Boyle went to the auto-dispenser in a corner and brought back three drinks, frosted and effervescing. They touched rims. Moira sipped at her glass quietly, waiting in tacit agreement with Locke for the older man's opinion.
"This longevity should be available to the Social Body as well as to AL&O," Boyle said. "It's obvious even to non-politicals like Locke and myself that, unless equal privilege is maintained, there's going to be the devil to pay and the Weal will suffer. It's equally obvious that the Alcorians' offer is made with the deliberate intent of undermining our system through dissension."
"To their own profit, of course," Locke put in. "Divide and conquer...."
"Whatever is to be done must be done quickly," Boyle said. "It would take months to negotiate a definitive plebiscite, and in that time the Alcorians would have gone home again without treating anyone outside AL&O. And there the matter would rest. It seems to be up to us to get hold of the longevity process ourselves and to broadcast it to the public."
"The good of the Body is the preservation of the Weal," Locke said sententiously. "What do you think, Moira?"
Moira touched her lips with a delicate pink tongue-tip, considering. To Boyle, her process of thought was as open as a plain-talk teletape; immortality for the Social Body automatically meant immortality for Moira and for David Locke. Both young, with an indefinite guarantee of life....
"Yes," Moira said definitely. "If some have it, then all should. But how, Philip?"
"You're both too young to remember this, of course," Boyle said, "but until the 1980 Truth-check Act, there was a whole field of determinative action applicable to cases like this. It's a simple enough problem if we plan and execute it properly."
His confidence was not feigned; he had gone over the possibilities already with the swift ruthlessness that had made him head of Transplanet Enterprises, and the prospect of direct action excited rather than dismayed him. Until now he had skirted the edges of illegality with painstaking care, never stepping quite over the line beyond which he would be liable to the disastrous truth-check, but at this moment he felt himself invincible, above retaliation.
"This present culture is a pragmatic compromise with necessity," Boyle said. "It survives because it answers natural problems that couldn't be solved under the old systems. Nationalism died out, for example, when we set up a universal government, because everyone belonged to the same Social Body and had the same Weal to consider. Once we realized that the good of the Body is more important than personal privacy, the truth-check made ordinary crime and political machination obsolete. Racial antagonisms vanished under deliberate amalgamation. Monogamy gave way to the marital-seven, settling the problems of ego clash, incompatability, promiscuity and vice that existed before. It also settled the disproportion between the male and female population.