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.
