  The conductance of disordered wires with symplectic symmetry is studied by a
random-matrix approach. It has been shown that the behavior of the conductance
in the long-wire limit crucially depends on whether the number of conducting
channels is even or odd. We focus on the metallic regime where the wire length
is much smaller than the localization length, and calculate the
ensemble-averaged conductance and its variance for both the even- and
odd-channel cases. We find that the weak-antilocalization correction to the
conductance in the odd-channel case is equivalent to that in the even-channel
case. Furthermore, we find that the variance dose not depend on whether the
number of channels is even or odd. These results indicate that in contrast to
the long-wire limit, clear even-odd differences cannot be observed in the
metallic regime.
