I said, "I thought this was a V.A. facility."
"Exactly. Here comes our boy."
A Navy officer was coming in, hand and smile outstretched to Candace. "Hi, good to see you. And you must be Mr. Gunnarsen."
Candace introduced us as we shook hands. The fellow's name was Commander Whitling; she called him Tom. He said, "We'll have to move. Since I talked to you, there's been an all-hands evolution scheduled for eleven-some high brass inspection. I don't want to hurry you, but I'd like it if we were out of the way. . . this is a little irregular."
"Nice of you to arrange it," I said. "Lead on."
We went up a high-rise elevator and came out on the top floor of the building, into a corridor covered with murals of Disney and Mother Goose. From a sun deck came the tinkle of a music box. Three children, chasing each other down the hail, dodged past us, yelling. They made pretty good time, considering that two of them were on crutches. "What the hell are you doing here?" asked Commander Whitling sharply.
I looked twice, but he wasn't talking to me or the kids. He was talking to a man with a young face but a heavy black beard, who was standing behind a Donald Duck mobile, looking inconspicuous and guilty.
"Oh, hi, Mr. Whitling," the man said. "Jeez, I must've got lost again looking for the PX."
"Carhart," said the commander dangerously, "if I catch you in this wing again, you won't have to worry about the PX for a year. Hear me?"
"Well, jeez! All right, Mr. Whitling." As the man saluted and turned, his face wearing an expression of injury, I noticed that the left sleeve of his bathrobe was tucked, empty, into a pocket.
"You can't keep them out," said Whitling and spread his hands. "Well, all right, Mr. Gunnarsen, here it is. You're seeing the whole thing."
I looked carefully around. It was all children-limping children, stumbling children, pale children, weary children. "But what am I seeing, exactly?" I asked.
"Why, the Children, Mr. Gunnarsen. The ones we liberated. The ones the Arcturans captured on Mars."
And then I connected. I remembered about the capture of the colony on Mars.
Interstellar war is waged at the pace of a snail's crawl, because it takes so long to go from star to star. The main battles of our war with Arcturus had been fought no farther from Earth than the surface of Mars, and the fleet engagement around Orbit Saturn. Still, it had taken eleven years, first to last, from the surprise attack on the Martian colony to the armistice signed in Washington.
I remembered seeing a reconstructed tape of that Martian surprise attack. It was a summer's day-hot-at full noon, ice melted into water. The place was the colony around the Southern Springs. Out of the small descending sun a ship appeared.
It was a rocket. It was brilliant gold metal, and it came down with a halo of gold radiation around its splayed front, like the fleshy protuberance of a star-nosed mole. It landed with an electrical crackle on the fine-grained orange sand, and out of it came the Arcturans.
Of course, no one had known they were Arcturans then. They had swung around the sun in a long anecliptic orbit, watching and studying, and they had selected the small Martian outpost as the place to strike. In Mars gravity they were bipeds-two of their ropy limbs were enough to lift them off the ground-man tall, in golden pressure suits. The colonists came running out to meet them-and were killed. All of them. All of the adults.
The children, however, had not been killed, not that quickly or that easily, at least. Some had not been killed at all, and some of those were here in Donnegan General Hospital.
But not all.
Comprehension beginning to emerge in my small mind, I said, "Then these are the survivors."
Candace, standing very close to me, said "Most of them, Gunner. The ones that aren't well enough to be sent back into normal life."
"And the others?"
"Well, they mostly don't have families-having been killed, you see. So they've been adopted out into foster homes here in Belport. A hundred and eight of them-isn't that right, Tom? And now maybe you get some idea of what you're up against."
There were something like a hundred of the Children in that wing, and I didn't see all of them. Some of them were not to be seen.
Whitling just told me about but couldn't show me the blood temperature room, where the very young and very bad cases lived. They had a gnotobiotic atmosphere, a little rich in oxygen, a little more humid than the ambient air, plus pressure to help their weak metabolism keep oxygen spread in their parts. On their right, a little farther along, were the small individual rooms belonging to the worst cases of all. The contagious. The incurables. The unfortunates whose very appearance was bad for the others. Whitling was good enough to open polarizing shutters and let me look in on some of those where they lay (or writhed or stood like sticks) in permanent solitary. One of the Arcturan efforts had been transplantation, and the project seemed to have been directed by a whimsical person. The youngest was about three; the oldest in the late teens.
They were a disturbing lot, and if I have glossed lightly over what I felt, it is because what I felt is all too obvious.
Kids in trouble! Of course, those who had been put back into population weren't put back shocking as these. But they would pull at the heartstrings-they even pulled at mine-and every time a foster parent or a foster parent's neighbor or a casual passer-by on the street felt that heartstring tug, he would feel, too, a single thought: The Arcturans did this.
For after killing the potentially dangerous adults, they had caged the tractable small ones as valuable research specimens.
And I had hoped to counteract this with five hundred Arcturan pets!
Whitling had been all this time taking me around the wing, and I could hear in his voice the sound of what I was up against, because he loved and pitied those kids. "Hi, Terry," he said on the sun deck, bending over a bed and patting its occupant on his snow-white hair. Terry smiled up at him. "Can't hear us, of course," said Whitling. "We grafted in new auditory nerves four weeks ago-I did it myself- but they're not surviving. Third try, too. And, of course, each attempt is a worse risk than the one before: antibodies."
I said, "He doesn't look more than five years old." Whitling nodded. "But the attack on the colony was-"
"Oh, I see what you mean," said Whitling. "The Arcturans were, of course, interested in reproduction too. Ellen-she left us a couple of weeks ago-was only thirteen, but she'd had six children. Now this is Nancy."
Nancy was perhaps twelve, but her gait and arm coordination were those of a toddler. She came stumbling in after a ball, stopped, and regarded me with dislike and suspicion. "Nancy's one of our cures," Whitling said proudly. He followed my eyes. "Oh, nothing wrong there," he said. "Mars-bred. She hasn't adjusted to Earth gravity, is all; she isn't slow-the ball's bouncing too fast. Here's Sam."
Sam was a near-teenager, giggling from his bed as he tried what was obviously the extremely wearing exercise of lifting his head off the mattress. A candy-striped practical nurse was counting time for him as he touched chin to chest, one and two, one and two. He did it five times, then slumped back, grinning. "Sam's central nervous system was almost gone," Whitling said fondly. "But we're making progress. Nervous tissue regeneration, though, is awfully-" I wasn't listening; I was looking at Sam's grin, which showed black and broken teeth. "Diet deficiency," said Whitling, following my look again.
"All right," I said, "I've seen enough; now I want to get out of here before they have me changing diapers. I thank you, Commander Whiting. I think I thank you. Which way is out?"
IV
I didn't want to go back to Haber's office. I was afraid of what the conversation might be like. But I had to get a fill-in on what had been happening with our work, and I had to eat.