strong views about.”
“Because of religion?”
Harris shook his head negatively. “I’m an agnostic.”
“What kind of views, then?”
“You sure you want to hear?”
“It’s a long night,” Demerest said. “Why not?”
On radio they listened to an exchange between air route control and a TWA flight, Paris-bound, which had taken off shortly after Trans America Flight Two. The TWA jet was ten miles behind, and several thousand feet lower. As Flight Two continued to climb, so would TWA.
Most alert pilots, as a result of listening to other aircraft transmissions, maintained a partial picture of nearby traffic in their minds. Demerest and Harris both added this latest item to others already noted. When the ground-to-air exchange ended, Demerest urged Anson Harris, “Go ahead.”
Harris checked their course and altitude, then began refilling his pipe.
“I’ve studied a lot of history. I got interested in college and followed through after. Maybe you’ve done the same.”
“No,” Demerest said. “Never more than I had to.”
“Well, if you go through it all — history, that is — one thing stands out. Every bit of human progress has happened for a single, simple reason: the elevation of the status of the individual. Each time civilization has stumbled into another age that’s a little better, a bit more enlightened, than the one before it, it’s because people cared more about other people and respected them as individuals. When they haven’t cared, those have been the times of slipping backward. Even a short world history — if you read one — will prove it’s true.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“You don’t have to. There are plenty of examples. We abolished slavery because we respected individual human life. For the same reason we stopped hanging children, and around the same time we invented habeas corpus, and now we’ve created justice for all, or the closest we can come to it. More recently, most people who think and reason are against capital punishment, not so much because of those to be executed, but for what taking a human life — any human life — does to society, which is all of us.”
Harris stopped. Straining forward against his seat harness, he looked outward from the darkened cockpit to the night surrounding them. In bright moonlight he could see a swirl of darkened cloudtops far below. With a forecast of unbroken cloud along the whole of their route until mid-Atlantic, there would be no glimpses tonight of lights on the ground. Several thousand feet above, the lights of another aircraft, traveling in an opposite direction, flashed by and were gone.
From his seat behind the other two pilots, Second Officer Cy Jordan reached forward, adjusting the throttle settings to compensate for Flight Two’s increased altitude.
Demerest waited until Jordan had finished, then protested to Anson Harris, “Capital punishment is a long way from abortion.”
“Not really,” Harris said. “Not when you think about it. It all relates to respect for individual human life; to the way civilization’s come, the way it’s going. The strange thing is, you hear people argue for abolition of capital punishment, then for legalized abortion in the same breath. What they don’t see is the anomaly of raising the value of human life on one hand, and lowering it on the other.”
Demerest remembered what he had said to Gwen this evening. He repeated it now. “An unborn child doesn’t have life — not an individual life. It’s a fetus; it isn’t a person.”
“Let me ask you something,” Harris said. “Did you ever see an aborted child? Afterward, I mean.”
“No.”
“I did once. A doctor I know showed it to me. It was in a glass jar, in formaldehyde; my friend kept it in a cupboard. I don’t know where he got it, but he told me that if the baby had lived — not been aborted — it would have been a normal child, a boy. It was a fetus, all right, just the way you said, except it had been a human being, too. It was all there; everything perfectly formed; a good-looking face, hands, feet, toes, even a little penis. You know what I felt when I saw it? I felt ashamed; I wondered where the hell was I; where were all other decent- minded, sensitive people when this kid, who couldn’t defend himself, was being murdered? Because that’s what happened; even though, most times, we’re afraid to use that word.”
“Hell! I’m not saying a baby should be taken out when it’s that far along.”
“You know something?” Harris said. “Eight weeks after conception, everything’s present in a fetus that’s in a full-term baby. In the third month the fetus
Demerest grumbled, “You should have been a lawyer, not a pilot.” Just the same, he found himself wondering how far Gwen was along, then reasoned: if she conceived in San Francisco, as she assured him, it must be eight or nine weeks ago. Therefore, assuming Harris’s statements to be true, there was almost a shaped baby now.
It was time for another report to air route control. Vernon Demerest made it. They were at thirty-two thousand feet, near the top of their climb, and in a moment or two would cross the Canadian border and be over southern Ontario. Detroit and Windsor, the twin cities straddling the border, were ordinarily a bright splash of light, visible for miles ahead. Tonight there was only darkness, the cities shrouded and somewhere down below to starboard. Demerest remembered that Detroit Metropolitan Airport had closed shortly before their own takeoff. Both cities, by now, would be taking the full brunt of the storm, which was moving east.
Back in the passenger cabins, Demerest knew, Gwen Meighen and the other stewardesses would be serving a second round of drinks and, in first class, hot hors d’oeuvres on exclusive Rosenthal china.
“I warned you I had strong feelings,” Anson Harris said. “You don’t need a religion, to believe in human ethics.”
Demerest growled, “Or to have screwball ideas. Anyway, people who think like you are on the losing side. The trend is to make abortion easier; eventually, maybe, wide open and legal.”
“If it happens,” Harris said, “we’ll be a backward step nearer the Auschwitz ovens.”
“Nuts!” Demerest glanced up from the flight log, where he was recording their position, just reported. His irritability, seldom far below the surface, was beginning to show. “There are plenty of good arguments in favor of easy abortion — unwanted children who’ll be born to poverty and never get a chance; then the special cases — rape, incest, the mother’s health.”
“There are always special cases. It’s like saying, ‘okay, we’ll permit just a little murder, providing you make out a convincing argument.’” Harris shook his head, dissenting. “Then you talked about unwanted children. Well, they can be stopped by birth control. Nowadays everyone gets that opportunity, at every economic level. But if we slip up on that, and a human life starts growing, that’s a new human being, and we’ve no moral right to condemn it to death. As to what we’re born into, that’s a chance we all take without knowing it; but once we have life, good or bad, we’re entitled to keep it, and not many, however bad it is, would give it up. The answer to poverty isn’t to kill unborn babies, but to improve society.”
Harris considered, then went on, “As to economics, there are economic arguments for everything. It makes economic logic to kill mental deficients and mongoloids right after birth; to practice euthanasia on the terminally ill; to weed out old and useless people, the way they do in Africa, by leaving them in the jungle for hyenas to eat. But we don’t do it because we value human life and dignity. What I’m saying, Vernon, is that if we plan to progress we ought to value them a little more.”
The altimeters — one in front of each pilot — touched thirty-three thousand feet. They were at the top of their climb. Anson Harris eased the aircraft into level flight while Second Officer Jordan reached forward again to adjust the throttles.
Demerest said sourly to Harris, “Your trouble is cobwebs in the brain.” He realized he had started the discussion; now, angrily, he wished he hadn’t. To end the subject, he reached for the stewardess call button. “Let’s get some hors d’oeuvres before the first-class passengers wolf them all.”
Harris nodded. “Good idea.”
A minute or two later, in response to the telephoned order, Gwen Meighen brought three plates of aromatic hors d’oeuvres, and coffee. On Trans America, as on most airlines, captains got the fastest service.
“Thanks, Gwen,” Vernon Demerest said; then, as she leaned forward to serve Anson Harris, his eyes confirmed what he already knew. Gwen’s waist was as slim as ever, no sign of anything yet; nor would there be, no
