Well? We can keep gametes alive outside the body…and genes, while infinitesimally small, are large enough to be recognized under our ultramicroscopes. Go ahead. Take a look. Is it the gamete we want, or is it one of its lesser brothers? If the latter, then reject it, and look again.
Wait a moment! Genes are such tiny things that to examine one is to disturb it. The radiations used to see a gamete closely enough to tell anything about its chromosomes will produce a storm of mutations. Sorry, what you were looking for isn’t there any more. You’ve changed it-more probably killed it. So we fall back on the most subtle and powerful tool of research…inference. You will remember that a single male gonad cell produces two groups of gametes, complementary in their chromosome patterns. The female producers have the larger heads; the males are more agile. We can separate them. If, in a given small constellation of male gametes, enough members are examined to determine that they all stem from the same parent cell, then we may examine in minute detail the group producing the sex we do not want. From the chromosome-gene pattern of the group examined we can infer the complementary pattern of the group kept free of the perils of examination.
With female gametes the problem is similar. The ovum need not leave its natural environment in the body of the female. The polar bodies, worthless and non-viable in themselves, are examined. Their patterns are either identical with that of their sister cell, or complementary. Those that are complementary are more numerous than those identical. The pattern of the ovum may be inferred with exactness.
Half the cards are face up. Therefore we know the value of the cards face down. We can bet-or wait for a better hand. Romantic writers of the first days of genetics dreamed of many fantastic possibilities-test-tube babies, monsters formed by artificial mutation, fatherless babies, babies assembled piece by bit from a hundred different parents. All these horrors are possible, as the geneticists of the Great Khans proved, but we citizens of this Republic have rejected such tampering with our life stream. Infants born with the assistance of the neo-Ortega-Martin gene selection technique are normal babies, stemming from normal germ plasm, born of normal women, in the usual fashion.
They differ in one respect only from their racial predecessors: they are the best babies their parents can produce!
CHAPTER FOUR
Boy Meets Girl
MONROE-ALPHA called for his ortho-wife again the next evening. She looked up and smiled as he came into her apartment. “Two nights running,” she said. “Clifford, you’ll have me thinking you are courting me.”
“I thought you wanted to go to this party,” he said woodenly.
“I do, my dear. And I appreciate your taking me. Half a minute, while I gown.” She got up and slipped out of the room with a slow-seeming, easy glide. Larsen Hazel had been a popular dancing star in her day, both record and beamcast. She had wisely decided to retire rather than fight it out with younger women. She was now just thirty, two years younger than her spouse.
“All ready,” she announced after an interval hardly longer than her promise mentioned.
He should have commented on her costume; it deserved comment. Not only did it do things with respect to her laudable figure, but its color, a live Mermaid green, harmonized with her hair and with her sandals, her hair ornaments, and her costume clips. They all were of the same dull gold as the skin-tight metallic habit he had chosen.
He should at least have noticed that she had considered what he was wearing in selecting her own apparel. Instead he answered, “Fine. We’ll be right on tune.”
“It’s a new gown, Clifford.”
“It’s very pretty,” he answered agreeably. “Shall we go?”
“Yes, surely.”
He said very little during the ride, but watched the traffic as if the little car were not capable of finding its way through the swarming traffic without his supervision. When the car finally growled to a stop at the top floor of an outlying residence warren he started to raise the shell, but she put a hand on his arm. “Let it be, for a moment, Clifford. Can we talk for a little before we get lost in a swarm of people?”