"He wasn't really a cop, just a sheriff's deputy. And I didn't say he was shot. Actually, he was garroted, strangled to death. In Fort Adams, Oklahoma. That's where they had those student riots recently, I believe. Apparently somebody's been giving extracurricular courses in how to use the old piano-wire noose. Why?"
I hesitated, and shook my head. "Never mind."
Martha, who'd been trying to speak, broke in hotly: "You're so terribly, terribly amusing, both of you! It's very easy to make fun of the little girl, isn't it? The little girl who has the naпve and romantic notion that human life is something valuable and… and kind of sacred…
I started to say something and checked myself. Lorna made an odd little sound in her throat and turned to the dresser and splashed more whiskey into her glass. She stood there for a moment regarding her sunburned features in the mirror, without affection. She spoke without turning her head.
"Do they all live in a dream world, Helm?" she asked softly. "Don't any of them ever wake up?"
I didn't say anything. Martha stirred angrily and blurted, "I don't want to wake up! Not if being awake will make me like you!"
Lorna, still without looking around, said, "Miss Borden, what is the one thing we have plenty of in this world? What is the single material that is not in short supply these days?"
"I don't know what you mean!"
The older woman said quietly, "We're running out of clean air and water, are we not? And not only clean water. I read in the same newspaper that in the capital city of New Mexico, practically right next door, they are not watering their lawns or washing their ears this summer because they have hardly any water, clean or dirty. We 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?"
1 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 horrible, but they accepted death. You accept sex, but you think death is perfectly dreadful. That makes both of you hypocrites. No life is any more sacred than any other. Why should you be more important than a streptococcus or a mosquito, just because you happen to be a little more highly developed from one point of view-your own? Either all life is sacred, which is ridiculous, since most life forms, men included, have to live by preying on other life forms; or no life is sacred, not mine, not Helm's, not yours. 01. course, his and mine are a little more sacred than yours-"
"Why?" Martha demanded. "Because you're older? That's just silly!"
Lorna started to drink from her replenished glass, but frowned and set it aside carefully. She gripped the edge of the dresser, staring at her image in the mirror. She spoke, still without turning her head.
"Not because we're older," she said slowly and deliberately, "but because we make our lives more valuable by making it damned tough for anyone who tries to take them away from us. But they could have your life just by reaching out for it, couldn't they, Miss Borden? You wouldn't defend it. You've backed yourself into a philosophical corner from which you can't strike back; and even if you could bring yourself to do it, you wouldn't know how. Which, my dear, makes your life about as valuable as that of a sick mouse, worth only the slight effort required, by anyone who doesn't mind messing up his boot heel, to stamp down hard. And in the truly overcrowded world that's coming, those who aren't prepared to fight will get stamped on, girl, and that goes for nations as well as individuals. We haven't turned any peaceful corners and I can see none ahead. I see just a very tough battle for room enough to live in halfway decent fashion…
Her voice stopped abruptly. Her fingers released the edge of the dresser; and she slid to the floor in a dead faint.
xl.
Kneeling beside the woman on the floor, I was aware of Martha Borden rising from the bed and coming to stand over us.
"Is she… is she drunk? She certainly talked as if she were drunk."
I said, "Help me get her on the bed. Now, unlace those clodhopper boots and get them off her, will you?" I arranged the pillows under Lorna's head and went into the bathroom for a towel, which I moistened under the tap and brought back to wipe off her face, oddly pale now under the recent sunburn. I said, "Call it what you want. She's just spent two days on the desert living on a couple of candybars and half a gallon of water. Maybe the alcohol hit her, maybe just reaction… Hi, there," I said to Lorna as she opened her eyes. "Come back and join the party."