The Man in the Tree

The woman on the other side leaned over, spilling her Martini on Hamilton's knee. "Oh, sorry," she said. "But after all, Reggie, what's wrong with six billion people?"

Hamilton looked at her. "We can't feed that many," he said. "Even if we could, can we feed twice as many? Fifteen billion in twenty fifty? What about twenty-four billion? If we don't reduce our population ourselves, something else will reduce it for us."

"What might that be?"

"War. Famine. Plague."

"How grim." The woman got up, swaying a little, and called to a man across the room. "Donald, haven't you got any good records?"

"You see," said Hamilton, "they won't listen. I think it's the most extraordinary thing."

"Well, she's drunk," Gene said.

"Yes, but you're not, and you're not really listening either, are you?"

"Did you say you'd published a book about this?"

"Yes. It sold two thousand copies in England. There were more babies born than that on the day of publication. The main culprit," he went on, "is modern medicine. If you wanted to do something useful for humanity, you could go back in a time machine and kill Pasteur."

"Are you serious?"

"Oh, absolutely. Until the end of the nineteenth century there was really no effective medicine for anything. Doctors weren't healers especially, they were diagnosticians -- their job was to identify the malady and tell the patient what to expect. Apart from that, and a lot of nostrums that didn't work, they just did palliative things -- sent people on ocean voyages, and so on. Well, in the twentieth century we've wiped out one disease after another, and the result is that there is no effective check on population. But people are breeding pretty much the way they always have, and you see the ghastly result. You're, what, about twenty?"

"Twenty-four."

"Well, with reasonable luck, you'll live long enough to see the big smash. I put it about ten years into the new century. We can't go on as we are much longer than that."

"You'd rather see people die of things like cholera, and typhoid?"

"It's not a question of wanting people to die. We're all going to die. The question is how many. People are going to die of plague and famine and war. The longer we put it off, the worse it will be."

"What's the answer, then? Birth control, education?"

"Yes. The only answer, except the three I mentioned."

"Will it work?"

After a moment Hamilton put his envelope away in his pocket. "No. Probably not. But one's got to try."

One spring in Rome, when Claudina was there, she took him to see an extraordinary exhibit. It was not in a gallery but in a cellar hired for the occasion, under an abandoned brewery. From the lobby where they bought their tickets they went down a steep flight of stairs into an unpleasant earth-smelling gloom. An attendant held a curtain open. "Per favore." Beyond the curtain they found themselves in a long, high chamber with a wooden hand-rail running down the middle. The only light came from dim hooded lamps aimed diagonally upward from the floor. Above each of these lights, as their eyes began to adjust, they could see a monstrous incomprehensible shape projecting from the wall. As they moved slowly down the room, each figure in turn became clearer. There were five: a king and a queen in tenth-century costume, a goat-horned demon, a nude and obese woman with a hood concealing her face, a hawk-headed image of the god Horus. The figures were carved of some grainless wood, stained red-brown; each one sat on a carved throne fixed to the wall, not upright but projecting horizontally, so that the vast malignant faces stared downward; and the figures were so massive, so arrogant in their perverse gravity that Gene and Claudina felt a kind of vertigo, as if they themselves, not the carved figures, were standing impossibly on a wall.