Flatlander - Larry Niven [49]
“You know, I think you’d take it as a personal insult if Tiller shot at you just because he didn’t like you.”
I had to laugh. “How personal can you get?”
“That’s better. Now, will you stop sweating this? It’s just another long shot. You know what legwork is like. We bet a lot of man-effort on this one because the odds looked good. Look how many organleggers would have to be in on it if it were true! We’d have a chance to snaffle them all. But if it doesn’t work out, why sweat it?”
“The second Freezer Bill,” I said, as if he didn’t know.
“The will of the people be done.”
“Censor the people! They’re murdering those dead men!”
Garner’s face twitched oddly. I said, “What’s funny?”
He let the laugh out. It sounded like a chicken screaming for help. “Censor. Bleep. They didn’t used to be swear words. They were euphemisms. You’d put them in a book or on TV when you wanted a word they wouldn’t let you use.”
I shrugged. “Words are funny. Damn used to be a technical term in theology, if you want to look at it that way.”
“I know, but they sound funny. When you start saying bleep and censored, it ruins your masculine image.”
“Censor my masculine image. What do we do about the corpsicle heirs? Call off the surveillance?”
“No. There’s too much in the pot already.” Garner looked broodingly into one bare wall of my office. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could persuade ten billion people to use prosthetics instead of transplants?”
Guilt glowed in my right arm, my left eye. I said, “Prosthetics don’t feel. I might have settled for a prosthetic arm—” Dammit, I’d had the choice! “—but an eye? Luke, suppose it was possible to graft new legs on you. Would you take them?”
“Oh, dear, I do wish you hadn’t asked me that,” he said venomously.
“Sorry. I withdraw the question.”
He brooded. It was a lousy thing to ask a man. He was still stuck with it; he couldn’t spit it out.
I asked, “Did you have any special reason for dropping in?”
Luke shook himself. “Yah. I got the impression you were taking all this as a personal defeat. I stopped down to cheer you up.”
We laughed at each other. “Listen,” he said, “there are worse things than the organ bank problem. When I was young—your age, my child—it was almost impossible to get anyone convicted of a capital crime. Life sentences weren’t for life. Psychology and psychiatry, such as they were, were concerned with curing criminals, returning them to society. The United States Supreme Court almost voted the death penalty unconstitutional.”
“Sounds wonderful. How did it work out?”
“We had an impressive reign of terror. A lot of people got killed. Meanwhile, transplant techniques were getting better and better. Eventually Vermont made the organ banks the official means of execution. That idea spread very damn fast.”
“Yah.” I remembered history courses.
“Now we don’t even have prisons. The organ banks are always short. As soon as the UN votes the death penalty for a crime, most people stop committing it. Naturally.”
“So we get the death penalty for having children without a license, or cheating on income tax, or running too many red traffic lights. Luke, I’ve seen what it does to people to keep voting more and more death penalties. They lose their respect for life.”
“But the other situation was just as bad, Gil. Don’t forget it.”
“So now we’ve got the death penalty for being poor.”
“The Freezer Law? I won’t defend it. Except that that’s the penalty for being poor and dead.”
“Should it be a capital crime?”
“No, but it’s not too bright, either. If a man expects to be brought back to life, he should be prepared to pay the medical fees. Now, hold it. I know a lot of the pauper group had trust funds set up. They were wiped out by depressions, bad investments. Why the hell do you think banks take interest for a loan? They’re being paid for the risk. The risk that the loan won’t be paid back.”
“Did you vote for the Freezer Law?”
“No, of course not.”
“I must be spoiling for a fight. I’m glad you dropped by, Luke.”
“Don