“Got the news on?” it said. “Who’s ahead?”
It was Jurg Wester, a fellow resident; Jorn was not particularly fond of
him, but a prudent man did not invite animosity in quarters as close and
lacking in privacy as a conclave. Today be was looking unusually seedy; his
state-issue suit looked as though it might have been slept in. But then,
they all got to looking like that after a while; the fabric wrinkled
readily and getting the wrinkles pressed out was too expensive for a
bachelor to undertake very often-too expensive, and mostly too purposeless.
“The women, who else?” Jorn said. “Sit down and shut up a minute, Jurg. I
want to hear this.”
“You want a job shoveling garbage?” Jurg said, but he subsided after that
accommodatingly enough, his
12 fames Blish
eyes slowly glazing as he watched the screen. jorn, only a little
distracted, did not find it difficult to recapture the skein of his musings.
For the Age of Woman had indeed followed almost directly upon the Age of
Power, though nobody had accurately foreseen it at the time. Probably such
a prophet, had he existed, would not have been heeded anyhow. The relevant
technique was called sperm electrophoresis, a ridiculously simple trick to
perform in glassware-and the pharmaceutical manufacturers had quickly come
up with a medium, an anion or cation exchange gel, which made it equally
easy to perform in situ. Its purpose was sex deten-nination of the child at
conception.
By hindsight, jom thought gloomily, it ought to have been realized that the
first several generations to have the trick made available to them would