When I Grow Up

A good many science fiction writers seem determined to depict children as little monsters. Not all children perhaps, and not with completely merciless regularity. But often enough to make us shudder. Only Richard Lowe remains independent. The youngster of this story isn't a child monster at all. He's just—a destructor. And that in itself is somehow unimaginably terrifying!
The two professors couldn't agree on the fundamentals of child behavior. But that was before they met little Herbux!
The University sprawled casually, unashamed of its disordered ranks, over a hundred thousand acres of grassy, rolling countryside. It was the year A.D. 3896, and the vast assemblage of schools and colleges and laboratories had been growing on this site for more than two thousand years.
It had survived political and industrial revolutions, local insurrections, global, inter-terrestrial and nuclear wars, and it had become the acknowledged center of learning for the entire known universe.
No subject was too small to escape attention at the University. None was too large to be attacked by the fearless, probing fingers of curiosity, or to in any way over-awe students and teachers in this great institution of learning.
No book was ever closed in the University and no clue, however tiny, was discarded as useless in the ceaseless search for knowledge which was the University's prime and overriding goal.
For no matter how fast and far the spaceships might fly, or what strange creatures might be brought back across the great curve of the universe or how deeply the past was resurrected or the future probed, of one thing only was the University quite sure— man did not know enough .
All manner of schools had come into being at the University, and often they functioned in pairs, one devoted to proving a proposition, and the other to disproving it. And among these pairs of schools two, in particular, seemed to exist on a most tenuous basis. Their avowed mission was to settle the age-old argument concerning the relative influences of heredity and environment.