“This isn’t a matter of lots of men,” Weinstein broke in. “This is a matter of all —all of us.”
“Blobs thou art,” Wang Hsi murmured. “And to blobs returneth. They might have given at least a few of us a chance. The kids mightn’t have turned out so bad.”
Roger Grey slammed his huge hand down on the arm of his chair. “That’s just the point, Wang,” he said savagely. “The kids might have turned out good—too good. Our kids might have turned out to be better than their kids—and where would that leave the proud and cocky, the goddam name-calling, the realo trulo human race?”
I sat staring at them once more, but now I was seeing a different picture. I wasn’t seeing conveyor belts moving along slowly covered with human tissues and organs on which earnest biotechs performed their individual tasks. I wasn’t seeing a room filled with dozens of adult male bodies suspended in nutrient solution, each body connected to a conditioning machine which day and night clacked out whatever minimum information was necessary for the body to take the place of a man in the bloodiest part of the fighting perimeter.
This time, I saw a barracks filled with heroes, many of them in duplicate and triplicate. And they were sitting around griping, as men will in any barracks on any planet, whether they look like heroes or no. But their gripes concerned humiliations deeper than any soldiers had hitherto known—humiliations as basic as the fabric of human personality.
“You believe, then,” and despite the sweat on my face, my voice was gentle, “that the reproductive power was deliberately withheld?”
Weinstein scowled. “Now, Commander. Please. No bedtime stories.”
“Doesn’t it occur to you at all that the whole problem of our species at the moment is reproduction? Believe me, men, that’s all you hear about on the outside. Grammar-school debating teams kick current reproductive issues back and forth in the district medal competitions; every month scholars in archaeology and the botany of fungi come out with books about it from their own special angle. Everyone knows that if we don’t lick the reproduction problem, the Eoti are going to lick us. Do you seriously think under such circumstances, the reproductive powers of anyone would be intentionally impaired?”
“What do a few male blobs matter, more or less?” Grey demanded. “According to the latest news bulletins, sperm bank deposits are at their highest point in five years. They don’t need us.”
“Commander,” Wang Hsi pointed his triangular chin at me. “Let me ask you a few questions in your turn. Do you honestly expect us to believe that a science capable of reconstructing a living, highly effective human body with a complex digestive system and a most delicate nervous system, all this out of dead and decaying bits of protoplasm, is incapable of reconstructing the germ plasm in one single, solitary case?”