She was not human either.
“It’s no use worrying, Kern,” she said, smiling down at him. “It’ll work out all right. You’ll see.”
“All right!” Kern snorted scornfully. “You think so, do you?”
Kua glanced instinctively around the hillside, making sure they were alone. Then she put both hands to her face and slipped off the glasses and the dark band from her forehead. Kern, meeting the gaze of her bright blue eye, was conscious again of the little shock he always felt when he looked into her uncovered face.
For Kua was a cyclops. She had one eye centered in her forehead. And she was—when the mind could accept her as she was, not as she should be—a beautiful woman in spite of it. That blue brilliance in the dusky face had a depth and luster beyond the eyes of humans. Heavy lashes ringed it, and the gaze could sink fathom upon fathom in her eye and never plumb its depths.
Kua’s eye was a perfect lens. Whatever lens can do, her eye could do. No one could be sure just what miraculous mechanisms existed beyond the blue surface, but she could see to a distance almost beyond the range of the ordinary telescope and she could focus down upon the microscopic. And there may have been other things the single eye could do. One did not question one’s companions too closely in this house of the mutations.
“You’ve been with us two years, Kern,” she was saying now. “Only two years. You don’t know yet how strong we are, or how much we can accomplish among us. Bruce Hallam knows what he’s doing, Kern. He never works on theories. Or if he does, the theories become truth. He has a mind like that. You don’t know us, Kern!”
“You can’t fight a whole world.”
“No. But we can leave it.” She smiled, and he knew she saw nothing of the golden morning all around them. She knew nothing, really, of the cities that dotted the world of , or the lives that were so irrevocably alien to her. They should have been alien to Kern too, but not until he was eighteen had the wings begun to grow upon his shoulders.
“I don’t know, Kua,” he said. “I’m not sure I want to. I had a father and a mother—brothers—friends.”
“Your parents are your greatest enemies,” she told him flatly. “They gave you life.”
He looked away from the penetrating stare of that great blue single eye and past her at the big plastic house. That had been asylum, after the massacre of —asylum against the hordes bent on extirpating the freakish monsters created by atomic radiation. He could not remember, of course, but he had read about it, never guessing then that such a thing would ever apply to him. The old man had told him the story.
First had come the atomic war, brief, terrible, letting loose nameless radiations upon the world. And then had followed the wave upon wave of freak births among those exposed to it. Genes and chromosomes altered beyond comprehension. Monstrous things were born of human parents.
One in ten, perhaps, had been a successful mutation. And even those were dangerous to Homo sapiens.
Evolution is like a roulette wheel. The conditions of the earth favor certain types of mutation capable of survival. But atomic energies had upset the balance, and mutations spawned in sheer madness began to spread. Not many, of course. Not many were viable. But two-headed things were born—and lived—along with geniuses and madmen. World Council had studied the biological and social problem for a long time before it recommended euthanasia. Man’s evolution had been planned and charted. It must not be allowed to swerve from the track, or chaos would be let loose.
Geniuses, mutant humans with abnormally high I.Q.’s, were allowed to survive. Of the others, none lived after they had been detected. Sometimes they were difficult to detect. By only the true-line mutations, faithful to the human biological norm, were alive—with certain exceptions.
Such as the old man’s son, Sam Brewster. He was a freak, with a certain—talent. A superhuman talent. The old man had disobeyed the Government law, for he had not sent the infant to the labs for checking and testing—and annihilation. Instead, he had built this great house, and the boy had never gone far beyond its grounds.
Gradually then, partly to provide the youth with companionship, partly out of compassion, the father had begun to gather others together. Secretly, a mutant infant here, a mutant child there, he brought them in, until he had a family of freaks in the big plastic house. He had not taken them haphazardly. Some would not have been safe to live with. Some were better dead from the start. But those with something to offer beyond their freakishness, he found and sheltered.
It was the bringing in of Kern that gave the secret away. The boy had gone too long among ordinary humans, while his wings grew. He was eighteen, and his pinions had a six-foot spread, when old Mr. Brewster found him. His family had tried to keep him hidden, but the news was leaking out already when he left for the Brewster asylum, and in the years since it had spread until the authorities at last issued their ultimatum.
“It was my fault,” Kern said bitterly. “If it hadn’t been for me, you’d never have been molested.”
“No.” Kua’s deep, luminous eye fixed
