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"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 pla
"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.
I Lead-in.
A Stress genuine emergency.
B Mention ramrobot package.
C "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.
II The organ-bank problem.
A Earth calls it a problem; we do not. Therefore Earth knows considerably more about it.
B 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.
C But the citizen, ca
D The only feasible method of supplying the organ banks is through execution of criminals. (Demonstrate this; show why other methods are inadequate.)
E 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.
1)
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 0. 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 1960's and 1970's, 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 2010's ....
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.
F 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.