Страница 27 из 56
1) Life. The organ banks can cure nearly anything, and the government can regulate which citizens shall benefit, on grounds that materials are ru
2) 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.
III The organ-bank problem--colonies.
A Alloplasty: the science of putting foreign materials in the human body for medical purposes.
B Examples:
1) Implanted hearing aids
2) Heart pacemakers and artificial hearts
3) Plastic tubing for veins, arteries.
C Alloplasty in use on Earth for half a thousand years.
D No alloplasty for a colony world. Alloplasty needs a high technology.
E 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.
F Thus the organ-bank "problem" is unrelieved even by the alternative of alloplasty, on any colony world.
IV The organ-bank problem as it relates to the power politics of Mount Lookitthat.
A 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.
B The Hospital:
1) Control of electric power
2) Control of news media
3) Control of justice: of the police, of trials, of executions
4) Control of medicine and the organ banks: the positive side of justice
C Organ replacement for colonists? Yes!
1) Colonists in good standing are obviously entitled to medical care. Obviously even to themselves.
2) Justice must have a positive side.
3) The organ-bank "problem" implies that the colonists who can hope for medical treatment will support the government.
V 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!
VI The danger of the ramrobot capsule.
A 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.
B 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.
C Capital punishment ca
1) Decrease the severity of punishment, and crime increases drastically. (Cite examples from Earth history. Unfortunate that Mount Lookitthat has none.)
2) 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.
VII 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.