Argosy, September 1955 — page 119: what you’re looking at

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

THE CHRYSALIDS er7 Half-Uncle Angus acquired the habit of referring to my father as “that purity bigot.”” And it was my father who came off worst, because it is always wise to keep on the right side of the District Inspector, as the delay over Petra’s certificate showed. Now, to you, in a country so differently situated, this matter of Offences, which played such a large part in our lives, may not be quite clear. Our neighbours to the east were less concerned with it the farther east one went, but when one was as far west as Waknuk there was need for constant vigilance. Some thirty-five miles away at the nearest point, Wild Country began; ten or fifteen miles farther on, it merged into the lawless Fringes, which extended another forty or fifty miles until one reached the impassablebarrier of the Badlands. The chief difference between Waknuk and the Wild Country was the degree of stability. When proper care was taken, there was an almost eighty-per-cent chance that seeds sown or stock mated in Waknuk would produce orthodox results: with the rich soil, this made farming there quite profitable. In Wild Country, however, although it was quite possible to live there in a civilized way, the chances were fifty per cent or more that a crop would go wrong, even using imported seed, so that farming became barely economic at all; while if you were to plant close to the Fringes, no one could say what monstrosity might not come up. All these things that you didn’t expect were Offences. Uncle Axel explained it to me when I was small and rather worried by some of our more severe texts such as: Accursed is the Mutant in the Sight of God and Man! ‘A Mutant,” he told me, “ is a thing that God didn’t intend to exist. You know what a head of corn should look like, or a potato— well, that’s the way God made them and intended them to look. But sometimes there is an evil in them which makes them grow - differently, so they are called Offences. It is our duty to destroy these Offences so that they shall not produce young Offences of their own kind.” ‘“* But how do people know which are the right ones? ”’ I asked. “A lot of them are described—some with pictures—in Nichol- son’s Repentances,” he told me. ‘Ill show you that one day. And then there is a list which the Government at Rigo sends out, so that if there is any argument the Inspector looks it up in his copy of the list, and if he still can’t decide, he appeals to the Council. But that doesn’t happen very often, because when there is anything wrong, you can usually tell pretty easily.” I was silent for a while. His explanation had shed a new and helpful light on several things that had puzzled me—and, while exciting me, had been rather frightening, too. Sometimes these had been quite impressive occasions. ‘The first sign of one was usually that my father came into the house in a bad temper. ‘Then, in the evening, he would call everyone to- gether and proclaim that we were harbouring an Offence. comicbooks.conn