Munich, Germany: at a mass rally Gerhard Speck, leader of the influential Aryan Purity Brigade, claimed that but for the unification of Germany into Common Europe the country could long ago have been re-populated with pure Nordic stock, quote without mongrelisation and barbaric contamination unquote.
“I’ve had it aborted. The Americans think genes like yours are serious enough to make their transmission illegal. I’m not going to start another with you or anyone else. My second is going to be optimised, like they’re doing in Yatakang.”
Washington, D.C.: at his press conference this morning the President stated that his advisors regard the Yatakangi optimisation programme as a mere propaganda gesture, quote a boast which even a far richer country like ours could not dream of carrying out this century unquote.
Paris, France: the incumbent chairman of the Board for Common Europe, Dr. Wladislaw Koniecki of Poland, declared that the Yatakangi claim was unfounded in reality, being quote a programme not even the combined wealth of all our countries could make possible unquote.
“That sheeting little bureaucrat in the Eugenics Office! I bet he’s got a genotype so dirty you could use it for a mud-pack! And I wager he has prodgies—someone in his position could fix things, couldn’t he?”
Caracas, Venezuela: in a spectacular departure from previous policy, representatives of the Olive Almeiro Agency, Puerto Rico’s world-famous adoption service, announced the availability of pure Castilian ova from Spanish sources, to be shipped trans-Atlantic by express while in deep freeze and implanted in the quote mother unquote. This confirms authoritative predictions that Puerto Rican legislation will be a death-blow to the operations of baby-farmers in the entire U.S.A.
Madrid, Spain: Pope Eglantine denounced the Yatakangi programme as another blasphemous interference with God’s handiwork and promised eternal damnation to any Catholic in Yatakang who complied with government policy. An emergency decree by the Royalist party will impose the death penalty for the donation of ova for export, if approved by the Cortes tomorrow.
“Darling, you’re talking nonsense! So we don’t have Shalmaneser, so we do have some of the world’s finest computing equipment, and they ran a programme through this morning and it turned out the Yatakangis can’t possibly keep their promise. The whole thing’s a bluff … You aren’t listening, are you? What’s the good of talking?”
Cairo, Egypt: addressing a rally of pilgrims bound Mecca-ward for the hajj, a government spokesman denounced the Yatakangi optimisation programme as quote a barefaced lie unquote.
Havana, Cuba: at a meeting to mark the anniversary of the death of Fidel Castro, the Cuban Minister of Welfare and Parenthood accused the Yatakangi government of quote deliberately misleading the world’s under-privileged peoples unquote and was booed off the stand by his audience.
“Sheeting hole, Frank, I’ll never forgive those bleeders! Here we are stuck in this Godforsaken town and we could have stayed home among our friends and even if we couldn’t have used a nucleus from one of your cells we could have used one from mine and at least had a daughter, couldn’t we?”
Port Mey, Beninia: in an Independence Day broadcast to the public, during which he announced that his doctors had given him only a short time to live, childless President Obomi declared that with or without the Yatakangi treatment he could not have wished for a better family than the people he has ruled for so long.
Berkeley, California: Bennie Noakes sits in front of a set tuned to SCANALYZER repeating over and over, “Christ, what an imagination I’ve got!”
(The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.
—Ezekiel XVIII, 2.)
tracking with closeups (16)
THE MESSENGER OF THE GOSPEL OF UNIVERSAL LOVE
“Which was the lady who lost her baby so unfortunately?” Henry Butcher inquired of the ward sister.
The sister, her face weary, glanced up at the plump jolly man in front of her. Drawn lines of tiredness changed to those of a smile.
“Hullo, Henry,” she said. “Go along in—I’m sure she’ll be glad to have a few words of sympathy from someone. The blonde in the third bed on the right.”
“It’s the first for a long time, isn’t it?” Henry asked.
“Lord, yes. First since I came to work here, and that’s nearly eleven years. The path lab is checking up now to see what went wrong.”
“Should it have been a normal case?”
The sister leaned back in her chair, tapping one white tooth with the tip of a well-shaped nail. “I guess so,” she said thoughtfully. “That is, there was a rhesus problem, but that kind of thing used to be routine—a whole-body blood-transfusion prior to the birth, and plain sailing from then on.”
“A rhesus problem?” Henry repeated.
“Yes—you know, or at least you should, working in the blood-bank.”
“Oh, I know about it,” Henry agreed. His jolly face wore its solemn look rather awkwardly. “But I didn’t think rhesus-incompatibles were allowed to start children any longer.”
“Not in this country. But the girl’s been working in Africa somewhere. Her husband sent her home specially to have the prodgy in a proper hospital. And one can’t refuse to accept a maternity case just because it wasn’t conceived under our laws.”
“Of course not … Well, well, it’s all very sad. I’ll pop in the ward and see what I can do to cheer the lady up a bit.”
Still smiling, the sister watched him leave the office, his sterile white plastic coverall glistening wetly under the lamps and making shush-slap noises as his legs brushed together at each step. It was very kind of him to take the trouble for a perfect stranger, she thought. But just the sort of thing you’d expect from him.
Everyone in the hospital liked Henry Butcher.
* * *
When he had spent a few minutes with the mother of the dead child, he gave her one of his little inspirational pamphlets, which she promised to read—it was divided into sections with such titles as Love Thy Neighbour and The Truth Shall Make You Free. By then it was the end of his lunch-break, so he headed back to the blood-bank where he worked, exchanging cheery greetings with everyone he met on the way.
A requisition had come down during his absence, ordering the preparation of a hundred donor-flasks with labels for a routine session at a nearby block. He sorted out the appropriate file of names, ages and blood-groups from the records cabinet, selected the right number of labels plus ten per cent for spoilage to match the numbers in each group, broke off for a moment to issue two flasks of O blood to an orderly from the maternity ward, and then mixed and measured the correct quantity of citric-saline solution into each flask, to prevent the blood clotting in storage.
Finally, making a careful check to be sure he was unobserved, he inserted a hypodermic through the rubber penetration-seal on each flask and squirted in a hundred milligrams of Triptine in solution, beaming.
The idea had escaped him for a long, long time. He had achieved a number of successful public demonstrations of his treasured credo—in particular, the Sunday morning when he had managed to smear the front of the cathedral pulpit with “Truth or Consequences” and thus ensured that the bishop told the honest truth for once instead of his usual prevaricating falsehoods—but it was only recently that he had discovered this far more effective means of exposing people to the actual effects of the panacea he believed in.