David Gerrold - A Matter for Men

Now I knew him. Jarles "Free Fall" Ferris. The Lunar Colony. One of the seventeen who made it back. We never heard how they chose who stayed and who returned. I wondered if we'd ever find out.

Fromkin was saying, "The fact is, we're still getting aftereffects of the plagues. We'll be getting them for another year or three-but we're nowhere better equipped to handle them for a small, spread-out, disorganized population than we were able to handle them for a large, dense, organized one. If anything, an individual's chances are worse now for survival. There are still ripples of those plagues circulating. Slowly, but surely, we're going to lose another half-billion people-that's the guess of the RandTanks. Then, of the survivors, we're going to lose ten percent who will have lost the will to live. Anomie. Shock. The walking wounded-and just because you don't see them wandering around in herds anymore doesn't mean they're not there. Then we'll lose the very old and the very young who won't be able to take care of themselves. And the very ill too. Anyone on any kind of maintenance is in danger, even if it's something as easily controllable as diabetes. There simply won't be either the medical care or the supplies. We lost nearly eighty percent of the world's supply of doctors, nurses and support technicians. We'll lose a lot of children because there won't be anyone around to parent them.

"Some will die, some will go feral. The birth rate will be down for a long time. We're going to lose all the babies who won't be born because those who could have been parents are no longer capable or willing. We'll lose even more babies who are born to parents who can't or won't maintain them. Should I go on? No? Okay-but we're real close to the edge. It'll look like positive feedback on the cultural level: psychoses creating more psychoses, distrust and suspicion leading to more distrust and suspicion. And if enough people start to perceive that there isn't enough of anything to go around-food, fuel, whatever-they'll start fighting over what's left. And by then we'll be into serious problems with population density; the survivors-a rag-taggle conglomeration of misfits by any definition-may be too spread out to meet and mate. Those few left who are capable and willing to be responsible parents may not be able to find each other. I expect the recede to take us right down to the level where it will be questionable if we can come back. Which means, by the way, that the casey was a noble experiment, but I'm afraid it's going to be overinflated and worthless for a long time to come. I wish I were wrong, but I've already converted most of my holdings to property or dollars. I'd advise the rest of you to do the same. With a shrinking tax base, the government is going to have to take drastic steps soon, and you're going to have to protect your wealth, or you might find yourself turned into a pauper overnight by a paper revaluation. That's happened a couple times in the past two decades, but this next one ought to be a wowzer."

He paused to take another bite of food and wash it down with a drink.

Maybe it was my high-school reflexes-I had to say something. He was talking about the fact that the dying hadn't ended yet, that we were going to lose one-third, maybe even one-half, of the remaining human beings left on the planet. He wasn't talking about how to save them; he was talking dispassionately about how to avoid economic discomfort. No-he was talking about how to profit from it. I couldn't help myself. "Sir-"

He looked up. His eyes were shaded. "Yes?"

"What about the people?"

"Say again?"

"The people. Aren't we going to try to save them?"

"Save whom? From what?"

"You said at least another half-billion people are going to die. Can't we do something about that?"

"What would you have us do?"

"Well-save them!"

"How?"

"Um, well-"

"Excuse me-I should have asked, `With what?' Most of us are spending most of our energies just staying alive. Most governments are having too much trouble just maintaining internal order to mount a rescue effort even for their own populations, let alone others. And how do you rescue people from the crisscrossing wave fronts of five different plagues, each wave front more than a thousand kilometers wide? We may have identified the plagues, but we haven't finished identifying the mutations. By the way, are you vaccinated?"

"Sure, isn't everybody?"

He snorted. "You're vaccinated because you're in the army, or the Civil Service, or something like that-someone considers you valuable enough to justify keeping you alive; but that vaccine costs time, money-and, most valuable of all, human effort. And there isn't enough of the latter to go around. Not everybody is vaccinated-only the ones that the government needs to survive. We don't have the technicians to program even the automated laboratories. We don't even have the personnel to teach new technicians. We don't have the people to maintain the equipment. We don't have-"

"I get the point-but still, isn't there something-?"

"Young man, if there were something, we would be doing it. We are doing it. Whatever we can. The point is, that even with our best efforts we are still going to lose that half-billion people. It's as unavoidable as sunrise. We might as well acknowledge it because, like it or not, that's what's so."

"I don't like it," I said.

"You don't have to." Fromkin shrugged. "The universe doesn't care. God doesn't take public opinion polls. The fact is, what you like, what I like, what anyone likes-it's all irrelevant." His expression was deceptively cordial. He seemed almost deliberately hostile. "If you really want to make a difference, then you need to ask yourself this question about everything you do: will this contribute to the survival of the species?" He looked around the gathering. "Most of us here are breeders. Would you have us compromise that breeding potential in favor of some altruistic gesture of ultimately questionable value? Or let me put that another way: you can spend the rest of your life raising and teaching the next generation of human beings, or you can spend it nursing a few dozen of the walking wounded, catatonics, autistics and retards who will never be able to contribute, who will only continue to use up resources-not the least of which is your valuable time."

"I hear you, sir. But to sit calmly and eat caviar and strawberries and bagels and lox while talking about global death and benevolent genocide-"

He put down his plate. "Would it be more moral if I starved while I talked about global death and benevolent genocide? Would starving make me care more? Would it increase my ability to do something-other than hurt?"

"You shouldn't be talking about it so dispassionately at all," I said. "It's unthinkable."

A flicker of annoyance crossed his face, but his voice remained steady. "It is not unthinkable." He said it very deliberately-was he angry? "In fact, if we do not think about it, we will be risking the consequences of being caught by surprise. One of the basic fallacies of sophomoric intelligence-don't take it personal, son; I insult everybody equally-is moral self-righteousness. Merely being able to perceive the difference between right and wrong does not make you a moral person; it only gives you some guidelines in which to operate." He leaned forward in his chair. "Now, here's the bad news. Most of the time those guidelines are irrelevant-because the pictures we hold in our heads about the way things should be usually have very little relation to the way things actually are. And holding the position that things should be some way other than what they are will only keep you stuck. You'll spend so much time arguing with the physical universe that you won't produce any result at all. You'll have some great excuses, but you won't have a result. The fact that we can do nothing about the circumstances that are sending us into a long recede is unpleasant, yes-now let's stop arguing about the situation and start handling it. There is still much we can do to minimize the unpleasantness-"