"You can?" Derwin asked doubtfully. "I know you mutants had some way of communicating with each other, without speaking, but I thought the profs at the University decided you couldn't understand us." He seemed to make a sudden decision. "I'll be right back," he said.
Derwin returned to his office and picked up his desk chair, carried it to the corridor opposite the boy's cell and sat down. "If you do understand what I say, maybe we can have some kind of confab. Can you speak?"
The boy made no reply.
"No, I guess you can't," Derwin said. "Or they'd have found out about it before this." He considered a moment. "How about us setting up some kind of code," he suggested. "I'll ask questions, and you nod if I'm right, and shake your head if I'm wrong?"
The boy made no answer except for his continued expectant gaze.
Derwin shrugged. "O.K. If you can't, you can't. The profs had a theory that you couldn't understand what they said, but that you got some of the meaning of the words from the sound and the inflections."
Still there was no response.
"Maybe you can read my mind?" Derwin waited a moment. "You're a strange one, whatever the answers might be. When you eight mutants were found in the lost islands area of the Lake of the Woods the doctor who had brought you there—evidently when you were very young—had been dead for years. He had been a famous genetics specialist, and had probably cared for you from birth. The profs even believe he must have influenced your development before birth. Anyway, there was no doubt that you were all geniuses of a high order. But there was a screw loose somewhere. When you were brought to the University of Minnesota you soon turned into a pack of murderers.
"And you were brilliant enough to get by with it for months before the authorities learned what you were doing. The other seven were killed, either fighting or trying to get away. You're the last one left now. Wouldn't you like to make your peace—before it's too late for you, too?"