Soon afterward, all the children started "school," but Adam excelled. At seven, he knew all about landing the ship. He played that he was already eighteen and the ship was no longer on automatic.
He was in everything and everywhere. His tow hair poked above the control board. His busy fingers hand-picked an experimental meal from the farmroom. When he learned how to turn the artificial gravity switch off in the recroom, his child legs floated haphazardly somewhere above his head. And in the sunroom, where heat-lamp walls were triggered by the degree of an occupant's tan, Adam's freckled face stared through the visiport, seeing in his mind's eye the New Earth he would one day conquer.
He lived fully, asking questions, accepting the answers, receiving instructions. Some of them he testily disobeyed, was punished compassionately, and learned respect and a kind of love for the mecs.
He played the games of childhood, but he played them alone. Once he was gazing out a port, imaginatively sorting the stars of his universe into shapes of the animals in the ship's farm. Mecfather lit up at a nearby panel, glowing faintly red. Adam resisted an impulse to shiver—the panel always made him flinch when it glowed red. Red, he was being conditioned, was his conscience, brought out by Mecfather until he grew old enough to bring it out himself.
"Why aren't you playing with the other children?" Mecfather asked. "I've been watching you all day and you've avoided them on every occasion."
Though he feared him, Adam loved Mecfather as he had been taught to do and did not hesitate to confide. But how could he explain that the other children did not seem as real to him as the mecs?
"I don't know," Adam answered truthfully.
"They don't ignore you. They ask you to play, but you always go off by yourself. Don't you like them?"
"They're flat, Father. They're not deep—like you."