“You!” Chad said. “You there—what’s your name! Don Hogan! This is your line, isn’t it? Is it dreck or not?”
At first Donald couldn’t answer. This must be why they’d activated him. Somewhere, ten years in the past, someone—or far more likely, something, since it would have been a computer analysis they trusted to make forecasts on such an important subject—had suspected the possibility of a development along these lines. Against that vanishingly small risk they had taken precautions; they had chosen, and nurtured, a man who—
“Are you going deaf, codder?”
“What? Oh—sorry, Chad, my mind was wandering. What did you say?”
Listening to the repetition of Chad’s question, already aware of what it was, Donald cast his eyes around nervously for Sergeant Schritt, and there he was, a few places distant in the throng. But his cocksure manner of earlier had faded in an instant; he looked, in fact, as though he was going to cry.
His lips moved. He didn’t see Donald before him although he raised his face and his gaze swept across where the other was standing. Off the writhing mouth Donald read what he was saying too quietly for it to carry through the mounting chatter. It was approximately, “Sheeting hole, sheeting hole, and they wouldn’t let me and where is she now who’s got her who’s making her preg—?”
It went on. Donald, embarrassed, turned his eyes away. He felt he had just looked into another man’s personal hell.
But in a state like that Schritt wasn’t going to worry about his charge delivering classified information to a potential subversive like Chad Mulligan. In any case, everything Donald knew about the subject was thanks to his college courses and the New York Public Library. Only the all-encompassing patterns he had been able to formulate out of what he read were in any sense less than public knowledge.
He said tiredly, “It doesn’t have to be dreck. SCANALYZER carries both gossip and hard computer-evaluated fact, and the guy didn’t say it had been in the rumour slot.”
“Who’ve they got over there who could handle such a programme?” Chad was leaning forward now, elbows on knees, eyes sharp and alert, his drunkenness magically forgotten. Also, Elihu and Norman were listening intently to what Donald and he were saying.
“Well, the first part—the simple optimising of your embryos—has been theoretically possible since the 1960s,” Donald sighed. “Reimplantation of externally fertilised ova is offered in this country as a commercial service, though it’s never been popular enough to become cheap. Governmental decree, though, might—”
He stopped short and snapped his fingers. “Of course!” he exploded. “Chad, you impress the hole out of me, know that? You did ask, didn’t you, ‘who’ve they got over there?’”
Chad nodded.
“It was the right question. For the second stage—the bit about going beyond the mere purification of your gene-pool to actual improvement of the stock—you do need the genius of someone with high-level breakthrough capacity. And they have a man like that, somebody who hasn’t been heard of for almost ten years except as a professor at Dedication University.”
“Sugaiguntung,” Chad said.
“That’s right.”
Elihu looked, puzzled, at Chad first, then Donald, asking a question with lifted eyebrows.
“Sugaiguntung was the man who put Yatakang into the tailored bacteria market when he was in his twenties,” Donald said. “Brilliant, original, supposed to be one of the world’s greatest tectogeneticists. Then he—”
“Something about rubber,” Chad interrupted. “It’s coming back to me now.”
“Right. He developed a new strain of rubber-tree which replaced the natural strains in all the Yatakangi plantations and as a result it’s the last country anywhere on Earth where synthetics can’t compete with tree-grown latex. I didn’t know he’d been working on animal stocks, but—”
“Has he any? What would you need, anthropoid apes?”
“Ideally, but I imagine quite a lot could be done on pigs.”
“Pigs?” Norman echoed in a disbelieving tone.
“That’s right. Pig-embryos are often used for teaching purposes—the resemblances are astonishing until very shortly before birth.”
“Yes, but we’re not talking about the embryonic scale,” Chad pointed out. “This is deep-down stuff, right inside the germ-plasm. Orang-outangs?”
“Oh my God,” Donald said.
“What?”
“I never made the connection before. The Yatakangi government has been diligently preserving and breeding orang-outangs for the past five or six years. Right out of the blue they imposed a death penalty for killing one and offered a reward equal to about fifty thousand dollars for capturing them and bringing them in alive.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Chad said with decision, dumping his glass on the nearest table and jumping to his feet.
“Yes, let’s,” Norman agreed. “But—”
“I don’t mean stop talking about it,” Chad snapped. “You live together, don’t you? We’ll go to your place. Elihu, will you come along too? When we’ve sorted this out there are still more questions I want to ask you about Beninia. Okay? Right, let’s blast off out of this freaking awful party and go find some peace and quiet!”
They were not the only ones who had had the same idea. Glancing back as they waited for a chance to filter through the exit door, the last thing Donald saw was Sergeant Schritt leaning on the wall with one hand, with the other holding a large glass of vodka or gin from which he tossed gulp after gulp down his throat to put out the fire of sorrow in his heart.
And by tomorrow, how many more like Sergeant Schritt?
context (13)
THE OLD NEWSPAPER
“BOY SHOOTS FIVE DEAD IN BEAUTY SCHOOL
“Mesa, Arizona, 12 November
“FIVE PEOPLE, including a mother and her three-year-old daughter, were shot dead today by a boy who forced them to lie down on the floor of a beauty school here.
“Two other victims—including the three-month-old baby of the dead mother—are in hospital.
“It was the third mass murder in the United States in four months. In August a sniper shot dead 15 people in Austin, Texas, and in July eight student nurses were strangled or knifed in Chicago.”
“THE LONGEST RISK YET IN SPACE
“by our Science Correspondent
“ASTRONAUT Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin opened the hatch of his Gemini-12 spacecraft yesterday and stood up in space. Two hours and 28 minutes later he withdrew, having set a record for direct exposure to the hazards of space.”
“NEW EINSTEINS FROM ‘CUTTINGS’
“by JOHN DAVY, our Science Correspondent
“IT MAY soon be possible to propagate people in much the same way as we now propagate roses—by taking the equivalent of cuttings.
“According to the Nobel prize–winning geneticist, Professor Joshua Lederberg, writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, we should consider the implications of this now, since it would offer the possibility of making dozens or hundreds of genetically identical individuals like multiplied identical twins …
“The techniques are likely to be tried ‘even without an adequate basis of understanding of human values, not to mention vast gaps in human genetics.’ This makes it essential to think out the implications beforehand, since otherwise policies are likely to be based on ‘the accidents of the first advertised samples.’ Public opinion might be determined by the nationality or public esteem of the cloned person, or ‘the handsomeness of para-human progeny.’
“The prediction and modification of human nature, the professor urges, badly need the planning and ‘informed foresight’ which we apply to other aspects of life.”
—Three adjacent news-stories from the front page of the London Observer, 13th November 1966
continuity (13)
MULTIPLY BY A MILLION