at blossom time, trappers in Canada, beaches at Acapulco, and listening to the drizzle of light music from her handbag radio; throughout the sweltering days she waited for Algy to return.

Few vehicles moved along the Iffley Road outside. Occasionally one would growl by with an engine note that she thought was familiar. She would jump up, often to stand staring out of the window for a long time after she realized her mistake.

Martha looked out on an unfamiliar city. She smiled to think how they had been buoyed with the spirit of adventure on the drive down from London, laughing, and boasting of how young they felt, how they were ready for anything - yet already she was surfeited of jigsaws and worried by Algy's increasingly heavy drinking.

When they were in America, he drank a lot, but the drinking there with Jack Pilbeam, an eager companion, had a gaiety about it lacking now. Gaiety! The last few months in London had held no gaiety.

The government enforced a strict curfew; Martha's father had disappeared into the night, presumably arrested without trial; and as the cholera spread, Patricia, Algy's feckless old mother, deserted by her third husband, had died in agony.

She ran her fingers over the window-sill. They came away dirty and she looked at them.

She laughed her curt laugh at an inner thought, and returned to the table. With an effort, she forced herself to go on building the sunlit beach of Acapulco.

The Cowley shops opened only in the afternoon. She was grateful for the diversion they offered. To go into the street, she deliberately made herself unattractive, wore an old bonnet and pulled coarse stockings over her fine legs, despite the heat, for the soldiers had a rough way with women.

This afternoon, she noticed fewer uniforms about. Rumour had it that several platoons were being driven east, to guard against possible attack from London. Other rumour said the soldiers were confined to their barracks and dying like flies.

Standing in line by the white-tiled fishmonger's shop in the Cowley Road, Martha found that her secret fears accepted this latter rumour the more readily. The overheated air held a taste of death. She wore a handkerchief over her nose and mouth, as did most of the other women. Rumour of plague becomes most convincing when strained through dirty squares of fabric.

"I told my husband I'd rather he didn't join up," the woman next to Martha told her. "But you can't get Bill to listen if he don't want to. See, he used to work at the garage, but he reckons they'll lay him off sooner or later, so he reckons he'd be better in the army. I told him straight, I said, I've had enough of war if you haven't, but he said, 'This is different from war, it's a case of every man for himself.' You don't know what to do for the best, really, do you?"

As she trudged back to the flat with her ration of dried and nameless fish, Martha echoed the woman's words.

She went and sat at the table, folded her arms on it, and rested her head on her arms. In that position, she let her thoughts ramble, waiting all the while for sound of that precious truck which would herald Timberlane's return.

When finally she heard the truck outside, she went down to meet Timberlane. As he opened the door, she clung to him, but he pushed her off.

"I'm dirty, I'm foul, Martha," he said. "Don't touch me till I've washed and got this jacket off."

"What's the matter? What's been happening?"

He caught the overwrought note in her voice.

"They're dying, you know. People, everywhere."

"I know they're dying."

"Well, it's getting worse. It's spread from London. They're dying in the streets now, and not getting shifted. The army's doing what it can, but the troops are no more immune to the infection than anyone else."

"The army! You mean Croucher's men!"

"You could have worse men ruling the Midlands than Croucher. He's keeping order. He understands the necessity for running some sort of public service, he's got hygiene men out. Nobody could do more."

"You know he's a murderer. Algy, how can you speak well of him?"

They went upstairs. Timberlane flung his jacket into a corner.

He sat down with a glass and a bottle of gin. He added a little water, and began to sip at it steadily. His face was heavy, the set of his mouth and eyes gave him a brooding look. Beads of sweat stood on his bald head.

"I don't want to talk about it," he said. His voice was tired and stony: Martha felt her own slip into the same cast. The shabby room was set solid with their discomfort. A fly buzzed fitfully against the window pane.

"What do you want to talk about?"

"For God's sake, Martha, I don't want to talk about anything. I'm sick of the stink of death and fear, I've been going round with my recorder all day, doing my bloody stuff for DOUCH(E). I just want to drink myself into a stupor."

Although she had compassion for him, she would not let him see it.

"Algy - your day has been no worse than mine. I've spent all day sitting here doing these jigsaw puzzles till I could scream. I've spoken to no one but a woman at the fish shop. For the rest of the time, the door has been locked and bolted as you instructed. Am I just expected to sit here in silence while you get drunk?"

"Not by me you're not. You haven't got that amount of control over your tongue."

She went over to the window, her back to him. She thought: I am not sick; I am vital in my senses; I can still give a man all he wants; I am Martha Timberlane, born Martha Broughton, forty-three years of age. She heard his glass shatter in a far comer.

"Martha, I'm sorry. Murdering, getting drunk, dying, living, they're all reduced to the same dead level…"

Martha made no answer. With an old magazine, she crushed the fly buzzing against the window. She closed her eyes to feel how hot her eyelids were. At the table, Timberlane went on talking.

"I'll get over it, but to see my poor dear silly mother panting for years, recalling how I loved her as a kid…

Ah… Get me another glass, love - get two. Let's finish this gin. Sod the whole rotten system! How much longer are people going to be able to take this?"

"This what?" she asked, without turning round.

"This lack of children. This sterility. This creeping paralysis. What else do you think I mean?"

"I'm sorry, I've got a headache." She wanted his sympathy, not his speeches, but she could see that something had upset him, that he was going to have a talk, and that the gin was there to help him talk. She got him another glass.

"What I'm saying is, Martha, that it's finally sinking in on people that the human race is not going to produce any more young. Those little bawling bundles we used to see outside shops in prams are gone for good. Those little girls that used to play with dolls and empty cereal packets are things of the past. The knot of teenagers standing on corners or bellowing by on motor bikes have had it for ever. They aren't coming back. Nor are we ever going to see a nice fresh young twenty-year-old girl pass us like a blessing in the street, with her little bum and tits like a banner. Where are all your young sportsmen? Remember the cricket teams, Martha? Football, eh? What about the romantic leads of television and the cinema? They've all gone!

Where are the pop singers of yesteryear? Sure, there are still games of football going on. The fifty-year-olds creak round as best they can…"

"Stop it, Algy. I know we're all sterile as well as you do. We knew that when we got married, seventeen years ago. I don't want to hear it once more."

When he spoke again, his voice was so changed that she turned and looked at him.

"Don't think I want to hear it again, either. But you see how every day reveals the wretched truth all over again. The misery always comes hot and new. We're over forty now, and there's scarcely anyone younger than we. You only have to walk through Oxford to see how old and dusty the world is getting. And it's now that youth is passing that the lack of replenishments is really being felt - in the marrow."

She gave him another measure of gin, and set a glass down on the table for herself. He looked up at her with a wry smile, and poured her a measure.

"Perhaps it's the death of my mother makes me talk like this. I'm sorry, Martha, particularly when we don't know what's become of your father. All the while I've been so busy living my life, Mother's been living hers. You know what her life's been like! She fell in love with three useless men, my father, Keith Barratt, and this Irishman, poor woman! Somehow I feel we should have done more to help her."

"You know she enjoyed herself in her own way. We've said all this before."

He wiped his brow and head on a handkerchief and grinned more relaxedly.

"Maybe that's what happens when the mainspring of the world snaps: everyone is doomed for ever to think and say what they thought and said yesterday."

"We don't have to despair, Algy. We've survived years of war, we've come through waves of puritanism and promiscuity. We've got away from London, where they are in for real trouble, now that the last authoritarian government has broken down. True, Cowley's far from being a bed of roses, but Croucher is only a local phenomenon; if we can survive him, things may get better, become more settled. Then we can get somewhere permanent to live."

"I know, my love. We seem to be going through an interim period. The trouble is, there have been a number of interim periods already, and there will be more. I can't see how stability can ever be achieved again. There's just a road leading downhill."

"We don't have to be involved in politics. DOUCH(E) doesn't require you to mix in politics to make your reports. We can just find somewhere quiet and reasonably safe for ourselves, surely?"

He laughed. He stood up and looked genuinely amused. Then he stroked her hair with its grey and brown streaks and drew his chair closer.

"Martha, I'm mad about you still! It's a national failing to think of politics as something that goes on in Parliament. It isn't; it's something that goes on inside us. Look, love, the United National Government has broken apart, and thank God for it. But at least its martial law kept things going and wheels turning. Now it has collapsed, millions of people are saying, "I have nothing to save for, no sons, no daughters. Why should I work?", and they've stopped work. Others may have wanted to work, but you can't carry on industry like that.

Disorganize one part effectively, and it all grinds to a halt. The factories of Britain stand empty. We're making nothing to export. You think America and the Commonwealth and the other countries are going to go on sending us food free? Of course not, especially when a lot of them are harder hit than we are! I know food is short at present, but next year, believe me, there's going to be real famine. Your safe place won't exist then, Martha. In fact there may only be one safe place."

"Abroad?"

"I mean working for Croucher."

She turned away frowning, not wishing to voice again her distrust of the local dictator.

"I've got a headache, Algy. I shouldn't be drinking this gin. I think I must go and lie down."

He took her wrist.

"Listen to me, Martha. I know I'm a devil to live with just now and I know you don't want to sleep with me just now, but don't stop listening to me or the last line of communication will be cut. We may be the final generation, but life's still precious. I don't want us to starve. I have made an appointment to see Commander Croucher tomorrow. I'm offering to cooperate."

"What?"

"Why not?"

"Why not? How many people did he massacre in the centre of Oxford last week? Over sixty, wasn't it? -

and the bodies left lying there for twenty-four hours so that people could count and make sure. And you-"

"Croucher represents law and order, Martha."

"Madness and disorder!"

"No - the Commander represents as much law and order as we have any right to expect, considering the horrible outrage we have committed on ourselves. There's a military government in the Home Counties centred on London, and one of the local gentry has set up a paternalistic sort of community covering most of Devon. Apart from them and Croucher, who now controls the South Midlands and down to the South Coast, the country is slipping rapidly into anarchy. Have you thought what it must be like farther up in the Midlands, and in the North, in the industrial areas? What do you think is going to happen up there?"

"They'll find their own little Crouchers soon enough."

"Right! And what will their little Crouchers do? March 'em down south as fast as they can."

"And risk the cholera?"

"I only hope the cholera stops them! Quite honestly, Martha, I hope this plague wipes out most of the population. If it doesn't stop the North, then Croucher had better be strong, because he'll have to be the one to stop them. Have another gin. Here's to Bonnie Prince Croucher! We'll have to defend a line across the Cotswolds from Cheltenham to Buckingham. We should be building our defences tomorrow. It would keep Croucher's troops busy and out of the centre of population where they can spread infection. He's got too many soldiers; the men join his army rather than work in the car factories. They should be put on defence at once. I shall tell Croucher when I see him…"

She lurched away from the table and went to swill her face under the cold tap. Without drying her face, she rested by the open window, looking at the evening sun trapped in the shoddy suburban street.

"Croucher will be too busy defending himself from the hooligans in London to guard the north," she said.

She didn't know what either of them was saying. The world was no longer the one into which she had been born; nor was it even the one in which - ah, but they had been young and innocent then! - they had married; for that ceremony was distant in space as well as time, in a Washington they idealized because they had then been idealists, where they had talked a lot of being faithful and being strong… No, they were all mad. Algy was right when he said they had committed a horrible outrage on themselves. She thought about the expression as she stared into the street, no longer listening as Timberlane embarked on one of the long speeches he now liked to make.

Not for the first time, she reflected on how people had grown fond of making rambling monologues; her father had fallen into the habit in recent years. In a vague way, she could analyse the reasons for it: universal doubt, universal guilt. In her own mind, the same monologue rarely stopped, though she guarded her speech.

Everyone spoke endlessly to imaginary listeners. Perhaps they were all the same imaginary listener.

It was really the generation before hers that was most to blame, the people who were grown up when she was born, the millions who were adults during the 1960's and 70's. They had known all about war and destruction and nuclear power and radiation and death - it was all second nature to them. But they never renounced it. They were like savages who had to go through some fearful initiation rite. Yes, that was it, an initiation rite, and if they had come through it, then perhaps they might have grown up into brave and wise adults. But the ceremony had gone wrong. Too frenzied by far! Instead of a mere circumcision, the whole organ had been lopped off. Though they wept and repented, the outrage had been committed; all they could do was hop about with their deformity, alternately boasting about and bemoaning it.

Through her misery, peering between the seams of her headache, she saw a Windrush with Croucher's yellow X on its sides swing round the corner and prowl down the street. Windrushes were the locally manufactured variety of hovercraft, a family-sized model now largely appropriated by the military. A man in uniform craned his neck out of the blister, staring at house numbers as he glided down the street. When it drew level with the Timberlane flat, the machine stopped and lowered itself to the ground in a dying roar of engines.

Frightened, Martha summoned Timberlane over to the window. There were two men in the vehicle, both wearing the yellow X on their tunics. One climbed out and walked across the street.

"We've nothing to fear," Timberlane said. He felt in his pocket for the little 7.7 mm. automatic with which DOUCH(E) had armed him. "Lock yourself in the kitchen, love, just in case there's trouble. Keep quiet."

"What do they want, do you think?"

There was a heavy knocking on the door.

"Here, take the gin bottle," he said, giving her a taut grin. The bottle passed between them, all there was time to exchange. He patted her behind as he pushed her into the kitchen. The knocking was repeated before he could get down to the door.

A coporal was standing there; his mate leaned from the blister of the Windrush, half-whistling and rubbing his lower lip on the protruding snout of his rifle.

"Timberlane? Algernon Timberlane? You're wanted up at the barracks."

The corporal was an undersized man with a sharp jaw and patches of dark skin under his eyes. He would be only in his early fifties - youngish for these days. His uniform was clean and pressed, and he kept one hand near the revolver at his belt.

"Who wants me? I was just going to have my supper."

"Commander Croucher wants you, if you're Timberlane. Better hop in the Windrush with us." The corporal had a big nose, which he rubbed now in a furtive fashion as he summed up Timberlane.

"I have an appointment with the Commander tomorrow."

"You've got an appointment with him this evening, mate. I don't want any argument."

There seemed no point in arguing. As he turned to shut the door behind him, Martha appeared. She spoke direct to the guard.

"I'm Mrs. Timberlane. Will you take me along too?"

She was an attractive woman, with a rich line to her, and a certain frankness about her eye that made her appear younger than she was. The corporal looked her over with approval.

"They don't make 'em like you any more, lady. Hop up with your husband."

She silenced Timberlane's attempt at protest by hurrying ahead to climb into the Windrush. Impatiently, she shook off the corporal's hand and swung herself up without aid, ignoring the man's swift instinctive glance at the thigh she showed.

They toured by an unnecessarily long way to the Victorian pseudo-castle that was Croucher's military headquarters. On the first part of the way, she thought in anguish to herself, "Isn't this one of the archetypal situations of the last century -and the Twentieth really was the Last Century: the unexpected peremptory knocking at the door, and the going to find someone there in uniform waiting to take you off somewhere, for reasons unknown? Who invented the situation, that it should be repeated so often? Perhaps this is what happens after an outrage - unable to regenerate, you just have to go on repeating yourself." She longed to say some of this aloud; she was generalizing in the rather pretentious way her father had done, and generalizing is a form of relief that gains its maximum effect from being uttered aloud; but a look at Timberlane's face silenced her. She could see he was excited.

She saw the boy in his face as well as the old man.

Men! She thought. There was the seat of the whole sickness. They invented these situations. They needed them - torturer or tortured, they needed them. Friend or enemy, they were united in an algolagnia beyond woman's cure or understanding.

The instant that imperious knocking had sounded at the door, their hated little flat had turned into a place of refuge; the dripping kitchen tap, whistling into its chipped basin, had turned into a symbol of home, the littered pieces of jigsaw a sign of a vast intellectual freedom. She had whispered a prayer for a safe return to the fragmented beach of Acapulco as she hastened down to join her husband.

Now they moved three feet above ground level, and she tasted the chemistries of tension in her bloodstream.

In the September heat, the city slept. But the patient was uneasy in its slumber. Old cartons and newspaper heaved in the gutters. A battery-powered convertible lay with its nose nestling in a shattered shop front. At open windows, people lolled, heavy sunlight filling their gasping mouths. The smell of the patient showed that blood-poisoning had set in.

Before they had gone far, their expectation of seeing a corpse was satisfied, doubly. A man and woman lay together in unlikely attitudes on the parched grass of St. Clement's roundabout. A group of starlings fluttered round their shoulders.

Timberlane put an arm about Martha and whispered to her as he had when she was a younger woman.

"Things will be a lot worse before they're better," the beak-nosed corporal said to nobody in particular. "I don't know what'll happen to the world, I'm sure." Their passage sent a wave of dust washing over the houses.

At the barracks, they sailed through the entrance gate and disembarked. The corporal marched them towards a distant archway. The heat in the central square lay thick; they pressed through it, in at a door, along a corridor, and up into cooler quarters. The corporal conferred with another man who summoned them into a further room, where a collection of hot and weary people waited on benches, several of them wearing cholera masks.

They sat there for half an hour before being summoned. Finally they were led into a spacious room furnished in a heavy way that suggested it had once been used as an officers' mess. Occupying one half of it were a mahogany table and three trestle tables. Men sat at these tables, several of them with maps and papers before them; only the man at the mahogany table had nothing but a notebook before him; he was the only man who did not seem idle. The man at the mahogany table was Commander Peter Croucher.

He looked solid, fleshy, and hard. His face was big and unbeautiful, but it was the face of neither a fool nor a brute. His sparse grey hair was brushed straight back in furrows; his suit was neat, his whole aspect businesslike. He was little more than ten years older than Timberlane; fifty-three or four, say. He looked at the Timberlanes with a tired but appraising look.

Martha knew his reputation. They had heard of the man even before the waves of violence had forced them to leave London. Oxford's major industry was the production of cars and GEM'S (Ground Effect Machines), particularly the Windrush. Croucher had been Personnel Manager at the largest factory. The United National Government had made him Deputy District Officer for Oxfordshire. On the collapse of the government, the District Officer had been found dead in mysterious circumstances, and Croucher had taken over the old controls, drawing them in tighter.

He spoke without moving. He said, "No invitation was issued for you being here, Mrs. Timberlane."

"I go everywhere with my husband, Commander."

"Not if I say not. Guard!"

"Sir." The corporal marched forward with a parody of army drill.

"It was an infringement, you bringing this woman in here, Corporal Pitt. Supervise her immediate removal at once. She can wait outside."

Martha started to protest. Timberlane silenced her, pressing her hand, and she allowed herself to be led away. Croucher got up and came round his table.

"Timberlane, you're the only DOUCH(E) man in the territory under my control. Dissuade your mind that my motives towards you are ulterior. That's the reverse of the truth. I want you on my side."

"I shall be on your side if you treat my wife properly."

Croucher gestured to show how poorly he regarded the remark. "What can you offer me in any way advantageous to me?" he asked. The involved semi-literacy of his speech added to his menace in Greybeard's estimation.

"I'm well informed, Commander. I have an idea that you must defend Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire from the Midlands and the North, if your forces are strong enough. If you could lend me a map-"

Croucher held up a hand.

"Look, I'd better cut you down to size a bit, my friend. Just for the record, I don't need any half-baked intellectual ideas from self-styled pundits like yourself. See these men here, sitting at these tables? They have the mutual benefit of performing my thinking for me, thus utilizing advantageously one of the advantages of having a terra firma in a university city like Oxford. The old Town versus Gown battle has been fought and decided, Mr. Timberlane, as you'd know if you hadn't been knocking about in London for so long. I decided and implemented it. I rule all Oxford for the benefit of one and all. These blokes are the cream of the colleges that you are seeing here, all very high-flown intellects. See that gink at the end, with the shaky hands and cracked specs? He's the University Chichele Professor for War, Harold Biggs. Down there, that's Sir Maurice Rigg, one of the all-time greats at history, I'm told. So kindly infer that I'm asking you about DOUCH(E), not how you'd run operations if you were in my shoes."

"No doubt one of your intellectual ginks can tell you about DOUCH(E)."

"No they can't. That's why it was compulsory you attending here. You see, all the data I've got about DOUCH(E) is that it's some sort of an intelligence unit with its headquarters in London. London organizations are suspect with me just now, for obvious reasons. Unless you wish to be mistaken for a spy, etcetera, perhaps you ought to set my mind in abeyance about what you intend doing here."

"I think you misunderstand my attitude, sir. I wish to inform you about DOUCH(E); I am no spy.

Although I was brought to you like a captive, I had made an appointment through the patrols to see you tomorrow and offer you what help I could."

"I am not your dentist. You do not make an appointment with me - you crave an audience." He rapped his knuckles on the table. "I cavil at your phoney attitude! Get wise to the reality of the situation - I can have you shot anywhere in the curriculum if I find you unconstructive."

Timberlane said nothing to that. In a more reasonable voice, Croucher said, "Now then, let's have the lowdown what exactly DOUCH(E) is and how it functions."

"It is simply an academic unit, sir, although with more power behind it than academic units usually have.

Can I explain in private? The nature of the unit's work is confidential."

Croucher looked at him with raised eyebrows, turned and surveyed the jaded men at the trestle tables, flicked an eye at two guards.

"I should not cavil at a change of scenery. I work long hours."

They moved into the next room. The guards came too. Although the room was small and hot, it was a relief to get away from the idle faces sitting by the tables. When Croucher gestured to one of the guards, the man opened a window.

"What exactly is this 'confidential work' precisely?", Croucher asked.

"It's a job of documentation," Timberlane said. "As you know, it was in 1981 that the Accident occurred which sterilized man and most of the higher mammals. The Americans were first to realize the full implications of what was happening. In the nineties, various foundations collaborated in setting up DOUCH

in Washington. There it was decided that in view of the unprecedented global conditions, a special emergency study group should be established. This group was to be equipped to function for seventy-five years, whether man eventually recovered his ability to procreate or whether he failed to do so and became extinct. Members were enlisted from all over the world and trained to interpret their country's agonies objectively and record them permanently.

"The group was called Documentation of Universal Contemporary History. The bracketed E means I'm one of the English wing. I joined the organization early, and was trained in Washington in '01. Back in those days, the organization tried to be as pessimistic as possible. Thanks to their realistic thinking, we can go on functioning as individuals even when national and international contacts have broken down."

"As has now happened. The President was eliminated by a bunch of crooks. The United States is in a state of anarchy. You know that?"

"Britain too."

"Not so. We have no anarchy here, don't know the meaning of the word. I know how to keep order, of that you can be quite convinced. Even with this plague on, we have no disorder and British justice prevails."

"The cholera is only just hitting its stride, Commander Croucher. And mass executions are not a manifestation of order."

Angrily, Croucher said, "Manifestations, hell! Tomorrow, everyone in the Churchill Hospital will be shot.

No doubt you will cry out about that also. But you do not understand. You must expunge the erroneous misapprehension. I have no wish to kill. All I want is to keep order."

"You must have read enough history to know how hollow that rings."

"It's true! Chaos and civil war are absolutely deterrent to me! Listen to me, what YOU tell Me Of DOUCH(E) confirms what I had already been informed. You were not lying to me. So-"

"Why should I lie to you? If you are the benefactor you claim to be I have nothing to fear from you."

"Because if I was the madman you take me for, my main objective would be to kill any objective observers of my régime. The reverse is true - I visualize my job as to keep order - only that. Consequentially, I can utilize your DOUCH(E) set-up. I want you here, recording. Your testimony is going to vindicate me and the measures I am forced to implement."

"Vindicate you before whom? Before posterity? There is no posterity. They died in addled sperm, if you remember."

They were both sweating freely. The guard behind them shuffled weary feet. Croucher brought a tube of peppermints from his pocket and slipped one into his mouth.

He said, "How long do you keep on persevering with this DOUCH(E) job, Mr. Timberlane?"

"Till I die or get killed."

"Recording?"

"Yes, recording and filming."

"For posterity?"

After a moment of silence, Timberlane said, "All right, we both think we know where duty lies. But I don't have to shoot all the poor old wrecks in the Churchill Hospital."

Croucher crunched his peppermint. The eyes in his ugly face stared at the floor as he spoke.

"Here's a nodule of information for you to record. For the last ten years, the Churchill has been devoted to one line of research and one only. The doctors and staff there include some expert biochemists. Their project and endeavour is trying to prolong life. They are not just studying ger - what do you call it, geriatrics; they are looking for a drug, a hormone; I am no medical specialist, and I don't differentiate one from the other, but they are looking for a way to enable people such as me and you to live to be two hundred or two thousand years old. Impossible boloney! Waste an organization chasing phantoms! I can't let that hospital run to waste, I want to utilize it for more productive purposes."

"The Government subsidized the hospital?"

"They did. The corrupt politicians of Westminster aspired to discover this elixir of life and immortality and perpetuate it for their own personal advantage. With that kind of nonsense we aren't going to be bothered. Life's too short."

They stared at each other.

"I will accept your offer," said Timberlane, "though I cannot see how it will benefit you. I will record whatever you do at the Churchill. I would like documentary evidence that what you say about this longevity project is true."

"Documents! You talk like one of those clever fool dons in the other room. I respect learning, but not pedantry, get that straight. Listen, I'm evacuating the whole bunch of crooks out of that hospital, them and their mad ideas; I don't believe in the past - I believe in the future."

To Timberlane it sounded only like an admission of madness. He said, "There is no future, remember?

We killed it stone dead in the past."

Croucher unwrapped another peppermint; his thick lips took it from the palm of his hand.

"Come to me tomorrow and I will show you the future. The sterility was not entirely total, you know.

There was, there still are, a minimal trickle of children being born in odd corners of the world - even in Britain. Most of them are defectives - monstrosities beyond your conception."

"I know what you mean. Do you remember the Infantop Corps during the war years? It was the British equivalent of the American Project Childsweep. I was on that. I know all about monstrosities. My feeling is that it would be sane to kill most of them at birth."

"A percentage of the local ones are not killed at birth, motherly love being such as it is." Croucher turned to the guards who were whispering behind him, and irritably ordered them to be silent. He continued, "I'm rounding up all these creatures, whatever they look like. Some of them are minus limbs. Sometimes they are without intelligence and unspeakably stupid. Sometimes they are born inside out, and then they die by degrees - though we have got one boy who survives despite his whole digestive system - stomach, intestines, anus - being on the outside of his body in a sort of bag. It's a supremely gruesome sight. Oh, we've got all sorts of miscellaneous half-human creatures. They will be incarcerated in the Churchill for supervision. They are the future." When Timberlane did not speak, he added, "Admitted, a frightening future, but it may be the only one. We must labour under the assertion that when these creatures reach adulthood, they will breed normal infants. We shall keep them and make them breed. Assure yourself it's better a world populated by freaks than a dead world."

Croucher eyed Timberlane challengingly, as if expecting him to disagree with this proposition. Instead, Timberlane said, "I'll come and see you in the morning. You will place no censorship on me?"

"You will have a guard with you to ensure security. Corporal Pitt that you met has been detailed for the task. I do not want your reports falling into hostile hands."

"Is that all?"

"No. I have to consider your own hands as hostile hands. Till you prove them otherwise, your wife will live here in these barracks as a token of your goodwill. You will billet here too. You'll find the comfort will be more considerable than your flat was. Your belongings are already undergoing transportation to here from the flat."

"So you are just a dictator, like all the others before you!"

"Be careful - I cannot stomach a stubborn mind! You will soon learn otherwise of me - you'd better! I want you as my conscience. Get that point clarified in your brain with all just momentum. You have seen I have surrounded myself with the intelligentsia; unfortunately, they superficially do what I say - at least to my face. Such a creed revolts me to my skin! I don't want that from you; I want you to do what you have been trained for. Damn it, why should I bother with you at all when there's plenty else to worry about? You must do as I say."

"If I am to be independent, I must retain my independence."

"Don't go all highbrow on me! You must do as I say. I ask you to sleep here tonight, and that's an order.

Think this conversation over, talk with your wife. I saw immediately she was a fairly hirsute type.

Remember, I offer you security, Timberlane."

"In this insanitary fort?"

"You will be sent for in the morning. Guard, take this man away. Give him into Corporal Pitt's keeping."

As they came up in a business-like way to take Timberlane, Croucher coughed into a handkerchief, wiped his hand across his brown and said, "One concluding point, Timberlane. I hope friendship will originate between us, as far as that's possible. But if you cogitate trying to escape, I had better inform you that from tomorrow new restrictive orders are in operation throughout the area in my jurisprudence. I will stamp out the spread of plague at all costs. Anybody caught trying to move from Oxford in future will be shot, no questions asked. Barriers will be erected round the city at dawn. All right, guard, remove him. And expedite me a secretary and a pot of tea immediately."

Their quarters in the barracks consisted of one large room. It contained a wash basin, a gas ring, and two army beds with a supply of blankets. Their belongings arrived in fits and starts from a lorry downstairs.

Other commandeered property arrived spasmodically, until they grew tired of the echo of army boots.

A senile guard sat on a chair in the doorway, fingering a light machine gun and staring at them with the stony curiosity of the bored.

Martha lay on one of the beds with a damp towel across her forehead. Timberlane had given her a full account of the talk with Croucher. They remained in silence, the man sitting on his bed, resting his head heavily on his elbow, sinking slowly into a sort of lethargy.

"Well, we've more or less got what we wanted," Martha said. "We're working for Croucher with a vengeance. Is he to be trusted?"

"I don't think that's a question you can ask. He can be trusted as far as circumstances allow. He had a way of not seeming to take in all that I was saying - as if his mind was working all the time on another problem.

Perhaps I got a glimpse of that problem when he visualized a world populated by monsters. Perhaps he felt he must have someone to rule over, even if it was only a - a collection of abnormalities."

His wife's thoughts returned to a point they had reached earlier in the day.

"Everyone is obsessed with the Accident, even if they do not show it immediately. We're all sick with guilt. Perhaps that's Croucher's trouble, and he has to live with a vision of himself ruling over a twilight world of cripples and deformed creatures."

"His grip on the present seems stronger than that would imply."

"How strong is anyone's grip on the present?"

"It's a pretty fleeting grip, as the cholera reminds us, but -"

"Our society, our biosphere, has been sick for forty years now. How can the individual remain healthy in it? We may all be madder than we know."

Not liking the note in her voice, Timberlane went over and sat on the edge of her bed, saying strongly,

"Anyhow, our immediate concern is with Croucher. It will suit the DOUCH scheme if we co-operate with him, so that's what we will do. But I still can't see why, at a time like this, he should want to encumber himself with me."

"I can think of a reason. He doesn't want you. He's after the truck. He probably thinks there is evidence in it he could use."

He squeezed her hand. "It could be that. He might think that as we have come from London, I have recorded information he could use. Indeed I may have done. London is his best-organized enemy at present. I wonder how long they will leave the truck where it is now?"

The DOUCH(E) truck was a valuable piece of equipment. When national governments broke down, as foreseen by the Washington foundation, the trucks became in themselves small DOUCH HQ's. They contained full recording equipment, stores, and sundry supplies; they were fully armoured; an hour's work would convert them into tracked vehicles; they ran on the recently perfected charge-battery system, and had an emergency drive that worked on petrol or any of the current petrol substitutes. This neat packet of technology, or Timberlane's sample of it, had been left in its garage, below the flat in Iffley Road.

"I have the keys still," Timberlane said, "and the vehicle is shuttered down. They haven't asked me for the keys."

Martha's eyes were closed. She heard him, but she was too tired to reply.

"We're well placed here to observe contemporary history," he said. "What DOUCH did not consider was that the vehicles might be an attraction to the history-makers. Whatever happens, we must not let the truck pass out of our control."

After a minute of silence, he added, "The vehicle must be our first concern."

With the sudden energy of fury, she sat up on the bed. "Damn and blast the bloody vehicle!" she said.

"What about me?"

She slept fitfully throughout that stuffy night in the barracks. The silence was fractured by army boots stamping across a parade ground, by shouts, by the close vibrations of a mosquito or by the surge of a Windrush coming home. Her bed rumbled like an empty stomach when she turned in it.

Night, it seemed to her, was a padded pincushion - she almost had it in her hand, so closely did its warmth match the humidity of her palm - and into it, an infinite number of pins, went the sound effects of militant humanity. But each pin pierced her as well as the cushion. Towards morning, the noises grew less frequent, though the heat bowl of the square outside remained unemptied. Then from a different quarter came the faint ring, long continued, of an alarm clock. Distantly, a cock crowed. She heard a town clock - Magdalen? -

chime five. Birds quarrelled over the dawn in their guttering. Army noises slowly took over again. The clang of buckets and iron utensils from the cookhouse proclaimed that preparations for breakfast had begun. She slept, fading out on a tide of despair.

Her sleep was deep and restorative.

Timberlane was sitting grey and unshaven on the edge of his bed when she awoke. A guard came in with a breakfast tray, set it down, and departed.

"How are you feeling, my love?"

"I'm better this morning, Algy. But what a noise there was in the night."

"A lot of stretcher parties, I'm afraid," he said, glancing out of the window. "We're in one of the centres of infection here. I am prepared to give Croucher guarantees about my conduct if he'll let us live away from here."

She went over to him, cupping his stubby jaws in her hands. "You've come to a decision, then?"

"I had last night. We took on a job with DOUCH(E). We are after history, and history is now being made here. I think we must trust Croucher; so we remain in Cowley to co-operate with him."

"You know I don't question your decisions, Algy. But can we trust a man in his position?"

"Let's just say that a man in his position does not seem to have any reason to shoot us out of hand," he said.

"Perhaps a woman looks at these things differently, but let's not allow DOUCH to take precedence over our safety."

"Look at it this way, Martha. In Washington we didn't just take on obligations; we took on a way of thinking that makes sense when most human activities no longer do. That may have a lot to do with the way we have survived as a pair in London while all around us personal relationships are going to pot. We have a mission; we must serve it, or it won't serve us."

"You put it like that and it sounds fine. Just let's not fall into the trap of putting ideas before people, eh?"

They turned their attention to the breakfast. It looked like soldier's rations; because tea was scarce, there was weak beer to drink, and to eat the inevitable vitamin pills that had established themselves as a national food since domestic animals were stricken, a grainy bread, and some fillets of a brown and nameless fish.

Because whales and seals had almost vanished from the sea, and freak radiation effects seemed to have encouraged the growth of plankton and minute crustacea, fish had multiplied. Many farmers in coastal areas throughout the world had been forced to take to the seas when their livestock dwindled; so there was still a strip of fish to stretch across the cracked plates of the world.

As they ate, Martha said, "This Corporal Pitt who is acting as combined gaoler and bodyguard is a nice sort of man. If we must have someone sitting over us all the time, perhaps we could have him. Ask Croucher about it when you see him."

They were swallowing the vitamin pills down with the last of the beer, when Pitt came in with another guard. On his shoulder tabs, Pitt wore the insignia of a captain.

"It looks as if we have to congratulate you on a good and swift promotion," said Martha.

"You needn't be funny," Pitt said sharply. "There happens to be a shortage of good men round these parts."

"I was not trying to be funny, Mr. Pitt, and I can see from the number of stretchers busy outside that men are growing shorter all the while."

"It doesn't do to try and make jokes about the plague."

"My wife was attempting to be pleasant," Timberlane said. "Just watch how you answer her, or there will be a complaint in."

"If you have any complaints, address them to me," Pitt said.

The Timberlanes exchanged glances. The unassuming corporal of the night before had disappeared; this man's voice was ragged, and his whole manner highly strung. Martha went over to her mirror and sat down before it. How the hollows crept on in her cheeks! She felt stronger today, but the thought of the trials and heat that lay before them gave her no reassurance. She felt in the springs of her menstruation a dull pain, as if her infertile and unfertilizable ovaries protested their own sterility. Laboriously, from her pots and tubes, she endeavoured to conjure into her face a life and warmth she felt she would never again in actuality possess.

As she worked, she studied Pitt in the glass. Was that nervous manner simply a result of sudden promotion, or was there another reason for it?

"I am taking you and Mrs. Timberlane out on a mission in ten minutes," he told Timberlane. "Get yourself ready. We shall proceed to your old flat in Iffley Road. There we shall pick up your recording van, and go up to the Churchill Hospital."

"What for? I have an appointment with Commander Croucher. He said nothing to me about this yesterday."

"He told me he did tell you about it. You said you wanted documentary evidence of what has been going on up at the hospital. We are going up there to get it."

"I see. But my appointment -"

"Look, don't argue with me, I've got my orders, see, and I'm going to carry them out. You don't have appointments here, anyway - we just have orders. The Commander is busy."

"But he told me -"

Captain Pitt tapped his newly acquired revolver for emphasis.

"Ten minutes, and we are going out. I'll be back for you. You are both coming with me to collect your vehicle." He turned on his heel and marched noisily out. The other guard, a big slack-jawed fellow, moved ostentatiously to stand by the door.

"What's it mean?" Martha asked, going to her husband. He put his arms about her waist and gave her a worried frown.

"Croucher must have changed his mind in some way. Yet it may be perfectly okay. I did ask to see the Churchill records, so perhaps he is trying to show he will co-operate with us."

"But Pitt is so different, too. Last night he was telling me about his wife, and how he had been forced to take part in this massacre in the centre of Oxford…"

"Perhaps his promotion has gone to his head…"

"Oh, it's the uncertainty, Algy, everything's so - nothing's definite, nobody knows what's going to happen from day to day… Perhaps they are just after the truck."

She stood with her head against his chest, he stood with his arms round her, neither saying more until Pitt returned. He beckoned to them and they went down into the square, the new captain leading and the slack-mouthed guard following.

They climbed into a Windrush. Under Pitt's control, the motor faltered and caught, and they moved slowly across the parade ground and through the gates with a wave at the sentries.

The new day had brought no improvement in Oxford's appearance. Down Hollow Way, a row of semi-detacheds burned in a devitalized fashion, as though a puff of wind might extinguish the blaze; smoke from the fire hung over the area. Near the old motor works, there was military activity, much of it disorganized. They heard a shot fired. In the Cowley Road, the long straggling street of shops which pointed towards the ancient spires of Oxford, the façades were often boarded or broken. Refuse lay deep on the pavements. By one or two of the shops, old women queued for goods, silent and apart, with scarves round their throats despite the growing heat. Dust eddying from the underthrust of the Windrush blew round their broken shoes. They ignored it, in the semblance of dignity that abjection brings.

Throughout the journey, Pitt's face was like brittle leather. His nose, like the beak of a falcon, pointed only ahead. None of the company spoke. When they arrived at the flat, he settled the machine to a poor landing in the middle of the road. Martha was glad to climb out; their Windrush was full of stale male odours.

Within twenty-four hours their flat had become a strange place. She had forgotten how shabby and unpainted it looked from outside. They saw a soldier sat at what had been their living-room window. He commanded a line of fire on to the garage door. At present, he was leaning out of the flat window shouting down to a ragged old man clad in a pair of shorts and a mackintosh. The old man stood in the gutter clutching a bundle of newspapers.

"Oxford Mail!", the old man croaked. As Timberlane went to buy one, Pitt made as if to stop him, muttered, "Why not?", and turned away. Martha was the only one to see the gesture.

The paper was a single sheet peppered with literals. A prominently featured leader rejoiced in being able to resume publication now that law and order had been restored; elsewhere it announced that anyone trying to leave the city boundaries without permission would be shot; it announced that the Super Cinema would give a daily film show; it ordered all men under the age of sixty-five to report within forty-eight hours to one of fifteen schools converted into emergency military posts. Clearly, the newspaper had fallen under the Commander's control.

"Let's get moving. We haven't got all day," Captain Pitt said.

Timberlane tucked the paper into his hip pocket and moved towards the garage. He unlocked it and went in. Pitt stood close by his side as he squeezed along the shuttered DOUCH(E) truck and fingered the combination lock on the driver's door. Martha watched the captain's face; over and over, he was moistening his dry lips.

The two men climbed into the truck. Timberlane unlocked the steering column and backed slowly out into the road. Pitt called to the soldier in the window to lock up the flat and drive his Windrush back to the barracks. Martha and the slack-mouthed guard were told to climb aboard the truck. They settled themselves in the seats immediately behind the driver. Both Pitt and his subordinate sat with revolvers in their hands, resting them on their knees.

"Drive towards the Churchill," Pitt said. "Take it very slowly. There's no hurry at all." He cleared his throat nervously. Sweat stood out on his forehead. He rubbed his left thumb up and down the barrel of his revolver without ceasing.

Giving him a searching glance, Timberlane said, "You're sick, man. You'd better get back to barracks and have a doctor examine you."

The revolver jerked. "Just get her rolling. Don't talk to me." He coughed, and ran a hand heavily over his face. One of his eyelids developed a nervous flutter and he glanced over his shoulder at Martha.

"Really, don't you think -"

"Shut up, woman!"

With Timberlane hugging the wheel, they crawled down a little dead side street. Two Cowley Fathers in black habits were carrying a woman between them, moving with difficulty under her weight; her left hand trailed against the pavement. They stood absolutely still as the truck came level with them and did not move until it had gone past. The dead vacant face of the woman gaped at Martha as they growled by. Pitt swallowed spittle audibly.

As if coming to a resolution, he raised his revolver. As the point swung towards Timberlane, Martha screamed. Her husband trod on the brake. They rocked back and forth, the engine died, they stopped.

Before Timberlane could heave himself round, Pitt dropped the gun and hid his face in his hands. He was weeping and raving, but what he said was indistinguishable.

The slack-mouthed fellow said, "Keep still! Keep still! Don't run away! We don't none of us want to get shot."

Timberlane had the corporal's revolver in his hand. He knocked Pitt's arms down from his face. Seeing how his weapon had changed owners sobered Pitt.

"Shoot me if you must - think I'd care? Go on, better get it over with. I shall be shot anyhow when Croucher finds I let you escape. Shoot us all and be done with it!"

"I never done no one any harm - I used to be a postman. Let me get out! Don't shoot me," the slack-mouthed guard said. He still nursed his revolver helplessly on his lap. The sight of his captain's breakdown had completely disorganized him.

"Why should I shoot either of you?" Timberlane asked curtly. "Equally, why should you shoot me? What were your orders, Pitt?"

"I spared your life. You can spare mine. You're a gentleman! Put the gun away. Let me have it again. Shut it in a locker." He was recovering again, still confused, but cocky and casting his untrustworthy eye about.

Timberlane kept the gun aimed at his chest.

"Let's have that explanation."

"It was Croucher's orders. He had me in front of me - I mean in front of him, this morning. Said that this vehicle of yours should be in his hands. Said you were just an intellectual troublemaker, a spy maybe, from London. Once you'd got the truck moving, I was to shoot you and your lady wife. Then Studley here and me was to report back to him, with the vehicle. But I couldn't do it, honest, I'm not cut out for this sort of thing. I had a wife and family - I've had enough of all this killing - if my poor old Vi -"

"Cut out the ham acting, Mr. Pitt, and let us think," Martha said. She put an arm over her husband's shoulder. "So we couldn't trust friend Croucher after all."

"He couldn't trust us. Men in his position may be fundamentally liberal, but they have to remove random elements."

"You got that phrase from my father. Okay, Algy, so we're random elements again; now what do we do?"

To her surprise, he twisted round and kissed her. There was a hard gaiety in him. He was the man in command. He removed the revolver from the unprotesting Studley, and slipped it into a locker.

"In the circumstances we have no alternatives. We're getting out of Oxford. We'll head west towards Devon. That would seem to be the best bet. Pitt, will you and Studley join us?"

"You'll never get out of Oxford and Cowley. The barricades are up. They were put up during the night across all roads leading out of town."

"If you want to throw in your lot with us, you take orders from me. Are you going to join us? Yes or no?"

"But I'm telling you, the barricades are up. You couldn't get out of town, not if you were Croucher you couldn't," Pitt said.

"You must have a pass or something to permit you to be driving round the streets. What was that thing you flashed at the guard as we left the barracks?"

Pitt brought a pass sheet out of his tunic pocket, and handed it over.

"I'll have your tunic, too. From now on you are demoted to private. Sorry, Pitt, but you didn't exactly earn your promotion, did you?"

"I'm no murderer, if that's what you mean." His manner was steadier now. "Look, I tell you we'll all get killed if you attempt to drive through the barricades. They've established these big concrete blocks everywhere. They stop traffic and tip up GEM's."

"Get that tunic off before we talk."

The Cowley Fathers came level with the truck. They stared in before labouring into a public house with their burden.

As Timberlane passed his jacket over to Martha and slipped on Pitt's tunic - it creaked at its rotten seams as he struggled into it - he said, "Food must be still coming into the town, mustn't it? Food, stores, ammunition - God knows what. Don't tell me Croucher isn't intelligent enough to organize that. In fact he's probably looting the counties all round for his supplies."

Unexpectedly, Studley leant forward and tapped Timberlane on the shoulder. "That's right, sir, and there's a fish convoy coming up from Southampton due here this morning, 'cos I heard that Transport Sergeant Tucker say so when we signed for the Windrush earlier on."

"Good man! The barriers will have to go down to let the convoy through. As the convoy enters, we go out. Which way will it be coming from?"

As they trundled south through the devouring sunlight, the sound of an explosion came to them. Farther up the road, they saw by a pall of smoke to their right that Donnington Bridge had been blown up. A way out of the city had been cut off. Nobody spoke. Like the cholera, the desolation in the streets was contagious.

At Rose Hill, the blocks of flats set back from the road were as blank as cliffs. The only alleviation to the stark nudity of the the thoroughfare was an ambulance that crawled from a service road, its blue light revolving. All its windows were blanketed. It mounted the grass verge, crossed the main road only a few yards ahead of the DOUCH(E) vehicle, and stopped on the opposite verge with a final shudder. As they passed it, they caught sight of the driver sprawled across the wheel…

Farther on, among private houses, it was less like death. In several front gardens, old men and women were burning bonfires. And what superstition did that represent? Martha wondered.

When they reached a roundabout, soldiers with slung rifles came out from a check point to meet them.

Timberlane leant out of the window and flashed the pass without stopping. The soldiers waved him on.

"How much farther?" Timberlane asked.

"We're nearly there. The road block we want is at Littlemore railway bridge. Beyond that it's just country," Pitt said.

"Croucher has a long boundary to defend."

"That's why he wants more men. This blocking of roads was a bright idea of his. It helps keep strangers out, as well as us in. He doesn't want deserters getting away and setting up in opposition, does he? The road takes a right bend here towards the bridge, and there's a road joins it from the right. Ah, there's that pub, the Marlborough - that's on the corner!"

"Right, do what I told you. Take a tip from that ambulance we passed. All right, Martha, my sweet? Here we go!"

As they rounded the bend, Timberlane slumped over the wheel, trailing his right hand out of the window.

Pitt slumped beside him, the other two lolled back in their seats. Steering carefully, Timberlane negotiated their vehicle in a drunken line towards the public house Pitt had mentioned. He let it mount the pavement, then twisted the wheel and released the clutch while remaining in gear. The truck shuddered violently before stopping. They were facing Littlemore Bridge, a mere two hundred yards up the road.

"Good, keep where you are," Timberlane said. "Let's hope the Southampton convoy is on time. How many vehicles is it likely to consist of, Studley?"

"Four, five, six. Hard to tell. It varies."

"Then we ought to aim to get through after the second truck."

As Timberlane spoke, he was scanning ahead. The railway line lay hidden in its cutting. The road narrowed into two traffic lanes by the bridge. It was concealed beyond the bridge by the rise of the land but, fortunately, the road block had been set up on this side of the bridge, and so was visible from where they waited. It consisted of a collection of concrete blocks, two old lorries, and wooden poles. A small wooden building near by had been taken over by the military; it looked as if it might house a machine-gun. Only one soldier could be seen, leaning by the door of the building and shading his eyes to look down the road at them.

A builder's lorry stood near the barrier. A man was standing in it, throwing bricks down to another man.

They appeared to be strengthening the defences, and to judge by their clumsy movements they were unused to the job.

Minutes passed. The whole scene was nondescript; this dull stretch of road was neither town nor country.

Not only did the sunlight drain it of all its pretensions; it had perhaps never been surveyed as purposefully as Timberlane surveyed it now. The slothful movements of the men handling bricks took on a sort of dreamlike persistence. Flies entered the DOUCH(E) track, droning their way fruitlessly about the interior. Their noise reminded Martha of the long summer days of her girlhood, when into her happiness, to become an inseparable part of it, had entered the realization that a wrong like a curse hung over her and over her parents and over her friends - and over everyone. She had seen the effects of the curse spread wider and wider, like the sand in a desert sandstorm that erodes the sky. Wide-eyed, she stared at the hunched back of her husband, indulging herself in a little horror fantasy that he was dead, really dead of the cholera. She succeeded in frightening herself.

"Algy -"

"Here they come! Watch it now! Lie flat, Martha; they're bound to shoot as we go through."

He sent them rolling forward, bumping back on to the road. A first lorry, a big furniture lorry plastered in dust, humped itself over the narrow bridge from the other side. One soldier came to attend to it; he drew back part of the wooden barricade to allow the lorry through. It growled forward through the narrow opening. As it moved down the road towards the DOUCH(E) vehicle, a second lorry - this one an army lorry with a torn canopy - appeared over the bridge.

Their timing had to be good. Rolling steadily ahead, the DOUCH(E) truck had to pass that second lorry as close to the bridge as possible. Timberlane pressed his foot down harder. Elms by the roadside, tawdry from dust, scattered sunlight red and white across his vision. They passed the first lorry. The driver called something. They sped towards the army lorry. It was coming through the concrete blocks. The driver saw Timberlane, gestured, accelerated, swung his wheel to the near side. The sentry ran forward, swinging up his rifle. His mouth flapped. His words were lost in the sound of engines. Timberlane drove straight at him.

They roared past the army lorry without touching it, all four of them instinctively watching and yelling.

Their offside headlight struck the soldier before he could turn. His rifle went flying. Like a bag of cement, he was flung against one of the concrete blocks. Something screamed as they scraped past the barrier: steel on stone. As they lurched across the bridge, the third vehicle in the convoy loomed up ahead of them.

From the wooden sentry post they had passed, a machine-gun woke into action. Bullets clattered against the grating across the back of their truck, making the inside ring like a steel drum. The windscreen of the vehicle ahead shattered, new rips bloomed sharp across its old canvas. With a whistle of tyres, it slewed off to one side. The driver flung open his door, but fell back into the cab as it canted to the other side. Bumping and jarring, it smashed through railings down the embankment towards the railway line below.

Timberlane had swerved in the other direction to avoid hitting the lorry. Only the accident that overtook it enabled him to get past it. They lurched forward again, and the road was clear ahead. The machine-gun was still barking, but the lie of the land sheltered them from it.

If Studley had not collapsed at that point, and had not needed to be rested in a deserted village called Sparcot, where other refugees were gathering, they might have made it down to Devon. But Studley had the cholera; and a paranoiac called Mole arrived to turn them into a fortified outpost; and a week later severe rains washed out a host of opportunities. The halt at Sparcot lasted for eleven long grey years.

Looking back to that time, Martha reflected on the way in which the nervous excitement of their stay at Cowley had embalmed it in memory, so that it all came back easily. The years that followed were less clear, for they had been dulled by misery and monotony. The death of Studley; the deaths of several others of that original bunch of refugees; the appearance of Big Jim Mole, and the quarrels as he distributed them among the deserted houses of the village; the endless struggle, the fights over women; the abandonment of hope, convention, and lipstick; these were now like figures in a huge but faded tapestry to which she would not turn again.

One event in those days (ah, but the absence of children had been a sharper wound in her mind then!) remained with her clearly, because she knew it still fretted her husband; that was their bartering of the DOUCH(E) truck, during the second winter at Sparcot, when they were all light-headed from starvation.

They exchanged it for a cart-load of rotting fish, parsnips and vitamin pills belonging to a one-eyed wandering hawker. She and Algy had haggled with him throughout one afternoon, to watch him in the end drive away into the dusk in their truck. In the darkness of that winter, their miseries had reached their deepest point.

Several men, among them the ablest, had shot themselves. It was then that Eve, a young girl who was mistress to Trouter, bore a child with no deformity. She had gone mad and run away. A month later her body and the baby's were found in a wood near by.

In that vile winter, Martha and Greybeard had organized lectures, not entirely with Mole's approval. They had spoken on history, on geography, on politics, on the lessons to be learnt from life - but as all their subject matter was necessarily drawn from an existence that died even as they spoke, the lectures were a failure. To the hunger and deprivation had been added something more sinister: a sense that there was no longer a place on earth for mind.

Someone had invented a brief-lived phrase for that feeling: the Brain Curtain. Certainly the brain curtain had descended that winter with a vengeance.

In January, the fieldfares brought their harsh song of Norway to Sparcot. In February, cold winds blew and snow fell every day. In March, the sparrows mated on the crusted and dirty piles of ice. Only in April did a softer air return.

During that month, Charley Samuels married Iris Ryde. Charley and Timberlane had fought together in the war, years earlier, when both had formed part of the Infantop Corps. It had been a good day when he arrived at the motley little village. When he married, he moved his bride into the house next to Martha and Algy. Six years later, Iris died of cancer that, like sterility, was an effect of the Accident.

That had been an ill time. And all the while they had laboured under Mole's fears, hardly aware of the imposition. To get away was like a convalescence, when one looks back and sees for the first time how ill one has been. Martha recalled how eagerly they had conspired with nature, encouraging the roads to decay, sealing them off from the dangerous world outside, and how anxiously they guarded Sparcot against the day when Croucher's forces moved to overwhelm them.

Croucher never came to Sparcot. He died from the pandemic that killed so many of his followers and converted his stronghold into a morgue. By the time the disease had run its course, large organizations had gone the way of large animals; the hedges grew, the copses heaved their shoulders and became forests; the rivers spread into marshland; and the mammal with the big brain eked out his dotage in small communities.

III. The River: Swifford Fair

Both human beings and sheep coughed a good deal as the boats sailed downstream. The party had lost its first sense of adventure. They were too old and had seen too much wrong to entertain high feeling for long.

The cold and the landscape also had a hand in subduing them: bearded with rime like the face of an ancient spirit, the vegetation formed part of a scene that patently had come about and would continue without reference to the stray humans crossing it.

In the sharp winter's air, their breath steamed behind them. The dinghy went first, followed by Jeff Pitt rowing his little boat, with two sheep in a net lying against his tattered backside. Their progress was slow; Pitt's pride in his rowing was greater than his ability.

In the dinghy, Charley and Greybeard rowed most of the time, and Martha sat at the tiller facing them.

Becky and Towin Thomas remained sulkily at one side; Becky had wished to stay at the inn where the sheep were until the liquor and the winter ran out, but Greybeard had overruled her. The rest of the sheep now lay between them on the bottom of the boat.

Once, tired of having a man sit idle beside her, Becky had ordered Towin to get into Jeff Pitt's boat and help him row. The experiment had not been successful. The boat had almost capsized. Pitt had cursed continuously. Now Pitt rowed alone, thinking his own thoughts.

His was, in its sixty-fifth year of existence, a strange spiky face. Although his nose still protruded, a gradual loss of teeth and a drying of flesh had brought his jawline and chin also into prominence.

Since his arrival at Sparcot, when he had been happy enough to get away from Greybeard, the ex-captain of Croucher's guard had led a solitary life. That he resented the existence into which he was forced was clear enough; though he never confided, his air was the air of a man long used to bitterness; the fact remained that he, more effectively than anyone else, had taken to a poacher's ways.

Though he had thrown in his lot with the others now, his unsocial disposition still lingered; he rowed with his back to the dinghy, gazing watchfully back at the ruffled winter landscape through which they had journeyed. He was with them, but his manner suggested he was not necessarily for them.

Between low banks scourged tawny and white by the frost, their way crackled continuously as ice shattered under their bows. On the second afternoon after they had left the inn where they found the sheep, they smelt wood smoke and saw its haze ahead of them, heavy over the stream. Soon they reached a place where the ice was broken and a fire smouldered on the bank. Greybeard reached for his rifle, Charley seized his knife, Martha sat alertly watching; Towin and Becky ducked out of sight below the decking. Pitt rose and pointed.

"My God, the gnomes!" he exclaimed. "There's one of them for sure!"

On the bank, dancing near the fire, was a little white figure, flexing its legs and arms. It sang to itself in a voice like a creaking bough. When it saw the boats through the bare shanks of a bush, it stopped. Coming forward to the edge of the bank, it clasped hands over the black fur of its crutch and called to them. Though they could not understand what it was saying, they rowed mesmerized towards it.

By the time they reached the bank, the figure had put on some clothes and looked more human. Behind it they saw, half hidden in an ash copse, a tarred barn. The figure was jigging and pointing to the barn, talking rapidly at them as he did so.

He was a lively octogenarian, judging by appearance, a sprightly grotesque with a tatter of red and violet capillaries running from one cheekbone to another over the alp of his nose. His beard and top-knot formed one continuous conflagration of hair, tied bottom and top below jaw and above crown, and dyed a deep tangerine. He danced like a skeleton and motioned to them.

"Are you alone? Can we put in here?" Greybeard called.

"I don't like the look of him - let's press on," Jeff Pitt called, labouring his boat up through the panes of ice. "We don't know what we're letting ourselves in for."

The skeleton cried something unintelligible, jumping back when Greybeard climbed ashore. He clutched some red and green beads that hung round his neck.

"Sirrer vine daver zwimmin," he said.

"Oh - fine day for swimming! You have been swimming? Isn't it cold? Aren't you afraid of cutting yourself on the ice?"

"Warreryer zay? Diddy zay zomminer bout thize?"

"He doesn't seem to understand me any better than I can understand him," Greybeard remarked to the others in the boats. But with patience, he managed to penetrate the skeleton's thick accent. His name appeared to be Norsgrey, and he was a traveller. He was staying with his wife, Lita, in the barn they saw through the ash trees. He would welcome the company of Greybeard and his party.

Like Charley's fox, the sheep were all on tethers. They were made to jump ashore, where they immediately began cropping the harsh grasses. The humans dragged their boats up and secured them. They stood stretching themselves, to force the chill and stiffness from their limbs. Then they made towards the barn, moving their legs painfully. As they became used to the skeleton's accent, what he had to say became more intelligible, though in content his talk was wild.

His preoccupation was with badgers.

Norsgrey believed in the magical power of badgers. He had a daughter, he told them, who would be nearly sixty now, who had run off into the woods ("when they was a-seeding and a-branching themselves up to march forth and strangle down the towns of man") and she had married a badger. There were badger men in the woods now who were her sons, and badger girls her daughters, black and white in their faces, very lovely to behold.

"Are there stoats round here?" Martha asked, cutting off what threatened to be a long monologue.

Old Norsgrey paused outside the barn and pointed into the lower branches of a tree.

"There's one now, a-looking down at us, Mrs. Lady, sitting in its wicked little nest as cute as you like. But he won't touch us 'cos he knows as I'm related to the badgers by matterrimony."

They stared and could see only the pale grey twigs of ash thrusting black-capped into the air.

Inside the barn, an ancient reindeer lay in the half-dark, its four broad hooves clumped together. Becky gave a shriek of surprise as it turned its ancient sullen face towards them. Hens clucked and scattered at their entrance.

"Don't make a lot of row," Norsgrey warned them. "Lita's asleep, and I don't want her wakened. I'll turn you out if you disturb her, but if you're quiet, and give me a bite of supper, I'll let you stay here, nice and warm and comfortable - and safe from all those hungry stoats outside."

"What ails your wife?" Towin asked. "I'm not staying in here if there's illness."

"Don't you insult my wife. She's never had an illness in her life. Just keep quiet and behave."

"I'll go and get our kit from the boat," Greybeard said. Charley and the fox came back to the river with him. As they loaded themselves, Charley spoke with some show of embarrassment, looking not at Greybeard but at the cool grey landscape.

"Towin and his Becky would have stayed at the place where the dead man sat in his kitchen," he said.

"They didn't care to come any further, but we persuaded them. That's right, isn't it, Greybeard?"

"You know it is."

"Right. What I want to ask you, then, is this. How far are we going? What are you planning? What have you got in mind?"

Greybeard looked at the river.

"You're a religious man, Charley. Don't you think God might have something in mind for us?"

Charley laughed curtly. "That would sound better if you believed in God yourself. But suppose I thought He had in mind for us to settle down here, what would you do? I don't see what you are aiming on doing."

"We're not far enough from Sparcot to stop yet. They might make an expedition and catch us here."

"You know that's nonsense as well as I do. Truth of the matter is, you don't really know where you want to go, or why, isn't that it?"

Greybeard looked at the solid face of the man he had known for so long. "Each day I become more sure. I want to get to the mouth of the river, to the sea."

Nodding, Charley picked up his equipment and started to trudge back towards the barn. Isaac led the way.

Greybeard made as if to add something, then changed his mind. He did not believe in explaining. To Towin and Becky, this journey was just another hardship; to him, it was an end in itself. The hardship of it was a pleasure. Life was a pleasure; he looked back at its moments, many of them as much shrouded in mist as the opposite bank of the Thames; objectively, many of them held only misery, fear, confusion; but afterwards, and even at the time, he had known an exhilaration stronger than the misery, fear, or confusion. A fragment of belief came to him from another epoch: Cogito ergo sum. For him that had not been true; his truth had been, Sentio ergo sum. I feel so I exist. He enjoyed this fearful, miserable, confused life, and not only because it made more sense than non-life. He could never explain that to anyone; he did not have to explain it to Martha; she knew; she felt as he did in that respect.

Distantly he heard music.

He looked about him with a tingle of unease, recalling the tales Pitt and others told of gnomes and little people, for this was a little music. But he realized it came to him over a long distance. Was it - he had almost forgotten the name of the instrument - an accordion?

He went thoughtfully back to the barn, and asked Norsgrey about it. The old man, sprawling with his back to the reindeer's flank, looked up keenly through his orange hair.

"That would be Swifford Fair. I just come from there, done a bit of trading. That's where I got my hens."

As ever, it was hard to make out what he was saying.

"How far's Swifford from here?"

"Road will take you quicker than the river. A mile as the crow flies. Two miles by road. Five by your river. I'll buy your boat from you, give you a good price."

They did not agree to that, but they gave the old man some of their food. The sheep they had killed ate well, cut up into a stew and flavoured with some herbs which Norsgrey supplied from his little cart. When they ate meat, they took it in the form of stews, for stews were kindest to old teeth and tender gums.

"Why doesn't your wife come and eat with us?" Towin asked. "Is she fussy about strangers or something?"

"She's asleep like I told you behind that blue curtain. You leave her alone - she's done you no harm."

The blue curtain was stretched across one corner of the barn, from the cart to a nail on the wall. The barn was now uncomfortably full, for they brought the sheep in with them at dusk. They made uneasy bedfellows with the hens and the old reindeer. The glow of their lamps hardly reached up to the rafters. Those rafters had ceased to be living timber two and a half centuries before. Other life now took refuge in them: grubs, beetles, larvae, spiders, chrysalises slung to the beams with silken threads, fleas and their pupae in swallows'

nests, awaiting their owner's return in the next unfailing spring. For these simple creatures, many generations had passed since man contrived his own extinction.

"Here, how old was you reckoning I was?" Norsgrey asked, thrusting his colourful countenance into Martha's face.

"I wasn't really thinking," Martha said sweetly.

"You was thinking about seventy, wasn't you?"

"I really was not thinking. I prefer not to think about age; it is one of my least favourite subjects."

"Well, think about mine, then. An early seventy you'd say, wouldn't you?"

"Possibly."

Norsgrey let out a shriek of triumph, and then looked apprehensively towards the blue curtain.

"Well, let me tell you that you'd be wrong, Mrs. Lady - ah, oh dear, yes, very wrong. Shall I tell you how old I am? Shall I? You won't believe me?"

"Go on, how old are you?" Towin asked, growing interested. "Eighty-five, I'd say you were. I bet you're older than me, and I was born in 1945, the year they dropped that first atomic bomb. I bet you were born before 1945, mate."

"They don't have years with numbers attached any more," Norsgrey said with immense scorn, and turned back to Martha. "You won't believe this, Mrs. Lady, but I'm close on two hundred years old, very close indeed. In fact you might say that it was my two hundredth birthday next week."

Martha raised an ironical eyebrow. She said, "You look well for your age."

"You're never two hundred, no more than I am," Towin said scornfully.

"That I am. I'm two hundred, and what's more I shall still be be knocking around the old world when all you buggers are dead and buried."

Towin leant forward and kicked the old man's boot angrily. Norsgrey brought up a stick and whacked Towin smartly over the shin. Yelping, Towin heaved himself up on his knees and brought his cudgel down at the old man's flaming cranium. Charley stopped the blow in mid-swing.

"Give over," he said sternly. "Towin, leave the poor old chap his delusions."

" 'Tisn't no delusion," Norsgrey said irritably. "You can ask my wife when she wakes up."

Throughout this conversation and during the meal, Pitt had said hardly a word, sitting withdrawn into himself as he so often did in the Sparcot days. Now he said, mildly enough, "We'd'a done better if you'd listened to what I said and stayed on the river rather than settle down in this madhouse for the night. All the world to choose from and you had to choose here!"

"You can get outside if you don't like the company," Norsgrey said. "Your trouble is you're rude as well as stupid. Praise be, you'll die! None of you lot know anything of the world - you've been stuck in that place wherever-it-was you told me about. There are strange new things in the world you've never heard of."

"Such as?" Charley asked.

"See this red and green necklace I got round my neck? I got it from Mockweagles. I'm one of the few men who've actually been to Mockweagles. I paid two young cow reindeer for it, and it was cheap at half the price. Only you have to call back there once every hundred years to renew, like, or one morning as you open your eyelids on a new dawn - phutt! you crumble into dust, all but your eyeballs."

"What happens to them?" Becky asked, peering at him through the thick lampglow.

Norsgrey laughed.

"Eyeballs never die. Didn't you know that, Mrs. Taffy? They never die. I seen them watching out of thickets at night. They wink at you to remind you what will happen to you if you forget to go back to Mockweagles."

"Where is this place Mockweagles?" Greybeard asked.

"I shouldn't be telling you this. There aren't any eyeballs looking, are there? Well, there's this place Mockweagles, only it's secret, see, and it lies right in the middle of a thicket. It's a castle - well, more like a sort of skyscraper than a castle, really. Only they don't live on the bottom twenty floors; those are empty. I mean, you've got to go right up to the top floor to find them."

"Them, who are them?"

"Oh, men, just ordinary men, only one of them has got a sort of second head with a sealed up mouth coming out of his neck. They live for ever because they're immortals, see. And I'm like them, because I won't ever die, only you have to go back there once every hundred years. I've just been back there now, on my way south."

"You mean this is your second call there?"

"My third. I went there first of all for the treatment, and you have to go to get your beads renewed." He ran his fingers through the orange curtain of his beard and peered at them. They were silent.

Towin muttered, "You can't be that old. It isn't all that time since things fell apart and no more kids were born. Is it?"

"You don't know what time is. Aren't you a bit confused in your mind? Mind you, I'm saying nothing. All I'm saying is I just come from there. There's too many vagabonds wandering round like you lot, moving about the country. It'll be better next time I go there, in another hundred years. There won't be any vagabonds then. They'll all be underground, growing toadstools. I shall have the whole world to myself, just me and Lita and those things that twitter and fry in the hedges. How I wish they'd stop that bloody old twittering and frying all the time. It's going to be hell with all them in a few thousand years or so." Suddenly he put his paws over his eyes; big senile tears came spurting through his fingers, his shoulders shook. "It's a lonely life, friends," he said.

Greybeard laid a hand on his shoulder and offered to get him to bed. Norsgrey jumped up and cried that he could look after himself. Still snivelling, he turned into the gloom, scattering hens, and crawled behind the blue curtain. The others sat looking at each other.

"Daft old fool!" Becky said uncomfortably.

"He seems to know a lot of things," Towin said to her."In the morning, we'd better ask him about your baby."

She rounded angrily on him.

"Towin, you useless clot you, letting our secrets out! Didn't I tell you over and over you wasn't to mention it till people saw the state I'm in? Your stupid old clacking tongue! You're like an old woman -"

"Becky, is this true?" Greybeard asked. "Are you pregnant?"

"Ah, she's gravid as a rabbit," Towin admitted, hanging his head. "Twins, I'd say it is, by the feel."

Martha looked at the plump little woman; phantom pregnancies were frequent in Sparcot, and she did not doubt this was another such. But people believed what they wanted to believe; Charley clasped his hands together and said earnestly, "If this be true, God's name be praised! It's a miracle, a sign from Heaven!"

"Don't give us any of that old rubbish," Towin said angrily. "This was my doing and no one else's."

"The Almighty works through the lowest among us, Towin Thomas," Charley said. "If Becky is pregnant, then it is a token to us that He will after all come down in the eleventh hour and replenish the Earth with his people. Let us all join in prayer - Martha, Algy, Becky -"

"I don't want any of that stuff," Towin said. "Nobody's praying for my offspring. We don't owe your God a brass farthing, Charley boy. If he's so blessed powerful, then he was the one that did all this damage in the first place. I reckon old Norsgrey was right - we don't know how long ago it all happened. Don't tell me it was only eleven years we was at Sparcot! It seemed like centuries to me. Perhaps we're all a thousand years old, and -"

"Becky, may I put my hand on your stomach?" Martha asked.

"Let's all have a feel, Beck," Pitt said, grinning, his interest momentarily roused.

"You keep your hands to yourself," Becky told him. But she allowed Martha to feel beneath her voluminous clothes, looking into space as the other woman gently kneaded the flesh of her stomach.

"Your stomach is certainly swollen," Martha said.

"Ah ha! Told you!" Towin cried. "Four years gone, she is - mean, four months. That's why we didn't want to leave that house where the sheep were. It would have made us a nice little home, only Clever Dick here would shove off down his beloved river!"

He bared his stubbly wolf visage in a grin towards Greybeard.

"We will go to Swifford fair tomorrow, and see what we can fix up for you both," Greybeard said. "There should be a doctor there who will examine Becky and give her advice. Meanwhile, let's follow the ginger chap's example and settle down for some sleep."

"You mind that old reindeer don't eat Isaac during the night," Becky told Charley. "I could tell you a thing or two about them animals, I could. They're crafty beasts, reindeer."

"It wouldn't eat a fox," Charley said.

"We had one ate our cat now, didn't we, Tow? Tow used to trade in reindeer, whenever it was they first came over to this country - Greybeard'll know, no doubt."

"Let's see, the war ended in 2005, when the government was overthrown," Greybeard said. "The Coalition was set up the year after, and I believe they were the people who first imported reindeer into Britain."

The memory came back like a blurred newspaper photo. The Swedes had discovered that, alone among the large ruminants, the reindeer could still breed normally and produce living fawns. It was claimed that these animals had acquired a degree of immunity against radiation because the lichen they ate contained a high degree of fall-out contamination. In the 1960's, before Greybeard was born, the contamination in their bones was of the order of 100 to 200 strontium units - between six and twelve times above the safety limit for humans.

Since reindeer made efficient transport animals as well as providing good meat and milk, there was a great demand for them throughout Europe. In Canada, the caribou became equally popular. Herds of Swedish and Lapp stock were imported into Britain at various times.

"It must have been about '06," Towin confirmed. " 'Cos it was then my brother Evan died. Went just like that he did, as he was supping his beer."

"About this reindeer," Becky said. "We made a bit of cash out of it. We had to have a licence for the beast

- Daffid, we called it. Used to hire it out for work at so much a day.

"We had a shed out the back of our little shop. Daffid was kept in there. Very cosy it was, with hay and all. Also we had our old cat, Billy. Billy was real old and very intelligent. Not a better cat anywhere, but of course we wasn't supposed to keep it. They got strict after the war, if you remember, and Billy was supposed to go for food. As if we'd give Billy up!

"Sometimes that Coalition would send police round and they'd come right in - not knock nor nothing, you know. Then they'd search the house. It's ungodly times we've lived through, friends!

"Anyhow, this night, Tow here comes running in - been down the boozer, he had - and he says the police are coming round to make a search."

"So they were!" Towin said, showing signs of an old discomfiture.

"So he says," Becky repeated. "So we has to hide poor old Billy or we'd all be in the cart. So I run with her out into the shed where old Daffid's lying down just like this ugly beast here, and tucks Billy under the straw for safety.

"Then I goes back into our parlour. But no police come, and Tow goes off fast asleep, and I nod off too, and at midnight I know the old fool has been imagining things."

"They passed us by!" Towin cried.

"So out I went into the shed, and there's Daffid standing there chewing, and no sign of Billy. I get Towin and we both have a search, but no Billy. Then we see his tail hanging out bloody old Daffid's mouth."

"Another time, he ate one of my gloves," Towin said.

As Greybeard settled to sleep by a solitary lantern, the last thing he saw was the gloomy countenance of Norsgrey's reindeer. These animals had been hunted by Paleolithic man; they had only to wait a short while now and all the hunters would be gone.

In Greybeard's dream, there was a situation that could not happen. He was in a chromium-plated restaurant dining with several people he did not know. They, their manners, their dress, were all very elaborate, even artificial; they ate ornate dishes with involved utensils. Everyone present was extremely old -

centenarians to a man - yet they were sprightly, even childlike. One of the women there was saying that she had solved the whole problem; that just as adults grew from children, so children would eventually grow from adults, if they waited long enough.

And then everyone was laughing to think the solution had not been reached before. Greybeard explained to them how it was as if they were all actors performing their parts against a lead curtain that cut off for ever every second as it passed - yet as he spoke he was concealing from them, for reasons of compassion, the harsher truth that the curtain was also barring them from the seconds and all time before them. There were young children all round them (though looking strangely grown up), dancing and throwing some sticky substance to each other.

He was trying to seize a strand of this stuff when he woke. In the ancient dawn light, Norsgrey was harnessing up his reindeer. The animal held its head low, puffing into the stale cold. Huddled under their wrappings, the rest of Greybeard's party bore as much resemblance to human forms as a newly-made grave.

Wrapping one of his blankets round him, Greybeard got up, stretched, and went over to the old man. The draught he had been lying in had stiffened his limbs, making him limp.

"You're on your way early, Norsgrey."

"I'm always an early mover. Lita wants to be off."

"Is she well this morning?"

"Never mind about her. She's tucked safe under the canopy of the cart. She won't speak to strangers in the mornings."

"Are we not going to see her?"

"No." Over the cart, a tatty brown canvas was stretched, and tied with leather thongs back and front so that nobody could see within. The cockerel crowed from beneath it. Norsgrey had already gathered up his chickens. Greybeard wondered what of their own equipment might not be missing, seeing that the old fellow worked so quietly.

"I'll open the door for you," he said. Weary hinges creaked as he pushed the door forward. He stood there scratching his beard, taking in the frost-becalmed scene before him. His company stiffed as cold air entered the barn. Isaac sat up and licked his sharp muzzle. Towin squinted at his defunct watch. The reindeer started forward and dragged the cart into the open.

"I'm cold and stiff; I'll walk with you a minute or two to see you on your way," Greybeard said, wrapping his blanket more tightly about him.

"As you will. I'd be glad of your company as long as you don't talk too much. I like to make an early start when the frying's not so bad. By midday, it makes such a noise you'd think the hedges were burning."

"You still find roads you can travel?"

"Ah, lots of roads still open between necessary points. There's more travelling being done again lately; people are getting restless. Why they can't sit where they are and die off in peace, I don't know."

"This place you were telling us about last night…"

"I never said nothing last night; I was drunk."

"Mockweagles, you called it. What sort of treatment did they give you when you were there?"

Norsgrey's little eyes almost disappeared between folds of his fibrous red and mauve skin. He jerked his thumb into the bushes through which they were pushing their way.

"They're in there waiting for you, my bearded friend. You can hear them twittering and frying, can't you?

They get up earlier than us and they go to bed later than us, and they'll get you in the end."

"But not you?"

"I go and have this injection and these beads every hundred years -"

"So that's what they give you… You get an injection as well as those things round your neck. You know what those beads are, don't you? They're vitamin pills."

"I'm saying nothing. I don't know what you're talking about. Any case, you mortals would do best to hold your tongues. Here's the road, and I'm off."

They had come out at a sort of crossroads, where their track crossed a road that still boasted traces of tarmac on its rutted surface. Norsgrey beat at his reindeer with a stick, goading it into a less dilatory walk.

He looked over his shoulder at Greybeard, his misty breath entangled with the bright hairs of his cheeks.

"Tell you one thing - if you get to Swifford Fair, ask for Bunny Jingadangelow."

"Who's he?" Greybeard asked.

"I'm telling you, he's the man you should ask for at Swifford Fair. Remember the name - Bunny Jingadangelow."

Wrapped in his blanket, Greybeard stood looking at the disappearing cart. He thought the canvas at the back stirred, and that he glimpsed - no, perhaps it was not a hand but his imagination. He stood there until the winding track carried Norsgrey and his conveyance out of sight.

As he turned away, he saw in the bushes close by a broken-necked corpse pinned to a post. It had the cocky, grinning expression achieved only by those successfully long dead. Its skull was patched with flesh like dead leaves. Thin though the corpse's jacket was, its flesh had worn still thinner, had shrivelled and parted like moisture drying off a stretch of sand, leaving the bars of rib salt beneath.

"Left dead at the crossroads as a warning to wrongdoers… like the Middle Ages… The old-aged Middle Ages…" Greybeard muttered to himself. The eye sockets stared back at him. He was overtaken less by disgust than by a pang of longing for the DOUCH(E) truck he had parted with years ago. How people had underestimated the worth of mechanical gadgetry! The urge to record was on him; someone should leave behind a summary of Earth's decline, if only for visiting archeologists from other possible worlds. He trotted heavily back down the track towards the barn, saying to himself as he went, "Bunny Jingadangelow, Bunny Jingadangelow…"

Nightfall came that day to the sound of music. They could see the lights of Swifford across the low flood.

They rowed through a section of the Thames that had burst its banks and spread over the adjoining land, making water plants of the vegetation. Soon there were other boats near them, and people calling to them; their accents were difficult to understand, as Norsgrey's had been at first.

"Why don't they speak English the way they used?" Charley asked angrily. "It makes everything so much harder."

"P'raps it isn't only the time that's gone funny," Towin suggested. "P'raps distances have gone wrong too.

P'raps this is France or China, eh, Charley? I'd believe anything, I would."

"More fool you," Becky said.

They came to where a raised dyke or levee had been built. Behind it were dwellings of various kinds, huts and stalls, most of them of a temporary nature. Here was a stone bridge built in imposing fashion, with a portly stone balustrade, some of which had tumbled away. Through its span, they saw lanterns bobging, and two men walked among a small herd of reindeer, tending them and seeing they were watered for the night.

"We shall have to guard the boats and the sheep," Martha said, as they moored against the bridge. "We don't know how trustworthy these people are. Jeff Pitt, stay with me while the others go to look about."

"I suppose I'd better," Pitt said. "At least we'll be out of trouble here. Perhaps you and I might split a cold lamb cutlet between us while the others are gone."

Greybeard touched his wife's hand.

"I'll see how much the sheep will fetch while I'm about it," he said.

They smiled at each other and he stepped up the bank, into the activity of the fair, with Charley, Towin and Becky following. The ground squelched beneath their feet; smoke rolled across it from the little fires that burned everywhere. A heartening savour of food being cooked hung in the air. By most of the fires were little knots of people and a smooth talker, a vendor offering something for sale, whether a variety of nuts or fruits - one slab-cheeked fellow offered a fruit whose name Greybeard recalled only with difficulty from another world: peaches - or watches or kettles or rejuvenation elixirs. The customers were handing over coin for their acquisitions. In Sparcot, currency had almost disappeared; the community had been small enough for a simple exchange of work and goods to be effective.

"Oooh, it's like being back in civilization again," Towin said, rubbing his wife's buttocks. "How do you like this, eh, missus? Better than cruising on the river, wouldn't you say? Look, they've even got a pub! Let's all get a drink and get our insides warm, wouldn't you say?"

He produced a bayonet, hawked it to two dealers, set them bidding against each other, and handed over the blade in exchange for a handful of silver coin. Grinning at his own business acumen, Towin doled some of the money out to Charley and Greybeard.

"I'm only lending you this, mind. Tomorrow we'll flog one of the sheep and you can repay me. Five per cent's my rate, lads."

They pushed into the nearest liquor stall, a framework hut with wooden floor. Its name, Potsluck Tavern, stood above the door in curly letters. It was crowded with ancient men and women, while behind the bar a couple of massive gnarled men like diseased oaks presided over the bottles. As he sipped a mead, Greybeard listened to the conversation about him, insensibly letting his mood expand. He had never thought it would feel so good to hear money jingle in his pocket.

Impressions and images fluttered in on him. It seemed as if, in leaving Sparcot, they had escaped from a concentration camp. Here the human world went on in a way it had not managed at Sparcot. It was fatally wounded perhaps; in another half century, it would be rolled up and put away; but till then, there was business to be made, life to be transacted, the chill and heat of personality to be struck out. As the mead started its combustion in his blood, Greybeard rejoiced to see that here was humanity, rapped over the knuckles for its follies by Whatever-Gods-May-Be, but still totally unregenerate.

An aged couple sat close by him, both of them wearing ill-fitting false teeth that looked as if they had been hammered into place by the nearest blacksmith; Greybeard drank in the noisy backchat of their party.

They were celebrating their wedding. The man's previous wife had died a month before of bronchitis. His playful scurries at his new partner, all fingers under the table, all lop-sided teeth above, had about it a smack of the Dance of Death, but the earthy fallen optimism of it all went not ill with the mead.

"You aren't from the town?" one of the knotty barmen asked Greybeard. His accents, like those of everyone else they met, were difficult to understand at first.

"I don't know what town you mean," Greybeard said.

"Why, from Ensham or Ainsham, up the road a mile. I took you for a stranger. We used to hold the fair there in the streets where it was comfortable and dry, but last year they reckoned we brought the flu bugs with us, and they wouldn't have us in this year. That's why we're camped here on the marsh, developing rheumatics. Now they walk down to us - no more than a matter of a mile it is, but a lot of them are so old and lazy they won't come this far. That's why business is so bad."

Although he looked like a riven oak, he was a gentle enough man. He introduced himself as Pete Potsluck, and talked with Greybeard between serving.

Greybeard began to tell him about Sparcot; bored by the subject, Becky and Towin and Charley, the latter with Isaac in his arms, moved away and joined in conversation with the wedding party. Potsluck said he reckoned there were many communities like Sparcot, buried in the wilderness. "Get a bad winter, such as we've not had for a year or two, and some of them will be wiped out entirely. That'll be the eventual end of all of us, I suppose."

"Is there fighting anywhere? Do you hear rumours of an invasion from Scotland?"

"They say the Scots are doing very well, in the Highlands anyhow. There was so few of them in the first place; down here, population was so high it took some years for plagues and famines to shake us down to a sort of workable minimum. The Scots probably dodged all that trouble - but why should they bother us?

We're all getting too long in the tooth for fighting."

"There are some wild-looking sparks at this fair."

Potsluck laughed. "I don't deny that. Senile delinquents, I call them. Funny thing, without any youngsters to set the pace, the old ones get up to their tricks - as well as they're able."

"What has happened to people like Croucher, then?"

"Croucher? Oh, this Cowley bloke you mentioned! The dictator class are all dead and buried, and a good job too. No, it's getting too late for that sort of strong-arm thing. I mean, you just find laws in the towns, but outside of them, there is no law."

"I didn't so much mean law as force."

"Well now, you can't have law without force, can you? There's a level where force is bad, but when you get to the sort of level we are down to, force becomes strength, and then it's a positive blessing."

"You are probably right."

"I'd have thought you would have known that. You look the kind who carries a bit of law about with him, with those big fists and that bushy great beard."

Greybeard grinned. "I don't know. It's difficult to judge what one's own character is in unprecedented times like ours."

"You haven't made up your mind about yourself? Perhaps that's what's keeping you looking so young."

Changing the subject, Greybeard changed his drink, and got himself a big glass of fortified parsnip wine, buying one for Potsluck also. Behind him, the wedding party became tuneful, singing the ephemeral songs of a century back which had oddly developed a power to stick - and to stick in the gullet, Greybeard thought, as they launched into:

"If you were the only girl in the world,

And I were the only boy…"

"It may come to that yet," he said half-laughing to Potsluck. "Have you see any children around? I mean, are any being born in these parts?"

"They've got a freak show here. You want to go and look in at that," Potsluck said. Sudden bleakness eclipsed his good-humour, and he turned sharply away to arrange the bottles behind him. In a little while, as if feeling he had been discourteous, he turned back and began to talk on a new tack.

"I used to be a hairdresser, back before the Accident and until that blinking Coalition government closed my shop. Seems years ago now - but then so it is - long years, I mean. I was trained up in my trade by my Dad, who had the shop before me; and I always used to say when we first heard about this radiation scare that as long as there were people around they'd still want their hair cut - as long as it didn't all fall out, naturally. I still do a bit of cutting for the other travelling men. There are those that still care for their appearance, I'm glad to say."

Greybeard did not speak. He recognized a man in the grip of reminiscence; Potsluck had lost some of his semi-rustic way of speech; with a genteel phrase like "those that still care for their appearance", he revealed how he had slipped back half a century to that vanished world of toilet perquisites, hair creams, before- and after-shave lotions, and the disguising of odours and blemishes.

"I remember once, when I was a very young man, having to go round to a private house - I can picture the place now, though I daresay it has fallen down long since. It was very dark going up the stairs, and I had to take the young lady's arm. Yes, that's right, and I went there after the shop had shut, I remember. My old Dad sent me; I can't have been more than seventeen, if that.

"And there was this dead gentleman laid out upstairs in his coffin, in the bedroom. Very calm and prosperous he looked. He'd been a good customer, too, in his lifetime. His wife insisted that his hair was cut before the funeral. He was always a very tidy gentleman, she told me. I spoke to her downstairs afterwards -

a thin lady with ear-rings. She gave me five shilllings. No, I don't remember - perhaps it was ten shillings.

Anyhow, sir, it was a generous sum in those days - before all this dreadful business.

"So I cut the dead gentleman's hair. You know how the hair and the finger-nails keep on growing on a man after death, and his had got rather straggly. Only a trim it needed really, but I cut it as reverently as I could. I was a churchgoer in those days, believe it or not. And this young lady that showed me upstairs, she had to hold his head up under the neck so that I could get at it with my scissors; and in the middle of it she got the giggles and dropped the dead gentleman. She said she wanted me to give her a kiss. I was a bit shocked at the time, seeing that the gentleman was her father… I don't know why I should be telling you this.

Memory's a rare funny thing. I suppose if I'd had any sense in those days, I'd have screwed the silly little hussy on the spot, but I wasn't too familiar with life then - never mind death! Have another drink on me?"

"Thanks, I may come back later," Greybeard said. "I want to have a look round at the fair now. Do you know of anyone called Bunny Jingadangelow?"

"Jingadangelow? Yes, I know of him. What do you want with him? Go over the bridge and up the road towards Ensham, and you'll come to his stall; it's got the words 'Eternal Life' above it. You can't mistake it.

Okay?"

Looking round at the party of singers, Greybeard caught Charley's eye. Charley rose, and they walked out together, leaving Towin and Becky singing "Any Old Iron" with the wedding party.

"The fellow who's just got married again is a reindeer breeder," Charley said. "It seems they're still the only big mammal unaffected by the radiation. Do you remember how people said they'd never do over here when they were first imported, because the climate was too wet for their coats?"

"It's too wet for my coat too, Charley… It's less cold than it was, and by the look of the clouds there's rain about. What sort of shelter are we going to find ourselves for the night?"

"One of the women back in the bar said we might get lodgings up this way, in the town. We'll look out.

It's early yet."

They walked up the road, taking in the bustle at the various pitches.

Isaac yipped and snuffled as they passed a cage of foxes, and next to it a run full of weasels. There were also hens for sale, and a woman wrapped in furs tried to sell them powdered reindeer antler as a charm against impotence and ill health. Two rival quacks sold purges and clysters, charms against rheumatism, and nostrums for the cramps of age; the few people who stood listening to them seemed sceptical. Trade was dropping off at this time of evening; people were now after entertainment rather than business, and a juggler drew appreciative crowds. So did a fortune-teller - though that must be a limited art now, Greybeard thought, with all dark strangers turned to grey and no possible patter of tiny feet.

An old bent man was masturbating in a ditch and drunkenly cursing his seed before they came to the next stall. It was little more than a wooden platform. Above it fluttered a banner with the words ETERNAL LIFE

on it.

"This must be Jingadangelow's pitch," Greybeard said.

Several people were here; some were listening to the man speaking from the platform, while others jostled about a fallen figure that was propped against the platform edge, with two aged crones weeping and croaking over it. To see what was happening was difficult in the flapping light of unguarded torches, but the words of the man on the platform made things clearer.

This speaker was a tall raven figure with wild hair and a face absolutely white except for quarries of slatey grey under his eyes. He spoke in the voice of a cultured man, with a vigour his frame seemed scarcely able to sustain, beating time to his phrases with a pair of fine wild hands.

"Here before us you see evidence of what I am saying, my friends. In sight and hearing of us all, a brother has just departed this life. His soul burst out of his ragged coating and left us. Look at us - look at us, my dearly loved brethren, all dressed in our ragged coating on this cold and miserable night somewhere in the great universe. Can you say any one of you in your hearts that it would not be better to follow our friend?"

"To hell with that for a lark!" a man called, clasping a bottle. He drew the speaker's accusing finger.

"For you it might not be better, I agree, my friend - for you would go as our brother here did, loaded before the Lord with liquor. The Lord's stood enough of our dirty nonsense, brethren; that's the plain truth.

He's had more than He call stand. He's finished with us, but not with our souls. He's cut us off, and manifestly He will disapprove if we persist till our graves in perpetuating the follies we should have left behind in our youth."

"How else are we to keep warm on these mucking winter's nights?" the jolly man asked, and there was a murmur of approval about him. Charley tapped him on the shoulder and said, "Would you mind keeping quiet while this gentleman speaks?"

The jolly man swung round on Charley. Though age had withered him like a prune, his mouth was spread red and large across his face as if it had been plastered there by a fist. He worked this ample mouth now, realized that Charley was stronger than he was, and relapsed into silence. Unmoved, the parson continued his oration.

"We must bow before His will, my friends, that's what we must do. Soon we shall all go down on our knees here and pray. It will be fitting for us all to go together into His presence, for we are the last of His generations, and it is meet that we should bear ourselves accordingly. What have we to fear if we are righteous, ask yourselves that? Once before He swept the Earth clean with a flood because of the sins of man. This time He has taken from our generative organs the God-given power to procreate. If you think that to be a more terrible punishment than the flood, then the sins of our century, the Twenty-First Century, are more terrible sins. He can wipe the slate clean as many times as He will, and begin again.

"So we do not weep for this Earth we are to leave. We are born to vanish as the cattle we once tended have already vanished, leaving the Earth clean and new for His further works. Let me recall to you, my brethren, before we sink upon our knees in prayer, the words of the scriptures concerning this time."

He put his fluttering hands together and peered into the darkness to recite: " 'For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth the beasts - yea, even one thing befalleth them. As the one dieth, so dieth the other, and they have but one breath. So that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast, for all is vanity. All go unto one place, all are of the dust, and all turn again to dust. Wherefore I perceive that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in the Lord's works, for that is his portion. And who shall bring him to see what shall be after him?"

"My old missus will be after me, if I don't get home," the jolly man said. "Good night to thee, parson." He began to straggle up the road, supported by a crony. Greybeard shook Charley's arm, and said, "This man isn't Bunny Jingadangelow, for all that he advertises eternal life. Let's move on."

"No, let's hear a bit more yet, Greybeard. Here's a man speaking truth. In how many years have I heard someone so worth listening to?"

"You stay here then, I'll go on."

"Stay and listen, Algy - it'll do you good."

But Greybeard moved up the road. The parson was again using the dead man by his platform for his text.

Perhaps that had been one of the ineradicable faults of mankind - for even a convinced atheist had to admit there were faults - that it was never content with a thing as a thing; it had to turn things into symbols of other things. A rainbow was not only a rainbow; a storm was a sign of celestial anger; and even from the puddingy earth came forth dark chthonian gods. What did it all mean? What an agnostic believed and what the willowy parson believed were not only irreconcilable systems of thought: they were equally valid systems of thought because, somewhere along the evolutionary line, man, developing this habit of thinking of symbols, had provided himself with more alternatives than he could manage, more systems of alternatives than he could manage. Animals moved in no such channel of imagination - they copulated and they ate; but to the saint, bread was a symbol of life, as the phallus was to the pagan. The animals themselves were pressed into symbolic service - and not only in mediaeval bestiaries, by any means.

Such a usage was a distortion, although man seemed unable to ratiocinate without it. That had been the trouble right from the beginning. Perhaps it had even been the beginning, back among those first men that man could never get clearly defined (for the early men, being also symbols, had to be either lumbering brutes, or timid noble savages, or to undergo some other interpretation). Perhaps the first fire, the first tool, the first wheel, the first carving in a limestone cave, had each possessed a symbolic rather than a practical value, had each been pressed to serve distortion rather than reality. It was a sort of madness that had driven man from his humble sites on the edges of the woods into towns and cities, into arts and wars, into religious crusades, into martyrdom and prostitution, into dyspepsia and fasting, into love and hatred, into this present cul-de-sac; it had all come about in pursuit of symbols. In the beginning was the symbol, and darkness was over the face of the Earth.

Greybeard abandoned this line of thought as he came to the next pitch along the road. He found himself looking at another banner that said "Eternal Life".

The banner hung across the front of a garage standing drunkenly beside a dilapidated house. Its doors had fallen off, but were propped inside to screen off the back half of the garage. A fire burned behind this screen, throwing the shadows of two people across the roof. In front of the screen, nursing a lantern in chilled hands, was a shrivel-gummed old girl perched on a box. She called to Greybeard in a routine fashion, "If you want Eternal Life, here's the place to find it. Don't listen to the parson! His asking price is too high. Here, you don't have to give anything, you don't have to give anything up. Our kind of eternal life can be bought by the syringe-full and paid for without any trouble over your soul. Walk in if you want to live for ever!"

"Shot in the arm or shot in the dark, I don't know that I entirely trust you or the parson, old lady."

"Come in and get reborn, you bag of bones!"

Not relishing this mode of address, even if delivered by rote, Greybeard said sharply, "I want to speak to Bunny Jingadangelow. Is he here?"

The old witch coughed and sent a gob of green phlegm flapping towards the floor.

" Doctor Jingadangelow ain't here. He's not at everyone's beck and call, you know. What do you want?"

"Can you tell me where he is? I want to speak to him."

"I'll fix you an appointment if you want a rejuvenation or the immortality course, but I tell you he ain't here."

"Who's behind the screen?"

"My husband, if you must know, and a client, as if it's any of your business. Who are you, anyway? I never seen you before."

One of the shadows flopped more widely across the roof, and a high voice said, "What's the trouble out there?"

Next moment, a youth appeared.

The effect on Greybeard was like a shock of cold water. Through the toils of the years, he had arrived at the realization that childhood was now no more than an idea interred within the crania of old men, and that young flesh was an antiquity in the land. If you forgot about rumours, he was himself all that the withered world had left to offer in the way of a youngster. But this - this stripling, dressed merely in a sort of tunic, wearing a red and green necklace like Norsgrey's, exposing his frail white legs and arms, regarding Greybeard with wide and innocent eyes…

"My God," Greybeard said. "They they are still being born!"

The youth spoke in a shrill impersonal voice. "You see before you, sir, the beneficial effects of Dr.

Jingadangelow's well-known combined Rejuvenation and Immortality course, respected and recommended from Gloucester to Oxford, from Banbury to Berks. Enrol yourself here for a course, sir, before you are too late. You can be like me, friend, after only a few trial doses."

"I believe you no more than I believed the parson," Greybeard said, still slightly breathless. "How old are you, boy? Sixteen, twenty, thirty? I forget the young ages."

A second shadow flapped across the roof, and a shabby grotesque with a plantation of warts on his chin and forehead hobbled into view. He was bent so double that he could scarcely peer up at Greybeard through his tangled eyebrows.

"You want the treatment, sir? You want to become lovely and beautiful again like this fine young attractive fellow?"

"You're not a very good advertisement for your own preparation, are you?" Greybeard said, turning again to regard the youth. He stepped forward to peer at him more closely. As the stunning first effects wore off, he saw the youth was in fact a flabby and poor specimen with a pasty countenance.

"Doctor Jingadangelow developed his wonderful treatments too late to help me, sir," said the grotesque. "I run up against him too late in life, you might say, but he could help you, as he did our young friend here. Our young friend is actually one hundred and ninety-five years old, sir, though you'd never think it to see him.

Why, bless him, he's in the full bloom of youth, as you could be."

"I never felt better in my life," the youth said, in his curious high voice. "I'm in the full bloom of youth."

Suddenly Greybeard grasped his arm and swung him so that the light from the crone's lantern gleamed direct on to the boy's face. The boy cried out in sudden hurt. The innocence in his eyes was revealed as vacancy. Thick powder on his face furrowed up into tracks of pain, he opened his mouth and exposed black fangs behind a frontal layer of white paint. Slipping away, he kicked Greybeard fiercely on the shin, cursing as he did so.

"You rogue, you filthy little swindler, you're ninety years old - you've been castrated!" Greybeard swung angrily on the ancient man. "You've no right to do such a thing!"

"Why not? He's my son." He shrank back with raised arm in front of his face. He showed his twisted and pocked jaw, champing with fury. The "boy" started to scream. As Greybeard turned, he shrieked, "Don't touch my Dad! Bunny and I thought of the idea. I'm only earning an honest living. Do you think I want to spend my days haggard and starved like you? Help, help, murderer! Thieves! Fire! Help, friends, help!"

"Shut your -" Greybeard got no further. The crone moved, leaping from behind him. She swung her lantern down across the side of his face. As he twisted round, the old man brought a thick stick down on his neck, and he tumbled towards the crumbling concrete floor.

Again for him a situation that could not happen. There were young women sitting at tables, scantily clad, entertaining antique men with physiognomies like ill-furled sails. Their lips were red, their cheeks pink, their eyes dark and lustrous. The girl nearest Greybeard wore stockings of a wide mesh net that climbed up to the noble eminence of her crutch; here they met red satin knickers, frilled at the edges, as though to conceal a richer rose among their petals, and matching in hue the brief tunic, set off with inviting brass buttons, which partially hid a bosom of such splendour that it made its possessor's chin appear undershot.

Between this spectacle and Greybeard was a number of legs, one pair of which he identified as Martha's.

The act of recognition made him realize that this was far from being a dream and he near to being unconscious. He groaned, and Martha's tender face came down to his level; she put a worn hand to his face and kissed him.

"My poor old sweetheart, you'll be all right in a minute."

"Martha… Where are we?"

"They were mobbing you for laying hands on that eunuch at the garage. Charley heard them and fetched Pitt and me. We came as soon as we could. We're going to stay here for the night, and you'll be all right by morning."

Prompted by this remark, he recognized two of the other pairs of legs now; both sprouted mud and marsh grass; one pair was Charley's, one Jeff Pitt's. He asked again, more strongly, "Where are we?"

"Lucky you didn't get yourself killed," Pitt grunted.

"We're next door to the garage where they attacked you," Martha said. "It's a house - to judge by its popularity - of rather good repute."

He caught the fleeting smile on her face. His heart opened up to her, and he pressed her hand to show how he cherished a woman who could make even an unpleasant pleasantry. Life flowed back into him.

"Help me up, I'm mended," he said.

Pitt and Charley took a hold of him under his arms. Only a pair of legs he had not recognized did not move. As he rose, his gaze travelled up these solid shanks and up the extravagant territory of a coat fashioned from rabbit skins. The skins preserved the heads of these lagomorphs, teeth, ears, whiskers, and all; the eyes had been replaced with black buttons; some of the ears, improperly preserved, were decaying, and a certain effluvium - probably encouraged by the warmth of the room - was radiated; but the effect of the whole was undeniably majestic. As Greybeard's eyes came level with those of the coat's wearer, he said,

"Bunny Jingadangelow, I presume?"

"Doctor 'Bunny' Jingadangelow at your service, Mr. Timberlane," the man in the coat said, flexing his sacrolumbar regions sufficiently to indicate a bow. "I'm delighted that my ministrations have had such excellent and speedy effect on your injuries -but we can discuss the state of your indebtedness to me later.

First, I think you should exercise your circulation by taking a turn about the room. Allow me to assist you."

He took a purchase on Greybeard's arm, and began to walk him between the tables. For the moment, Greybeard offered no opposition, as he studied the man in the rabbit-skin coat. Jingadangelow looked to be scarcely out of his fifties - perhaps no more than six years older than Greybeard, and a young man as men went these days. He wore a twirling moustache and sideburns, but the rotundity of his chin attained a smoothness now seldom seen or attempted. There was over his face such a settled look of blandness that it seemed no metoposcopy could ever decide his true character.

"I understand," he said, "that before you tried to attack one of my clients you were seeking me out to ask my help and advice."

"I did not attack your client," Greybeard said, freeing himself from the man's embrace. "Though I regret that in a moment of anger I seized hold of one of your accomplices."

"Tosh, man, young Trotty is an advertisement, not an accomplice. The name of Dr. Jingadangelow is known throughout the Midlands, you understand, as that of a great humanitarian - a human humanitarian. I'd give you one of my bills if I had one on me. You should realize before you start feeling pugilistic that I am one of the great figures of the - er, where are we now? of the Twenty Twenties."

"You may be widely known. I'm not arguing about that. I met a poor mad fellow, Norsgrey, and his wife, who had been to you for treatment -"

"Wait, wait-Norsgrey, Norsgrey… What kind of name is that? Not on my books…" He stood with his head raised and one finger planted in the middle of his forehead. "Oh, yes, yes, yes, indeed. Mention of his wife had me baffled for a moment. Strictly between you and me…" Jingadangelow manœuvred Greybeard into a corner; he leant forward and said confidentially, "Of course, the complaints of one's patients are both private and sacred, but poor old Norsgrey hasn't really got a wife, you know, any more than this table has; it's a she-badger that he's rather too fond of." He tapped his forehead again with an ample finger. "Why not?

Thin blood needs a little warmth abed these chilly nights. Poor fellow nutty as a walnut tree…"

"You are broadminded."

"I forgive all human faults and follies, sir. It's part of my calling. We must mitigate this vale of tears what way we can. Such understanding is, of course, part of the secret of my wonderful curative powers."

"Which is a way of saying you leech a living out of old madmen like Norsgrey. He is under the delusion that you have made him immortal."

During this conversation, Jingadangelow seated himself and beckoned to a woman who hobbled over and set down two drinks before them. The doctor nodded and waved a pair of plump fingers at her in thanks. To Greybeard he said, "How strange to hear ethical objections again after all these years - quite takes me back…

You must lead a secluded life. This old chap Norsgrey, you understand, is dying. He gets noises like frying in his head; it's a fatal dropsy. So - he mistakes the hope I have given him for the immortality I promised him. It's a comfortable error, surely? I travel, if I may for a moment indulge in a personal confidence, without any such hope; therefore Norsgrey - and there are many like him, luckily - is more fortunate than I in spirit. I console myself by being more fortunate in worldly possessions."

Greybeard set down his drink and looked about. Although his neck still ached, good humour filled him.

"Do you mind if my wife and friends join us?"

"Not at all, not at all, though I trust you are not bored with my company already. I hoped some talk of this and that might precede any business we might do together. I thought I had recognized a kindred spirit in you."

Greybeard said, "What made you think that?"

"Mainly the intuitive feeling with which I am richly endowed. You are uncommitted. You don't suffer as you should in this blighted time; though life is miserable, you enjoy it. Is this not so?"

"How do you know this? Yes, yes, you are correct, but we have only just met -"

"The answer to that is never entirely pleasing to the ego. It is that although all men are each unique, all men are also each much the same. You have an ambivalence in your nature; many men have an ambivalence.

I only have to talk with them for a minute to diagnose it. Am I making sense?"

"How do you diagnose my ambivalence?"

"I am not a mind reader, but let me cast about." He expanded his cheeks, raised his eyebrows, gazed into his glass, and made a very judicious face indeed. "We need our disasters. You and I have weathered, somehow, the collapse of a civilization. We are survivors after shipwreck. But for us two, we feel something deeper than survival - triumph! Before the crash came, we willed it, and so disaster for us is a success, a victory for the raging will. Don't look so surprised! You're not a man, surely, to regard the recesses of the mind as a very salubrious place. Have you thought of the world we were born in, and what it would have grown into had not that unfortunate little radiation experiment run amok? Would it not have been a world too complex, too impersonal, for the likes of us to flourish in?"

"You are doing my thinking for me," Greybeard said.

"It is a wise man's role; but so is listening." Jingadangelow quaffed his drink and leant forward over the empty glass. "Is not this rag-taggle present preferable to that other mechanised, organized, deodorized present we might have found ourselves in, simply because in this present we can live on a human scale? In that other present that we missed by a neutron's breadth, had not megalomania grown to such a scale that the ordinary simple richness of an individual life was stifled?"

"Certainly there was a lot wrong with the twentieth-century way of life."

"There was everything wrong with it."

"No, you exaggerate. Some things -"

"Don't you think that if everything spiritual was wrong with it, everything was wrong with it? It's no good getting nostalgic. It wasn't all drugs and education. Wasn't it also the need for drugs and the poverty of education? Wasn't it the climax and orgasm of the Machine Age? Wasn't it Mons and Belsen and Bataan and Stalingrad and Hiroshima and the rest? Didn't we do well to get flung off the roundabout?"

"You only ask questions," Greybeard said.

"They are themselves answers."

"That is double talk. You are giving me double talk. No, wait - look, I wish to talk more with you. I can pay you. This is an important conversation… Let me get my wife and friends here."

Greybeard rose. His head ached. The drink had been powerful, the room was noisy and hot, he was over-excited. It was seldom anyone talked about anything but toothache and the weather. He looked about for Martha and could not see her.

He walked through the room. There were stairs leading to the rooms above. He saw that the painted women were neither so voluptuous nor so busy as he had at first imagined. Though they were padded and painted, their skins were stamped with the liver marks and whorls of age, their eyes were rheumy. Bizarrely smiling, they reached out hands to him. He stumbled through them. They were full of liquor, they coughed and laughed and trembled as he went by. The room was full of their motions, like a cage of captive jackdaws.

The women waved - had he once dreamed of them? - but he took no notice. Martha had gone. Charley and old Pitt had gone. Seeing that he was all right, they must have returned to guard the boats. And Towin and Becky - no, they had not been here… He remembered what he had been seeking Bunny Jingadangelow for; instead of leaving, he turned back to the far corner, where another drink awaited him and the doctor sat with an octogenarian hussy on his knee. This woman sat with one hand about his neck and with the other stroked the rabbit heads on his coat.

"Look, Doctor, I came here to seek you not for myself, but for a couple who are of my party," Greybeard said, leaning over the table. "There's a woman, Becky; she claims that she is with child, though she must be over seventy. I want you to examine her and see if what she says is true."

"Sit down, friend, and let us discuss this expectant lady of yours," Jingadangelow said. "Drink your drink, since I presume you will be paying for this round. The delusions of elderly ladies is a choice topic for this time of night, eh, Jean? No doubt neither of you would recall that little poem, how does it go now? - 'looking in my mirror to see my wasted skin', and - yes -

"But time, to make me grieve,

Part steals, part lets abide,

And shakes my fractured frame at eve

With throbbings of noontide.

"Touching, eh? I fancy your lady has a few throbbings left, nothing more. But I shall come and see her, of course. It is my duty. I shall naturally assure her that she is in the family way, if that is what she desires to hear." He folded his fleshy hands together and frowned.

"There's no chance she might really be about to bear a child?"

"My dear Timberlane - if you will pardon my not using your somewhat inane sobriquet - hope springs as eternal to the human womb as to the human breast, but I am surprised to find you seem to share her hope."

"I suppose I do. You said yourself that hope was valuable."

"Not valuable: imperative. But you must hope for yourself - when we hope for other people we are invariably disappointed. Our dreams have jurisdiction only over ourselves. Knowing you as I do, I see that you really come to me for your own sake. I rejoice to see it. My friend, you love life, you love this life with all its blemishes, with all its tastes and distastes - you also desire my immortality cure, do you not?"

Resting his throbbing head on his hand, Greybeard quaffed down more drink and said, "Many years ago, I was in Oxford - in Cowley to be accurate - when I heard of a treatment, it was just a rumour, a treatment that might prolong life, perhaps for several hundred years. It was something they were developing at a hospital there. Is it possible this could be done? I'd want scientific evidence before I believe."

"Of course you do, naturally, undeniably, and I would expect nothing less of a man like you,"

Jingadangelow said, nodding so vigorously that the woman was almost dislodged from his lap. "The best scientific evidence is empirical. You shall have empirical evidence. You shall have the full treatment - I'm absolutely convinced that you could afford it - and you shall then see for yourself that you never grow a day older."

Squinting at him cunningly, Greybeard said, "Shall I have to come to Mockweagles?"

"Ah ha, he's clever, isn't he, Ruthie? He's prepared the way for himself nicely. That's the sort of man I prefer to deal with. I -"

"Where is Mockweagles?" Greybeard asked.

"It's what you might call my research headquarters. I reside there when I am not travelling the road."

"I know, I know. You have few secrets from me, Doctor Jingadangelow. It's twenty-nine storeys high, more like a castle than a skyscraper…"

"Possibly your informants have been slightly exaggerating, Timberlane, but your general picture is of course amazingly accurate, as Joan will tell you, eh, my pet? But first we should get a few details straight; you will want your lovely wife to undergo the treatment too?"

"Of course I will, you old fool. I can quote poetry too, you know; to be a member of DOUCH(E) you have to be educated. 'Let me not to the marriage of two minds omit impediment…' How does it go? Shakespeare, Doctor, Shakespeare. Ever make his acquaintance? First-class scholar… Oh, there is my wife! Martha!"

He staggered to his feet, knocking over his glass. Martha hurried towards him, anxiety in her face.

Charley Samuels was close behind, carrying Isaac in his arms.

"Oh, Algy, Algy, you must come at once. We've been robbed!"

"What do you mean, robbed?" He stared stupidly at her, resenting the interruption of his train of thought.

"While we were bringing you in here after you were attacked, thieves got into the boats and took everything they could lay their hands on."

"The sheep!"

"They've all been taken, and our supplies."

Greybeard turned to Jingadangelow and made a loose gesture of courtesy.

"Be seeing you, Doctor. Got to go - den of thieves - we've been robbed."

"I always mourn to see a scholar suffer, Mr. Timberlane," Jingadangelow said, bowing his massive head towards Martha without otherwise moving.

As he hurried into the open with Martha and Charley, Greybeard said brokenly, "Why did you leave the boats?"

"You know why! We had to leave them when we heard you were in trouble. We heard they were beating you up. Everything's gone except the boats themselves."

"My rifle!"

"Luckily Jeff Pitt had your rifle with him."

Charley put the fox down, and it pulled on ahead. They pushed through the dark, down the uneven road.

There were few lights now. Greybeard realized how late it was; he had lost the idea of time. Potluck's Tavern had its single window boarded up. The bonfires were mere smouldering cones of ash. One or two stalls were being shut by their owners; otherwise, the place was silent. A thin chip of moon, high overhead, shone on the expanse of flood water that threaded its way through the darkness of the land. Breathing the sharp air steadied the pulse in Greybeard's head.

"That Jingadangelow's behind all this," Charley said savagely. "He has these travelling people in the power of his hand, from what I've seen and heard. He's a charlatan. You shouldn't have had anything to do with him, Greybeard."

"Charlatans have their ambivalences," Greybeard said, recognizing the preposterousness of the words as soon as they were out. Hurriedly, he said, "Where are Becky and Towin?"

"They're down by the river with Jeff now. We couldn't find them first go off, then they turned up. They were busy celebrating."

As they came off the road and padded over soggy ground, they saw the trio huddled by the river bank near by the dinghy, carrying a couple of lanterns. They all stood together, not saying much. The celebration was over. Isaac padded unhappily in the mud, until Charley took pity on him and lifted him into his arms.

"It would be best if we leave this place straight away," Greybeard said, when examination proved that though the two boats were indeed all that was left to them, they were intact. "This is not the place for us, and I am ashamed of my part in this evening's events."

"If you'd taken my advice, you'd never have left the boat in the first place," Pitt said. "They're just a lot of crooks here. It's the loss of the sheep that grieves me."

"You could have stayed by the boat as you were told," Greybeard pointed out sharply. Turning to the others, he said, "My feeling is that we'll be better off on the river. It is a fine night, I have alcohol in my system to row off. By tomorrow, we can reach Oxford and get work and shelter there. It will be a very different place from what it was when Martha and I were last there, however many years ago that was. Do you all agree to leaving this thieves' den now?"

Towin coughed, shiffing his lantern from hand to hand.

"Actually, me and the missus was thinking of staying here, like. We made some great friends, see, called Liz and Bob, and we thought we'd join forces with them - if you had no particular objection. We aren't much set on this idea of going down the river, as you know." In the moonlight, he smiled his injured wolf's grin and shuffled his feet.

"I need rest in my condition," Becky said. She spoke more boldly than her husband, glaring at them through the sickly light. "I've had enough of being in that little leaking boat. We'd be better off with these friends of ours."

"I'm sure that's not true, Becky," Martha said.

"Why, I should catch my death of cold in that boat, me in my condition. Tow agrees with me."

"He always has to," Pitt observed.

There was a silence as they stood together but separate in the dark. Much lay between them they could never express, currents of liking and resentment, affinity and aversion: vague but not the less strong for that.

"All right, if you've decided, we'll continue without you," Greybeard said. "Watch your belongings, that's all I say."

"We don't like leaving you, Greybeard," Towin said. "And you and Charley can keep that bit of money you owe me."

"It's entirely your choice."

"That's what I said," Becky said. "We're about old enough to take care of ourselves, I should reckon."

As they were shaking hands all round, bidding each other good-bye, Charley started to hop about and scold.

"This fox has picked up all the fleas in Christendom. Isaac, you're letting them loose on me, you villain!"

Setting the fox down, he ordered it towards the water. The fox understood what was required of it. It moved backwards into the flood, slowly, slowly, brush first and then the rusty length of its body, and finally its head. Pitt held a lantern so that they could see it better.

"What's he doing? Is he going to drown himself?" Martha asked anxiously.

"No, Martha, only humans take their own lives," Charley said. "Animals have got more faith. Isaac knows fleas don't like cold water. This is his way of getting rid of them. They climb right up his body on to his muzzle, see, to avoid a soaking. You watch him now."

Only part of the fox's head was above the water. He sank down until his muzzle alone was showing. Then he ducked under completely. A circle of little fleas was left struggling on the surface. Isaac came up a yard away, bounded ashore, shook himself, and raced round in circles before returning to his master.

"I never saw a smarter trick," Towin said to Becky, nodding his head, as the others climbed into the boats.

"It must be something like that that the world's doing to human beings, when you work it out - shaking us off its snout."

"You're taking a lot of rubbish, Towin Thomas," she said.

They stood waving as the boats moved slowly away, Towin with his cheeks screwed up to see the particular outline merge with the general gloom.

"Well, there they go," Charley said, pulling on his paddle. "She's a sharp-tongued one, but I'm sorry to leave them in such a thieves' den."

They were towing Jeff Pitt's little boat, so that he could be in with them. He said, "Who's the thieves? It might have been Jingadangelow's men took our property. On the other hand, I reckon it might just as well have been old Towin. I never did trust him, crafty old blighter."

"Whoever it was, the Lord will provide for us," Charley said. He bent his back and guided his paddle deeper into the sedgy waters.