By now, of course, memory of life outside the Hive was a dim phantasm to most of the inmates, and the idea of living anywhere else would have appalled them. The robots did all the heavy labor, patrolled the streets in super-efficient anti-crime campaigns, and possessed enough knowledge—via the Brain—to make a lot of fact-learning superfluous. The one insuperable problem was population. Stanton knew that ten million was the ultimate amount the Brain-controlled Hive could care for with maximum efficiency. Yet the disease-controlled nature of the Hive made normal life-expectancy far higher than at any time in man's history. Something had to be done.
To this end, Stanton did not wish to consult the Brain. He knew too well its Gordian-knot methods of solving problems. It might simply make it law that no one be allowed to live beyond a certain age, and Stanton was—save for Bodger—the oldest person in the Hive. So he swallowed his natural distrust of the second-in-command, and asked his help in finding a means to control the situation.
There was, at that time, a central hospital in the Hive, located on the fiftieth and fifty-first levels. Bodger, not wishing to formulate a law that might be detrimental to any particular Kinsman's status in the Hive, decided that the best method of "unnatural selection" should be one involving an area of chance: Sick or injured people would be taken to new hospitals built outside the Hive (ostensibly to obviate the dangers of contagion). The radiation count was still deadly enough out there to destroy any such unfortunates for the next thirty years, but the Kinsmen need not be told this. It was cruel, but—until life outside the Hive was once again possible—it was the only way of preserving the lives of the ten million the Hive could accommodate.
"It's murderous," Bodger told Stanton, "and I hate being the man to set it up. But—I'm like the captain of a ship, having to destroy the lives of some in order to make rescue possible for the others. It must be done, and—though I abhor this cruel means—I can see no other way."
The measure was put into effect, and worked well for a span of three years. Then certain members of the populace began to question the non-return of hospitalized Kinsmen, and Stanton, after a hot argument with Bodger, put through his Readjustment Bill, proclaiming that any act of treason against the Hive would result in hospitalization for the agitator, in which psychotherapy might restore his sense of values. In short: Anyone who said a word against the hospitals would be sent there.
Open resistance ceased the same day the bill was passed.
It was shortly after this time that Bodger—in his nineties, actually, but possessing the health and appearance of a greying forty-year-old—fell in love with his personal secretary, Miss Patricia Arland, and was married to her in a private ceremony before President Stanton—Bodger did not like the Speaksters, which were, after all, only Stanton-via-machine, and had insisted on eliminating "the middle-robot"—and in a year's time she bore him a son, Lloyd Bodger, Junior, in Bodger's private Unit, since he stated (solely for the Kinsmen's benefit) that the child had arrived unexpectedly, and his wife had been unable to make the trip to the outlying maternity wing of the exterior hospitals.
For obvious reasons, it had been impossible to have a maternity hospital in which all the patients perished; the "wing" of the main hospital was, in actuality, the only genuinely functioning part of that structure, and was sealed off against the still-rampant radiation. (The entire staff there was robotic, of course.) Bodger however, did not trust Stanton to the extent of leaving his wife and forthcoming child in the hands of Stanton's metallic minions, hence his decision to have his wife bear their first-born child at home, a decision that—due to lack of proper medical equipment in the Unit—cost her her life. Bodger, not quite irrationally, blamed Stanton for the loss of his wife, and their relationship thenceforth—never on a good basis—sundered abruptly into a strictly-business proposition.
The heart had gone out of Bodger, however, with the death of his wife, and Stanton found he could allow the old man much more latitude than he'd have formerly dared, even to the extent of allowing him the newly created job of Secondary Speakster, to take the more humdrum phases of that task out of Stanton's hands.