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.
"Your husband," said Calhoun, carefully impassive, "had better try to gather in some of them. As I remember it, they're capable of a rather admirable romantic idea of duty—for a while. We're going to need some romanticists presently."
Elsa had faith in Calhoun now, because he seemed concerned about the children. She said unhappily:
"Do you really think the . . . old people will attack? I've grown older since I've been here. Those of us who came first are almost like the people on Phaedra—some ways. The younger people are inclined to be suspicious of us because we . . . try to guide them."
"If you're confiding that you think there may be two sides to this war," Calhoun told her, "you are quite right. But see what your husband can do about gathering some of the hunting-and-fishing members of the community. I've got to get back to my ship."
He got himself driven back to the landing grid. Walker did not drive him, but another of the now-suspect men of twenty-five or so, from the shelter village of the first-landed colonists. He was one of those who'd worked with Walker from the beginning and with him had been most embittered. Now he found himself almost a member of an older generation. He was still bitter against the people of Phaedra, but—
"This whole business is a mess," he said darkly as he drove through the nearly deserted city toward the landing grid. "We've got to figure out a way to organize things that'll be better than the old way. But no organization at all is no good, either! We've got some tough young characters who like it this way, but they've got to be tamed down."
Calhoun had his own unsettling suspicions. There have always been splendid ideas of social systems which will make earthly paradises for their inhabitants. Here, by happenchance, there had come to be a world inhabited only by the young. He tried to put aside, for the moment, what he was unhappily sure he'd find out back at the ship. He tried to think about this seemingly perfect opportunity for a new and better organization of human lives.
But he couldn't believe in it. Culture-instinct theory is pretty well worked out. The Med Service considered it proven that the basic pattern of human societies is instinctual rather than evolved by trial and error. The individual human being passes through a series of instinct-patterns which fit him at different times to perform different functions in a social organization which can vary but never change its kind. It has to make use of the successive functions its members are driven by instinct to perform. If it does not use its members, or give scope to their instincts, it cannot survive. The more lethal attempts at novel societies tried not only to make all their members alike, but tried to make them all alike at all ages. Which could not work.
Calhoun thought unhappily of the tests he meant to make in the Med Ship. As the ground-car swerved into the great open center of the grid, he said:
"My job is doing Med Service. I can't advise you how to plan a new world. If I could, I wouldn't. But whoever does have authority here had better think about some very immediate troubles."
"We'll fight if Phaedra attacks," said the driver darkly. "They'll never get to ground alive, and if they do—they'll wish they hadn't!"
"I wasn't thinking of Phaedra," said Calhoun.
The car stopped close by the Med Ship. He got out. There had been attempts to enter the ship in his absence. The gang which occupied the control building and in theory protected Canis III against attack from the sky had tried to satisfy their curiosity about the little ship. They'd even used torches on the metal. But they hadn't gotten in.
Calhoun did. Murgatroyd chattered shrilly when he was put down. He scampered relievedly about the cabin, plainly rejoicing at being once more in familiar surroundings. Calhoun paid no attention. He closed and dogged the air-lock door. He switched on the spacephone and said shortly:
"Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty calling Phaedrian fleet. Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty calling—"
The loud-speaker fairly deafened him as somebody yelled into another spacephone mike in the grid-control building.
"Hey! You in the ship! Stop that! No talking with the enemy!"
Calhoun turned down the incoming volume and said patiently:
"Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty calling fleet from Phaedra. Come in, fleet from Phaedra! Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty calling—"
There was a chorus of yelling from the nearby building. The motley, swaggering, self-appointed landing-grid guard had tried to break into the ship out of curiosity, but they were vastly indignant when Calhoun did something of which they disapproved. They made it impossible for him to have heard a reply from the space fleet presumably overhead. But after a moment someone in the control house evidently elbowed the others aside and shouted:
"You! Keep that up and we'll smash you! We've got the grid to do it with, too!"