A Stress genuine emergency.
B Mention ramrobot package.
C "What follows is background."
How real would an emergency seem to these people? The last emergency session Millard Parlette could recall was the Great Plague of 2290, more than a century ago. Most of his audience would not have been born then.
Hence the lead-in, to grab their attention.
II The organ-bank problem.
A Earth calls it a problem; we do not. Therefore Earth knows considerably more about it.
B Any citizen, with the help of the organ banks, can live as long as it takes his central nervous system to wear out. This can be a very long time if his circulatory system is kept functioning.
C But the citizen, cannot take more out of the organ banks than goes into them. He must do his utmost to see that they are supplied.
D The only feasible method of supplying the organ banks is through execution of criminals. (Demonstrate this; show why other methods are inadequate.)
E A criminal's pirated body can save a dozen lives. There is now no valid argument against capital punishment for any given crime; for all such argument seeks to prove that killing a man does society no good.
Hence the citizen, who wants to live as long and as healthily as possible, will vote any crime into a capital crime if the organ banks are short of material.
1)
Cite Earth's capital punishment for false advertising, income tax evasion, air pollution, having children without a license.
The wonder was that it had taken so long to pass these laws.
The organ-bank problem could have started in the year 1900, when Karl Landsteiner separated human blood into four types: A, B, AB, and 0. Or in 1914, when Albert Hustin found that sodium citrate would prevent blood from clotting. Or in 1940, when Landsteiner and Wiener found the Rh factor. Blood banks could so easily have been supplied by condemned criminals, but apparently nobody had realized it.
And there was Hamburger's work in the 1960's and 1970's, in a Parisian hospital where kidney transplants were made from donors who were not identical twins. There were the antirejection serums discovered by Mostel and Granovich in the 2010's ....
Nobody seemed to have noticed the implications--until the middle of the twenty-first century.
There were organ banks all over the world, inadequately supplied by people kind enough to will their bodies to medical science.
How useful is the body of a man who dies of old age? How fast can you reach a car accident? And in 2043, Arkansas, which had never rescinded the death penalty, made the organ banks the official state method of execution.
The idea had spread like wildfire .... like a moral plague, as one critic of the time had put it. Millard Parlette had researched it very thoroughly, then cut all of the historical matter out of his speech, afraid it would lose him his audience. People, especially crew, did not like to be lectured.
F Thus the government which controls the organ banks is more powerful than any dictator in history. Many dictators have had the power of death, but organ banks give a government power of life and death.
1) Life. The organ banks can cure nearly anything, and the government can regulate which citizens shall benefit, on grounds that materials are running short. Priorities become vital.
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 Hospitaclass="underline"
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 cannot stop in any case.
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.