Worlds Apart by Joe Haldeman

up. I thought it was the craps and still do. The timing of the war was just coincidence. Charlie Manson was just a crazy goof. I don’t know about Jesus.”
    “Does the rest of your family feel the same?”
    “No. Or if they do, they keep it to themselves.” When Jeff didn’t say anything, he went on. “I’ve heard of a few other old people, and I even saw one once, Big Mickey over in Disney World. He was big like you, but crazy. All of the old ones are supposed to be big and crazy. How come you’re different? Tell me and I’ll let you use the fuel cell.”
    “I can tell you what I think, but it won’t save you from the death.”
    “Go ahead.”
    “It’s an accident of birth. I’m a kind of mutie, like the other old people. It’s called acromegaly; something goes wrong with your glands and you keep growing after normal people stop. It usually affects your mind, but it started late in my case, and I had medicine.”
    “So how does that keep you from the death?”
    “All I know is that it does. I’ve traveled around a lot since the war, and never met or heard of anybody over twenty-some who didn’t have acromegaly.”
    “Okay.” He looked thoughtful, took a sip of wine. “Now is there some way I can catch the acromegaly from you? Like a blood transfusion?”
    “No, you have to be born with it. There’s a hormone involved, growth hormone, that might work, but I’ve never found any in hospitals and I wouldn’t know how to make it. I’m not a scientist; I’m not even a doctor. With the radio, maybe I can find something out.”
    Tad looked at the door to the kitchen. “Go away, Mark. This is grownup talk.” A young boy was in the doorway, standing on his hands. His hands were like flesh spatulas, no fingers. Instead of legs he had a single limb rising into the air, ending in a flipper. He had a harelip and eyes that were too small and too close together in his egg-shaped head. He mewed something, turned around and padded out.
    “Never know how much he understands,” Tad said. “Have you ever seen one like him?”
    “Not quite. Most muties do have more than one thing wrong with them, but he’s a regular catalog: harelip, srenomelus, microphthalmia, acrocephalosyndactyly. God knows what else inside. It’s a wonder he survived.”
    “Eats like a pig. If you’re not a doctor, how come you know all those names?”
    “Found a book on monsters, not that it does any good. The few things that can be fixed, they take surgery. I can stitch up a wound, but that’s about it.”
    “Do you think we ought to let them live? Most families don’t, I guess.”
    “Hmm.” Jeff drank off his wine and refilled both glasses. “I wouldn’t say this to most people—and you’re not hearing it, right?” Tad nodded. “We should let the muties grow up and mate. Sooner or later a gene might come along that carries immunity to the death, maybe like acromegaly but without the bad side effects.”
    “What do you think the death is? Other than Charlie’s blessing.”
    “It’s either some kind of biological warfare agent or a common disease that underwent mutation. It might die out or it might last forever. I don’t even know how wide-spread it is, which is another reason for getting the radio working.”
    “They’ve got it in Georgia, we know that. Met a guy from Atlanta.”
    Jeff nodded. “It’s probably all over. At least all over the East Coast. You’d expect that Florida would have quite a few immigrants, after a winter or two.”
    “Maybe they stick to the Atlantic side.”
    “It’s pretty well bombed up. I started there, but came inland, looking for farms.”
    For a while they sat and traded information about the various places they’d been. Then a little girl, apparently normal, came in and shyly said that dinner was ready.
    They ate at two trench tables, one for the adults and one for the children. The food was delicious, chickenstewed with fresh vegetables, but the dinner companions at the other