Harry Harrison - Stainless Steel Rat 07 by The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You

Author:The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You [You, The Stainless Steel Rat Wants]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-02-15T22:52:39.921000+00:00

Both admonitions were being grimly obeyed. What kind of a schoolroom was this? As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness I saw a switch and a loudspeaker next to the glass; the function seemed obvious. I flicked the switch and the teacher's voice rolled over me in drab tones.

". . . Moral Philosophy. This course is a required course and every one of you will take it and stay with the course until you have a perfect grade. There are no failures. Moral Philosophy is what makes us great.

Moral Philosophy is what enables us to rule. You have read your history books, you know the Days of Kekkonshiki. You know how we were abandoned, how we died, how only the Thousand were left alive. When they were weak, they died. When they were afraid, they died. When they allowed emotion to rule reason, they died. All of you are here today because they lived. Moral Philosophy enabled them to live. It will enable you to live as well. To live and grow and to leave this world and bring our rule to the weaker and softer races. We are superior. We have that right. Now tell me. If you are weak?"

"We die." The boyish voices chanted in expressionless harmony.

"If you are afraid?"

"We die."

"If you allow emotion. .

I switched off the program, having the feeling that I had heard more than enough for the moment. It gave pause for thought. For all of the years that I had been pursuing and battling with the gray men I had never bothered to stop and think why they were what they were. I had just taken their nastiness for granted. The few words I had overheard told me that their brutality and intransience was no accident. Abandoned, that's what the teacher had said. For reasons lost in the depths of time a colony must have been established on this planet. For ore or minerals of some kind, possibly. It was so inhospitable, so far from the nearest settled worlds, that there had to have been a good reason to come here, to work to establish a settlement. Then the people here had been abandoned. Either for local reasons, or during the bad years of the Breakdown. Undoubtedly the colony had never been meant to be self-sustaining. But, once on its own, it had to be. The majority must have died; a handful lived. Lived--if it can be called that--by abandoning all human graces and emotions, lived by devoting their lives simply to the battle for existence. They had fought this implacably brutal planet and had won.

But they had lost a good deal of their humanity in doing this. They had become machines for survival and bad brutalized themselves emotionally, crippled themselves. And passed on this disability as a strength to the future generations. Moral Philosophy. But moral only when it related to surviving on this savage planet. Most unmoral when it came to subjugating other people. Yet there was a horrible kind of correctness to it--at least from their point of view.

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