He stared at the little lumps, realizing at last that these were not cultured tissue at all, but the raw material itself. He was going to have to do the growth culturing personally. He swallowed. Not impossible, he reassured himself.
He found a pair of scissors, cut open the top packet, and dropped its contents, plop, into a waiting buffer bath. He contemplated it in some dismay. Perhaps it ought to be segmented, for maximum penetration of the nutrient solution—no, not yet, that would shatter the cellular structure in its frozen state. Thaw first.
He poked through the others, driven by growing unease. Strange, strange. Here was one six times the size of the other little ovoids, glassy and round. Here was one that looked revoltingly like a lump of cottage cheese. Suddenly suspicious, he counted packets. Thirty-eight. And those great big ones on the bottom—once, during his youthful army service, he had volunteered for K. P. in the butcher's department, fascinated by comparative anatomy even then. Recognition dawned like a raging sun.
"That," he hissed through clenched teeth, "is a cow's ovary!"
The examination was intense, and thorough, and took all afternoon. When he was done, his laboratory looked like a first-year zoology class had been doing dissections all over it, but he was quite, quite sure.
He practically kicked open the door to Desroches' office, and stood hands clenched, trying to control his ragged breathing.
Desroches was just donning his coat, the light of home in his eye; he never turned off the holocube until he was done for the day. He stared at Ethan's wild, disheveled face. "My God, Ethan, what is it?"
"Trash from hysterectomies. Leavings from autopsies, for all I know. A quarter of them are clearly cancerous, half are atrophied, five aren't even human for God's sake! And every single one of them is dead."
"What?" Desroches gasped, his face draining. "You didn't botch the thawing, did you? Not you—I"
"You come look. Just come look," Ethan sputtered. He spun on his heel, and shot over his shoulder, "I don't know what the Population Council paid for this crud, but we've been screwed."
CHAPTER TWO
"Maybe," the senior Population Council delegate from Las Sands said hopefully, "it was an honest error. Maybe they thought the material was intended for medical students or something."
Ethan wondered why Roachie had dragged him along to this emergency session. Expert witness? Another time, he might have been awed by his august surroundings; the deep carpeting, the fine view of the capital, the long polished ripple-wood table and the grave, bearded faces of the elders reflected in it. Now he was so angry he barely noticed them. "That doesn't explain why there were 38 in a box marked 50," he snapped. "Or those damned cow ovaries—do they imagine we breed minotaurs here?"
The junior representative from Deleara remarked wistfully, "Our box was totally empty."
"Faugh!" said Ethan. "Nothing so completely screwed up could be either honest or an error—' Desroches, looking exasperated, motioned him down, and Ethan subsided. "Gotta be deliberate sabotage," Ethan continued to him in a whisper.
"Later," Desroches promised. "We'll get to that later."
The chairman finished recording the official inventory reports from all nine Rep Centers, filed them in his comconsole, and sighed. "How the hell did we pick this supplier, anyway?" he asked, semi-rhetorically.
The head of the procurement subcommittee dropped two tablets of medication into a glass of water, and laid his head on his arms to watch them fizz. "They were the lowest bidder," he said morosely.
"You put the future of Athos in the hands of the lowest bidder?" snarled another member.
"You all approved it, remember?" replied the procurement head, stung into animation. "You insisted on it, in fact, when you found the next bidder would only send thirty for the same price. Fifty different cultures promised for each Rep Center—you practically peed yourself with glee, as I recall—"
"Let us keep these proceedings official, please," the chairman warned. 'We have no time to waste either apportioning or evading blame. The galactic census ship breaks orbit in four days, and is the only vector for our decisions until next year."
"We should have our own jump ships," remarked a member. "Then we wouldn't be treed like this, at the mercy of their schedule."
"Military's been begging for some for years," said another.
"So which Rep Centers do you want to trade in to pay for them?" asked a third sarcastically. "We and they are the two biggest items in the budget, next to the terraforming that grows the food for our children to eat while they're growing up—do you want to stand up and tell the people that their child-allotment is to be halved to give those clowns a pile of toys that produce nothing for the economy in return?"
"Nothing until now," muttered the second speaker cogently.
"Not to mention the technology we'd have to import—and what, pray tell, are we going to export to pay for it? It took all our surplus just to—"
"So make the jump ships pay for themselves. If we had them, we could export something and obtain enough galactic currency to—"
"It would directly contravene the purposes of the Founding Fathers to seek contact with that contaminated culture," interjected a fourth man. "They put us at the end of this long pipeline in the first place precisely to protect us from—"
The chairman tapped the table sharply. "Debates on larger issues belong in the General Council, gentlemen. We are met today to address a specific problem, and quickly." His flat, irritated tone did not invite contradiction. There was a general stirring and shuffling of notes and straightening of spines.
The junior member from Barca, poked by his senior, cleared his throat. "There is one possible solution, without going off-planet. We could grow our own."
"It's exactly because our cultures won't grow any more that we—" began another man.
"No, no, I understand that—none better," said the Barca man, a Chief of Staff like Deroches, hastily. "I meant, ah…" he cleared his throat again. "Grow some female fetuses of our own. They need not even be brought to term, quite. Then raid them for ovarian material and, er, begin again."
There was a revolted silence around the table. The chairman looked like a man sucking on a lemon. The member from Barca shrank in his seat.
The chairman spoke at last. "We're not that desperate yet. Although it may be well to have spoken what others will surely think of eventually."
"It needn't be public knowledge," the Barca man offered.
"I should hope not," agreed the chairman dryly. "The possibility is noted. Members will mark this section of the record classified. But I point out, for all, that this proposal does not address the other, perennial problem faced by this Council, and Athos: maintaining genetic variety. It had not pressed on our generation—until now—but we all knew it had to be faced in the future." His tones grew more mellow. "We would be shirking our responsibilities to ignore it now and let it be dumped on our grandsons in the form of a crisis."
There was a murmur of relief around the table, as logic safely propped emotional conviction. Even the junior member from Barca looked happier.
"Quite."
"Exactly."
"Just so—"
"Better to kill two chickens with one stone, if we can—"
"Immigration would help," put in another member, who doubled, one week a year, as Athos's Department of Immigration and Naturalization. "If we could get some."
"How many immigrants came on this year's ship?" asked the man across from him.