like?"

"He was a slob, like I already told you. A real nowhere slob." She stared up at the leaves. "Sometimes he was okay, but what I couldn't stand was he was so stupid."

"No, no, that's not what I mean. Did he seem different in any way? Physically, for example?"

She sat up angrily. "I don't have to take no insults from you!"

"No, I mean did he seem different in the way he reacted to pain, or injury? You told me he didn't get sick when the plague hit the city."

She didn't answer for a while. "Yeah," she said thoughtfully. "I forgot. Yeah, he did. Once he fell off his motorcycle and gave his head a hit on a brick wall. I thought he was dead; he didn't breathe or nothing. And then just when I was getting real scared, in he walks, looking like nothing happened."

Markel rubbed his chin. "How long was it between the time he fell and the time he returned?"

"About a day, I guess. He just lay there all that time like dead."

Markel's thoughts went tangentially down a dark, twisted path. "Where was Rocky born? What did he do before the bombings? Did he ever say anything about the fall, how he felt, or anything—"

"Take it easy, will you? Like I said, I never seen him before the bombings. He was just there in the town, I guess."

Spitting out the twig, Markel filled his pipe and lapsed into isolated thought.

What it narrowed down to, he decided, was this: when ordinary men died they stayed dead. But Rocky died and recovered from death; therefore Rocky was not an ordinary man. The question, then: what, precisely, was Rocky? Logically, he could be only one of two things: a supernormal man or a supernatural one. Supernormal in that he was revived from death by bodily processes superior to those of normal men; or supernatural like a zombie or a vampire, both of which reputedly defied death. Markel preferred the supernormal theory; he didn't think highly of folk legends. The more he thought about it, the more it made sense.

And the "why" of it? Mutation, of course. Furthermore, where else would you find a mutant with superior survival qualities but among the survivors?

Markel tapped out his pipe and told the Earth Mother his theory. She listened, eyes 

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