Villiers Touch (30 page)

“I know. That's why it pays to live out here, where you can strip away the fog and see through to the core of things.” The old man, still on his feet, kept tugging at his chin. “Russ, I'm glad you came. I've had it in mind for a month to call you and ask you to come down.”

“About Diane?”

“No. That's over and done with—I couldn't handle her, and neither could you. Maybe someone else can, but it's not up to us to meddle, is it? No, it's something else.”

Hastings watched him with full attention. The old man sat down where he could see out through the huge plate-glass window, across the rolling miles of grass. “Russ, nowadays this country's full of young squirts just burning to save the world from villains like me. Are you one of them?”

“I guess that depends on what you mean. I'm no radical.”

“Maybe you ought to be. It's taken me three-quarters of a century to learn some things I should have known by instinct from birth.”

“What do you mean?”

“When a man gets as rich as I am, he gets to thinking there's nothing left to buy but personal comforts—privacy, luxuries, people to do for him. But it's a terrible mistake. There is, after all, something important he can buy. He can buy, or at least try to buy, survival for his species.”

“Sounds ambitious.”

“You're skeptical—that's good.” Judd smiled at him. “The beginning of wisdom is knowing where to look for it, Russ, and you won't find it in Wall Street. It's right here. Look out there—what do you see? Virgin land. Four thousand square miles inside my fence, and a National Forest backing up on it. Outside of Alaska, it's one of the biggest tracts of its kind in the country.”

He had to wait to get his breath before he spoke again: “I thought it was a virtue to build things. I was wrong. I've spent my whole damn life building things that have strangled our cities with traffic, killed thousands of people on the highways, poisoned the air and polluted the water. Destroying this planet of ours not for the betterment of man but for the profit of corporate industry. Well, we've always thought we were carrying on the American dream—the pioneer builder. But it's become a nightmare, the pioneer heroes have become criminal rapists. We've killed off the animals, chopped down the trees, grazed off the grass, furrowed the earth into dust bowls, and filled the air and water with poisons. You can't breathe anywhere anymore—there isn't a river I know of where a man can feel safe drinking the water. This world's not fit to live in any more.”

“I've given it all my attention these past months, Russ, and I've satisfied myself I'm not just an old fogy demented by a senile obsession. I've put huge teams of trained men to studying this thing, at great expense, and the findings terrify me. We're getting closer and closer to a catastrophe that can't be reversed. It could happen in a dozen ways. A big pesticide spill in ocean areas where marine organisms produce most of our oxygen. An oil spill in the Arctic, to melt the ice cap. But even if that kind of thing can be held off, there isn't enough air and soil and water left to absorb our poisons. We carry smoke in our lungs and strontium 90 in our bones and DDT in our flesh and poison iodine 131 in our thyroids. We've burned so much fuel the carbon dioxide content of the earth's atmosphere has increased by ten percent—and if it goes up another four percent the oxygen balance of the atmosphere will collapse. Every living thing on the face of the earth will die. We could reach that point within eighteen years. Am I boring you, Russ? Never mind—do an old man a courtesy, hear me out.”

Hastings watched him, unblinking, listening to the painful voice, the frequent pauses for breath, watching the fiery glitter of the old eyes, like the last bright coals in a dying bed of ashes.

“I've talked to the engineers. They think we'll solve everything with our marvelous technology. We won't. Technology never saved a society. The most technologically advanced nation in Europe produced the most irresponsible tyranny we've ever seen—and when we get as overpopulated and regimented as Germany we'll do the same thing, count on it.”

He paused; the silence ran on while Hastings put his glass down and put his hands in his pockets. When the old man resumed, he seemed at first to have lost the thread of his thought.

“Back in twenty-nine,” Judd said, “I knew the country was in for a spectacular bust. Bloated up and ready to pop. I liquidated my stocks and put the money in short-term municipals and land and cash in my own vault. When the panic came, I waited for it to hit bottom, and then I stepped in and bought up blue-chips—oil, utilities, telephone, the things the country had to have, no matter how panicky the market got.

“Every day from my office window I could see the breadlines outside the public kitchens, men without jobs sitting like corpses in the parks, long lines standing outside the employment offices along Sixth Avenue. I gave jobs to as many of them as I could, and I thought my responsibility ended there. Maybe, in those times, it did. In any ordinary world—one that isn't threatened with complete extinction—you need hardship. An environment of savage conflict produces one thing—it produces leadership. The Depression produced the last real generation of leaders we've had in this country. Today even courage has become suspect. We can't afford to fight our enemies; we've got to learn to live with them on penalty of nuclear extinction, and that destroys the meaning of courage—do you suppose Roosevelt could have held this country together in forty-two if the Japanese had been armed with nuclear missiles?”

Hastings, expressionless, watched the quixotically gaunt face; the old man went on: “We haven't got leaders with the guts to do what has to be done. I know this much, Russ—nothing worth a hoot in hell will ever be preserved for mankind unless we can stabilize the numbers of our species. I'm glad I'm old—I'd rather sit under a nuclear blast than see what's going to happen in the next thirty years, when we'll have twice as many people as we've got now. We're going to have suffering the like of which no man has ever experienced. Right now, today, in the past twenty-four hours, ten thousand people have starved to death on this earth. If all the food in the world were evenly distributed today, every human being alive would go hungry. Is it any wonder it's the Cubas and the North Vietnams, and not the United States, that are producing leadership?”

Judd made a half-turn in his chair so that his gaunt face picked up light from the window; it looked remotely savage. He spoke in a whisper. “What happens to the quality of human life, even in this rich country, when we've tripled the population of the earth, Russ?”

Then his head wheeled, and he leveled a bony finger. “You are the last generation that can save us, Russ. You, not your kids or your grandkids. For them it will be all over but the burying.”

He drew a ragged breath. His eyes stared, defiant, and he went on more gently: “We spend two thousand dollars on military hardware for every dollar we spend on population control. If we keep doing it, you'll have no grandchildren, Russ. The race of man will be dead.”

Hastings stirred. “You're a very wise old bird.”

“I'm just a crusty old fart with his eyes open to see. Now I had better tell you why I've inflicted this impassioned speech on you—I confess I've rehearsed it for some time. I'm going to ask you to do something, Russ, so pay attention now.” He eased himself back in his chair, heartbreakingly feeble. “My personal fortune,” he said, “is larger than the national budgets of some small countries. I'm putting it to use. I've set up trusts here and in Canada and Australia and several other foreign parts—because frankly I don't trust America to survive—to work toward the rigid enforcement of population control throughout the world. I have not contributed to organizations that seek to control the conception of unwanted children, because we have got to prevent births of children whether they are wanted or not. Governments are going to have to prohibit childbearing by law, not by individual choice. I'm pessimistic, I don't think it's going to work, but it's the only chance we have.

“At the same time, I've set up a trust to operate the land we're standing on—about twenty-five million acres. It's set up to maintain this land as a perpetual wilderness. No tree cutting, no digging for minerals, no construction of any buildings aside from the replacement of worn-out structures on the same sites. The place will become an inviolable park when I die. I don't trust the National Park people—they're subject to lobbyists, and they'd throw it wide open the minute somebody discovered gold here—and so I'm keeping it in private hands. It's to be a completely private park. No trespassing.”

“What?”

The old man's creased mouth had stretched into a strict, stern smile. “A few years ago,” he murmured, “the last time I was in New York, I rented a bicycle and pedaled my way through Central Park. It was a Monday morning, and the park was reasonably deserted. Do you know what I saw?”

“I can imagine.”

“Yes. The excrement of a thousand human savages. The leavings of a population of mindless animals who'd had their Sunday outing in the sun, and left their spoor behind. There wasn't a square yard of grass that wasn't covered with broken glass, crumpled napkins, bent beer cans, torn newspapers, spilled mustard, discarded condoms and brassieres, crushed sunglasses, bloody sanitary napkins, paper plates, half-pint whiskey bottles. All right. I believe the parks weren't put there for savages to defile. They don't deserve the use of it. I don't suppose there's any way to prevent the wildlife here from being stunned by a periodic sonic boom, but short of that I want this land untouched by human beings. The time is going to come when people will need to know there's an untouched wilderness like this still on the map of the United States. The public parks will soon be so mobbed with campers and picnickers there won't be room left to see the landscape, and I refuse to let that happen here. They won't get in here, they'll never see it with their own eyes, but they'll know it's here, Russ, and I believe that's pricelessly important.”

Hastings moved to the window and swept the horizon. Finally he said, “You're dead right, of course.”

It brought a wide smile to Judd's face. “You can't know how happy it makes me to hear you say that. Because I'm offering it to you.”

Hastings' mouth dropped open. He spun on his heel and stared.

“I need a man I trust to take it over,” Judd said. “To oversee the birth-control trusts and see to it this place is kept intact. Someone to live here, on this land, and watch over it. When I set it up, I had you in mind.”

Hastings was shaking his head. The old man murmured, “Don't say anything yet. Think about it, that's all I'm asking.”

He had forgotten what a straightforward affair supper was at Elliot Judd's house. Judd had always been a meat-and-potatoes man. The old Indian woman rustled in and out of the dining room, serving; the conversation, with Lewis Downey at table, was light and inconsequential.

There were fourteen rooms in the house, most of them connected to one another only by the common porch-roofed walkway that ran around the patio. The front of the house contained three enormous rooms interconnected by wide double doorways.

The dining room contained Monets, and a Renoir worth close to a million dollars; the front room was hung with postimpressionists, Léger, and Lichtensteins; the office-library contained a hodgepodge of Wyeths and Sargents and a Remington cowboy in bronze. Judd was talking about his artwork: “I loathe museums. They're as bad as zoos. Hang a picture in a museum, and it takes the life out of it—museums are for the dead. Paintings were made for the walls of houses, where people live.”

Downey said in his irritatingly impersonal voice, “Hadn't you better take it easy on that Rothschild?”

The old man's hand made a claw around the wineglass. “You're an old woman, Lewis. We're celebrating a homecoming.”

It made Hastings feel awkward. The meal concluded, Downey excused himself and left. Hastings sat back, finishing his wine, feeling logy and inert; the wine moved like a soft warm hand across his tired joints.

The old man sat slack and indifferent, like an animal going into hibernation; he was awake, but unmoving, his breathing hard to detect, his metabolism slow in the suspended animation of the very old. He stirred and said, “Do you ever see Diane? Or did I ask you that before? I apologize—sometimes memories get stuck together like pages in a book. But the strange thing is, even now when I look in the mirror I still expect to see a young face looking back at me.… I was asking about Diane, wasn't I?”

“We—don't see each other.”

“Just as well, of course.”

There was another stretch of silence; finally Judd said, “When I sit here dozing I like to think it passes for deep thinking. Actually, I'm distantly aware of the beating of my old heart, but that's about all. Oh, Christ, Russ, when you're old it takes so damned much frustrating time to do even the simple things like getting to the bathroom, reading, getting in and out of chairs. You've noticed I've pared the staff here down to nearly nothing—the old Indian woman cooks and cleans, and Lewis pretends to nurse me, and there's a fellow who comes up from the bunkhouse once or twice a week to make repairs and do the gardening. But I got rid of the rest of them—they all started treating me with humorous amicability, which I hated bitterly. I can't stand being patronized. I envy my late wife, you know—she died within two days of falling ill with bulbar polio. No time for the kind people to come around and croon their sycophantic sympathy. You never knew her, did you—Diane's mother? No, of course not, she died long before. On this last page of my life I tend to confuse things in time. But sometimes I wake up in the morning and twist my head around, and I'm surprised to discover I've slept alone.”