Mutant (SF Anthology)

by Henry Kuttner

  “It wasn’t,” Line denied futilely. “I didn’t… you shouldn’t think-“

  “It’s all right. You can’t help reactions as deeply rooted as that. Some day standards of beauty will change. Hairlessness will be lovely. Today it isn’t, certainly not to a man with your psychological background. You must have been made to feel very keenly that you were inferior because of your baldness-“

  Line stood there awkwardly, unable to deny the thought ” that had sprung so vividly into his mind, burning with shame I and dismay at the knowledge that she had seen as clearly as himself the ugly picture of her baldness in his thought. As if he had held up a distorting mirror to her face and said aloud, “This is the way you look to me.” As if he had slapped her gratuitously across the cheek with the taunt of her-abnormality.

  “Never mind,” Alexa said, a little shakily, smiling. “You can’t help it if baldness disg … distresses you. Forget it. It isn’t as if we were m-married or… anything.”

  They looked at each other in silence. Their minds touched and sprang apart and then touched again, tentatively, with light thoughts that leaped from point to point as gingerly as if the ideas were ice-floes that might sink beneath the full weight of conscious focus.

  I thought I loved you … perhaps I did… yes, I too… but now there can’t be … (sudden, rebellious denial) … no, it’s true, there can’t ever be Tightness between us… not as if we were ordinary people… we’d always remember that picture, how I looked (abrupt sheering off from the memory) … (agonized repudiation of it) … no, couldn’t help that… always between MS … rooted too deeply … and anyhow, Cos-(sudden closing off of both minds at once, before even the thought-image had time to form.)

  Alexa stood up. “I’m going into town,” she said. “Marian’s at the hairdresser’s. I… I’ll get a wave or something.”

  He looked at her helplessly, half reluctant to let her go, though he knew as well as she how much had been discussed and weighed and discarded in the past moment of voiceless speech.

  “Gopd-by, Alexa,” he said.

  “Good-by, Line.”

  Line stood for a long time watching the path, even after she had gone. He would have to leave. He didn’t belong here. Even if nearness to Alexa were possible after this, he knew he could not stay. They were-abnormal. He would be seeing the baldness, the contemptible, laughable baldness he had hated in himself, more clearly now than the wigs they wore. Somehow until this moment he had never fully realized—

  Well, he couldn’t go without telling Darryl. Slowly, dragging his feet a little, he turned back toward the house. When he came to the side lawn he sent out an inexpert, querying thought.

  Something answered him from the cellar-laboratory, a queer, strange, disturbing vibration that clung briefly to his mind and then pulled away. It wasn’t McNey. It was-an intruder. Line went down the cellar steps. At the bottom he paused, trying to sort the tangled confusion in his mind as he thrust out exploratory mental fingers. The door was open. McNey was lying on the floor, his mind blanked, blood seeping from a red stain on his side. The intruder? Who-Sergei Callahan. Where-Hidden. And armed.

  So am I, Line thought, his dagger springing into his hand. Telepathically you are untrained. In a fight you can’t win. That was probably true. Telepathy took the place of prescience with the Baldies. Any Baldy could outguess and conquer a non-Baldy, and Line was not yet thoroughly trained in the use of the telepathic function.

  He probed awkwardly. And, suddenly, he knew where Callahan was.

  Behind the door. Where he could strike Line in the back when the boy entered the laboratory. He had not expected the untrained Baldy to discover the ambush until too late, and even as Line realized the situation, Callahan made a move to spring out.

  All Line’s weight smashed against the panel, slamming the door back against the wall. Callahan was caught. Pressed helplessly between the two metal planes-door and wall-he tried to brace himself, to wriggle free. His hand, gripping a dagger, snaked out. Line dropped his own weapon, put his back against the door, and planted his feet more firmly. The door frame gave him good purchase. Veins stood out on his forehead as he ground, crushed, drove the door back with all his strength.

  What had Dave Barton said once? “Kill them with machines-” This was a machine-one of the oldest. The lever.

  Suddenly Callahan began to scream. His agonized thought begged for mercy. In a moment his strength would fail, he pleaded. “Don’t-don’t crush me!”

  His strength failed.

  Line’s heavy shoulders surged. There was one frightful mental scream from Callahan, more agonizing than the audible sound he made, Bnd Line let the door swing slowly away from the wall. A body collapsed with its movement. Line picked up his dagger, used it efficiently, and then turned to McNey.

  There was a puddle of blood on the floor, but McNey still lived. Callahan had not had time to finish his task.

  Line became busy administering first aid.

  This was it.

  It was past midnight. In the cellar laboratory, McNey leaned back in his chair, wincing as he felt the pressure of the bandages about his ribs. He blinked at the fluorescents, sighed, and rubbed his forehead.

  His hand hovered over the notepad. An equation was lacking. He wasn’t quite ready to think of it just yet.

  But the job was almost finished. It would give the Baldies a weapon, at last, against the paranoids. They couldn’t tap the paranoid’s secret wave length, but they could—

  Not yet. Don’t think of it yet.

  Even Line had helped, unknowingly, by one suggestion he had made. Mimicry. Yes, that was one answer. The paranoids would not even suspect—

  Not yet.

  Well, Line had gone back to his Hedgehound tribe and his Hedgehound squaw. In the end, the psychological fixation implanted in the boy’s mind had proved stronger than the strong bonds of race. Too bad, because Line had had something that few Baldies possessed-an innate hardness, a resourceful strength that might prove useful in the dark days that were coming.

  The dark days that might yet be postponed, for a while, if—

  Marian was asleep. McNey forced his thought from her. After years of marriage, they were so closely attuned that even that casual thought might waken her. And not until she had fallen asleep had he dared to bring his mind to bear on this ultimate problem. There could be no secrets between Baldies.

  But this would be a secret-the one that would give Dave

  Barton a weapon against the paranoids. It was the unbreakable code that McNey had searched for for two years now.

  It was a secret method of communication for Baldies.

  Now. Work fast. Work fast!

  McNey’s stylus moved rapidly. He made a few adjustments in the machine before him, sealed its fastenings thoroughly, and watched power-flow develop. After a while, something came out of a small opening at one end of the device, a fine mesh of wire, with a few flatly curved’ attachments. McNey took off his wig, fitted the wire cap to his head, and donned the wig again. After a glance at a mirror, he nodded, satisfied.

  The machine was permanently set now to construct these communicator caps when raw materials were fed into it. The matrix, the blueprint, had been built into the device, and the end result was a communicator gadget, easily hidden under a wig, which every non-paranoid Baldy probably would eventually wear. As for the nature of the gadget-The problem had been to find a secret means of communication, akin to the paranoids’ untappable wave band. And telepathy itself is simply a three-phase oscillation of electromagneto-gravitic energy, emanating from the specialized colloid of the human brain. But telepathy, per se, can be received by any sensitive mind en rapport with the sender.

  And so the trick had been-find a method of artificial transmission. The brain, when properly stimulated by electric energy, will give out electromagnet-gravitic energy, undetectable except to telepaths because there are no instruments sensitive to this output. But when the paranoids would receive such radi
ations, without the unscrambling assistance of one of McNey’s little caps, they wouldn’t suspect a code.

  Because they’d be hearing-sensing-only static.

  It was a matter of camouflage. The waves masqueraded. They masqueraded on a wave band that nobody used, for that particular band was too close to that of the radio communicators used in thousands of private helicopters. For these radios, five thousand megacycles was normal; fifteen thousand manifested itself as a harmless harmonic static, and McNey’s device simply added more squirts of static to that harmonic interference.

  True, direction finders could receive the signals and locate them-but helicopters, like Baldies, were scattered all over the country, and the race traveled a good deal, both by necessity and by choice. The paranoids could locate the source of the fifteen thousand megacycles emanating from the wire caps-but why should they think to?

  It was an adaptation of the Hedgehounds’ code of imitating bird and animal calls. A tenderfoot in the woods wouldn’t look for a language in the cry of an owl-and the paranoids wouldn’t be seeking secret messages in what was apparently only static.

  So, in these light, easily disguised mesh helmets, the problem was solved, finally. The power source would be an automatic tapping of free energy, an imperceptible drain on any nearby electrical generator, and the master machine itself, which made the communicators, was permanently sealed. No one, except McNey himself, knew even the principles of the new communication system. And, since the machine would be guarded well, the paranoids would never know, any more than Barton himself would know, what made the gadget tick. Barton would realize its effectiveness, and that was all. The list of raw materials needed was engraved on the feeder-hopper of the machine; nothing else was necessary. So Barton would possess no secrets to betray inadvertently to the paranoids, for the secrets were all sealed in the machine, and in one other place.

  McNey took off the wire cap and laid it on the table. He turned off the machine. Then, working quickly, he destroyed the formulas and any traces of notes or raw materials. He wrote a brief note to Barton, explaining what was necessary.

  There was no more time left after that. McNey sank back in his chair, his tired, ordinary face without expression. He didn’t look like a hero. And, just then, he wasn’t thinking about the future of the Baldy race, or the fact that the other place where the secret was sealed was in his brain.

  As his hands loosened the bandage about his ribs, he was thinking of Marian. And as his life began to flow out with the blood from his reopened wound, he thought: I wish I could say good-by to you, Marian. But I mustn’t touch you, not even with my mind. We’re too close. You’d wake up, and I hope you won’t be. too lonely, my dear—

  He was going back. The Hedgehounds weren’t his people, but Cassie was his wife. And so he had betrayed his own race, betrayed the future itself, perhaps, and followed the wandering tribe across three states until now, with the autumn winds blowing coldly through bare leaves, he had come to the end of his search. She was there, waiting. She was there, just beyond that ridge. He could feel it, sense it, and his heart stirred to the homecoming.

  Betrayal, then. One man could not matter in the life of a race. There would be a few Baldy children less than if he had married Alexa. The Baldies would have to work out then-own salvation—

  But he wasn’t thinking about that as he leaped the last hurdle and ran to where Cassie was sitting near the fire. He was thinking about Cassie, and the glossy darkness of her hair, and the soft curve of her cheek. He called her name, again and again.

  She didn’t believe it at first. He saw doubt in her eyes and in her mind. But that doubt faded when he dropped beside her, a strange figure in his exotic town clothing, and took her hi his arms.

  “Line,” she said, “you’ve come back.”

  He managed to say, “I’ve come back,” and stopped talking and thinking for a while. It was a long time before Cassie thought to show him something in which he might be expected to evince interest.

  He did. His eyes widened until Cassie laughed and said that it wasn’t the first baby in the world.

  “I… us … you mean-“

  “Sure. Us. This is Line Junior. How’d you like him? He takes after his dad, too.”

  “What?”

  “Hold him.” As Cassie put the baby into his arms, Line saw what she meant. The small head was entirely hairless, and there was no sign of lashes or eyebrows.

  “But… you ain’t bald, Cassie. How-“

  “You sure are, though, Line. That’s why.”

  Line put his free arm around her and drew her close. He couldn’t see the future; he couldn’t realize the implications of this first attempt at mixing races. He only knew a profound and inarticulate relief that his child was like himself. It went deeper than the normal human desire to perpetuate one’s own kind. This was reprieve. He had not, after all, wholly failed his race. Alexa would never bear his children, but his children need not be of alien stock in spite of it.

  That deep warping which the Hedgehounds had wrought upon himself must not happen to the child. ‘I train him, he thought. He’ll know from the start-he’ll learn to be proud he’s a Baldy. And then if they ever need him … no, if We ever need him … he’ll be ready where I failed.

  The race would go on. -It was good and satisfying and right that the union of Baldy and human could result in Baldy children. The line need not come to dead end because a man married outside his own kind. A man must follow his instinct, as Line had done. It was good to belong to a race that allowed even that much treason to its tradition, and exacted no lasting penalty. The line was too strong to break. The dominant strain would go on.

  Perhaps McNey’s invention could postpone the day of the pogrom. Perhaps it could not. But if the day came, still the Baldies would go on. Underground, hidden, persecuted, still they must go on. And perhaps it would be among the Hedgehounds that the safest refuge could be found. For they had an emissary there, now-Maybe this was right, Line thought, his arm around Cassie and the child. Once I belonged here. Now I don’t. I’ll never be happy for good in the old life. I know too much-But here I’m a link between the public life and the secret life of the refugees. Maybe some day they’ll need that link. “Line,” he mused, and grinned.

  Off in the distance a growl of song began to lift. The tribesmen, coming back from the day’s hunting. He was surprised, a little, to realize he felt no more of the old, deep, bewildered distrust of them. He understood now. He knew them as they could never know themselves, and he had learned enough in the past months to evaluate that knowledge. Hedgehounds were no longer the malcontents and misfits of civilization. Generations of weeding-out had distilled them. Americans had always been a distillation in themselves of the pioneer, the adventurous drawn from the old world. The buried strain came out again in their descendants. The Hedgehounds were nomads now, yes; they were woodsmen, yes; they were fighters, always. So were the first Americans. The same hardy stock that might, some day, give refuge again to the oppressed and the hunted.

  The song grew louder through the trees, Jesse James Hartwell’s roaring bass leading all the others.

  “Hurrah, hurrah, we bring the jubilee! Hurrah, hurrah, the flag that makes men free-“

  Four

  Night had fallen again. I lay looking up at the coldly sparkling stars and felt my mind toppling into that endless void of infinity.

  I felt very clear-headed.

  I had been lying here for a long time without moving, looking up at the stars. The snow had stopped some while ago, and the starlight glittered on its blue-shadowed mounds.

  There was no use waiting any longer. I reached into my belt and took out my knife. I laid its blade across my left wrist and considered. That might take too long. There were quicker ways, in places where the body was more vulnerable.

  But I was too tired to move. In a moment I would draw the blade back, with a heavy, pressing motion. Then it would be over, for there was no use waiting for rescue no
w, and I was blind and deaf and mute here behind the mountain barrier. Life had gone out of the world completely. The little sparks of glowing warmth which even insects possess, the strange, pulsing beat of life that flows like a tidal current through the universe^ perhaps emanating from the microscopic organisms which exist everywhere-the light and warmth had gone out. It seemed as though the soul had been drained from everything.

  Unconsciously I must have sent out a thought asking for help, because I heard a response within my mind. I almost shouted before I realized that the response had come from my own mind, some memory summoned up by associations.

  You’re one of us, the thought had said.

  Why should I remember that? It reminded me of… Hob-son. Hobson and the Beggars in Velvet. For McNey had not solved the ultimate problem.

  The next battle in the war had been fought in Sequoia.

  Should I remember?

  The blade of the knife lay wire-cold across my wrist. It would be very easy to die. Much easier than to keep on living, blind and deaf and alone.

  You’re one of us, my thought said again.

  And my mind went back to a bright morning in a town near the old Canadian border, and the smell of cold, pine-sharp air, and the rhythmic beat of a man’s footsteps along Redwood Street-a hundred years ago.

  BEGGARS IN VELVET

  IT WAS like stepping on a snake. The thing, concealed in fresh, green grass, squirmed underfoot and turned and struck venomously. But the thought was not that of reptile or beast; only man was capable of the malignance that was, really, a perversion of intellect.

  Burkhalter’s dark face did not change; his easy stride did not alter. But his mind had instantly drawn back from that blind malevolence, alert and ready, while all through the village Baldies paused imperceptibly in their work or conversation as their minds touched Burkhalter’s.

  No human noticed.

  Under bright morning sunlight Redwood Street curved cheerful and friendly before Burkhalter. But a breath of uneasiness slipped along it, the same cool, dangerous wind that had been blowing for days through the thoughts of every telepath in Sequoia. Ahead were a few early shoppers, some children on their way to school, a group gathered outside the barber shop, one of the doctors from the hospital.