Young Mutants

by Asimov, Isaac

  The baseball whizzed from the blue sky, stung his hand like a great pale insect. Nursing it, he hears his memory say:

  “I worked with what I had. After my folks died, after I found I couldn’t get man’s work anywhere, I tried carnivals, but they only laughed. ‘Son,’ they said, ‘you’re not a midget, and even if you are, you look like a boy I We want midgets with midgets’ faces! Sorry, son, sorry.’ So I left home, started out, thinking: What was I? A boy. I looked like a boy, sounded like a boy, so I might as well go on being a boy. No use fighting it. No use screaming. So what could I do? What job was handy? And then one day I saw this man in a restaurant looking at another man’s pictures of his children. ‘Sure wish I had kids,’ he said. ‘Sure wish I had kids.’ He kept shaking his head. And me sitting a few seats away from him, a hamburger in my hands. I sat there, frozen! At that very instant I knew what my job would be for all the rest of my life. There was work for me, after all. Making lonely people happy. Keeping myself busy. Playing forever. I knew I had to play forever. Deliver a few papers, run a few errands, mow a few lawns, maybe. But hard work? No. All I had to do was be a mother’s son and a father’s pride. I turned to the man down the counter from me. ‘I beg your pardon,’ I said. I smiled at him… .”

  “But, Willie,” said Mrs. Emily long ago, “didn’t you ever get lonely? Didn’t you ever want—things—that grownups wanted?”

  “I fought that out alone,” said Willie. “I’m a boy, I told myself, I’ll have to live in a boy’s world, read boys’ books, play boys’ games, cut myself off from everything else. I can’t be both. I got to be only one thing—young. And so I played that way. Oh, it wasn’t easy. There were times—” He lapsed into silence.

  “And the family you lived with, they never knew?”

  “No. Telling them would have spoiled everything. I told them I was a runaway; I let them check through official channels, police. Then, when there was no record, let them put in to adopt me. That was best of all; as long as they never guessed. But then, after three years, or five years, they guessed, or a traveling man came through, or a carnival man saw me, and it was over. It always had to end.”

  “And you’re very happy and it’s nice being a child for over forty years?”

  “It’s a living, as they say. And when you make other people happy, then you’re almost happy too. I got my job to do and I do it. And anyway, in a few years now I’ll be in my second childhood. All the fevers will be out of me and all the unfulfilled things and most of the dreams. Then I can relax, maybe, and play the role all the way.”

  He threw the baseball one last time and broke the reverie. Then he was running to seize his luggage. Tom, Bill, Jamie, Bob, Sam—their names moved on his lips. They were embarrassed at his shaking hands.

  “After all, Willie, it ain’t as if you’re going to China or Timbuktu.”

  “That’s right, isn’t it?” Willie did not move.

  “So long, Willie. See you next week!”

  “So long, so long!”

  And he was walking off with his suitcase again, looking at the trees, going away from the boys and the street where he had lived, and as he turned the corner a train whistle screamed, and he began to run.

  The last thing he saw and heard was a white ball tossed at a high roof, back and forth, back and forth, and two voices crying out as the ball pitched now up, down, and back through the sky, “Annie, Annie, over! Annie, Annie, over!” like the crying of birds flying off to the far south.

  In the early morning, with the smell of the mist and the cold metal, with the iron smell of the train around him and a full night of traveling shaking his bones and his body, and a smell of the sun beyond the horizon, he awoke and looked out upon a small town just arising from sleep. Lights were coming on, soft voices muttered, a red signal bobbed back and forth, back and forth in the cold air. There was that sleeping hush in which echoes are dignified by clarity, in which echoes stand nakedly alone and sharp. A porter moved by, a shadow in shadows.

  “Sir,” said Willie.

  The porter stopped.

  “What town’s this?” whispered the boy in the dark.

  “Valley ville.”

  “How many people?”

  “Ten thousand. Why? This your stop?”

  “It looks green.” Willie gazed out at the cold morning town for a long time. “It looks nice and quiet,” said Willie.

  “Son,” said the porter, “you know where you going?”

  “Here,” said Willie, and got up quietly in the still, cool, iron-smelling morning, in the train dark, with a rustling and stir.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing, boy,” said the porter.

  “Yes, sir,” said Willie. “I know what I’m doing.” And he was down the dark aisle, luggage lifted after him by the porter, and out in the smoking, steaming-cold, beginning-to-lighten morning. He stood looking up at the porter and the black metal train against the few remaining stars. The train gave a great wailing blast of whistle, the porters cried out all along the line, the cars jolted, and his special porter waved and smiled down at the boy there, the small boy there with the big luggage who shouted up to him, even as the whistle screamed again.

  “What?” shouted the porter, hand cupped to ear.

  “Wish me luck!” cried Willie.

  “Best of luck, son,” called the porter, waving, smiling. “Best of luck, boy!”

  “Thanks,” said Willie, in the great sound of the train, in the steam and roar.

  He watched the black train until it was completely gone away and out of sight. He did not move all the time it was going. He stood quietly, a small boy twelve years old, on the worn wooden platform, and only after three entire minutes did he turn at last to face the empty streets below.

  Then, as the sun was rising, he began to walk very fast, so as to keep warm, down into the new town.

  Keep Out

  by Fredric Brown

  Change the body’s shape and function and we might also change the person’s point of view.

  * * *

  Daptine is the secret of it. Adaptine, they called it first; then it got shortened to daptine. It let us adapt.

  They explained it all to us when we were ten years old; I guess they thought we were too young to understand before then, although we knew a lot of it already. They told us just after we landed on Mars.

  “You’re home, children,’’ the Head Teacher told us after we had gone into the glassite dome they’d built for us there. And he told us there’d be a special lecture for us that evening, an important one that we must all attend.

  And that evening he told us the whole story and the whys and wherefores. He stood up before us. He had to wear a heated space suit and helmet, of course, because the temperature in the dome was comfortable for us but already freezing cold for him and the air was already too thin for him to breathe. His voice came to us by radio from inside his helmet.

  “Children,” he said, “you are home. This is Mars, the planet on which you will spend the rest of your lives. You are Martians, the first Martians. You have lived five years on Earth and another five in space. Now you will spend ten years, until you are adults, in this dome, although toward the end of that time you will be allowed to spend increasingly long periods outdoors.

  “Then you will go forth and make your own homes, live your own lives, as Martians. You will intermarry and your children will breed true. They, too, will be Martians.

  “It is time you were told the history of this great experiment of which each of you is a part.”

  Then he told us.

  Man, he said, had first reached Mars in 1985. It had been uninhabited by intelligent life (there is plenty of plant life and a few varieties of nonflying insects) and he had found it by terrestrial standards uninhabitable. Man could survive on Mars only by living inside glassite domes and wearing space suits when he went outside of them. Except by day in the warmer seasons it was too cold for him. The air was too thin for him to breathe and long expo
sure to sunlight—less filtered of rays harmful to him than on Earth because of the lesser atmosphere—could kill him. The plants were chemically alien to him and he could not eat them; he had to bring all his food from Earth or grow it in hydroponic tanks.

  For fifty years he had tried to colonize Mars and all his efforts had failed. Besides this dome, which had been built for us, there was only one other outpost, another glassite dome much smaller and less than a mile away.

  It had looked as though mankind could never spread to the planets of the solar system other than Earth, for of all of them Mars was the least inhospitable; if he couldn’t live here there was no use even trying to colonize the others.

  And then, in 2034, thirty years ago, a brilliant biochemist named Waymoth had discovered daptine, a miracle drug that worked not on the animal or person to whom it was given but on the progeny he conceived during a limited period of time after inoculation.

  It gave his progeny almost limitless adaptability to changing conditions, provided the changes were made gradually.

  Dr. Waymoth had inoculated and then mated a pair of guinea pigs; they had borne a litter of five and by placing each member of the litter under different and gradually changing conditions, he had obtained amazing results. When they attained maturity one of those guinea pigs was living comfortably at a temperature of forty degrees below zero Fahrenheit, another was quite happy at a hundred and fifty above. A third was thriving on a diet that would have been deadly poison for an ordinary animal and a fourth was contented under a constant X-ray bombardment that would ha e killed one of its parents within minutes.

  Subsequent experiments with many litters showed that animals who had been adapted to similar conditions bred true and their progeny was conditioned from birth to live under those conditions.

  “Ten years later, ten years ago,” the Head Teacher told us, “you children were born. Born of parents carefully selected from those who volunteered for the experiment. And from birth you have been brought up under carefully controlled and gradually changing conditions.

  “From the time you were born the air you have breathed has been very gradually thinned and its oxygen content reduced. Your lungs hae compensated by becoming much greater in capacity, which is why your chests are so much larger than those of your teachers and attendants: when you are fully mature and are breathing air like that of Mars, the difference will be even greater.

  “Your bodies are growing fur to enable you to stand the increasing cold. You are comfortable now under conditions which would kill ordinary people quickly. Since you were four years old. your nurses and teachers have had to wear special protection to survive conditions that seem normal to you.

  “In another ten years, at maturity, you will be completely acclimated to Mars. Its air will be your air; its food plants your food. Its extremes of temperature will be easy for you to endure and its median temperatures pleasant to you. Already, because of the five years we spent in space under gradually decreased gravitational pull, the gravity of Mars seems normal to you.

  “It will be your planet, to live on and to populate. You are the children of Earth but you are the first Martians.”

  Of course we had known a lot of those things already.

  The last year was the best. By then the air inside the dome—except for the pressurized parts where our teachers and attendants lived—was almost like that outside, and we were allowed out for increasingly long periods. It is good to be in the open.

  The last few months they relaxed segregation of the sexes so we could begin choosing mates, although they told us there is to be no marriage until after the final day, after our full clearance. Choosing was not difficult in my case. I had made my choice long since and I’d felt sure that she felt the same way; I was right.

  Tomorrow is the day of our freedom. Tomorrow we will be Martians, the Martians. Tomorrow we shall take over the planet.

  Some among us are impatient, have been impatient for weeks now, but wiser counsel prevailed and we are waiting. We have waited twenty years and we can wait until the final day.

  And tomorrow is the final day.

  Tomorrow, at a signal, we will kill the teachers and the other Earthmen among us before we go forth. They do not suspect, so it will be easy.

  We have dissimulated for years now, and they do not know how we hate them. They do not know how disgusting and hideous we find them, with their ugly, misshapen bodies, so narrow shouldered and tiny chested, their weak, sibilant voices that need amplification to carry in our Martian air, and above all their white, pasty, hairless skins.

  We shall kill them and then we shall go and smash the other dome so all the Earthmen there will die, too.

  If more Earthmen ever come to punish us, we can live and hide in the hills where they’ll never find us. And if they try to build more domes here we’ll smash them. We want no more to do with Earth.

  This is our planet and we want no aliens. Keep out!

  What Friends Are For

  by John Brunner

  Children often use their parents’ behavior as a model for their own actions.

  * * *

  After Tim killed and buried the neighbors’ prize terrier the Pattersons took him to the best-reputed—and most expensive—counselor in the state: Dr. Hend.

  They spent forty of the fifty minutes they had purchased snapping at each other in the waiting room outside his office, breaking off now and then when a scream or a smashing noise eluded the soundproofing, only to resume more fiercely a moment later.

  Eventually Tim was borne out, howling, by a strong male nurse who seemed impervious to being kicked in the belly with all the force an eight-year-old can muster, and the Pattersons were bidden to take his place in Dr. Hend’s presence. There was no sign of the chaos the boy had caused. The counselor was a specialist in such cases, and there were smooth procedures for eliminating incidental mess.

  “Well, Doctor?” Jack Patterson demanded.

  Dr. Hend studied him thoughtfully for a long moment, then glanced at his wife, Lorna, reconfirming the assessment he had made when they arrived. On the male side: expensive clothing, bluff good looks, a carefully constructed image of success. On the female: the most being made of what had, to begin with, been a somewhat shallow prettiness, even more expensive clothes, plus ultra-fashionable hair style, cosmetics, and perfume.

  He said at last, “That son of yours is going to be in court very shortly. Even if he is only eight, chronologically.”

  “What?” Jack Patterson erupted. “But we came here to—”

  “You came here,” the doctor cut in, “to be told the truth. It was your privilege to opt for a condensed-development child. You did it after being informed of the implications. Now you must face up to your responsibilities.”

  “No, we came here for help!” Lorna burst out. Her husband favored her with a scowl: Shut up!

  “You have seven minutes of my time left,” Dr. Hend said wearily. “You can spend it wrangling or listening to me. Shall I proceed?”

  The Pattersons exchanged sour looks, then both nodded.

  “Thank you. I can see precisely one alternative to having your child placed in a public institution. You’ll have to get him a Friend.”

  “What? And show the world we can’t cope?” Jack Patterson rasped. “You must be out of your mind!”

  Dr. Hend just gazed at him.

  “They’re—they’re terribly expensive, aren’t they?” Lorna whispered.

  The counselor leaned back and set his fingertips together.

  “As to being out of my mind … Well, I’m in good company. It’s customary on every inhabited planet we know of to entrust the raising of the young to Friends programed by a consensus of opinion among other intelligent races. There was an ancient proverb about not seeing the forest for the trees; it is well established that the best possible advice regarding optimum exploitation of juvenile talent comes from those who can analyze the local society in absolute, rather than committed, terms. A
nd the habit is growing commoner here. Many families, if they can afford to, acquire a Friend from choice, not necessity.

  “As to expense—yes, Mrs. Patterson, you’re right. Anything which has had to be shipped over interstellar distances can hardly be cheap. But consider: this dog belonging to your neighbors was a show champion with at least one best-of-breed certificate, quite apart from being the boon companion of their small daughter. I imagine the courts will award a substantial sum by way of damages…. Incidentally, did Tim previously advance the excuse that he couldn’t stand the noise it made when it barked?”

  “Uh …” Jack Patterson licked his lips. “Yes, he did.”

  “I suspected it might have been rehearsed. It had that kind of flavor. As did his excuse for breaking the arm of the little boy who was the best batter in your local junior ball team, and the excuse for setting fire to the school’s free-fall gymnasium, and so forth. You have to accept the fact, I’m afraid, that thanks to his condensed-development therapy your son is a total egocentric. The universe has never yet proved sufficiently intractable to progress him out of the emotional stage most infants leave behind about the time they learn to walk. Physically he is ahead of the average for his age. Emotionally, he is concerned about nothing but his own gratification. He’s incapable of empathy, sympathy, worrying about the opinions of others. He is a classic case of arrested personal development.”

  “But we’ve done everything we can to—”

  “Yes, indeed you have. And it is not enough.” Dr. Hend allowed the comment to rankle for a few seconds, then resumed.