Argosy, September 1955 — page 117: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

te THE CHRYSALIDS its and so on, so she got her certificate. Nobody could blame the Inspector for that: she looked as normal a human as I] did... Ours was a very godfearing household. My grandfather, who was one of the pioneers at Waknuk, had built the chapel, and preached in it. My father had followed his example and preached there frequently, too. He also preached and prayed a lot at home, so that some of our workers got rather tired of it. However, the thanksgiving for Petra was not a thing anybody would grudge, so we all listened patiently to my father and made our responses with a good will. Most of the life of our house went on in the big kitchen, rather than in the sitting-room, and you had only to enter it to realize that we were orthodox and exemplary. Among the burnished pans that hung against the walls because they were too big to go into the cupboards were a number of wooden panels with admonishments, mostly taken from Nicholson’s Repent- ances, decoratively burnt into them. ‘The one on the left of the fireplace said: Keep Pure the Stock. On the opposite wall was: Blessed is the Norm, and the largest was a panel on the back wall that faced you as you came in. It warned everybody: WATCH THOU FOR THE MUTANT! References to these texts had made me familiar with them long before I could read, and with the others elsewhere about the house, such as: The Devil 1s the Father of Deviation, and The Norm is the Will of God. I think there was considered to be some virtue in my ability to quote them at an early age, but there might have been more if anyone had taken the trouble to see that I had some idea what they were about. The truth is, however, that they meant almost nothing—I was able to join in the thanksgiving for the normality of Petra quite sincerely, and remain unperturbed by the surrounding precepts although I had by that time known for some years that I had one quality not shared by anyone else in the household. Somehow, I still failed entirely to connect my difference with the implications of those long-familiar texts. There was, therefore, no mockery at all in my heart while I listened to my father thanking God for blessing his house with the addition of a new child of the true human stock. Even though at one moment I caught my Uncle Axel’s gaze resting speculatively upon me while my father prayed, I thought nothing of it. Nor did it occur to me—and probably not to anyone else, with the possible exception of Uncle Axel—that the Inspector could have been in any way deceived about Petra... My half-Uncle, Angus Morton, owned the big farm less than a mile away, with fields that were in some places contiguous to our own. Half-Uncle Angus and my father had never cared for one another. comiclbooks.conn