Young Mutants

by Asimov, Isaac

  He put up with everything, so that he might be near Ruth Hall. His love for her was a clean fire burning inside him and nothing in the world now seemed so desirable as that she should love him too. Yet because he was still mostly of the wild, and had had little experience in talking, he found it hard to tell her what he felt.

  He did tell her, finally, sitting beside her in the sunlit garden. When he had finished, Ruth’s gentle brown eyes were troubled.

  “You want me to marry you, David?”

  “Why, yes,” he said, a little puzzled. “That’s what they call it when people mate, isn’t it? And I want you for my mate.”

  She said, distressed, “But David, your wings—”

  He laughed. “Why, there’s nothing the matter with my wings. The accident didn’t hurt them. See!”

  And he leaped to his feet, whipping open the great bronze wings that glittered in the sunlight, looking like a figure of fable poised for a leap into the blue, his slim, tanned body clad only in the shorts which were all the clothing he would wear.

  The trouble did not leave Ruth’s eyes. She explained, “It’s not that, David—it’s that your wings make you so different from everybody else. Of course it’s wonderful that you can fly, but they make you so different from everyone else that people look on you as a kind of freak.”

  David stared. “Tow don’t look on me as that, Ruth?”

  “Of course not,” Ruth said. “But it does seem somehow a little abnormal, monstrous, your having wings.”

  “Monstrous?” he repeated. “Why, it’s nothing like that. It’s just—beautiful, being able to fly. See!”

  And he sprang upward with great wings whirring—up and up, climbing into the blue sky, dipping and darting and turning up there like a swallow, then cometing down in a breathless swoop to land lightly on his toes beside the girl.

  “Is there anything monstrous about that?” he demanded joyously. “Why, Ruth, I want you to fly with me, held in my arms, so that you’ll know the beauty of it as I know it.”

  The girl shuddered a little. “I couldn’t, David. I know it’s silly, but when I see you in the air like that you don’t seem so much a man as a bird, a flying animal, something unhuman.”

  David Rand stared at her, suddenly miserable. “Then you won’t marry me—because of my wings?”

  He grasped her in his strong, tanned arms, his lips seeking her soft mouth.

  “Ruth, I can’t live without you now that I’ve met you. I can’t!”

  It was on a night a little later that Ruth, somewhat hesitantly, made her suggestion. The moon flooded the garden with calm silver, gleamed on David Rand’s folded wings as he sat with keen young face bent eagerly toward the girl.

  She said, “David, there is a way in which we could marry and be happy, if you love me enough to do it.”

  “I’ll do anything!” he cried. “You know that.”

  She hesitated.

  “Your wings—they’re what keep us apart. I can’t have a husband who belongs more to the wild creatures than to the human race, a husband whom everyone would consider a freak, a deformed oddity. But if you were to have your wings taken off—”

  He stared at her. “My wings taken off?”

  She explained in an eager little rush of words. “It’s quite practicable, David. Doctor White, who treated you for that 108

  wound and who examined you then, has told me that it would be quite easy to amputate your wings above their bases. There would be no danger at all in it, and it would leave only the slight projection of the stumps on your back. Then you’d be a normal man and not a freak,” she added, her soft face earnest and appealing. ‘‘Father would give you a position in his business, and instead of an abnormal, roaming, half-human creature you would be like—like everyone else. We could be so happy then.”

  David Rand was stunned. ‘‘Amputate my wings?” he repeated almost uncomprehendingly. ‘‘You won’t marry me unless I do that?”

  ‘‘I can’t,” said Ruth painfully. ‘‘I love you, David, I do— but I want my husband to be like other women’s husbands.”

  “Never to fly again,” said David slowly, his face white in the moonlight. “To become earthbound, like everyone else! No!” he cried, springing to his feet in a wild revulsion. “I won’t do it—I won’t give up my wings! I won’t become like—”

  He stopped abruptly. Ruth was sobbing into her hands. All his anger gone, he stooped beside her, pulled down her hands, yearningly tilted up her soft, tear-stained face.

  “Don’t cry, Ruth,” he begged. “It isn’t that I don’t love you—I do, more than anything else on earth. But I had never thought of giving up my wings—the idea stunned me.” He told her, “You go on into the house. I must think it over a little.”

  She kissed him, her mouth quivering, and then was gone through the moonlight to the house. And David Rand remained, his brain in turmoil, pacing nervously in the silver light.

  Give up his wings? Never again to dip and soar and swoop with the winged things of the sky, never again to know the mad exaltation and tameless freedom of rushing flight?

  Yet—to give up Ruth—to deny this blind, irresistible yearning for her that beat in every atom of him—to know bitter loneliness and longing for her the rest of his life—how could he do that? He couldn’t do it. He wouldn’t.

  So David went rapidly toward the house and met the girl waiting for him on the moonlit terrace.

  “David?” ’

  “Yes, Ruth, I’ll do it. I’ll do anything for you.”

  She sobbed happily on his breast. “I knew you really loved me, David. I knew it.”

  Two days later David Rand came out of the mists of anesthesia in a hospital room, feeling very strange, his back an aching soreness. Doctor White and Ruth were bending over his bed.

  “Well, it was a complete success, young man,” said the doctor. “You’ll be out of here in a few days.”

  Ruth’s eyes were shining. “The day you leave, David, we’ll be married.”

  When they were gone, David slowly felt his back. Only the no bandaged, projecting stumps of his wings remained. He could move the great wing-muscles, but no whirring pinions answered. He felt dazed and strange, as though some most vital part of him was gone. But he clung to the thought of Ruth—of Ruth waiting for him—

  And she was waiting for him, and they were married on the day he left the hospital. And in the sweetness of her love, David lost all of that strange dazed feeling, and almost forgot that once he had possessed wings and had roamed the sky a wild, winged thing.

  Wilson Hall gave his daughter and son-in-law a pretty white cottage on a wooded hill near town, and made a place for David in his business and was patient with his ignorance of commercial matters. And every day David drove his car into town and worked all day in his office and drove back homeward in the dusk to sit with Ruth before their lire, her head on his shoulder.

  “David, are you sorry that you did it?” Ruth would ask anxiously at first.

  And he would laugh and say, “Of course not, Ruth. Having you is worth anything.”

  And he told himself that that was true, that he did not regret the loss of his wings. All that past time when he had flown the sky with whirring wings seemed only a strange dream and only now had he awakened to real happiness, he assured himself.

  Wilson Hall told his daughter, “David’s doing well down at the office. I was afraid he would always be a little wild, but he’s settled down fine.”

  Ruth nodded happily and said, “I knew that he would. And everyone likes him so much now.”

  For people who once had looked askance at Ruth’s marriage now remarked that it had turned out very well after all.

  “He’s really quite nice. And except for the slight humps on his shoulders, you’d never think that he had been different from anyone else,” they said.

  So the months slipped by. In the little cottage on the wooded hill was complete happiness until there came the fall, frosting the lawn wit
h silver each morning, stamping crazy colors on the maples.

  One fall night David woke suddenly, wondering what had so abruptly awakened him. Ruth was still sleeping softly with gentle breathing beside him. He could hear no sound.

  Then he heard it. A far-away, ghostly whistling trailing down from the frosty sky, a remote, challenging shrilling that throbbed with a dim, wild note of pulsing freedom.

  He knew what it was, instantly. He swung open the window and peered up into the night with beating heart. And up there he saw them, long, streaming files of hurtling wild birds, winging southward beneath the stars. In an instant the wild impulse to spring from the window, to rocket up after them into the clean, cold night, clamored blindly in David’s heart.

  Instinctively the great wing-muscles at his back tensed. But only the stumps of his wings moved beneath his pajama jacket. And suddenly he was limp, trembling, aghast at that blind surge of feeling. Why, for a moment he had wanted to go, to leave Ruth. The thought appalled him, was like a treachery against himself. He crept back into bed and lay, determinedly shutting his ears to that distant, joyous whistling that fled southward through the night.

  The next day he plunged determinedly into his work at the office. But all through that day he found his eyes straying to the window’s blue patch of sky. And week by week thereafter, all through the long months of winter and spring, the old, wild yearning grew more and more an unreasonable ache inside his heart, stronger than ever when the flying creatures came winging north in spring.

  He told himself savagely, “You’re a fool. You love Ruth more than anything else on earth and you have her. You don’t want anything else.”

  And again in the sleepless night he would assure himself, “I’m a man, and I’m happy to live a normal man’s life, with Ruth.”

  But in his brain old memories whispered slyly, “Do you remember that first time you flew, that mad thrill of soaring upward for the first time, the first giddy whirl and swoop and glide?”

  And the night wind outside the window called, “Remember how you raced with me, beneath the stars and above the sleeping world, and how you laughed and sang as your wings fought me?”

  And David Rand buried his face in his pillow and muttered, “I’m not sorry I did it. I’m not!”

  Ruth awoke and asked sleepily, “Is anything the matter, David?”

  “No, dear,” he told her, but when she slept again he felt the hot tears stinging his eyelids, and whispered blindly, “I’m lying to myself. I want to fly again.”

  But from Ruth, happily occupied with his comfort and their home and their friends, he concealed all that blind, buried longing. He fought to conquer it, destroy it, but could not.

  When no one else was by, he would watch with aching heart the swallows darting and diving in the sunset, or the hawk soaring high and remote in the blue, or the kingfisher’s thrilling swoop. And then bitterly he would accuse himself of being a traitor to his own love for Ruth.

  Then that spring Ruth shyly told him something. “David, next fall—a child of ours—”

  He was startled. “Ruth, dear!” Then he asked, “You’re not afraid that it might be—”

  She shook her head confidently. “No. Doctor White says there is no chance that it will be born abnormal as you were. He says that the different gene-characters that caused you to be born with wings are bound to be a recessive character, not . n4

  a dominant, and that there is no chance of that abnormality being inherited. Aren’t you glad?”

  “Of course,” he said, holding her tenderly. “It’s going to be wonderful.”

  Wilson Hall beamed at the news. “A grandchild—that’s fine!” he exclaimed. “David, do you know what I’m going to do after its birth? I’m going to retire and leave you as head of the firm.”

  “Oh, Dad!” cried Ruth, and kissed her father joyfully.

  David stammered his thanks. And he told himself that this ended for good all his vague, unreasonable longings. He was going to have more than Ruth to think about now, was going to have the responsibilities of a family man.

  He plunged into work with new zest. For a few weeks he did entirely forget that old blind yearning, in his planning for things to come. He was all over that now, he told himself.

  Then suddenly his whole being was overturned by an amazing thing. For some time the wing-stumps on David’s shoulders had felt sore and painful. Also it seemed they were much larger than they had been. He took occasion to examine them in a mirror and was astounded to discover that they had grown out in two very large, humplike projections that curved downward on each side along his back.

  David Rand stared and stared into the mirror, a strange surmise in his eyes. Could it be possible that—

  He called on Doctor White the next day, on another pretext. But before he left he asked casually, “Doctor, I was wondering, is there any chance that my wings would ever start to grow out again?”

  Doctor White said thoughtfully, “Why, I suppose there is a chance of it, at that. A newt can regenerate a lost limb, you know, and numerous animals have similar powers of regeneration. Of course an ordinary man cannot regenerate a lost arm or leg like that, but your body is not an ordinary one and your wings might possess some power of partial regeneration, for one time at least.” He added, “You don’t need to worry about it, though, David. If they start to grow out again, just come in and I’ll remove them again without any trouble.”

  David Rand thanked him and left. But day after day thereafter, he closely watched and soon saw beyond doubt that the freak of genes that had given him wings in the first place had also given him at least a partial power of regenerating them.

  For the wings were growing out again, day by day. The humps on his shoulders had become very much larger, though covered by his specially tailored coats the change in them was not noticed. They broke through late that summer in wings—real wings, though small as yet. Folded under his clothing, they were not apparent.

  David knew that he should go in and let the doctor amputate them before they got larger. He told himself that he did not any longer want wings—Ruth and the coming child and 116

  their future together were all that meant anything to him now.

  Yet still he did not say anything to anyone, kept the growing wings concealed and closed beneath his clothing. They were poor, weak wings, compared to his first ones, as though stunted by the previous amputation. It was unlikely that he would ever be able to fly with them, he thought, even if he wanted to, which he didn’t.

  He told himself, though, that it would be easier to have them removed after they had attained their full size. Besides, he didn’t want to disturb Ruth at this time by telling her that the wings had grown again. So he reassured himself, and so the weeks passed until by early October his second wings had grown to their full size, though they were stunted and pitiful compared to his first splendid pinions.

  On the first week in October, a little son was born to Ruth and David. A fine, strong-limbed little boy, without a trace of anything unusual about him. He was normal of weight, and his back was straight and smooth, and he would never have wings. And a few nights later they were all in the little cottage, admiring him.

  “Isn’t he beautiful?” asked Ruth, looking up with eyes shining with pride.

  David nodded dumbly, his heart throbbing with emotion as he looked down at the red, sleeping mite. His son!

  “He’s wonderful,” he said humbly. “Ruth, dear—I want to work the rest of my life for you and for him.”

  Wilson Hall beamed on them and chuckled, “You’re going to have a chance to do that, David. What I said last spring goes. This afternoon I formally resigned as head of the firm and saw that you were named as my successor.”

  David tried to thank him. His heart was full with complete happiness, with love for Ruth and for their child. He felt that no one before had ever been so happy.

  Then after Wilson Hall had left, and Ruth was sleeping and he was alone, David suddenly r
ealized that there was something he must do.

  He told himself sternly, “All these months you’ve been lying to yourself, making excuses for yourself, letting your wings grow again. In your heart, all that time, you were hoping that you would be able to fly again.”

  He laughed. “Well, that’s all over, now. I only told myself before that I didn’t want to fly. It wasn’t true, then, but it is now. I’ll never again long for wings, for flying, now that I have both Ruth and the boy.”

  No, never again—that was ended. He would drive into town this very night and have Doctor White remove these new-grown second wings. He would never even let Ruth know about them.

  Flushed with that resolve, he hurried out of the cottage into the windy darkness of the fall night. The red moon was lifting above the treetops eastward and by its dull light he started back toward the garage. All around him the trees were bending and creaking under the brawling, jovial hammering of the hard north wind.

  David stopped suddenly. Down through the frosty night had come a faint, far sound that jerked his head erect. A distant, phantom whistling borne on the rushing wind, rising, falling, growing stronger and stronger—the wild birds, southing through the noisy night, shrilling their exultant challenge as the wind bore their wings onward. That wild throb of freedom that he had thought dead clutched hard of a sudden at David’s heart.

  He stared up into the darkness with brilliant eyes, hair blowing in the wind. To be up there with them just once again—to fly with them just one more time—

  Why not? Why not fly this one last time and so satisfy that aching longing before he lost these last wings? He would not go far, would make but a short flight and then return to have the wings removed, to devote his life to Ruth and their son. No one would ever know.

  Swiftly he stripped off his clothing in the darkness, stood erect, spreading the wings that had been so long concealed and confined. Quaking doubt assailed him. Could he fly at all, now? Would these poor, stunted, second wings even bear him aloft for a few minutes? No, they wouldn’t—he knew they wouldn’t!