James Blish

“ In human beings, that lesson isn't learned completely until about a month after birth. During the intervening time, the newborn infant is protected by antibodies that it gets from the colestrum, the 'first milk' it gets from the breast during the three or four days immediately after birth. It can't generate its own; it isn't allowed to, so to speak, until it's learned the trick of cleaning up body residues without triggering the antibody mechanisms. Any dead cells marked 'personal' have to be dealt with some other way. ”

“ The fact is that the body's ability to distinguish between its own cells and those of some foreign tissue—a skin graft, say, or a bacterial invasion of the blood—isn't an inherited ability. It's a learned reaction. ”

“ Sure, everybody wants to go topside as soon as it's possible. Even people who are reconciled to these endless caverns and corridors hope for something better for their children—a glimpse of sunlight, a little rain, the fall of a leaf. ”

“ That's more important now to all of us than the war, which we don't believe in any longer. That doesn't even make any military sense, since we haven't the numerical strength to occupy the enemy's territory any more, and they haven't the strength to occupy ours. ”

“ Carson said. The motive behind the question interested him hugely, but he didn't dare show it. "But any fooling around with the immunity mechanisms can give rise to symptoms—fever, general malaise, and so on. We try to protect our subjects by giving them a light shock anesthesia first."
"Shock?" Hamelin repeated. "You mean electroshock? I don't see how—"
"Call it stress anesthesia instead. We give the man a steroid drug that counterfeits the anesthesia the body itself produces in moments of great stress—on the battlefield, say, or just after a serious injury. ”

“ Hamelin murmured. "That enormous object can process only one man at a time?"
"That's right," Mudgett said. "Luckily it doesn't have to treat all the body cells directly. It works through the blood, re-selfing the cells by means of small changes in the serum chemistry."
"What kind of changes?"
"Well," Carson said, choosing each word carefully, "that's more or less a graveyard secret, Mr. Secretary. We can tell you this much: the machine uses a vast array of crystalline, complex sugars which behave rather like the blood group-and-type proteins. ”

“ And as for actual insanity—of our thirty-five million people still unhospitalized, there are four million cases of which we know, each one of which should be committed right now for early paranoid schizophrenia—except that were we to commit them, our essential industries would suffer a manpower loss more devastating than anything the enemy has inflicted upon us. ”

“ What we do here is to impose upon the cells of the body—all of them—a new set of recognition-units for the guidance of the lymph nodes and the spleen, which are the organs that produce antibodies. The new units are highly complex, and the chances of their being duplicated by bacterial evolution, even under forced draught, are too small to worry about. ”

“ Body cells die, too, and have to be disposed of; what would happen if removing those dead cells provoked an antibody reaction, as the destruction of foreign cells does? We'd die of anaphylactic shock while we were still infants. ”

“ Not now, not after twenty-five years of underground life.
"He knows it's impossible, doesn't he?" Mudgett demanded abruptly.
"Of course he doesn't," Carson said impatiently. "He doesn't know any more about the real nature of the project than the people do. He thinks the 'educating' we do is in some sort of survival technique—That's what the papers think, too, as you can plainly see by the way they loaded that editorial."
"Um. If we'd taken direct control of the papers in the first place—"
Carson said nothing. Military control of every facet of civilian life was a fact, and Mudgett knew it. ”

“ We know from sampling that no new disease has been introduced by either side in over ten years now. Against all the known ones, we have immunization techniques, anti-sera, antibiotics, and so on. I suppose you get your shots every six months like all the rest of us; we should all be very hard to infect now, and such infections as do take should run mild courses. ”

“ Those are very minor renal functions in the higher mammals. The organ's main duty is chemical control of immunity. If Burnet and Fenner had known that back in 1949, when the selfing theory was being formulated, we'd have had Re-Education long before now."
"Most of the machine's size is due to the computation section," Mudgett emphasized. "In the body, the brain-stem does those computations, as part of maintaining homeostasis. But we can't reach the brain-stem from outside; it's not under conscious control. Once the body is re-selfed, it will re-train the thalamus where we can't." ”

“ And every move he's made since we first heard of him has been aimed directly at us—aimed directly at tricking us into getting him into the machine!"
"I think so too," Carson said grimly. "I just hope the enemy hasn't many more agents as brilliant."
"One's enough," Mudgett said. "He's sure to be loaded to the last cc of his blood with catalyst poisons. Once the machine starts processing his serum, we're done for—it'll take us years to re-program the computer, if it can be done at all. It's got to be stopped!" ”

“ Every one will have to be a highly trained specialist, if we're to bring the war to a quick conclusion."
"Which means no civilians," Hamelin said. "I see. I'm not entirely convinced, but—by all means let's see how it's done."
Once inside, the under-secretary tried his best to look everywhere at once. The room cut into the rock was roughly two hundred feet high. Most of it was occupied by the bulk of the Re-Education Monitor, a mechanism as tall as a fifteen-storey building, and about a city block square. Guards watched it on all sides, and the face of the machine swarmed with technicians. ”

“ We still have a reservoir of older people who lived through the war: people who had one or several of the new diseases that swept the world, some as many as five, and yet recovered. They still have their immunities ”

“ Every one of those four million persons is a major hazard to his neighbors and to his job, but how can we do without them? And what can we do about the unrecognized, sub-clinical cases, which probably total twice as many? How long can we continue operating without a collapse under such conditions?"
Carson mopped his brow. "I didn't suspect that it had gone that far."
"It has gone that far," Hamelin said icily, "and it is accelerating. Your own project has helped to accelerate it. Col. Mudgett here mentioned the opening of isolated cities to the pestilences. ”

“ But we also know that the enemy is intent on prosecuting the war to the end. Extermination is what they say they want, on their propaganda broadcasts, and your own Department reports that they seem to mean what they say. ”

“ The physician tossed the square of paper down under Mudgett's eyes. "Summary of the press reaction to Hamelin's speech last night," he said. "The total effect is going against us, Colonel. Unless we can change Hamelin's mind, this outcry to re-educate civilians ahead of soldiers is going to lose the war for us. The urge to live on the surface again has been mounting for ten years; now it's got a target to focus on. Us."
Mudgett chewed on a pencil while he read the summary; a blocky, bulky man, as short as Carson and with hair as grey and close-cropped. ”

“ If we can get troops onto the surface first, we'll be able to scout out their important installations in short order, and issue them a surrender ultimatum with teeth in it. They'll take it. The only other course is the sort of slow, mutual suicide we've got now. ”

“ But—"
"But he's getting nitrous oxide in the machine, and he'll be held six hours under anesthesia anyhow—also for his own protection," Mudgett broke in. He was grinning back at Carson like an idiot. "When he comes out from under, he'll assume that he's been re-educated, and he'll beat it back to the enemy to report that he's poisoned our machine, so that they can be sure they'll beat us to the surface. And he'll go the fastest way: overland." ”

“ Hamelin put the tips of his fingers together. "You gentlemen lecture me about policy as if I had never heard the word before. I'm familiar with your arguments for sending soldiers first. You assume that you're familiar with all of mine for starting with civilians, but you're wrong, because some of them haven't been brought up at all outside the Department. ”