A Case of Conscience

"Ramon, I guess it's up to us. Shall I speak first? I think I'm ready."

"Of course, Mike."

"Then," Michelis said evenly, and without changing in the slightest his accustomed tone of grave impartiality, "I'll say that I think both of these gentlemen are fools, and calamitous fools at that because they're supposed to be scientists. Paul, your maneuvers to set up a phony situation are perfectly beneath contempt, and I shan't mention them again. I shan't even appeal to have them cut from the tape, so you needn't feel that you have to mend any fences with me. I'm looking solely at the purpose those maneuvers were supposed to serve, just as you asked me to do."

Cleaver's obvious self-satisfaction began to dim a little around the edges. He said, "Go ahead," and wound the blanket a little bit tighter around his legs.

"Lithia is not even the beginning of an arsenal," Michelis said. "Every piece of evidence you offered to prove that it might be is either a half-truth or the purest trash. Take cheap labor, for instance. With what will you pay the Lithians? They have no money, and they can't be rewarded with goods. They have almost everything that they need, and they like the way they're living right now — God knows they're not even slightly jealous of the achievements we think make Earth great. They'd like to have space flight but, given a little time, they'll get it by themselves; they have the Coupling ion-jet right now, and they won't be needing the Haertel overdrive for another century."

He looked around the gently rounded room, which was shining softly in the gaslight.

"And I don't seem to see any place in here," he said, "where a vacuum cleaner with forty-five patented attachments would find any work to do. How will you pay the Lithians to work in your thermonuclear plants?"

"With knowledge," Cleaver said gruffly. "There's a lot they'd like to know."

"But what knowledge, Paul? The things they'd like to know are specifically the things you can't tell them, if they're to be valuable to you as a labor force. Are you going to teach them quantum mechanics? You can't; that would be dangerous. Are you going to teach them nucleonics, or Hilbert space, or the Haertel scholium? Again, any one of those would enable them to learn other things you think dangerous. Are you going to teach them how to extract titanium from rutile, or how to accumulate enough iron to develop a science of electrodynamics, or how to pass from this Stone Age they're living in now — this Pottery Age, I should say — into an Age of Plastics? Of course you aren't. As a matter of fact, we don't have a thing to offer them in that sense. It'd all be classified under the arrangement you propose — and they just wouldn't work for us under those terms."

"Offer them other terms," Cleaver said shortly. "If necessary, tell them what they're going to do, like it or lump it. It'd be easy enough to introduce a money system on this planet. You give a Snake a piece of paper that says it's worth a dollar, and if he asks you just what makes it worth a dollar — well, the answer is, an honest day's work."

"And we put a machine pistol to his belly to emphasize the point," Ruiz-Sanchez interjected.

"Do we make machine pistols for nothing? I never figured out what else they were good for. Either you point them at someone or you throw them away."

"Item: slavery," Michelis said. "That disposes, I think, of the argument of cheap labor. I won't vote for slavery. Ramon won't. Agronski?"

"No," Agronski said uneasily. "But isn't it a minor point?"

"The hell it is! It's the reason why we're here. We're supposed to think of the welfare of the Lithians as well as of ourselves — otherwise this commission procedure would be a waste of time, of thought, of energy. If we want cheap labor, we can enslave any planet."

"How do we do that?" Agronski said. "There aren't any other planets. I mean, none with intelligent life on them that we've hit so far. You can't enslave a Martian sand crab."

"Which brings up the point of our own welfare," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "We're supposed to be considering that, too. Do you know what it does to a people to be slave-owners? It kills them."

"Lots of people have worked for money without calling it slavery," Agronski said. "I don't mind getting a pay check for what I do."

"There is no money on Lithia," Michelis said stonily. "It we introduce it here, we do so only by force. Forced labor is slavery. Q. E. D."

Agronski was silent.

"Speak up," Michelis said. "Is that true, or isn't it?" Agronski said, "I guess it is. Take it easy, Mike. There's nothing to get mad about."

"Cleaver?"

"Slavery's just a swearword," Cleaver said sullenly. "You're deliberately clouding the issue."

"Say that again."

"Oh, hell. All right, Mike, I know you wouldn't. But we could work out a fair pay scale somehow."