Badge of Infamy | Page 5

all,
and they made the story stick well enough to swing the farm vote. They
made the laws when it came to food and crops.
The last of the great lobbies was Space, probably. It was an accident
that grew up so fast it never even knew it wasn't a real part of the
government. It developed during a period of chaos when another
country called Russia got the first hunk of metal above the atmosphere
and when the representatives who had been picked for everything but
their grasp of science and government went into panic over a myth of
national prestige.
The space effort was turned over to the aircraft industry, which had
never been able to manage itself successfully except under the stimulus
of war or a threat of war. The failing airplane industry became the
space combine overnight, and nobody kept track of how big it was,
except a few sharp operators.
They worked out a system of subcontracts that spread the profits so
wide that hardly a company of any size in the country wasn't getting a
share. Thus a lot of patriotic, noble voters got their pay from companies
in the lobby block and could be panicked by the lobby at the first
mention of recession.
So Space Lobby took over completely in its own field. It developed

enough pressure to get whatever appropriations it wanted, even over
Presidential veto. It created the only space experts, which meant that
the men placed in government agencies to regulate it came from its
own ranks.
The other lobbies learned a lot from Space.
There had been a medical lobby long before, but it had been a
conservative group, mostly concerned with protecting medical
autonomy and ethics. It also tried to prevent government control of
treatment and payment, feeling that it couldn't trust the people to know
where to stop. But its history was a long series of retreats.
It fought what it called socialized medicine. But the people wanted
their troubles handled free--which meant by government spending,
since that could be added to the national debt, and thus didn't seem to
cost anything. It lost, and eventually the government paid most medical
costs, with doctors working on a fixed fee. Then quantity of treatment
paid, rather than quality. Competence no longer mattered so much. The
Lobby lost, but didn't know it--because the lowered standards of
competence in the profession lowered the caliber of men running the
political aspects of that profession as exemplified by the Lobby.
It took a world-wide plague to turn the tide. The plague began in old
China; anything could start there, with more than a billion people
huddled in one area and a few madmen planning to conquer the world.
It might have been a laboratory mutation, but nobody could ever prove
it.
It wiped out two billion people, depopulated Africa and most of Asia,
and wrecked Europe, leaving only America comparatively safe to take
over. An obscure scientist in one of the laboratories run by the Medical
Lobby found a cure before the first waves of the epidemic hit America.
Rutherford Ryan, then head of the Lobby, made sure that Medical
Lobby got all the credit.
By the time the world recovered, America ran it and the Medical Lobby
was untouchable. Ryan made a deal with Space Lobby, and the two

effectively ran the world. None of the smaller lobbies could buck them,
and neither could the government.
There was still a president and a congress, as there had been a Senate
under the Roman Caesars. But the two Lobbies ran themselves as they
chose. The real government had become a kind of oligarchy, as it
always did after too much false democracy ruined the ideals of real and
practical self-rule. A man belonged to his Lobby, just as a serf had
belonged to his feudal landlord.
It was a safe world now. Maybe progress had been halted at about the
level of 1980, but so long as the citizens didn't break the rules of their
lobbies, they had very little to worry about. For that, for security and
the right not to think, most people were willing to leave well enough
alone.
Some rules seemed harsh, of course, such as the law that all operations
had to be performed in Lobby hospitals. But that could be justified; it
was the only safe kind of surgery and the only way to make sure there
was no unsupervised experimentation, such as that which supposedly
caused the plague. The rule was now an absolute ethic of medicine. It
also made for better fees.
Feldman's father had stuck by the rule but had questioned it. Feldman
learned not to question in medical school. He scored second in Medical
Ethics only to Christina Ryan.
He had never figured