“Senator, that’s correct, but as you know, intolerable is a word that means different things to different people. The pain caused by this apparatus is moderate, I would say, but it’s unpleasant. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a bad toothache, Senator, or if anybody on the panel has? Well, that pain I would say is about twice the highest point reached on the Wolff-Wolf apparatus, and yet people endure it; I have myself. And then there’s childbirth, which I haven’t experienced.” Plotkin smirked.
“The question is whether people can tolerate a pain that is natural in origin,” said Senator Gottlieb, “or whether they ought to be made to tolerate a pain inflicted by somebody else. We call that torture, as you know, Mr. Plotkin.”
“Except when it’s done in the course of scientific research,” Plotkin said.
“Then you don’t call it torture?”
“No.”
“Bloody barbarian,” Bliss said, “they ought to shoot him.”
“But surely this isn’t still going on?”
“If I thought so, I wouldn’t be here.”
“It’s a prison ship, though.”
Bliss squirmed in his chair. “I know it is. I ask myself, if I refused to cooperate, what would the result be? Would they stick to this insane scheme of teaching a computer to run CV, or would they hire somebody competent?”
“There isn’t anybody as competent as you.”
“That’s as may be. At least, if I do my job and the computer does what they say it can, it’s possible that Sea Venture won’t sink, prisoners and all.”
Later the subcommittee allowed Plotkin to demonstrate the Wolff-Wolf machine. He put his bare arm under the lens and turned up the rheostat. “This is one dol,” he said. “Just a faint prickling warmth. “This is three—this is five—seven—” The skin of his pale arm was turning pink. “This is eight.” He turned the machine off:
“And is eight dols as high as you went, with the patient?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Mr. Plotkin, in preparing for this demonstration, did you use any pain-killer of any kind?”
“No, sir. I did not. Anything of that kind would have been falsifying the demonstration. As a scientist, I would never do that, Senator. That would be unprincipled behavior.”
Harriet Owen got up at six the next morning, an hour before her usual time, and ate her breakfast while she watched the Senate hearings in Washington. Plotkin’s performance the day before had been distasteful but adequate, and he had been excused. Now, apparently, the subcommittee was considering the whole question of parasite containment. A familiar face caught her eye. “Senator,” Dr. Wallace McNulty was saying, “I’d like to comment on some testimony you heard before from Mr. Peebles at NIH. If I understand what they’re saying, they believe the only way to get rid of this thing is to isolate breeding populations of human beings, make sure they’re free of symbionts, and forbid other people to reproduce, period. And then what?”
“As I understand Mr. Peebles’ testimony,” said the Chairman, “then we would expand slowly out of the quarantined areas into areas of depopulation.”
“What about livestock?” McNulty asked. “Do you know the thing can go into a goat, or a fish?”
“I understand that’s your belief, Doctor. If that’s true, then I suppose it would be necessary to sterilize the infected areas, one at a time, before we expand into them again. I want to say that of course we all hope such extreme measures will not be needed.”
“You know, this is loony,” McNulty said. “You’re talking about human beings as if they were laboratory animals.”
The chairman was rapping his gavel. “You are out of order, Dr. McNulty.”
McNulty raised his voice. “You can’t get away with that, and if you could, what for?”
The chairman said, “Dr. McNulty, your remarks are out of order, and no more such outbursts will be permitted. Nevertheless, before we excuse you, I believe Senator Jergen would like to respond.”
Jergen said stiffly, “What’s your alternative, Doctor, just to give up and live with this parasite forever? Remember that we don’t know what the long-term effects may be. There is evidence that the parasites are actually killing people in high office already. We don’t know what else they are capable of. A hundred years from now we may be watching the human race go right down the slide.”
McNulty said, “Senator, I take it you haven’t had the disease yourself?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“I thought not.”
“How did we ever come to this?” said Bliss. “It’s fascism all over again.” They were walking down the street, looking for a Greek restaurant Hartman thought he remembered seeing. Outside the carefully preserved tourist areas, the city had altered dismally since the last time Bliss had been here: plastic panels warping off the sides of buildings, some of them replaced by decaying sheets of particleboard; scabby fluepipes, scumbled blue and red, hanging all anyhow from building faces; filth, grime, rubbish heaped in comers.
"Plus ca change, the more it’s the same old mess,” Hartman said. “If you look back far enough, what we now call national governments all began as protection rackets, pure and simple.”
A ragged man lurched toward them out of a doorway. “Spare a fiver, boss? I haven’t ate since yesterday.” Hartman fumbled out a plastic coin and gave it to him.
“Thanks, boss,” said the man. There was something wrong with his face; it was grey and sweaty. He went away with a stumbling gait.
“Probably spend it on drugs,” Bliss said.,
“No doubt. Well, as I was saying, you’ve heard about protection? A gangster stops by and tells you that for five hundred dollars a month he’ll protect you against vandalism. If you turn him down, you know somebody will break your windows. So you pay. The same thing happened thousands of years ago, when people stopped hunting and gathering and took up agriculture. As soon as there were large fixed populations of farmers, they became a profit source for bandits. The bandits farmed the farmers. They said, turn over a share of what you produce, and we’ll protect you against other bandits. And they did, you know, but if they hadn’t, the next lot would have been no worse. Then the bandits fought each other for territory, and presently there were warlords and dukes and so on. The imperial palaces in China were built on the rice extorted from peasants. So the peasants, who had had plenty for themselves, were reduced to poverty, and the imperial court got rich. When England and France went to war in the fourteenth century, they were disputing the right to farm the French peasants. We’ve always had the two classes, the one that produces and the one that takes.”
“Aren’t you a member of the class that takes?”
“I am not, I’m a working man like yourself. Now mind you, the system produced some marvelous things. The glory that was Greece and so on. But it certainly has altered our moral perceptions. I remember when the controversy over the Aswan Dam was going on, somebody said that the irrigation projects were good on balance because they produced more food. And somebody else replied that it was the people in the cities who got the food, and the peasants who got bilharziasis.”
“But don’t you think it’s better for some people to be rich, or at least comfortably off-, than for everybody to be poor?”
“That’s my point, the peasants weren’t poor until the gangsters took them over. Nowadays there are no more peasants in this part of the world, and nobody asked for their opinion anyhow, but how many would have agreed to that proposition, do you suppose?”
“I take your point, but that’s all water under the bridge.”