“That good, eh? Better than the old-fashioned mother’s son type?”

“Well-1-1,” she considered. “You’d really be amazed, Commander, if you could see the very latest performance charts. Of course, there is always that big deficiency, the one activity we’ve never been able to—”

“One thing I can’t understand,” the kid broke in, “why do they have to use corpses! A body’s lived its life, fought its war—why not leave it alone? I know the Eoti can outbreed us merely by increasing the number of queens in their flagships; I know that manpower is the biggest single TAF problem—but we’ve been synthesizing protoplasm for a long, long time now. Why not synthesize the whole damn body, from toenails to frontal lobe, and turn out real, honest-to-God androids that don’t wallop you with the stink of death when you meet them?”

The little blonde got mad. “Our product does not stink! Cosmetics can now guarantee that the new models have even less of a body odor than you, young man! And we do not reactivate or revitalize corpses, I’ll have you know; what we do is reclaim human protoplasm, we reuse worn-out and damaged human cellular material in the area where the greatest shortages currently occur, military personnel. You wouldn’t talk about corpses, I assure you, if you saw the condition that some of those bodies are in when they arrive. Why, sometimes in a whole baling package—a baling package contains twenty casualties—we don’t find enough to make one good, whole kidney. Then we have to take a little intestinal tissue here and a bit of spleen there, alter them, unite them carefully, activa—”

“That’s what I mean. If you go to all that trouble, why not start with real raw material?”