“Now look here,” George said, beginning to get angry. “I may be the youngest of you, but I’m not a kid to be—”
“I wanted George here,” Levinson interrupted. “He is younger, and because of that he’s inclined to be less stodgy. Also, he has more of the adventurousness of youth, and that may be damned important.”
George sat back, compressing his lips and giving one emphatic nod.
“What scared you, Art?” asked Stiles.
Levinson broke the cigar with bitter abruptness. “The human race,” he said bluntly, “is nine-tenths sterile.”
The others looked at him in shocked silence. George glanced around, saw that nobody else was ready to speak, and asked, “How did you find out?”
“Restocking my sperm and ova banks,” said Levinson. “I’ve been keeping them for a good many years, you may remember. There are a lot of men and women living today who have never had children. Good stock—stock we’ll need when and if the race starts breeding again, and yet any one of those people might get killed in an accident and we’d lose it. So I’ve been keeping up the banks, though I never thought I’d see them used for another couple of thousand years. But nine out of ten donors are now sterile.”
“You checked?” asked Luther.
“Naturally. I’ve got samples from North and South America, from Europe, Asia, Africa. All the same. There it is — we’re standing on top of the last slide down to hell.”
Stiles looked puzzled. He said, “How do you know it’s going to get worse, Art?”
“It’s that kind of thing—a progressive change. Morphological deterioration. Sperm with two tails, three tails, no tail, or all but motionless. Ova that can’t be fertilized. I’ve made some tentative charts. I haven’t got enough data yet for accuracy, but the breakdown seems to begin in men who are physiologically at least forty and chronologically at least three hundred. In women, a little earlier. That includes damn near everybody. I’m not kidding, Morey. In five to ten years more, there won’t be enough viable stock left to start the human race again.”
“Have you got any idea what’s causing it, Art?” George asked.
“Only the obvious one — it’s just one more side effect of longevity. You know that in gross terms what the treatments do is to slow down your catabolic rate. In about fifty years, in other words, you age about as much as you would naturally in one year. At first it was thought that that was all the treatments did, but we know better now. We have the expected increase in ‘diseases of the aged’—kidneys, heart, liver, arteriosclerosis, calcium deposits and so on—but we also have a rash of things nobody figured on. Cancer, for instance, came close to wiping out the race until they licked it at the Gandhi Center about two hundred years ago. Then there’s an unexpected drop in resistance to respiratory infections along about age-of-record 250. And now this.”
“What have you done about it?” asked Stiles. “You talk to anybody in the government?”
“Sure.” Levinson picked up a fresh cigar and bit into it savagely. “I talked to Van Dam, the Public Health Commissioner, after sitting around his office for three days, and he took it up with President Golightly. He brought me back Golightly’s answer. Here it is.”
He took a folded piece of paper out of his vest pocket.
“ ‘Thank you for your interesting report, which I am turning over to the appropriate department for further study. In reply to your question, resumption of wholesale breeding at this time would be prejudicial to world peace and security, and no such measure will be entertained until all other avenues have been exhausted.’ ”
He stuffed the note back into his pocket.
“What about those other avenues, Art?” asked Stiles.
“Nonexistent. There is no known cure for morphological sterility in men or women, and not even a promising line of research. We’ve got to start breeding, that’s all. No way out of it. But that trained-seal department of Golightly’s will kick the problem around for ten, twenty, fifty years. By that time we might as well start carving our own monuments. Prejudicial to world peace and security,” he added bitterly.
Stiles scratched his ear, looking mournful. “It would kick up kind of a rumpus, Art,” he said, “He’s right there.”
Levinson turned on him. “Try to see a little further than your own union for once, Morey. Would you let the whole blasted race die just to preserve the shortage of masons?”
” ’Tain’t only that,” said Stiles, unruffled. “We’d be ready for another war as soon as the population got big enough, for one thing.”
“Let’s have a couple of more voices here,” said Levinson. “Luther, any comment?”
Luther sighed. “Shall I get out my checkbook now, Art, or do you want me. to wait until I’ve liquidated some of my holdings?”
Levinson shrugged at him. “It’s going to cost you, all right,” he agreed. “All three of you. We’ll need about three hundred thousand credits to start. More later.”
“Much more, Art?” Luther queried.
“Plenty. We’ve got to set up at least half a dozen birth centers, each equipped to handle upward of a thousand children and meet all their needs, if necessary, over a twenty-year period. We’ll build the centers, or buy and adapt them. They’ve got to be in out-of-the-way places and adequately camouflaged to fool the Security Police. We’ve got to staff them, service them, arrange for protection—and we’ve got to do it fast.” He looked at each of them in turn. “I know that all three of you are worth several million apiece.. I may want all of it before we’re through.”
There was a short silence. Then Stiles coughed and looked apologetic. “Let’s just clear up a few points, Art. One thing, it seems to me that this cloak-and-dagger stuff is unnecessary. Why not take it to the people? Force the Golightly gang to repeal the birth prohibition?”
Levinson said, “You’ve done some publicity, Morey. How long do you think it would take to put such a program over, on a worldwide scale?”
Stiles frowned. “A year, maybe… He winced comically. “All right, all right, I know what you’re going to say. It would take Golightly just about twenty-four hours to throw us all in pokey. I was just stalling on that one, I guess. But here’s another thing, Art. As I get it, you’re figuring on six thousand kids or more in the first generation. Why so many?”
“Simply because I’m afraid we won’t be able to do much better. If we could manage a million, we still couldn’t save all the useful, strains that are still viable. It’s like this, Morey: Suppose there are only five men and five women in the world. Each one has some quality that the others don’t in his heredity. One has mechanical ingenuity, another one leadership, another one artistic imagination, and so on. If one of those couples fails to reproduce, there are two qualities gone forever. Multiply that by a billion and there’s our problem.”
He waved his cigar at Stiles’s nose. “Don’t forget, we’re down to ten per cent of our stock already. The best we can hope to do is to patch together some kind of crude imitation of the human race, and hope it will work. If we manage to save homo sap at all; we’ll be damned lucky.”
Stiles leaned forward, elbows on knees, and laced his big fingers together. “Art, I don’t know—” he said slowly.
George, who was facing the door, saw it open a crack. He said quietly, “We have visitors.”