Page:Weird Tales volume 32 number 01.djvu/73

 "My God!" he exclaimed.

"You see it too?" exclaimed Doctor Harriman. "Then I guess I'm not crazy after all. But this thing—why, it's without precedent in all human history!"

He babbled incoherently, "And the bones, too—hollow—the whole skeletonal structure different. His weight"

He set the infant hastily on a scale. The beam jiggled.

"See that!" exclaimed Harriman. "He weighs only a third of what a baby his size should weigh."

Red-headed young Doctor Morris was staring in fascination at the curving humps on the infant's back. He said hoarsely, "But this just isn't possible"

"But it's real!" Harriman flung out. His eyes were brilliant with excitement. He cried, "A change in gene-patterns—only that could have caused this. Some pre-natal influence"

His fist smacked into his hand. "I've got it! The electrical explosion that injured this child's mother a year before his birth. That's what did it—an explosion of hard radiations that damaged, changed, her genes. You remember Midler's experiments"

The head nurse's wonder overcame her respect. She asked, "But what is it, doctor? What's the matermatter [sic] with the child's back? Is it so bad as all that?"

"So bad?" repeated Doctor Harriman. He drew a long breath. He told the nurse, "This child, this David Rand, is a unique case in medical history. There has never been anyone like him—as far as we know, the thing that's going to happen to him has never happened to any other human being. And all due to that electrical explosion."

"What's going to happen to him?" demanded the nurse, dismayed.

"This child is going to have wings!" shouted Harriman. "Those projections growing out on his back—they're not just ordinary abnormalities—they're nascent wings, that will very soon break out and grow just as a fledgling bird's wings break out and grow."

head nurse stared at them. "You're joking," she said finally, in flat unbelief.

"Good God, do you think I'd joke about such a matter?" cried Harriman. "I tell you, I'm as stunned as you are, even though I can see the scientific reason for the thing. This child's body is different from the body of any other human being that ever lived.

"His bones are hollow, like a bird's bones. His blood seems different and he weighs only a third what a normal human infant weighs. And his shoulder-blades jut out into bone projections to which are attached the great wing-muscles. The X-rays dearly show the rudimentary feathers and bones of the wings themselves."

"Wings!" repeated young Morris dazedly. He said after a moment, "Harriman, this child will be able to"

"He'll be able to fly, yes!" declared Harriman. "I'm certain of it. The wings are going to be very large ones, and his body is so much lighter than normal that they'll easily bear him aloft."

"Good Lord!" ejaculated Morris incoherently.

He looked a little wildly down at the infant. It had stopped crying and now waved pudgy red arms and legs weakly.

"It just isn't possible," said the nurse, taking refuge in incredulity. "How could a baby, a man, have wings?"

Doctor Harriman said swiftly, "It's