But the day will come when there are others like me. And there may be even now.
For you can’t tell a mutant by the way he combs his hair, nor the way he walks or talks. He sprouts no horns and he grows no tail and there’s no mark upon his forehead.
But when you spot one, you must watch him carefully. You must spy against him and set double-checks about him. And you must find a place to put him where you’ll be safe from anything he does … but you must not let him know. You must try him and sentence him and send him into exile without his ever knowing it.
Like, said West, you tried to do with me.
But, said West, talking to the Earth, I didn’t like your exile, so I chose one of my own. Because I knew, you see. I knew when you began to watch me and about the double-checks and the conferences and the plan of action and there were times when I could hardly keep from laughing in your face.
He stood for a long moment, staring into space, out where the Earth swam somewhere in darkness around the starlike Sun.
Bitter? he asked himself. And answered: No, not bitter. Not exactly bitter.
For you must understand, he said, still talking to the Earth, that a man is human first and mutant after that. He is not a monster simply because he is a mutant … he is just a little different. He is human in every way that you are human and it may be that he is human in more ways than you are. For the human race as it stands today is the history of long mutancy … of men who were a little different, who thought a little clearer, who felt a deeper compassion, who held an attribute that was more human than the rest of their fellow men. And they passed that clearer thinking and that deeper compassion on to sons and daughters and the sons and daughters passed it on to some—not all—but some of their sons and daughters. Thus the race grew up from savagery, thus the human concept grew.
Perhaps, he thought, my father was a mutant, a mutant that no one suspected. Or it may have been my mother. And neither of them would have been suspected. For my father was a farmer and if his mutancy had made the crops grow a little better through his better understanding of the soil or through a deeper feeling for the art of growing things, who would there be to know that he was a mutant? He would simply have been a better farmer than his neighbors. And if at night, when he read the well-worn books that stood on the shelf in the dining room, he understood those books and the things they meant to say better than most other men, who was there to know?
But I, he said, I was noticed. That is the crime of mutancy, to be noticed. Like the Spartan boy whose crime of stealing a fox was no crime at all, but whose cries when the fox ripped out his guts were a crime indeed.
I rose too fast, he thought. I cut through too much red tape. I understood too well. And in governmental office you can not rise too fast nor cut red tape nor understand too well. You must be as mediocre as your fellow officeholders. You cannot point to a blueprint of a rocket motor and say, “There is the trouble,” when men who are better trained than you cannot see the trouble. And you cannot devise a system of production that will turn out two rocket motors for the price of one in half the time. For that is not only being too efficient; it’s downright blasphemy.
But most of all you cannot stand up in open meeting of government policy makers and point out that mutancy is no crime in itself … that it only is a crime when it is wrongly used. Nor say that the world would be better off if it used its mutants instead of being frightened of them.
Of course, if one knew one was a mutant, one would never say a thing like that. And a mutant, knowing himself a mutant, never would point out a thing that was wrong with a rocket engine. For a mutant has to keep his mouth shut, has to act the mediocre man and arrive at the ends he wishes by complex indirection.
If I had only known, thought West. If I had only known in time. I could have fooled them, as I hope many others even now are fooling them.
But now he knew it was too late, too late to turn back to the life that he had rejected, to go back and accept the dead-end trap that had been fashioned for him … a trap that would catch and hold him, where he would be safe. And where the human race would be safe from him.
West turned around and found the path that led up the rocky decline toward the laboratory.
A hulking figure stepped out of the shadows and challenged him.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
West halted. “Just got in,” he said. “Looking for a friend of mine. By the name of Nevin.”
Inside the pocket of his suit, he felt Annabelle stirring restlessly. Probably she was getting cold.
“Nevin?” asked the man, a note of alarm chilling his voice. “What do you want of Nevin?”
“He’s got a painting,” West declared.
The man’s voice turned silky and dangerous. “How much do you know about Nevin and his painting?”
“Not much,” said West. “That’s why I’m here. Wanted to talk with him about it.”
Annabelle turned a somersault inside West’s zippered pocket. The man’s eyes caught the movement.
“What you got in there?” he demanded, suspiciously.
“Annabelle,” said West. “She’s—well, she’s something like a skinned rat, partly, with a face that’s almost human, except it’s practically all
