To Pay the Piper

Clearly, re-educating Man's brain wouldn't fit him for survival on the plague-ridden surface. Re-educating his body was the answer; but the process was so very long....
The man in the white jacket stopped at the door marked Re-Education Project—Col. H. H. Mudgett, Commanding Officer and waited while the scanner looked him over. He had been through that door a thousand times, but the scanner made as elaborate a job of it as if it had never seen him before.
It always did, for there was always in fact a chance that it had never seen him before, whatever the fallible human beings to whom it reported might think. It went over him from grey, crew-cut poll to reagent-proof shoes, checking his small wiry body and lean profile against its stored silhouettes, tasting and smelling him as dubiously as if he were an orange held in storage two days too long.
Name? it said at last.
Carson, Samuel, 32-454-0698.
Business?
Medical director, Re-Ed One.
While Carson waited, a distant, heavy concussion came rolling down upon him through the mile of solid granite above his head. At the same moment, the letters on the door—and everything else inside his cone of vision—blurred distressingly, and a stab of pure pain went lancing through his head. It was the supersonic component of the explosion, and it was harmless—except that it always both hurt and scared him.
The light on the door-scanner, which had been glowing yellow up to now, flicked back to red again and the machine began the whole routine all over; the sound-bomb had reset it. Carson patiently endured its inspection, gave his name, serial number and mission once more, and this time got the green. He went in, unfolding as he walked the flimsy square of cheap paper he had been carrying all along.
Mudgett looked up from his desk and said at once: What now?
The physician tossed the square of paper down under Mudgett's eyes. Summary of the press reaction to Hamelin's speech last night, he said. The total effect is going against us, Colonel. Unless we can change Hamelin's mind, this outcry to re-educate civilians ahead of soldiers is going to lose the war for us. The urge to live on the surface again has been mounting for ten years; now it's got a target to focus on. Us.