But damage, physical or economic, can be pointed to and measured. Citizens were forbidden by the Covenant to damage another. Any act not leading to damage, physical or economic, to some particular person, they declared to be lawful.
Since they had abandoned the concept of ‘justice’, there could be no rational standards of punishment. Penology took its place with lycanthropy and other forgotten witchcrafts. Yet, since it was not practical to permit a source of danger to remain in the community, social offenders were examined and potential repeaters were given their choice of psychological readjustment, or of having society withdraw itself from them-Coventry.
Early drafts of the Covenant contained the assumption that the socially unsane would naturally be hospitalized and readjusted, particularly since current psychiatry was quite competent to cure all non-lesional psychoses and cure or alleviate lesional psychoses, but Novak set his face against this.
‘No!’ he protested. ‘The government must never again be permitted to tamper with the mind of any citizen without his consent, or else we set up a greater tyranny than we had before. Every man must be free to accept, or reject, the Covenant, even though we think him insane!’
The next time David MacKinnon looked up Persephone he found her in a state of extreme agitation. His own wounded pride was forgotten at once. ‘Why, my dear,’ he said, ‘whatever in the world is the matter?’
Gradually he gathered that she had been present at a conversation between Magee and the Doctor, and had heard, for the first time, of the impending military operation against the United States. He patted her hand. ‘So that’s all it is,’ he observed in a relieved voice. ‘I thought something was wrong with you yourself.’
‘”That’s all-” David MacKinnon, do you mean to stand there and tell me that you knew about this, and don’t consider it worth worrying about?’
‘Me? Why should I? And for that matter, what could I do?’
‘What could you do? You could go outside and warn them-that’s what you could do . . . As to why you should-Dave, you’re impossible!’ She burst into tears and ran from the room.
He stared after her, mouth open, then borrowed from his remotest ancestor by observing to himself that women are hard to figure out.
Persephone did not appear at lunch. MacKinnon asked the Doctor where she was.
‘Had her lunch,’ the Doctor told him, between mouthfuls. ‘Started for the Gateway.’
‘What! Why did you let her do that?’
‘Free agent. Wouldn’t have obeyed me anyway. She’ll be all right.’
Dave did not hear the last, being already out of the room and running out of the house. He found her just backing her little motorcycle runabout out of its shed. ‘Persephone!’
‘What do you want?’ she asked with frozen dignity beyond her years.
‘You mustn’t do this! That’s where the Fader got hurt!’
‘I am going. Please stand aside.’
‘Then I’m going with you.’
‘Why should you?’
‘To take care of you.’
She sniffed. ‘As if anyone would dare to touch me.’
There was a measure of truth in what she said. The Doctor, and every member of his household, enjoyed a personal immunity unlike that of anyone else in Coventry. As a natural consequence of the set-up, Coventry had almost no competent medical men. The number of physicians who committed social damage was small. The proportion of such who declined psychiatric treatment was negligible, and this negligible remainder were almost sure to be unreliable bunglers in their profession. The Doctor was a natural healer, in voluntary exile in order that he might enjoy the opportunity to practice his art in the richest available field. He cared nothing for dry research; what he wanted was patients, the sicker the better, that he might make them well again.
He was above custom and above law. In the Free State the Liberator depended on him for insulin to hold his own death from diabetes at arm’s length. In New America his beneficiaries were equally powerful. Even among the Angels of the Lord the Prophet himself accepted the dicta of the Doctor without question.
But MacKinnon was not satisfied. Some ignorant fool, he was afraid, might do the child some harm without realizing her protected status. He got no further chance to protest; she started the little runabout suddenly, and forced him to jump out of its path. When he had recovered his balance, she was far down the lane. He could not catch her.