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Show 163 "Sometimes when the mumps go down like that, son, they sort of wipe out the testicles. They cut down the production of sperm. Do you know what I mean?" I nodded. "You have to have an awful lot of sperm to be potent-millions. Each time. Nature is very wasteful. If you just have a few thousand, say, it's no good, you're sterile." I waited. "I'm afraid, Brocken, that that's what happened to you, wiped out. Let's just hope that's all that happened." I blinked. He smiled. "Look, there's worse things that can happen to a man. Some war wound, huh? But there's worse ways to be wounded." "You mean I'm sterile?" "You don't have enough sperm to knock up a mosquito." I didn't smile. He started to say something else, stopped and grew solemn. "Do you want to talk about it?" I didn't want to talk about anything. I was placed in a new squadron where I knew no one. Mo one called me Babe, they called me Chet or Chester, gradually Chess, but I felt lost, alone, unknown and unknowing. Chess seemed wrong, out of place. We were sent to San Diego and were there checking out carrier landings on an actual ship when the A first Bomb went off over Hiroshima. We were sailing into the Pacific when the peace terms were signed, though I didn't get discharged and back to Escalante until the following April. By that time all my friends who were still alive had returned and had had their fling and were started on a serious direction in life. Elizabeth Brown had married a guy she had met in the Army and had gone off to live in New Orleans. I wasn't surprised. I wasn't even too surprised when Bill Boucher told me that when we were seniors in high school he had been screwing Liz regularly. That certainly turned my rusty |