only he had a beard, or even a mustache, people would not be constantly mistaking him for a 20-year-old despite his six-foot frame. Brother Haas was sporting a beard, about a two-week growth, scrubby by comparison to the luxuriant mustache that proclaimed him a long-standing designated alternate parent. Solid citizen. Ethan sighed. 'Sit, sit,' he gestured again.
The man sat on the edge of his chair, clutching his headgear in earnest supplication. His formal clothes were out of fashion and fit, but painfully clean and tidy; Ethan wondered how long the fellow'd had to scrub this morning to get every speck of dirt from under those horny nails.
Brother Haas slapped his cap absently against his thigh. 'My boy, doctor—is—is there something the matter with my son?'
'Uh—didn't they tell you anything on the comlink?'
'No, sir. They just told me to come. So I signed out the ground car from my commune motor pool, and here I am.'
Ethan glanced at the dossier on his desk. 'You drove all the way up here from Crystal Springs this morning?'
The bear smiled. 'I'm a farmer. I'm used to getting up early. Anyway, nothing's too much trouble for my boy. My first, y'know—' he ran a hand over his chin, and laughed, 'well, I expect that's obvious.'
'How did you end up here at Sevarin, instead of your district Rep Center at Las Sands?' asked Ethan curiously.
'It was for the CJB. Las Sands said they didn't have a CJB.'
'I see.' Ethan cleared his throat. 'Any particular reason you decided on CJB stock?'
The farmer nodded firmly. 'It was the accident last harvest decided me. One of our fellows tangled wrong-end-to with a thresher—lost an arm. Typical farm accident, but they said, if only he'd got to a doctor sooner, they mighta saved it. The commune's growing. We're right on the edge of the terraforming. We need a doctor of our own. Everybody knows CJBs make the best doctors. Who knows when I'll get enough social duty credits for a second son, or a third? I meant to get the best.'
'Not all doctors are CJBs,' said Ethan. 'And most certainly not all CJBs are doctors.'
Haas smiled polite disagreement. 'What are you, Dr. Urquhart?'
Ethan cleared his throat again. 'Well—in feet, I'm a CJB-8.'
The former nodded confirmation to himself. 'They said you were the best. ' He stared hungrily at the Rep doctor, as if he might trace the lineaments of his dream son in Ethan's face.
Ethan tented his hands together upon his desk, trying to look kindly and authoritative. 'Well. I'm sorry they didn't tell you more over the comlink—there was no reason to keep you in the dark. As you no doubt suspected, there is a problem with your, uh, conceptus.'
Haas looked up. 'My son.'
'Uh—no. I'm afraid not. Not this round.' Ethan inclined his head in sympathy.
Haas's face fell, then he looked up again, lips compressed with hope. 'Is it anything you can fix? I know you do genetic repairs—if it's the cost, well, my commune brethren will back me—I can clear the debt, in time—'
Ethan shook his head. 'There are only a couple dozen common disorders we can do something about— some types of diabetes, for example, that can be repaired by one gene splice in a small group of cells, if you catch them at just the right stage of development. Some can even be pulled from the sperm sample when we filter out the defective X-chromosome-bearing portion. There are many more that can be detected in the early check, before the blastula is implanted in the replicator bed and starts forming its placenta. We routinely pull one cell then, and put it through an automated check. But the automated check only finds problems it's programmed to find—the hundred or so most common birth defects. It's not impossible for it to miss something subtle or rare—it happens half-a-dozen times a year. So you're not alone. We usually pull it, and just fertilize another egg—it's the most cost- effective solution, with only six days invested at that point.'
Haas sighed. 'So we start over.' He rubbed his chin. 'Dag said it was bad luck to start growing your father-beard before birthday. Guess he was right.'
'Only a set-back,' Ethan reassured his stricken look. 'Since the source of the difficulty was in the ovum and not the sperm, the Center isn't even going to charge you for the month on the replicator.' He made a hasty note to that effect in the dossier.
'Do you want me to go down to the paternity ward now, for a new sample?' asked Haas humbly.
'Ah—before you go, certainly. Save you another long drive. But there's one other little problem that needs to be ironed out first.' Ethan coughed. 'I'm afraid we can't offer CJB stock any more.'
'But I came all the way here just for CJB!' protested Haas. 'Damn it—I have a right to choose!' His hands clenched alarmingly. 'Why not?'
'Well…' Ethan paused, careful of his phrasing. 'Yours is not the first difficulty we've had with the CJB lately. The culture seems to be—ah—deteriorating. In fact, we tried very hard—all the ova it produced for a week were devoted to your order.' No need to tell Haas how frighteningly scant that production was. 'My best techs tried, I tried—part of the reason we took a chance on the current conceptus was that it was the only fertilization we achieved that was viable past the fourth cell division. Since then our CJB has stopped producing altogether, I'm afraid.'
'Oh.' Haas paused, deflated, then swelled with new resolve. 'Who does, then? I don't care if I have to cross the continent. CJB is what I mean to have.'
Ethan wondered glumly why resolution was classed as a virtue. More of a damned nuisance. He took a breath, and said what he'd hoped to avoid saying; 'No one, I'm afraid, Brother Haas. Ours was the last working CJB culture on Athos.'
Haas looked appalled. 'No more CJBs? But where will we get our doctors, our medtechs—'
'The CJB genes are not lost,' Ethan pointed out swiftly. 'There are men all over the planet who carry them, and who will pass them on to their sons.'
'But what happened to the, the cultures? Why don't they work any more?' asked Haas in bewilderment. 'They haven't—been poisoned or anything, have they? Some damned Outlander vandalism—'
'No, no!' Ethan said. Ye gods, what a riot that fabulous rumor could start. 'It's perfectly natural. The first CJB culture was brought by the Founding Fathers when Athos was first settled—it's almost two hundred years old. Two hundred years of excellent service. It's just—senescent. Old. Worn out. Used up. Reached the end of its life- cycle, already dozens of times longer than it would have lived in a, ah,' it wasn't an obscenity, he was a doctor and it was correct medical terminology, 'woman.' He hurried on, before Haas could make the next logical connection. 'Now, I'm going to offer a suggestion, Brother Haas. My best medtech—does superb work, most conscientious—is a JJY-7. Now, we happen to have a very fine JJY-8 culture here at Savarin that we can offer you. I wouldn't mind having a JJY myself, if only…' Ethan cut himself off, lest he tip into a personal bog and wallow in front of this patron. 'I think you'd be very satisfied.'
Haas reluctantly allowed himself to be talked into this substitute, and was sent off to the sampling room he had first visited with such high hopes a month before. Ethan sighed, sitting at his desk after the patron had departed, and rubbed the worry around his temples. The action seemed to spread the tension rather than dissipate it. The next logical connection…
Every ovarian culture on Athos was a descendant of those brought by the Founding Fathers. It had been an open secret in the Rep Centers for two years and more—how much longer could it be until the general public picked up on it? The CJB was not the first culture to die out recently. Some sort of bell curve, Ethan supposed; they were on the up-slope, and rising dizzily. Sixty percent of the infants growing cozily, placentas tucked in their soft nests of microscopic exchange tubing in the replicators downstairs, came from just eight cultures. Next year, if his secret calculations were borne out, it would be even worse. How long before there was not enough ovarian material to meet growth demand—or even population replacement? Ethan groaned, picturing his future unemployment prospects—if he wasn't ripped apart by angry mobs of ursine non-fathers before then….
He shook himself from his depression. Something would be done before things came to that pass, surely. Something had to break.
The worry made an ominous bass note under Ethan's pleasant routine for three months after his return from vacation. Another ovarian culture, LMS-10, curled up and died altogether, and EEH-9's egg cell production declined by half. It would be the next to go, Ethan calculated. The first break in the downward slide arrived unexpectedly.
