The mules fought us-yet the true men won. Won because they fought and continued to fight, as individuals and guerilla groups. The Empire had one vulnerable point, its co-ordinators, the Khan, his satraps and administrators. Biologically the Empire was a single organism and could be killed at the top, like a hive with a single queen bee. At the end, a few score assassinations accomplished a collapse which could not be achieved in battle.
No need to dwell on the terror that followed the collapse. Let it suffice that no representative of homo proteus is believed to be alive today. He joined the great dinosaurs and the sabre-toothed cats.
He lacked adaptability.
“The Genetic Wars were brutal lessons,” Mordan added, “but they taught us not to tamper casually with human characteristics. If a characteristic is not already present in the germ plasm of the race we don’t attempt to put it in. When natural mutations show up, we leave them on trial for a long time before we attempt to spread them around through the race. Most mutations are either worthless, or definitely harmful, in the long run. We eliminate obvious disadvantages, conserve obvious advantages; that is about all. I note that the backs of your hands are rather hairy, whereas mine are smooth. Does that suggest anything to you?”
“No.”
“Nor to me. There appears to be no advantage, one way or the other, to the wide variations in hair patterns of the human race. Therefore we leave them alone. On the other hand-have you ever had a toothache?”
“Of course not.”
“Of course not. But do you know why?” He waited, indicating that the question was not rhetorical.
“Well…it’s a matter of selection. My ancestors had sound teeth.”
“Not all of your ancestors. Theoretically it would have been enough for one of your ancestors to have naturally sound teeth, provided his dominant characteristics were conserved in each generation. But each gamete of that ancestor contains only half of his chromosomes; if he inherited his sound teeth from just one of his ancestors, the dominant will be present in only half of his gametes.
“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.”
Hamilton leaned forward. “Gotcha!” he said. “You’re trying to do what the Great Khans did. You’re trying to separate out one line and make it different from the rest…as different as we are from the control naturals. It’s no good. I won’t have it. ”
Mordan shook his head slowly. “Wrong on both counts. We intend to follow a process similar to that used to get sound teeth. Have you ever heard of Deaf Smith County?”
“No.”
“Deaf Smith County, Texas, was a political subdivision of the old United States. Its natives had sound teeth, not by inheritance, but because of the soil. It gave them a diet rich in phosphates and fluorides. You can hardly appreciate the curse of dental caries in those days. Teeth actually rotted in the head, and were the cause of a large part of the continual sicknesses of the time. There were nearly a hundred thousand technicians in North America alone who did nothing but remove and repair diseased teeth-even at that, four fifths of the population had no such help. They simply suffered and died, with their rotten teeth poisoning their whole bodies.”