Overruled

by Hank Davis

  “Oh, certainly. No good for polo, but you could ride him.”

  “I’ll settle for that. Ask Benny Creeth, or whatever his name is, how long that would take.”

  The Martian had faded out of the screens. “I don’t need to ask him,” Cargrew asserted. “This is my job—purely manipulation. B’na’s collaboration is required only for rearrangement and transplanting of genes—true genetic work. I can let you have the beast in eighteen months.”

  “Can’t you do better than that?”

  “What do you expect, man? It takes eleven months to grow a new-born colt. I want one month of design and planning. The embryo will be removed on the fourth day and will be developed in an extra-uterine capsule. I’ll operate ten or twelve times during gestation, grafting and budding and other things you’ve heard of. One year from now we’ll have a baby colt, with wings. Thereafter I’ll deliver to you a six-months-old Pegasus.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  Cargrew made some notes, then read, “One alate horse, not capable of flight and not to breed true. Basic breed your choice—I suggest a Palomino, or an Arabian. Wings designed after a condor, in white. Simulated pin feathers with a grafted fringe of quill feathers, or reasonable facsimile.” He passed the sheet over. “Initial that and we’ll start in advance of formal contract.”

  “It’s a deal,” agreed van Vogel. “What is the fee?” He placed his monogram under Cargrew’s.

  Cargrew made further notes and handed them to Blakesly—estimates of professional man-hours, purchases, and overhead. He had padded the figures to subsidize his collateral research but even he raised his eyebrows at the dollars-and-cents interpretation Blakesly put on the data. “That will be an even two million dollars.”

  Van Vogel hesitated; his wife had looked up at the mention of money. But she turned her attention back to the scholarly elephant.

  Blakesly added hastily, “That is for an exclusive creation, of course.”

  “Naturally,” Van Vogel agreed briskly, and added the figure to the memorandum.

  Van Vogel was ready to return, but his wife insisted on seeing the “apes,” as she termed the anthropoid workers. The discovery that she owned a considerable share in these subhuman creatures had intrigued her. Blakesly eagerly suggested a trip through the laboratories in which the workers were developed from true apes.

  They were arranged in seven buildings, the seven “Days of Creation.” “First Day” was a large building occupied by Cargrew, his staff, his operating rooms, incubators, and laboratories. Martha van Vogel stared in horrified fascination at living organs and even complete embryos, living artificial lives sustained by clever glass and metal recirculating systems and exquisite automatic machinery.

  She could not appreciate the techniques; it seemed depressing. She had about decided against plasto-biology when Napoleon, by tugging at her skirts, reminded her that it produced good things as well as horrors.

  The building “Second Day” they did not enter; it was occupied by B’na Kreeth and his racial colleagues. “We could not stay alive in it, you understand,” Blakesly explained. Van Vogel nodded; his wife hurried on—she wanted no Martians, even behind plastiglass.

  From there on the buildings were for development and production of commercial workers. “Third Day” was used for development of variations in the anthropoids to meet constantly changing labor requirements. “Fourth Day” was a very large building devoted entirely to production-line incubators for commercial types of anthropoids. Blakesly explained that they had dispensed with normal birth. “The policy permits exact control of forced variations, such as for size, and saves hundreds of thousands of worker-hours on the part of the female anthropoids.”

  Martha van Vogel was delighted with the “Fifth Day,” the anthropoid kindergarten where the little tykes learned to talk and were conditioned to the social patterns necessary to their station in life. They worked at simple tasks such as sorting buttons and digging holes in sand piles, with pieces of candy given as incentives for fast and accurate work.

  “Sixth Day” completed the anthropoid’s educations. Each learned the particular sub-trade it would practice, cleaning, digging, and especially agricultural semi-skills such as weeding, thinning, and picking. “One Nisei farmer working three neo-chimpanzees can grow as many vegetables as a dozen old-style farm hands.” Blakesly asserted. “They really like to work—when we get through with them.”

  They admired the almost incredibly heavy tasks done by modified gorillas and stopped to gaze at the little neo-Capuchins doing high picking on prop trees, then moved on toward “Seventh Day.”

  This building was used for the radioactive mutation of genes and therefore located some distance away from the others. They had to walk, as the slidewalk was being repaired; the detour took them past workers’ pens and barracks. Some of the anthropoids crowded up to the wire and began calling to them: “Sigret! Sigret! Preese, Missy! Preese, Boss! Sigret!”

  “What are they saying?” Martha van Vogel inquired.

  “They are asking for cigarettes,” Blakesly answered in annoyed tones. “They know better, but they are like children. Here—I’ll put a stop to it.” He stepped up to the wire and shouted to an elderly male, “Hey! Strawboss!”

  The worker addressed wore, in addition to the usual short canvas kilt, a bedraggled arm band. He turned and shuffled toward the fence. “Strawboss,” ordered Blakesly, “get those Joes away from here.”

  “Okay, boss,” the old fellow acknowledged and started cuffing those nearest him. “Scram, you Joes! Scram!”

  “But I have some cigarettes,” protested Mrs. Van Vogel, “and I would gladly have given them some.”

  “It doesn’t do to pamper them,” the Manager told her. “They have been taught that luxuries come only from work. I must apologize for my poor children; those in these pens are getting old and forgetting their manners.”

  She did not answer but moved further along the fence to where one old neo-chimp was pressed up against the wire, staring at them with soft, tragic eyes, like a child at a bakery window. He had taken no part in the jostling demand for tobacco and had been let alone by the strawboss. “Would you like a cigarette?” she asked him.

  “Preese, Missy.”

  She struck one which he accepted with fumbling grace, took a long, lung-filled drag, let the smoke trickle out his nostrils, and said shyly, “Sankoo, Missy. Me Jerry.”

  “How do you do, Jerry?”

  “Howdy, Missy.” He bobbed down, bending his knees, ducking his head, and clasping his hands to his chest, all in one movement.

  “Come along, Martha.” Her husband and Blakesly had moved in behind her.

  “In a moment,” she answered. “Brownie, meet my friend, Jerry. Doesn’t he look just like Uncle Albert? Except that he looks so sad. Why are you unhappy, Jerry?”

  “They don’t understand abstract ideas,” put in Blakesly.

  But Jerry surprised him. “Jerry sad,” he announced in tones so doleful that Martha van Vogel did not know whether to laugh or cry.

  “Why, Jerry?” she asked gently. “Why are you so sad?”

  “No work,” he stated. “No sigret. No candy. No work.”

  “These are all old workers who have passed their usefulness,” Blakesly repeated. “Idleness upsets them, but we have nothing for them to do.”

  “Well!” she said. “Then why don’t you have them sort buttons, or something like that, such as the baby ones do?”

  “They wouldn’t even do that properly,” Blakesly answered her. “These workers are senile.”

  “Jerry isn’t senile! You heard him talk.”

  “Well, perhaps not. Just a moment.” He turned to the apeman, who was squatting down in order to scratch Napoleon’s head with a long forefinger thrust through the fence. “You, Joe! Come here.”

  Blakesly felt around the worker’s hairy neck and located a thin steel chain to which was attached a small metal tag. He studied it. “You’re right,” he admitted.
“He’s not really over age, but his eyes are bad. I remember the lot—cataracts as a result of an unfortunate linked mutation.” He shrugged.

  “But that’s no reason to let him grieve his heart out in idleness.”

  “Really, Mrs. Van Vogel, you should not upset yourself about it. They don’t stay in these pens long—only a few days at the most.”

  “Oh,” she answered, somewhat mollified, “you have some other place to retire them to, then. Do you give them something to do there? You should—Jerry wants to work. Don’t you, Jerry?”

  The neo-chimp had been struggling to follow the conversation. He caught the last idea and grinned. “Jerry work! Sure Mike! Good worker.” He flexed his fingers, then made fists, displaying fully opposed thumbs.

  Mr. Blakesly seemed somewhat nonplussed. “Really, Mrs. Van Vogel, there is no need. You see—” He stopped.

  Van Vogel had been listening irritably. His wife’s enthusiasms annoyed him, unless they were also his own. Furthermore he was beginning to blame Blakesly for his own recent extravagance and had a premonition that his wife would find some way to make him pay, very sweetly, for his indulgence.

  Being annoyed with both of them, he chucked in the perfect wrong remark. “Don’t be silly, Martha. They don’t retire them; they liquidate them.”

  It took a little time for the idea to sink in, but when it did she was furious. “Why…why—I never heard of such a thing! You ought to be ashamed. You…you would shoot your own grandmother.”

  “Mrs. Van Vogel—please!”

  “Don’t ‘Mrs. Van Vogel’ me! It’s got to stop—you hear me?” She looked around at the death pens, at the milling hundreds of old workers therein. “It’s horrible. You work them until they can’t work anymore, then you take away their little comforts, and you dispose of them. I wonder you don’t eat them!”

  “They do,” her husband said brutally. “Dog food.”

  “What! Well, we’ll put a stop to that!”

  “Mrs. Van Vogel,” Blakesly pleaded. “Let me explain.”

  “Hummph! Go ahead. It had better be good.”

  “Well, it’s like this—” His eye fell on Jerry, standing with worried expression at the fence. “Scram, Joe!” Jerry shuffled away.

  “Wait Jerry!” Mrs. Van Vogel called out. Jerry paused uncertainly. “Tell him to come back,” she ordered Blakesly.

  The manager bit his lip, then called out, “Come back here.”

  He was beginning definitely to dislike Mrs. Van Vogel, despite his automatic tendency to genuflect in the presence of a high credit rating. To be told how to run his own business—well, now, indeed! “Mrs. van Vogel, I admire your humanitarian spirit but you don’t understand the situation. We understand our workers and do what is best for them. They die painlessly before their disabilities can trouble them. They live happy lives, happier than yours or mine. We trim off the bad part of their lives, nothing more. And don’t forget, these poor beasts would never have been born had we not arranged it.”

  She shook her head. “Fiddlesticks! You’ll be quoting the Bible at me next. There will be no more of it, Mr. Blakesly. I shall hold you personally responsible.”

  Blakesly looked bleak. “My responsibilities are to the directors.”

  “You think so?” She opened her purse and snatched out her telephone. So great was her agitation that she did not bother to call through, but signalled the local relay operator instead. “Phoenix? Get me Great New York Murray Hill 9Q-4004, Mr. Haskell. Priority—star subscriber 777. Make it quick.” She stood there, tapping her foot and glaring, until her business manager answered. “Haskell? This is Martha van Vogel. How much Workers, Incorporated, common do I own? No, no never mind that—what percent?…so? Well, it’s not enough. I want 51% by tomorrow morning…all right, get proxies for the rest but get it…I didn’t ask you what it would cost; I said get it. Get busy.” She disconnected abruptly and turned to her husband. “We’re leaving, Brownie, and we’re taking Jerry with us. Mr. Blakesly, will you kindly have him taken out of that pen? Give him a check for the amount, Brownie.”

  “Now, Martha—”

  “My mind is made up, Brownie.”

  Mr. Blakesly cleared his throat. It was going to be pleasant to thwart this woman. “The workers are never sold. I’m sorry. It’s a matter of policy.”

  “Very well then, I’ll take a permanent lease.”

  “This worker has been removed from the labor market. He is not for lease.”

  “Am I going to have trouble with you?”

  “If you please, madame! This worker is not available under any terms—but as a courtesy to you, I am willing to transfer to you indentures for him, gratis. I want you to know that the policies of this firm are formed from a very real concern for the welfare of our charges as well as from the standpoint of good business practice. We therefore reserve the right to inspect at any time to assure ourselves that you are taking proper care of this worker.” There, he told himself savagely, that will stop her clock!

  “Of course. Thank you, Mr. Blakesly. You are most gracious.”

  The trip back to Great New York was not jolly. Napoleon hated it and let it be known. Jerry was patient, but airsick. By the time they were grounded the van Vogels were not on speaking terms.

  * * *

  “I’m sorry Mrs. van Vogel. The shares were simply not available. We should have a proxy on the O’Toole block but someone tied them up an hour before I reached them.”

  “Blakesly.”

  “Undoubtedly. You should not have tipped him off; you gave him time to warn his employers.”

  “Don’t waste time telling me what mistakes I made yesterday. What are you going to do today?”

  “My dear Mrs. van Vogel, what can I do? I’ll carry out any instructions you care to give.”

  “Don’t talk nonsense. You are supposed to be smarter than I am; that’s why I pay you to do my thinking for me.”

  Mr. Haskell looked helpless.

  His principle struck a cigarette so hard she broke it. “Why isn’t Weinberg here?”

  “Really, Mrs. van Vogel, there are no special legal aspects. You want the stock; we can’t buy it nor bind it. Therefore—”

  “I pay Weinberg to know the legal angles. Get him.”

  Weinberg was leaving his office; Haskell caught him on a chase-me circuit. “Sidney,” Haskell called out. “Come to my office, will you? Oscar Haskell.”

  “Sorry. How about four o’clock?”

  “Sidney, I want you—now!” cut in the client’s voice. “This is Martha van Vogel.”

  The little man shrugged helplessly. “Right away,” he agreed. That woman—why hadn’t he retired on his one hundred and twenty-fifth birthday, as his wife had urged him to?

  Ten minutes later he was listening to Haskell’s explanations and his client’s interruptions. When they had finished he spread his hands. “What do you expect, Mrs. van Vogel? These workers are chattels. You have not been able to buy the property rights involved; you are stopped. But I don’t see what you are worked up about. They gave you the worker whose life you wanted preserved.”

  She spoke forcefully under her breath, then answered him. “That’s not important. What is one worker among millions? I want to stop this killing, all of it.”

  Weinberg shook his head. “If you were able to prove that their methods of disposing of these beasts were inhumane, or that they were negligent of their physical welfare before destroying them, or that the destruction was wanton—”

  “Wanton? It certainly is!”

  “Probably not in a legal sense, my dear lady. There was a case, Julius Hartman et al. vs. Hartman Estate, 1972, I believe, in which a permanent injunction was granted against carrying out a term of the will which called for the destruction of a valuable collection of Persian cats. But in order to use that theory you would have to show that these creatures, when superannuated, are notwithstanding more valuable alive than dead. You cannot compel a person to maintain chattels at a loss
.”

  “See here, Sidney, I didn’t get you over here to tell me how this can’t be done. If what I want isn’t legal, then get a law passed.”

  Weinberg looked at Haskell, who looked embarrassed and answered, “Well, the fact of the matter is, Mrs. van Vogel, that we have agreed with the other members of the Commonwealth Association not to subsidize any legislation during the incumbency of the present administration.”

  “How ridiculous! Why?”

  “The Legislative guild has brought out a new fair-practices code which we consider quite unfair, a sliding scale which penalizes the well-to-do—all very nice sounding, with special provisions for nominal fees for veterans’ private bills and such things—but in fact the code is confiscatory. Even the Briggs Foundation can hardly afford to take a proper interest in public affairs under this so-called code.”

  “Hmmph! A fine day when legislators join unions—they are professional men. Bribes should be competitive. Get an injunction.”

  “Mrs. van Vogel,” protested Weinberg, “how can you expect me to get an injunction against an organization which has no legal existence? In a legal sense, there is no Legislative Guild, just as the practice of assisting legislation by subsidy has itself no legal existence.”

  “And babies come under cabbage leaves. Quit stalling me, gentlemen. What are you going to do?”

  Weinberg spoke when he saw that Haskell did not intend to. “Mrs. van Vogel, I think we should retain a special shyster.”

  “I don’t employ shysters, even—I don’t understand the way they think. I am a simple housewife, Sidney.”

  Mr. Weinberg flinched at her self-designation while noting that he must not let her find out that the salary of his own staff shyster was charged to her payroll. As convention required, he maintained the front of a simple, barefoot solicitor, but he had found out long ago that Martha van Vogel’s problems required an occasional dose of the more exotic branch of the law. “The man I have in mind is a creative artist,” he insisted. “It is no more necessary to understand him than it is to understand the composer in order to appreciate a symphony. I do recommend that you talk with him, at least.”