Grazer nodded approvingly at the insults—a touch of interest in an otherwise sterile existence. “Bored is the very word, Doc. The hours I spend on the pot—”

  “What did you do before you retired?”

  “That was a real long time ago.”

  “Not so long that you can’t remember. And if you can’t, why then you’re just too old to waste food and space on. We’ll just have to hook that old brain out of your skull and put it in a bottle with a label saying senile brain on it.”

  Grazer chuckled; he might have cried if someone younger had talked to him this way. “Said it was a long time ago, didn’t say I forgot. Painter. Housepainter, not the artist kind, worked at it eighty years before the union threw me out and made me retire.”

  “Pretty good at it?”

  “The best. They don’t have my kind of painter around anymore.”

  “I can’t believe that. I’m getting damn tired of the eggshell off-white superplastic eternal finish on the walls of this office. Think you could repaint it for me?”

  “Paint won’t stick to that stuff.”

  “If I find one that will?”

  “I’m your man, Doc.”

  “It’ll take time. Sure you won’t mind missing all the basket-weaving, social teas, and television?”

  Grazer snorted in answer, and he almost smiled.

  “All right, I’ll get in touch with you. Come back in a month in any case so I can look at that kidney. As for the rest, you’re in perfect shape after your geriatric treatments. You’re just bored with television and the damned baskets.”

  “You can say that again. Don’t forget about that paint, hear?”

  A distant silver bell chimed, and Livermore pointed to the door, picking up the phone as soon as the old man had gone. Leatha Crabb’s tiny and distraught image looked up at him from the screen.

  “Oh, Dr. Livermore, another bottle failure.”

  “I know. I was in the lab this morning. I’ll be down there at fifteen hundred and we can talk about it then.” He hung up and looked at his watch. Twenty minutes until the meeting— he still had time to see another patient or two. Geriatrics was not his field, and he really had very little interest in it. It was the people who interested him. He sometimes wondered if they knew how little they needed him, now that they were on constant monitoring and automated medical attention. Perhaps they just enjoyed seeing and talking to him as he did to them. No harm done in any case.

  The next patient was a thin, white-haired woman who began complaining as she came through the door. Did not stop even as she put her crutches aside and sat carefully in the chair. Livermore nodded and made doodles on the pad before him and admired her flow of comment, criticism, and invective over a complaint she had covered so well and so often before. It was just a foot she was talking about, which might seem a limited area of discussion—toes, tendons, and not much else. But she had unusual symptoms, hot flushes and itching in addition to the usual pain, all of which was made even more interesting by the fact that the foot under discussion had been amputated over sixty years earlier. Phantom limbs with phantom symptoms were nothing new—there were even reported cases of completely paralyzed patients with phantom sexual impulses terminating in phantom orgasms—but the longevity of this case was certainly worth noting. He relaxed under the

  wave of detailed complaint, and when he finally gave her some of the sugar pills and ushered her out, they both felt a good deal better.

  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. It was a veritable bestiary of a face. His ears could be those of a moose, Livermore thought, then sniffed and rubbed his nose.

  “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 ones and have a full report for our next meeting. Just a mechanical foul-up and nothing to bother us here. What does bother me is our genetic priorities. I have a list.”

  He searched the pockets of his jacket, one after another, while 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 for a moment 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, hairy armpits and agile fingers. Everything happened and all this 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, then feed the results to the computer to work out favorable combinations. After that we 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 follows. 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. Like the spacemen who can live without physical or mental breakdowns during the decade-long trips to the outer planets. Or the low-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 aim to improve—and what a vague ambition that is. But while we are making this new race of supermen what will we lose? Will new-man be pink, and if so, what has happened to the Oriental and the Negro—”

  “For God’s sake, Livermore, let us not start on that again,” Sturtevant shouted. “We have fixed charts, rules, regulations, everything carefully mapped out for all the operations.”

  “I said you had no real knowledge of genetics and that proves it once again. You simply can’t get it through your head that genetic selection does not work that way. With each selection the game starts completely over again. As they say in the historical 3V’s, it’s a brand-new ball game. The entire world is born anew with every child.”

  “I think you tend to overdramatize,” Catherine Ruffin said stolidly.

  “Not in the slightest. Genes are not bricks. We can’t use them to build a desired structure to order. We just aim for optimum, then see what we have and try again. No directives can lay down the details of every choice or control every random combination. Every technician is a small god, making

  real decisions of life and death. And some of these decisions are questionable in the long run.”

  “Impossible,” Sturtevant said, and Catherine Ruffin nodded agreement.

  “No, it’s just going to be very expensive. We must find a closer examination of every change made and get some predictions of where we are going.”

  “You are out of order, Dr. Livermore,” Catherine Ruffin broke in. “Your proposal has been made in the past, a budget forecast was estimated, and the entire matter was then turned down because of cost. This was not our decision you will recall, but came down from Genguidecounchief. We accomplish nothing by raking over these well-raked coals yet another time. There is new business we must consider that I wish to place before this council.”

  Livermore had the beginnings of a headache, and he fumbled a pill from the carrier in his pocket. The other two were talking, and he paid them no attention at all.

  When Leatha Crabb hung up the phone after talking with Dr. Livermore, she felt as though she wanted to cry. She had been working long hours for weeks and not getting enough sleep. Her eyes stung, and she was a little ashamed of this unaccustomed weakness: she was the sort of person who simply did not cry, woman or no. But seventeen bottle failures, seventeen deaths. Seventeen tiny lives snuffed out before they had barely begun to live. It hurt, almost as though they had been real children… .

  “So small you can’t hardly see it,” Veazy said. The laboratory assistant held one of the disconnected bottles up to the light and gave it a shake to swish the liquid about inside it. “You sure it’s dead?”

  “Stop that!” Leatha snapped, then curbed her temper: she had always prided herself on the way that she treated those who worked beneath her. “Yes, they are all dead, I’ve checked that. Decant, freeze, and label them. I’ll want to do examinations later.”

  Veazy nodded and took the bottle away. She wondered what had possessed her thinking of them as lives, children. She must be tired. They were groups of growing cells with no more personality than the cells grouped in the wart on the back of her hand. She rubbed at it, reminding herself again that she ought to have it taken care of. A handsome, well-formed girl in her early thirties, with hair the color of honey and tanned skin to match. But her hair was cropped short, close to her head, and she wore not the slightest trace of makeup, while the richness of her figure was lost in the heavy folds of her white laboratory smock. She was too young for it, but a line of worry was already beginning to form between her eyes. When she bent over her microscope, peering at the stained slide, the furrow deepened.

  The bottle failures troubled her, deeply, more than she liked to admit. The program had gone so well the past few years that she was beginning to take it for granted, already looking ahead to the genetic possibilities of the second generation. It took a decided effort to forget all this and turn back to the simple mechanical problems of ectogenesis. …

  Strong arms wrapped about her from behind; the hands pressed firmly against the roundness of her body below the waist; hard lips kissed the nape of her neck.

  “Don’t!” she said, surprised, pulling away. She look around. Her husband. Gust dropped his arms at once, stepping back from her.

  “You don’t have to get angry,” he said. “We’re married you know, and no one is watching.”

  “It’s not your pawing me I don’t like. But I’m working, can’t you see that?”

  Leatha turned to face him, angry at his physical touch despite her words. He stood dumbly before her, a solid black-haired and dark-complexioned man with slightly protruding lower lip that made him look, now, as though he were pouting.

  “You needn’t look so put out. It’s work time, not play time.”

  “Damn little playtime anymore.” He glanced quickly around to see if anyone was within earshot. “Not the way it was when we were first married. You were pretty affectionate then.” He reached out a slow finger and pressed it to his midriff.

  “Don’t do that.” She drew away, raising her hands to cover herself. “It’s been absolute hell here today. A defective valve in one of the hormone feed lines, discovered too late. We lost seventeen bottles. In an early stage, luckily.”

  “So what’s the loss? There must be a couple of billion sperm and ova in the freezers. They’ll pair some more and put you back in business.”

  “Think of the work and labor in gene-matching, all wasted.”

  “That’s what technicians are paid for. It will give them something to do. Look, can we forget work for a while, take off an evening? Go to Old Town. There’s a place there I heard about, Sharm’s. They have real cult cooking and entertainment.”

  “Can’t we talk about it later? This really isn’t the time….”

  “By Christ, it never is. I’ll be back here at seventeen thirty. See if you can’t possibly make your mind up by then.”

  He pushed angrily out of the door, but the automatic closing mechanism prevented him from slamming it behind him. Something had gone out of life, he wasn’t sure just what. He loved Leatha and she loved him, he was sure of that, but something was missing. They both had their work to do, but it had never caused trouble before. They were used to it, even staying up all night sometimes, working in the same room in quiet companionship. Then coffee, perhaps as dawn was breaking, a drowsy pleasant fatigue, falling into bed, making love.

  It just wasn’t that way anymore and he couldn’t think why. At the elevators he entered the nearest and called out, “Fifty.” The doors closed, and the car fell smoothly away. They would go out tonight: he was resolved that this evening would be different.

  Only after he had emerged from the elevator did he realize that it had stopped at the wrong floor. Fifteen, not fifty; the number analyzer in the elevator computer always seemed to have trouble with those two. Before he could turn, the doors shut behind him, and he noticed the two old men frowning in his direction. He was on one of the eldster floors. Instead of waiting for another car, he turned away from their angry looks and hurried down the hall. There were other old people about, some shuffling along, others riding powered chairs, and he looked straight ahead so he wouldn’t catch their eyes. They resented youngsters coming here.

  Well, he resented them occupying his brand-new building. That wasn’t a nice thought, and he was sorry at once for even thinking a thing like that. This wasn’t his building; he was just one of the men on the design team who had stayed on for construction. The eldsters had as much right here as he did, more so, since this was their home. And a pleasant compromise it had been, too. This building, New Town, was designed for the future, but the future was rather slow coming, since you could accelerate almost everything in the world except fetal growth. Nine months from conception to birth, in either bottle or womb. Then the slow years of childhood, the quick years of puberty. It would be wasteful for the city to stay vacant all those years.

  That was where the eldsters came in, the leftover debris of an overpopulated world. Geriatrics propped them up and kept them going. They were growing older together, the last survivors of the greedy generations. They were the parents who had fewer children and even fewer grandchildren as the realities of famine, disease, and the general unwholesomeness of life were

  driven home to them. Not that they had done this voluntarily. Left alone they would have responded as every other generation of mankind had done: selfishly. If the world is going to be overpopulated—it is going to be overpopulated with my kids. But the breakthrough in geriatric treatment and drugs came along at that moment and provided a far better carrot than had ever been held in front of the human donkey before. The fewer children you had the more treatment you received. The birthrate dived to zero almost overnight. The indifferent over-populators had decided to overpopulate with themselves instead of their children. If life was being granted, they preferred to have granted to them.

  The result was that a child of the next generation might have, in addition to his mother and father, a half-dozen surviving relatives who were elders. A married couple might have ten or fifteen older relatives, all of them alone in the world, looking to their only younger kin. There could be no question of this aging horde moving in with the present generation, who had neither room for them nor money to support them. They were a government burden and would remain so. A decreasing burden that required less money every year as old machinery, despite the wonders of medicine, finally ran down. When the new cities were being designed for the future, scientifically planned generations, the wise decision had been made to move the eldsters into them. The best of food, care, and medicine could be provided with the minimum effort and expense. Life in the older cities would be happier, relieved of the weight of the solid block of aging citizenry. And since the geriatric drugs didn’t seem to work too well past the middle of the second century, a timetable could be established for what was euphemistically called “phasing out.” Dying was a word no one liked to use. So as the present inhabitants were phased out to the phasing place of their choice, the growing generations would move in. All neat. All tidy.

  As long as you stayed away from the eldster floors.