A good many science fiction writers seem determined to depict children aslittle monsters. Not all children perhaps, and not with completely mercilessregularity. But often enough to make us shudder. Only Richard Lowe remainsindependent. The youngster of this story isn't a child monster at all. He'sjust—a "destructor." And that in itself is somehow unimaginably terrifying!
The two professors couldn't agree on the fundamentals ofchild behavior. But that was before they met little Herbux!
The University sprawled casually,unashamed of its disorderedranks, over a hundred thousandacres of grassy, rolling countryside.It was the year A.D. 3896, andthe vast assemblage of schools andcolleges and laboratories had beengrowing on this site for more thantwo thousand years.
It had survived political and industrialrevolutions, local insurrections,global, inter-terrestrial andnuclear wars, and it had becomethe acknowledged center of learningfor the entire known universe.
No subject was too small toescape attention at the University.None was too large to be attackedby the fearless, probing fingers ofcuriosity, or to in any way over-awestudents and teachers in this greatinstitution of learning.
No book was ever closed in theUniversity and no clue, howevertiny, was discarded as useless in theceaseless search for knowledgewhich was the University's primeand overriding goal.
For no matter how fast and farthe spaceships might fly, or whatstrange creatures might be broughtback across the great curve of theuniverse or how deeply the past wasresurrected or the future probed, ofone thing only was the Universityquite sure—man did not knowenough.
All manner of schools had comeinto being at the University, andoften they functioned in pairs, onedevoted to proving a proposition,and the other to disproving it. Andamong these pairs of schools two,in particular, seemed to exist on amost tenuous basis. Their avowedmission was to settle the age-oldargument concerning the relativeinfluences of heredity and environment.
One, headed by Professor Miltcheckvon Possenfeller, workedtirelessly to prove that there wasno such determining factor asheredity, and that environmentalone was the governing influencein human behavior.
The other, under the directionof Dr. Arthur D. Smithlawn, wasdedicated to the task of provingthat environment meant nothing,and that only heredity was important.
Success, in short, could onlycome to those who were born withthe genes of success in their bodies,and failure was as preordained forthe rest as was ultimate death forall.
Over a period of more than twohundred years the School of Environmenthad been taking babiesfrom among the thousands ofhomeless waifs gathered inthroughout the universe, and raisingthem carefully in a closelysupervised, cultural atmosphere.
The School of Heredity, on theother hand, was more select. Itspupils came only from familieswhose genealogy could be tracedback for at least a thousand years.Freedom of choice and expressionwas the rule here, since the schoolwas attempting to prove that achild's inherited tendencies willsend it inevitably along a predeterminedpath, completely uninfluencedby outside help or hindrance.
In two centuries neither schoolhad been able to develop an overpoweringcase in support of itsown theory. Hence they boththrived, and cheerfully ignored thediscrepancies which existed in thecase records of individuals whohad not turned out according tothe bo