Pat Frank - Mr. Adam

“It is very simple,” I said. “When normal intercourse isn’t practical, you just take a specimen of the male sperm, and plant it within the female.”

“Hasn’t it been done with horses?” Two Tone asked.

“Oh, yes. Nowadays, when a horse is standing at stud, he doesn’t have to service a mare in person. His sperm is shipped, injected, and that is all there is to it. Why, some of our best thoroughbred stock has been planted in Argentine and Australia that way. It’s much easier to ship an ounce of sperm than a one-ton horse.”

“Can it be done with men?” Two Tone demanded.

“Of course. I think there are eight thousand cases of artificial insemination recorded in this country.”

“That’s what we wanted to know.”

“Don’t you read the papers?” I asked. “The papers have been talking about nothing but A.I. ever since it was recommended by N.R.P.”

“Well, we don’t read that part of the papers,” said Two Tone Jones. That was that. I bet twenty to win on Eastbound, in the fifth, and he finished absolutely last.

Marge returned home during the running of the sixth. Cliffdweller, which I had backed to win and place, was on the rail and leading by two lengths when Marge swung open the door of our bedroom. I hushed her with a wave of my hand. “And now as they come into the stretch,” Malcolm Parkinson was saying, “it is still Cliffdweller, and he’s running easy. He’s followed by Ragtime, June Bug, Third Fleet, and Firefly… now at an eighth from the wire Cliffdweller still leads but—”

“Stephen Decatur Smith,” Marge interrupted, “we have company!”

“Quiet!” I shouted, leaning forward, pounding my knees with my fists as Cliffdweller labored towards the finish. At this point, it seemed that the television screen had shifted to slow motion.

“Stephen!” Marge shouted.

The horses crossed the finish line. “It’s a photo!” shouted Parkinson. I fell back against the pillow.

“So this is why I haven’t been able to get you on the telephone all afternoon!” Marge said. “Sneaked off to the races!”

I looked up at her. She was remarkably businesslike and trim and tidy in a blue suit and a white blouse that concealed, and yet promised, the smooth curves underneath. She was a very admirable-looking woman, but she was very angry. In a case like this, I believe that the best defense is an offense. “Here I am, down in bed with a chill, and I get abused!” I reproached her.

Marge smiled, and touched my forehead lightly with her fingers. She knew that I wasn’t ill, and she knew that I knew that she knew. “Come on! Get off the Field and into the living room. I brought home some people.”

Parkinson’s cheerful, weathered face appeared on the screen. “Who?” I asked absent-mindedly.

“In just a second,” said Parkinson, “the judges will have inspected the picture, and we will have the result of the sixth. Meanwhile, let me tell you that I’ve never seen Hialeah more colorful than it is today, here in the bright sunshine, with the brilliant plumage of the famous flamingoes out by the lake. And remember that for relaxation like a trip to the Southland, always smoke—”

“That man is a bad influence on you,” Marge interrupted. “Shoo him away. Anyway, it gives me the creeps to have strange men in the bedroom, staring at us.”

“Here’s the results,” said Parkinson. “It’s Cliffdweller, by a whisker.”

I flicked the switch and rolled off Smith Field, feeling better. Out in the living room, their faces flushed by the cold wind, Maria Ostenheimer and my friend of the Apennines and Polyclinic, Dr. Thompson, were standing close to the fire. “Hello,” I greeted them, “didn’t know you two knew each other.”

“Our acquaintanceship,” said Thompson, “is strictly professional—at least thus far.” Maria, delicately made, looked almost childlike alongside his bulk. “We’re on the same committee,” she explained.

Marge inspected me thoughtfully, tapping a cigarette on the mantel. “They’ve just come from Washington,” she said. “They appeared before both the Executive Inter-Departmental group and the Joint Congressional Committee on behalf of the National Re-fertilization Project. They testified for A.I.”

“Well, Maria did,” amended Thompson. “I’m more interested in another aspect of the problem.”

“All I’ve heard today,” I complained, “is A.I.” A startling, and horrible possibility gripped me. I pointed my finger at Marge. “If you think for one instant,” I told her, “that we are going to fill this apartment with lanky, redheaded children all subject to inferiority complexes, and none of them mine, then you had better start thinking again. You’re not going to be any female guinea pig to test the productive capacity of Mr. Adam!”

Thompson threw back his head and laughed. “Relax, Steve,” he said. “Relax!”

“Anyway,” said Marge, acidly, “I understand that Washington has been simply snowed under with applications. There are thousands ahead of me, even if I wanted an Adam child. There are plenty of husbands whose sense of responsibility to the human race is greater than their selfishness and stupid jealousy!”

Maria cocked her head on the side and looked at me with her wise, dark eyes. “I have just finished telling our distinguished statesmen,” she said, “that A.I. may be the only salvation for mankind. I say may”—her words tripped out slowly and daintily, as if they were being carefully marched across a narrow plank—“I say may because right at present A.I. is the only solution which we know will work. Artificial insemination is bound to furnish at least a limited number of males in another generation.”

“Can you imagine,” I exclaimed, “the whole world peopled with redheaded beanpoles, all looking exactly like Homer Adam!”

“But that’s not why we came to see you,” Maria said, and for a small, quite pretty and young girl she was alarmingly grave. “We came to see you about Homer Adam himself.”

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Is he pining away without his Mary Ellen?”

“Well, something like that,” Maria said, still grave and troubled. “You see, this business has naturally been a very great shock to him. And they mauled and manhandled him fearfully when he got to Washington.”

“That Phelps-Smythe!” said Thompson. “The first thing the Eastern Defense Command did to Adam was fill him up with shots until he was a walking pharmaceutical encyclopedia. They shot him full of paratyphoid, typhus, yellow fever, influenza, cholera—as if he were going to catch cholera at Fort Myer—smallpox, and I don’t know what else besides.”

“Phelps-Smythe,” I remarked, “is a revolving son-of-a-bitch.”

“And all the brass exhibits poor Mr. Adam at dinners,” said Maria, “as if he were a freak.”

“Phelps-Smythe,” I said, “is bucking for a star. If he pleases enough generals, maybe one day he’ll get to be a general himself. Ask any correspondent who was in the Southwest Pacific. They’ll tell you how it works. They had a beaut out there.”

Thompson held out his huge hands, six inches apart. “Adam,” he said, “is now no wider than that. Furthermore, he has developed a twitch.”

“It is really very serious,” said Maria. “As things are now, everything depends on the well-being of one man—a sensitive man who apparently was never very strong. If his health is ruined—either his physical health or his mental health—it imperils the chances of successful artificial insemination.

“Let me put it this way. Our present methods of A.I. are still fairly crude. It is true that you will find millions of motile sperm cells in one male specimen, but we have not yet found a way to isolate these cells—keep each one of them alive, happy, and potent so that each one has a chance of causing pregnancy. Artificial insemination is still a matter of mass impregnation. You use millions of cells, but only one does the job.”