But that was sixteen or more years ago, and his memories of that time were dim by now, blurted in a tidal wave of savage, resistless events. The brief, the incredible nightmare of a war that wiped out every important city in the world in a couple of months—its protracted aftermath of disease, starvation, battle, work, woe, and the twisting of human destiny—it covered those earlier experiences, distorted them like rocks seen through a flowing stream. Now the campus stood in ruinous desolation, cattle staked out in the long grass, crumbling empty buildings staring with blind eyes at the shards of civilization.
After the cities went, and the deliberately spread diseases and blights shattered the world’s culture into fratricidal savages fighting for the scraps, there was no more need of professors but a desperate shortage of mechanics and technicians. Southvale, by-passed by war, a college town in the agricultural Midwest, drew into itself a tight communistic dictatorship defending what it had with blood and death. It was cruel, that no-admission policy. There had been open battles with wandering starvelings. But the plagues were kept out, and they had saved enough food for most of them to survive even that first terrible winter after the war-strewn blights and insects had devoured the crops. But farm machinery had to be kept going. It had to be converted to horse, ox, and human power when gasoline gave out. So Wayne was assigned to the machine shop and, somewhat to his own surprise, turned out to be an excellent technician. His talents for robbing now useless tractors and automobiles in search of spare parts for the literally priceless food machines got his nickname changed to Cannibal, and he rose to general superintendent.
That was a long time ago, and conditions had improved since. The dictatorship was relaxed now, but Southvale still didn’t need professors, and it had enough elementary teachers for its waning child population. So Wayne was still machine shop boss. In spite of which, he was only a very tired man in patched and greasy overalls, going home to supper, and his thoughts darkened as he saw his child.
Alaric Wayne crossed the ruinous bridge a few yards upriver and joined his father. They were an odd contrast, the man tall and stooped with grayed hair and a long, lined face; the boy small for his fourteen years, lean and ragged, his frail-looking body too short for his long legs, his head too big for both. Under ruffled brown hair his face was thin, almost intense in its straight-lined, delicately cut pensiveness, but his huge light-blue eyes were vacant and unfocused.
«Where’ve you been all day, son?» asked Wayne. He didn’t really expect an answer, and got none. Alaric rarely spoke, didn’t even seem to hear most questions. He was looking blankly ahead now, like a blind creature, but for all his gawky appearance moved with a certain grace.
Wayne’s glance held only pity, his mind only an infinite weariness. And this is the future. The war, loading air and earth with radioactive colloids, dust, which won’t burn out for a century. Not enough radioactivity to be lethal to any but highly susceptible individuals—but enough to saturate our organisms and environment, enough to start an explosion of mutations in every living creature. This was man’s decision, to sell his birthright, his racial existence, for the sovereign prerogatives of nations existing today only in name and memory. And what will come of it, nobody can know.
They walked up a hill and onto the street. Grass had grown between paving blocks, and tumbledown houses stood vacantly in weed-covered lots. A little farther on, though, they came into the district still inhabited. The population had fallen to about half the prewar, through privation and battle as well as causes which had once been more usual. At first glance, Southvale had a human, almost medieval look. A horse-drawn wagon creaked by. Folk went down toward the market place in rude homespun clothes, carrying torches and clumsy lanterns. Candlelight shone warmly through the windows of tenanted houses.
Then one saw the dogs and horses and cattle more closely—and the children. And knew what an irrevocable step had been taken, knew that man would, in a racial sense, no longer be human.
A small pack of grimy urchins raced by, normal by the old standards, normal too in their shouting spite: «Mutie! Mutie! Yaaah, mutant!» Alaric did not seem to notice them, but his dog bristled and growled. In the dusk the animal’s high round head, hardly canine, seemed demoniac, and his eyes gleamed red.
Then another band of children went by, as dirty and tattered as the first, but—not human. Mutant. No two alike. A muzzled beast face. An extra finger or more, or a deficiency. Feet like toeless, horny-skinned hoofs. Twisted skeletons, grotesque limping gait. Pattering dwarfs. Acromegalic giants, seven feet tall at twelve years of age. A bearded six-year-old. Things even worse—
Not all were obviously deformed. Most mutations were, of course, unfavorable, but none in that group were cripplingly handicapped. Several looked entirely normal, and their internal differences had been discovered more or less accidentally. Probably many of the «human» children had some such variation, unsuspected, or a latent mutation that would show up later. Nor were all the deviations deformities. Extremely long legs or an abnormally high metabolism, for instance, had advantages as well as disadvantages.
Those were the two kinds of children in Southvale and, by report, the world. A third pitiful group hardly counted, that of hopelessly crippled mutants, born with some handicap of mind or body which usually killed them in a few years.
At first, the tide of abnormal births following the war had brought only horror and despair. Infanticide had run rampant, but today, there were asylums for unwanted children. People knew their child had about three chances in four of being mutant to a greater or lesser degree—but, after all, there could be a human, if not this time then next—or even a genuinely favorable mutation.
But Wayne had not seen or heard of any such, and doubted that he ever would. There were so many ways of not doing something, and even an unquestionably good characteristic seemed to involve some loss elsewhere. Like the Martin kid, with his eagle-keen eyes and total deafness.
He waved to that boy, running along with the mutant band, and got an answer. The rest ignored him. Mutants were shy of humans, often resentful and suspicious. And one could hardly blame them. This first generation had been hounded unmercifully by the normal children as it grew up, and had had to endure a lot of abuse and discrimination on the part of adults. No wonder they drew together, and said little to anyone except their fellows. Today, with most of their persecutors grown up, the mutants were a majority among the children, but they still had nothing to do with humans of their generation beyond a few fights. The older ones generally realized that they would inherit the earth, and were content to wait. Old age and death were their allies.
But Alaric— The old uncertain pain stirred in Wayne. He didn’t know. Certainly the boy was mutant; an X-ray, taken when the town machine had recently been put back into service, had shown his internal organs to be reversed in position. And apparently the mutation involved moronic traits, for he spoke so little and so poorly, had flunked out of elementary school, and seemed wholly remote from the world outside him. But—well, the kid read omnivorously, and at tremendous speed if he wasn’t just idly turning pages. He tinkered with apparatus Wayne had salvaged from the abandoned college labs, though there seemed to be no particular purpose to his actions. And every now and then he made some remark which might be queerly significant—unless, of course, that was only his parents’ wishful thinking.