"Thank you, O'Hara. You are more gracious than the circumstances," said the Father, now opening his eyes again, while weariness dragged at the corners of his pallid mouth. "A new race, O'Hara," he whispered. "We need it here. You will remember that I mentioned it to you? Come, now, don't glare at me so sanctimoniously—I am mathematician enough to know that a new race cannot be bred from a single woman, your woman, nor the handful of women I might have the Sons take from the mountains. Are you a student of husbandry? There are books here—behind this dais a doorway leads into the library where I once used to study. Among these books are many from the days before the Curtain, and in that section, if you wish, you may learn all we've ever learned of genetics. We have no cattle now. Our only animals"—the pale lips twisted—"but you know them—men! Your brothers, O'Hara, the masses of Washington and Emporia, New York and Chicago, all our cities. In husbandry, O'Hara, the soundest concept was that rundown stock was easiest improved by crossing the prevailing females with a superior male. The get of any single male is almost limitless, provided—"
"This was explained to me," O'Hara interrupted, "by one of the Sons at Emporia. Artificial insemination."
"I heard his explanation, O'Hara. Yes, the males of the masses are sterile, although not impotent. And actually the tests which we make at birth do not determine intelligence as such, but fertility. The relation of those two factors is no coincidence. The stupid-fertile, once a predominant strain, have bred themselves out with the vanishing of the reason for their existence, which was hunger—the substitution of one physical satisfaction for another. The intelligent-sterile, toward which the ruling classes tended in the days before the Curtain, likewise have passed, and for the same cause—with the necessities of life available to all without effort, intelligence, in itself, lost its survival virtues.
"What now remain are the two breeds that our way of life brought to the front—the stupid-sterile and the intelligent-fertile, a geneticist's dream come true, the fruit of our atomic civilization. We should be reaching the millennium, O'Hara.
"But while we have got the two best strains predominating now, the unforeseeable reversal of the laws of evolution has shoved both strains ever backward, although comparably for each. The keel is on the bottom still, the mast upon the deck, but the ship is sinking. And nature has confounded man once more.
"And so, O'Hara—so through these endless years alone I have been forced to tinker—selective breeding, elimination of the weak, artificial insemination—tricks, all tricks, all little stratagems to stall off the immutable. Each generation slides back further than its sires. Your son—forgive me—will be not quite you, and his son will be neither you nor his mother. And your son's son will see his newborn son with horror. It is exact. But if a new race suddenly were spawned into the hemisphere, recapturing the ground lost in these generations since the Curtain—"
"Father, you'd still be tinkering."
"But the possibilities of this tinkering are extensive. Beyond the Curtain, fortunately, exists an inexhaustible source of uncontaminated sires."
"How would you get them here?"
"That is your task."