Matlock's System

2

My “dear Matt! Do step in.” Jack Browning came forward with his hand outstretched and a smile of apparently real pleasure on his face.

“Thank you, Clive,” he said to the smooth young man who had ushered Matlock into the room, then to Matlock, “I hope you didn’t mind my sending the hovercar for you.”

“Not in the least,” said Matlock, and he was speaking the truth. “I enjoyed its company.”

Browning looked at him quizzically. The smooth young man who seemed reluctant to accept his dismissal said acidly, “Mr. Matlock did not care to be driven here, Prime Minister. He walked with the car behind him.”

“Did he now? How very odd of you, Matt,” said Browning his smile re-appearing, even broader.

Matlock began to wonder how clever he had been. It had seemed a good publicity stunt to approach the House with the large official car crawling at his heels like a monstrous but obedient dog.

Several photographs had been taken and a large number of questions asked by the horde of journalists whose prowling ground this was. It had seemed a useful and entertaining manoeuvre.

Now faced by Browning’s enjoyment of the jest, it all seemed rather silly. Worse, he felt that something like this might have been exactly what Browning had planned. Then he reminded himself that Browning’s strength as a politician had always been his capacity for being unsurprised. It was said of him (by friends and foes alike) that he could turn a disaster into a forecast within a day, and into a plan by the end of the week.

The reluctant Clive having removed himself, Matlock was ushered to a chair, upright but comfortable — a compromise between the official and the domestic which he felt rather suited the situation. The Prime Minister himself looked very relaxed and unofficial. He was casually but immaculately dressed, and wore no tie. His crinkly brown hair had just that touch of untidiness which gave an effect of vigour and energy and which it was said took two hairdressers three hours a week to maintain. His square farmer’s face was aglow with health and he carried his fifteen stone lightly on his six foot plus frame. As always, Matlock felt physically diminished by the man, by his bulk, his lightness of foot, his vigour, the very richness of his voice.

“Now what about a drink, Matt? Whisky?”

“It’s too early in the morning to be patriotic, Prime Minister,” he answered.

Browning boomed with laughter, then came over to Matlock with two brimming glasses and sat beside him.

“We don’t see enough of you, Matt. This bunch of sycophantic moles I’m surrounded with make me take myself too seriously.”

“Only those in danger from delusion of grandeur need deflation,” said Matlock.

He took a sip of his drink and recognized without surprise his favourite Scotch. It was a long time since he had tasted it.

“They wouldn’t like this in Yorkshire,” he said, indicating his glass, referring to the main source of English whisky since the secession of Scotland.

“They’re not bloody well going to get it in Yorkshire,” laughed Browning.

“Anyway, we’ve got to support our neighbours. It’s like liar dice. You look after the man on your right.”

“I would hardly have thought the Scots, or anyone for that matter, were on your right, Prime Minister.”

Browning stood up and leaned against the mantelshelf. It was a perfectly casual move and one which fitted perfectly with the appearance of the man — a gentleman farmer elegantly at home in his own parlour. Not that such a creature had existed for half a century or more, but Matlock recognized it. He also recognized the picture behind Browning’s head.

“Careful, Matt. You’re talking about the party you helped to make great.”

It was a photograph of seven men and three women talking casually against a background of fruit trees in blossom.

Browning followed Matlock’s gaze and nodded twice.

“That was it. Matt. That first Cabinet. I was only a toddler then, but that picture means something to me.”

Matlock rose and moved towards the mantelshelf. Browning stepped aside.

“Have a good look, Matt. Those must have been great days.”

He watched with approval as Matlock reached up and unhooked the photo from the wall, and the approval remained as Matlock placed the picture face downwards on the mantelshelf and looked quizzically at the small oval-shaped discoloration on the wallpaper.

“It can only have started meaning something to you quite recently, Prime Minister. I would be interested in purchasing the miniature that used to hang here if you have grown tired of it.”

Browning downed his drink with gusto and went to pour himself another.

“It’s like a game, Matt; a great game. It’s marvellous to meet someone who’s almost as good as me at it. Or at least to meet someone who dares show he’s almost as good as me. I don’t surround myself by fools. Never did. That’s a fool’s policy. But they only let me see so much cleverness, no more. That’s what being clever is.”

“I take it you’re practising what you preach, Prime Minister?”

Browning slapped his thigh. Matlock had never seen anyone slap his own thigh, and he mentally applauded the naturalness of the innately ludicrous gesture.

“So you see me as a kind of subtle Iago? Dishonest even in his protestations of dishonesty? Why do you think I brought you here, Matt?”

“Invited. You invited me. I accepted your invitation.”

“And damn decent of you it was. Why?”

“Why what? Or rather, which why?”

“Answer what you will, Matt. It’s been all counter-punching so far. Let’s have some aggression.”

“How curious your terminology is. Boxing has been outlawed in this country for thirty years.”

“I travel a lot, Matt. It goes with the job. Go on talking.”

“All right. If you will. You’re obviously fishing for a cue. I’ll endeavour to pander to your theatrical whims and supply you with it. I think you would like to do a deal. I have some small nuisance value — perhaps more than I am aware. Your government is approaching Budget Day with greater trepidation than ever before. It’s worth an hour of your time trying to buy me off. But no more. Am I right?”

Browning looked full at Matlock, his body tense and now with no trace of merriment on his face.

“No, Matt. Wrong. I brought you here to have you killed.”

Matlock’s stomach twisted violently and he felt the blood drain from his cheeks, leaving his head light and giddy.

Then Browning’s great jovial laugh filled the room, echoing and re-echoing as the Prime Minister doubled up with mirth.

“I had you there, Matt. For a moment, you believed me. Admit it, eh?”

Matlock could say nothing. He took a long pull at his drink and sat stiffly, filled with self-loathing.

It’s true then. I fear death that much. It’s true. I am terrified. I am paralysed with fear at the awareness of death. It is true. This is the reality in the midst of all my moral abstractions. It is true. I am afraid, selfishly, egotistically, isolatedly afraid.

Browning was speaking again, with a serious note in his voice now.

“But all the same and joking apart, Matt, it’s a bit sad that it’s come to this between us. That you could really believe that, even for a moment, that I had the inclination or the power to have you killed. This is a democracy we live in, not a police state. I’m a civilized man, a politician. You’re an opponent, but I hope I can still keep you as a friend. And even politically we were once on the same side of the fence.”

Matlock still did not trust himself to speak. Browning went on.

“You were right of course. I’ve brought you here to offer you a deal. But before I do, there’s something I’d like you to see. You’re always ready to tell me what I am, Matt, to use my own words against me, to show the world how you feel I am being dishonest, deceptive, immoral. Sometimes what you say hits home, rings a bell. You may not think so, but it does. Well, I’m going to offer you a chance to take instead of give for a change. I’m not going to accuse, to point, to decry. Just show. We should all face our origins some time. Are you ready to do that here and now?”

Matlock pulled himself together. This was no time for introspection. He wondered how much of his reactions had shown and was thankful that he too was not unskilled in the use of political masks.

“I never forget my origins, personal or public, by day or by night, Prime Minister.” He decided to test how much Browning wanted him to stay. “It seems a shame to waste your time in reminiscence. I think I should be off.”

Browning leaned forward and stabbed a button on his desk, then stood up and made for the door.

“That’s very good of you, Matt. But there’s no need to worry about me. I’ll leave you to your own devices for a while and catch up on a bit a work. See you soon.”

He slipped through the door which clicked with ominous finality behind him. The poro-glass windows blackened and the room was engulfed in total darkness. Matlock started to his feet, the terror back, then subsided again as a white square glowed in the wall opposite him and he realized what was happening. He was being shown a film.

Back projection was being used of course, so there was no stream of light pouring over his head. Also it was obviously a poro-glass screen, the advantage of which was that its shape and size were easily altered.

An impersonal voice began to speak. There was still no image on the screen.

“Matlock Matthew. Born Carlisle, Cumberland, Committee Region 62. Parents ...”

And now the picture appeared. His mother, long haired, bright eyed, her lovely face animated as she mouthed silent badinage at the camera-man; his father, tall, thin, a trifle ascetic, but touched as always by the fullness of life which overflowed from his wife. These were home movies. Matlock dimly recollected having seen them before. If asked where they were he would have guessed in one of the trunks that contained all he had wanted to keep of his childhood home and which had lain in storage untouched for forty-five years. Untouched by himself, at least.

Matlock saw himself on the screen now. A mere child. An only child.

His education and adolescent life were dealt with briefly, but with a remarkable attention to essential detail. It didn’t surprise him. No one grew up without leaving traces of his passage. Everyone left a trail of pictures and tapes and documents marking a clear path from birth to the grave. Since the passing of the Age Act, the necessity for close documentation had become still more acute.

But soon he felt a growing unease as it became apparent that ever since his earliest successes in politics, his every move had been carefully supervised.

The voice went on: “The accidental death of his parents in May 1982 came at an opportune moment. He had been moving further and further towards the Uniradical Party and only his emotional loyalty to his father and mother had prevented him from openly joining at an earlier date. Now he accepted the Party discipline, was soon adopted as a candidate and was elected at his second attempt.”

The film now was all professionally shot. Some of it was newscast material; much wasn’t. In an effort to be fair, he reminded himself that much of it must have been shot at the instigation of the Lib-Lab coalition then in office, and only later inherited by the Unirads.

The years in Opposition were soon disposed of, but not without a clear picture being sketched of Matlock’s attitudes to the big questions of the day. The drive, the force, the sense of mission, the ruthlessness of this ghost from his own past were always apparent.

The events which led to the expansion of the Unirads from one of the smallest Parties in the House (five or six new Parties had gained representation in the seventies and eighties of the twentieth century) to the first Party in nearly ten years capable of governing without coalition, were clearly and honestly indicated. The world was in economic chaos, due mainly to the population explosion. America and Russia had turned their backs on their former allies and retreated into self-sufficient isolation in which the only things that mattered were employment and food. Their moonbases were abandoned by both nations and the planets handed back to the science fiction writers. The European common market was creaking along in an atmosphere of mutual distrust at Governmental level and hatred at national level. The Lib-Labs had put all their eggs in the European basket and when the Great Consult of Brussels in 1987 broke up in confusion and recrimination, the British Government fell. The Unirads, who had been advocating a return to insularity for years, were returned to Parliament with a slender overall majority.

It was a great year for Matlock. He was elected with the largest personal majority ever known in modem Parliamentary history, he married Edna Carswell, only daughter of the party leader, and he was made at the age of twenty-seven Secretary of State at the Ministry of National Re-organization.

The photograph above the mantelshelf appeared now for a moment. Matlock looked at his fresh young face, brown against the apple-blossom of Carswell’s orchard, and found he was clenching his fist till it seemed that these savagely sharp knuckles would cut through his skin.

Now the voice was stressing, gently but insistently, that the main policymaking responsibility of this first Unirad government was Matlock’s. His own post was a new creation. He made it the most important in the Cabinet.

“The decision to quit Europe was the Party’s. The speed and completeness with which it was put into effect were Matlock’s,” said the voice. “He rescued more for Britain than had ever seemed possible and left the other European nations bewildered at the fate which had overtaken them. Within weeks every other British overseas commitment had been cancelled. The national enthusiasm which had brought the Unirads to power reached incredible proportions and Matlock’s personal popularity was so vast that many felt he would have taken over the leadership of the Party had it not been in his father-in-law’s hands.”

Matlock smiled for the first time since the film had started.

It amused him for once to be wrongly assigned a virtuous motive instead of the other way round. The reason he had not taken over the leadership of the Party was practical, not sentimental. Indeed, old Carswell had offered to stand down.

But his smile faded as the voice continued.

“The truth is that Matlock was not yet absolutely certain of his authority, whereas Carswell could only be challenged by Matlock. And he still had the biggest step of all to take.

“In January 1991 Matlock introduced the Age Bill.”

Matlock who had felt uncomfortably hot for some time began to sweat profusely. On an impulse he rose, knelt in a comer and put his hand over the airconditioning duct.

The gentle stream of air was burning hot. He almost heard Browning’s appreciative chuckle and the air began to grow cooler even as he took his hand away.

Back on the screen, the effects of the introduction of the Age Bill were being described. Comfortable again — in body, but not in mind — Matlock watched as the strikes, the demonstrations, the protest-meetings unfolded on the wall.

Then he saw himself, young, confident, poker-faced, being escorted by the police through booing crowds from the House to the Westminster Bridge Hover-launch. He had seen this sequence a hundred times. Until comparatively recently it had appeared at least a couple of times a year on the popular Tele-recall programmes. It was still, so he was told, a leading request item on these shows.

As he stepped on to the pier, over the heads of the demonstrators in full view of the cameras soared a small round object. The sun glinted on it as it spun in the air. The young Matlock stepped forward casually, cupped his hands close to his chest like a seasoned cricketer, caught it; then, changing sport, turned, dropped it on to his foot and booted it far out into the clear blue waters of the Thames.

It exploded just below the surface. A fountain of water arched into the air and its outermost fringe rained down on the pier where the police were plunging into the bewildered crowd in pursuit of the thrower.

Matlock, with a cool wave to the onlookers, stepped into the launch which swept away up river.

“It is not impossible that this incident as much as anything else turned the tide for Matlock,” said the voice. “It has been suggested that Matlock himself arranged it. Whatever the truth, it created a breathing space. Matlock’s next step was a mammoth statistical attack upon his opponents. The main burden of his arguments was that ...”

The voice droned on, the pictures flickered by. Matlock neither saw nor heard. A voice in his head and a picture behind his eyes were much clearer, much closer.

Population had outstripped production. The causes were partly inefficient management, partly a steadily increasing birthrate, but principally the rapidly decreasing mortality rate. The country was top-heavy. He was not rationing children, he was not denying the right to procreate. He was giving the old a term to their years; an equal term for rich and poor, great and small; he was offering what could be a great boon to mankind — the chance to know the moment of one’s end and the chance to meet it with dignity and serenity.

He was proposing that every man, woman and child in the country should be fitted with a heart clock; a minute device, fixed in the main valve of the heart, which at the end of a determined number of years, would stop.

Euthanasia had been legalized eight years earlier. It was now an accepted part of the nation’s life.

The heart clock involved a kind of economic euthanasia.

What a phrase! gibed Matlock bitterly to himself. How they had all liked it. Or nearly all.

“Let us, as we have so often done in past centuries, let us lead the world to a new kind of freedom and prosperity. And let us show that we are aware that true freedom is only possible through voluntary restriction; and true prosperity is the fruit of democratic sacrifice.”

His thought bitter and self-mocking, had joined in perfect timing with the voice, youthful and vibrant, from his face on the screen. He covered his ears and closed his eyes, careless of the eyes he knew were watching him.

When he looked at the screen again, he was lying naked on a table and a knife was cutting into his chest.

The film was well edited, the whole sequence here took only five minutes.

This had been his final card, of course. This had been his greatest gamble.

The Age Bill had not yet been voted on. Opposition throughout the country, though slackening off, was still considerable. And within the ranks of the Unirads themselves there was not enough certainty of support to guarantee the vote.

So Matlock presented the most bizarre Party Political Broadcast ever. It consisted of live coverage of himself undergoing the first heart-clock operation. Recorded television surgery was a commonplace; open-heart surgery, heart transplants, these were as familiar as visits to the dentist had been in mid-century. But this was something new and had hitherto uncontemplated audience appeal. Ninety- eight per cent of the television sets in the country were tuned in to the operation that February night.

The operation went smoothly, smartly. The programme ended with Matlock opening his eyes in the recovery room. Blinking in bewilderment at the camera for a second. Then with a faint smile saying into the microphone, “That’s all it is, ladies and gentlemen. I will bid you good-night now. I must get some sleep. I have a hard day in the House tomorrow.”

His car had driven to Westminster the following morning between cheering crowds such as had not been seen since the crowning of the King.

His reception in the Commons was not so unanimously applaudatory. The Leader of the Opposition congratulated him on his recovery, then enquired what part of Matlock’s anatomy they could hope to see dissected in the next episode.

When the laughter had died away, it was Carswell, not Matlock, who stood up to reply. His speech was short, but it stunned the Opposition, and a great many members of the Government too. This was too important a matter for a Government with such a small majority to push through, Carswell said. (Cries of “hear, hear,” from the Opposition.) Therefore he thought it best that the people should themselves give the answer, and consequently he had formally requested the King to dissolve Parliament.

There had been uproar, Matlock recalled. For a man who had been calling on the Government to resign since it came into being, the Leader of the Opposition looked remarkably displeased.

The rest was history. This became the biggest single-issue election campaign ever. Matlock’s teams were superbly drilled. No one not wholly and publicly committed to the Age Bill was put forward as a Unirad candidate. The country, in love with the hero-figure of Matlock and readily reacting to the appeal to self-interest implicit in the Bill (for all those under sixty anyway), returned the Unirads to power with a majority so large that the Government’s side of Chamber could not seat all its members.

On the screen appeared the film of that first re-assembling of Parliament. Matlock saw himself entering the House, heard the great roar of applause which greeted him, saw himself advancing to his place on the front bench with a slight deprecatory smile on his face. Then the film stopped and held his face there quite still, until suddenly it began to expand and spread out till it covered the whole wall. Till the pores of his skin pitted his face like the craters of the moon. Till only his mouth was visible, vast, canyon-like, but still holding that vilely modest smile.

Then it stopped. And the lights went on.

“Hello Matt,” said Browning from behind him. “Hope you’re enjoying the show?”

He must have slipped in in the dark. He had certainly gone out earlier. Matlock wondered how long he had been back.

“It has some historical interest,” he said in reply.

“Yes, hasn’t it? Great days, those. Great days. I think there are a lot of Unirads today, the young ones especially, who don’t realize how much we owe you.”

“Perhaps you’d like me to do a lecture tour?”

Browning roared with laughter.

“No, Matt. I think we’ll leave it to the historians eh? Look Matt, what I’ve been trying to do with this film is to remind you of what you once were. It was you who created the modem Unirad Party, Matt. You attack us and slander us, but we’re your creation. When I was a lad in my teens and just getting interested in politics, it was you whom I took as my model. You were held up to me as the greatest thing that had happened to this country since Churchill.”

“So we have had a nostalgic stroll down memory lane, Prime Minister. With the heat full on. It’s been very interesting. I think I must go now.”

Browning put on his mock-penitent look.

“I’m sorry about the heat. One of the Psychi boys suggested it. Said it would lower your resistance. Bloody tom-fool idea it sounded to me. I know the only way to destroy your resistance is by reason, Matt, boy.”

Matlock again was almost taken aback by Browning’s frankness; then he shook his head and sighed heavily, a trifle histrionically.

“You were right, Prime Minister, we don’t meet often enough nowadays. I find myself at times tottering on the brink of trusting you.”

“Oh you can, Matt. You can. You must. Look, I’ll be frank. We’re in a spot of bother. Nothing really. Just a bit of shoaly water. But till we get over it I’d like you back in the Government. You can be sitting in the Cabinet tomorrow. It’ll take three weeks to get you elected, though. We can’t hurry the next by-election. But that doesn’t matter. It’s a safe seat. They’re all safe seats since you got us going, eh?”

Matlock found himself joining in the man’s laughter. There didn’t seem anything else to do somehow. Browning stopped first and Matlock found himself laughing alone. The sound seemed thin and reedy beside the echoes of Browning’s deep-throated guffaws.

“So you’ll do it?” said Browning.

“No,” said Matlock. “But I’ll stop till the end of the show. You’ve got me that interested.”

“That’s a start. What are your terms?”

“What’s the hurry? Indeed, why do you want me at all? I find it flattering, but it encourages me to oppose you rather than support you. I must be more successful than I thought.”

“I thought you might argue like that, Matt. Don’t fool yourself. Here’s the truth. We’re in pretty deep, Matt. I’ve been to the Swiss more than once in the last five years. I’ve got to go again. But they want reassurances. They want evidence of good faith. They want all kinds of things. One of them is a cut in the E.O.L. A drastic cut.”

Matlock began to understand. He had suspected the country was mortgaged up to the hilt with the Swiss but was horrified to learn that they were in a position to be able to command an Expectation of Life cut. Outside influence on the E.O.L. was a possibility he had always strenuously denied when he was in office. But so many other reassurances he had given had proved false in his own day that he forced himself not to feel indignant at this.

For many years now the Age Rate had been the outward and visible sign of the state of the country’s economy. He had never intended this, but somehow it had come about. In a good year when the economy could support a heavy load at the top, the Age Rate remained high, 84, 85 years perhaps. During the great boom of the previous decade it had twice topped ninety. But the last few years had seen a frightening decline, till at 76, the country had the lowest E.O.L. in Europe (only Switzerland was not now a heart-clock economy).

Now it was to come down still further. Browning went on speaking.

“We’ll have to cut it. We can’t afford not to. It’ll be in the Budget, of course. I’d like you beside me when I present that Budget, Matt.”

“How big’s the cut?”

Browning grinned and laid a finger by his nose.

“Now that’d be telling. But big, Matt.”

“It can’t be too big. You’re getting a bit near the Bible Barrier.”

As he uttered the words, he heard again briefly his own young voice sententiously proclaiming. “Three score years and ten we are promised in the Good Book. And three score years and ten we shall have whatever happens. But more than that, I promise you, much more. Eighty, ninety, eventually one hundred years can be ours if we put our house in order now.”

Thus the Bible Barrier had been born and though it was mentioned nowhere in the Act itself, the concept was one of peculiar force.

“Look, Matt. Even if we drop just a year, it’s a year too much for you. You can’t afford a year at your age. But come back in out of the cold and you can have another quarter of a century. You’re in great trim, I can see that. And we’ve got drugs that’ll keep you that way.”

“I’ve never heard of any.”

“For God’s sake, Matt, be your age, if you’ll forgive the phrase. What’s the point of releasing new drugs when the E.O.L. is seventy-six? But once in the House nothing can touch you. It’s Sanctuary, Matt. You should know. You built the bloody cathedral, eh?”

Yes, thought Matlock, I built the whole hideous edifice. Not that the House had taken much persuading to agree that M.P.s should be outside the scope of the Act on the grounds that considerations of one’s own age should not be allowed to become a factor in the way an M.P. voted on age cuts.

“I’ll think it over,” said Matlock and turned to the door. I really will think it over, he thought. I must think it over to discover why he is really offering me this job. There can surely be no real danger to him in this Budget. He’ll get the vote — Jesus, he has a majority of hundreds and there’s no election for two and a half years. In any case, he has the electoral system sewn up tight, the police and the army are in his pocket.

Why has he offered me this deal?

“I’ll think it over,” he repeated.

“No, Matt,” said Browning. “Don’t think. You might think yourself to a wrong answer. What’s holding you back?”

“It’s a big step,” said Matlock lightly. “Turning my back on twenty-five years and publicly reversing all my beliefs.”

“You did it once before, Matt,” said Browning with a trace of a sneer. “Look.”

He raised his index finger. The lights dimmed but did not go out, the poro-screen shrank to its normal size and the film began to race through. The voice was a mere gabble but Matlock needed no voice to interpret the ludicrously rapid scenes which unwound before him. He saw the Age Bill being put into effect, saw himself talking, talking, always talking, the lower jaw rattling up and down at an ever increasing speed till the whole thing became a blur. When the film finally decelerated to a viewable pace, he was still there but he was no longer talking. He was sitting with his head between his hands, listening.

The voice which settled out of the high-pitched swirl was his wife’s. Edna.

Dead now for eighteen years.

“You can’t do it, Matt. You can’t. It’ll finish you. It’ll be the end of father. But you can’t destroy the Party. That’s too strong now, because of you. But it will never forget, never forgive. The Party will destroy you.”

Matlock raised his head on the screen.

I look older than I do now, thought the spectator Matlock.

“I must do it, Edna, even if I am destroyed. It’s gone sour, all sour. This is not what I meant, not what I meant at all. I must resign and speak out.”

“Speak out! What chance do you think you’ll get to speak out? Do you imagine they don’t know?”

“You forget that I am still ‘they’, my dear.”

Edna looked down at him.

“You are still rather touchingly naive, Matt.”

She was right, thought Matlock. I knew soon enough she was right. But dear God! that they could have been filming this!

“Enough?” asked Browning.

He nodded.

The film froze on his face again, this time lined with weariness and despair. The lights came on.

“I couldn’t do it twice, Prime Minister. Not that.”

“You once would have said you could not have done it once.”

“But I had reasons then that you cannot offer me now. Faith, conscience, a desire for atonement.”

“You had believed in what you did. Could you not believe again?”

Matlock shook his head wearily.

“I did an evil and believed in it. But worst, I convinced others. I used no force, no coercion. I made them believe. That’s what I have been trying to undo ever since. You can give me no reasons for stopping doing that.”

Browning’s voice dropped to what in another man would have been a histrionic softness.

“Oh, but I can, Matt. I cannot persuade you to join me, perhaps. But I can give you reasons to stop opposing me.”

“Are these threats?”

“Only if the law is a threat. Your law, Matt. You are getting old. You must be tempted to try to escape the law. Perhaps even now you are arranging to go for Op. But it won’t do, Matt. It won’t do. You must keep your nose clean. And that means you mustn’t be an accessory to any breakage of the Age Law. And that’s what you are, every time you preach one of your little sermons, so my legal boys tell me. You encourage evasion. Do you deny it?”

Matlock laughed.

“I say nothing, Prime Minister. Except that in the end you have disappointed me. You threaten my freedom. Perhaps my life. I value both, more than you can know. But they are not negotiable in the long run. I will not bargain with them.”

“I expected no less,” replied Browning. “Indeed, Matt, I expected a bit more, but that’s beside the point. No, the real thing is that you seem to have forgotten what your Law says about the penalties for evasion, or attempted evasion of the E.O.L.”

“Hardly. The penalty shall be loss of years and any superfluity in the penalty shall be carried out, at the discretion of the court, on the wife and or children of the offender.”

“And you could lose up to one hundred years, Matt. You can afford only six. That leaves a possible superfluity of ninety-four to share out. A stem measure. It had to be stem, remember, to make this law for all people, all classes.”

“I remember saying it, Prime Minister. It was a foolish thing to say, but at least you cannot turn it to use against me. My wife has been dead for eighteen years. We had no children. It is me you must deal with. Alone. Good day.”

Matlock was almost through the door this time when Browning’s voice made him turn again.

“Look at the screen, Matt. Just once more.”

The entire wall was filled with the picture. Projected on it were two documents. The lights in the room were too bright to let the writing on them be immediately legible.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Browning. “Can’t you see properly?”

He waved his hand and the lights dimmed once more.

“There we are. Can you see now?”

Matlock could see, but he could not understand. The blood seemed to be bubbling through the veins at the side of his forehead and a line of sweat arched across his upper lip.

The top document was a certificate of marriage, dated three years earlier, between himself and Lizzie Armstrong, Spinster.

The lower one was a birth-certificate dated forty years previously. The parents were named as Matthew Matlock and Edna Carswell. The child was a boy. Named Ernst.

The documents faded and were replaced by two faces. Lizzie and Ernst, smiling out at him.

“They can afford about seventy between them. That’s what we’re bargaining about, Matt,” said Browning. “Off you go now. Just think things over. See you soon.”

Matlock stumbled through the door.