Robert Heinlein - Beyond This Horizon

"And children, " Hamilton added mechanically.

They tossed them down. Herbert filled them up again. "Take children, " he began. "Any man wants to see his kids do better than he did. Now I've been married for twenty-five years to the same woman. My wife and I are both First Truthers and we don't hold with these modern arrangements. But children... we settled that a long time ago. 'Martha, ' I said to her, 'it don't matter what the brethren think. What's right is right. Our kids are going to have every advantage that other kids have. ' And after a while she came around to my way of thinking. So we went to the Eugenics Board-"

Hamilton tried to think of a way to stop his confidences.

"I must say that they were very kind and polite. First they told us to think it over. 'If you practice gene selection, ' they said, 'your children won't receive the control benefit. ' As if we didn't know that: Money wasn't the object. We wanted our kids to grow up fine and strong and smarter than we were. So we insisted and they made a chromosome chart on each of us.

"It was two, three weeks before they called us back. 'Well, Doc, ' I said, soon as we were inside, "what's the answer? What had we better select for?' 'Are you sure you want to do this?' he says. 'You're both good sound types and the state needs controls like you. I'm willing to recommend an increase in benefit, if you'll drop it. ' 'No, ' I said, 'I know my rights. Any citizen, even a control natural, can practice gene selection if he wants to. ' Then he let me have it, full charge."

"Well?"

"There wasn't anything to select for in either of us."

"Huh?"

"'S truth. Little things, maybe. We could have arranged to leave out my wife's hay fever, but that was about all. But as for planning a child that could compete on even terms with the general run of planned children, it just wasn't in the cards. The material wasn't there. They had made up an ideal chart of the best that could be combined from my genes and my wife's and it still wasn't good enough. It showed a maximum of a little over four percent over me and my wife in the general rating scale. 'Furthermore, ' he told us, 'you couldn't plan on that score. We might search your germ plasm throughout your entire fertile period and never come across two gametes that could be combined in this combination. ' 'How about mutations?' I asked him. He just shrugged it off. 'In the first place, ' he said, 'it's damned hard to pick out a mutation in the gene pattern of a gamete itself. You generally have to wait for the new characteristic to show up in the adult zygote, then try to locate the variation in the gene pattern. And you need at least thirty mutations, all at once, to get the child you want. It's not mathematically possible. '"

"So you gave up the idea of planned children?"

"So we gave up the idea of children period. Martha offered to be host-mother to any child I could get, but I said 'No, if it ain't for us, it ain't for us. '"

"Hmmm. I suppose so. Look-if you and your wife are both naturals, why do you bother to run this place? The citizen's allowances plus two control benefits add up to quite a tidy income. You don't look like a man with extravagant tastes."

"I'm not. To tell you the truth we tried it, after our disappointment. But it didn't work out. We got uneasy and fretful. Martha comes to me and says 'Herbert, please yourself, but I'm going to start my hairdressing studio again.' And I agreed with her. So here we are."

"Yes, so we are, " Hamilton concurred. "It's a queer world. Let's have another drink."

Herbert polished the bar before replying. "Mister, I wouldn't feel right about selling you another unless you checked that gun with me and let me loan you a brassard."

"So? Well, in that case I guess I've had enough. Good night."

"G'night."

"Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Thief-"

HIS TELEPHONE started to yammer as soon as he was home. "Nuts to you," said Hamilton. "I'm going to get some sleep." The first three words were the code cut-off to which he had set the instrument; it stopped mournfully in the middle of its demand.

Hamilton swallowed eight hundred units of thiamin as a precautionary measure, set his bed for an ample five hours of sleep, threw his clothes in the general direction of the service valet, and settled down on the sheet. The water rose gently under the skin of the mattress until he floated, dry and warm and snug. The lullaby softened as his breathing became regular. When his respiration and heart action gave positive proof of deep sleep, the music faded out unobtrusively, shut off without so much as a click.

"It's like this," Monroe-Alpha was telling him,"we're faced with a surplusage of genes. Next quarter every citizen gets ninety-six chromosomes-"

"But I don't like it," Hamilton protested. Monroe-Alpha grinned gleefully.

"You have to like it," he proclaimed. "Figures don't lie. Everything comes out even. I'll show you." He stepped to his master accumulator and started it. The music swelled up, got louder. "See?" he said. "That proves it." The music got louder.

And louder.

Hamilton became aware that the water had drained out of his bed, and that he lay with nothing between him and the spongy bottom but the sheet and the waterproof skin. He reached up and toned down the reveille whereupon the insistent voice of his telephone cut through to him. "Better look at me, Boss. I got troubles. Better look at me Boss. I got troubles. Better look at me, Boss. I got troubles-"

"So have I. Thirty minutes!" The instrument shut off obediently. He punched for breakfast and stepped into the shower, eyed the dial, and decided against the luxury of a long workout. Besides, he wanted breakfast. Four minutes would do.

Warm soapy emulsion sprayed over his body, was scrubbed in by air blast, was replaced at the end of the first minute by water of the same temperature in needle jets. The temperature dropped, the needle jets persisted for a few seconds, then changed to a gentle full stream which left him cool and tingling. The combination was his own; he did not care what the physiotherapists thought of it.

The air blast dried him with a full minute to spare for massage. He rolled and stretched against the insistent yielding pressure of a thousand mechanical fingers and decided that it was worthwhile to get up, after all. The pseudo-dactyls retreated from him. He pushed his face for a moment into the capillotomer. Shave completed, the booth sprayed him with scent and dusted him off. He was beginning to feel himself again.

He tucked away a quarter litre of sweet-lemon juice and went to work seriously on the coffee before turning on the news roundup.

The news contained nothing fit to be recorded permanently. No news, he thought, makes a happy country but a dull breakfast. The machine called out the plugs for a dozen stories while the accompanying flash pictures zipped past without Hamilton's disturbing the setting When he did so, it was not because the story was important but because it concerned him. The announcer proclaimed "Diana's Playground Opened to the Public!"; the flash panned from a crescent moon down to the brutal mountain surface and below to a gaily lighted artificial dream of paradise. Hamilton slapped the tell-me-more.

"Leyburg, Luna. Diana's Playground, long touted by its promoters as the greatest amusement enterprise ever undertaken off earth or on, was invaded fry the first shipload of tourists at exactly twelve thirty-two, Earth Prime, These old eyes have seen many a pleasure city, but I was surprised! Biographers relate that Ley himself was fond of the gay spots-I'm going to keep one eye on his tomb while I'm here; he might show up-" Hamilton gave half an ear to the discourse, half an eye to the accompanying stories, most of his attention to half a kilo of steak, rare.