His insurance company, however, refused to pay off on his policy, on the grounds that Carter was not finally dead. Mrs. Carter, whose sole inheritance from her husband was his $500,000 life insurance policy, promptly sued the insurance company. The insurance company’s lawyers, in turn, sued the Carter estate on the grounds that he was trying to cheat, not death, but the insurance company.
After several years of legal maneuvering the suit came to court. It was decided in favor of the insurance company. Mrs. Carter promptly sued the judge and each individual member of the jury for personal liability on the grounds that they had «willfully and deliberately denied her her legal rights.» And caused her intense pain and suffering while doing so.
The judge, near retirement age, had a vision of his pension being eaten up by legal proceedings. He quit the bench and signed a public apology to Mrs. Carter in return for her dropping the suit against him. The jurors, none of them wealthy, quickly settled out of court. The insurance company did likewise, in advance of having its entire board of directors sued.
Mrs. Carter’s lawyers, unsatisfied with their share of the loot, looked for bigger game. Fueled by Carter’s modest nest egg (Mrs. C. would not let them touch her own money), they began suing members of the National Institutes of Health and the Justice Department, on the grounds that they had failed to provide proper medical and legal grounds for judging the rights of the cryonically undead.
A new fad erupted. Suddenly taxpayers were suing local bureaucrats for personal liability over failure to fill potholes in their streets. In one state the governor and entire legislature were sued for raising taxes to cover a budget imbalance. In another, the state environmental protection agency was sued for failing to regulate the pollution emissions of diesel trucks. The Secretary of Defense was sued simultaneously for invading Mexico and for failing to conquer Mexico. Politicians everywhere were sued for not fulfilling their campaign promises.
Bureaucrats resigned or retired rather than spend the rest of their lives and fortunes in court. Politicians thought twice, thrice, and even more about promises they had no intention of keeping.
A crisis struck the civil service at local, state, and federal levels. Faced with the threat of personal liability suits over alleged failures to perform their jobs, government employees were quitting those jobs faster than they could be replaced. It did not really matter if they won or lost their suits, the time and cost of defending themselves were more than they could bear.
Several states tried to pass laws exempting civil servants from personal liability suits. Each legislator proposing or supporting such a law was sued black and blue. The idea died long before it reached the Supreme Court—which was down to five members at the time, since four justices had hastily retired.
Faced with empty desks and unfilled job openings, government departments reluctantly turned to computers to fill the roles that human bureaucrats had abandoned.
«At least they can’t sue a computer,» said one department head, wise in the ways of bureaucracies.
To everyone’s surprise, the computers worked better than the humans they replaced. Thanks to their programming, they were industrious, unfailingly polite, and blindingly fast. And much cheaper than people. They worked all hours of the night and day, even weekends. They never took coffee breaks or asked for raises. They transferred information with electrical alacrity, and eventually with the speed of light, when photonics began to replace electronics.
Computers’ programs could easily be changed to accommodate new facts, something that had been impossible with human bureaucrats.
Taxpayers liked the computers. The usual gloom and oppressive atmosphere of government offices was replaced by bright humming efficiency. Citizens could even handle most problems from their homes, with their personal computers talking to the government’s computers to settle problems swiftly and neatly.
In the meantime, with fewer and fewer liability suits to sustain them, lawyers began to sue one another in a frenzy that eventually came to be called «the time of great dying.» Within a century the last lawyer in the U.S. was replaced by a computer and sent into a richly deserved retirement in Death Valley.
By the time Carter C. Carter was finally revived from his cryonic sleep, decision-making computers had replaced humans at all levels of government except the very top posts, where policy was decided by elected officials. All permanent government «employees» had electrons and/or photons flowing through them instead of blood.
Carter, however, was dismayed to learn that his modest nest egg had long since been devoured by rapacious lawyers, and that—thanks to compound interest—he owed the estates of his erstwhile legal representatives a total of some six million dollars.
The shock stopped his heart. Since he had not had time to make out a new will, he was declared finally dead and cremated.
But his memory lives on. The happy and efficient society in which we live, unthreatened by the personal liability suits that ruined many an earlier life, is directly attributable to that unlikely hero of heroes, Carter C. Carter.
A SMALL KINDNESS
To this day, I’m not quite certain of how this story originated. I’ve been to Athens, and found it a big, noisy, dirty city fouled with terrible automobile pollution—and centered on the awe-inspiring Acropolis.
The world’s most beautiful building, the Parthenon, is truly a symbol of what is best and what is worst in us. Of its beauty, its grace, its simple grandeur I can add nothing to the paeans that have been sung by so many others. But over the millennia, the dark forces of human nature have almost destroyed the Parthenon. It has been blasted by cannon fire, defaced by conquerors and tourists, and now is being eaten away by the acidic outpourings of automobile exhausts.
A pessimist would say, with justice, that this is a case where human technology is obviously working against the human spirit. An optimist would say that since we recognize the problem, we ought to take steps to solve it.
In a way, that’s what «A Small Kindness» is about—I think.
Jeremy Keating hated the rain. Athens was a dismal enough assignment, but in the windswept rainy night it was cold and black and dangerous.
Everyone pictures Athens in the sunshine, he thought. The Acropolis, the gleaming ancient temples. They don’t see the filthy modern city with its endless streams of automobiles spewing out so much pollution that the marble statues are being eaten away and the ancient monuments are in danger of crumbling.
Huddled inside his trenchcoat, Keating stood in the shadows of a deep doorway across the street from the taverna where his target was eating a relaxed and leisurely dinner—his last, if things went the way Keating planned.
He stood as far back in the doorway as he could, pressed against the cold stones of the building, both to remain unseen in the shadows and to keep the cold rain off himself. Rain or no, the automobile traffic still clogged Filellinon Boulevard, cars inching by bumper to bumper, honking their horns, squealing on the slickened paving. The worst traffic in the world, night and day. A million and a half Greeks, all in cars, all the time. They drove the way they lived—argumentatively.
The man dining across the boulevard in the warm, brightly-lit taverna was Kabete Rungawa, of the Tanzanian delegation to the World Government conference. «The Black Saint of the Third World,» he was called. The most revered man since Gandhi. Keating smiled grimly to himself. According to his acquaintances in the Vatican, a man had to be dead before he could be proclaimed a saint.