"Hand me the insert pack there. What makes you think he'll get any better?"
"He has a strong personality, to be sure."
"Strong? Crippled. Nine-tenths dead, as he put it."
"But he's not dead. He's a live man: John Kaph Chow. He had a jolly queer upbringing, but after all every boy has got to break free of his family. He will do it."
"I can't see it."
"Think a bit, Martin bach. What's this cloning for? To repair the human race. We're in a bad way. Look at me. My IIQ and GC are half this John Chow's. Yet they wanted me so badly for the Far Out Service that when I volunteered they took me and fitted me out with an artificial lung and corrected my myopia. Now if there were enough good sound lads about would they be taking one-lunged shortsighted Welshmen?"
"Didn't know you had an artificial lung."
"I do then. Not tin, you know. Human, grown in a tank from a bit of somebody; cloned, if you like. That's how they make replacement-organs, the same general idea as cloning, but bits and pieces instead of whole people. Its my own lung now, whatever. But what I am saying is this, there are too many like me these days, and not enough like John Chow. They're trying to raise the level of the human genetic pool, which is a mucky little puddle since the population crash. So then if a man is cloned, he's a strong and clever man. It's only logic, to be sure."
Martin grunted; the servo began to hum.
Kaph had been eating little; he had trouble swallowing his food, choking on it, so that he would give up trying after a few bites. He had lost eight or ten kilos. After three weeks or so, however, his appetite began to pick up, and one day he began to look through the clone's possessions, the sleeping-bags, kits, papers which Pugh had stacked neatly in a far angle of a packing-crate alley. He sorted, destroyed a heap of papers and oddments, made a small packet of what remained, then relapsed into his walking coma.
Two days later he spoke. Pugh was trying to correct a flutter in the tape-player, and failing; Martin had the jet out, checking their maps of the Pampas. "Hell and damnation!" Pugh said, and Kaph said in a toneless voice, "Do you want me to do that?"
Pugh jumped, controlled himself, and gave the machine to Kaph. The young man took it apart, put it back together, and left it on the table.
"Put on a tape," Pugh said with careful casualness, busy at another table.
Kaph put on the topmost tape, a chorale. He lay down on his cot. The sound of a hundred human voices singing together filled the dome. He lay still, his face blank.
In the next days he took over several routine jobs, unasked. He undertook nothing that wanted initiative, and if asked to do anything he made no response at all.
"He's doing well," Pugh said in the dialect of Argentina.
"He's not. He's turning himself into a machine. Does what he's programmed to do, no reaction to anything else. He's worse off than when he didn't function at all. He's not human any more."
Pughsighed. "Well, good night," he said in English. "Good night, Kaph."
"Good night," Martin said; Kaph did not.
Next morning at breakfast Kaph reached across Martin's plate for the toast. "Why don't you ask for it," Martin said with the geniality of repressed exasperation. "I can pass it."
"I can reach it," Kaph said in his flat voice.
"Yes, but look. Asking to pass things, saying good night or hello, they're not important, but all the same when somebody says something a person ought to answer. ..."
The young man looked indifferently in Martin's direction; his eyes still did not seem to see clear through to the person he looked toward. "Why should I answer?"
"Because somebody has said something to you."
"Why?"
Martin shrugged and laughed. Pugh jumped up and turned on the rock-cutter.
Later on he said, "Lay off that, please, Martin."
"Manners are essential in small isolated crews, some kind of manners, whatever you work out together. He's been taught that, everybody in Far Out knows it. Why does he deliberately flout it?"
"Do you tell yourself good night?"
"So?"
"Don't you see Kaph's never known anyone but himself?"
Martin brooded and then broke out, "Then by God this cloning business is all wrong. It won't do. What are a lot of duplicate geniuses going to do for us when they don't even know we exist?"
Pugh nodded. "It might be wiser to separate the clones and bring them up with others. But they make such a grand team this way."
"Do they? I don't know. If this lot had been ten average inefficient ET engineers, would they all have been in the same place at the same time? Would they all have got killed? What if, when the quake came and things started caving in, what if all those kids ran the same way, farther into the mine, maybe, to save the one that was farthest in? Even Kaph was outside and went in. ... It's hypothetical. But I keep thinking, out often ordinary confused guys, more might have got out."
"I don't know. It's true that identical twins tend to die at about the same time, even when they have never seen each other. Identity and death, it is very strange. ..."
The days went on, the red sun crawled across the dark sky, Kaph did not speak when spoken to, Pugh and Martin snapped at each other more frequently each day. Pugh complained of Martin's snoring. Offended, Martin moved his cot clear across the dome and also ceased speaking to Pugh for some while. Pugh whistled Welsh dirges until Martin complained, and then Pugh stopped speaking for a while.
The day before the Mission ship was due, Martin announced he was going over to Merioneth.
"I thought at least you'd be giving me a hand with the computer to finish the rock-analyses," Pugh said, aggrieved.
"Kaph can do that. I want one more look at the Trench. Have fun," Martin added in dialect, and laughed, and left.
"What is that language?"
"Argentinean. I told you that once, didn't I?"
"I don't know." After a while the young man added, "I have forgotten a lot of things, I think."
"It wasn't important, to be sure," Pugh said gently, realizing all at once how important this conversation was. "Will you give me a hand running the computer, Kaph?"
He nodded.
Pugh had left a lot of loose ends, and the job took them all day. Kaph was a good co-worker, quick and systematic, much more so than Pugh himself. His flat voice, now that he was talking again, got on the nerves; but it didn't matter, there was only this one day left to get through and then the ship would come, the old crew, comrades and friends.
During tea-break Kaph said, "What will happen if the Explorer ship crashes?"
"They'd be killed."
"To you, I mean."
"To us? We'd radio SOS all signals, and live on half rations till the rescue cruiser from Area Three Base came. Four and a half E-years away it is. We have life-support here for three men for, lets see, maybe between four and five years. A bit tight, it would be."
"Would they send a cruiser for three men?"
"They would."
Kaph said no more.
"Enough cheerful speculations," Pugh said cheerfully, rising to get back to work. He slipped sideways and the chair avoided his hand; he did a sort of half-pirouette and fetched up hard against the dome-hide. "My goodness," he said, reverting to his native idiom, "what is it?"
"Quake," said Kaph.
The teacups bounced on the table with a plastic cackle, a litter of papers slid off a box, the skin of the dome swelled and sagged. Underfoot there was a huge noise, half sound half shaking, a subsonic boom.
Kaph sat unmoved. An earthquake does not frighten a man who died in an earthquake.
Pugh, white-faced, wiry black hair sticking out, a frightened man, said, "Martin is in the Trench."