Hamilton settled himself. “If the Moderator pleases.”
“My name is Mordan” — which Hamilton knew — “my friends call me Claude. And I would speak with you in friendship.”
“You are most gentle-Claude.”
“Not at all, Felix. Perhaps I have an ulterior motive. But tell me: what was that devil’s toy you used on the cocky young brave? It amazed me.”
Hamilton looked pleased and displayed his new weapon. Mordan looked it over. “Oh, yes,” he said, “a simple heat engine burning a nitrate fuel. I think I have seen its pattern, have I not, on display at the Institution?”
Felix acknowledged the fact, a little crestfallen that Mordan was so little surprised at his toy. But Mordan made up for it by discussing in detail with, apparently, lively interest the characteristics and mechanism of the machine. “If I were a fighting man, I would like to have one like it,” he concluded.
“I’ll have one fashioned for you.”
“No, no. You are kind, but I would have no use for it.”
Hamilton chewed his lip. “I say…you’ll pardon me…but isn’t it indiscreet for a man who does no fighting to appear in public armed?”
Mordan smiled. “You misconstrue. Watch.” He indicated the far wall. It was partly covered with a geometrical pattern, consisting of small circles, all the same size and set close together. Each circle had a small dot exactly in the center.
Mordan drew his weapon with easy swiftness, coming up, not down, on his target. His gun seemed simply to check itself at the top of its swing, before he returned it to his holster.
A light puff of smoke drifted up the face of the wall. There were three new circles, arranged in tangent trefoil. In the center of each was a small dot.
Hamilton said nothing. “Well?” inquired Mordan.
“I was thinking,” Hamilton answered slowly, “that it is well for me that I was polite to you yesterday evening.”
Mordan chuckled.
“Although we have never met,” Mordan said, “you and the gene pattern you carry have naturally been of interest to me.”
“I suppose so. I fall within the jurisdiction of your office.”
“You misunderstand me. I cannot possibly take a personal interest in every one of the myriad “zygotes in this district. But it is my duty to conserve the best strains. I have been hoping for the past ten years that you would show up at the clinic, and ask for help in planning children.”
Hamilton’s face became completely expressionless. Mordan ignored it and went on. “Since you did not come in voluntarily for advice, I was forced to ask you to visit me. I want to ask you a question: Do you intend to have children any time soon?”
Hamilton stood up. “This subject is distasteful to me. May I have your leave, sir?”
Mordan came to him and placed a hand on his arm. “Please, Felix. No harm can be done by listening to me. Believe me, I do not wish to invade your private sphere-but I am no casual busybody. I am your moderator, representing the interests of all of your own kind. Yours among them.”
Hamilton sat down without relaxing. “I will listen.”
“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 co-operation 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.”