Drummond gave Robinson a gentle push toward the inner door. ‘You’re exhausted, beat up, ready to quit,’ he said. ‘It’ll look different tomorrow. Go on in and see Elaine. Give her my regards. Then take a long rest before going back to work. I still think you’ve got a good kid.’

  Mechanically, the de facto President of the United States left the room. Hugh Drummond stared after him a moment, then went out into the street, zipping up his jacket against the cold.

  CHAIN OF LOGIC

  Brother bringeth

  brother his bane,

  and sons of sisters

  split kinship’s bonds.

  Not ever a man

  spareth another.

  Hard is the world.

  Whoredom waxeth.

  Ax-time, sword-time,

  – shields are cloven –

  wind-time and wolf-time,

  ere the world waneth.

  – Elder Edda

  I

  HE was nearly always alone, and even when others were beside him, even when he was speaking with them, he seemed to be standing on the far side of an unbridgeable gulf. His only companion was a gaunt gray mongrel with a curiously shaped head and savage disposition, and the two had traveled far over the empty countryside, the rolling plains and straggling woods and high bluffs that went for miles down the river. They were an uncanny sight, walking along a ridge against the blood-flaring sunset, the thin, ragged, big-headed boy like a dwarf from some legend and the shaggy, lumpish animal skulking at his heels.

  Roderick Wayne saw them thus as he walked home along the river. They were trotting rapidly on the other side. He hailed them, and they stopped, and the boy stared curiously, almost wonderingly. Wayne knew that attitude, though Alaric was only a gargoyle outline against the fantastically red sky. He knew that his son was looking and looking at him, as if trying to focus, as if trying to remember who the – stranger – was. And the old pain lay deep in him, though he called loudly enough: ‘Come on over, Al!’

  Wayne had had a hard day’s work in the shop, and he was tired. Fixing machines was a long jump down from teaching mathematics in Southvale College, but the whole world had fallen and men survived as best they could in its ruins. He was better off than most – couldn’t complain.

  Of old he had been wont to stroll by the river that traversed the campus, each evening after classes, smoking his pipe and swinging his cane, thinking perhaps of what Karen would have for supper or of the stark impersonal beauty of the latest development in quantum mechanics – two topics not as unrelated as one might suppose. The quiet summer dusks were not to be spent in worry or petty plans for the next day, there was always time enough for that. He simply walked along in his loose-jointed fashion, breathing tobacco smoke and the cool still air, watching the tall old trees mirror themselves in the water or the molten gold and copper of sunset. There would be a few students on the broad smooth lawns, who would hail him in a friendly way, for Bugsy Wayne was well liked – otherwise only the river and himself and the evening star.

  But that was sixteen or more years ago, and his memories of it were dim by now. The brief, incredible nightmare of a war that wiped out every important city in the world in a couple of months – its long-drawn aftermath of diseases, starvation, battle, work, woe, and the twisting of human destiny – that covered those earlier days, distorting them like rocks seen through a flowing stream. Now the campus stood in ruinous desolation, cattle staked out in the long grass, crumbling empty buildings staring with blind eyes at the shards of man.

  After the cities went and the world’s culture shattered into a fratricidal fighting for scraps, there was no more need for professors but a desperate shortage of mechanics and technicians. Southvale, a sleepy college town in the agricultural Midwest, drew itself into a tight communistic dictatorship to defend what it had. Those had been cruel times, when every stranger was met with guns. There had been open battles with wandering starvelings.

  But the plagues were kept out, and they had saved enough food for most of them to survive even that first winter. Thereafter, farm machinery had to be kept going. When the gasoline gave out, it had to be converted to the power of horse, mule, ox, and man. So Wayne had been assigned to the machine shop and, somewhat to his own surprise, turned out to be an excellent technician. His talent for robbing now useless tractors and automobiles in search of spare parts for the literally priceless food machines got his nickname changed to Cannibal, and he rose to general superintendent.

  That was a long time ago, and things had improved since. The dictatorship was gone now, and Southvale was again a part of the nation. But it still didn’t need professors, and it had enough elementary teachers for its waning child population. So Wayne was still machine-shop boss. In spite of which, he was only a very tired man in patched and greasy overalls, going home to supper, and his thoughts darkened as he saw his child.

  Alaric Wayne crossed the bridge a few yards upriver and joined his father. They were an odd contrast: the man tall and stooped, with grayed hair and a long, lined face; the boy small for his fourteen years, lean and ragged, his frail-looking body a little too short for his long legs, his head a little too big for both. Under ruffled brown hair his face was thin, straight-lined and delicately cut, but the huge light-blue eyes were vacant.

  ‘Where’ve you been all day, son?’ asked Wayne. He didn’t really expect an answer, and got none. Alaric rarely spoke, didn’t even seem to hear most questions. He was looking ahead now like a blind creature, but for all his gawky appearance there was a certain grace in his movements.

  Wayne’s glance held only pity, and there was an infinite weariness in his mind. This is the future. This was man’s decision, to sell his birthright, his racial existence, for the sovereign prerogatives of nations existing today only in name and memory. And what will come of it, no one can know.

  They walked up a hill and onto the street. Grass had grown between paving blocks, and tumbledown houses stood empty in weed-covered lots. A little further on, they came into the district still inhabited. The population had fallen to about half the prewar, through privation and battle and sterility, and there had been little immigration since the restrictions were lifted.

  At first glance, Southvale had a human, almost medieval look. A horse-drawn wagon creaked by. Folk went down toward the market place in rude homespun clothes, carrying torches and clumsy lanterns. Candlelight shone warmly through the windows of tenanted houses.

  Then you saw the dogs and horses and cattle more closely – and the children.

  A pack of grimy urchins went by, normal by the old standards, normal too in their shouting spite: ‘Mutie! Mutie! Yaaah, mutunt!’ Alaric did not seem to notice them, but his dog bristled and growled. In the dusk the animal’s high round head, hardly canine, seemed demoniac, and his eyes gleamed red.

  Another band of children went by, as dirty and tattered as the first, but – not human. Mutant. No two alike. A muzzled beast face. A finger less or a finger more than five. Feet like toeless, horny-skinned hoofs, twisted backs, grotesque limping gait. Pattering dwarfs. Acromengalic giants, seven feet tall at six years of age. A bearded six-year-old. And worse.

  Not all were obviously deformed. Most mutations were, naturally, unfavorable, but none in that group was cripplingly handicapped. Several looked entirely normal, and their internal differences had been discovered more or less accidentally. Probably many of the ‘human’ children had some such variation, unsuspected, or a latent mutation that would show up later. Nor were all the deviations deformities. Extremely long legs, or an abnormally high metabolism, for instance, had advantages as well as drawbacks.

  Those were the two kinds of children in Southvale and, by report, the world. A third pitiful group hardly counted, that of hopelessly crippled mutants, born with some handicap of mind or body which usually killed them in a few years.

  Wayne remembered the horror and despair following the postwar tide of abnormal births, the abortion and infanticide and pogroms. It had faded, of necessity. People knew their child had about three chances in four of being mutant to a greater or lesser degree – but after all, there could be a human, if not this time then next, and asylums were maintained for the unwanted young. There could even be a genuinely favorable mutation.

  But Wayne had not seen or heard of any such, and in spite of all the wild superman stories doubted that he ever would. There were so many ways of not doing something, so few ways of shaping life right. Even unquestionably good characteristics were, through chance, usually accompanied by a loss elsewhere – like the Martin kid, with his eagle-keen eyes and total deafness.

  Wayne waved to that boy, running along with the mutie band, and got an answer. The rest ignored him. Mutants were shy of humans, often resentful and suspicious. And one could hardly blame them. This first generation had been hounded unmercifully by the normal children as it grew up, and had had to endure a lot of abuse and discrimination on the part of adults. Today, with most of their persecutors mature, the mutants were a majority among the children, but they still had little to do with humans of their generation beyond a few fights. The older ones generally realized that they would inherit the earth, and were content to wait. Old age and death were their allies.

  But Alaric – the ancient uncertain pain stirred in Wayne. He didn’t know. Certainly the boy was mutant; an X-ray, taken when the town’s machine had recently been put back into service, had shown his internal organs to be reversed in position. That meant little, it had happened before the war now and then, but apparently he also had moronic traits; for he spoke so little and so poorly, had flunked out of elementary school, and seemed wholly remote from the world outside him. But – well, the kid read omnivorously, and at tremendous speed if he wasn’t just idly turning pages. He tinkered with apparatus Wayne had salvaged from the abandoned college labs, though there seemed to be no particular purpose in his actions. And every now and then he made some remark which might be queerly significant – unless, of course, that was only his parents’ wishful thinking.

  Well, Alaric was all they had now. Little Ike, born before the war, had died of hunger the first winter. Since Al’s birth they’d had no more children. The radioactivity seemed to have a slow sterilizing effect on many people. And Al was a good kid – well-behaved, shy but not without affection; perhaps all you could really say against him was that he lacked color.

  They reached their own home, and Karen met them at the door. The mere sight of her blonde vivacity was enough to lift Wayne’s spirits. ‘Hello, gentlemen,’ she said. ‘Guess what?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ answered Wayne.

  ‘Government jet was here today. We’re going to get regular air service.’

  ‘No kidding!’

  ‘Honest Injun. I have it straight from the pilot, a colonel no less. I was down by the field, on the way to market, about noon, when it landed, and of course forced my way into the conversation.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have to,’ said Wayne admiringly.

  ‘Flatterer! Anyway, he was informing the mayor officially, and a few passers-by like myself threw in their two bucks’ worth.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ Wayne entered the house. ‘Of course, I knew the government was starting an airline, but I never thought we’d get a place on it, even if we do have a cleared space euphemistically termed an airport.’

  ‘Anyway, think of it. Think of the business that’ll be coming in. And we’ll be getting clothes, fuel, machinery, food – no, I suppose we’ll be shipping that ourselves. Apropos which, soup’s a-boiling.’

  It was a good meal, plain ingredients but imaginative preparation. Wayne attacked it vigorously, but his mind was restless. ‘Funny,’ he mused, ‘how our civilization overreached itself. It grew topheavy and collapsed in a war so great we had to start almost from scratch again. But we had some machines, and enough knowledge to rebuild without too many intervening steps. Our railroads and highways, for instance, are gone, but now we’re replacing them with a national airline. Likewise, I imagine later we’ll go direct from foot and horseback to private planes.’

  ‘And we won’t be isolated any more,’ said Karen eagerly. ‘We won’t be contacting the outside world maybe four times a year. We’ll be part of the world again.’

  ‘Mmmm – what’s left of it, and that isn’t much. Europe and most of Asia, I’m told, are too far gone to count; the southern parts of this country are still pretty savage.’

  ‘It’ll be a curious new culture,’ said Karen thoughtfully. ‘Scattered towns and villages, connected by airlines so fast that cities probably won’t need to grow up again. Stretches of wild country in between, and – well, it’ll be strange.’

  ‘Certainly that,’ said Wayne. ‘But we can hardly extrapolate at this stage of the game. Look, in places like this one people are pretty well back on their feet – blights and bugs and plagues just about licked, outlaws rounded up or gone into remote areas. Martial law was – ah – undeclared nine years ago, when the U.S. and Canada were formally united and Hugh Drummond was elected President.’

  ‘I know a little of that already, O omniscient one. What are you leading up to?’

  ‘Simply this. In spite of all which has been accomplished, there’s still a long ways to go. South of us is anarchic barbarism. We have precarious contact with some towns and districts in Latin America, Russia, China, Australia, South Africa, and a few other areas. But apart from that we – northern North America – are an island of civilization in a planetary sea of savagery. What will come of that? I can’t predict it. Or still more important – what will come of the mutants?’

  Karen’s eyes were suddenly haggard as they searched Alaric’s unheeding face. ‘Perhaps at last – the superman,’ she whispered.

  ‘Not at all probable, dear, even if that has been the great legend of the postwar world. You know how many mutated recessive genes there must still be, to show up unpredictably in all the centuries to come. There can be no family line on Earth which won’t produce sports sometimes in the next few generations. And so few of those characteristics can be favorable. God only knows what the end result will be – but it won’t be human.’

  ‘There may be other senses of that word.’

  ‘There will be. But they won’t be today’s.’

  ‘Still,’ said Karen wistfully, ‘if all the favorable changes showed up in one individual, wouldn’t he be a superman?’

  ‘You assume no unfavorable ones, possibly linked, will appear. And the odds against it are unguessable. Anyway, what is a superman? Is he a bulletproof organism of a thousand horsepower? Is he a macrocephalic dwarf talking in symbolic logic formulas? I suppose you mean a godlike being, a greatly refined and improved human. I grant you, a few minor changes in human physique would be desirable, though not at all necessary. But any psychologist will tell you Homo sapiens is a long way from realizing the full capacities he’s already got. He needs training right now, not evolution.

  ‘In any case,’ finished Wayne flatly, ‘we’re arguing a dead issue. Homo sapiens has committed race suicide. The mutants will be man.’

  ‘Yes – I suppose so. What do you think of the steak?’

  After supper, Wayne settled down in his easy chair. Tobacco and newspapers were still unavailable, and the government was still taking all the radios and teevees produced in its new or revived factories. But he had a vast library, his own books and those he had rescued from the college, and most of them were timeless. He opened a well-thumbed little volume and glanced at lines he knew by heart.

  ‘For a’ that an’ a’ that,

  It’s comin’ yet for a’ that,

  When men to men, the whole world o’er,

  Shall brothers be for a’ that.’

  I wonder. How often I’ve wondered! And even if Burns was right, will the plowman’s common sense apply to nonhumanness? Lets see what another old drunkard has to say—

  ‘And we, that now make merry in the Room

  They left, and Summer dresses in new bloom,

  Ourselves must we beneath the Couch of Earth

  Descend – ourselves to make a Couch – for whom?’

  His gaze went to Alaric. The boy sprawled on the floor in a litter of open books. His eyes darted from one to another, skipping crazily, their blankness become a weird blue flicker. The books – Theory of Functions, Nuclear Mechanics, Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, Principles of Psychology, Thermodynamics, Rocket Engineering, Introduction to Biochemistry – None of it could be skimmed through, or alternated that way. The greatest genius in all history couldn’t have done it. And a senseless jumble like that … no, Alaric was just turning pages. He must be only a – moron?

  Well, I’m tired. Might as well go to bed. Tomorrow’s Sunday – good thing we can take holidays again, and sleep late.

  II

  There were some fifty men in Richard Hammer’s gang, and about ten women equally gaunt and furtive and dangerous. They moved slowly along the riverbank, cursing the rocks they stumbled on, but in a ferocious whisper. Overhead a half moon gave vague light from a cloudy sky. The river sped on its way, moonlight shimmering fitfully off its darkness, and an uncertain wind ghosted through soughing trees. Somewhere a dog howled, and a wild cow bellowed alarm for her calf. The night was cool and damp and waiting.

  ‘Dick! How much longer, Dick?’

  Hammer turned at the low call and scowled back at the dim forms of his followers. ‘Shut up,’ he growled. ‘No talkin’ on march.’

  ‘I’ll talk when I please.’ The voice was louder.

  Hammer hunched his great shoulders and thrust his battered hairy face aggressively into the moonlight. ‘I’m still boss,’ he said quietly. ‘Anytime you want to fight me for the job, go ahead.’