“So you’ll do it?” said Browning.
“No,” said Matlock. “But I’ll stop till the end of the show. You’ve got me that interested.”
“That’s a start. What are your terms?”
“What’s the hurry? Indeed, why do you want me at all? I find it flattering, but it encourages me to oppose you rather than support you. I must be more successful than I thought.”
“I thought you might argue like that, Matt. Don’t fool yourself. Here’s the truth. We’re in pretty deep, Matt. I’ve been to the Swiss more than once in the last five years. I’ve got to go again. But they want reassurances. They want evidence of good faith. They want all kinds of things. One of them is a cut in the E.O.L. A drastic cut.”
Matlock began to understand. He had suspected the country was mortgaged up to the hilt with the Swiss but was horrified to learn that they were in a position to be able to command an Expectation of Life cut. Outside influence on the E.O.L. was a possibility he had always strenuously denied when he was in office. But so many other reassurances he had given had proved false in his own day that he forced himself not to feel indignant at this.
For many years now the Age Rate had been the outward and visible sign of the state of the country’s economy. He had never intended this, but somehow it had come about. In a good year when the economy could support a heavy load at the top, the Age Rate remained high, 84, 85 years perhaps. During the great boom of the previous decade it had twice topped ninety. But the last few years had seen a frightening decline, till at 76, the country had the lowest E.O.L. in Europe (only Switzerland was not now a heart-clock economy).
Now it was to come down still further. Browning went on speaking.
“We’ll have to cut it. We can’t afford not to. It’ll be in the Budget, of course. I’d like you beside me when I present that Budget, Matt.”
“How big’s the cut?”
Browning grinned and laid a finger by his nose.
“Now that’d be telling. But big, Matt.”
“It can’t be too big. You’re getting a bit near the Bible Barrier.”
As he uttered the words, he heard again briefly his own young voice sententiously proclaiming. “Three score years and ten we are promised in the Good Book. And three score years and ten we shall have whatever happens. But more than that, I promise you, much more. Eighty, ninety, eventually one hundred years can be ours if we put our house in order now.”
Thus the Bible Barrier had been born and though it was mentioned nowhere in the Act itself, the concept was one of peculiar force.
“Look, Matt. Even if we drop just a year, it’s a year too much for you. You can’t afford a year at your age. But come back in out of the cold and you can have another quarter of a century. You’re in great trim, I can see that. And we’ve got drugs that’ll keep you that way.”
“I’ve never heard of any.”
“For God’s sake, Matt, be your age, if you’ll forgive the phrase. What’s the point of releasing new drugs when the E.O.L. is seventy-six? But once in the House nothing can touch you. It’s Sanctuary, Matt. You should know. You built the bloody cathedral, eh?”
Yes, thought Matlock, I built the whole hideous edifice. Not that the House had taken much persuading to agree that M.P.s should be outside the scope of the Act on the grounds that considerations of one’s own age should not be allowed to become a factor in the way an M.P. voted on age cuts.
“I’ll think it over,” said Matlock and turned to the door. I really will think it over, he thought. I must think it over to discover why he is really offering me this job. There can surely be no real danger to him in this Budget. He’ll get the vote — Jesus, he has a majority of hundreds and there’s no election for two and a half years. In any case, he has the electoral system sewn up tight, the police and the army are in his pocket.
Why has he offered me this deal?
“I’ll think it over,” he repeated.
“No, Matt,” said Browning. “Don’t think. You might think yourself to a wrong answer. What’s holding you back?”
“It’s a big step,” said Matlock lightly. “Turning my back on twenty-five years and publicly reversing all my beliefs.”
“You did it once before, Matt,” said Browning with a trace of a sneer. “Look.”
He raised his index finger. The lights dimmed but did not go out, the poro-screen shrank to its normal size and the film began to race through. The voice was a mere gabble but Matlock needed no voice to interpret the ludicrously rapid scenes which unwound before him. He saw the Age Bill being put into effect, saw himself talking, talking, always talking, the lower jaw rattling up and down at an ever increasing speed till the whole thing became a blur. When the film finally decelerated to a viewable pace, he was still there but he was no longer talking. He was sitting with his head between his hands, listening.
The voice which settled out of the high-pitched swirl was his wife’s. Edna.
Dead now for eighteen years.
“You can’t do it, Matt. You can’t. It’ll finish you. It’ll be the end of father. But you can’t destroy the Party. That’s too strong now, because of you. But it will never forget, never forgive. The Party will destroy you.”
Matlock raised his head on the screen.
I look older than I do now, thought the spectator Matlock.
“I must do it, Edna, even if I am destroyed. It’s gone sour, all sour. This is not what I meant, not what I meant at all. I must resign and speak out.”
“Speak out! What chance do you think you’ll get to speak out? Do you imagine they don’t know?”
“You forget that I am still ‘they’, my dear.”
Edna looked down at him.
“You are still rather touchingly naive, Matt.”
She was right, thought Matlock. I knew soon enough she was right. But dear God! that they could have been filming this!
“Enough?” asked Browning.
He nodded.
The film froze on his face again, this time lined with weariness and despair. The lights came on.
“I couldn’t do it twice, Prime Minister. Not that.”
“You once would have said you could not have done it once.”
“But I had reasons then that you cannot offer me now. Faith, conscience, a desire for atonement.”
“You had believed in what you did. Could you not believe again?”
Matlock shook his head wearily.
“I did an evil and believed in it. But worst, I convinced others. I used no force, no coercion. I made them believe. That’s what I have been trying to undo ever since. You can give me no reasons for stopping doing that.”
Browning’s voice dropped to what in another man would have been a histrionic softness.
“Oh, but I can, Matt. I cannot persuade you to join me, perhaps. But I can give you reasons to stop opposing me.”
“Are these threats?”
“Only if the law is a threat. Your law, Matt. You are getting old. You must be tempted to try to escape the law. Perhaps even now you are arranging to go for Op. But it won’t do, Matt. It won’t do. You must keep your nose clean. And that means you mustn’t be an accessory to any breakage of the Age Law. And that’s what you are, every time you preach one of your little sermons, so my legal boys tell me. You encourage evasion. Do you deny it?”
Matlock laughed.
“I say nothing, Prime Minister. Except that in the end you have disappointed me. You threaten my freedom. Perhaps my life. I value both, more than you can know. But they are not negotiable in the long run. I will not bargain with them.”
“I expected no less,” replied Browning. “Indeed, Matt, I expected a bit more, but that’s beside the point. No, the real thing is that you seem to have forgotten what your Law says about the penalties for evasion, or attempted evasion of the E.O.L.”