Young Mutants

by Asimov, Isaac

  “I know how you feel,” said Ben. “The only thing you could have got out of this was money, but I get to ride him.”

  “Well,” I said, trying to be philosophical about it, “I get to watch him and that’s almost as good as riding him.” I stopped and grabbed Ben’s arm. “What did I say?”

  Ben jerked his arm away. “You gone nuts?”

  “Get to watch him! Ben, what’s happened every time the Eagle’s run?”

  “He’s broke a record,” said Ben matter-of-factly.

  “He’s sent several thousand people into hysterics,” I amended.

  Ben looked at me. “Are you thinking people would pay to see just one horse run?”

  “Has there ever been more than one when the Eagle’s run? Come on. We’re going to enter him.”

  We entered Eagle in the next to the last race of the season. What I’d expected happened. All the other owners pulled out. They weren’t having any of the Eagle even carrying a hundred and seventy pounds. They all entered in the last race. No horse, not even the Eagle—they thought— had the kind of stamina to make two efforts on successive days with a plane trip sandwiched between, so they felt safe.

  The officials at the second track were jubilant. They had the largest field they had ever run. The officials at the first track had apoplexy. They wanted to talk to us. They offered plane fare and I flew down.

  “Would you consider an arrangement,” they asked, “whereby you would withdraw your horse?”

  “I would not,” I replied.

  “The public won’t attend a walkaway,” they groaned, “even with the drawing power of your horse.” What they were thinking of was that ten cents on the dollar.

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” I told them. “Advertise that the wonder horse is running unweighted against his own record and you’ll have a sellout.”

  Legally, they could not call off the race, so they had to agree.

  On the way home I stopped off at Carvelliers’. We had a 80

  long talk and drew up an agreement. “It’ll work,” I said. “1 know it will.”

  “Yes,” agreed Carvelliers, “it will work, but you must persuade Ben to run him just once carrying the hundred and seventy. We’ve got to scare the whole racing world to death.”

  “I’ll persuade him,” I promised.

  When I got home I took Ben aside. “Ben,” I said, “every cow horse has to carry more than a hundred and seventy pounds.”

  “Yeah, but a cow horse don’t run a mile in just over a minute.”

  “Nevertheless,” I said, “he’ll run as fast as he can carrying that weight and it doesn’t hurt him.”

  “But a cow horse has pasterns and joints like a work horse.

  They just ain’t built like a thoroughbred.”

  “Neither is Red Eagle,” I answered.

  “What’s this all about? You already arranged for him not to carry any weight.”

  “That’s for the first race.”

  “First race! You ain’t thinkin’ of runnin’ in both of them?”

  “Yes, and that second one will be his last race. I’ll never ask you to ride him carrying that kind of weight again.”

  “You ought to be ashamed to ask me to ride him carrying it at all.” Then what I had said sunk in. “Last race! How do you know it’ll be his last race?”

  “I forgot to tell you I had a talk with Carvelliers.”

  “So you had a talk with Carvelliers. So what?”

  “Ben,” I pleaded, “trust me. See what the Eagle can do with a hundred and seventy.”

  “All right,” said Ben grudgingly, “but I ain’t goin’ to turn him on.”

  “Turn him on!” I snorted. “You ain’t ever been able to turn him off.”

  Ben was surprised but I wasn’t when Red Eagle galloped easily under the weight. Ben rode him for a week before he got up the nerve to let him run. Eagle was still way ahead of every record except his own. He stayed sound.

  When we entered him in the second race all but five owners withdrew their horses. These five knew their animals were the best of that season, barring our colt. And they believed that the Eagle after a plane ride, a run the day before, and carrying a hundred and seventy pounds was fair competition.

  At the first track Eagle ran unweighted before a packed stand. The people jumped and shouted with excitement as the red streak flowed around the track, racing the second hand of the huge clock that had been erected in front of the odds board. Ben was worried about the coming race and only let him cut a second off his previous record. But that was enough. The crowd went mad. And I had the last ammunition I needed.

  The next day dawned clear and sunny. The track was fast. Every seat in the stand was sold and the infield was packed. The press boxes overflowed with writers, anxiously waiting 82

  to report to the world what the wonder horse would do. The crowd that day didn’t have to be told. They bet their last dollar on him to win.

  Well, it’s all history now. Red Eagle, carrying one hundred and seventy pounds, beat the next fastest horse five lengths. All the fences in front of the stands were torn down by the crowd trying to get a close look at the Eagle. The track lost a fortune and three officials had heart attacks.

  A meeting was called, and they pleaded with us to remove our horse from competition.

  “Gentlemen,” I said, “we’ll make you a proposition. You noticed yesterday that the gate for Eagle’s exhibition was the largest that track ever had. Do you understand? People will pay to watch Eagle run against time. If you’ll guarantee us two exhibitions a season at each major track and give us sixty percent of the gate, we’ll agree never to run the Eagle in competition.”

  It was such a logical move that they wondered they hadn’t thought of it themselves. It worked out beautifully. Owners of ordinary horses could run them with the conviction that they would at least be somewhere in the stretch when the race finished. The officials were happy, because not only was racing secure again, but they made money out of their forty percent of the gates of Eagle’s exhibitions. And we were happy, because we made even more money. Everything has been serene for three seasons. But I’m a little concerned about next year.

  I forgot to tell you the arrangement Carvelliers and I had made. First, we had discussed a little-known aspect of mutations: namely, that they pass on to their offspring their new characteristics. Carvelliers has fifty brood mares on his breeding farm, and Red Eagle proved so sure at stud that next season fifty carbon copies of him will be hitting the tracks. You’d never believe it, but they run just like their sire, and Ben and I own fifty percent of each of them. Ben feels somewhat badly about it, but, as I pointed out, we only promised not to run the Eagle.

  He That Hath Wings

  by Edmond Hamilton

  If “a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do,” maybe “a mutant’s got to do what a mutant’s got to do.”

  * * *

  Doctor Harriman paused in the corridor of the maternity ward and asked, “What about that woman in 27?’’

  There was pity in the eyes of the plump, crisply dressed head nurse as she answered, “She died an hour after the birth of her baby, doctor. Her heart was bad, you know.’’

  The physician nodded, his spare, clean-shaven face thoughtful. “Yes, I remember now—she and her husband were injured in an electrical explosion in a subway a year ago, and the husband died recently. What about the baby?”

  The nurse hesitated. “A fine, healthy little boy, except—”z

  “Except what?”

  “Except that he is humpbacked, doctor.”

  Doctor Harriman swore in pity. “What horrible luck for the poor little devil! Born an orphan, and deformed, too.” He said with sudden decision, “I’ll look at the infant. Perhaps we could do something for him.”

  But when he and the nurse bent together over the crib in which red-faced little David Rand lay squalling lustily, the doctor shook his head. “No, we can’t do anything for that back. Wh
at a shame!”

  David Rand’s little red body was as straight and clean-lined as that of any baby ever born—except for his back. From the back of the infant’s shoulder blades jutted two humped projections, one on each side, that curved down toward the lower ribs.

  Those twin humps were so long and streamlined in their jutting curve that they hardly looked like deformities. The skillful hands of Doctor Harriman gently probed them. Then an expression of perplexity came over his face.

  “This doesn’t seem any ordinary deformity,” he said puzzledly. “I think we’ll look at them through the X-ray. Tell Doctor Morris to get the apparatus going.”

  Doctor Morris was a stocky, red-headed young man who looked in pity, also, at the crying, red-faced baby lying in front of the X-ray machine, later.

  He muttered, “Tough on the poor kid, that back. Ready, doctor?”

  Harriman nodded. “Go ahead.”

  The X-rays broke into sputtering, crackling life. Doctor Harriman applied his eyes to the fluoroscope. His body stiffened. It was a long, silent minute before he straightened from his inspection. His spare face had gone dead white and the waiting nurse wondered what had so excited him.

  Harriman said, a little thickly, “Morris! Take a look through this. I’m either seeing things, or else something utterly unprecedented has happened.”

  Morris, with a puzzled frown at his superior, gazed through the instrument. His head jerked up.

  “My God!” he exclaimed.

  “You see it too?” exclaimed Doctor Harriman. “Then I guess I’m not crazy after all. But this thing—why, it’s without precedent in all human history!”

  He babbled incoherently, “And the bones, too—hollow— the whole skeletal structure different. His weight—”

  He set the infant hastily on a scale. The beam jiggled.

  “See that!” exclaimed Harriman. “He weighs only a third of what a baby his size should weigh.”

  Red-headed young Doctor Morris was staring in fascination at the curving humps on the infant’s back. He said hoarsely, “But this just isn’t possible—”

  “But it’s real!” Harriman flung out. His eyes were brilliant with excitement. He cried, “A change in gene-patterns— only that could have caused this. Some prenatal influence—”

  His fist smacked into his hand. “I’ve got it! The electrical explosion that injured this child’s mother a year before his 87

  birth. That’s what did it—an explosion of hard radiations that damaged, changed, her genes. You remember Muller’s experiments—”

  The head nurse’s wonder overcame her respect. She asked, “But what is it, doctor? What’s the matter with the child’s back? Is it so bad as all that?”

  “So bad?” repeated Doctor Harriman. He drew a long breath. He told the nurse, “This child, this David Rand, is a unique case in medical history. There has never been anyone like him—as far as we know, the thing that’s going to happen to him has never happened to any other human being. And all due to that electrical explosion.”

  “What’s going to happen to him?” demanded the nurse, dismayed.

  “This child is going to have wings!” shouted Harriman. “Those projections growing out on his back—they’re not just ordinary abnormalities—they’re nascent wings, that will very soon break out and grow just as a fledgling bird’s wings break out and grow.”

  The head nurse stared at them. “You’re joking,” she said finally, in flat unbelief.

  “Good God, do you think I’d joke about such a matter?” cried Harriman. “I tell you, I’m as stunned as you are, even though I can see the scientific reason for the thing. This child’s body is different from the body of any other human being that ever lived.

  “His bones are hollow, like a bird’s bones. His blood seems different, and he weighs only a third what a normal human infant weighs. And his shoulder blades jut out into bone projections to which are attached the great wing-muscles. The X-rays clearly show the rudimentary feathers and bones of the wings themselves.”

  “Wings!” repeated young Morris dazedly. He said after a moment, “Harriman, this child will be able to—”

  “He’ll be able to fly, yes!” declared Harriman. “I’m certain of it. The wings are going to be very large ones, and his body is so much lighter than normal that they’ll easily bear him aloft.”

  “Good Lord!” ejaculated Morris incoherently.

  He looked a little wildly down at the infant. It had stopped crying and now waved pudgy red arms and legs weakly.

  “It just isn’t possible,” said the nurse, taking refuge in incredulity. “How could a baby, a man, have wings?”

  Doctor Harriman said swiftly, “It’s due to a deep change in the parents’ genes. The genes, you know, are the tiny cells which control bodily development in every living thing that is born. Alter the gene-pattern and you alter the bodily development of the offspring, which explains the differences in color, size, and so forth, in children. But those minor differences are due to comparatively minor gene-changes.

  “But the gene-pattern of this child’s parents was radically changed a year ago. The electrical explosion in which they were injured must have deeply altered their gene-patterns, by a wave of sudden electrical force. Muller, of the University of Texas, has demonstrated that gene-patterns can be greatly altered by radiation, and that the offspring of parents so treated will differ greatly from their parents in bodily form. That accident produced an entirely new gene-pattern in the parents of this child, one which developed their child into a winged human. He’s what biologists technically call a mutant.”

  Young Morris suddenly said, “Good Lord, what the newspapers are going to do when they get hold of this story!”

  “They mustn’t get hold of it,” Doctor Harriman declared. “The birth of this child is one of the greatest things in the history of biological science, and it mustn’t be made a cheap popular sensation. We must keep it utterly quiet.”

  They kept it quiet for three months, in all. During that time, little David Rand occupied a private room in the hospital and was cared for only by the head nurse and visited only by the two physicians.

  During those three months, the correctness of Doctor Harriman’s prediction was fulfilled. For in that time, the humped projections on the child’s back grew with incredible rapidity until at last they broke through the tender skin in a pair of stubby, scrawny-looking things that were unmistakably wings.

  Little David squalled violently during the days that his wings broke forth, feeling only a pain as of teething many times intensified. But the two doctors stared and stared at those little wings with their rudimentary feathers, even now hardly able to believe the witness of their eyes.

  They saw that the child had as complete control of the wings as of his arms and legs, by means of the great muscles around their bases which no other human possessed. And they saw too that while David’s weight was increasing, he remained still just a third of the weight of a normal child of his age, and that his heart had a tremendously high pulsebeat and that his blood was far warmer than that of any normal person.

  Then it happened. The head nurse, unable any longer to contain the tremendous secret with which she was bursting, told a relative in strict confidence. That relative told another relative, also in strict confidence. And two days later the story appeared in the New York newspapers.

  The hospital put guards at its doors and refused admittance to the grinning reporters who came to ask for details. All of them were frankly skeptical, and the newspaper stories were written with a tongue in the cheek. The public laughed. A child with wings! What kind of phoney new story would they think up next?

  But a few days later, the stories changed in tone. Others of the hospital personnel, made curious by the newspaper yarns, pried into the room where David Rand lay crowing and thrashing his arms and legs and wings. They babbled broadcast assertions that the story was true. One of them, who was a candid camera enthusiast, even managed to slip out
a photograph of the infant. Smeary as it was, that photograph did unmistakably show a child with wings of some sort growing from its back.

  The hospital became a fort, a place besieged. Reporters and photographers milled outside its doors and clamored against the special police guard that had been detailed to keep them out. The great press associations offered Doctor Harriman large sums for exclusive stories and photographs of the winged child. The public began to wonder if there was anything in the yarn.

  Doctor Harriman had to give in, finally. He admitted a committee of a dozen reporters, photographers and eminent physicians to see the child.

  David Rand lay and looked up at them with a wise blue gaze, clutching his toe, while the eminent physicians and newspapermen stared down at him with bulging eyes.

  The physicians said, “It’s incredible, but it’s true. This is no fake—the child really has wings.”

  The reporters asked Doctor Harriman wildly, “When he gets bigger, will he be able to fly?”

  Harriman said shortly, “We can’t tell just what his development will be like, now. But if he continues to develop as he has, undoubtedly he’ll be able to fly.”

  “Good Lord, let me at a phone!” groaned one newshound. And they were all scrambling pell-mell for the telephones.

  Doctor Harriman permitted a few pictures, and then unceremoniously shoved the visitors out. But there was no holding the newspapers after that. David Rand’s name became overnight the best known in the world. The pictures convinced even the most skeptical of the public.

  Great biologists made long statements on the theories of genetics which could explain the child. Anthropologists speculated as to whether similar freak winged men had not been born a few times in the remote past, giving rise to the worldwide legends of harpies and vampires and flying people. Crazy sects saw in the child’s birth an omen of the approaching end of the world.

  Theatrical agents offered immense sums for the privilege of exhibiting David in a hygienic glass case. Newspapers and press services outbid each other for exclusive rights to the story Doctor Harriman could tell. A thousand firms begged to purchase the right to use little David’s name on toys, infant foods, and what not.