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He stared at the little lumps, realizing at last that these were not cultured
tissue at all, but the raw material itself. He was going to have to do the
growth culturing personally. He swallowed. Not impossible, he reassured
himself.
He found a pair of scissors, cut open the top packet, and dropped its
contents, plop, into a waiting buffer bath. He contemplated it in some dismay.
Perhaps it ought to be segmented, for maximum penetration of the nutrient
solution no, not yet, that would shatter the cellular structure in its frozen
state. Thaw first.
He poked through the others, driven by growing unease. Strange, strange. Here
was one six times the size of the other little ovoids, glassy and round. Here
was one that looked revoltingly like a lump of cottage cheese. Suddenly
suspicious, he counted packets. Thirty-eight. And those great big ones on the
bottom once, during his youthful army service, he had volunteered for K.P. in
the butcher's department, fascinated by comparative anatomy even then.
Recognition dawned like a raging sun.
"That," he hissed through clenched teeth, "is a cow's ovary!"
The examination was intense, and thorough, and took all afternoon. When he was
done, his laboratory looked like a first-year zoology class had been doing
dissections all over it, but he was quite, quite sure.
He practically kicked open the door to Desroches' office, and stood hands
clenched, trying to control his ragged breathing.
Desroches was just donning his coat, the light of home in his eye; he never
turned off the holocube until he was done for the day. He stared at Ethan's
wild, disheveled face. "My God, Ethan, what is it?"
"Trash from hysterectomies. Leavings from autopsies, for all I know. A quarter
of them are clearly cancerous, half are atrophied, five aren't even human for
God's sake! And every single one of them is dead."
"What?" Desroches gasped, his face draining. "You didn't botch the thawing,
did you? Not you !"
"You come look. Just come look," Ethan sputtered. He spun on his heel, and
shot over his shoulder, "I don't know what the Population Council paid for
this crud, but we've been screwed."
Chapter Two
"Maybe," the senior Population Council delegate from Las Sands said hopefully,
"it was an honest error. Maybe they thought the material was intended for
medical students or something."
Ethan wondered why Roachie had dragged him along to this emergency session.
Expert witness? Another time, he might have been awed by his august
surroundings: the deep carpeting, the fine view of the capital, the long
polished ripple-wood table and the grave, bearded faces of the elders
reflected in it. Now he was so angry he barely noticed them. "That doesn't
explain why there were 38 in a box marked 50," he snapped. "Or those damned
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cow ovaries do they imagine we breed minotaurs here?"
The junior representative from Deleara remarked wistfully, "Our box was
totally empty."
"Faugh!" said Ethan. "Nothing so completely screwed up could be either honest
or an error " Desroches, looking exasperated, motioned him down, and Ethan
subsided. "Gotta be deliberate sabotage," Ethan continued to him in a whisper.
"Later," Desroches promised. "We'll get to that later."
The chairman finished recording the official inventory reports from all nine
Rep Centers, filed them in his comconsole, and sighed. "How the hell did we
pick this supplier, anyway?" he asked, semi-rhetorically.
The head of the procurement subcommittee dropped two tablets of medication
into a glass of water, and laid his head on his arms to watch them fizz. "They
were the lowest bidder," he said morosely.
"You put the future of Athos in the hands of the lowest bidder?" snarled
another member.
"You all approved it, remember?" replied the procurement head, stung into
animation. "You insisted on it, in fact, when you found the next bidder would
only send thirty for the same price. Fifty different cultures promised for
each Rep Center you practically peed yourself with glee, as I recall "
"Let us keep these proceedings official, please," the chairman warned. "We
have no time to waste either apportioning or evading blame. The galactic
census ship breaks orbit in four days, and is the only vector for our
decisions until next year."
"We should have our own jump ships," remarked a member. "Then we wouldn't be
treed like this, at the mercy of their schedule."
"Military's been begging for some for years," said another.
"So which Rep Centers do you want to trade in to pay for them?" asked a third
sarcastically. "We and they are the two biggest items in the budget, next to
the terraforming that grows the food for our children to eat while they're
growing up do you want to stand up and tell the people that their
child-allotment is to be halved to give those clowns a pile of toys that
produce nothing for the economy in return?"
"Nothing until now," muttered the second speaker cogently.
"Not to mention the technology we'd have to import and what, pray tell, are we
going to export to pay for it? It took all our surplus just to "
"So make the jump ships pay for themselves. If we had them, we could export
something and obtain enough galactic currency to "
"It would directly contravene the purposes of the Founding Fathers to seek
contact with that contaminated culture," interjected a fourth man. "They put
us at the end of this long pipeline in the first place precisely to protect us
from "
The chairman tapped the table sharply. "Debates on larger issues belong in the
General Council, gentlemen. We are met today to address a specific problem,
and quickly." His flat, irritated tone did not invite contradiction. There was
a general stirring and shuffling of notes and straightening of spines.
The junior member from Barca, poked by his senior, cleared his throat. "There
is one possible solution, without going off-planet. We could grow our own."
"It's exactly because our cultures won't grow any more that we " began another
man.
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