Gould nodded encouragingly. ‘It’s not deformed at all — any more than Carmen. It’s like the so-called population decline that we’ve all accepted as an obvious truth. In fact, there hasn’t been a decline — except in the sense that we’ve been slaughtering our offspring. Over the past fifty years the birth-rate has gone up, not down.’ Before Forrester could protest, he went on, ‘Try for a moment to retain an open mind — we have this vastly increased sexuality, and an unprecedented fertility. Even your wife has had — what — seven children. Yet why? Isn’t it obvious that we were intended to embark on a huge replacement programme, though sadly the people we’re replacing turn out to be ourselves. Our job is simply to repopulate the world with our successors. As for our need to be alone, this intense enjoyment of our own company, and the absence of any sense of despair, I suppose they’re all nature’s way of saying goodbye.’
‘And the runway?’ Forrester asked. ‘Is that your way of saying goodbye?’
A month later, as soon as Judith had recovered from the birth of her son, she and Forrester left Rosas to return to Geneva, After they had made their farewells to Se–or Cervera and his wife, Forrester drove the car along the beach road. It was 11 a.m., but Gould’s aircraft still stood on the airstrip. For some reason the doctor was late.
‘It’s a long drive — are you going to be well enough?’ he asked Judith.
‘Of course — I’ve never felt better.’ She settled herself in the seat. It seemed to Forrester that a kind of shutter had been lowered across her mind, hiding away all memories of the past months. She looked composed and relaxed again, but with the amiable and fixed expression of a display-window mannequin.
‘Did you pay off the practicante?’ she asked. ‘They expect something extra for..
Forrester was gazing up at the faades of the Venus hotels. He remembered the evening of the birth, and the practicante carrying his son away from Se–ora Cervera. The district nurse had taken it for granted that he would be given the task of destroying the child. As Forrester stopped the Spaniard by the elevator he found himself wondering where the man would have killed it — in some alley behind the cheaper hotels at the rear of the town, or in any one of a thousand vacant bathrooms. But when Forrester had taken the child, careful not to look at its eyes, the practicante had not objected, only offering Forrester his surgical bag.
Forrester had declined. After the practicante had left, and before Se–ora Cervera returned to the lobby, he set off through the dark streets to the canal. He had put on again the silver jacket he had worn on the day when Gould had flown him into the mountains. As he crossed the bridge the young woman emerged from the hangar, almost invisible in her dark shawl. Forrester walked towards her, listening to the faint clicking and murmurs of the strong child. He pressed the infant into her hands and turned back to the canal, throwing away his jacket as he ran.
While they drove along the line of hotels to the Figueras road Forrester heard the sounds of the aircraft. Gould was climbing into the cockpit, about to warm up the engine before take-off.
‘I never really understood him,’ Judith commented. ‘What was he up to in the mountains?’
‘I don’t know — some obsession of his.’
During a brief storm two nights earlier another section of the runway had collapsed. But Forrester knew that Gould would go on flying to the end, driving his herd higher into the mountains, until they no longer needed him and the day had come to take off for the last time.
During the spring and summer of 1980 an extraordinary rumour began to sweep the world. At first confined to government and scientific circles in Washington, London and Moscow, it soon spread through Africa, South America and the Far East, and among people in all walks of life, from Australian sheep-farmers to Tokyo nightclub hostesses and stockbrokers on the Paris Bourse. Rarely a day passed without the rumour reaching the front pages of at least a dozen newspapers around the world.
In a few countries, notably Canada and Brazil, the persistence of the rumour caused a dangerous drop in commodity prices, and firm denials were issued by the governments of the day. At the United Nations headquarters in New York the SecretaryGeneral appointed a committee of prominent scientists, churchmen and business leaders with the sole purpose of restraining the excitement which the rumour was beginning to generate by the late spring. This, of course, simply convinced everyone that something of universal significance would soon be disclosed.
