“Thank you. Felix, the responsibility of improving the race under the doctrines of our republic is not a simple one. We can advise but not coerce. The private life and free action of every individual must be scrupulously respected. We have no weapon but cool reason and the appeal to every man’s wish that the next generation be better than the last. Even with cooperation there is little enough we can do—in most cases, the elimination of one or two bad characteristics, the preservation of the good ones present. But your case is different.”
“How?”
“You know how. You represent the careful knitting together of favorable lines over four generations. Literally tens of thousands of gametes were examined and rejected before the thirty gametes were picked which constitute the linkage of your ancestral zygotes. It would be a shame to waste all that painstaking work.”
“Why pick on me? I am not the only result of that selection. There must be at least a hundred citizens descended from my great-gross-grandparents. You don’t want me—I’m a cull. I’m the plan that didn’t pan out. I’m a disappointment.”
“No,” Mordan said softly, “no, Felix, you are not a cull. You are the star line.”
“Huh?”
“I mean it. It is contrary to public policy to discuss these things, but rules were made to be broken. Step by step, back to the beginning of the experiment, your line has the highest general rating. You are the only zygote in the line which combines every one of the favorable mutations with which my predecessors started. Three other favorable mutations showed up after the original combinations; all of them are conserved in you.”
...
“We selected—our predecessors, I mean—for sound teeth. Today, it would be hard to find a citizen who does not have that dominant from both his parents. We no longer have to select for sound teeth. It’s the same with color blindness, with cancer, with hemophilia, with a great many other heritable defects—we selected and eliminated them, without disturbing in any way the ordinary, normal, biologically commendable tendency for human beings to fall in love with other human beings and produce children. We simply enabled each couple to have the best children of which they were potentially capable by combining their gametes through selection instead of blind chance.”
“You didn’t do that in my case,” Hamilton said bitterly. “I’m a breeding experiment.”
“That’s true. But yours is a special case, Felix. Yours is a star line. Every one of your last thirty ancestors entered voluntarily into the creation of your line, not because Cupid had been out with his bow and arrow, but because they had a vision of a race better than they were. Every cell in your body contains in its chromosomes the blueprint of a stronger, sounder, more adaptable, more resistant race. I’m asking you not to waste it.”
Hamilton squirmed uncomfortably. “What do you expect me to do? Play Adam to a whole new race?”
“Not at all. I want you to perpetuate your line.”
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