The Stilled Patter
By JAMES E. GUNN
Illustrated by STALLMAN
The age-old battle of the sexes
may yet be the deadliest of all!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Infinity Science Fiction, June 1956.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
George Washington was the father of his country.
I am not George Washington. My name is Andrew Jones, and it is becauseof me there will be no more Joneses in the world. There will be, infact, no more anybody.
This is the end of the world.
It did not come through fire or ice, with a bang or a whimper, fromsolar catastrophe or man's suicidal mis-use of atomic power or anyof the other fearful possibilities with which the Sunday-supplementwriters once terrified us. It came through the exposure of an age-oldconspiracy.
I did it. My excuse is the eternal excuse of the scientist: I soughtthe truth. How it was used was not my concern.
But that it should have led to the depopulation of the Earth concernsme, as it must concern every man, and I have an unshakable feeling ofguilt.
Perhaps I write this now in the hope that I may somehow purge myself. Iknow that it will never be read.
The linen wick gutters in the saucer of melted tallow. It casts strangeshadows on the cellar wall. Sometimes I think that they are the ghostsof children come to haunt me, the ghosts of all the little children whowill never be born.
But this is not what I sat down to write while I waited for Lindsay toreturn. What is keeping Lindsay? He should be back by now.
I will begin again.
My name is Andrew Jones, and today, by my figures, is October 3, 1969.The weather is turning cold here, and soon we must go looking foranother hiding place. My joints are getting old; the damp has seepedinto them. I long for the year-long warmth of California or Florida,but those areas are still crowded and deadly.
Someone would recognize me.
I think we will try a powerhouse again this winter. Often they havesupplies of coal large enough to last us through the cold weatherwithout extra foraging.
Cataclysm began in 1954, June 13 to be exact. That was the day mysecond child was born, a boy we named Kevin.
It is surprising that a man who was the father of two children shouldaccuse himself of depopulating the Earth. And yet it is because I wasthe father of two children that it happened.
Pre-natal care of mothers and post-natal care of infants weresubjects of compelling interest in those days, arriving monthly inthe burgeoning women's magazines and annually in the proliferouschild-care manuals. Pediatricians and mothers besieged parents withadvice, and we consumed everything with catholic appetite: logical,illogical, sensible, insensible, nonsensical, self-contradictory.
They kept us on our toes, strung as taut as Stradivarius violins,afraid to act for fear we would do the wrong thing, afraid not to actfor fear inaction would be disastrous. Pediatricians and mothers,always the same authors. Never were there any articles on the care ofmother and child by a father, only by what I came to think of as thevested interests.
I was slow, I admit; but what father has not been slow? Who, if he hadnot been slow, would be a father?
The books and the articles would have been troublesome enough if theinformation they imparted had been accurate. But slowly I became awarethat they were subtly interwoven with mis-statements.