"Sutton," Trevor asked, "how much do you know about this Cradle business?"
"Nothing," Sutton told him. "They told me I was a human and it was an android matter."
"You can see from that how important it must be."
"I think I can," said Sutton.
"You can guess, just from the name, what it might be."
"That's not too hard to do," said Sutton.
"Because we needed a greater force of humans," said Trevor, "we made the first androids a thousand years ago. We needed them to fill out the too-thin ranks of mankind. We made them as close to humans as we could. They could do everything the humans could except one thing."
"They can't reproduce," said Sutton. "I wonder, Trevor, if it had been possible, if we would have given that power to them, too. For if we had, they would have been true humans. There would have been no difference between a man whose ancestors were made in a laboratory and those whose ancestors stemmed back to the primal ocean. The androids would have been a self-continuing race, and they wouldn't have been androids. They would have been humans. We would have been adding to our population by chemical as well as biological means."
"I don't know," said Trevor. "Honestly, I don't. Of course, the wonder is that we could make them at all, that we could produce life in the laboratory. Think of the sheer intellectual ability and the technical skill that went into it. For centuries men had tried to find out what life was, had run down one blind alley after another, bumping into stone wall after stone wall. Failing in a scientific answer, many of them turned back to the divine source, to a mythical answer, to the belief that it was a matter of divine intervention. The idea is perfectly expressed by du Noüy, who wrote back in the twentieth century."
"We gave the androids one thing we do not have ourselves," said Sutton, calmly.