Eutopia by David Nickle Read Free Book Online Page A

Madame,” said the doctor. “Precisely. For we are all made from the same protoplasm. And in understanding these creatures—how they live and eat and, forgive me Madame, how they breed—we can better understand how we might live, might eat, might breed. To our race’s betterment, of course.”
    This occasioned, said Aunt Germaine, some controversy in the lecture hall, as some wondered whether the doctor was comparing humanity to common garden slugs by some blasphemous design. But Dr. Davenport was not deterred.
    “Our ignorance,” he said, “is appalling, when it comes to the understanding of the effect of interbreeding on the races and the children they beget. And the consequences might be severe, should we not move swiftly to eradicate that ignorance.”
    Jason wasn’t sure that he would have been any less put off than the others who were there. “I know I ain’t a garden slug,” he said. “Or descended from one either.”
    “Do not be so certain, Jason.”
    “And what did he mean about interbreeding?” asked Jason. “What consequences are those?”
    Aunt Germaine sat back.
    “You and your mother raised swine,” she said. “Perhaps I can explain it that way. How is it that you get a prize pig? Do you pray for one? Do you purchase two inferior pigs and mate them? No. You feed and keep a good sow. And from time to time you bring in a prize boar.”
    “If there’s one around,” said Jason.
    “All right,” said Aunt Germaine. “If there’s one around. If there is not—and you mate your beautiful sow with some—oh, some stringy, undersized, sickly little pig . . . what sort of offspring would you expect?”
    “Not so fine,” he said. “I expect.”
    “There is a saying that Dr. Davenport coined some time after that. Breed a white woman with a Negro—the baby’s a Negro. A German with an Italian: Italian. A white fellow with an Indian squaw?”
    Jason guessed: “A baby squaw?”
    Aunt Germaine clapped.
    “You mean to tell me Dr. Davenport was talking about breeding people the way farmers breed pigs.”
    Aunt Germaine beamed. “It is a science,” she said. “A new science.”
    “A new science.” Jason shook his head. “That’s something.”
    “Do you know what it’s called?”
    He shrugged. “Breeding, I guess.”
    “It is called that. But there is a better word.”
    Aunt Germaine leaned forward, her hand on Jason’s arm.
    “Eugenics,” she said. Her eyebrows sprang up over the top of her glasses for an instant, and she smiled. “Eugenics, Nephew.”
    “And now there’s a Eugenics Records Office,” said Jason. “I guess it caught on.”
    The ERO as Aunt Germaine called it had started up officially in the last year. But it had been a dream of Dr. Davenport’s for more than ten years.
    “Dr. Davenport contacted me personally ,” said Aunt Germaine, “to join his crusade.”
    “Crusade?”
    “A figure of speech. Call it a mission. The mission, then, of the ERO was to compile an immense list—of every man, woman and child in America. Divided, of course, into segments.”
    “Segments.”
    “Of the population. Am I speaking too scientifically for you to follow, Jason?”
    “I’m following.” Jason took a sip of coffee. “Dr. Davenport contacted you to help him make this list with segments and all.”
    “Very good. Last year, he engaged a number of very proficient researchers—nurses, biologists, breeders, and so on—to travel out to the far corners of this nation, and compile this list. We all gathered at Cold Spring Harbor. We learned how to gather the information so as to be most useful to the enterprise. And then, one by one, we set out.”
    “To Sing Sing?”
    “Among other places, but yes. Sing Sing and prisons and hospitals are places that we have visited. It is particularly important to understand the scope of the criminal and the infirm, after all. For those—illness and stupidity and criminality—are among the things we hope to one day