Mutants Read online

  “Seems to me—”

  “I’ll put money on it. Ten bucks says it was a decision in fifteen, Mac.”

  Sound of confident chuckles. “I wouldn’t want to take your money so easy, pal. Everyone knows it was a knockout in one.”

  “Ten bucks, I said.”

  Niles turned to see what was happening. Two of the truck drivers, burly men in dark pea jackets, stood nose to nose. Automatically the thought came: Louis knocked Max Schmeling out in the first round at Yankee Stadium, New York, June 22, 1938. Niles had never been much of a sports fan, and particularly disliked boxing—but he had once glanced at an almanac page cataloguing Joe Louis’ title fights, and the data had, of course, remained.

  He watched detachedly as the bigger of the two truck drivers angrily slapped a ten-dollar bill down on the bar; the other matched it. Then the first glanced up at the barkeep and said, “Okay, Bud. You’re a shrewd guy. Who’s right about the second Louis-Schmeling fight?”

  The barkeep was a blank-faced cipher of a man, middle-aged, balding, with mild, empty eyes. He chewed at his lip a moment, shrugged, fidgeted, finally said, “Kinda hard for me to remember. That musta been twenty-five years ago.”

  Twenty, Niles thought.

  “Lessee now,” the bartender went on. “Seems to me I remember—yeah, sure. It went the full fifteen, and the judges gave it to Louis. I seem to remember a big stink being made over it; the papers said Joe should’ve killed him a lot faster’n that.”

  A triumphant grin appeared on the bigger driver’s face. He deftly pocketed both bills.

  The other man grimaced and howled, “Hey! You two fixed this thing up beforehand! I know damn well that Louis kayoed the German in one.”

  “You heard what the man said. The money’s mine.”

  “No,” Niles said suddenly, in a quiet voice that seemed to carry halfway across the bar. Keep your mouth shut, he told himself frantically. This is none of your business. Stay out of it!

  But it was too late.

  “What you say?” asked the one who’d dropped the tenspot.

  “I say you’re being rooked. Louis won the fight in one round, like you say. June 22, 1938, Yankee Stadium. The barkeep’s thinking of the Arturo-Godoy fight. That we it the full fifteen in 1940. February 9.”

  “There—told you! Gimme back cny money!”

  But the other driver ignored t” te cry and turned to face Niles. He was a cold-faced, heavyset man, and his fists were starting to clench. “Smart man, eh? Boxing expert?”

  “I just didn’t want to see an}:>ody get cheated,” Niles said stubbornly. He knew what was comii g now. The truck driver was weaving drunkenly toward him; the b<’ rkeep was yelling, the other patrons were backing away.

  The first punch caught Niles i i the ribs; he grunted and staggered back, only to be grabbed by the i iroat and slapped three times. Dimly he heard a voice saying, “Hey, 1 it go the guy! He didn’t mean anything! You want to kill him?”

  A volley of blows doubled h m up; a knuckle swelled his right eyelid, a fist crashed stunningly i lto his left shoulder. He spun, wobbled uncertainly, knowing that ] is mind would permanently record every moment of this agony.

  Through half-closed eyes he: aw them pulling the enraged driver off him; the man writhed in the £ tip of three others, aimed a last desperate kick at Niles’s stomach ai id grazed a rib, and finally was subdued.

  Niles stood alone in the mic:le of the floor, forcing himself to stay upright, trying to shake off the sudden pain that drilled through him in a dozen places.

  “You all right?” a solicitous voice asked. “Hell, those guys play rough. You oughtn’t mix up with hem.”

  “I’m all right,” Niles said ho lowly. “Just . • . let me … catch my breath.”

  “Here. Sit down. Have a drink It’ll fix you up.”

  “No,” Niles said. I can’t stay here, I have to get moving. “I’ll be all right,” he muttered unconv icingly. He picked up his suitcase, wrapped his coat tight about hi n, and left the bar, step by step by step.

  He got fifteen feet before the pain became unbearable. He crumpled suddenly and fell forward o l his face in the dark, feeling the cold iron-hard frozen turf against hit cheek, and struggled unsuccessfully to get up. He lay there, remembering all the various pains of his life, the beatings, the cruelty, and when the weight of memory became too much to bear he blanked out.

  The bed was warm, the sheets clean and fresh and soft. Niles woke slowly, feeling a temporary sensation of disorientation, and then his infallible memory supplied the data on his blackout in the snow and he realized he was in a hospital.

  He tried to open his eyes; one was swollen shut, but he managed to get the other’s lids apart. He was in a small hospital room—no shining metropolitan hospital pavilion, but a small county clinic with gingerbread molding on the walls and homey lace curtains, through which afternoon sunlight was entering.

  So he had been found and brought to a hospital. That was good. He could easily have died out there in the snow; but someone had stumbled over him and brought him in. That was a novelty, that someone had bothered to help him; the treatment he had received in the bar last night—was it last night?—was more typical of the world’s attitude toward him. In twenty-nine years he had somehow failed to learn adequate concealment, camouflage, and every day he suffered the consequences. It was hard for him to remember, he who remembered everything else, that the other people were not like him, and hated him for what he was.

  Gingerly he felt his side. There didn’t seem to be any broken ribs—just bruises. A day or so of rest and they would probably discharge him and let him move on.

  A cheerful voice said, “Oh, you’re awake, Mr. Niles. Feeling better now? I’ll brew some tea for you.”

  He looked up and felt a sudden sharp pang. She was a nurse—twenty-two, twenty-three, new at the job perhaps, with a flowing tumble of curling blond hair and wide, clear blue eyes. She was smiling, and it seemed to Niles it was not merely a professional smile. “I’m Miss Carroll, your day nurse. Everything okay?”

  “Fine,” Niles said hesitantly. “Where am I?”

  “Central County General Hospital. You were brought in late last night—apparently you’d been beaten up and left by the road out on Route 32. It’s a lucky thing Mark McKenzie was walking his dog, Mr. Niles.” She looked at him gravely. “You remember last night, don’t you? I mean—the shock—amnesia—”

  Niles chuckled. “That’s the last ailment in the world I’d be afraid of,” he said. “I’m Thomas Richa d Niles, and I remember pretty well what happened. How badly am I < amaged?”

  “Superficial bruises, mild shoe c and exposure, slight case of frostbite,” she summed up. “You’ll 1 *re. Dr. Hammond’ll give you a full checkup a little later, after you’v< eaten. Let me bring you some tea.”

  Niles watched the trim figure vj nish into the hallway.

  She was certainly an attracts t girl, he thought, fresh-eyed, alert .,, alive.

  Old cliche: patient falling for his nurse. But she’s not for me, I’m afraid.

  Abruptly the door opened anc the nurse reentered, bearing a little enameled tea tray. “You’ll never guess! I have a surprise for you, Mr. Niles. A visitor. Your mother.”

  “My moth—”

  “She saw the little notice abou you in the county paper. She’s waiting outside, and she told me she hasn’t seen you in seventeen years. Would you like me to send her in low?”

  “I guess so,” Niles said, in a dr r, feathery voice.

  A second time the nurse dei arted. My God, Niles thought! // I had known I was this close to hoi ie—

  I should have stayed out of Oh o altogether.

  The last person he wanted t j see was his mother. He began to tremble under the covers. The < Idest and most terrible of his memories came bursting up from the lark compartment of his mind where he thought he had imprisoned it forever. The sudden emergence from warmth into coolness, fron darkness to light, the jarring slap
of a heavy hand on his buttocks, he searing pain of knowing that his security was ended, that from n )w on he would be alive, and therefore miserable—

  The memory of the agonized:«irth-shriek sounded in his mind. He could never forget being born…ind his mother was, he thought, the one person of all he could ne^ sr forgive, since she had given him forth into the life he hated. He dr jaded the moment when—

  “Hello, Tom. It’s been a long 1 me.”

  Seventeen years had faded h sr, had carved lines in her face and made the cheeks more baggy, th j blue eyes less bright, the brown hair a mousy gray. She was smiling And to his own astonishment Niles was able to smile back.

  “Mother.”

  “I read about it in the paper. ] said a man of about thirty was found just outside town with papers bearing the name Thomas R. Niles, and he was taken to Central County General Hospital. So I came over, just to make sure—and it was you.”

  A lie drifted to the surface of his mind, but it was a kind lie, and he said it: “I was on my way back home to see you. Hitchhiking. But I ran into a little trouble en route.”

  “I’m glad you decided to come back, Tom. It’s been so lonely, ever since your father died, and of course Hank was married, and Marian too—it’s good to see you again. I thought I never would.”

  He lay back, perplexed, wondering why the upwelling flood of hatred did not come. He felt only warmth toward her. He was glad to see her.

  “How has it been—all these years, Tom? You haven’t had it easy, I can see. I see it all over your face,”

  “It hasn’t been easy,” he said. “You know why I ran away?”

  She nodded. “Because of the way you are. That thing about your mind—never forgetting. I knew. Your grandfather had it too, you know.”

  “My grandfather-but—”

  “You got it from him. I never did tell you, I guess. He didn’t get along too well with any of us. He left my mother when I was a little girl, and I never knew where he went. So I always knew you’d go away the way he did. Only you came back. Are you married?”

  He shook his head.

  “Time you got started, then, Tom. You’re near thirty.”

  The room door opened, and an efficient-looking doctor appeared. “Afraid your time’s up, Mrs. Niles. You’ll be able to see him again later. I have to check him over, now that he’s awake.”

  “Of course, Doctor.” She smiled at him, then at Niles. “I’ll see you later, Tom.”

  “Sure, Mother.”

  Niles lay back, frowning, as the doctor poked at him here and there. I didn’t hate her. A growing wonderment rose in him, and he realized he should have come home long ago. He had changed, inside, without even knowing it.

  Running away was the first stage in growing up, and a necessary one. But coming back came later, and that was the mark of maturity. He was back. And suddenly he saw he had been terribly foolish all his bitter adult life.

  He had a gift, a great gift, an awesome gift. It had been too big for him until now. Self-pitying, self- urmented, he had refused to allow for the shortcomings of the forge iuI people about him, and had paid the price of their hatred. But he ouldn’t keep running away forever. The time would have to come fo him to grow big enough to contain his gift, to learn to live with it i Jtead of moaning in dramatic self-inflicted anguish.

  And now was the time, It was 1« ng overdue.

  His grandfather had had the g it; they had never told him that. So it was genetically transmissible, le could marry, have children, and they, too, would never forget.

  It was his duty not to let his £:t die with him. Others of his kind, less sensitive, less thin-skinned, would come after, and they, too, would know how to recall a Be;thoven symphony or a decade-old wisp of conversation. For the I ist time since that fourth birthday party he felt a hesitant flicker of appiness. The days of running were ended; he was home again. If I k rn to live with others, maybe they’ll be able to live with me.

  He saw the things he yet neede: a wife, a home, children—

  “—a couple of days’ rest, plent of hot liquids, and you’ll be as good as new, Mr. Niles,” the doctor as saying. “Is there anything you’d like me to bring you now?”

  “Yes,” Niles said. “Just send 1 the nurse, will you? Miss Carroll, I mean.”

  The doctor grinned and left, files waited expectantly, exulting in his new self. He switched on I at Three of Die Meistersinger as a kind of jubilant backdrop music: his mind, and let the warmth sweep up over him. When she entered the room he was smiling and wondering how to begin saying what u wanted to say.

  Ginny Wrapped in the Sun

  R. A Lafferty

  R. A. Lafferty’s theories of evol ttion are very much his own, and this playful account of the coming:nd going of the mutation that produced Homo sapiens will probal y horrify those whose scientific beliefs tend toward the conservative But, like everything this madcap Oklahoman creates, his notions of how mankind evolved seem wildly and weirdly persuasive—at least or the duration of the story.

  “I’m going to read my paper to ght9 Dismas,” Dr. Minden said, “and they’ll hoot me out of the hall The thought of it almost makes the hair walk off my head.”

  “Oh, well, serves you right, ^linden. From the hints you’ve given me of it, you can’t expect accep mce for the paper; but the gentlemen aren’t so bad.”

  “Not bad? Hauser honks li! o a gander! That clattering laugh of Goldbeater! Snodden sniggers o loud that it echoes! Cooper’s boom is like barrels rolling downstaii 3, and your own—it’ll shrivel me, Dis-mas. Imagine the weirdest cac phony ever—oh no! I wasn’t thinking of one so weird as that!”

  Musical screaming! Glorio n gibbering with an undertone that could shatter rocks! Hooting c i a resonance plainly too deep for so small an instrument! Yowlin, hoodoo laughing, broken roaring, rhinoceros ranting! And the child came tumbling out of the tall rocks of Doolen’s Mountain, leaping down the flanks of the hill as though she were a waterfall. And both the men laughed.

  “Your Ginny is the weirdest cacophony I can imagine, Dismas,” Dr. Minden said. “It scares me, and I love it. Your daughter is the most remarkable creature in the world.

  “Talk to us, Ginny! I wish I could fix it that you would be four years old forever.”

  “Oh, I’ve fixed it myself, Dr. Minden,” Ginny sang as she came to them with a movement that had something of the breathless grace of a gazelle and something of the scuttering of a little wild pig. “I use a trick like the hoodoo woman did. She ate water-puppy eggs. She never got any older, you know.”

  “What happened to her, Gin?” Dr. Minden asked Ginny Dismas.

  “Oh, after a while she got gray-headed and wrinkled. And after another while her teeth and hair fell out, and then she died. But she never did get any older. She had everybody fooled. I got everybody fooled too.”

  “I know that you have, Ginny, in very many ways. Well, have you eaten water-puppy eggs to get no older?”

  “No. I can’t find out where they lay them, Dr. Minden. I’ve got my own trick that’s even better/’

  “Do you know, Ginny, that when you really cut loose you are the loudest girl in the world?”

  “I know it. I won it yesterday. Susanna Shonk said that she was the loudest. We hollered for an hour. Susanna’s home with a sore throat today, but there isn’t anything the matter with me. Hey, has that house ever been there before?”

  “That house? But it’s our own house, Ginny,” her father, Dr. Dismas, said softly. “You’ve lived in it all your life. You’re in and out of it a thousand times a day.”

  “Funny I never saw it before,” Ginny said. “I better go see what it looks like on the inside.” And Ginny hurtled into the house that she was in and out of a thousand times a day.

  “I’ll tell you a secret, Dismas,” Dr. Minden said. “Your small daughter Ginny is not really beautiful.”

  “Everybody thinks that she is, Minden.”

  “I know. They all believe her the most b
eautiful child in the world. So did I till a moment ago. So will I again in another minute when I see her come out of the house. But her contemporary, my smaU son Krios, told me how to look at ier; and I do so. For an instant, out of her incessant movement, I forced myself to see her as stopped cold, at rest. She is grotesque, Dismas. If ever she pauses, she is grotesque.”

  “No, she is like ultimate matter. Existence and motion are the same thing for her, and there cannol be the one without the other. But I’ve never seen her stopped, even in sleep. She’s the liveliest sleeper anyone ever watched—a laughing and singing sleeper. Her mother calls her our beautiful goblin.”

  “Exactly, she’s a goblin, a monkey, a kobold. She’s even grown a little pot like one of them. Dismas, she has a monkey face and bandy legs and a goblin’s own pot.”

  “No, she hasn’t! There she jjoes! Out of the house and up into the rocks again, and she’s so beautiful that it shakes me. Four years old—and she can still look at the world and say, ’Funny I never saw you before!’ Yes, I’ve got a multidimensional daughter, Minden. Also a neighbor who is either deep or murky. You keep feeding me snatches of that paper of yours, so 1 suppose that you want to excite my curiosity about it. And the tii—The Contingent Mutation. What is? Who is?”

  “We are, Dismas. We an contingent, conditional, temporary, makeshift and improbable in our species. Mine is a paper badly conceived and badly put together, and I shiver at the reception that it will get. But it is about man, who is also badly conceived and badly put together. The proposition:>f my paper is that man is descended, recently and by incredible mutation, from the most impossible of ancestors, Xauenanthropus, cr Xauen Man. The answer of that descent scares me.”

  “Minden, are you out of your mind? Where is the descent? Where is the mutation? The Xauens were already men. No descent and no mutation was required. The finds are all fifteen years old. One look at Xauen, and everybody saw instantly that the Neanderthals and Grimaldi and Cro-Magnon were all close cousins of the same species—ourselves. They were the ten: plate, the master key. They unriddled every riddle. We saw why the ohin, or lack of chin, was only a racial characteristic. We saw it all. There is nothing to distinguish the Xauens from ourselves except that their adults were badly made ganglers, and probably unhealthy. The Xauens are modern men. They are ourselves. There is nothing revolutionary about stuttering out fifteen-year-old certainties, Minden. I thought your paper was to be a giant stride. But it is only stepping off a two-inch curb.