“Possibly. I think not.”
“What do you call a favorable characteristic?”
“A survival factor, considered in a broad sense. This inventiveness of yours, which you disparage, is a very strong survival factor. In you it lies almost latent, or applied to matters of no importance. You don’t need it, because you find yourself in a social matrix in which you do not need to exert yourself to stay alive. But that quality of inventiveness can be of crucial importance to your descendants. It can mean the difference between life and death.”
“But—”
“I mean it. Easy times for individuals are bad times for the race. Adversity is a strainer which refuses to pass the ill equipped. But we have no adversity nowadays. To keep the race as strong as it is and to make it stronger requires careful planning. The genetic technician eliminates in the laboratory the strains which formerly were eliminated by simple natural selection.”
“But how do you know that the things you select for are survival factors? I’ve had my doubts about a lot of them.”
“Ah! There’s the rub. You know the history of the First Genetic War.”
“I know the usual things about it, I suppose.”
“It won’t do any harm to recapitulate. The problem those early planners were up against is typical—”
The problems of the earliest experiments are typical of all planned genetics. Natural selection automatically preserves survival values in a race simply by killing off those strains poor in survival characteristics. But natural selection is slow, a statistical process. A weak strain may persist—for a time—under favorable conditions. A desirable mutation may be lost—for a time—because of exceptionally unfavorable conditions. Or it may be lost through the blind wastefulness of the reproductive method. Each individual animal represents exactly half of the characteristics potential in his parents.
The half which is thrown away may be more desirable than the half which is perpetuated. Sheer chance.
Natural selection is slow—it took eight hundred thousand generations to produce a new genus of horse. But artificial selection is fast, if we have the wisdom to know what to select for.
But we do not have the wisdom. It would take a superman to plan a superman. The race acquired the techniques of artificial selection without knowing what to select.
Perhaps it was a bad break for mankind that the basic techniques for gene selection were developed immediately after the last of the neo-nationalistic wars. It would be interesting to speculate whether or not the institution of modern finance structure after the downfall of the Madagascar System would have been sufficient to maintain peace if no genetic experiments had been undertaken. But pacifist reaction was at its highest point at this time; the technique of para-ectogenesis was seized on as a God-given opportunity to get rid of war by stamping it out of the human spirit.
After the Atomic War of 1970, the survivors instituted drastic genetic regulations intended for one purpose alone—to conserve the Parmalee-Hitchcock recessive of the ninth chromosome and to eliminate the dominant which usually masks it—to breed sheep rather than wolves.
It is wryly amusing that most of the “wolves” of the period—the Parmalee-Hitchcock island is recessive; there are few natural “sheep”—were caught by the hysteria and co-operated in the attempt to eliminate themselves. But some refused. The Northwest Colony eventually resulted.
That the Northwest Union should eventually fight the rest of the world was a biological necessity. The outcome was equally a necessity and the details are unimportant. The “wolves” ate the “sheep.”
Not physically in the sense of complete extermination, but, genetically speaking, we are descended from “wolves,” not “sheep.”
“They tried to breed the fighting spirit out of men,” Mordan went on, “without any conception of its biological usefulness. The rationalization involved the concept of Original Sin. Violence was ‘bad’; non-violence was ‘good.’”
“But why,” protested Hamilton, “do you assume that combativeness is a survival characteristic? Sure—I’ve got it; you’ve got it; we’ve all got it. But bravery is no use against nuclear weapons. What real use is it?”
Mordan smiled. “The fighters survived. That is the final test. Natural selection goes on always, regardless of conscious selection.”
“Wait a minute,” demanded Hamilton. “That doesn’t check. According to that, we should have lost the Second Genetic War. Their ‘mules’ were certainly willing to fight.”
“Yes, yes,” Mordan agreed, “but I did not say that combativeness was the only survival characteristic. If it were, the Pekingese dog would rule the earth. The fighting instinct should be dominated by cool self-interest. Why didn’t you shoot it out with me last night?”
“Because there was nothing worth fighting about.”
“Exactly. The geneticists of the Great Khan made essentially the same mistake that was made three hundred years earlier; they thought they could monkey with the balance of human characteristics resulting from a billion years of natural selection and produce a race of supermen. They had a formula for it—efficient specialization. But they neglected the most obvious of human characteristics.
“Man is an unspecialized animal. His body, except for its enormous brain case, is primitive. He can’t dig; he can’t run very fast; he can’t fly. But he can eat anything and he can stay alive where a goat would starve, a lizard would fry, a bird freeze. Instead of special adaptations he has general adaptability—”
The Empire of the Great Khans was a reversion to an obsolete form—totalitarianism. Only under absolutism could the genetic experiments which bred homo proteus have been performed, for they required a total indifference to the welfare of individuals.
Gene selection was simply an adjunct to the practices of the imperial geneticists. They made use also of artificial mutation, by radiation and through gene-selective dyes, and they practiced endocrine therapy and surgery on the immature zygote. They tailored human beings—if you could call them that—as casually as we construct buildings.
At their height, just before the Second Genetic War, they bred over three thousand types including the hyperbrains (thirteen sorts), the almost brainless matrons, the clever and repulsively beautiful pseudo-feminine freemartins, and the neuter “mules”.
We tend to identify the term mule with fighters, since we knew them best, but in fact, there was a type of mule for every sort of routine job in the Empire. The fighters were simply those specialized for fighting.
And what fighters! They needed no sleep. They had three times the strength of ordinary men. There is no way to compare their endurance since they simply kept on going, like well designed machines, until disabled. Each one carried fuel—“fuel” seems more appropriate than “food”—to last it for a couple of weeks, and could function beyond that time for at least another week.
Nor were they stupid. In their specialization their minds were keen. Even their officers were mules, and their grasp of strategy and tactics and the use of scientific weapons was masterly. Their only weakness lay in military psychology; they did not understand their opponents—but men did not understand them; it worked both ways.
The basic nature of their motivation has been termed a “substitute for sex sublimation”, but the tag does not explain it, nor did we ever understand it. It is best described negatively by saying that captured mules became insane and suicided in not over ten days time, even though fed on captured rations. Before insanity set in they would ask for something called vepratoga in their tongue, but our semanticists could discover no process referent for the term.
They needed some spark that their masters could give them, and which we could not. Without it they died.
The mules fought us—yet the true men won. Won because they fought and continued to fight, as individuals and guerilla groups. The Empire had one vulnerable point, its co-ordinators, the Khan, his satraps and administrators. Biologically the Empire was a single organism and c
ould be killed at the top, like a hive with a single queen bee. At the end, a few score assassinations accomplished a collapse which could not be achieved in battle.
No need to dwell on the terror that followed the collapse. Let it suffice that no representative of homo proteus is believed to be alive today. He joined the great dinosaurs and the sabre-toothed cats.
He lacked adaptability.
“The Genetic Wars were brutal lessons,” Mordan added, “but they taught us not to tamper casually with human characteristics. If a characteristic is not already present in the germ plasm of the race we don’t attempt to put it in. When natural mutations show up, we leave them on trial for a long time before we attempt to spread them around through the race. Most mutations are either worthless, or definitely harmful, in the long run. We eliminate obvious disadvantages, conserve obvious advantages; that is about all. I note that the backs of your hands are rather hairy, whereas mine are smooth. Does that suggest anything to you?”
“No.”
“Nor to me. There appears to be no advantage, one way or the other, to the wide variations in hair patterns of the human race. Therefore we leave them alone. On the other hand—have you ever had a toothache?”
“Of course not.”
“Of course not. But do you know why?” He waited, indicating that the question was not rhetorical.
“Well…it’s a matter of selection. My ancestors had sound teeth.”
“Not all of your ancestors. Theoretically it would have been enough for one of your ancestors to have naturally sound teeth, provided his dominant characteristics were conserved in each generation. But each gamete of that ancestor contains only half of his chromosomes; if he inherited his sound teeth from just one of his ancestors, the dominant will be present in only half of his gametes.
“We selected—our predecessors, I mean—for sound teeth. Today, it would be hard to find a citizen who does not have that dominant from both his parents. We no longer have to select for sound teeth. It’s the same with color blindness, with cancer, with hemophilia, with a great many other heritable defects—we selected and eliminated them, without disturbing in any way the ordinary, normal, biologically commendable tendency for human beings to fall in love with other human beings and produce children. We simply enabled each couple to have the best children of which they were potentially capable by combining their gametes through selection instead of blind chance.”
“You didn’t do that in my case,” Hamilton said bitterly. “I’m a breeding experiment.”
“That’s true. But yours is a special case, Felix. Yours is a star line. Every one of your last thirty ancestors entered voluntarily into the creation of your line, not because Cupid had been out with his bow and arrow, but because they had a vision of a race better than they were. Every cell in your body contains in its chromosomes the blueprint of a stronger, sounder, more adaptable, more resistant race. I’m asking you not to waste it.”
Hamilton squirmed uncomfortably. “What do you expect me to do? Play Adam to a whole new race?”
“Not at all. I want you to perpetuate your line.”
Hamilton leaned forward. “Gotcha!” he said. “You’re trying to do what the Great Khans did. You’re trying to separate out one line and make it different from the rest…as different as we are from the control naturals. It’s no good. I won’t have it.”
Mordan shook his head slowly. “Wrong on both counts. We intend to follow a process similar to that used to get sound teeth. Have you ever heard of Deaf Smith County?”
“No.”
“Deaf Smith County, Texas, was a political subdivision of the old United States. Its natives had sound teeth, not by inheritance, but because of the soil. It gave them a diet rich in phosphates and fluorides. You can hardly appreciate the curse of dental caries in those days. Teeth actually rotted in the head, and were the cause of a large part of the continual sicknesses of the time. There were nearly a hundred thousand technicians in North America alone who did nothing but remove and repair diseased teeth—even at that, four fifths of the population had no such help. They simply suffered and died, with their rotten teeth poisoning their whole bodies.”
“What has this to do with me?”
“It will have. The data from Deaf Smith County was seized on by the contemporary technicians—medicine men, they called them—as a solution for the problem. Duplicate the diet of the Deaf Smithians—no more caries. They were perfectly right and biologically quite wrong, for an advantage is no good to a race unless it can be inherited. The clue was there, but they used it the wrong way. What we looked for finally were men and women who had perfect teeth despite poor diet and lack of attention. In time it was proved that all such cases had a group of three genes, previously uncharted. Call it a favorable mutation. Or call the susceptibility to tooth decay an unfavorable mutation which didn’t quite kill off the race.
“My predecessors conserved this particular gene group. You know how inheritance fans out; go back enough generations and all of us are descended from the whole population. But, genetically, our teeth are descended from one small group—because we selected to preserve that dominant. What we want to do with you; Felix, is to conserve the favorable variations present in you until the whole race has your advantages. You won’t be the only ancestor of coming generations—oh, no!—but you will be, genetically, the ancestor of them all in the respects in which you are superior to the majority.”
“You’ve picked the wrong man. I’m a failure.”
“Don’t tell me that, Felix. I know your chart. I know you better than you know yourself. You are a survivor type. I could set you down on an island peopled by howling savages and dangerous animals—in two weeks you would own the place.”
Hamilton grudged a smile. “Maybe so. I’d like to try it.”
“We don’t need to try it. I know! You’ve got the physique and the mentality and the temperament. What’s your sleep ration?”
“Around four hours.”
“Fatigue index?”
“It runs around a hundred and twenty-five hours, maybe more.”
“Reflex?”
Hamilton shrugged. Mordan suddenly whipped his sidearm clear, aimed it at Hamilton. Hamilton had his own out and had Mordan covered at appreciably the same instant. He returned it at once. Mordan laughed and replaced his own. “I was in no danger,” he declared. “I knew that you could draw, evaluate the situation, and decide not to fire, before a slower man would see that anything was going on.”
“You took a long chance,” Hamilton complained.
“Not at all. I know your chart. I counted not only on your motor reactions, but your intelligence. Felix, your intelligence rating entitles you to the term genius even in these days.”
There followed a long silence. Mordan broke it. “Well?”
“You’ve said all you have to say?”
“For the moment.”
“Very well, then, I’ll speak my piece. You haven’t said anything that convinces me. I wasn’t aware that you planners took such an interest in my germ plasm, but you didn’t tell me anything else that I did not already know. My answer is ‘no’—”
“But—”
“My turn—Claude. I’ll tell you why. Conceding that I am a superior survival type—I don’t argue that; it’s true. I’m smart and I’m able and I know it. Even so, I know of no reason why the human race should survive…other than the fact that their make-up insures that they will. But there’s no sense to the whole bloody show. There’s no point to being alive at all. I’m damned if I’ll contribute to continuing the comedy.”
He paused. Mordan waited, then said slowly, “Don’t you enjoy life, Felix?”
“I certainly do,” Hamilton answered emphatically. “I’ve got a twisted sense of humor, and everything amuses me.”
“Then isn’t life worth living for itself alone?”
“It is for me. I intend to live as long as I can and I expect to enjoy most of it. But do most people enjoy life? I
doubt it. As near as I can tell from outward appearances it’s about fourteen to one against it.”
“Outward appearances may be deceiving. I am inclined to think that most people are happy.”
“Prove it!”
Mordan smiled. “You’ve got me. We can measure most things about the make-up of a man, but we’ve never been able to measure that. However—don’t you expect your own descendants to inherit your zest for living?”
“Is it inheritable?” Hamilton asked suspiciously.
“Well, truthfully, we don’t know. I can’t point to a particular spot on a particular chromosome and say, ‘There lies happiness.’ It’s more subtle than blue eyes versus brown eyes. But I want to delve into this more deeply. Felix, when did you begin to suspect that life was not worth living?”
Hamilton stood up and paced nervously, feeling in himself such agitation as he had not felt since adolescence. He knew the answer to that question. He knew it well. But did he wish to bare it to this stranger?
No one speaks to a little child of chromosome charts. There was nothing to mark Hamilton Felix out from other infants in the first development center he could remember. He was a nobody, kindly and intelligently treated, but of importance to no one but himself. It had dawned on him slowly that his abilities were superior. A bright child is dominated in its early years by other, duller children, simply because they are older, larger, better informed. And there are always those remote omniscient creatures, the grown ups.
He was ten—or was it eleven?—when he began to realize that in competition he usually excelled. After that he tried to excel, to be conspicuously superior, cock-o’-the-walk. He began to feel the strongest of social motivations, the desire to be appreciated. He knew now what he wanted to be when he “grew up.”
The other fellows talked about what they wanted to do. (“I’m going to be a rocket pilot when I grow up.” “So am I.” “I’m not. My father says a business man can hire all the rocket pilots he wants.” “He couldn’t hire me.” “He could so.”)