A Case of Conscience

Michelis walked to the glass wall and looked out onto the sun porch. All of Liu's flowering plants were out there, a real garden, which had to be kept sealed off from the rest of the apartment; for in addition to being an ardent amateur gardener, Liu bred bees. There was a colony of them there, making singular and exotic honeys from the congeries of blossoms Liu had laid out so carefully. The honey was fabulous and ever-changing, sometimes too bitter to eat except in tiny fork-touches like Chinese mustard, sometimes containing a heady touch of opium from the sticky hybrid poppies that nodded in a soldierly squad along the sun porch railing, sometimes sickly-sweet and insipid until, with a surprisingly small amount of glassware, Liu converted it into a liqueur that mounted to the head like a breeze from the Garden of Allah. The bees that made it were tetraploid monsters the size of hummingbirds, with tempers as bad as Michelis' own was getting to be; only a few of them could kill even a big man. Luckily, they flew badly in the gusts common at this altitude, and would starve anywhere but in Liu's garden, otherwise Liu would never have been licensed to keep them on an open sun porch in the middle of the city. Michelis had been more than a little wary of them at first, but lately they had begun to fascinate him: their apparent intelligence was almost as phenomenal as their size and viciousness.

"Damn." Liu said behind him.

"What's the matter?"

"Omelettes again. That's the second wrong number I've dialed this week."

Both the oath — mild though it was — and the error were uncharacteristic. Mike felt a twinge, a mixture of compassion and guilt. Liu was changing; she had never been so distractible before. Was he responsible?

"It's all right. I don't mind. Let's eat."

"All right."

They ate silently, but Michelis was conscious of the pressure of inquiry behind Liu's still expression. The chemist thought furiously, angry with himself, and yet unable to phrase what he wanted to say. He should never have got her into this at all. No, that couldn't have been prevented; she had been the logical scientist to handle Egtverchi in his infancy — probably nobody else could have brought him through it even this well. But surely it should have been possible to keep her from becoming emotionally involved -

No, that had not been possible either; that was the woman of it. And the man of it, now that he was forced to think about his own role. It was no use; he simply did not know what he should think; Egtverchi's broadcast had rattled him beyond the point of logical thought. He was going to wind up with his usual bad compromise with Liu, which was to say nothing at all. But that would not do either.

And yet it had been a simple enough piece of foolery that the Lithian had perpetrated — childish, as Liu had said. Egtverchi had been urged to be off beat, rebellious, irresponsible, and he had come through in spades. Not only had he voiced his disrespect for all established institutions and customs, but he had also challenged his audience to show the same disrespect. In the closing mornents of his broadcast, he had even told them how: they were to mail anonymous, insulting messages to Egtverchi's own sponsors.

"A postcard will do," he had said, gently enough, through his grinning chops. "Just make the message pungent. If you hate that powdered concrete they call a knish mix, write and tell them so. If you can eat the knishes but our commercials make you sick, write them about that, and don't pull any punches. If you loathe me, tell the Bifalcos that, too, and make sure you're spitting mad about it. I'll read the five messages I think in the worst possible taste on my broad — "

'To nobody," Michelis said angrily.

"Quite so. And yet I repeat that I didn't select it deliberately for shock value, Dr. Michelis. It's a bagatelle — very mild, compared to some of the stuff we've been getting. This Snake obviously has an audience of borderline madmen, and he means to use it. That's why I came to see you. We think you might have some idea as to what he intends to use it for."

"For nothing, if you people have any control over what you yourselves do," Michelis said. "Why don't you cut him off the air? If he's poisoning it, then you don't have any other choice."

"One man's poison is another man's knish mix," the UN man said smoothly. "The Bifalcos don't see this — the way we do. They have their own analysts, and they know as well as we do that they're going to get more than seven and a half million dirty postcards in the next week. But they like the idea. In fact, they're positively wriggling with delight. They think it will sell products. They will probably give the Snake a whole half hour, solely sponsored by them, if the response comes through as predicted — and it will."

"Why can't you cut Egtverchi off anyhow?" Liu said.