“What do a few male blobs matter, more or less?” Grey demanded. “According to the latest news bulletins, sperm bank deposits are at their highest point in five years. They don’t need us.”
“Commander,” Wang Hsi pointed his triangular chin at me. “Let me ask you a few questions in your turn. Do you honestly expect us to believe that a science capable of reconstructing a living, highly effective human body with a complex digestive system and a most delicate nervous system, all this out of dead and decaying bits of protoplasm, is incapable of reconstructing the germ plasm in one single, solitary case?”
“You have to believe it,” I told him. “Because it’s so.”
Wang sat back, and so did the other three. They stopped looking at me.
“Haven’t you ever heard it said,” I pleaded with them, “that the germ plasm is more essentially the individual than any other part of him? That some whimsical biologists take the attitude that our human bodies and all bodies are merely vehicles, or hosts, by means of which our germ plasm reproduces itself? It’s the most complex biotechnical riddle we have! Believe me, men,” I added passionately, “when I say that biology has not yet solved the germ-plasm problem, I’m telling the truth. I know.”
That got them.
“Look,” I said. “We have one thing in common with the Eoti whom we’re fighting. Insects and warm-blooded animals differ prodigiously. But only among the community-building insects and the community-building men are there individuals who, while taking no part personally in the reproductive chain, are of fundamental importance to their species. For example, you might have a female nursery school teacher who is barren but who is of unquestionable value in shaping the personalities and even physiques of children in her care.”
“Fourth Orientation Lecture for Soldier Surrogates,” Weinstein said in a dry voice. “He got it right out of the book.”
“I’ve been wounded,” I said, “I’ve been seriously wounded fifteen times.” I stood before them and began rolling up my right sleeve. It was soaked with my perspiration.
“We can tell you’ve been wounded, Commander,” Lamehd pointed out uncertainly. “We can tell from your medals. You don’t have to—”
“And every time I was wounded, they repaired me good as new. Better. Look at that arm.” I flexed it for them. “Before it was burned off in a small razzle six years ago, I could never build up a muscle that big. It’s a better arm they built on the stump, and, believe me, my reflexes never had it so good.”
“What did you mean,” Wang Hsi started to ask me, “when you said before—”
“Fifteen times I was wounded,” my voice drowned him out, “and fourteen times the wound was repaired. The fifteenth time—The fifteenth time—Well, the fifteenth time it wasn’t a wound they could repair. They couldn’t help me one little bit the fifteenth time.”
Roger Grey opened his mouth.
“Fortunately,” I whispered, “it wasn’t a wound that showed.”
Weinstein started to ask me something, decided against it and sat back. But I told him what he wanted to know.
“A nucleonic howitzer. The way it was figured later, it had been a defective shell. Bad enough to kill half the men on our second-class cruiser. I wasn’t killed, but I was in range of the back-blast.”
“That back-blast,” Lamehd was figuring it out quickly in his mind. “That back-blast will sterilize anybody for two hundred feet. Unless you’re wearing—”
“And I wasn’t.” I had stopped sweating. It was over. My crazy little precious secret was out. I took a deep breath. “So you see—well, anyway, I know they haven’t solved that problem yet.”
Roger Grey stood up and said, “Hey.” He held out his hand. I shook it. It felt like any normal guy’s hand. Stronger maybe.
“Sling-shot personnel,” I went on, “are all volunteers. Except for two categories: the commanders and soldier surrogates.”
“Figuring, I guess,” Weinstein asked, “that the human race can spare them most easily?”
“Right,” I said. “Figuring that the human race can spare them most easily.” He nodded.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Yussuf Lamehd laughed as he got up and shook my hand, too. “Welcome to our city.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Son.”
He seemed puzzled at the emphasis.
“That’s the rest of it,” I explained. “Never got married and was too busy getting drunk and tearing up the pavement on my leaves to visit a sperm bank.”
“Oho,” Weinstein said, and gestured at the walls with a thick thumb. “So this is it.”
“That’s right: this is it. The Family. The only one I’ll ever have. I’ve got almost enough of these—” I tapped my medals “—to rate replacement. As a sling-shot commander, I’m sure of it.”
“All you don’t know yet,” Lamehd pointed out, “is how high a percentage of replacement will be apportioned to your memory. That depends on how many more of these chest decorations you collect before you become an—ah, should I say raw material?”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling crazily light and easy and relaxed. I’d got it all out and I didn’t feel whipped any more by a billion years of reproduction and evolution. And I’d been going to do a morale job on them! “Say raw material, Lamehd.”
“Well, boys,” he went on, “it seems to me we want the commander to get a lot more fruit salad. He’s a nice guy and there should be more of him in the club.”
They were all standing around me now, Weinstein, Lamehd, Grey, Wang Hsi. They looked real friendly and real capable. I began to feel we were going to have one of the best sling-shots in—What did I mean one of the best? The best, mister, the best.
“Okay,” said Grey. “Wherever and whenever you want to, you start leading us—Pop.”
Afterword
There’s not much I have to say about “Down Among the Dead Men.” Horace L. Gold said he needed a novelette almost immediately for Galaxy, and most of all he wanted a space opera.
“You’ve never written a space opera, a real bangety-bang space opera,” he said. “Why not?”
“I don’t like them,” I told him. “I don’t like to read them, and I don’t like to write them. Science-fiction westerns: they’re kill-’em-on-Mercury-instead-of-Montana.”
Well, he explained, if—in spite of my bullshit fastidiousness—I managed to write one in the next week, he would give me a large bonus on the word rate and voucher the check through immediately.
As always, in those days, I could very much use the money; so I agreed to think about it. To my surprise, by the time I got home, I had an idea. I began writing.
It went fast. I completed the piece in a weekend.
Horace loved it, bought it. “It’s a real space opera,” he marveled, “but all the important action takes place completely offstage. A tour deforce!”
I rarely agreed with Horace, but I told him I was thoroughly with him on his last sentence.
The point being that, despite its disreputable origin, I have grown to be very fond of this story. I’m almost astonished to say that now I would rank it among my best.