Flatlander - Larry Niven [12]
“Kenneth Graham.”
“That’s what I thought.” I hung up.
Taffy touched my shoulder. “Do—do you really think he might have been—killed?”
“Yah. The whole setup depended on him not being able to—”
“No. Wait. I don’t want to know about it.”
I turned to look at her. She really didn’t. The very subject of a stranger’s death was making her sick to her stomach.
“Okay. Look, I’m a jerk not to at least offer you breakfast, but I’ve got to get on this right away. Can I call you a cab?”
When the cab came, I dropped a ten-mark coin in the slot and helped her in. I got her address before it took off.
ARM Headquarters hummed with early morning activity. Hellos came my way, and I answered them without stopping to talk. Anything important would filter down to me eventually.
As I passed Julie’s cubicle, I glanced in. She was hard at work, limply settled in her contour couch, jotting notes with her eyes closed.
Kenneth Graham.
A hookup to the basement computer formed the greater part of my desk. Learning how to use it had taken me several months. I typed an order for coffee and doughnuts, then: INFORMATION RETRIEVAL. KENNETH GRAHAM, LIMITED LICENSE: SURGERY. GENERAL LICENSE: DIRECT CURRENT STIMULUS EQUIPMENT SALES. ADDRESS: NEAR WEST LOS ANGELES.
Tape chattered out of the slot, an instant response, loop after loop of it curling on my desk. I didn’t need to read it to know I was right.
New technologies create new customs, new laws, new ethics, new crimes. About half the activity of the United Nations Police, the ARMs, dealt with control of a crime that hadn’t existed a century ago. The crime of organ-legging was the result of thousands of years of medical progress, of millions of lives selflessly dedicated to the ideal of healing the sick. Progress had brought these ideals to reality and, as usual, had created new problems.
1900 A.D. was the year Karl Landsteiner classified human blood into four types, giving patients their first real chance to survive a transfusion. The technology of transplants had grown with the growing of the twentieth century. Whole blood, dry bone, skin, live kidneys, live hearts could all be transferred from one body to another. Donors had saved tens of thousands of lives in that hundred years by willing their bodies to medicine.
But the number of donors was limited, and not many died in such a way that anything of value could be saved.
The deluge had come something less than a hundred years ago. One healthy donor (but of course there was no such animal) could save a dozen lives. Why, then, should a condemned murderer die for no purpose? First a few states, then most of the nations of the world had passed new laws. Criminals condemned to death must be executed in a hospital, with surgeons to save as much as could be saved for the organ banks.
The world’s billions wanted to live, and the organ banks were life itself. A man could live forever as long as the doctors could shove spare parts into him faster than his own parts wore out. But they could do that only as long as the world’s organ banks were stocked.
A hundred scattered movements to abolish the death penalty died silent, unpublicized deaths. Everybody gets sick sometime.
And still there were shortages in the organ banks. Still patients died for the lack of parts to save them. The world’s legislators had responded to steady pressure from the world’s people. Death penalties were established for first-, second-, and third-degree murder. For assault with a deadly weapon. Then for a multitude of crimes: rape, fraud, embezzlement, having children without a license, four or more counts of false advertising. For nearly a century the trend had been growing as the world’s voting citizens acted to protect their right to live forever.
Even now there weren’t enough transplants. A woman with kidney trouble might wait a year for a transplant: one healthy kidney to last the rest of her life. A thirty-five-year-old heart patient must live with a sound but forty-year-old