Hamilton, Donald - Matt Helm 14 by The Intriguers (v1.1) Page B

are
running out of important metals and minerals. Some areas of the world cannot
produce enough food to support their populations adequately. Fuels of all kinds
are becoming scarce. In fact we are running out of just about everything, Miss
Borden, with one spectacular exception. What is the one resource that's
practically unlimited'?" The girl licked her lips and didn't answer. Lorna
said, "The one thing we have plenty of, my dear, is people."
                Martha licked her lips once more.
"Assuming that what you say is true, Mrs. Holt or whatever I'm supposed to
call you, what's your point?"
                Lorna sipped her drink, still
studying the tanned, aquiline face in the mirror. Her voice remained very soft.
"We are going to have to take a long hard look at the so-called sacredness
of human life in the very near future, if the race is to survive. We are going
to have to apply a little logic to the problem, instead of continuing to wallow
in the sentimental humanitarianism currently fashionable. And the simple fact
is, Miss Borden, that on strictly logical grounds we should consider war a
tremendous, if rather inefficient, blessing. We should look at the yearly
traffic toll as a great, beneficial contribution to population control. We
should applaud every suicide as a public benefactor voluntarily yielding up his
place on this crowded planet and making it available to somebody else."
                I didn't like it. When they start
thinking deep thoughts, and particularly when they start talking about them,
they're apt to get kind of unreliable in action.
                I said, "Hooray for cancer and
emphysema. Bring on your drugs and cigarettes. Cut it out, Lorna. You can solve
the problems of humanity some other night. Right now let's tackle something
important, like who's going to sleep where."
                She paid me no attention, and
neither did Martha. The younger girl said, "You must be crazy, Mrs. Holt!
That's a terrible way to think!"
                Lorna shrugged. "I'm not crazy,
just realistic. The basic trouble with your generation, Miss Borden, is that
you will not face the facts. Subconsciously you realize that you're mostly
superfluous-that the world would be much better off if only a fraction of you
had been born-but you can't bring yourself to admit it and face the logical
consequences: that your lousy little lives are not particularly valuable, let
alone sacred. There are too many of you. Anything that plentiful can't be worth
much, can it?"
                I said, "Damn it, Lorna, shut
up! it's too late at night-"
                "No," said the woman at
the dresser, gulping down the last of her drink and reaching for the bottle
again, "no, it's not too late at night, and no, I will not shut up! I am
fed up to here with children who consider themselves something special simply
because they happened to be born. And I am particularly tired of the hypocritical
attitude towards death they all display. They live on death. Every antibiotic
they take-and they gobble penicillin like candy-kills millions of living
organisms. The slaughterhouses of the nation run knee-deep in blood to supply
them with hamburgers and hotdogs. Even if they're vegetarians, they're eating
bread and cereal and salads from fields protected by lethal farm chemicals that
murdered countless innocent insects that had a perfect right to exist-and after
all, a stalk of wheat or a head of lettuce is a living thing, too, something
they carefully ignore. This girl is right now sitting in a motel room which was
undoubtedly constructed on the graves of hundreds of small living creatures,
slaughtered and dispossessed by the cruel bulldozers
                "You're here, too!" the
girl protested.
                "My dear, I'm not carrying on a
crusade against death. You are. It's the great fashionable cause of modern
times. The Victorians thought sex was