Downey went by them, taking Hastings’ suitcase into the house. The old man tugged at the flap of skin that sagged beneath his jaw. “Let’s not stand here all day staring at each other like two strange dogs off their home ground. Come inside and let’s relax.” He turned, not quite steady on the balls of his feet, and led the way, talking over his shoulder: “I talked to Diane a few days ago. A regular damn tycoon I raised there-I guess she’s doing fine with her art, and I suppose it’s what she thinks she wants. But I wish I’d made more of a woman of her. No disloyalty meant to my own blood, Russ, but I’ve always taken it for granted the break-up was more her fault than yours.”
“I wouldn’t say that, exactly.”
It was only a few steps, but by the time they entered the big front room the old man was trying to conceal the fact that he was breathing hard. Hastings felt uneasy alarm. Judd pressed a buzzer and waved toward a chair. He sounded hoarse when he said, “I know all about Women’s Liberation and all the rest of that Carrie Nation crap, but nothing’s convinced me yet that women are biologically designed to excel as hunter-gatherers. Physically we’re still a tool-making species of apes, and any woman who tries to hunt with the men has something wrong with her. Know what I’m driving at?”
“Sure. I’m almost old-fashioned enough to agree with you.”
The old man grinned at him. A chicken-necked old Indian woman, her parchment face as wrinkled as a prune, rustled into the room in response to Judd’s ring. Covered by a long severe black dress that was buttoned up to the chin, she carried a drink on a silver platter. Hastings scented it and watched the old woman walk out. “Always the best Scotch in this house,” he said. “Aren’t you joining me?”
“Not now,” Judd replied. “Diane’s got a wire down in her somewhere, that’s certain-and I don’t imagine she’ll find any real kind of satisfaction until she gets over trying to prove she’s better than a man.”
“Back in New York things never seem that clear-cut.”
“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?”