It had yet to produce an Optiman, male or female, and never a viable gamete match.
Potter had long since given up. He was one of those who’d voted to discontinue the Zeek. He thought of the Optimen with whom he dealt and sneered at himself, There but for the brown eyes… But the sneer no longer gave him a twinge of bitterness.
“You know,” he said, smiling at the nurse, “these Durants whose emb I have this morning—I cut them both. Maybe I’ve been in this business too long.”
“Oh, go on with you, Doctor,” she said with an arch turn of her head. “You’re not even middle-aged. You don’t look a day over a hundred.”
He glanced at the folder. “But here are these kids bringing me their emb to cut and I…” He shrugged.
“Are you going to tell them?” she asked. “I mean that you had them, too.”
“I probably won’t even see them,” he said. “You know how it is. Anyway, sometimes people are happy with their cut… sometimes they wish they’d had a little more of this, less of that. They tend to blame the surgeon. They don’t understand, can’t understand the problems we have in the cutting room.”
“But the Durants seem like a very successful cut,” she said. “Normal, happy… perhaps a little over-worried about their son, but…”
“Their genotype is one of the most successful,” he said. He tapped the record folder with a forefinger. “Here’s the proof: they had a viable with potential.” He lifted a thumb in the time-honored gesture for Optiman.
“You should be very proud of them,” she said. “My family’s had only fifteen viables in a hundred and eighty-nine years, and never an…” She repeated Potter’s thumb gesture.
He pursed his lips into a moue of commiseration, wondering how he let himself get drawn into these conversations with women, especially with nurses. It was that little seed of hope that never died, he suspected. It was cut from the same stuff that produced the wild rumors, the quack “breeder doctors” and the black market in “true breed” nostrums. It was the thing that sold the little figurines of Optiman-Calapine because of the unfounded rumor that she had produced a viable. It was the thing that wore out the big toes of fertility idols from the kisses of the hopeful.
His moue of commiseration became a cynical sneer. Hopeful! If they only knew.
“Were you aware the Durants are going to watch?” the nurse asked.
His head jerked up and he glared at her.
“It’s all over the hospital,” she said. “Security’s been alerted. The Durants have been scanned and they’re in Lounge Five with closed circuit to the cutting room.”
Anger blazed through him. “Damn it to hell! Can’t they do anything right in this stupid place?”
“Now, Doctor,” she said, stiffening into the prim departmental dictator. “There’s no call to lose your temper. The Durants quoted the law. That ties our hands and you know it.”
“Stupid damn’ law,” Potter muttered, but his anger had subsided. The law! he thought. More of the damn’ masquerade. He had to admit, though, that they needed the law. Without Public Law 10927, people might ask the wrong kinds of questions. And no doubt Svengaard had done his bumbling best to try to dissuade the Durants.
Potter assumed a rueful grin, said, “Sorry I snapped like that. I’ve had a bad week.” He sighed. “They just don’t understand.”
“Is there any other record you wish, Doctor?” she asked.
Rapport was gone, Potter saw. “No, thanks,” he said. He took the Durant folder, headed for Svengaard’s office. Just his luck: a pair of watchers. It meant plenty of extra work. Naturally!
The Durants couldn’t be content with seeing the tape after the cut. Oh, no. They had to be on the scene. That meant the Durants weren’t as innocent as they might appear—no matter what this hospital’s Security staff said. The public just did not insist anymore. That was supposed to have been cut out of them.
The statistical few who defied their genetic shaping now required special attention.
And Potter reminded himself, I did the original cut on this pair. There was no mistake.
He ran into Svengaard outside the latter’s office, heard the man’s quick résumé. Svengaard then began babbling about his Security arrangements.
“I don’t give a damn what your Security people say,” Potter barked. “We’ve new instructions. Central Emergency’s to be called in every case of this kind.”
They went into Svengaard’s office. It pretended to wood paneling—a corner room with a view of flowered roof gardens and terraces built of the omnipresent three-phase regenerative plasmeld, the “plasty” of the Folk patios. Nothing must age or degenerate in this best of all Optiman worlds. Nothing except people.
“Central Emergency?” Svengaard asked.
“No exceptions,” Potter said. He sat in Svengaard’s chair, put his feet on Svengaard’s desk, and brought the little ivory-colored phone box to his stomach with its screen only inches from his face. He punched in Security’s number and his own code identification.
Svengaard sat on a corner of the desk across from him, appearing both angry and cowed. “They were scanned, I tell you,” he said. “They were carrying no unusual devices. There’s nothing unusual about them.”
“Except they insist on watching,” Potter said. He jiggled the phone key. “What’s keeping those ignoramuses?”
Svengaard said, “But the law -”
“Damn the law!” Potter said. “You know as well as I do that we could route the view signal from the cutting room through an editing computer and show the parents anything we want. Has it ever occurred to you to wonder why we don’t do just that?”
“Why… they… ahh…” Svengaard shook his head. The question had caught him off balance. Why wasn’t that done? The statistics showed a certain number of parents would insist on watching and…
“It was tried,” Potter said. “Somehow, the parents detected the computer’s hand in the tape.”
“How?”
“We don’t know.”
“Weren’t the parents questioned and…”
“They killed themselves.”
“Killed them—How?”
“We don’t know.”
Svengaard tried to swallow in a dry throat. He began to get a picture of intense excitement just under Security’s surface. He said, “What about the statistical ratio of -”
“Statistical, my ass!” Potter said.
A heavy masculine voice came from the phone: “Who’re you talking to?”
Potter focused on the screen, said, “I was talking to Sven. This viable he called me on -”
“It is a viable?”
“Yes! It’s a viable with the full potential, but the parents insist on watching the -”
“I’ll have a full crew on the way by tube in ten minutes,” said the voice on the phone. “They’re at Friscopolis. Shouldn’t take ’em more than a few minutes.”
Svengaard rubbed wet palms against the sides of his working smock. He couldn’t see that face on the phone, but the voice sounded like Max Allgood, T-Security’s boss.
“We’ll delay the cut until your people get here,” Potter said. “The records are being faxed to you and should be on your desk in a few minutes. There’s another -”
“Is that embryo everything we were told?” asked the man on the phone. “Any flaws?”
“A latent myxedema, a projective faulty heart valve, but the -”