He reached down, picked up the chair he’d knocked over, and resumed his seat. Then, clasping his hands in front of him, he swept the room with a long and stony gaze.
“I have been telling all of you for over two years now that we’re living on borrowed time. There is no way—I don’t care how you try, barbed wire around the borders, it doesn’t matter—that you can insulate our little United States here from the rest of the world. For Christ’s sake, people, even with the resources the old U.S.A. had, millions of so-called ‘illegal aliens’ came across our borders every year. From everywhere—China to South America—where there were poor people looking for something better, or fleeing from persecution and oppression. And in case you haven’t noticed yet, 17th-century Europe in the middle of the Thirty Years War has more poverty and persecution and oppression and desperation than we did back up-time—and, God knows, we had plenty of it.”
He paused, letting that sink in. “What we are faced with here is basically the same choice we’ve been faced with since Day One. This is the same argument Mike had with Simpson at that first public meeting. The same argument he had again with him during the campaign. The analogy Mike likes to use is whether a man who stumbles should try to take the fall—on broken glass—or run faster. I think of it like a man in the surf who sees a tidal wave coming. He’s got a choice between trying to get to dry land—with not enough time to do it—or swimming out to meet the wave and trying to ride it in. Either way, the odds are crappy. But what looks like the safest course in the short run is sure to be the most dangerous one in the end.”
Quentin was frowning. Clearly enough, the parallel James was drawing between the current issue and the old battle between Mike and Simpson had gone right over his head. James sighed.
“I’ll put it a different way. The only way we’ve really got to protect ourselves from epidemics—sure as hell in the long run—is to spread our knowledge and our sanitary and medical techniques, throughout Europe. The whole world, eventually. I’ve always known that. The problem, however—compared to which deciding what to do with the piddly supply of antibiotics we’ve got on hand is meaningless—fucking meaningless, people—is that most of Europe doesn’t believe us. Half the time, even our friends and allies don’t really believe us. For every Balthazar Abrabanel who does, there’s at least ten people who think our notions are either witless babble or heretical theology or—or—God knows what they think. Not the least of the reasons I supported Mike during the wrangle over chemical warfare was because I knew that if we set that monster loose we’d never get anyone to trust us when it came to medicine. Nobody in their right mind goes to a poisoner for remedies.”
He lifted his clasped hands and thumped them on the table. Not angrily, so much as forcefully. “Who cares, goddammit, if we give up enough existing antibiotic to treat a few thousand people? If an epidemic hits the U.S., we’ll run through that much antibiotic inside of a week. And then what?” He shook his head. “It’s penny-wise and pound-foolish. We’ll keep making the stuff, of course, and rebuild the stockpile. But it’s way better for us, right now, to send what we’ve already got on hand to Luebeck and Amsterdam. Why? Because—are you listening, Underwood?—think what’s going to happen there this winter. In a siege, rampant disease is a given. It’s a fact of life. Everybody in this day and age knows it perfectly well. Right?”
Several people nodded. James smiled coldly. “Okay, then. Think what happens—what people all over Europe think—when they see Spanish besiegers dying in droves . . . and Dutchmen in Amsterdam surviving. When they see Danish and French soldiers being shoveled into mass graves outside of Luebeck—and Swedish and German troops surviving inside the city. Because of what we sent them.”
He opened his clasped hands and spread them wide on the table. “Sure, Europe’s princes don’t give a damn—well, most of them—what happens to their commoners. But they do give a damn about their wars. Show them—in as graphic a way as possible—how a war can be impacted by modern sanitary practices, prophylaxis and medical treatment . . .”