mistake of taking too much for granted. He knew that she despised the imaginative stories of interplanetary travel, atomic power and future science that he liked to read and ponder.

So he made the mistake of assuming that, if he gave those stories their due, and a little more than their due, her antagonism would become a shield, insulating and protecting her.

"You have a psychological block, but you can overcome it," he said. "Next time you dust my books look inside the ones you're always putting back upside down. They contain a master plan for changing the genes of human inheritance."

"A master plan?"

Stephen nodded. "The brightest crop of post-Wellsian imaginative science writers are convinced that if you bombard one, or both parents of a child, with atomic radiations well in advance of the event you're likely to get a little stranger in the house. A mutant child who isn't quite human. And, if you want to be morbid about it—a gnome, of a sort. A small weird guest!"

"Stephen!"

"Oh, so far it's never happened, except to fruit flies. But I was pretty close to Bikini Atoll. I was flying high in a plane the Navy supplied without realizing what they might be letting me in for. I was a bachelor then, of course."

He smiled. "Some of my favorite authors believe that kids like our Johnny belong to another race entirely. They're born human or almost human, but they grow out of it. Super-kids who grow up to become multi-dimensional, all shining cubes and bright impossible angles. They're only human in the caterpillar stage of their development."

Johnny's mother gasped wildly. "How can you even think such things! Horrible!"

At this, Stephen made one last heroic attempt to convince his wife that he had spoken with his tongue in his cheek. "The Hindus believe that man was made by Prajapati, after many efforts in which the experimental beings did not harmonize with their environment. Maybe somebody like Prajapati is trying to make a race of super-beings, and our Johnny's just an experiment."

Helen Ambler did not smile.

Stephen's lips tightened and all the levity ebbed from his stare. "You asked me how I can think such things. I don't think them. But you do, subconsciously. Helen, listen to me. All kids become little strangers at times. If their parents love them, it doesn't 

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