World Without Children

I

THE last diapers were in museums, along with teething rings, layettes, formula bottles, perambulators, rattles and teddy bears. Swings and trapezes, slides and jungle gyms had been broken up for scrap. The books, most of them, had been junked: Baby and Child Care, Black Beauty, Obstetrics for the Millions, Tom Swift and his Rocket Glider, What Every Boy Should Know, What Every Girl Should Know, Diseases of Childhood, The Book of Knowledge, Manners for Teeners, One Hundred Things a Boy Can Make.

The last recorded birth had been two hundred years ago.

That child—who had also been the last to wear a snowsuit, the last to cut his finger playing with knives, and the last to learn about women—had now reached the physiological age of twenty-five years, and looked even younger owing to his excellent condition. His name was George Miller; he had been a great curiosity in his day and a good many people still referred to him as The Child.

George did his best to live up to the name. Everything he did was essentially outré; everything he wore was outlandish; everything he said was outrageous. He got along better with most women than with most men. He said the sort of things to women that made them say, “Oh, George!” half wincing, half melting.

At the moment he was busy explaining to Lily Hoffman, head of the Human Conservation League, why he had never permanently given up drinking or smoking.

“Oh, George,” said Lily.

“No, really,” said George earnestly. “You say having fun will take ten per cent off my life. Well, but Art Levinson tells me that my present life expectancy is probably somewhere around three thousand years. So if he’s right, and you’re right, my disgraceful habits won’t catch up to me until 5062 A.D. and by that time I expect to be glad enough to lie down.”

Lily tilted her careful blonde curls forward to avoid a drink in the hand of a wandering guest. “That’s an average, George,” she said. “And of course it’s only a guess, because nobody who’s had the longevity treatments early in life has passed away from old age yet. Now I personally believe that it’s possible to live for ten thousand years or more. And, George, just suppose you did pass away in 5062 from overindulgence, and the very next year they found a way to extend the life-span even more!”

“Good Lord,” said George, looking distressed. “That would be a laugh on me, wouldn’t it?”

“Really, George, this is a serious—”

George put his hand on her arm. “You’re right,” he said, with fervor. “I might be throwing away the best centuries of my life. I’ll stop this very minute.” He took a beautifully chased silver cigarette case out of his breast pocket and emptied it into his hand. “If you’ll excuse me,” he said, rising, “I’ll go and throw these in the fireplace so as not to be tempted.”

She called after him, “George, stick to it. That’s the important thing. You’ve quit before, you know.”

“I know,” said George humbly.

Carrying the cigarettes at arm’s length, as if they were a clutch of poisonous serpents, he maneuvered his slender body among the standing, sitting and perambulating guests until he reached the fireplace.

“Hello, Luther,” he said to a gray-haired, comfortably plump man wearing rimless spectacles. “I’m enjoying your party.” He dropped the cigarettes ceremoniously behind a charred log.

“Again?” asked Luther Wheatley amiably.

“Lily talked me into it,” George told him. “You ought to try virtue some time, Luther. It gives you a sort of intense feeling, an I-am-the-master-of-my-fate kind of thing. Besides, it’s an inexhaustible source of conversation. And then when you finally succumb, you have such a delightful sense of wickedness. I think everybody ought to abstain from everything once in a while, just to keep from taking it for granted.”

“George,” said Luther, frowning in concentration, “I believe that is the same discovery that you first announced to me when you were about twenty-three. How do you manage to - shall I say—keep your mind so fresh?”

“How do you manage to remember every damned thing I’ve said over the course of a hundred and fifty-odd years?” George countered irritably.

“You always say the same thing.” One of Luther’s cats wandered by, and Luther stooped to pick it up. It was a pretty thing marked like a Siamese, but with long, light fur. It stared at Luther with offended dignity and mad a noise in its throat.

“Haven’t seen that one before, have I?” George asked.

“No. She’s a distant descendant of Mimi, though—sixteen generations removed. You remember Mimi.”

“I do, indeed. A great cat. Luther. You weren’t worthy of her. Pity they’re so short-lived, isn’t it?”

“That’s why I like them,” Luther said, letting the cat drip from his hands like golden taffy. “People are so inconveniently permanent… . Art! Is that you? I thought you were in Pasadena for the season.”

A stocky, owl-faced man with a shining bald pate put his hand on Wheatley’s shoulder. “I flew in especially to see you, Luther,” he said. “Hello, George. You, too.” He shook hands with them in turn. “Can we go somewhere and talk? It’s important. Is Morey here?”

Luther peered across the room.“ He’s around somewhere.” He stopped a man carrying a tray of cocktail glasses and said, “Find Mr. Stiles for me, will you? Tell him I’d like to see him in my study.” He took the owlish man’s arm and gently propelled him toward the door, leaving George to trail along. “How are you, you dog-robber? How are the famous Levinson fruit-flies?”

“How are the cats?”

“Esthetically rewarding, which is more than I can say for your noxious pets.”

Luther opened the study door and ushered them in. It was an almost fanatically tidy place, like the rest of Luther’s apartment. There was a small window looking out on the roof-tops of Venice; the Rio Foscari was on the opposite side of the building. There were a desk, a work table, an easy chair and two straight chairs. The walls were covered with shelves of books: mostly history and genetics, with the usual peppering of salty novels.

Two cats were in the easy chair, one in each of the straight chairs, and one asleep on the table.

“Dump them off,” said Luther, setting an example and easing himself into the one comfortable chair. “You can sit on the table, George—you’ve got the youngest and most resilient ligaments.”

A man with the long, cartilagenous face of an honest son of toil appeared in the doorway. His collar was too big and too stiff, his tie creased and askew, and his short iron-gray hair was fiercely rumpled like a eagle’s nest. He looked as if he might bite, until he smiled; then he looked unexpectedly shy and friendly.

His voice was a subdued rumble: “Hello, Art. Glad to see you. What’s the bad news?”

“It’s bad, all right,” said Levinson. His round face was serious as he bit off the end of a cigar with a quick, nervous gesture. “Shut the door, will you, Morey?”

He looked at the unlit cigar and put it down. “Listen,” he said, “I could build up to this gradually and spare your nerves, but I haven’t got the patience. I found out something last week that scared me to my toenails.” He stopped and glanced at each of them. They seemed impressed. George did, too, but grim seriousness always impressed him. It made him feel uncomfortable enough to want to drive it off with a facetious remark, but before he had a chance to think of one, Luther said to Levinson, “You really are upset, Art, and that’s something you don’t do easily.” He looked just above George’s head. “Are you sure we’re the ones you want to tell?”

“Now look here,” George said, beginning to get angry. “I may be the youngest of you, but I’m not a kid to be—”

“I wanted George here,” Levinson interrupted. “He is younger, and because of that he’s inclined to be less stodgy. Also, he has more of the adventurousness of youth, and that may be damned important.”

George sat back, compressing his lips and giving one emphatic nod.

“What scared you, Art?” asked Stiles.

Levinson broke the cigar with bitter abruptness. “The human race,” he said bluntly, “is nine-tenths sterile.”

The others looked at him in shocked silence. George glanced around, saw that nobody else was ready to speak, and asked, “How did you find out?”

“Restocking my sperm and ova banks,” said Levinson. “I’ve been keeping them for a good many years, you may remember. There are a lot of men and women living today who have never had children. Good stock—stock we’ll need when and if the race starts breeding again, and yet any one of those people might get killed in an accident and we’d lose it. So I’ve been keeping up the banks, though I never thought I’d see them used for another couple of thousand years. But nine out of ten donors are now sterile.”

“You checked?” asked Luther.

“Naturally. I’ve got samples from North and South America, from Europe, Asia, Africa. All the same. There it is — we’re standing on top of the last slide down to hell.”

Stiles looked puzzled. He said, “How do you know it’s going to get worse, Art?”

“It’s that kind of thing—a progressive change. Morphological deterioration. Sperm with two tails, three tails, no tail, or all but motionless. Ova that can’t be fertilized. I’ve made some tentative charts. I haven’t got enough data yet for accuracy, but the breakdown seems to begin in men who are physiologically at least forty and chronologically at least three hundred. In women, a little earlier. That includes damn near everybody. I’m not kidding, Morey. In five to ten years more, there won’t be enough viable stock left to start the human race again.”

“Have you got any idea what’s causing it, Art?” George asked.

“Only the obvious one — it’s just one more side effect of longevity. You know that in gross terms what the treatments do is to slow down your catabolic rate. In about fifty years, in other words, you age about as much as you would naturally in one year. At first it was thought that that was all the treatments did, but we know better now. We have the expected increase in ‘diseases of the aged’—kidneys, heart, liver, arteriosclerosis, calcium deposits and so on—but we also have a rash of things nobody figured on. Cancer, for instance, came close to wiping out the race until they licked it at the Gandhi Center about two hundred years ago. Then there’s an unexpected drop in resistance to respiratory infections along about age-of-record 250. And now this.”

“What have you done about it?” asked Stiles. “You talk to anybody in the government?”

“Sure.” Levinson picked up a fresh cigar and bit into it savagely. “I talked to Van Dam, the Public Health Commissioner, after sitting around his office for three days, and he took it up with President Golightly. He brought me back Golightly’s answer. Here it is.”

He took a folded piece of paper out of his vest pocket.

“ ‘Thank you for your interesting report, which I am turning over to the appropriate department for further study. In reply to your question, resumption of wholesale breeding at this time would be prejudicial to world peace and security, and no such measure will be entertained until all other avenues have been exhausted.’ ”

He stuffed the note back into his pocket.

“What about those other avenues, Art?” asked Stiles.

“Nonexistent. There is no known cure for morphological sterility in men or women, and not even a promising line of research. We’ve got to start breeding, that’s all. No way out of it. But that trained-seal department of Golightly’s will kick the problem around for ten, twenty, fifty years. By that time we might as well start carving our own monuments. Prejudicial to world peace and security,” he added bitterly.

Stiles scratched his ear, looking mournful. “It would kick up kind of a rumpus, Art,” he said, “He’s right there.”

Levinson turned on him. “Try to see a little further than your own union for once, Morey. Would you let the whole blasted race die just to preserve the shortage of masons?”

” ’Tain’t only that,” said Stiles, unruffled. “We’d be ready for another war as soon as the population got big enough, for one thing.”

“Let’s have a couple of more voices here,” said Levinson. “Luther, any comment?”

Luther sighed. “Shall I get out my checkbook now, Art, or do you want me. to wait until I’ve liquidated some of my holdings?”

Levinson shrugged at him. “It’s going to cost you, all right,” he agreed. “All three of you. We’ll need about three hundred thousand credits to start. More later.”

“Much more, Art?” Luther queried.

“Plenty. We’ve got to set up at least half a dozen birth centers, each equipped to handle upward of a thousand children and meet all their needs, if necessary, over a twenty-year period. We’ll build the centers, or buy and adapt them. They’ve got to be in out-of-the-way places and adequately camouflaged to fool the Security Police. We’ve got to staff them, service them, arrange for protection—and we’ve got to do it fast.” He looked at each of them in turn. “I know that all three of you are worth several million apiece.. I may want all of it before we’re through.”

There was a short silence. Then Stiles coughed and looked apologetic. “Let’s just clear up a few points, Art. One thing, it seems to me that this cloak-and-dagger stuff is unnecessary. Why not take it to the people? Force the Golightly gang to repeal the birth prohibition?”

Levinson said, “You’ve done some publicity, Morey. How long do you think it would take to put such a program over, on a worldwide scale?”

Stiles frowned. “A year, maybe… He winced comically. “All right, all right, I know what you’re going to say. It would take Golightly just about twenty-four hours to throw us all in pokey. I was just stalling on that one, I guess. But here’s another thing, Art. As I get it, you’re figuring on six thousand kids or more in the first generation. Why so many?”

“Simply because I’m afraid we won’t be able to do much better. If we could manage a million, we still couldn’t save all the useful, strains that are still viable. It’s like this, Morey: Suppose there are only five men and five women in the world. Each one has some quality that the others don’t in his heredity. One has mechanical ingenuity, another one leadership, another one artistic imagination, and so on. If one of those couples fails to reproduce, there are two qualities gone forever. Multiply that by a billion and there’s our problem.”

He waved his cigar at Stiles’s nose. “Don’t forget, we’re down to ten per cent of our stock already. The best we can hope to do is to patch together some kind of crude imitation of the human race, and hope it will work. If we manage to save homo sap at all; we’ll be damned lucky.”

Stiles leaned forward, elbows on knees, and laced his big fingers together. “Art, I don’t know—” he said slowly.

George, who was facing the door, saw it open a crack. He said quietly, “We have visitors.”

As the others turned, the door swung open all the way. A woman with coppery hair piled around the merest sketch or suggestion of a hat was leaning into the room with her slender hand on the doorknob. George caught a glimpse of someone standing behind her, and then, smiling brilliantly, she was advancing toward them like a minor natural catastrophe.

“There you all are,” she said happily. “Hiding! Did you think I wasn’t coming, Luther? Art, when did you get into town? Why didn’t you call me? Morey, you’re looking as eatable as ever. George, darling,” she finished, and patted him on the cheek.

The four of them were standing, even Luther, who normally made getting out of a chair a ceremony. George found his heart going at an unusual rate. Glancing at the others, he conjectured that they all felt the came symptoms as far as the state of their arteries would permit. Luther and Art were beaming, and Morey’s grin was a little more shy than usual. Hilda Place affected men like that—all men, as far as George had been able to discover.

She had enormous brilliant eyes, with faint bluish shadows under them, the eyes of a mature and knowing woman; but her lips had the softness of youth. Her slender body was covered from throat to wrist and calf by her dark green dress. Hilda preferred not to expose herself in public; she had never worn the showcase gowns that were currently fashionable.

Accepting their greetings, she gave each of them a kiss on the cheek. All except George. While he was still telling himself that it was absurd for this to matter so much to him, she had turned and brought a stranger into the group.

“I want you all to meet Joseph Krueger,” she said gaily. “He’s the most fascinating man in the world, and I want everybody to remember that I discovered him. Gentlemen, this is the Man From the Past!”

The Man From the Past looked as young as George; he was well set up, but had a curious awkwardness about him, a coltish uncertainty. He had a large chin, mild eyes behind dark-rimmed spectacles, and an engaging smile. George, despite a stab of jealousy, decided that he liked him.

“I’m not a time traveler or anything,” Krueger was saying. “That’s only Miss Place’s exaggeration. I’m an amnesiac, they tell me. I found myself standing on a street corner in Vienna two weeks ago, and the last thing I remember before that was having a drink in Wichita, Kansas, in December, 1953. So I’m amusingly ignorant, as Miss Place puts it.”

“Astonishing,” said Levinson. “Isn’t it?” said Hilda delightedly. Her parted lips were moist. “This is all new to him. He drinks it in like a man from Mars — about the world government, and what happened to New York, and G-string parties—”

“And people hundreds of years old,” Krueger put in. “That, mostly.”

Levinson was still pursuing his own thought. “You lived under amnesia for better than three centuries, then,” he said. “That must be a record. You have no idea what you were doing all that time, I suppose?”

Krueger shook his head. “No, sir. I’ve made inquiries, of course, but there was nothing in my pockets that gave any clue, and apparently I didn’t live in Vienna; I couldn’t find anybody who knew me there. Actually, I don’t mind very much—I feel like what Miss Place calls me, the Man From the Past. I’m having a time just trying to catch up.”

“We’ve been to see the Peace Monument, and Chico’s, and the Doges’ Palace—”

“And the pretty girls on the Lido,” added Krueger, widening his grin.

“—and we’re still not half done. I’m exhausted,” Hilda said. “And I’ve got to disappear for a few weeks on business, so I hope some of you will find time to show Joseph the sights. Not you, Luther. I know you never go out. And, Art, I suppose you’re running back to your fruit-flies. But Morey? Or George?”

Krueger looked uncomfortable. “I don’t want to be any bother.”

“Not at all,” said George sympathetically. “You’re a novelty, you know, and that’s a rare thing after the first hundred years or so. Have you got any notion where you’d like to go next, or is it all too new?”

“Too new, I’m afraid. But any place I haven’t seen yet would be fine with me, as long as I’m no trouble.”

“I’ll work out an itinerary and Call you,” said George. “Let me have your address and number.”

Luther said, “Meanwhile, shall we go mingle with the populace? I’ve got to, anyway. Some of them would probably recognize me if they saw me and will be hurt if they don’t.” He offered his arm to Hilda and they started out. He turned at the door to ask Levinson, “You’re staying the night at least, aren’t you. Art? Good. We’ll all get together again a little later.”

George exchanged a few more words with Krueger, introduced him to three beautiful women, and wandered off looking for Hilda.

He found her in the middle of a tight group near the end of the room where dancing was being attempted to the strains of Luther’s music-library outlet, and wormed his way in to her.

“Dance with me?” he asked hopefully.

“Of course, George,” she said, and a reluctant lane opened for them. Then her lithe warm body was in his arms, and the ridiculous gilded feathers on her hat were tickling his ear.

“I rather like your Joe,” he said.

“I’m glad. Isn’t he delicious?” Her breath warmed the side of his neck.

“Haven’t kissed him,” said George. “I’ll have to take your word for it.”

Somehow, without seeming to withdraw deliberately, she no longer was quite so close to him.

“Sorry, ” he said.“That slipped.”

“I didn’t like it,” she told him, “but I think I’ll forgive you, because I like you so much. Actually, though, you’re wrong. Joseph is one man I’m absolutely certain I shall never have an affair with.”

“That’s not much comfort,” George said grumpily. “It seems to make two of us—Joseph and me.”

She smiled up at him. “As if it matters, darling. There are so many women in the world.”

“But it’s you I want.”

“For the moment.”

He stared in astonishment at her softly laughing eyes. “Well, good Lord, you don’t think it should be forever, do you? I mean monogamy was all very well for a short-lived human race, but—”

“Don’t be silly, George. Nobody could stand one mate for what may be centuries or even more. It’s a horrifying thought.”

“Then what are you trying to tell me?” he challenged.

“I’m very fond of you; you know that. And I’m very pleased and flattered that you want me.”

“Then why not—”

She seemed almost embarrassed. “I don’t know just how to put it, darling. If it’s just me you want, when there are so many other women, then it’s an obsession and you ought to see an analyst.”

“But I said it wasn’t that. Really, Hilda, this is all very damaging to my self-esteem. I’m not sure I want to know your objection to me, but I’m afraid I must. What is it?”

She turned still pinker and looked away. “It’s idiotic, George. You probably won’t understand it; I don’t think I do, myself.” She turned her face up defiantly. “I feel—motherly toward you.”

“Motherly?” he repeated, stunned. “But that’s nonsense! You wouldn’t know how a mother feels! None of us would—I mean women, of course — any more than I know what it’s like to feel fatherly.”

“But I’m so much older than you.”

“Well, who isn’t?”

“You see, I said you wouldn’t understand,” she answered sadly, then tugged his arm with sudden desperate gaiety toward the bar. “Let’s forget all this sociological argument, George. I want a drink.”

So did he, George realized.