And the cause of all this excitement lay and rolled and crowed and sometimes cried in his little bed, now and then vigorously flapping the sprouting wings that had upset the whole world. Doctor Harriman looked thoughtfully down at him.
He said, “I’ll have to get him out of here. The hospital superintendent is complaining that the crowds and commotion are wrecking the place.”
“But where can you take him?” Morris wanted to know. “He hasn’t any parents or relatives, and you can’t put a kid like this in an orphan asylum.”
Doctor Harriman made his decision. “I’m going to retire from practice and devote myself entirely to observing and recording David’s growth. I’ll have myself made his legal guardian and I’ll bring him up in some spot away from all this turmoil—an island or some place like that, if I can find one.”
Harriman found such a place, an island off the Maine coast, a speck of barren sand and scrubby trees. He leased it, built a bungalow there, and took David Rand and an elderly nurse-housekeeper there. He took also a strong Norwegian watchman who was very efficient at repelling the boats of reporters who tried to land there. After a while the newspapers gave it up. They had to be content to reprint the photographs and articles which Doctor Harriman gave to scientific publications concerning David’s growth.
David grew rapidly. In five years he was a sturdy little youngster with yellow hair, and his wings were larger and covered with short bronze feathers. He ran and laughed and played, like any youngster, flapping his wings vigorously.
He was ten before he flew. By then he was a little slimmer, and his glittering bronze wings came to his heels. When he walked or sat or slept, he kept the wings closely folded on his back like a bronze sheath. But when he opened them, they extended much farther than his arms could, on either side.
Doctor Harriman had meant to let David gradually try flying, to photograph and observe every step of the process.
But it did not happen that way. David flew first as naturally as a bird first flies.
He himself had never thought much about his wings. He knew that Doctor John, as he called the physician, had no such wings, and that neither did Flora, the gaunt old nurse, nor Holf, the grinning watchman, have them. But he had seen no other people, and so he imagined the rest of the world was divided into people who had wings and people who didn’t have them. He did not know just what the wings were for, though he knew that he liked to flap them and exercise them when he was running, and would wear no shirt over them.
Then one April morning, David found out what his wings were for. He had climbed into a tall, old scrub oak to peer at a bird’s nest. The child was always inordinately interested in the birds of the little island, jumping and clapping his hands as he saw then darting and circling overhead, watching their flocks stream south each fall and north each spring, prying into their ways of living, because of some dim sense of kinship with these other winged things.
He had climbed nearly to the top of the old oak on this morning, toward the nest he had spied. His wings were tightly folded to keep them out of the way of branches. Then, as he reached up to pull himself the last step upward, his foot pressed on the merest rotten shell of a dead branch. Abnormally light as he was, his weight was enough to snap the branch and he fell cleanly toward the ground.
Instincts exploded in David’s brain in the moment that he plummeted toward the ground. Quite without will, his wings unfolded with a bursting whir. He felt a terrific tug on them that wrenched his shoulders hard. And then suddenly, marvelously, he was no longer falling but was gliding downward on a long slant, with his wings unfolded and rigidly set.
There burst from his innermost being a high, ringing shout of exultation. Down—down—gliding like a swooping bird with the clean air buffeting at his face and streaming past his wings and body. A wild, sweet thrill that he had never felt before, a sudden crazy joy in living.
He shouted again, and with instant impulse flapped his great wings, beating the air with them, instinctively bending his head sharply back and keeping his arms flattened against his sides, his legs straight and close together.
He was soaring upward now, the ground swiftly receding beneath him, the sun blazing in his eyes, the wind screaming around him. He opened his mouth to shout again, and the cold, clean air hammered into his throat. In sheer, mad physical ecstasy he rocketed up through the blue with whirring wings.
It was thus that Doctor Harriman saw him when he chanced to come out of the bungalow a little later. The doctor heard a shrill, exultant cry from high above and looked up to see that slim, winged shape swooping down toward him from the sunlit heavens.
The doctor caught his breath at the sheer beauty of the spectacle as David dived and soared and whirled above him, gone crazy with delight in his new-found wings. The boy had instinctively learned how to turn and twist and dive, even though his movements had yet a clumsiness that made him sometimes side-slip.
When David Rand finally swooped down and alighted in front of the doctor with quick-closing wings, the boy’s eyes streamed electric joy.
“I can fly’.”
Doctor Harriman nodded. “You can fly, David. I know I can’t keep you from doing it now, but you must not leave the island and you must be careful.”
By the time David reached the age of seventeen, there was no longer any need to caution him to be careful. He was as much at home in the air as any bird living.
He was a tall, slim, yellow-haired youth now, his arrow-straight figure still clad only in the shorts that were all the clothing his warm-blooded body required, a wild, restless energy crackling and snapping in his keen face and dancing blue eyes.
His wings had become superb, glittering, bronze-feathered pinions that extended more than ten feet from tip to tip when he spread them, and that touched his heels with their lowest feathers when he closed them on his back.
Constant flying over the island and the surrounding waters had developed the great wing-muscles behind David’s shoulders to tremendous strength and endurance. He could spend a whole day gliding and soaring over the island, now climbing high with a mad burst of whirring wings, then circling, planing on motionless wings, slowly descending.
He could chase and overtake almost any bird in the air. He would start up a flock of pheasants and his laughter would ring high and wild across the sky as he turned and twisted and darted after the panicky birds. He could pull out the tail-feathers of outraged hawks before they could escape, and he could swoop quicker than a hawk on rabbits and squirrels on the ground.
Sometimes, when fog banked the island, Doctor Harriman would hear the ringing shout from the gray mists overhead and would know that David was somewhere up there. Or again he would be out over the sunlit waters, plummeting headlong down to them and then at the last moment swiftly spreading his wings so that he just skimmed the wave-crests with the screaming gulls before he rocketed upward again.
Never yet had David been away from the island, but the doctor knew from his own infrequent visits to the mainland that the worldwide interest in the flying youth was still strong. The photographs which the doctor gave to scientific journals no longer sufficed for the public curiosity, and launches and airplanes with moving-picture cameramen frequently circled the island to snap pictures of David Rand flying.
To one of those airplanes occurred a thing that gave its occupants much to talk about for days to come. They were a pilot and cameraman who came over the island at midday, in spite of Doctor Harriman’s prohibition of such flights, and who circled brazenly about looking for the flying youth.
Had they looked up, they could have seen David as a circling speck high above them. He watched the airplane with keen interest mixed with contempt. He had seen these flying ships before and he felt only pity and scorn for their stiff, clumsy wings and noisy motors with which wingless men made shift to fly. This one, though, so directly beneath him, stimulated his curiosity so that he swooped down toward it from above and behind, his great wings urging him
against the slip-stream of its propeller.
The pilot in the open rear cockpit of that airplane nearly had heart failure when someone tapped him on the shoulder from behind. He whirled, startled, and when he saw David Rand crouching precariously on the fuselage just behind him, grinning at him, he lost his head for a moment so that the ship side-slipped and started to fall.
With a shouting laugh, David Rand leaped off the fuselage and spread his wings to soar up past it. The pilot recovered enough presence of mind to right his ship, and presently David saw it move unsteadily off toward the mainland. Its occupants had enough of the business for one day.
But the increasing number of such curious visitors stimulated in David Rand a reciprocal curiosity concerning the outside world. He wondered more and more what lay beyond the low, dim line of the mainland over there across the blue waters. He could not understand why Doctor John forbade him to fly over there, when well he knew that his wings would bear him up for a hundred times that distance.
Doctor Harriman told him, “I’ll take you there soon, David. But you must wait until you understand things better—you wouldn’t fit in with the rest of the world, yet.’’
“Why not?’’ demanded David puzzledly.
The doctor explained, “You have wings, and no one else in the world has. That might make things very difficult for you.’’
“But why?”
Harriman stroked his spare chin and said thoughtfully, “You’d be a sensation, a sort of freak, David. They’d be curious about you because you’re different, but they’d look down on you for the same reason. That’s why I brought you up out here, to avoid that. You must wait a little longer before you see the world.”
David Rand flung a hand up to point half angrily at a streaming flock of piping wild birds, heading south, black against the autumn sunset. “They don’t wait! Every fall I see them, everything that flies, going away. Every spring I see them returning, passing overhead again. And I have to stay on this little island!”
A wild pulse of freedom surged in his blue eyes.
“I want to go as they do, to see the land over there, and the lands beyond that.”
“Soon you shall go over there,” promised Doctor Harriman. “I will go with you—will look out for you there.”
But through the dusk that evening, David sat with chin in hand, wings folded, staring broodingly after the straggling, southing birds. And in the days that followed, he took less and less pleasure in mere aimless flight above the island, and more and more watched wistfully the endless, merry passage of the honking wild geese and swarming ducks and whistling songbirds.
Doctor Harriman saw and understood that yearning in David’s eyes, and the old physician sighed.
“He has grown up,” he thought, “and wants to go like any young bird that would leave its nest. I shall not be able much longer to keep him from leaving.”
But it was Harriman himself who left first, in a different way. For some time the doctor’s heart had troubled him, and there came a morning when he did not awaken, and when a dazed, uncomprehending David stared down at his guardian’s still, white face.
Through all that day, while the old housekeeper wept softly about the place and the Norwegian was gone in the boat to the mainland to arrange the funeral, David Rand sat with folded wings and chin in hand, staring out across the blue waters.
That night, when all was dark and silent around the bungalow, he stole into the room where the doctor lay silent and peaceful. In the darkness, David touched the thin, cold hand.
Hot tears swam in his eyes and he felt a hard lump in his throat as he made that futile gesture of farewell.
Then he went softly back out of the house into the night. The moon was a red shield above the eastern waters and the autumn wind blew cold and crisp. Down through the keen air came the joyous piping and carolling and whistling of a long swarm of wild birds, like shrill bugle-calls of gay challenge.
David’s knees bent, and he sprang upward with whirring wings—up and up, the icy air streaming past his body, thundering in his ears, his nostrils drinking it. And the dull sorrow in his heart receded in the bursting joy of flight and freedom. He was up among those shrilling, whistling birds now, the screaming wind tearing laughter from his lips as they scattered in alarm from him.
Then as they saw that this strange winged creature who had joined them made no move to harm them, the wild birds reformed their scattered flock. Far off across the dim, heaving plain of the waters glowed the dull red moon and the scattered lights of the mainland, the little lights of earth-bound folk. The birds shrilled loud and David laughed and sang in joyous chorus as his great wings whirred in time with their own, trailing high across the night sky toward adventure and freedom, flying south.
All through that night, and with brief rests through the next day also, David flew southward, for a time over endless waters and then over the green, fertile land. His hunger he satisfied by dipping toward trees loaded with ripening fruit. When the next night came he slept in a crotch high in a tall forest oak, crouched comfortably with his wings folded about him.
It was not long before the world learned that the freak youth with wings was abroad. People in farms and villages and cities looked up incredulously at that slim figure winging high overhead. Ignorant folk who had never heard of David Rand flung themselves prostrate in panic as he passed across the sky.
Through all that winter there were reports of David from the southland, reports that made it evident he had become almost completely a creature of the wild. What greater pleasure than to soar through the long sun-drenched days over the blue tropic seas, to swoop on the silver fish that broke from the waters, to gather strange fruits and sleep at night in a high tree close against the stars, and wake with dawn to another day of unfettered freedom?
Now and again he would circle unsuspected over some city at night, soaring slowly in the darkness and peering down curiously at the vast pattern of straggling lights and the blazing streets choked with swarms of people and vehicles. He would not enter those cities and he could not see how the people in them could bear to live so, crawling over the surface of the earth amid the rubbing and jostling of hordes like them, never knowing even for a moment the wild, clean joy of soaring through blue infinities of sky. What could make life worthwhile for such earthbound, antlike folk?
When the spring sun grew hotter and higher, and the birds began to flock together in noisy swarms, David too felt something tugging him northward. So he flew north over the spring-green land, great bronzed wings tirelessly beating the air, a slim, tanned figure arrowing unerringly north.
He came at last to his goal, the island where he had lived most of his life. It lay lonely and deserted now in the empty waters, dust gathering over the things in the abandoned bungalow, the garden weed-grown. David settled down there for a time, sleeping upon the porch, making long flights for amusement, west over the villages and dingy cities, north over the rugged, wave-dashed coast, east over the blue sea; until at last the flowers began to die and the air grew frosty, and the deep urge tugged at David until again he joined the ‘ great flocks of winged things going south.
North and south—south and north—for three years that wild freedom of unchecked migration was his. In those three years he came to know mountain and valley, sea and river, storm and calm, and hunger and thirst, as only they of the wild know them. And in those years the world became accustomed to David, almost forgot him. He was the winged man, just a freak; there would never be another like him.
Then in the third spring there came the end to David Rand’s winged freedom. He was on his spring flight north, and at dusk felt hunger. He made out in the twilight a suburban mansion amid extensive orchards and gardens, and swooped down toward it with ideas of early berries. He was very near the trees in the twilight when a gun roared from the ground. David felt a blinding stab of pain through his head, and knew nothing more.
When he awoke, it was in a bed in a sunlit room. There were
a kind-faced elderly man and a girl in the room, and another man who looked like a doctor. David discovered that there was a bandage around his head. These people, he saw, were all looking at him with intense interest.
The elderly, kind-looking man said, “You’re David Rand, the fellow with wings? Well, you’re mighty lucky to be living.” He explained, “You see, my gardener has been watching for a hawk that steals our chickens. When you swooped down in the dusk last night, he fired at you before he could recognize you. Some of the shot from his gun just grazed your head.”
The girl asked gently, “Are you feeling better now? The doctor says you’ll soon be as good as ever.” She added, “This is my father, Wilson Hall. I’m Ruth Hall.”
David stared up at her. He thought he had never seen anyone so beautiful as this shy, soft, dark girl with her curling black hair and tender, worried brown eyes.
He suddenly knew the reason for the puzzling persistence with which the birds sought each other out and clung together in pairs each mating season. He felt the same thing in his own breast now, the urge toward this girl. He did not think of it as love, but suddenly he loved her.
He told Ruth Hall slowly, “I’m all right now.”
But she said, “You must stay here until you’re completely well. It’s the least we can do when it was our servant who almost killed you.”
David stayed, as the wound healed. He did not like the house, whose rooms seemed so dark and stiflingly close to him, but he found that he could stay outside during the day, and could sleep on a porch at night.
Neither did he like the newspapermen and cameramen who came to Wilson Hall’s house to get stories about the winged man’s accident; but these soon ceased coming, for David Rand was not now the sensation he had been years ago. And while visitors to the Hall home stared rather disconcertingly at him and at his wings, he got used to that.
Young Mutants Page 7