“We don’t like bl—that word either. You are talking about human beings like yourself, Commander. Very much like yourself.”
I began to get sore fast, just the way the kid had out in the hall. Then I realized she didn’t mean anything by it. She didn’t know. What the hell—it wasn’t on our orders. I relaxed. “You tell me. What do you call them here?”
The blonde sat up stiffly. “ We refer to them as soldier surrogates. The epithet ‘zombie’ was used to describe the obsolete Model 21 which went out of production over five years ago. You will be supplied with individuals based on Models 705 and 706, which are practically perfect. In fact, in some respects—”
“No bluish skin? No slow-motion sleepwalking?”
She shook her head violently, Her eyes were lit up. Evidently she’d digested all the promotional literature. Not such a fluffhead, after all; no great mind, but her husbands had evidently had someone to talk to in between times. She rattled on enthusiastically: “The cyanosis was the result of bad blood oxygenation; blood was our second most difficult tissue reconstruction problem, The nervous system was the hardest. Even though the blood cells are usually in the poorest shape of all by the time the bodies arrive, we can now turn out a very serviceable rebuilt heart. But, let there be the teeniest battle damage to the brain or spine and you have to start right from scratch. And then the troubles in reconstitution! My cousin Lorna works in Neural Alignment and she tells me all you need to make is just one wrong connection—you know how it is, Commander, at the end of the day your eyes are tired and you’re kind of watching the clock—just one wrong connection, and the reflexes in the finished individual turn out to be so bad that they just have to send him down to the third floor and begin all over again. But you don’t have to worry about that. Since Model 663, we’ve been using the two-team inspection system in Neural Alignment. And the 700 series—oh, they’ve just been wonderful.”
“That good, eh? Better than the old-fashioned mother’s son type?”
“Well-1-1,” she considered. “You’d really be amazed, Commander, if you could see the very latest performance charts. Of course, there is always that big deficiency, the one activity we’ve never been able to—”
“One thing I can’t understand,” the kid broke in, “why do they have to use corpses! A body’s lived its life, fought its war—why not leave it alone? I know the Eoti can outbreed us merely by increasing the number of queens in their flagships; I know that manpower is the biggest single TAF problem—but we’ve been synthesizing protoplasm for a long, long time now. Why not synthesize the whole damn body, from toenails to frontal lobe, and turn out real, honest-to-God androids that don’t wallop you with the stink of death when you meet them?”
The little blonde got mad. “Our product does not stink! Cosmetics can now guarantee that the new models have even less of a body odor than you, young man! And we do not reactivate or revitalize corpses, I’ll have you know; what we do is reclaim human protoplasm, we reuse worn-out and damaged human cellular material in the area where the greatest shortages currently occur, military personnel. You wouldn’t talk about corpses, I assure you, if you saw the condition that some of those bodies are in when they arrive. Why, sometimes in a whole baling package—a baling package contains twenty casualties—we don’t find enough to make one good, whole kidney. Then we have to take a little intestinal tissue here and a bit of spleen there, alter them, unite them carefully, activa—”
“That’s what I mean. If you go to all that trouble, why not start with real raw material?”