Stevens lifted his sandy eyebrows briefly and glanced at Sutton half apologetically.
He cleared his throat. "That's quite right, sir," he said, "as you probably know. They are sterile, quite sterile. In other words, the human race can manufacture, chemically, a perfect human body, but it has been unable to solve the mystery of biological conception. Many attempts have been made to duplicate the chromosomes and genes, fertile eggs and sperm, but none has been successful."
"Someday, perhaps," said Sutton.
Mrs. Jellicoe shook her head. "We aren't meant to know all things, Mr. Sutton," she declared sanctimoniously. "There is a Power that guards against our knowing everything. There is…"
Stevens interrupted her. "Briefly, sir, we are interested in bringing about an acceptance of equality between the biological human race, the born human race, and the chemically manufactured human race that we call the androids. We contend that they are basically the same, that both are human beings, that each is entitled to the common heritage of the human race.
"We, the original, biological human race, created the androids in order to bolster our population, in order that "there might be more humans to man the command posts and administration centers spread through the galaxy. You perhaps are well aware that the only reason we have not brought the galaxy more closely under our control is the lack of human supervision."
"I am well aware of that," said Sutton.
And he was thinking: no wonder. No wonder that this Equality League is regarded as a band of crackpots. A flighty old woman, a stumbling, dirty oaf, a retired space captain with time hanging heavy on his hands and nothing else to do.
Stevens was saying, "Thousands of years ago slavery was wiped out as between one biological human and another. But today we have a slavery as between the biological human and the manufactured human. For the androids are owned. They do not live as masters of their own fate, but serve at the direction of an identical form of life…identical in all things except that one is biologically fertile and the other one is sterile."
And that, thought Sutton, certainly is something that he learned by rote from out of a book. Like an insurance salesman or an agent for an encyclopedia.