Colonists were piled against the steel doors at both ends, as if trying to escape the trap even while unconscious. One of the policemen spoke into a handphone, asking for stretchers.
Jesus Pietro stood over the piled rebels. “I never really hated them before,” he said.
“K’llr, use gyrsco’.”
“What?” Matt couldn’t spare the attention. He was trying to fly with one hand, the wrong hand; his car bucked and weaved like a frightened stallion.
“Gy—rro—skko’!” Hood enunciated painfully.
“I see it. What do I do with it?”
“Turr’ on.”
Matt flipped the Gyroscope switch to On. Something hummed below him. The car trembled, then righted itself, going straight up.
“Shlatsh.”
Matt used the knob. The car began to accelerate.
“Hel’ me see ow’, Laney.” Hood was propped upright beside the left front window, with Harry Kane in the middle and Matt on the right. Laney reached from the back seat to hold Hood’s head out the window.
“Turr’ ri’.”
“How?”
“Shtee—ring nog.”
“Knob? Like this thing?”
“Ye—ss i’iot.”
“For the record,” Matt said icily, “I flew a car all the way from Harry’s basement to Alpha Plateau. It was the first time I’d ever been in a car. Naturally I don’t know what all these gadgets do.”
“Thass ri’. Now go strray’ till I tell you.”
Matt released the knob. The car flew on by itself. “We aren’t going toward the coral houses,” he said.
“No.” Harry Kane spoke slowly but understandably. “The coral houses are the first place Implementation will look. I couldn’t drag a hundred men where we’re going.”
“Where’s that?”
“A large unoccupied mansion owned by Geoffrey Eustace Parlette and his family.”
“And where will Geoffrey Eustace Parlette be all this time?”
“He and his family are swimming and gambling in a small public resort on Iota. I’ve got contacts on Alpha Plateau, Keller.”
“Parlette. Any—”
“His grandson. Millard Parlette was staying with them, but he’s making a speech. He should be starting about now. The sending station on Nob Hill is far enough away, and his hosts here are gone, so he’ll probably be staying with a relative.”
“It still sounds dangerous.”
“You should talk.”
The left-handed compliment hit Matt like six dry martinis. He’d done it! He’d walked into the Hospital, freed prisoners, raised merry hell, left his mark, and walked out free and untouched! “We can hide the car till the furor dies down,” he said. “Then, back to Gamma—”
“And leave my men in the vivarium? I can’t do that. And there’s Polly Tournquist.”
Polly. The girl who’d—Yes. “I’m not a rebel, Harry. The grand rescue’s over. Frankly, I only came here to get Laney if I could. I can drop this crusade any time.”
“You think Castro will just let you go, Keller? He must know you were one of the prisoners. He’ll hunt you down wherever you hide. Besides, I can’t let you have the car. I’ll need it for my grand rescue.”
Matt grimaced. It was his car, wasn’t it? He’d stolen it himself. But they could fight that out later. “Why did you mention Polly?”
“She saw the ramrobot come down. Castro probably found the films on her. He may be questioning her to find out who else knows.”
“Knows what?”
“I don’t know either. Polly’s the only one. But it must be pretty damn important. Polly thought so, and apparently so did Castro. You didn’t know there was a ramrobot coming, did you?”
“No.”
“They kept it secret. They’ve never done that before.”
Laney said, “Polly acted like she’d found something vastly important. She insisted on telling us all at once, night before last. But Castro didn’t give her the chance. Now I’m wondering whether it wasn’t the ramrobot that brought on the raid.”
“She could be in the organ banks” said Matt.
“Not yet,” said Harry. “Not if Castro found the films. She wouldn’t have talked yet. He’ll be using the coffin cure, and that takes time.”
“Coffin cure?”
“It’s not important.”
Important or not, Matt didn’t like the sound of it. “How are you planning to mount your rescue?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Angle lef’,” said Hood.
Houses and greenery rolled beneath them. Flying a car was infinitely easier with the gyroscopes going. Matt could see no cars around, police or otherwise. Had something grounded them?
“So,” said Laney. “You came all the way to the Hospital to get me.”
“In a stolen car,” said Matt. “With a small detour into the void mist.”
Laney’s wide mouth formed half a smile and half a grin, half joy and half amusement. “Naturally I’m flattered.”
“Naturally.”
Mrs. Hancock spoke from the back seat. “I’d like to know why they didn’t beam us down, back there at the carport.”
“And you knew they wouldn’t,” said Laney. “How did you know, Matt?”
“Second the motion,” said Harry Kane.
“I don’t know,” said Matt.
“But you knew it might work.”
“Yah.”
“Why?”
“Okay. Hood, you listening?”
“Ye—ss.”
“It’s a long story. I’ll start with the morning after the party—”
“Start with the party,” said Laney.
“Everything?”
“Everything.” Laney gave the word undue emphasis. “I think it might be important, Matt.”
Matt shrugged an uncomfortable surrender. “It might at that. Okay. I met Hood in a bar for the first time in eight years…”
Jesus Pietro and Major Jansen stood well out of the way as a stream of stretchers moved into the vivarium to deposit their charges in contour couches. In another part of the Hospital other stretchers carried dead and wounded into the operating rooms, some to be restored to life and health and usefulness, others to be pirated for undamaged parts.
“What is it?” Jesus Pietro asked.
“I don’t know,” said Major Jansen. He stepped back from the door to get a better look. “It seems almost familiar.”
“That’s no help.”
“I assume a colonist drew it?”
“You might as well. Nobody else was left alive.”
Major Jansen drew even farther back, stood bouncing lightly on his toes, hands on hips. Finally he said, “It’s a valentine, sir.”
“A valentine.” Jesus Pietro glared intense irritation at his aide. He looked back at the door. “I’ll be damned. It is a valentine.”
“With teardrops.”
“A valentine with teardrops. Whoever drew that wasn’t sane. Valentine, valentine…Why would the Sons of Earth leave us a valentine drawn in human blood?”
“Blood. A bleeding—oh, I see. That’s what it is, sir. It’s a bleeding heart. They’re telling us they’re against the practice of executing felons for the organ banks.”
“A reasonable attitude for them to take.” Jesus Pietro looked once more into the vivarium. The bodies of Hobart and the vivarium guard had been removed, but the stains of carnage remained. He said, “They don’t act like the usual sort of bleeding heart.”
Thirty thousand pairs of eyes waited behind the teedee lenses.
Four teedee cameras circled him. They were blank now, and untended, as cameramen moved casually about the room, doing things and saying things Millard Parlette made no effort to understand. In fifteen minutes those blank teedee lenses would be peepholes for sixty thousand yes.
Millard Parlette began leafing through his notes. If here were any changes to be made, the time was Now.
Lead-in.
&nb
sp; Stress genuine emergency.
Mention ramrobot package.
“What follows is background.”
How real would an emergency seem to these people? The last emergency session Millard Parlette could recall was the Great Plague of 2290, more than a century ago. Most of his audience would not have been born then.
Hence the lead-in, to grab their attention.
The organ-bank problem—exposition.
Earth calls it a problem; we do not. Therefore Earth knows considerably more about it.
Any citizen, with the help of the organ banks, can live as long as it takes his central nervous system to wear out. This can be a very long time if his circulatory system is kept functioning.
But the citizen, cannot take more out of the organ banks than goes into them. He must do his utmost to see that they are supplied.
The only feasible method of supplying the organ banks is through execution of criminals. (Demonstrate this; show why other methods are inadequate.)
A criminal’s pirated body can save a dozen lives. There is now no valid argument against capital punishment for any given crime; for all such argument seeks to prove that killing a man does society no good. Hence the citizen, who wants to live as long and as healthily as possible, will vote any crime into a capital crime if the organ banks are short of material.
Cite Earth’s capital punishment for false advertising, income tax evasion, air pollution, having children without a license.
The wonder was that it had taken so long to pass these laws.
The organ-bank problem could have started in the year 1900, when Karl Landsteiner separated human blood into four types: A, B, AB, and O. Or in 1914, when Albert Hustin found that sodium citrate would prevent blood from clotting. Or in 1940, when Landsteiner and Wiener found the Rh factor. Blood banks could so easily have been supplied by condemned criminals, but apparently nobody had realized it.
And there was Hamburger’s work in the 1960s and 1970s, in a Parisian hospital where kidney transplants were made from donors who were not identical twins. There were the antirejection serums discovered by Mostel and Granovich in the 2010s…
Nobody seemed to have noticed the implications—until the middle of the twenty-first century.
There were organ banks all over the world, inadequately supplied by people kind enough to will their bodies to medical science.
How useful is the body of a man who dies of old age? How fast can you reach a car accident? And in 2043, Arkansas, which had never rescinded the death penalty, made the organ banks the official state method of execution.
The idea had spread like wildfire…like a moral plague, as one critic of the time had put it. Millard Parlette had researched it very thoroughly, then cut all of the historical matter out of his speech, afraid it would lose him his audience. People, especially crew, did not like to be lectured.
Thus the government which controls the organ banks is more powerful than any dictator in history. Many dictators have had the power of death, but organ banks give a government power of life and death.
Life. The organ banks can cure nearly anything, and the government can regulate which citizens shall benefit, on grounds that materials are running short. Priorities become vital.
Death. No citizen will protest when the government condemns a man to die, not when his death gives the citizen his chance to live.
Untrue and unfair. There were always altruists. But let it stand.
The organ-bank problem—colonies.
Alloplasty: the science of putting foreign materials in the human body for medical purposes.
Examples:
Implanted hearing aids
Heart pacemakers and artificial hearts
Plastic tubing for veins, arteries
Alloplasty in use on Earth for half a thousand years.
No alloplasty for a colony world. Alloplasty needs a high technology.
Every colony world has organ-bank facilities. The stasis room of a slowboat is designed to freeze organs. The ships themselves thus become the center of an organ bank.
Thus the organ-bank “problem” is unrelieved even by the alternative of alloplasty, on any colony world.
The organ-bank problem—as it relates to the power politics of Mount Lookitthat.
The Covenant of Planetfall.
Millard Parlette frowned. How would the average crew react to the truth about the Covenant of Planetfall?
What they were taught in school was true, in the main. The Covenant of Planetfall, the agreement which gave the crew authority over the colonists, had existed since the Planck landing. The colonists had agreed to it, all of them.
The rationale held, too. The crew had taken all the risks, done all the work of decades, suffered and slaved through years of training, to reach a target which might be habitable. The colonists had slept peacefully through all those weary years in space. It was right that the crew should rule.
But—how many crew knew that those first colonists had signed the Covenant at gunpoint? That eight had died rather than sign away their freedom?
Was it Millard Parlette’s place to tell them?
Yes, it was. They had to understand the nature of power politics. He left the notation unchanged.
The Hospital:
Control of electric power
Control of news media
Control of justice: of the police, of trials, of executions
Control of medicine and the organ banks: the positive side of justice
Organ replacement for colonists? Yes!
Colonists in good standing are obviously entitled to medical care. Obviously even to themselves.
Justice must have a positive side.
The organ-bank “problem” implies that the colonists who can hope for medical treatment will support the government.
The ramrobot capsule.
(Show pictures. Give ’em the full tour. Use #1 for visual impact, but concentrate on implications of rotifer.)
There was something he could add to that! Millard Parlette looked down at his right hand. It was coming along nicely. Already the contrast with his untreated left hand was dramatic.
That’d make ’em sit up!
The danger of the ramrobot capsule.
It does not make the organ banks obsolete. The capsule held only four items. To replace the organ banks would require hundreds, or thousands, each a separate project.
But any colonist report would blow it out of all proportion. Colonists would assume that capital punishment would stop now.
Millard Parlette glanced behind him—and shuddered. You couldn’t be rational about Ramrobot Capsule #143. The visual impact was too great.
If his speech got dull at any point, he could get their attention back by simply cutting to a shot of the ramrobot packages.
Capital punishment cannot stop in any case.
Decrease the severity of punishment, and crime increases drastically. (Cite examples from Earth history. Unfortunate that Mount Lookitthat has none.)
What punishment to substitute for capital punishment? No prisons on Mount Lookitthat. Warning notes and jottings on one’s record hold power only through threat of the organ banks.
Conclusion.
Violently or peaceably, the rule of the crew ends when the colonists learn of Ramrobot Capsule #143.
Three minutes to go. No question of changing the speech now.
The question was, and had always been, the speech itself. Should thirty thousand crew be told what had arrived in Ramrobot Capsule #143? Could they be made to understand its importance? And—could such a secret be kept by that many?
Members of the Council had fought bitterly to prevent this event. Only Millard Parlette’s sure control, his knowledge of the ways of power and the weaknesses of his fellow Council members, even his own striking authority-figure appearance, which he used ruthlessly—only Millard Parlette’s determination had brought the Council to issue their declaration of emergency.
And now every crew
on Alpha Plateau, and elsewhere, was before his teedee set. No cars flew above Alpha Plateau; no skiers glided down the snows of the northern glacier; the lake and the hot springs and the gambling halls of Iota were empty.
One minute to go. Too late to call off the speech.
Could thirty thousand people keep such a secret?
Why, no, of course they couldn’t.
“That big house with the flat roof,” said Harry Kane.
Matt tilted the car to the right. He continued, “I waited till the guards were out of sight, then went back to the vivarium. The man inside opened the door for me. I knocked him down and took his gun, found that bank of buttons and started pushing them.”
“Land in the garden, not on the roof. Did you ever figure out what was wrong with their eyes?”
“No.” Matt worked the slats and the steering knob, trying to get above the garden. It was big, and it ran to the void edge: a formal garden in a style a thousand years old, a symmetrical maze of right-angle hedges enclosing rectangles of brilliant color. The house too was all rectangles, an oversized version of the small identical-development-houses of the nineteens. Flat-roofed, flat-sided, nearly undecorated, the size of a motel but so wide it seemed low, the house seemed to have been built from prefabricated parts and then added to over the years. Geoffrey Eustace Parlette had evidently imitated ancient bad taste in hopes of getting something new and different.
Matt didn’t see it that way, naturally. To him all the houses of Alpha were equally strange.