serious – indeed they liked seriousness – but they hated a hint of any sort of emotional overtone to all this. And before he could frame a reply, the multi-coloured Alice again took on the role of smoothing things over.
‘But if you don’t budge and he doesn’t budge,’ she said, ‘then you will both go on manufacturing those ghastly things. And bankrupting yourselves in the process. For the expense is astronomical, isn’t it?’
‘Certainly it is.’ Juniper followed this up briskly. ‘Killing people gets more and more expensive century by century, and war by war. And when you break down the cost of nuclear fission you get some quite fantastic results. Advertising vacant appointments, for instance. Getting the right man for a moderately senior job often costs £8,000, that way alone.’
Arthur Ferris laughed. ‘It would be bad if getting an assistant master cost that, sir.’
‘My dear Ferris, I’d regard it as a facer if it cost a thousandth part of it. Even for somebody who can teach mathematics with an eye on Rugby – and I assure you they’re much the hardest to get hold of.’
‘And it could all be spent on medical research,’ Alice said. ‘Or on getting millions of people in what Toby calls obscure corners of the world up at least to something near the bread line.’
‘They’d only breed faster,’ Gavin said.
‘That’s where medical research would come in.’ Alice hesitated for a fraction of a second. ‘Contraception’s no good as it is – not among primitive peoples. But if you can manage it orally, the old Malthusian nightmare is solved.’
Everybody started talking at once. And Juniper, who knew that his nerves hadn’t been too good of late, was suddenly aware that he was almost in a queer way. For, quite out of the blue, he felt affection for these young people – and felt guilty about them too. He liked the small boys at Splaine Croft – he just wouldn’t be there if he didn’t – but the shades of their prison house were still far off. These young men and women were, so to speak, just ready to be tumbled in. For a still moment, while the chatter ran on, Juniper sat back and wondered what fool or blackguard had made the world into which the tumbling must be done.
It was Toby’s voice that brought him back to an awareness of the course of the argument. ‘So if people must be killed,’ Toby was saying, ‘there’s everything to be said for doing the job cheaply. It comes to that. Back to Tamburlaine and Genghis Khan.’
‘But there’s also much to be said for doing it with discrimination,’ Juniper said. ‘High explosive wasn’t too bad there. If you dropped it from Zeppelins’ – he paused for a moment, wondering if any of his hearers would be very clear about what a Zeppelin was – ‘or torpedoed it into a passenger liner, you were at least still more or less taking aim. And even if you blockaded a whole nation, you presumably knew what you were about – if that indeed can be called knowledge, which is, presumably, unaccompanied by imaginative realization.’ He paused again, aware that there was a real stillness in the railway compartment. ‘But the hydrogen bomb is, of course, quite simply madness. It’s spectacularly effective – just as would be some contrivance for ensuring that the earth should fall into the sun. It’s indiscriminate to that degree. We bankrupt ourselves, as one of you said, to manufacture something which must destroy us if put into use. So cheap ways of indiscriminate slaughter would be a little more rational. And cheap ways of very large-scale but yet controllable slaughter would be more rational still. A relative rationality, of course. Considering the whole thing entirely as an inside job.’
There was silence. ‘An inside job?’ somebody asked.
‘Inside the madhouse. My generation are all inside. We’re trapped into making all our calculations as if an outside didn’t exist. Your generation has the job of breaking out,
Chris Adrian, Eli Horowitz