The two men sat across from each other in the dim library, the weight of their respective philosophies hanging in the air between them.
George: Mr. Fedorov, I've read your remarkable work on the common task of humanity. Your vision of conquering death itself is... audacious. But I wonder—what use is immortality if we cannot first establish justice among the living?
Fedorov: Ah, Mr. George, but you mistake the order of necessity. Death is the source of all injustice. It is the ultimate landlord, claiming every soul regardless of their earthly holdings. Your single tax may redistribute land, but what of the greatest monopoly of all—mortality itself?
George: Yet surely you see that poverty breeds the very conditions that make death so terrible? When men scramble for scraps while others hoard abundance, when children die of hunger while granaries overflow—this is where resurrection must begin. Not in laboratories, but in the liberation of the earth's bounty for all.
Fedorov: But consider this: if we could recall our ancestors from death, what wealth of knowledge and wisdom we would gain! Every farmer, every craftsman, every mother who ever lived—all their accumulated understanding returned to us. Your economic justice would follow naturally from such abundance of human experience and capability.
George: And who would house these resurrected millions? Who would feed them? Without solving the land question first, you would only multiply suffering. The earth groans under its present burden of inequality—how much more if we doubled, tripled, increased a hundredfold its population?
Fedorov: Then we must expand beyond earth! The resurrection of humanity demands we claim the stars themselves. Death forces us to think small, to fight over scraps. Immortality compels us to think as large as the cosmos itself.
George: You speak of stars when children starve in the streets below our very feet. Mr. Fedorov, your cosmic vision blinds you to terrestrial necessity. Make the earth a paradise first—eliminate the rent that keeps men in bondage—and then perhaps we may dream of other worlds.
Fedorov: And you, dear George, would perfect an ant colony when humanity is destined for godhood. What is poverty beside the poverty of existing for mere decades? What is the injustice of rent beside the injustice of the grave claiming every reformer before his work is done?
George: Perhaps... perhaps we each see half the truth. You seek to expand the vessel while I seek to fill it justly.
Fedorov: Or perhaps we both seek the same thing—the elevation of humanity above the degraded conditions that now constrain it. Your single tax liberates us from artificial scarcity; my common task liberates us from natural scarcity itself.
George: Then let us agree on this: whether we conquer death or poverty first, both battles must ultimately be won.
Fedorov: Indeed. For what is the kingdom of heaven but earth made immortal, and what is immortality but justice perfected across all time?