himself, he thought I was from another planet!
Eh?
Describe yourself again.
He complied.
Suddenly she knew with absolute certainty that this was the one she was looking for. Out of all the people on earth, here was a man made for her.
Could you put your hand through a wooden door?
Of course.
She smiled happily. She meant to have him.
Hello.
Hello.
There was silence.
She wrinkled her forehead and tapped her knee. He had ceased transmitting.
He’ll be back, she thought with satisfaction. I wonder what size suit he wears? I think I’ll buy him a nice wool one. I want my husband to look presentable.
Smiling, she went to the phone. She called her bank and ordered her account transferred to the all-night branch in Los Angeles. She wanted to have her money available so she could leave town to go to him the moment she found out where he lived: or (assuming he came to her) to have it handy so she could leave town with him the moment he proposed to her—even if it were in the middle of the night.
After that, she went to the door and put her hand through it.
I’m going to have to figure this out, she thought. If I figure out how I did it, I’m sure I can teach other people. I’m no different than they are; and I don’t intend to be.
She went back to the bed and sat down and began to think.
And she discovered that she could remember the greater part of everything she’d ever read.
Chapter IV
Calvin practiced teleportation for endless hours. He kept the metal ball Forential had given him in almost constant motion.
He would exclaim delightedly and hurl it toward one of the twenty-seven other mutants in his compartment. Until the time he hit John in the back of the head with it, his intended victims had always parried it. John lay in a pool of blood, and Calvin began to cry—loud, shrill wails of despair and contrition. When Forential came, he knew instinctively what had happened.
Calvin represented the only failure the aliens had experienced in their mutation program; ten years ago his mind had ceased to develop. But for Forential’s intercession, the council would have had him destroyed long ago; Forential, like a proud parent, kept hoping to overcome Calvin’s heredity.
Forential waved his tentacles in exasperation. “You, here, Walt,” he said. “We’ll have to hurry. I’ll show you how, and you can do it.”
Walt, the most adept mutant in the compartment, listened attentively and then began to heal John. His face wrinkled in deep concentration. Flesh came together; blood ceased to flow; bone knitted. Forential grunted approval.
“Watch Walt, now,” the alien instructed. “He’s doing it nicely.”
The others, breath held, watched.
At length John’s head was healed. John stirred. He opened his eyes and looked about angrily. He stood up and hit Calvin in the face with his fist. Calvin, tears streaming down his cheeks, fingered his nose and sobbed brokenly. He put out a hand to touch Walt reassuringly.
Walt was his friend.
Walt—he had no other name—was six feet two inches tall, and, as Julia observed, handsome. His parents—he did not know this—were Americans; he had never seen them. He had been stolen from the hospital by Forential shortly after he was born. The alien, invisible, had come for him, clucked softly, wrapped him in a warm, invisible mantle, and taken him away; and the council of aliens had drawn a line through the names of another set of parents who had been exposed to the powerful, mutation-inducing field. Walt thought of Forential—in charge of their compartment—as a friend, as a parent, as a playmate, and as a counselor.
*
Shortly after Walt had healed John, the mutants of the smaller compartment gathered at the observation screen in the floor—or what was to them the floor: it was actually the broad rim of the wheel. They could look down at the screen and see a somewhat flickering image of Earth lying below their feet.
“Forential told us we’d get many strange powers . . . .” one said.
Just before we went down to the planet, another completed the thought.
It’s growing time, then.
They laughed together with excitement, and Calvin cracked his knuckles nervously.
“Let’s play a trick on Forential,” Calvin said. “Let’s see if we can go through the bulkhead.” His face was bright and hopeful. “Let’s huh?”
Calvin raced to the far end of the compartment. “Come on!”
Like guilty children, they looked at one another. Then a few of them joined Calvin. All right, let’s.
“Don’t,” Walt cautioned. “It’s just machinery on the other side.”
Why can’t our thoughts penetrate it, then?
We aren’t developed enough, Walt thought.
“Huh?” Calvin asked. He began pounding the bulkhead with his fist.
“No,” one of the other mutants said. “Like this.” He concentrated and tried to put a hand through the bulkhead.
We aren’t developed enough.
Still the mutants continued. Since the aliens had stepped up the power in the two transmitters (power that closed the final connection in the mutants’ brains and held it closed) the mutants were able to assault any problem with the full potentialities of the human brain. But even that was not enough. The aliens had planned carefully in order to keep the two mutant groups from discovering each other.
*
Forential came to make a special announcement. He spoke English with an accent that the mutants (who had learned the language from him) could not even imitate. As he surveyed them, his eyes shone with pride: they were a good, sturdy, healthy lot. “Children,” he said. “Earth is now in the middle of a war. There will be little work left for us within another two months.”
Calvin cried and waved his arms wildly and bounced the ball viciously around the room. Every earthman who killed an earthman was depriving him personally, of a victim. He wrung his hands.
“There’ll be a thousand or so left, Calvin,” Forential promised. “You must practice very diligently to be able to cope with them.”
Calvin
