Infinite Dreams (22 page)

I told them that the weakness in the idea had nothing to do with manipulation; that the universal storage of genetic material was in itself a questionable idea. For the convenience of the government, all of it would probably be stored near government centers which, like any large concentration of people, get power from one source: microwaves beamed down from the orbital solar stations. The fact that they have functioned continuously for over a century doesn’t mean they are immune to breakdown; in fact, it’s quite likely that if they go, it will be because of some powerful solar event, which would affect all of them simultaneously. No power, no refrigeration. The genetic material, at least most of it, would thaw out and die, and humanity would have to depend on the current crop of children to reach sexual maturity and replenish the race. That crop might be small indeed if there were stringent controls on family size. There might not be enough breeders to bring the next generation up to a size sufficient to carry on civilization as we live it now.

And it wouldn’t even require a solar catastrophe. It’s possible that some people wouldn’t like the idea of us changing all of humankind into
mutandis
, and would sabotage the sperm and ovum banks without thinking or caring about the consequences.

They listened politely to my counter-arguments, but I don’t think many of them were convinced. They take electrical power too much for granted, here on Earth. They have had local failures all their lives, which meant little more than having to walk down still slidewalks for a few hours. There has of course been only one power failure on Luna.

5 May.

Knowing that Pamela has a course in Sociometrics, I contrived to spend a few hours down at the social sciences computing facility, supposedly checking out an algorithm that simulated a Turing machine. Actually, I knew that it worked, having run it successfully over at the mathematics facility, but I kept putting glitches in it in order to remain at the console.

She did show up, after four hours. Luckily, she was only there to pick up a printout. It was dinner time, so I escorted her down to the Union. We each got a plate of small sandwiches and talked.

I told her about the experience with Beaumont’s crowd. She was amused, which for some reason made me angry at first—just because she was
sapiens
, I guess—but she jostled me about it so much that I wound up laughing too. She admitted that this had been her purpose when she first introduced Beaumont to me: to demonstrate that not all
mutandi
were
a priori
superior examples of humanity.

In the dining hall I said hello to one of the girls who had been at last night’s meeting, the one with the piezoelectric sculpture. She stared right through me and didn’t miss a bite.

6
May.

What a long and disturbing day. This morning, I found this note in my box: