“I appreciate your seeing me on such short notice, Supervisor.”
Janet Davidoff smiled beautifully. “To be honest, Dr. Field, it isn’t a privilege I extend to just anyone. But then, not everyone is founder and lead researcher at a major bio-genetics concern headquartered in my district.” She blinked. If she weren’t the most powerful member of the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors, Field would have thought she was batting her eyes. “Now, Doctor, what can I do for you?”
He smiled back. “You can act to keep that ‘major bio-genetics concern’ here in the Valley, instead of watching it move to Munich, Germany.”
She looked genuinely alarmed. “Doctor, I can understand why you might find a Common Market factory necessary, but why would you want to relocate corporate headquarters?”
He stared at her for a moment, then quite deliberately laid a hand on his belly. “You wrote the ‘Fatso Get Out’ law, right?”
“Please, Doctor.” She sat up straight in her chair. “I know that a few newspaper columnists have called it that, but the proper title is ‘An Ordinance Regulating Permissible Public Venues for the Outsized.’ ”
“Yeah.” He made a rude noise. “The gist of it, though, to quote your ordinance, is that ‘any commercial facility open to the public shall be required to install in its entryway an Outsize Measurer empowered to exclude from the premises, without regard to sex, race, ethnic background, age, religion or lack thereof, or sexual orientation, any individual of a weight greater than 120 percent of that ideal to his or her height, and a body-fat percentage greater than 15 percent.’ ”
Her shoulders rose and fell. “Yes. So?”
He suppressed the urge to growl and slap her desktop. “Good God! That’s blatant discrimination!”
“Not at all, Doctor. For one thing, federal law defines discrimination in terms of ‘sex, race, ethnic background, age, religion or lack thereof, or sexual orientation.’ For another, it’s obviously a public health measure.”
“ ‘Public’ health!?”
“Doctor,” she said, making an apparent effort to remain patient, “surely you know that now that we have virtually eliminated the use of tobacco products, the leading cause of death in America today is outsizedness?”
“First, that’s crap—”
“Statistics don’t lie, Doctor.”
He gave a Bronx cheer. “Statistics jump through any hoop you want them to. I’ve seen the studies. They’re full of it. Just for starters, they attribute any death by heart attack to obesity as long the deceased happened to be even few pounds above ideal weight at the time.”
“A clear reason to eliminate obesity, then, isn’t it, Doctor?”
He doubted it was coincidence that as she spoke, she ran her right hand along her flawlessly trim side. “People have heart attacks for all sorts of reasons, Supervisor. Take stress, for example.”
“Yes, do,” she said. “Surely you re aware of the studies linking secondhand oversizedness to stress and thus to heart attacks?”
“My God!” He threw up his hands. “Those are the most slanted, bigoted—”
“Tsk-tsk.” She waggled a finger at him. “A dozen independent researchers have found that the very sight of an oversized person is sufficient to provoke nausea, disgust, and high blood pressure in a propersized person. These are not health-promoting factors, Doctor.”
“But those studies are nonsense! Good God Almighty, the researchers had to lower the standards of statistical validity by two orders of magnitude in order to find any sort of correlation at all.”
“Those are the governing studies, Doctor. Besides—” she said before he could speak—“it’s indisputable that the oversized pose other, equally serious health risks to the propersized. For example, you—ah, they are much more likely to suffer sudden cardiac failure. Those in the vicinity, as well as any emergency medical personnel responding to the call, are that much more likely to suffer physical injury attempting to move the oversized, or to lift them onto a stretcher.”
“But that—”
She held up a hand. “More, the oversized exert greater force on all with which they come in contact. Furniture, for example. They weaken chairs, stools, benches, sofas, and the like to a much greater extent than a propersized person does. This vastly increases the likelihood of catastrophic furniture failure, and thereby imperils the propersized.”
“Now, that, Madam—”
“Really, Doctor! Are you attempting to suggest that even walking down the sidewalk you don’t stress the pavement to a greater degree than a propersized man of your height would?”
“But it’s—”
“The math is inescapable, Doctor.”
“Inescapable maybe, but relevant, no. Furniture and pavement are built to support much greater—”
“Only because the outsized walk—and sit-in our midst. Doctor. Were there no outsized, furniture could be built to lower tolerances and would, therefore, cost considerably less money. The annual national savings—”
“My God! That’s raving bullshit!”
Her face froze. “Good day, Doctor. Pardon me if I don’t see you to the door, but I’m sure you can find your own way out.”
As he stalked out of the county building, Field simmered with rage. He would move the damn company to Munich. First thing in the morning he’d hold a press conference to break the news. He’d blame it all on David-off—he’d make it clear that she had cost the Valley a thousand jobs and millions of dollars in property taxes. That would end her career in a hurry.
Halfway across the sun-washed parking lot, he stopped to catch his breath. A warm breeze played across his face, drying his sweat. The car at his side urged him to move along before it called the police. He just groaned.
What was he thinking? He could blame Davidoff and her ilk all he liked, but it wouldn’t work. Anybody who logged into the press conference would see his two hundred and eighty pounds. Newscasters wouldn’t even have to speak to portray him as a whiner who picked up his marbles and went home when things didn’t go his way—they’d need only to run the right video sound-bite to destroy his credibility.
And how could he counter the argument that he was just trying to cut costs by moving to a lower-wage country with laxer regulatory agencies?
“Oh, God!” It struck him that some media smart-ass would inevitably wink at the camera and call him yet another corporate fat cat.
“Unless you need medical assistance, sir,” said the car at his side, “I will have to insist that you move along. I will call the police in ten seconds. Nine. Eight—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Wishing he could shed those mental images as easily as a dog does water, he shook himself, and resumed his trek across the parking lot.
There was nothing he could do. He might as well go back to the lab, finish Dr. Field’s Cure for Cookies, and make himself rich. Surely enough money, suitably donated, could do serious damage to Davidoff’s political future.
Gloomily, he kicked a pebble, and had to make a hasty apology to the motorcycle into which it bounced.
The problem was, wealth had just lost some of its luster for him. Dr. Field’s Cure would earn him a fortune—but the very act of introducing it to the market would implicitly endorse all of Davidoff ’s prejudices. Dammit. She and her kind were going to win out no matter what he did.
Even more humbling: without their bigotry and their legalized discrimination, the Cure might never earn back its development costs. There would have been a market for it in any event, but not such a… large one.