Cities in Flight

“You needn’t worry,” Paige said. “Understand, I’ve no connection with the Bridge, though I do know some people on the Bridge gang, so I haven’t any inside information. I do have some public knowledge, just like yours—meaning knowledge that anyone can have, if he has the training to know where to look for it. As I understand it, the Bridge on Jupiter is a research project, designed to answer some questions—just what questions, nobody’s bothered to tell me, and I’ve been careful not to ask; you can see Francis X. MacHinery’s face in the constellations if you look carefully enough. But this much I know: the conditions of the research demand the use of the largest planet in the system. That’s Jupiter, so it would be senseless to build another Bridge on a smaller planet, like Saturn. The Bridge gang will keep the present structure going until they’ve found out what they want to know. Then the project will almost surely be discontinued—not because the Bridge is ‘finished,’ but because it will have served its purpose.”

“I suppose I’m showing my ignorance,” Anne said, “but it sounds idiotic to me. All those millions and millions of dollars—that we could be saving lives with!”

“If the choice were mine,” Paige agreed, “I’d award the money to you, not to Charity Dillon and his crew. But then, I know almost as little about the Bridge as you do, so perhaps it’s just as well that I’m not allowed to route the check. Is it my turn to ask a question? I still have a small one.”

“Your witness,” Anne said, smiling her altogether lovely smile.

“This afternoon, while I was in the labs, I twice heard a baby crying—and I think it was actually two different babies. I asked your Mr. Gunn about it, and he told me an obvious fairy story.” He paused. Anne’s eyes had already begun to glitter.

“You’re on dangerous ground, Colonel Russell,” she said.

“I can tell. But I mean to ask my question anyhow. When I pulled my absurd vivisection threat on you later, I was out-and-out flabbergasted that it worked, but it set me to thinking. Can you explain —and if so, would you?”

Anne got out her compact again and seemed to consult it warily. At last she said: “I suppose I’ve forgiven you, more or less. Anyhow, I’ll answer. It’s very simple: the babies are being used as experimental animals. We have a pipeline to a local foundling home. It’s all only technically legal, and had you actually brought charges of human vivisection against us, you probably could have made them stick.”

His coffee cup clattered into its saucer. “Great God, Anne. Isn’t it dangerous to make such a joke these days—especially with a man you’ve known only half a day? Or are you trying to startle me into admitting I’m a stoolie?”

“I’m not joking and I don’t think you’re a stoolie,” she said calmly. “What I said was perfectly true—oh, I souped up the way I put it just a little, maybe because I haven’t entirely forgiven you for that bit of successful blackmail, and I wanted to see you jump. And for other reasons. But it’s true.”

“But Anne—why?”

“Look, Paige,” she said. “It was fifty years ago that we found that if we added minute amounts of certain antibiotics, really just traces, to animal feeds, the addition brought the critters to market months ahead of normally-fed animals. For that matter, it even provokes growth spurts in plants under special conditions; and it works for poultry, baby pigs, calves, mink cubs, a whole spectrum of animals. It was logical to suspect that it might work in newborn humans too.”

“And you’re trying that?” Paige leaned back and poured himself another glass of Chilean Rhine. “I’d say you souped up your revelation quite a bit, all right.”

“Don’t be so ready to accept the obvious, and listen to me. We are not doing that. It was done decades ago, regularly and above the board, by students of Paul György and half a hundred other nutrition experts. Those people used only very widely known and tested antibiotics, drugs that had already been used on literally millions of farm animals, dosages worked out to the milligram of drug per kilogram of body weight, and so on. But this particular growth-stimulating effect of antibiotics happens to be a major clue to whether or not a given drug has the kind of biological activity we want—and we have to know whether or not it shows that activity in human beings. So we screen new drugs on the kids, as fast as they’re found and pass certain other tests. We have to.”

“I see,” Paige said. “I see.”

“The children are ‘volunteered’ by the foundling home, and we could make a show of legality if it came to a court fight,” Anne said. “The precedent was established in 1952, when Pearl River Labs used children of its own workers to test its live-virus polio vaccine—which worked, by the way. But it isn’t the legality of it that’s important. It’s the question of how soon and how thoroughly we’re going to lick the degenerative diseases.”