“Letting kids be born and then snuffing them out if a computer decides they’re the wrong sex or over the quota is inhuman.”
“I didn’t say I like it, Ross. But it works.”
“So do pills!”
“Pills are a private matter. A person might privately decide not to take hers. The box is a public matter and the group outnumbers and overrules a mother who decides not to use it. There’s your question of effectiveness answered, but there’s another point. Those people are sane, Ross. Preposterously naive, but sane! Saner than childless women or sour old bachelors we both know who never had to love anything small and helpless, and so come to love nobody but themselves. They’re sane. Partly because the women get a periodic biochemical shakeup called pregnancy that their biochemical balance is designed to mesh with. Partly because the men find tenderness and protectiveness in themselves toward the pregnant women. Mostly, I think, because—it’s something to do.
“Can you imagine the awful monotony of life in the ship? The work is sheer rote and repetition. They can’t read or watch screentapes. They were born in the ship, and the books and screentapes are meaningless because they know nothing to compare them with. The only change they see is each other, aging toward death. Frequent pregnancies are a Godsend to them. They compare and discuss them; they wonder who the fathers are; they make bets of rations; the men brag and keep score. The girls look forward to their first and their last. The jokes they make up about them! The way they speculate about twins! The purgative fear, even, keeps them sane.”
“And then,” Ross said, “‘the box.’”
Staring straight ahead at the ship’s port Marconi echoed: “Yes. ‘The box.’ If there were another way—but there isn’t.”
His breezy young boss, Charles Oldham IV, was not pleased with what Ross had to report.
“Asked for Haarland!” he repeated unbelievingly. “Those dummies didn’t know where they were going or where they were from, but they knew enough to ask for Haarland.” He slammed a ruler on his desk and yelled: “God-damn it!”