Alan E. Nourse - The Bladerunner by Alan E. Nourse, Karl Swanson Page A
Authors: Alan E. Nourse, Karl Swanson
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program would show measurable eugenics effects within forty to fifty years. By that time it would also show measurable and beneficial impact on population curves; the population crisis would be over. If the program was ultimately applied on a worldwide basis, Heinz and Lafferty calculated, dependence on health care facilities would diminish to a bare minimum within a few decades and world population figures would ultimately be reduced by two-thirds.
As a tentative working program, the Heinz-Lafferty proposal was carefully worked out—but their work was far from complete. A hundred details of the plan remained to be tested—the impact of the proposal on religious convictions, the attitudes the doctors might take, above all the attitude of the general public, all had to be studied in meticulous detail. A dozen more years of work were needed to crystallize the plan into sound policy, and neither Heinz nor Lafferty had any idea that the federal government might ever try to implement such a program before that vital work was done. But they had not counted on the sheer desperation of the government at the precise time that their preliminary studies were completed. Faced with an economic and political crisis, with the spreading Health Riots and threatened social disintegration, the aged President and his aged Congress were aghast at any program which sought to limit medical care in any way whatever. But an ambitious and liberal young opposition saw in the proposals the makings of a revolutionary reform program. Even as the incumbent administration floundered, the opposition broadcast the Heinz-Lafferty proposals as a panacea for the future, and in 1996 a frightened and riot-weary electorate bought the package in a landslide vote of historic proportions. Within sixty days after inauguration the tentative, untested Heinz-Lafferty proposals had been written into law, and for better or for worse the nation moved down a murky road of social and medical revolution.
No one at the time could see the end of that road, least of all Heinz and Lafferty, who shouted themselves hoarse warning that their work was incomplete, or the new President, to whom aoing something seemed synonymous with improving something. Yet as the fledgling program was instituted, the stage was set for the emergence of a strange and extralegal medical black market, existing solely to thwart the law. It was into this world of underground medicine that Billy Gimp, with his shadowy personal history, his youthful ambition and his half-repaired club foot, found work as a bladerunner—a procurer of illegal surgical supplies; and it was in this same underground world that men like Dr. John Long and multitudes of his professional colleagues set about with dogged determination to defeat a system they considered intolerable to the ideals and training of physicians anywhere, any time. And now, some eighteen years later, the network was tightening and the struggle reached a new level of ferocity, with no end in sight.
Ill
DOCTOR LONG! DOCTOR JOHN LONG! The paging speaker on Doc's office wall broke into his reverie. With a sigh, he reached for the phone switch. "Doctor Long? This is Miss Rupert on Nine North. We're about to give Mabel Turner her preoperative medication. Did you want to see her before your surgery?"
"Oh, yes, of course. I'll be right there." Doc checked his watch and saw that he had just an hour's leeway before he was due in the operating suites. As he had expected, the computer had designated Mabel Turner as his first case this morning, to be performed with a full neuropantograph hookup to trace and record his every move, his every surgical decision from beginning of the case to the end. And in this case Doc was ready and waiting for them with a large measure of undisguised glee. It would be a case to be remembered. For weeks now Doc had been carefully planting erroneous data in the computer record of Mabel Turner's case history—a false lead here, a
As a tentative working program, the Heinz-Lafferty proposal was carefully worked out—but their work was far from complete. A hundred details of the plan remained to be tested—the impact of the proposal on religious convictions, the attitudes the doctors might take, above all the attitude of the general public, all had to be studied in meticulous detail. A dozen more years of work were needed to crystallize the plan into sound policy, and neither Heinz nor Lafferty had any idea that the federal government might ever try to implement such a program before that vital work was done. But they had not counted on the sheer desperation of the government at the precise time that their preliminary studies were completed. Faced with an economic and political crisis, with the spreading Health Riots and threatened social disintegration, the aged President and his aged Congress were aghast at any program which sought to limit medical care in any way whatever. But an ambitious and liberal young opposition saw in the proposals the makings of a revolutionary reform program. Even as the incumbent administration floundered, the opposition broadcast the Heinz-Lafferty proposals as a panacea for the future, and in 1996 a frightened and riot-weary electorate bought the package in a landslide vote of historic proportions. Within sixty days after inauguration the tentative, untested Heinz-Lafferty proposals had been written into law, and for better or for worse the nation moved down a murky road of social and medical revolution.
No one at the time could see the end of that road, least of all Heinz and Lafferty, who shouted themselves hoarse warning that their work was incomplete, or the new President, to whom aoing something seemed synonymous with improving something. Yet as the fledgling program was instituted, the stage was set for the emergence of a strange and extralegal medical black market, existing solely to thwart the law. It was into this world of underground medicine that Billy Gimp, with his shadowy personal history, his youthful ambition and his half-repaired club foot, found work as a bladerunner—a procurer of illegal surgical supplies; and it was in this same underground world that men like Dr. John Long and multitudes of his professional colleagues set about with dogged determination to defeat a system they considered intolerable to the ideals and training of physicians anywhere, any time. And now, some eighteen years later, the network was tightening and the struggle reached a new level of ferocity, with no end in sight.
Ill
DOCTOR LONG! DOCTOR JOHN LONG! The paging speaker on Doc's office wall broke into his reverie. With a sigh, he reached for the phone switch. "Doctor Long? This is Miss Rupert on Nine North. We're about to give Mabel Turner her preoperative medication. Did you want to see her before your surgery?"
"Oh, yes, of course. I'll be right there." Doc checked his watch and saw that he had just an hour's leeway before he was due in the operating suites. As he had expected, the computer had designated Mabel Turner as his first case this morning, to be performed with a full neuropantograph hookup to trace and record his every move, his every surgical decision from beginning of the case to the end. And in this case Doc was ready and waiting for them with a large measure of undisguised glee. It would be a case to be remembered. For weeks now Doc had been carefully planting erroneous data in the computer record of Mabel Turner's case history—a false lead here, a
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