"There can't be a civilization without problems," said Walker. "But we're going to—" He opened a door. "My wife works with the kids the old people dumped on us. This way."
He motioned Calhoun inside the house. It was one of the shelters built during the frenzied building program designed to make an emergency refuge for the population of a planet. It was the roughest of machine-tool constructions. The floors were not finished. The walls were not smooth. The equipment showed. But there had been attempts to do something about the crudity. Colors had been used to try to make it homelike.
When a girl came in from the next room, Calhoun understood completely. She was a little younger than her husband, but not much. She regarded Calhoun with that anxiety with which a housekeeper always regards an unexpected visitor, hoping he will not notice defects.
"This is a Med Service man," said Walker briefly, indicating Calhoun. "I told him there was a health problem about some of the children." To Calhoun he said curtly: "This is my wife Elsa."
Murgatroyd said "Chee!" from where he clung to Calhoun's neck. He was suddenly reassured. He scrambled down to the floor. Elsa smiled at him.
"He's tame!" she said delightedly. "Maybe—"
Calhoun extended his hand. She took it. Murgatroyd, swaggering, extended his own black paw. Instead of conflict and hatred, here, Murgatroyd seemed to sense an amiable sociability such as he was used to. He felt more at home. He began zestfully to act like the human being he liked to pretend he was.
"He's delightful!" said the girl. "May I show him to Jak?"
Young Walker said:
"Elsa's been helping with the smaller kids. She says there's something the matter that she doesn't understand. She has one of the kids here. Bring him, Elsa."
She vanished. A moment later she brought in a small boy. He was probably six or seven. She carried him. He was thin. His eyes were bright, but he was completely passive in her arms. She put him down in a chair and he looked about alertly enough, but he simply did not move. He saw Murgatroyd, and beamed. Murgatroyd went over to the human who was near his own size. Swaggering, he offered his paw once more. The boy giggled, but his hand lay in his lap.
"He doesn't do anything!" said Elsa distressedly. "His muscles work, but he doesn't work them. He just sits and waits for things to be done for him. He acts as if he'd lost the idea of moving, or doing anything at all. And—it's beginning to show up among the other children. They just sit. They're bright enough . . . they see and understand—but they just sit!"
Calhoun examined the boy. His expression grew carefully impassive. But he winced as he touched the pipe-stem arms and legs. What muscles were there were almost like dough.
When he straightened up, despite himself his mouth was awry. Young Walker's wife said anxiously:
"Do you know what's the matter with him?"
"Basically," said Calhoun with a sort of desperate irony, "he's in revolt. As the rest of you are in revolt against Phaedra, he's in revolt against you. You needed rest you didn't get and recreation you couldn't have and something besides back-breaking labor under a load that grew heavier minute by minute for years. You revolted, and you've a fine justification for the war in which you're engaged. But he has needed something he hasn't had, too. So he's revolting against his lack—as you did—and he's dying as you will presently do from exactly the same final cause."
Walker frowned ominously.
"I don't understand what you're saying!" he said harshly.
Calhoun moistened his lips.
"I spoke unprofessionally. The real cause of his present troubles and your future ones is that a social system has been shattered. The pieces can't live by themselves. And I don't know what medical measures can be taken to cure an injured civilization. As a medical man, I may be whipped. But I'd better check—Did I say, by the way, that the war fleet from Phaedra is going to attack in just three days?"
V
" . . . Truth is the accord of an idea with a thing. Very often an individual fails to discover the truth about some matter because he neglects to become informed about something. But even more often, the truth is never found out because somebody refuses to entertain an idea . . ."
Manual, Interstellar Medical Service. Pp. 101–2.
On the first day, Calhoun went grimly to the crèches that had been set up by the first-arrived young colonists when ships began to discharge really young children at the landing grid in Canopolis. The crèches were not too much like orphanages, of course, but the younger generation of Phaedra had been put in a very rough situation by the adults. If the time of the imminent solar explosion had been known, the matter could have been better handled. Actually, the explosion had been delayed—to date—for nearly five years from the discovery that it must occur. If that much leeway could have been predicted, older men and many machines would have been sent at first. But the bursting could not be computed. It was a matter of probability. Such-and-such unrhythmic variables must inevitably coincide sooner or later. When they did—final and ultimate catastrophe. The sun would flare terribly and destroy all life in its solar system. It could be calculated that the odds were even that the explosion would happen within one year, two to one within two, and five to one within three. The odds were enormous against Phaedra surviving as long as it had. The people of the mother-world had had a highly improbable break.
But in cold common sense they'd done the sensible thing. They'd tried to save those of their children who could take care of themselves first, and added others as they dared. But the burden on the young colonists had been monstrous. Even adults would have tended to grow warped with such pressure to mine, build, plough, and sow, as was put upon the youngsters. There had never been more than barely enough of food—and more mouths were always on the way. There had never been extra shelter, and younger and ever younger cargoes were constantly arriving, each needing more of shelter and of care than the ones before. And there was the world of adults still to be provided for.
Calhoun met the girls who had devoted themselves to the quasi-orphaned children. They bore themselves with rather touching airs of authority among the smaller children. But they were capable of ferocity, on occasion. They had the need, sometimes, not to defend their charges but themselves against the clumsily romantic advances of loutish teen-agers who considered themselves fascinating.
They had done very well.
The small children were exactly what Calhoun had anticipated—in every way. The small boy Calhoun had seen first was an extreme case, but the results of play by proxy were visible everywhere. Calhoun constrainedly inspected one after another of the children's shelters. He was anxiously watched by the sober young faces of the nurses. But they giggled when Murgatroyd tried to go through Calhoun's actions of taking temperatures and the like. He had to be stopped when he attempted to take a throat-swabbing which Calhoun had said was pure routine.
After the fourth such inspection he said to Elsa:
"I don't need to see any more. What's happened to the boys the same age as these girl nurses—the thirteen and fourteen and fifteen-year-olds?"
Elsa said uncomfortably:
"They're mostly off in the wilds. They hunt and fish and pioneer. They don't care about girls. Some of them grow things . . . I don't think there'd be enough food if they didn't, even though we're not getting anybody new to feed."
Calhoun nodded. In all the cities of the galaxy, small children of both sexes were to be seen everywhere, and girls of the early teen-ages, and adults. But the boys' age-group he'd mentioned always made itself invisible. It congregated in groups away from the public eye, and engaged in adventurous games and quite futile explorations. It was socially quite self-sufficient everywhere.