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  MUTANT

  HENRY KUTTNER

  Copyright

  Mutant

  Copyright 1953 by Lewis Padgett

  Cover art and eForeword to the electronic edition copyright © 2002

  by RosettaBooks, LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  For information address [email protected]

  First electronic edition published 2002 by RosettaBooks LLC, New York.

  ISBN 0-7953-0462-5

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  Contents

  eForeword

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  About this Title

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  eForeword

  Mutant: Henry Kuttner's dark novel of a hidden and persecuted group of telepaths in a post-industrial society was published by Ballantine in l953. The novel was a compilation of five related novelettes, four of them published in Astounding Science Fiction in l945, the last in Astounding in l953 to which Kuttner had added some bridging material and an epilogue. The telepaths, products of spontaneous mutation after an atomic war, (they are known as

  "Baldies" because their gift always makes them hairless and they wear wigs to pass undetected among the population) are feared and hated. They can read the thoughts of every human at will and this ability to invade privacy and anticipate action is soon perceived by the majority of non-telepaths as implacably threatening. The struggle for co-existence,the struggle among factions of humans and Baldies, some of who feel that extermination of the others is the only answer, is the concern of this novel and the solution to a seemingly insoluble problem is both elegant and surprising.

  Henry Kuttner (l9l4-l958) both alone and in collaboration with his wife C.L. Moore (l9ll-l987) was one of the most important and admired writers of science fiction's so-called "Golden Age"

  identified with John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction.

  Although his first published story, The Graveyard Rats (in Weird Tales) was category horror and a Lovecraft imitation, and subsequent stories in the l930's written for the lesser pulps were not admired, Kuttner after his marriage to the much more highly regarded.L.Moore in l940, began to write at an entirely different level of quality. His brilliant short stories and novelettes published in Astounding, most of them under the collaborative pseudonyms

  "Lawrence O'Donnell" and "Lewis Padgett" were highly regarded

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  and have been much reprinted over the many decades. The

  "Baldie" stories were published under the Padgett pseudonym and were probably written in collaboration with C.L. Moore; Mutant, one of the earliest Ballantine science fiction titles was. in print almost continuously for 30 years. Kuttner and Moore turned from writing to academic pursuits in the early l950's, both of them earning degrees in psychology at USC and Kuttner was in a graduate program in psychology when he died suddenly in l958. A scattering of late short stories - Rite Of Passage, Two-Handed Engines, Home There's No Returnin g - showed no diminution in his abilities.

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  Chapter One

  Somehow I had to stay alive until they found me. They would be hunting for the wreck of my plane, and eventually they’d find it, and then they’d find me, too. But it was hard to wait.

  Empty blue day stretched over the white peaks; then the blazing night you get at this altitude, and that was empty too. There was no sound or sight of a jet plane or a helicopter. I was completely alone.

  That was the real trouble.

  A few hundred years ago, when there were no telepaths, men were used to being alone. But I couldn’t remember a time when I’d- been locked in the bony prison of my skull, utterly and absolutely cut off from all other men. Deafness or blindness wouldn’t have mattered as much. They wouldn’t have mattered at all, to a telepath.

  Since my plane crashed behind the barrier of mountain peaks, I had been amputated from my species. And there is something in the constant communication of minds that keeps a man alive. An amputated limb dies for lack of oxygen. I was dying for lack of . . .

  there’s never been any word to express what it is that makes all telepaths one. But without it, a man is alone, and men do not live long, alone.

  I listened, with the part of the mind that listens for the soundless voices of other minds. I heard the hollow wind. I saw snow lifting in feathery, pouring ruffles. I saw the blue shadows deepening. I looked up, and the eastern peak was scarlet. It was sunset, and I was alone.

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  I reached out, listening, while the sky darkened. A star wavered, glimmered, and stood steadily overhead. Other stars came, while the air grew colder, until the sky blazed with their westward march.

  Now it was dark. In the darkness, there were the stars, and there was I. I lay back, not even listening. My people were gone.

  I watched the emptiness beyond the stars.

  Nothing around me or above me was alive. Why should I be alive, after all? It would be easy, very easy, to sink down into that quiet where there was no loneliness, because there was no life. I reached out around me, and my mind found no other thinking mind.

  I reached back into my memory, and that was a little better.

  A telepath’s memories go back a long way. A good long way, far earlier than his birth.

  I can see clearly nearly two hundred years into the past, before the sharp, clear telepathically-transmitted memories begin to fray and fade into secondary memories, drawn from books. Books go back to Egypt and Babylon. But they are not the primary memories, complete with sensory overtones, which an old man gives telepathically to a young one, and which are passed on in turn through the generations. Our biographies are not written in books.

  They are written in our minds and memories, especially the Key Lives which are handed down as fresh as they were once lived by our greatest leaders. . . .

  But they are dead, and I am alone.

  No. Not quite alone. The memories remain, Burkhalter and Barton, McNey and Linc Cody and Jeff Cody—a long time dead, but still vibrantly alive in my memory. I can summon up every thought, every emotion, the musty smell of grass—where?—the yielding of a rubbery walk beneath hurrying feet—whose?

  It would be so easy to relax and die.

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  No. Wait. Watch. They’re alive, Burkhalter and Barton, the Key Lives are still real, though the men who once lived them have died.

  They are your people. You’re not alone.

  Burkhalter and Barton, McNey and Linc and Jeff aren’t dead.

  Remember them. You lived their lives telepathically as you learned them, the way they once lived them, and you can live them again.

  You are not alone.

  So watch. Start the film unreeling. Then you won’t be alone at all, you’ll be Ed Burkhalter, t
wo hundred years ago, feeling the cool wind blow against your face from the Sierra peaks, smelling the timothy grass, reaching out mentally to glance into the mind of your son . . . the piper’s son. . . .

  It began.

  I was Ed Burkhalter.

  It was two hundred years ago—

  THE PIPER’S SON

  THE Green Man was climbing the glass mountains, and hairy, gnomish faces peered at him from crevices. This was only another step in the Green Man’s endless, exciting odyssey. He’d had a great many adventures already—in the Flame Country, among the Dimension Changers, with the City Apes who sneered endlessly while their blunt, clumsy fingers fumbled at deathrays. The trolls, however, were masters of magic, and were trying to stop the Green Man with spells. Little whirlwinds of force spun underfoot, trying to trip the Green Man, a figure of marvelous muscular development, handsome as a god, and hairless from head to foot, glistening pale green. The whirlwinds formed a fascinating pattern. If you could thread a precarious path among them—avoiding the pale yellow ones especially—you could get through.

  And the hairy gnomes watched malignantly, jealously, from their crannies in the glass crags.

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  Al Burkhalter, having recently achieved the mature status of eight full years, lounged under a tree and masticated a grass blade. He was so immersed in his daydreams that his father had to nudge his side gently to bring comprehension into the half-closed eyes. It was a good day for dreaming, anyway—a hot sun and a cool wind blowing down from the white Sierra peaks to the east. Timothy grass sent its faintly musty fragrance along the channels of air, and Ed Burkhalter was glad that his son was second-generation since the Blowup. He himself had been born ten years after the last bomb had been dropped, but secondhand memories can be pretty bad too.

  “Hello, Al,” he said, and the youth vouchsafed a halflidded glance of tolerant acceptance.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “Want to come downtown with me?”

  “Nope,” Al said, relaxing instantly into his stupor.

  Burkhalter raised a figurative eyebrow and half turned. On an impulse, then, he did something he rarely did without the tacit permission of the other party; he used his telepathic power to reach into Al’s mind. There was, he admitted to himself, a certain hesitancy, a subconscious unwillingness on his part, to do this, even though Al had pretty well outgrown the nasty, inhuman formlessness of mental babyhood. There had been a time when Al’s mind had been quite shocking in its alienage. Burkhalter remembered a few abortive experiments he had made before Al’s birth; few fathers-to-be could resist the temptation to experiment with embryonic brains, and that had brought back nightmares Burkhalter had not since his youth. There had been enormous rolling masses, and an appalling vastness, and other things.

  Prenatal memories were ticklish, and should be left to qualified mnemonic psychologists.

  But now Al was maturing, and daydreaming, as usual, in bright colors. Burkhalter, reassured, felt that he had fulfilled his duty as a monitor and left his son still eating grass and ruminating.

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  Just the same there was a sudden softness inside of him, and the aching, futile pity he was apt to feel for helpless things that were as yet unqualified for conflict with that extraordinarily complicated business of living. Conflict, competition, had not died out when war abolished itself; the business of adjustment even to one’s surroundings was a conflict, and conversation a duel. With Al, too, there was a double problem. Yes, language was in effect a tariff wall, and a Baldy could appreciate that thoroughly, since the wall didn’t exist between Baldies.

  Walking down the rubbery walk that led to town center, Burkhalter grinned wryly and ran lean fingers through his well-kept wig.

  Strangers were very often surprised to know that he was a Baldy, a telepath. They looked at him with wondering eyes, too courteous to ask how it felt to be a freak, but obviously avid. Burkhalter, who knew diplomacy, would be quite willing to lead the conversation.

  “My folks lived near Chicago after the Blowup. That was why.”

  “Oh.” Stare. “I’d heard that was why so many—” Startled pause.

  “Freaks or mutations. There were both. I still don’t know which class I belong to,” he’d add disarmingly.

  “You’re or freak!” They did protest too much.

  “Well, some mighty queer specimens came out of the radio-active-affected areas around the bomb-targets. Funny things happened to the germ plasm. Most of ‘em died out; they couldn’t reproduce; but you’ll still find a few creatures in sanitariums—two heads, you know. And so on.”

  Nevertheless they were always ill-at-ease. “You mean you can read my mind—now?”

  “I could, but I’m not. It’s hard work, except with another telepath.

  And we Baldies—well, we don’t, that’s all.” A man with abnormal muscle development wouldn’t go around knocking people down.

  Not unless he wanted to be mobbed. Baldies were always sneakingly conscious of a hidden peril: lynch law. And wise Baldies

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  didn’t even imply that they had an . . . extra sense. They just said they were different, and let it go at that.

  But one question was always implied, though not always mentioned. “If I were a telepath, I’d . . . how much do you make a year?”

  They were surprised at the answer. A mindreader certainly could make a fortune, if he wanted. So why did Ed Burkhalter stay a semantics expert in Modoc Publishing Town, when a trip to one of the science towns would enable him to get hold of secrets that would get him a fortune?

  There was a good reason. Self-preservation was part of it. For which reason Burkhalter, and many like him, wore toupees. Though there were many Baldies who did not.

  Modoc was a twin town with Pueblo, across the mountain barrier south of the waste that had been Denver. Pueblo held the presses, photolinotypes, and the machines that turned scripts into books, after Modoc had dealt with them. There was a helicopter distribution fleet at Pueblo, and for the last week Oldfield, the manager, had been demanding the manuscript of “Psychohistory,”

  turned out by a New Yale man who had got tremendously involved in past emotional problems, to the detriment of literary clarity. The truth was that he distrusted Burkhalter. And Burkhalter, neither a priest nor a psychologist, had to become both without admitting it to the confused author of “Psychohistory.”

  The sprawling buildings of the publishing house lay ahead and below, more like a resort than anything more utilitarian. That had been necessary. Authors were peculiar people, and often it was necessary to induce them to take hydrotherapic treatments before they were in shape to work out their books with the semantic experts. Nobody was going to bite them, but they didn’t realize that, and either cowered in corners, terrified, or else blustered their way around, using language few could understand. Jem Quayle, author of “Psychohistory,” fitted into neither group; he was simply baffled by the intensity of his own research. His personal history had qualified him too well for emotional involvements with the past—

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  and that was a serious matter when a thesis of this particular type was in progress.

  Dr. Moon, who was on the Board, sat near the south entrance, eating an apple which he peeled carefully with his silver-hilted dagger. Moon was fat, short, and shapeless; he didn’t have much hair, but he wasn’t a telepath; Baldies were entirely hairless. He gulped and waved at Burkhalter.

  “Ed . . . urp . . . want to talk to you.”

  “Sure,” Burkhalter said, agreeably coming to a standstill and rocking on his heels. Ingrained habit made him sit down beside the Boardman; Baldies, for obvious reasons, never stood up when nontelepaths were sitting. Their eyes met now on the same level.

  Burkhalter said, “What’s up?”

  “The store got some Shasta apples flown in yesterday. Better tell Ethel to get some before the
y’re sold out. Here.” Moon watched his companion eat a chunk, and nod.

  “Good. I’ll have her get some. The copter’s laid up for today, though; Ethel pulled the wrong gadget.”

  “Foolproof,” Moon said bitterly. “Huron’s turning out some sweet models these days; I’m getting my new one from Michigan. Listen, Pueblo called me this morning on Quayle’s book.”

  “Oldfield?”

  “Our boy,” Moon nodded. “He says can’t you send over even a few chapters.”

  Burkhalter shook his head. “I don’t think so. There are some abstracts right in the beginning that just have to be clarified, and Quayle is—” He hesitated.

  “What?”

  Burkhalter thought about the Oedipus complex he’d uncovered in Quayle’s mind, but that was sacrosanct, even though it kept Quayle

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  from interpreting Darius with cold logic. “He’s got muddy thinking in there. I can’t pass it; I tried it on three readers yesterday, and got different reactions from all of them. So far ‘Psychohistory’ is all things to all men. The critics would lambaste us if we released the book as is. Can’t you string Oldfield along for a while longer?”

  “Maybe,” Moon said doubtfully. “I’ve got a subjective novella I could rush over. It’s light vicarious eroticism, and that’s harmless; besides, it’s semantically O.K.’d. We’ve been holding it up for an artist, but I can put Duman on it. I’ll do that, yeah. I’ll shoot the script over to Pueblo and he can make the plates later. A merry life we lead, Ed.”

  “A little too merry sometimes,” Burkhalter said. He got up, nodded, and went in search of Quayle, who was relaxing on one of the sun decks.

  Quayle was a thin, tall man with a worried face and the abstract air of an unshelled tortoise. He lay on his flexiglass couch, direct sunlight toasting him from above, while the reflected rays sneaked up on him from below, through the transparent crystal. Burkhalter pulled off his shirt and dropped on a sunner beside Quayle. The author glanced at Burkhalter’s hairless chest and half-formed revulsion rose in him: A Baldy . . . no privacy . . . none of his business . . . fake eyebrows and lashes; he’s still a—