50 in 50

Catherine Ruffin and Sturtevant were already waiting in the boardroom when he came in. Sturtevant, impatient as always, was tapping green-stained fingers on the marble tabletop, one of his cancer-free tobacco-substitute cigarettes dangling from his lip. His round and thick glasses and sharp nose made him resemble an owl, but the thin line of his mouth was more like that of a turtle's: it was a veritable bestiary of a face. His ears could be those of a moose, Livermore thought, then aloud: "Those so-called cigarettes of yours smell like burning garbage, Sturtevant, do you know that?"

"You have told him that before," Catherine Ruffin said in her slow, careful English. She had emigrated in her youth from South Africa, to marry the long-dead Mr. Ruffin, and still had the accents of her Boer youth. Full-bosomed and round in a very Dutch-housewife manner, she was nevertheless a senior administrator with a mind like a computer.

"Never mind my cigarettes." Sturtevant grubbed the butt out and instantly groped for a fresh one. "Can't you be on time just once for one of these meetings?"

Catherine Ruffin rapped with her knuckles on the table and switched on the recorder.

"Minutes of the meeting of the Genetic Guidance Council, Syracuse New Town, Tuesday, January 14, 2025. Present Ruffin, Sturtevant, Livermore, Ruffin chairman."

"What's this I hear about more bottle failures?" Sturtevant asked.

Livermore dismissed the matter with a wave of his hand. "A few bottle failures are taken for granted. I'll look into these latest and have a full report for our next meeting. Just a mechanical matter and not to bother us here. What does bother me is our genetic priorities. I have a list."

He searched the pockets in his jacket one after another, and Sturtevant frowned his snapping-turtle frown at him.

"You and your lists, Livermore. We've read enough of them. Priorities are a thing of the past. We now have a prepared program that we need only follow."

"Priorities are not outdated, and by saying that you show a sociologist's typical ignorance of the realities of genetics."

"You're insulting!"

"It's the truth. Too bad if it hurts." He found a crumpled piece of paper in an inside pocket and smoothed it out on the table before him. "You're so used to your damn charts and graphs, demographic curves and projections that you think they are really a description of the real world instead of being rough approximations well after the fact. I'm not going to trouble you with figures they're so huge as to be meaningless but I want you to consider the incredible complexity of our genetic pool. Mankind as we know it has been around about a half-million years, mutating, changing, and interbreeding. Every death in all those generations was a selection of some kind, as was every mating. Good and bad traits, pro- and anti-survival mutations, big brains and hemophilia, everything happened and was stirred up and spread through the human race. Now we say we are going to improve that race by gene selection. We have an endless reservoir of traits to draw from, ova from every woman, sperm from every man. We can analyze these for genetic composition and feed the results to the computer to work out favorable combinations, then combine the sperm and ova and grow the fetus ectogenetically. If all goes well, nine months later we decant the infant of our selection and the human race has been improved by that small increment. But what is an improvement, what is a favorable combination? Dark skin is a survival trait in the tropics, but dark skin in the Northern Hemisphere cuts off too much ultraviolet so the body cannot manufacture vitamin D, and rickets follow. Everything is relative."

"We have been over this ground before.” Catherine Ruffin said.

"But not often enough. If we don't constantly renew and review our goals, we are going to start down a one-way road. Once genetic traits have been discarded they are gone forever. In a way the team in San Diego New City have an easier job. They have a specific goal. They are out to build new breeds of men, specific types for different environments: the spacemen who can live without physical or mental breakdowns during the decade-long trips to the outer planets, — the temperature and low-pressure-resistant types for Mars settlers. They can discard genes ruthlessly and aim for a clear and well-established goal. We simply improve — and what a vague ambition that is! And in making this new race of supermen what will we lose? Will new-man be pink, and if so, what has happened to the Negro—?"

"For God's sake, Livermore, let us not start on that again!" Sturtevant shouted. "We have fixed charts, rules, regulations, laid down for all operations."

"I said you had no real knowledge of genetics and that proves it once again. You can't get it through your head that with each selection the game starts completely over again. As they say in the historical 3Vs, it's a brand-new ball game. The entire world is born anew with every child."