_Clearly, re-educating Man's brain wouldn't
fit him for survival on the plague-ridden
surface. Re-educating his body was the answer;
but the process was so very long...._
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, February 1956.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The man in the white jacket stopped at the door marked "Re-Education
Project--Col. H. H. Mudgett, Commanding Officer" and waited while the
scanner looked him over. He had been through that door a thousand
times, but the scanner made as elaborate a job of it as if it had never
seen him before.
It always did, for there was always in fact a chance that it _had_
never seen him before, whatever the fallible human beings to whom it
reported might think. It went over him from grey, crew-cut poll to
reagent-proof shoes, checking his small wiry body and lean profile
against its stored silhouettes, tasting and smelling him as dubiously
as if he were an orange held in storage two days too long.
"Name?" it said at last.
"Carson, Samuel, 32-454-0698."
"Business?"
"Medical director, Re-Ed One."
While Carson waited, a distant, heavy concussion came rolling down
upon him through the mile of solid granite above his head. At the same
moment, the letters on the door--and everything else inside his cone
of vision--blurred distressingly, and a stab of pure pain went lancing
through his head. It was the supersonic component of the explosion, and
it was harmless--except that it always both hurt and scared him.
The light on the door-scanner, which had been glowing yellow up to
now, flicked back to red again and the machine began the whole routine
all over; the sound-bomb had reset it. Carson patiently endured its
inspection, gave his name, serial number and mission once more, and
this time got the green. He went in, unfolding as he walked the flimsy
square of cheap paper he had been carrying all along.