"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.