"Lots of maybes," Dorsey said. "Lots of perhapses."
"I've got one more shaft in the quiver," I said. "This one's got a poisoned point, and it carries the names of our keepers. It's dirty, Bud. It's hardly fair to Dr. McQueen to use such blackmail."
"Blackmail sounds like just what we need," Dorsey said.
"O.K. Thirty of us were born into the Big Tank," I said. "One has already died as a result of his mental state, caused by imprisonment. Another is certain to die within the next few days. Had they been entirely sane, Mike Bohrman and Mary deWitte wouldn't have shed their sterility-suits outside the Tank. Without purpose to their lives, they cracked up.
"Two of us dead in the first twenty-six years of the human studies at BICUSPID," I went on. "Two, out of an original thirty. An attrition-rate of six and seven-tenths percent. How many more Lapins will wander out to commit innocent suicide in the snow, their minds messed up by the frustration and hopelessness of the guinea-pig way of life? How many more of us will escape from the Big Tank into the morgue? The Orion Zeta could be our salvation, Bud. It could give us the sort of purpose human beings must have in order to live."
Dorsey shook his head. "The Defense Department set up its young Clydeside in von Weizsäcker Crater just to build, test, and launch one ship: the Zeta. Two years of round-the-chronometer work have been poured into her," he said. "She's cost four billion dollars so far, Johnny; and they haven't bought the living-room furniture yet. I hardly think the generals will volunteer the result of all this effort to serve as psychotherapy for twenty-eight neurotic Hoosiers."
"You miss the point, Bud," I said. "We Lapins were born to crew the Zeta. Where else could you find a crew that's already spent twenty-odd years or so inside a box, living together in close quarters, being conditioned against claustrophobia? This Big Tank of ours could be a grounded spaceship, Bud! It's airtight, armored against outside dangers, even has the formaldehyde sump to serve us for airlock. What's a sterility-suit, anyway, but a special breed of space suit? Could you find a better crew than us twenty-eight, skilled in two dozen professions, young, sound of wind and limb, and willing as hell to take on the job? None of whom will ever have appendicitis, halitosis, toothache, barber's itch, or athlete's foot? Any one of whom can, in case of accident, first-aid his wounds with a spit-damp handkerchief, and heal wholesome? Man, we're what those generals have been dreaming of! Once we've been trained to aim that big ship and kick her off the back of the moon, we'll be the finest extra-solar crew that ever blasted free of the system!"
"One question," Dorsey said. "Where do I sign Ship's Articles?"