A Case of Conscience

Defensive though the shelter race seemed on the surface, it had taken on all the characteristics of a classical arms race — for the nation that lagged behind invited instant attack. Nevertheless, there had been a difference. The shelter race had been undertaken under the dawning realization that the threat of nuclear war was not only imminent but transcendent; it could happen at any instant, but its failure to break out at any given time meant that it had to be lived with for at least a century, and perhaps five centuries. Thus the race was not only hectic, but long-range. And, like all arms races, it defeated itself in the end, this time because those who planned it had planned for too long a span of time. The shelter economy was world-wide now, but the race had hardly ended when signs began to appear that people simply would not live willingly under such an economy for long; certainly not for five hundred years, and probably not for a century. The Corridor Riots of 1993 were the first major sign; since then, there had been many more.

The riots had provided the United Nations with the excuse it needed to set up, at long last, a. real supranational government and world state with teeth in it. The riots had provided the excuse — and the shelter economy, with its neo-Hellenic fragmentation of political power, had given the UN the means. Theoretically, that should have solved everything. Nuclear war was no longer likely between the member states; the threat was gone… but how do you unbuild a shelter economy? An economy which cost twenty-five billion dollars a year, every year for twenty-five years, to build? An economy now embedded in the face of the Earth in uncountable billions of tons of concrete and steel, to a depth of more than a mile? It could not be undone; the planet would be a mausoleum for the living from now until the Earth itself perished: gravestones, gravestones, gravestones…

The word tolled in Ruiz-Sanchez' ears, distantly. The infra-bass of the buried city's thunder shook the glass in front of him. Mingled with it there was an ominous grinding sound of unrest, more marked than he had ever heard it before, like the noise of a cannon ball rolling furiously around and around in "a rickety, splintering wooden track…"

"Dreadful, isn't it?" Michelis' voice said at his shoulder. Ruiz-Sanchez shot a surprised glance at the big chemist — not surprised that he had not heard Michelis enter, but that Mike was speaking to him again.

"It is," he said. "I'm glad you noticed it too. I thought it just might be hypersensitivity on my part — from having been away so long."

"It might well be that," Michelis agreed gravely. "I was away myself."

Ruiz-Sanchez shook his head.

"No, I think it's real," be said, "These are intolerable conditions to ask people to live under. And it's more than a matter of making them live ninety days out of every hundred at the bottom of a hole. After all, they think of living every day of their lives on the verge of destruction. We trained their parents to think that way, otherwise there'd never have been enough taxes to pay for the shelters. And of course the children have been brought up to think that too. It's inhuman."

"Is it?" Michelis said. "People lived all their lives on the verge for centuries — all the way up until Pasteur. How long ago was that?"

"Only about 1860," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "But no, it's quite different now. The pestilence was capricious; one's children might survive it; but fusion bombs are catholic." He winced involuntarily. "And there it is. A moment ago, I caught myself thinking that the shadow of destruction we labor under now is not only imminent but transcendent; I was burlesquing a tragedy; death in premedical days was always both imminent and immanent, impending and indwelling — but it was never transcendent. In those days, only God was impending, indwelling and transcendent all at once, and that was their hope. Today, we've given them Death instead."

"Sorry," Michelis said, his bony face suddenly turning flinty.

"You know I can't argue with you on those grounds, Ramon. I've already been burned once. Once is enough." The chemist turned away. Liu, who had been making a serial dilution at the long bench, was holding the ranked test tubes up to the daylight, and peeping up at Michelis from under her half-shut eyelids. She looked promptly away again as Ruiz-Sanchez' gaze fell on her face. He did not know whether she knew that he had caught her; but the tubes rattled a little in the rack as she put them down again.

"Excuse me," he said. "Liu, this is Dr. Michelis, one of my confreres on the commission to Lithia. Mike, this is Dr. Liu Meid, who'll be taking care of Chtexa's child for an indefinite period, more or less under my supervision. She's one of the world's best xenozoologists."