Argosy, September 1955 — page 124: what you’re looking at

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

122 JOHN WYNDHAM A Mutant, my father had called it . . . a Mutant! I recalled the voice of a visiting preacher, and the way he had thundered from the pulpit, ‘‘ Accursed 1s the Mutant! ”’ Accursed is the Mutant. . .'The Mutant, the enemy of the human race, of all God’s creation; the emissary of the Devil who tries unflaggingly, eternally, to destroy the divine order and turn our land, the stronghold of God, into a lewd chaos like the Fringes; to make it a place without the law, where the plants and the animals and the almost-human beings, too, brought forth young unlike themselves; where unnameable creatures prowled, abominable growths flourished, and travesties swam in the waters, where mad- ness mocked the Lord with obscene fantasies. I prayed very earnestly those nights. ‘‘ Oh God,” I said, ‘“ please let me be like other people. I don’t want to be different. Make it so that when I wake up in the morning I’ll be just like everybody else.”’ But in the morning, when I tested myself, Id find that the prayer hadn’t altered anything. I had to get up just the same person as had gone to bed, and I had to go into the big kitchen and eat my breakfast facing the panel which said, Accursed 1s the Mutant. And so I went on being very frightened... After about the fifth night that praying hadn’t done any good, Uncle Axel caught me at the end of breakfast and said I’d better eome along and help him mend a plough. We worked on that for about a couple of hours, then he declared a rest, so we went out of the forge to sit in the sun, with our backs against a wall. He gave me a bit of bread and cheese. We munched for a minute or two, then he said, ‘‘ Now, Davie boy, let’s have it.’ ** Have what? ” I said, though I knew. * Whatever’s been making you look as if you were sickening for something the last day or two,” he told me. | Uncle -Axel was the only person who could have asked me that without throwing me into a panic. He was the only one—well, the only normal one—who knew about the difference. All the same, I still hesitated. Nearly two years before, he had come upon me one day when I was talking to Rosalind—Rosalind Morton, my _ half-cousin, whose father owned the greathorses—and I was doing it out loud because I hadn’t had much practice then. It must have been an instinct of self-preservation that had made me keep it to myself, for I had no active realization of danger— so little, in fact, that when Uncle Axel came across me behind the rick apparently chatting to myself, I made very little effort to dissemble. I can remember how he stood regarding me, with a half-amused frown: he must, I think, have been there for a minute or two before I looked up and saw him. ‘“* Hullo, Davie boy, and who would you be chattering to? Is it fairies, or gnomes, or just the rabbits? ”’ he asked. I shook my head. conniclooks.COmn)