That was a long time ago, and conditions had improved since. The dictatorship was relaxed now, but Southvale still didn’t need professors, and it had enough elementary teachers for its waning child population. So Wayne was still machine shop boss. In spite of which, he was only a very tired man in patched and greasy overalls, going home to supper, and his thoughts darkened as he saw his child.

Alaric Wayne crossed the ruinous bridge a few yards upriver and joined his father. They were an odd contrast, the man tall and stooped with grayed hair and a long, lined face; the boy small for his fourteen years, lean and ragged, his frail-looking body too short for his long legs, his head too big for both. Under ruffled brown hair his face was thin, almost intense in its straight-lined, delicately cut pensiveness, but his huge light-blue eyes were vacant and unfocused.

“Where’ve you been all day, son?” asked Wayne. He didn’t really expect an answer, and got none. Alaric rarely spoke, didn’t even seem to hear most questions. He was looking blankly ahead now, like a blind creature, but for all his gawky appearance moved with a certain grace.

Wayne’s glance held only pity, his mind only an infinite weariness. And this is the future. The war, loading air and earth with radioactive colloids, dust, which won’t burn out for a century. Not enough radioactivity to be lethal to any but highly susceptible individuals—but enough to saturate our organisms and environment, enough to start an explosion of mutations in every living creature. This was man’s decision, to sell his birthright, his racial existence, for the sovereign prerogatives of nations existing today only in name and memory. And what will come of it, nobody can know.

They walked up a hill and onto the street. Grass had grown between paving blocks, and tumbledown houses stood vacantly in weed-covered lots. A little farther on, though, they came into the district still inhabited. The population had fallen to about half the prewar, through privation and battle as well as causes which had once been more usual. At first glance, Southvale had a human, almost medieval look. A horse-drawn wagon creaked by. Folk went down toward the market place in rude homespun clothes, carrying torches and clumsy lanterns. Candlelight shone warmly through the windows of tenanted houses.

Then one saw the dogs and horses and cattle more closely—and the children. And knew what an irrevocable step had been taken, knew that man would, in a racial sense, no longer be human.

A small pack of grimy urchins raced by, normal by the old standards, normal too in their shouting spite: “Mutie! Mutie! Yaaah, mutant!” Alaric did not seem to notice them, but his dog bristled and growled. In the dusk the animal’s high round head, hardly canine, seemed demoniac, and his eyes gleamed red.

Then another band of children went by, as dirty and tattered as the first, but—not human. Mutant. No two alike. A muzzled beast face. An extra finger or more, or a deficiency. Feet like toeless, horny-skinned hoofs. Twisted skeletons, grotesque limping gait. Pattering dwarfs. Acromegalic giants, seven feet tall at twelve years of age. A bearded six-year-old. Things even worse—