"It means," Calhoun told him, "that your brave new world rates as a slum. You've kept kids quiet with psych circuits, and they haven't eaten properly and haven't exercised at all. They're weak from malnutrition and feeble from not doing their own playing. They're like slum children used to be in past ages. Here on Canis you're about ready to wipe yourselves out. You may have done it."
"You're crazy!" snapped Walker. But he was upset.
"In the four shelters I visited," Calhoun said drearily, "I spotted four cases of early diphtheria, two of typhoid, three of scarlet fever and measles, and samples of nearly any other disease you care to name. The kids have been developing those diseases out of weakness and from the reservoir of infections we humans always carry with us. They'd reached the contagious stage before I saw them—but all the kids are kept so quiet that nobody noticed that they were sick. They've certainly spread to each other and their nurses, and therefore out into your general population, all the infections needed for a first-rate multiple epidemic. And you've no doctors, no antibiotics—not even injectors to administer shots with if you had them."
"You're crazy!" cried young Walker. "Crazy! Isn't this a Phaedra trick to make us give in?"
"Phaedra's trick," said Calhoun more drearily than before, "is an atom bomb they're going to drop into this landing-grid—I suspect quarantine or no quarantine—in just two days more. Considering the total situation, I don't think that matters."
VI.
"... The most difficult of enterprises is to secure the co-operation of others in enterprises those others did not think of first...."
Manual, Interstellar Medical Service. P. 189.
Calhoun worked all night, tending and inspecting the culture incubators which were part of the Med ship's technical equipment. In the children's shelters, he'd swabbed throats. In the ship, he'd diluted the swabbings and examined them microscopically. He'd been depressingly assured of his very worst fears as a medical man—all of which could have been worked out in detail from the psych circuit system of child care boastfully described by Fredericks. He could have written out his present results in advance from a glance at the child Jak shown him by the younger Walker's wife. But he hated to find that objective information agreed with what he would have predicted by theory.