She made a disapproving pout with her mouth. It was fully as cute as her approving pouts. “We do not like that word.”

“All right, blobs then.”

“We don’t like bl—that word either. You are talking about human beings like yourself, Commander. Very much like yourself.”

I began to get sore fast, just the way the kid had out in the hall. Then I realized she didn’t mean anything by it. She didn’t know. What the hell—it wasn’t on our orders. I relaxed. “You tell me. What do you call them here?”

The blonde sat up stiffly. “We refer to them as soldier surrogates. The epithet ‘zombie’ was used to describe the obsolete Model 21 which went out of production over five years ago. You will be supplied with individuals based on Models 705 and 706, which are practically perfect. In fact, in some respects—”

“No bluish skin? No slow-motion sleepwalking?”

She shook her head violently, Her eyes were lit up. Evidently she’d digested all the promotional literature. Not such a fluffhead, after all; no great mind, but her husbands had evidently had someone to talk to in between times. She rattled on enthusiastically: “The cyanosis was the result of bad blood oxygenation; blood was our second most difficult tissue reconstruction problem, The nervous system was the hardest. Even though the blood cells are usually in the poorest shape of all by the time the bodies arrive, we can now turn out a very serviceable rebuilt heart. But, let there be the teeniest battle damage to the brain or spine and you have to start right from scratch. And then the troubles in reconstitution! My cousin Lorna works in Neural Alignment and she tells me all you need to make is just one wrong connection—you know how it is, Commander, at the end of the day your eyes are tired and you’re kind of watching the clock—just one wrong connection, and the reflexes in the finished individual turn out to be so bad that they just have to send him down to the third floor and begin all over again. But you don’t have to worry about that. Since Model 663, we’ve been using the two-team inspection system in Neural Alignment. And the 700 series—oh, they’ve just been wonderful.”