Flatlander - Larry Niven [113]
We looked at each other. At least nobody disagreed.
“Your suggestions, Ms. Shaeffer?”
Marion looked uncomfortable. “I’ll make it a motion. Alter the law. Fines for accidental damage to equipment unless the damage causes death or injury. Anyone who ruins something vital when he can’t pay the damage gets broken up. We can live with that. And I’ll move to table the motion till we work up a proposed program of changes.”
That passed.
Jabez Stone had some details on the holding tanks and wanted them read into the record. In particular, there had been a power failure at Copernicus in 2111. Four Belt criminals had had to be broken up at once, and almost half the organs had been lost.
“There are safeguards now,” Ward told us. “It couldn’t happen again. Remember, holding tank technology was somewhat primitive twenty years ago. We were made responsible for developing it.”
“That’s reassuring, but it wasn’t what I was getting at. Shouldn’t those felons have been revived?”
“They were too badly damaged. Only organs could be saved,” Ward told him.
“It bothers me,” Stone said. “Never a reversal of sentence. Either this is an admirable record—”
“Stone, for God’s sake! Should we have convicted some innocent just to satisfy you by reviving him? Can you name one single sentence which should have been reversed?”
Stone said, “Case of Hovestraydt City versus Matheson & Co. It’s in the city computer memory.”
And everybody groaned.
If what I needed was something to take my mind off Naomi, then for four days I got my wish.
Days we spent arguing. We spent a full day on Hovestraydt City versus Matheson & Co., not to mention the night I spent reviewing the case. Allegedly the company’s carelessness had contributed to the Blowout of 2107. Two Matheson & Co. employees had gone to the organ banks. Penzler and I got Metchikov to admit in private that they might have been scapegoats, that the case should have been reviewed after the hysteria died down. Publicly, forget it.
Late afternoons I watched the news. Steeping myself in lunar culture was worth a try, but the lunie commentators didn’t make it easy. They used unfamiliar slang. They gave excessive detail. They droned.
Evenings I met with Stone and Budrys to discuss policy.
The Belters clearly saw their right, nay, their duty to make the lunar law more humanitarian. The moon didn’t see it that way. I made a long phone call to Luke Garner for instructions. All I could get out of him was that the ARM would support any decision I made.
So I backed Budrys and Stone. To us the lunar law had its peculiarities, but it wasn’t unduly harsh. Cultures are entitled to their variety, an attitude you’d expect from a club whose members have been battling with words and weapons and economic pressures for close to two hundred years. The drive that spread mankind through the solar system should have given Belters the same attitude, and I said so during a morning session. It fell flat.
Chris Penzler spoke to me afterward. He wasn’t moving like a cripple anymore, and some of the foam had sloughed off his chest, leaving bare pink skin bordered by thick black hair. He was a lot more cheerful now. “Kansas boy, you didn’t see variety in the Belt. You saw customs different from Kansas customs. What would happen to a Belt woman who wanted to raise her children in free fall? How do Belters treat a miner who neglects his equipment? Or a Naderite?” He patted the crown of his head, where what remained of his Belter crest started. “We all cut our hair the same way. Doesn’t that tell you something?”
“It should,” I admitted. “We committee members, we’re all politicians of a sort, aren’t we? Natural meddlers. But what if the UN was meddling with Belt law?”
He laughed. “I don’t have to wonder about that.”
“Too right you don’t It happened, and you seceded from Earth! How do you feel about ARM law?”
He told me what I already knew: the laws of Earth made