The Commonwealth as a whole detested the notion. Right from its conception, Huxley’s Haven became a near-pariah state. There were even serious calls for military/police style intervention made in the Senate, which contravened the organization’s constitution—the Commonwealth was set up originally to guarantee individual planet freedom within an overall legal framework. In the end, the Foundation was able to proceed because legally the planet was independent and free.
After several prominent and well-financed private court cases against the Foundation came to nothing, it was CST’s turn to face a barrage of media-supported pressure to close the gateway. Nigel Sheldon had to reluctantly argue the case for keeping it open: if they closed one gateway because of a cause activist campaign, that left all gateways vulnerable to people who disagreed with a planet’s culture, religion, or politics. The Hive stayed connected to the Commonwealth, though it never really contributed to the mainstream economic and financial structure. Quietly, and with considerable scientific flare, the Foundation got on with the job of building their unique society.
Some people never did accept the lost court cases or the Foundation’s “right” to pursue its goal. A greater human right took precedence, they argued. In their view Huxley’s Haven was a planet of genetically modified slaves who needed liberation.
If there was ever anybody to whom the term extreme liberals could be applied, it was Marcus and Rebecca Redhound. Born into the considerable wealth of Grand Earth Families, they were happy to contribute financially as well as actively to the cause. Along with a small, equally dedicated cabal, they planned a raid against the Hive, which they were convinced would be the grand event that would finally demonstrate to the rest of the Commonwealth that the Foundation was wrong, not just in its politics but in its science as well.
After months of covert planning and preparation, nine of these urban rich-kid commandos broke into one of the Foundation’s birthing wards in the Hive’s capital, Fordsville. They managed to steal seven new birthed babies and get them to the CST planetary station before the alarm was raised. Three infants were traced immediately by the Intersolar Serious Crimes Directorate and returned to their creche on Huxley’s Haven. The publicity was everything the group could have wished for, though public sympathy didn’t entirely swing their way. Something about stealing babies just cut people cold.
Four of the cabal were arrested when the babies were traced. After that, the Serious Crimes Directorate mounted the largest manhunt the Commonwealth had ever seen to find the four missing babies, one male and three females. It took another fifteen months of painstaking detective work by ten Chief Investigators aided by the SI to locate the missing boy in a town on the then-frontier planet of Ferarra. Five months after that two more of the girls were recovered on EdenBurg. The last child and remaining two cabal members proved more elusive.
With the paranoia that only the truly committed can muster, Marcus and Rebecca had spent over two years fermenting elaborate preparations for the snatch, an activity they kept secret from the rest of their cabal. The first part of their cover was to have a child of their own, Coya, who would act as a sister to the Hive baby. She would set a normal behavioral example to the psychoneural profiled waif; and a young family with twins would be less likely to attract attention. It was a good plan. Marcus and Rebecca had bought a house on Marindra, out in a small agricultural town, where they established a market garden business. It was a pleasant place to live, with a good community spirit. The children fitted in well as they grew up. Paula’s half-Filipino features were slightly incongruous, given her parents and “twin” Coya were all of prominent eastern Mediterranean stock. But they explained it away as a genetic modification designed to bring out Rebecca’s distant Asian ancestry, honoring her deep ethnic origin. By then, the case of the last missing Hive baby had long faded from public attention.
As a child, Paula really wasn’t too different from her sister. They played together, ran their parents ragged, loved the puppy Marcus bought them, had a fondness for swimming, and did well at school. It was as she moved into her teens that Paula was noticeably more restrained than Coya; she did as her parents asked, didn’t argue with them, and steered clear of all the trouble that was to be found in their little rural community. Everyone commented on what a nice girl she was becoming, not like half of the teenagers in this town who were simply terrible and a sure sign of society’s imminent collapse. She regarded boys with the same contempt and fascination as her peers; started dating, suffered the heart-aching humiliation of being dumped, and promptly took it out on her next two boyfriends by chucking them. Found another boy she liked—and went steady for five months. In sports she was competent rather than outstanding. Academically she excelled at languages and history. As teachers remarked, she had superb recall and an obsession with tracing down the smallest facts connected to her subjects. Aptitude tests showed she would make a great psychologist.
Looking at their contented, normal, extra daughter on her sixteenth birthday, Marcus and Rebecca knew they had succeeded. They’d brought up a Hive child in a loving natural environment, and produced a perfectly happy, healthy human being. What could be done with one could be done to all. The Foundation’s hold over its oppressed population could be broken; their method of control was flawed. Decency and human dignity had triumphed in the end.
Two days later, on a splendid late-summer afternoon, they took Paula out into the garden and told her of her true heritage. They even sheepishly showed her the old news media recordings of the snatch and subsequent manhunt.
What the Foundation had never revealed was the nature of the psychoneural profiling given to the snatched babies. The others were all reasonably standard for Huxley’s Haven: public service workers, engineers, accountants, even an archivist. But Paula, as luck or fate would have it, was an exception even among her own kind. Crime on Huxley’s Haven was extremely rare, naturally so given its citizens were all designed to be content in their jobs and lives. But not even the Foundation claimed to make life perfect. All human civilizations needed a police force. On Huxley’s Haven it was a source of national pride that there was one law enforcement officer for every ten thousand people. Paula was destined to be one of them.
Two hours after their joyful confession, Marcus and Rebecca were in custody. It was Paula who turned them in. She had no choice; knowing what was right and what was wrong was the core of her identity, her very soul.
The last missing Hive child was the greatest media story to hit the unisphere for a decade, making Paula an instant celebrity. Young, beautiful, and frighteningly incorruptible, she was everything a sixteen-year-old should never be.
Thanks to Paula’s relentless testimony, Marcus and Rebecca were sentenced to thirty-two years’ life suspension each, losing double the time over which their crime was perpetrated. It was the kind of punishment normally reserved for murderers. Unisphere coverage of the trial allowed a quarter of the human race to watch in silent fascination as Coya broke down and screamed hysterically at the judge before begging her step-twin to withdraw the sentencing application. Paula’s only answer, a silent pitying glance at the sobbing girl, made that whole quarter of the human race shiver.
After the trial, Paula went back to Huxley’s Haven, the home she’d never known, to discover her real name and suffer embarrassing introductions to the other stolen children with whom she had nothing in common. She belonged there even less than on Marindra; a modern Commonwealth education put her completely outside the norm as far as Huxley’s Haven was concerned. They didn’t have advanced technology on the Hive; the new conformist society was structured so that people did all the work, not machines. With her exposure to domestic bots and the ultimate data access of the unisphere, Paula considered such rejection to be stupid and provincial. It was the one success Marcus and Rebecca had with shaping her thoughts, though by then their bodies were beyond knowing, safely comatose in the Justice Directorate’s hibernation wombs.