A Torrent of Faces Read online

  Though Storm had thus far said nothing at all after the introductions, and listened to the others with a face polite but remote, the mechanically falling tears rattled Biond. Nor did he think he was alone in this. Several times he saw Marg’t looking speculatively from the Triton to Dorthy, and then back again.

  “Speaking of the Preserves,” Marg’t said abruptly, “has anybody ever wondered what it’d be like to eat real eggs? Or even real bacon?”

  “Marg’t!” her husband said. “What a subject for mealtime!”

  “Isn’t that the most pertinent time?” Deban Tod said. “Though the question does seem a bit academic.”

  “Why is it academic?” Marg’t twisted her magnificent shoulders toward her husband. Her aristocratic, perfectly chiseled face was gradually becoming animated under its helmet of fantastically sculptured blond hair; not even this coiffure could distract attention from the way her features came to life when she stopped thinking about internal politics. “That’s why I mentioned the Preserves. One could get the proper animal there. The Preserve staffs have to dispose of an animal now and then, don’t they?”

  “Yes,” Chen U said. “Not often, but now and then.”

  Marg’t’s head came to rest facing Chen U, considerably after the protracted sinuous turning of her coppery torso had stopped. “Then it shouldn’t be difficult,” she said. “The stacks could tell you which animal bacon came from, and the Preserve could supply it. Isn’t that so?”

  “No,” Chen U said. “Not even a person on Prime Center could take an animal out of a Preserve, dead or alive. Any carcasses the Preserves have to dispose of are destroyed inside the Preserve, and destroyed utterly. No one could take one out.”

  “I could,” Marg’t said. Biond looked sidewise at her. He thought she could.

  “I was talking to a young man today,” he said, “whose current fiancee is head ecological surgeon for one of the Preserves. I did him a favor. He might be moved to return it.” -

  Marg’t turned her speculative glance to the Disaster chief. “But wouldn’t that be in bad taste?” she said, her voice melodious and innocent.

  There was a brief moment of silence. Then Deban said, “Well, U, what’s on the agenda for this evening?”

  “Food, by coincidence,” Chen U said. “Briefly, World Resources is considering cutting the basic ration—in fact, the decision’s already made.”

  “But how is that possible?” Dorthy said. “I thought the ration was down to the minimum recommended level now.”

  “It is. But the recommended level and the minimum daily requirement are two different things. We aren’t planning any changes in the carbohydrate, fat, bulk, vitamin, or trace-metal levels, though, just in the amino acid. Right now the daily per-person allotment is a little over fifteen grams of ten aminos. The average minimum daily requirement is less than half of that, but we’ve been maintaining it at the present level because occasional individuals require more than the average minimum, and we could spare it.”

  “How big a cut do you plan to make?” Deban asked. “First of all, we’re going to cut two aminos out of-the diet entirely—histidine and arginine. They can be synthesized by the body itself. We included them in the present diet because we had them to spare, and because Paul Argus and the Genetics Board wanted us to. But we can afford to drop them. Secondly, we propose to cut the amount of the other eight aminos back to MDR level as a general policy, with an additional credit symbol on the card system allowing extra rations for all persons whose metabolisms require more.”

  “I hate those cards,” Biond said gloomily. “The first thing people do with them is lose them.”

  “The record-keeping requirements of the new system will be extensive, without doubt,” Chen U said smoothly. “But the saving in food will more than cancel out the increased energy budget.”

  “Not the heart of my complaint,” Biond said. “Oh well. What I really want to know is why Resources decided to do this. Surely we’re in no danger of a shortage?”

  “Not yet, but we will be soon.”

  “I thought dinosynthesis—”

  “We don’t have production fully adapted yet, Biond. Only about a quarter of our photosynthetic industry has been converted to dinosynthesis yet, even though the machinery for the two processes are partly compatible. It takes time to apply a new process on a worldwide scale, after all. In the meantime, consumption’s rising-consumption always rises, that’s axiomatic—and the computers say we’re to have a pinch in the year before we finish conversion. The proposed ration cut anticipates that. We’re being Joseph the Provider, as it were.”

  “How will the cut affect what we get, in terms of meals?” Dorthy said hesitantly.

  Chen U smiled at her. “You’ll never notice it,” he said. “You’ll get the same variety of foods as before, in the same quantities as always. We’ll even continue putting skins on the bananas, silly, though the procedure is. The amino acid content of your meals will be lower, that’s all.”

  “And you’re sure that there’s no danger of malnutrition?” Biond said.

  “None at all. Eight aminos, in quantities of a gram or less each, are all the human body needs per day to make protein—the other fourteen it synthesizes. There are individual variations, as I mentioned before, but we’ll see to it that all those people are given the additional amounts they need.”

  Deban picked up his phone and said, “Local. Kitchen. Instrument 29—1, 012. Endit.” At once the plates and cups and gear rose straight up and soared into the disposal tunnel. Deban put down the phone and stared thoughtfully out at his garden.

  “There’s something you’ve left out, U,” he said slowly. “You mentioned the Genetics Board. It’s a pity Paul Argus couldn’t make it tonight. I’d like to know what the board’s angle is on this.”

  “I can tell you,” Chen U said. “They asked us to keep histidine in the diet because it’s a necessary amino in every other animal except man. They felt that omitting it from the human diet might have some long-term effect that we’ve been unable to detect so far. Similarly, arginine is necessary in the diet of rats and some other animals. They can live without it, but they don’t attain proper growth. Again, omitting it from the human diet has no detectable effect, but Genetics hates to take chances.”

  “So do I. Does Genetics oppose the new amino schedule?”

  “They do,” Chen U admitted.

  “Then I oppose it too,” Deban said promptly. “I see no harm in cutting back the actual amounts, but let’s keep histidine and arginine both in the ration.”

  Dorthy said, “May I make a suggestion?”

  “That’s what you’re here for, Dorthy,” Biond said.

  “My company’s growing very rapidly. The Caribbean Hatchery is already producing on an enormous scale, and we’re opening deeper and deeper frontiers all the time—we’re no longer limited to the continental shelves since the Tritons and dolphins began to exploit this Deep Water Safari technique. If there’s going to be a shortage, why not make it up from the sea?”

  Chen U smiled indulgently. “We’ve computed the rate of expansion of your outfit,” he said, “and while it was astonishing enough to give you a place at Prime Center, Dorthy, it doesn’t begin to match the consumption curve. Natural foods, including those from the sea, can never meet more than a small fraction of our needs. No, we’re going to have to cut the ration, and take our chances with Genetics’ assorted misgivings. Frankly, I don’t put much stock in them. Our experiments show absolutely no effect from the omission of histidine and arginine, and they’ve been conducted over more than thirty-five years.”

  “I won’t ask where or how,” Deban said. “But let’s have a vote, just for the record. Biond?”

  “I don’t know enough about it. I’ll just go so far as to say I don’t like it. Call mine a no, pro tem.”

  “Transcorp?”

  “I think it’s necessary,” Marg’t Splain said. “It’s only to cope with one lean year, anyhow.”
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  “Dorthy?”

  “I—I still think you’re underestimating Submarine Products.” She hesitated and looked around the rest of the circle; then, apparently seeing no overt hostility in her confreres’ expressions, drew in a deep breath and burst out eagerly:

  “It happens that SPC is concentrating a special effort on a high-yield natural process for making aminos and proteins in quantity. We have a research team of about twelve hundred people—twelve hundred seventeen, if I remember correctly—working on it. Most of them are Tritons. The technique is being tested at twenty-five different stations throughout the world, in different seas, in different latitudes, at different depths, but all well down into the Dark Water—”

  “Dark Water!” murmured Biond, like an incantation. “What is the Dark Water?”

  “That’s SPC argot for all the underseas where no light penetrates,” Dorthy said, embarrassed perhaps, but forging on all the same. “There are bacteria living in the bottom ooze that synthesize nitrogen compounds in the absence of light. They live by oxidizing manganese. The oxidation releases energy and the energy makes the syntheses possible. You might say that these bacteria eat manganese. With a little tectogenetic tinkering we’ve produced several strains that put out ten to a hundred times the quantity of mixed nitrogen compounds the natural strains do—still not much, but there’s a good prospect of improvement. One of these strains is an excellent arginine producer. The crude product is a sheet of jellylike slime loaded with aminos. We don’t know how many. We’re still separating them.”

  “A very gratifying and unexpected development,” declared Chen U, his eyes sparkling with an animation Biond did not quite trust. “But why have we not heard of it until now? And what volume of production have you achieved?”

  “It’s very new,” Dorthy said. “We’ve been working on it only five months, changes in technique are made almost daily, and it was just last week that we found we had a hundredfold jump in production by one of the new strains. But the output of partly refined aminos is low. This morning we had about one point three kilograms of arginine, ninety percent purity, and smaller amounts of the others.

  “Our chief trouble is the low concentration of oxygen in the water. The deeper you go, the smaller the concentration that prevails. But we can lick that.

  “There’s a Triton team at Great Barrier Reef setting up a pilot plant for synthesizing aminos and proteins at a depth of three thousand feet. They’re laying a pipeline along the bottom from shoreline water level down to the culture area—about one square kilometer. Oxygenated surface water will be pumped down this pipeline to the culture. The pipeline project, and harvesting the slime for fractionation and purification ashore, gives them a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate the usefulness of the Deep Water Safari—”

  “Deep Water Safari!” Biond interposed again, helplessly. The occasional irruptions of poetry into Dorthy’s statistics distracted him every time. “I’m sorry, but you mentioned that before, and I intended to ask about it. I’ve heard a bit here and a bit there, and it sounds fantastic.”

  “It does at first,” admitted Dorthy, “but it’s straightforward enough. The Tritons are at home under water.” (Storm permitted himself a faint Mona Lisa smile.) “Skin-diving humans, even with Scuba, become uncomfortable if they stay down very long at*one hundred feet or more. They’re aliens in a submarine environment. Then there’s always the limitation of the oxygen supply—the tank becomes empty, the batteries for the gills run out. But Tritons are water people. They believe that even the greatest deeps are accessible to them without benefit of Scuba or bathyscaphe. They’ve been down to two thousand feet, traveling by easy stages and resting every hundred feet to allow their internal fluid pressure to equalize with the pressure outside. In one instance twelve Tritons descended to two thousand feet and stayed down for forty-eight hours. The return was made in stages, like the descent. They felt no ill effects on surfacing. Tritons are naturals for underwater construction, surveying, salvaging, or rescue operations. Think what a Deep Water Safari could mean to a bottom-stranded bathyscaphe! A Deep Water Safari can move about freely, observe, explore, collect—”

  “I wouldn’t dispute it,” Marg’t Splain said, somewhat coolly, “but I’m sure all of us would like to hear more about the aminos.”

  Dorthy flushed. It began at her shoulder blades and flowed up into her ears and cheeks. Evidently she had not heard Marg’t’s faint emphasis on the word all, or if she had, had not identified it as a shaft aimed at Biond alone.

  “I should tell you that our tectogenetic tinkering has produced a thing—1 suppose it’s a plant, and someone has suggested calling it a sarcophyte. It looks like squirmy chocolate-colored spaghetti. It has a rich meaty flavor, and it’s nontoxic.”

  Dorthy glanced at Chen U, and said, “If a crash program were* authorized I believe that we might be producing aminos by the kiloton at the end of twelve months. And sarcophytes as well, if they prove to be nutritionally acceptable. It would take some of the burden from the other processes during the conversion to dinosynthesis. Eventually it might take over amino production entirely. There are millions of square miles of ocean bottom, down there in the cold and the dark…waiting.”

  Unexpectedly, Biond shuddered. But apparently nobody noticed.

  “This is all very well,” Chen U interposed gently, “and I’m sure our colleagues here are surprised and pleased by much of it. But Dorthy, this is not exactly the time for it. What we need from you now is a vote, not a prospectus.”

  Dorthy returned to dry land with an almost audible plop. “I’m sorry,” she said, flushing slightly under her tan. “I’ll vote yes, then. On a temporary basis only.”

  “Quite. Then it’s three for, three against,” Chen U said. “The cut will proceed, of course, but the opposition is duly recorded. Now is there anything else? Biond, any catastrophes up your sleeve?”

  “Neither sleeve nor catastrophe on my person.”

  “Biond, did you get that red message my observatory chief sent you?” Deban said. “I’m curious to know what it was. He hasn’t had anything to say to anybody up to now but ho report’ since he went into office. If it wasn’t personal—”

  “I got it, but I haven’t studied it yet,” Biond said. He had, as a matter of fact, forgotten it. “I was tied up at the time. I’ll send you the gist later, if you like.”

  “Dorthy, anything else new—any problems, I mean?…All right. Marg’t, when do we go to the stars? It seems to me that it’s about time to let that crew on Ganymede out of exile and give up.”

  “You can’t give up,” Marg’t said, with quiet, cold intensity. “The interstellar drive is our only real hope, and you know it as well as I do. Besides, we’re making real progress at last. Another year’s work—”

  “And another fiasco,” Biond said, more drily than he had intended. “Marg’t, we’ve been hearing this story ever since the announcement of the Weinogradsky scholium. Our top space-flight speed is still only a bare fifteen hundred miles per second. Let’s face it, old Milne was right, and Einstein before him. Weinogradsky’s equations are elegant, but there’s no conceivable way that they can be tested.”

  “They’ve been tested. Before Weinogradsky.”

  “I know—phase velocity in wave-guide theory, and the rest of that. Skipping the good possibility that Weinogradsky’s examples are illusions—I’m not a physicist and won’t pretend to be one—I deny that the interstellar drive is the hope of the race, even if it is obtainable. As a matter of conjecture, I’d be more inclined to call it a curse.”

  “Excuse me,” Chen U said, “but I haven’t time to listen to the ensuing debate. If I feel the need I’ll replay it from memory, from one of the last dozen or so meetings. I’m due at the flyport right now, and in Seattle an hour from now. Good night, all—and Marg’t, stand your ground.”

  He went out, smiling. Biond stood with the rest as he left. So, of course, did Marg’t, halfway, her hands still linked gracefully in
her lap. But the moment that Chen U was gone she swung on Biond, the comers of her lips deepening.

  “Are you going to give me the Marching Chinamen again?” she demanded.

  “Of course I am,” Biond said contemptuously. Every word cut him like knives, but he was still too good an officer to allow his emotions to fog a matter of public policy. But he was also enough of a human being to see that he was coming closer to being a flagellant at each new meeting. “It’d be utterly impossible to export people from this planet fast enough to keep up with the birth rate, even if everybody in the world wanted to go.”

  “What in the world are we talking about?” Dorthy said. “The last I heard, the Ganymede project was a study of extraterrestrial bacteriology, out to make operational tests of the old Arrhenius idea that life went from world to world by light pressure. What has that to do with an interstellar drive?”

  “Nothing,” Marg’t said, “and the Ganymede project isn’t any more interested in xenobacteriology than you are. The publicity about it has been deliberately misleading.”

  “But why?”

  “Because,” Marg’t said, “stupid people like Biond are afraid of the very idea of an interstellar drive. They can’t see that the only way we’ll ever relieve the Earth of its overcrowding is to have new earths to occupy. They think that human dignity should be subject to more and more restrictions, so that we can stay home and become stagnant. They want to revive the old, old birth control campaigns, in the face of the plain evidence that such campaigns never work and setting aside the infringements upon human dignity that campaigns of that kind are founded on. They see human fertility as nothing but a menace. They’re incapable of seeing it as the driving force that it is—the force behind human destiny…Are you married, Dorthy?”