Flatlander - Larry Niven [13]
For instant replacement of your ruined digestive system, for a young healthy heart, for a whole liver when you’d ruined yours with alcohol … you had to go to an organlegger.
There are three aspects to the business of organlegging. One is the business of kidnap-murder. It’s risky. You can’t fill an organ bank by waiting for volunteers. Executing condemned criminals is a government monopoly. So you go out and get your donors: on a crowded city slidewalk, in an air terminal, stranded on a freeway by a car with a busted capacitor … anywhere.
The selling end of the business is just as dangerous, because even a desperately sick man sometimes has a conscience. He’ll buy his transplant, then go straight to the ARMs, curing his sickness and his conscience by turning in the whole gang. Thus the sales end is somewhat anonymous, but as there are few repeat sales, that hardly matters.
Third is the technical, medical aspect. Probably this is the safest part of the business. Your hospital is big, but you can put it anywhere. You wait for the donors, who arrive still alive; you ship out livers and glands and square feet of live skin, correctly labeled for rejection reactions.
It’s not as easy as it sounds. You need doctors. Good ones.
That was where Loren came in. He had a monopoly.
Where did he get them? We were still trying to find out. Somehow, one man had discovered a foolproof way to recruit talented but dishonest doctors practically en masse. Was it really one man? All our sources said it was. And he had half the North American west coast in the palm of his hand.
Loren. No holographs, no fingerprints or retina prints, not even a description. All we had was that one name and a few possible contacts.
One of those was Kenneth Graham.
The hologram was a good one. Probably it had been posed in a portrait shop. Kenneth Graham had a long Scottish face with a lantern jaw and a small, dour mouth. In the holo he was trying to smile and look dignified simultaneously. He only looked uncomfortable. His hair was sandy and close cut. Above his light gray eyes his eyebrows were so light as to be nearly invisible.
My breakfast arrived. I dunked a doughnut and bit it and found out I was hungrier than I’d thought.
A string of holos had been reproduced on the computer tape. I ran through the others fairly quickly, eating with one hand and flipping the key with the other. Some were fuzzy; they had been taken by spy beams through the windows of Graham’s shop. None of the prints were in any way incriminating. Not one showed Graham smiling.
He had been selling electrical joy for twelve years now.
A current addict has an advantage over his supplier. Electricity is cheap. With a drug, your supplier can always raise the price on you, but not with electricity. You see the ecstasy merchant once, when he sells you your operation and your droud, and never again. Nobody gets hooked by accident. There’s an honesty to current addiction. The customer always knows just what he’s getting into and what it will do for him—and to him.
Still, you’d need a certain lack of empathy to make a living the way Kenneth Graham did. Else he’d have had to turn away his customers. Nobody becomes a current addict gradually. He decides all at once, and he buys the operation before he has ever tasted its joy. Each of Kenneth Graham’s customers had reached his shop after deciding to drop out of the human race.
What a stream of the hopeless and the desperate must have passed through Graham’s shop! How could they help but haunt his dreams? And if Kenneth Graham slept well at night, then—
Then small wonder if he had turned organlegger.
He was in a good position for it. Despair is characteristic of the would-be current addict. The unknown, the unloved, the people nobody knew and nobody needed and nobody