"Daddy?"
"Yes?"
"Mother says you are eccentric. Is that true?"
"I'll speak to her about it."
"Don't you _know_?"
"Do you understand the word?"
"No."
I lifted her out of the chair and stood her on her skates. "Tell your
mother that I retaliate. I say _she_ is beautiful."
She skated awkwardly between the rows of cages from which mutants with
brown fur and blue fur, too much and too little fur, enormously long
and ridiculously short arms, stared at her with simian, canine or
rodent faces. At the door to the outside, she turned perilously and
waved.
Again in the laboratory, I entered the metabolic accelerator and
withdrew the intravenous needles from my first volplas. I carried their
limp little forms out to a mattress in the lab, two girls and a boy.
The accelerator had forced them almost to adulthood in less than a
month. It would be several hours before they would begin to move, to
learn to feed and play, perhaps to learn to fly.
Meanwhile, it was clear that here was no war of dominant mutations.
Modulating alleles had smoothed the freakish into a beautiful pattern.
These were no monsters blasted by the dosage of radiation into crippled
structures. They were lovely, perfect little creatures.
My wife tried the door, too, but more subtly, as if casually touching
the knob while calling.
"Lunch, dear."
"Be right there."
She peeked too, as she had for fifteen years, but I blocked her view
when I slipped out.
"Come on, you old hermit. I have a buffet on the terrace."
"Our daughter says I'm eccentric. Wonder how the devil she found out."
"From me, of course."
"But you love me just the same."
"I adore you." She stretched on tiptoe and put her arms over my
shoulders and kissed me.
My wife did indeed have a delicious-looking buffet ready on the
terrace. The maid was just setting down a warmer filled with hot
hamburgers. I gave the maid a pinch and said, "Hello, baby."
My wife looked at me with a puzzled smile. "What on Earth's got into
you?"
The maid beat it into the house.
I flipped a hamburger and a slice of onion onto a plate and picked up
the ketchup and said, "I've reached the dangerous age."
"Oh, good heavens!"
* * * * *
I dowsed ketchup over the hamburger, threw the onion on and closed it.
I opened a bottle of beer and guzzled from it, blew out my breath and
looked across the rolling hills and oak woods of our ranch to where the
Pacific shimmered. I thought, "All this and three volplas, too."
I wiped the back of my hand across my mouth and said aloud, "Yes, sir,
the dangerous age. And, lady, I'm going to have fun."
My wife sighed patiently.
I walked over and put the arm that held the beer bottle around her
shoulder and chucked her chin up with my other hand. The golden sun
danced in her blue eyes. I watched that light in her beautiful eyes and
said, "But you're the only one I'm dangerous about."
I kissed her until I heard rollerskates coming across the terrace from
one direction and a horse galloping toward the terrace from the other
direction.
"You have lovely lips," I whispered.
"Thanks. Yours deserve the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, too."
Our son reared the new palomino I had just bought him for his
fourteenth birthday and yelled down, "Unhand that maiden, Burrhead, or
I'll give you lead poisoning."
I laughed and picked up my plate and sat down in a chair. My wife
brought me a bowl of salad and I munched the hamburger and watched the
boy unsaddle the horse and slap it away to the pasture.
I thought, "By God, wouldn't he have a fit if he knew what I have back
there in that lab! Wouldn't they all!"
The boy carried the saddle up onto the terrace and dropped it. "Mom,
I'd like a swim before I eat." He started undressing.
"You _look_ as though a little water might help," she agreed, sitting
down next to me with her plate.