The Defenseless Dead

"The Defenseless Dead" is a science fiction novella by American writer Larry Niven, set in the Known Space universe. It is the second of five Gil Hamilton detective stories. It was published in 1973 in the Roger Elwood anthology Ten Tomorrows.

Science fiction philosopher Stephen R. L. Clark, in his work How to Live Forever (1995), mistakenly credits this story with inventing the term "corpsicle." The term had already appeared in Frederik Pohl's The Age of the Pussyfoot (1969), after an earlier spelling by Pohl was published in a 1966 Worlds of Tomorrow essay, "Immortality Through Freezing".

In the story, Organlegging is rampant on Earth in the early 22nd century. In an attempt to alleviate the problem, the UN had passed the first "Freezer Law", declaring paupers in cryogenic suspension to be dead in law, allowing their organs to be harvested and made available for transplant. A few years later with the organ banks running low, the second "Freezer Law" is going through the legislative process, this time targeting the insane, some quite wealthy. This despite cures existing for most forms of insanity.

After a visit to the local cryogenic facility, Hamilton is finishing lunch with an acquaintance, when he is shot at in a seemingly random act by a local lunatic. Closer investigation reveals the attacker to be a former organlegger who retired after the first Freezer Bill went into law. The plot becomes more complicated with the involvement of a potential cryo-heir to a considerable fortune who had been kidnapped, along with his sister, and then released, though the sister was left in a state of catatonia that doctors cannot cure. The heir has minor personality changes, but was apparently not otherwise affected by their ordeal, though he claims to remember nothing of it.

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