“OK! At the end of a perfect cycle—when the smoke clears—how many baby plookhs do you have all told?”
“Plookh h. We have forty-nine young.”
He rested his head on the back of the chair. “Not very many, considering how fast you seem to go out of this world.”
“True. Dismally true. But a parent is unable to hatch more than seven eggs in the conditions under which we live, and completely unable to rear more than seven young so that all will get the full benefit of his survival-knowledge. This is for the best.”
“I guess so.” He removed a pointed instrument from his garment and a sheet of white material. After a while, I recognized his actions from nzred fanobrel’s description. “In just a moment,” he said, while writing, “I’m going to have you shown into the projection room where you’ll see a recent stereo employing human performers. Not too good a stereo: colossal in a very minor way; but it’ll give you an idea of what I’ll be doing for your people in the line of culture. While you see it, figure out ways to help me on a story. Now, is this Gogarty’s description of your chromosome pattern after the parent germ-cell has undergone meiosis?” He extended the sheet under my sensory tentacles:
“Quite correct,” I said, marveling at the superiority of these written symbols to those we are still forced to scratch in sand or mud.
“Good enough.” He wrote further upon the sheet. “Now, which of your sexes is male and which female? I notice you say ‘he’ and—”
I was forced to interrupt him. “I only use those designations because of the deficiencies or limitations of English. I understand what a wonderful speech it is and how, when you came to construct it, you saw no reason to consider the Plookhh. Nonetheless, you have no pronouns for tkan or guur or blap. We are all male in relation to each other, in the sense that we transmit the fertilizing gametes; we are also female, in the sense that we hatch the developed zygote. Then again—”
“Slow down, boy, slow down. I have to work a story out of this, and you’re not doing me any good at all. Here’s a picture of your family—right?” He held the sheet out once more.