Matlock, with a cool wave to the onlookers, stepped into the launch which swept away up river.
“It is not impossible that this incident as much as anything else turned the tide for Matlock,” said the voice. “It has been suggested that Matlock himself arranged it. Whatever the truth, it created a breathing space. Matlock’s next step was a mammoth statistical attack upon his opponents. The main burden of his arguments was that ...”
The voice droned on, the pictures flickered by. Matlock neither saw nor heard. A voice in his head and a picture behind his eyes were much clearer, much closer.
Population had outstripped production. The causes were partly inefficient management, partly a steadily increasing birthrate, but principally the rapidly decreasing mortality rate. The country was top-heavy. He was not rationing children, he was not denying the right to procreate. He was giving the old a term to their years; an equal term for rich and poor, great and small; he was offering what could be a great boon to mankind — the chance to know the moment of one’s end and the chance to meet it with dignity and serenity.
He was proposing that every man, woman and child in the country should be fitted with a heart clock; a minute device, fixed in the main valve of the heart, which at the end of a determined number of years, would stop.
Euthanasia had been legalized eight years earlier. It was now an accepted part of the nation’s life.
The heart clock involved a kind of economic euthanasia.
What a phrase! gibed Matlock bitterly to himself. How they had all liked it. Or nearly all.
“Let us, as we have so often done in past centuries, let us lead the world to a new kind of freedom and prosperity. And let us show that we are aware that true freedom is only possible through voluntary restriction; and true prosperity is the fruit of democratic sacrifice.”
His thought bitter and self-mocking, had joined in perfect timing with the voice, youthful and vibrant, from his face on the screen. He covered his ears and closed his eyes, careless of the eyes he knew were watching him.
When he looked at the screen again, he was lying naked on a table and a knife was cutting into his chest.
The film was well edited, the whole sequence here took only five minutes.
This had been his final card, of course. This had been his greatest gamble.
The Age Bill had not yet been voted on. Opposition throughout the country, though slackening off, was still considerable. And within the ranks of the Unirads themselves there was not enough certainty of support to guarantee the vote.
So Matlock presented the most bizarre Party Political Broadcast ever. It consisted of live coverage of himself undergoing the first heart-clock operation. Recorded television surgery was a commonplace; open-heart surgery, heart transplants, these were as familiar as visits to the dentist had been in mid-century. But this was something new and had hitherto uncontemplated audience appeal. Ninety- eight per cent of the television sets in the country were tuned in to the operation that February night.
The operation went smoothly, smartly. The programme ended with Matlock opening his eyes in the recovery room. Blinking in bewilderment at the camera for a second. Then with a faint smile saying into the microphone, “That’s all it is, ladies and gentlemen. I will bid you good-night now. I must get some sleep. I have a hard day in the House tomorrow.”
His car had driven to Westminster the following morning between cheering crowds such as had not been seen since the crowning of the King.
His reception in the Commons was not so unanimously applaudatory. The Leader of the Opposition congratulated him on his recovery, then enquired what part of Matlock’s anatomy they could hope to see dissected in the next episode.
When the laughter had died away, it was Carswell, not Matlock, who stood up to reply. His speech was short, but it stunned the Opposition, and a great many members of the Government too. This was too important a matter for a Government with such a small majority to push through, Carswell said. (Cries of “hear, hear,” from the Opposition.) Therefore he thought it best that the people should themselves give the answer, and consequently he had formally requested the King to dissolve Parliament.
There had been uproar, Matlock recalled. For a man who had been calling on the Government to resign since it came into being, the Leader of the Opposition looked remarkably displeased.
The rest was history. This became the biggest single-issue election campaign ever. Matlock’s teams were superbly drilled. No one not wholly and publicly committed to the Age Bill was put forward as a Unirad candidate. The country, in love with the hero-figure of Matlock and readily reacting to the appeal to self-interest implicit in the Bill (for all those under sixty anyway), returned the Unirads to power with a majority so large that the Government’s side of Chamber could not seat all its members.
On the screen appeared the film of that first re-assembling of Parliament. Matlock saw himself entering the House, heard the great roar of applause which greeted him, saw himself advancing to his place on the front bench with a slight deprecatory smile on his face. Then the film stopped and held his face there quite still, until suddenly it began to expand and spread out till it covered the whole wall. Till the pores of his skin pitted his face like the craters of the moon. Till only his mouth was visible, vast, canyon-like, but still holding that vilely modest smile.
Then it stopped. And the lights went on.
“Hello Matt,” said Browning from behind him. “Hope you’re enjoying the show?”
He must have slipped in in the dark. He had certainly gone out earlier. Matlock wondered how long he had been back.
“It has some historical interest,” he said in reply.
“Yes, hasn’t it? Great days, those. Great days. I think there are a lot of Unirads today, the young ones especially, who don’t realize how much we owe you.”
“Perhaps you’d like me to do a lecture tour?”
Browning roared with laughter.
“No, Matt. I think we’ll leave it to the historians eh? Look Matt, what I’ve been trying to do with this film is to remind you of what you once were. It was you who created the modem Unirad Party, Matt. You attack us and slander us, but we’re your creation. When I was a lad in my teens and just getting interested in politics, it was you whom I took as my model. You were held up to me as the greatest thing that had happened to this country since Churchill.”
“So we have had a nostalgic stroll down memory lane, Prime Minister. With the heat full on. It’s been very interesting. I think I must go now.”
Browning put on his mock-penitent look.
“I’m sorry about the heat. One of the Psychi boys suggested it. Said it would lower your resistance. Bloody tom-fool idea it sounded to me. I know the only way to destroy your resistance is by reason, Matt, boy.”
Matlock again was almost taken aback by Browning’s frankness; then he shook his head and sighed heavily, a trifle histrionically.
“You were right, Prime Minister, we don’t meet often enough nowadays. I find myself at times tottering on the brink of trusting you.”
“Oh you can, Matt. You can. You must. Look, I’ll be frank. We’re in a spot of bother. Nothing really. Just a bit of shoaly water. But till we get over it I’d like you back in the Government. You can be sitting in the Cabinet tomorrow. It’ll take three weeks to get you elected, though. We can’t hurry the next by-election. But that doesn’t matter. It’s a safe seat. They’re all safe seats since you got us going, eh?”
Matlock found himself joining in the man’s laughter. There didn’t seem anything else to do somehow. Browning stopped first and Matlock found himself laughing alone. The sound seemed thin and reedy beside the echoes of Browning’s deep-throated guffaws.