I said hopefully, "I suppose as a Mekstrom I'll eventually be qualified to join you?"

Thornd.y.k.e looked blank. "Perhaps," he said flatly.

To my mind, that flat _perhaps_ was the same sort of reply that Mother used to hand me when I wanted something that she did not want to give.

I'd been eleven before I got walloped across the bazoo by pointing out to her that _we'll see_ really meant _no_, because nothing that she said it to ever came to pa.s.s.

"Look, Thornd.y.k.e, let's take off our shoes and stop dancing," I told him. "I have a pretty good idea of what's been going on. I'd like an honest answer to what's likely to go on from here."

"I can't give you that."

"Who can?"

He said nothing, but he began to look at me as though I weren't quite bright. That made two of us, I was looking at him in the same manner.

My finger itched a bit, saving the situation. I'd been about to forget that Thornd.y.k.e was a Mekstrom and take a swing at him.

He laughed at me cynically. "You're in a very poor position to dictate terms," he said sharply.

"All right," I agreed reluctantly. "So I'm a prisoner. I'm also under a sentence of death. Don't think me unreasonable if I object to it."

"The trouble with your thinking is that you expect all things to be black or white and so defined. You ask me, 'am I going to live or die?'

and expect me to answer without qualification. I can only tell you that I don't know which. That it all depends."

"Depends upon exactly what?"

He eyed me with a cold stare. "Whether you're worthy of living."

"Who's to decide?"

"We will."

I grunted, wishing that I knew more Latin. I wanted to quote that Latin plat.i.tude about who watches the watchers. He watched me narrowly, and I expected him to quote me the phrase after having read my mind. But apparently the implication of the phrase did not appeal to him, and so he remained silent.

I broke the silence by saying, "What right has any man or collection of men to decide whether I, or anyone else, has the right to live or die?"

"It's done all the time," he replied succinctly.

"Yeah?"

"Criminals are--"

"I'm not a criminal; I've violated no man-made law. I've not even violated very many of the Ten Commandments. At least, not the one that is punishable by death."

He was silent for a moment again, then he said, "Steve, you're the victim of loose propaganda."

"Who isn't?" I granted. "The entire human race is lambasted by one form of propaganda or another from the time the infant learns to sit up until the elderly lays down and dies. We're all guilty of loose thinking. My own father, for instance, had to quit school before he could take any advanced schooling, had to fight his way up, had to collect his advanced education by study, application, and hard practice. He always swore that this long period of hardship strengthened his will and his character and gave him the guts to go out and do things that he'd never have thought of if he'd had an easy life. Then the old duck turns right around and swears that he'll never see any son of his take the b.u.mps as he took them."

"That's beside the point, Steve. I know what sort of propaganda you've been listening to. It's the old do-good line; the everything for anybody line; the no man must die alone line."

"Is it bad?"

Dr. Thornd.y.k.e shrugged. "You've talked about loose propaganda," he said.

"Well, in this welter of loose propaganda, every man had at least the opportunity of choosing which line of guff he intends to adhere to. I'm even willing to admit that there is both right and wrong on both sides.

Are you?"

I stifled a sour grin. "I shouldn't, because it is a mistake in any political argument to even let on that the other guy is slightly more than an idiot. But as an engineer, I'll admit it."

"Now that's a help," he said more cheerfully. "You're objecting, of course, to the fact that we are taking the right to pick, choose, and select those people that we think are more likely to be of good advantage to the human race. You've listened to that old line about the hypothetical cataclysm that threatens the human race, and how would you choose the hundred people who are supposed to carry on. Well, have you ever eyed the human race in slightly another manner?"

"I wouldn't know," I told him. "Maybe."

"Have you ever watched the proceedings of one of those big trials where some conkpot has blown the brains out of a half-dozen citizens by pointing a gun and emptying it at a crowd? If you have, you've been appalled by the sob sisters and do-gooders who show that the vicious character was momentarily off his toggle. We mustn't execute a nut, no matter how vicious he is. We've got to protect him, feed him, and house him for the next fifty years. Now, not only is he doing Society absolutely no d.a.m.ned good while he's locked up for fifty years, he's also eating up his share of the standard of living. Then to top this off, so long as this nut is alive, there is the danger that some soft-hearted fathead will succeed in getting him turned loose once more."

"Agreed," I said. "But you're again talking about criminals, which I don't think applies in my case."

"No, of course not," he said quickly. "I used it to prove to you that this is one way of looking at a less concrete case. Carry this soft headed thinking a couple of steps higher. Medical science has made it possible for the human race to dilute its strength. Epileptics are saved to breed epileptics; haemophiliacs are preserved, neurotics are ironed out, weaknesses of all kinds are kept alive to breed their strain of weakness."

"Just what has this to do with me and my future?" I asked.

"Quite a lot. I'm trying to make you agree that there are quite a lot of undeserving characters here on Earth."

"Did I ever deny it?" I asked him pointedly, but he took it as not including present company.

But I could see where Thornd.y.k.e was heading. First eliminate the lice on the body politic. Okay, so I am blind and cannot see the sense of incarcerating a murderer that has to be fed, clothed, and housed at my expense for the rest of his natural life. Then for the second step we get rid of weaklings, both physical and mental. I'll call Step Two pa.s.sably okay, but--? Number Three includes grifters, beggars, b.u.ms, and guys out for the soft touch and here I begin to wonder. I've known some entertaining grifters, beggars, and b.u.ms; a few of them chose their way of life for their own, just as I became a mechanical engineer.

The trouble with this sort of philosophy is that it starts off with an appeal to justice and logic (I'm quoting myself), but it quickly gets dangerous. Start knocking off the bilge-sc.u.m. Then when the lowest strata of society is gone, start on the next. Carry this line of reasoning out to straight Aristotelian Logic and you come up with parties like you and me, who may have been quite acceptable when compared to the whole cross-section of humanity, but who now have no one but his betters to compete with.

I had never reasoned this out before, but as I did right there and then, I decided that Society cannot draw lines nor a.s.sume a static pose.

Society must move constantly, either in one direction or the other. And while I object to paying taxes to support some rattlehead for the rest of his natural life, I'd rather have it that way than to have someone start a trend of bopping off everybody who has not the ability to absorb the educational level of the scholar. Because, if the trend turned upward instead of downward, that's where the dividing line would end.

Anarchy at one end, is as bad as tyranny at the other--

"I'm sorry you cannot come to a reasonable conclusion," said Dr.

Thornd.y.k.e. "If you cannot see the logic of--"

I cut him off short. "Look, Doc," I snapped, "If you can't see where your line of thinking ends, you're in bad shape."

He looked superior. "You're sour because you know you haven't got what it takes."

I almost nipped. "You're so d.a.m.ned dumb that you can't see that in any society of supermen, you'd not be qualified to clean out ash trays," I tossed back at him.

He smiled self-confidently. "By the time they start looking at my level--if they ever do--you'll have been gone long ago. Sorry, Cornell.

You don't add up."

Well, that was nothing I didn't know already. In his society, I was a nonent.i.ty. Yet, somehow, if that's what the human race was coming to under the Thornd.y.k.e's and the Phelps', I didn't care to stay around.

"All right," I snapped. "Which way do I go from here? The laboratory, or will you dispense with the preliminaries and let me take the high slide right now before this--" I held up my infected finger, "gets to the painful stages."