“What’s your distribution curve?”

“One alpha to 100 betas to 1000 gammas. Your father worked out the ratios in the beginning and they’ve never been altered. The distribution precisely fits human needs.”

“My father is a man of great foresight,” said Manuel vaguely.

He wondered what the world would have been like today if the Krug cartel had not given it androids. Perhaps not very different. Instead of a small, culturally homogeneous human elite served by computers, mechanical robots, and hordes of obliging androids, there might be a small, culturally homogeneous human elite served only by computers and mechanical robots. Either way, twenty-third century man would be living a life of ease.

Certain determining trends had established themselves in the past few hundred years, long before the first clumsy android had staggered from its vat. Primarily, starting late in the twentieth century, there had been the vast reduction in human population. War and general anarchy had accounted for hundreds of millions of civilians in Asia and Africa; famine had swept those continents, and South America and the Near East as well; in the developed nations, social pressures and the advent of foolproof contraception had produced the same effects. A checking of the rate of population growth had been followed, within two generations, by an absolute and cascading decline in actual population.

The erosion and almost total disappearance of the proletariat was one historically unprecedented outcome of this. Since the population decline had been accompanied by the replacement of men by machines in nearly all forms of menial labor and some not so menial, those who had no skills to contribute to the new society were discouraged from reproducing. Unwanted, dispirited, displaced, the uneducated and the ineducable dwindled in number from generation to generation; and this Darwinian process was aided, subtly and then openly, by well-meaning officials who saw to it that the blessings of contraception were denied to no citizen. By the time the masses were a minority, genetic laws reinforced the trend. Those who had proven themselves unfit might not reproduce at all; those who merely came up to norms might have two children per couple, but no more; only those who exceeded norms could add to the world’s human stock. In this way population remained stable. In this way the clever inherited the earth.

The reshaping of society was worldwide. The advent of transmat travel had turned the globe into a village; and the people of that village spoke the same language — English — and thought the same thoughts. Culturally and genetically they tended toward mongrelization. Quaint pockets of the pure past were maintained here and there as tourist attractions, but by the end of the twenty-first century there were few differences in appearance, attitudes, or culture among the citizens of Karachi, Cairo, Minneapolis, Athens, Addis Ababa, Rangoon, Peking, Canberra, and Novosibirsk. The transmat also made national boundaries absurd, and old concepts of sovereignty melted.

But this colossal social upheaval, bringing with it universal leisure, grace, and comfort, had also brought an immense and permanent labor shortage. Computer-directed robots had proved themselves inadequate to many tasks: robots made excellent street-sweepers and factory workers, but they were less useful as valets, baby-sitters, chefs, and gardeners. Build better robots, some said; but others dreamed of synthetic humans to look after their needs. The technique did not seem impossible. Ectogenesis — the artificial nurturing of embryos outside the womb, the hatching of babies from stored ova and sperm — had long been a reality, chiefly as a convenience for women who did not wish to have their genes go down to oblivion, but who wanted to avoid the risks and burdens of pregnancy. Ectogenes, born of man and woman at one remove, were too thoroughly human in origin to be suitable as tools; but why not carry the process to the next step, and manufacture androids?

Krug had done that. He had offered the world synthetic humans, far more versatile than robots, who were long-lived, capable, complex in personality, and totally subservient to human needs. They were purchased, not hired, and by general consent they were regarded by law as property, not persons. They were slaves, in short. Manuel sometimes thought it might have been simpler to make do with robots. Robots were things that could be thought of as things and treated as things. But androids were things that looked uncomfortably like people, and they might not acquiesce in their status of thinghood forever.

The car glided through room after room of nursery chambers, silent, darkened, empty but for a few android monitors. Each fledgling android spent the first two years of its life sealed in such a chamber, Bompensiero pointed out, and the life rooms through which they were passing contained successive batches ranging in age from a few weeks to more than twenty months. In some rooms the chambers were open; squads of beta technicians were preparing them to receive new infusions of takeoff-level zygotes.

“In this room,” said Bompensiero many rooms later, “we have a group of matured androids ready to be ‘born.’ Do you wish to descend to the floor area and observe the decanting at close range?”

Manuel nodded.

Bompensiero touched a switch. Their car rolled serenely off its track and down a ramp. At the bottom they dismounted. Manuel saw an army of gammas clustered around one of the nursery chambers. “The chamber has been drained of nutrient fluids. For some twenty minutes now the androids within have been breathing air for the first time in their lives. The hatches of the chamber now are being opened. Here: come close, Mr. Krug, come close.”

The chamber was uncovered. Manuel peered in.

He saw a dozen full-grown androids, six male, six female, sprawled limply on the metal floor. Their jaws were slack, their eyes were blank, their arms and legs moved feebly. They seemed helpless, vacant, vulnerable.Lilith , he thought.Lilith!

Bompensiero, at his elbow, whispered, “In the two years between takeoff and decanting, the android reaches full physical maturity — a process that takes humans thirteen to fifteen years. This is another of the genetic modifications introduced by your father in the interests of economy. We produce no infant androids here.”

Manuel said, “Didn’t I hear somewhere that we turn out a line of android babies to be raised as surrogates by human women who can’t—”

“Please,” Bompensiero said sharply. “We don’t discuss—” He cut himself short, as if remembering who it was he had just reprimanded, and said in a more moderate way, “I know very little about what you mention. We have no such operations in this plant.”

Gammas were lifting the dozen newborn androids from the nursery chamber and carrying them to gaping machines that seemed part wheelchair, part suit of armor. The males were lean and muscular, the females high-breasted and slim. But there was something hideous about their mindlessness. Totally passive, utterly soul-empty, the moist, naked androids offered no response as they were sealed one by one into these metallic receptacles. Only their faces remained visible, looking out without expression through transparent visors.

Bompensiero explained, “They don’t have the use of their muscles yet. They don’t know how to stand, to walk, to do anything. These training devices will stimulate muscular development. A month inside one and an android can handle itself physically. Now, if we return to our car—”

“These androids I’ve just seen,” Manuel said. “They’re gammas, of course?”

“Alphas.”

Manuel was stunned. “But they seemed so … so… “ He faltered. “Moronic.”

“They are newly born,” said Bompensiero. “Should they come out of the nurseries ready to run computers?”