I felt the touch of one of my compatriots tap my shoulder, it was the Russian, and he asked me in the Zamanow language, "How long have you been here?"
"Five years, and you," I asked?
"Six years I think, give or take a month or two," he answered.
"It's been three years for me," the Chinamen piped in. His Zamanow was not as fluent as ours.
"You must put the uniforms on now, please. If we get stopped we could all get killed!" We could hear the pleading from our driver as she was pulling onto a gravel lane. She was beside herself with fear and concern and it was conveyed in her voice. We began to pull the clothing out of the sack and recalling how one piece jump suits worked, and put them on. The material was a synthetic and very pliable, but for us, having not worn clothing in a long time, it was cumbersome and scratchy and bulky. We looked and felt awkward wearing them.
After we dressed and felt suitably uncomfortable we investigated the contents of the tins. Like so many a shoe polish tin we turned the little metal wing nut on the side of the can to uncover the contents. Inside was a skin dye, used by the lighter skinned women to appear as if they were naturally a dark green color. You applied it with a soft cloth and just rubbing it on the skin turned our Lilly white skins into a dull green color. We helped each other apply the dye so that all exposed parts of us were covered. As instructed by our driver, we also rubbed the dye onto our scalp and it did not affect our natural hair color. We took care to get most of our upper chests and shoulders as well as our forearms and shins. When we were done, we looked like the Zamanow, at least, without close inspection, we could pass for it. One characteristic of the Zamanow was webbing between the fingers and toes and this concerned me.
"What about the webbed fingers?"
"Don't worry about that," our driver chuckled, "it's only the women that have the webbing. Our men have no such attributes."
"What about shoes," the Chinamen wanted to know?
"Everybody wears sandals here and you'll get them when we get to where we are going."
"Where are we going," asked the Russian?
"Someplace safe, about two hundred miles away from here in a town called Port Conway."
"Why are we in danger," the Russian asked?
She sighed and you could tell that she was collecting her thoughts. She made a turn onto a solid road and the sound of gravel popping under tires disappeared. She came to a decision about what she wanted to say and we hung on every word she uttered.
"After the war, we were devastated. We won, but, only by total obliteration of the enemy. Some of us felt that it was genocide. But the war was so brutal and all consuming that no one dared to speak against it. It was when our men came home that we discovered that they were no longer able to generate offspring. Virtually every male between the ages of seventeen and forty five was found to be sterile. Our entire civilization would have died out within a generation had we not sought to find a suitable genetic source outside of the planet.
That's where you come in. I was one of the scientists that developed the long range deep space scanners that located your interstellar ships. Another group of scientists developed a technology to divert space debris, like meteorites, to take out you vessels and set you adrift. Once adrift, we assumed that you would head for the closest planet that would support life for you. Hence, here you are. The country was desperate and they needed to generate a whole new generation of men for our women. We figured out how to combine genetic material so that cross breeding of different species would be successful and it worked. The five of you have generated about ten thousand children in the past six years. In the next ten years you would produce another fifteen thousand and that would give us a base to work with. A breeding program would start immediately when the children were old enough to begin to breed and we would have a slightly diluted but still viable offspring that would allow our civilization to continue."
"So why aren't we breeding right now, if this is working out." I asked.
"Last year, a group of my fellow scientists discovered a way to reverse the chemical toxin in about forty to sixty percent of the males affected. It takes about six months of painful treatment, but we can successfully restore a sterile male to his normal state. This started a major discussion among the more conservative of our people. There was a moral outcry about how we were destroying our society with these mongrel hybrids. At first the blame fell on us the scientists because we were the ones that developed the capability to create the toxins in the first place which caused the problem. Never mind that it was the people that we were at war with that created and used the chemical warfare, it was still our fault. Secondly, we are responsible for polluting the countries gene pool with inferior genetic material from outside our society. This last year has been real tough on us scientists and it has taken its toll. We are unable to work anywhere and when someone hears that we are scientists or researchers, we are subjected to everything from verbal taunting to out and out violence.
The Council for Domestic Purity was formed and most of the population has joined. They openly advocate fratricide and have generated some extremely ugly incidents. Some twenty five of us have been beaten to death in some of the more out of way towns and villages. Many more have been hospitalized. Now the mob mentality is turning to the output of our genius and they are beginning to slaughter the mulatto children. Yesterday, a preschool was raided and eighteen of the children were hacked to death with machetes. A pile of their severed heads was placed on the doorstep of the local Breeder Selection Services."
"Breeder Selection Services," I asked?
Z
The three of us looked at each other and felt a little embarrassed at the thought and at the same time, taking kind of a twisted pride in our work.
"Anyway," she went on, "at this very moment a crowd of people are gathering to march toward the Breeder Institute, where you were housed. They intend to burn it to the ground and drag every living person out of there and butcher it. That included anyone who worked there. Needles to say, since yesterday, the place has been abandon with the exception of you breeders.
For a couple of months now, my fellow scientists and I have been talking about getting out of the country. We have been setting it up with the Governments approval. We want to get the Mother's and their children out. Those mothers who wish to go will not be accompanied by their husbands. Most of the men will avoid these women who have had sex with you and conceived. They are considered to be dirty and shameful when just a year ago they were doing their patriotic duty. Some of the women have been beaten to death along with their mulatto child by their own husbands and boyfriends. Things are getting out of hand here and it's time to leave. We only decided to come and get you when we learned that the Institute was abandoned. Sorry, but you were something of an afterthought a missed detail in our plan. From here, we hope to get you on one of seven ships that are sailing to different destinations. All of these destinations are parts of the territory that the war was fought in and it is believed to be tainted with the same toxins that sterilized our men. Nobody will go near them. I have personally done extensive testing of the soil and water and air in some of these places and have found no evidence of toxic residue, yet, the populace believes that it is still infected and will not bother us there."
"Just how certain are you about the toxicity in these areas," The Russian asked.
"Oh, about seventy five percent," she answered.
We all digested that information.
"We are betting that seventy five percent of hope is better than no hope at all. What do you think," she asked?
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