brightly. The soldier screamed, struck at the mutant’s
face, smashed the jawbone. The mouth relaxed, released
him, but the mutant was still awake, still struggled to gain
control of itself and of the situation it found itself in.
“You did this!” Morsfagen roared, turning on me, point-
ing with a hand that trembled uncontrollably.
“No,” I said quietly.
“You’ll pay! Damn you, you’ll see the woman raped for
this, you’ll see her humiliated!”
I could not even summon up the slightest bit of disgust
for him. I looked with the eyes of the man I had been, but
with the judgment of a god, and I could do no more than
pity him. In a way, I resented my benevolence. I had
longed for the power to strike back with thunder and with
lightning. But now that the time had come, I found him
deserving of scorn and pity more than wrathful venge-
ance.
“What is wrong with him?” he asked, shoving his broad
face square into mine.
I knew exactly what was happening with Child’s husk,
though the rest of them could never possibly strike upon
the truth. When I had left that shell, I had momentarily
forgotten something which I should have remembered.
There was still one portion of Child’s mind down there in
the black waste of his body: the id. All those scorpion
analogues which I had dispersed in the ice-floored subter-
ranean cavern so long ago were now risen up and in
command of the mutant flesh. Normally the most directly
impotent of the mind’s factions, it now reigned without
control, without opposition. But the id alone was not a
functioning consciousness and could never hope to control
the body: the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde syndrome was a
complete impossibility, something that could only exist in
fiction. The mutant husk would die now, days after its
mental expiration, with the scorpion-clawed id seeking con-
trol to gratify its sex lusts and its blood longings.
“Everyone grab him at once!” Morsfagen directed,
leading the others in on the bed.
The mutant thrashed wildly, pitched from side to side of
the bed. Finally, it grasped the rails and clambered against
them, flung itself over the side. It crashed onto the floor
with a sickening crunch of flimsy bones, biting at the air,
spitting blood across the tiles, clawing and weakly kicking
at anyone who tried to bend to it, or to give it assistance
in its time of need. To the id, there was no such thing as a
friend, and it acted accordingly.
Then it succumbed.
Quietly, like a sigh.
Motionless on the hospital floor, with smears of blood
marking the space around it, it seemed more like a squashed
insect than the ex-home of a human creature.
They stared at the corpse for a long while, transfixed,
perhaps, by its inhumanness. Then Morsfagen turned to
look at me with the malevolence I had once despised.
“You killed him,” he said matter-of-factly, beyond ha-
tred now. He turned to the soldier named Larry. “Arrest
him. Get that bastard out of my sight!”
Larry lifted his gun, grinning. He enjoyed using it too
much. As he advanced on me like a homicidal maniac, I
began to think that even the mindless shell of the mutant
had been more human that this boy. Behind those eyes,
there was something a little less than a man.
“Stop where you are,” I said.
But he did not, of course.
I reached out for him, touched him, took him. His face
went utterly blank, and he ceased his advance.
“What the hell—” Morsfagen began.
With other esp fingers, I touched the minds of everyone
in that room and delivered them into a state of sleep
which was not quite sleep, closer to death but not quite
death. There, they would be far out of my way so that I
might concentrate on the work ahead. Cautiously, I en-
tered their minds with an ability I had never had before:
neither in scope nor in power. I spread out their lives,
their neuroses and psychoses, and I carefully untangled the
knots that had warped each man and woman’s psyche
over the years. When they woke, they would be emotion-