“But Kua, I’m human! I feel human. I don’t want to leave. This is where I belong!”
“You say that because you grew up among normal people. Kern, you’ve got to face it. The only place for any of us is—somewhere away.”
“I know.” He grinned wryly. “But I don’t have to like it. Well—we’d better go back. They’ll have the ultimatum by now, I suppose. May as well hear it. I know what the answer is. Don’t you?”
She nodded, watching his involuntary glance around the empty blue sky, the warm October hills. A world for humans. But for humans alone. …
Back in the Brewster plastic asylum, the inmates had assembled.
“There isn’t much time,” old Mr. Brewster said. “They’re on their way here now, to take you all back for euthanasia.”
Sam Brewster laughed harshly.
“We could show ’em a few tricks.”
“No. You can’t fight the whole world. You could kill many of them, but it wouldn’t do any good. Bruce’s machine is the only hope for you all.” His voice broke a little. “It’s going to be a lonely world for me, children, after you’ve gone.”
They looked at him uncomfortably, this strange, unrelated family of freak mutations, scarcely more than the children he had called them, but matured beyond their years by their strange rearing.
“There are worlds beyond counting, as you know,” Bruce said precisely. “Infinite numbers—worlds where we might not be freaks at all. Somewhere among them there must be places where each of our mutations is a norm. I’ve set the machine to the aggregate pattern of us all and it’ll find our equivalents—something to suit one of us at least. And the others can go on looking. I can build the machine in duplicate on any world, anywhere, where I can live at all.” He smiled, and his strange light eyes glowed.
It was curious, Kern thought, how frequently in mutations the eyes were the giveaway. Kua, of course. And Sam Brewster with his terrible veiled glance protected by its secondary lid which drew back only in anger. And Bruce Hallam, whose strangeness was not visible but existed only in the amazing intricacies of his brain, looked upon the alien world with eyes that mirrored the mysteries behind them.
Bruce knew machinery—call it machinery for lack of a more comprehensive word—with a knowledge that was beyond learning. He could produce miracles with any set of devices his fingers could contrive. He seemed to sense by sheer instinct the courses of infinite power, and harness them with the simplest ease, the simplest mechanics.
There was a steel cubicle in the corner of the room with a round steel door which had taken Bruce a week to set up. Over it a panel burned with changing light, flickering through the spectrum and halting now and then upon clear red. When it was red, then the—the world—upon which the steel door opened was a world suitable for the little family of mutations to enter. The red light meant it could support human life, that it paralleled roughly the world they already knew, and that something in its essential pattern duplicated the pattern of at least one of the mutant group.
Kern was dizzy when he thought of the sweep of universes past that door, world whirling upon world where no human life could dwell, worlds of gas and flame, worlds of ice and rock. And, one in a countless number, a world of sun and water like their own. …
It was incredible. But so were the wings at his own back, so was Kua’s cyclopean eye, and Sam Brewster’s veiled gaze, and so was the brain in Bruce Hallam’s skull, which had built a bridge for them all.
He glanced around the group. Sitting back against the wall, in shadow, Byrna, the last of the mutant family, lifted her gray gaze to his. Compassion touched him as always when he met her eyes.
Byrna was physically the most abnormal of them all, in her sheer smallness. She came scarcely to Kern’s elbow when she was standing. She was proportioned perfectly in the scale of her size, delicate, fragile as something of glass. But she was not beautiful to look at. There was a wrongness about her features that made them pathetically ugly, and the sadness in her gray eyes seemed to mirror the sadness of all misfit things.
Byrna’s voice had magic in it, and so did her brain. Wisdom came as simply to her as knowledge came to Bruce Hallam, but she had infinitely more warmth than he. Bruce, Kern sometimes thought, would dismember a human as dispassionately as he would cut wire in two if he needed the material for an experiment. Bruce looked the most normal of them all, but he would not have passed the questioning of the most superficial mental examination.
Now his voice was impatient. “What are we waiting for? Everything’s ready.”
“Yes, you must go quickly,” the old man said. “Look—the light’s coming toward red now, isn’t it?”
The panel above the steel door was orange. As they watched it shifted and grew ruddier. Bruce went silently forward and laid his hand on the lever that opened the panel. When the light was pure red he pushed the steel bar down.
In half-darkness beyond the opening a gust of luminous atoms blew across a craggy horizon. Against it there was a suggestion of towers and arches and columns, and lights that might have been aircraft swung in steady orbits above.
No one spoke. After a moment Bruce closed the door again, grimacing. The light above it hovered toward a reddish purple and then turned blue.
“Not that world,” Bruce said. “We’ll try again.”
In the shadow Byrna murmured:
“It doesn’t matter—any world will be the same for us.” Her voice
