"And they have dental caries to contend with, which we don't," I said. "Somehow, Chief, we'll get this experiment into its second generation, past the miseries of the gnotobiotic first-born, we Adams and Eves who were delivered into purity by aseptic Caesarian section. Maybe we'll have to toss coins or draw cards to pair up for parent-hood. But any kids we raise will be spared that indignity. Know how I've got it figured, Chief? We've got to make provision for exogamous matings, right? Novelty, in other words, is essential to romance. Here's the way we'll work it. We'll set half the babies, boys and girls together, on one side of a wall, half on the other side. We'll have established two tribes of kids, each growing up in ignorance of the other; and we'll keep them strictly apart till they're in their middle teens. Then, maybe the night of the Junior Prom, we'll cut a door-way in that wall and introduce them to each other." * * * * * Dr. McQueen smiled. "That will be a splendid evening, John. And a situation to make an anthropologist's mouth water. You may have found the answer to one of your children's major problems. I only wish we had as simple a solution to the current troubles of John Bogardus." "Don't blame yourself for what's happened to me," I said. "I've carried on pretty bad today, but that doesn't mean that I or any of the other Lapins blame you for causing us to be birthed into the Big Tank. It had to be done. Once Dr. Reyniers had made gnotobiotics possible, a colony of germ-free humans became available. You did a good and honest job of bringing us colonists up, Chief. As good a job as anyone could do." "Thank you, John," he said. "I often wonder, though, whether the Nuremberg Principles really gave us the right to build and populate this germless microcosm. We told your mothers when they volunteered that the results of raising humans gnotobiotically would be important. They have indeed. Thousands of lives have been saved by what we've learned here. We saw to it, as we'd also promised your mothers, that your health hasn't suffered by reason of experiments, that you've been given the education you need to earn a good living, and especially that your dignity as human beings has always been respected. The core question is, did we have the right to involve fellow humans, not yet born, in a process the end of which we couldn't entirely predict? Enough of this, though. My conscience is my own problem. For your immediate relief I can offer only: keep busy." "Work is dandy, but liquor's quicker," I said. "A wound of the heart calls for a therapeutic drunk." "I'll honor your prescription, Doctor," the Chief said. "The moment I get outside, I'll Seitz you some of my own Scotch." He stood up and caught hold of his air-hose. "Forgive me for behaving so like Pollyanna, John," he said. "I wish I could offer you relief more potent than Scotch and sympathy."