Page:Weird Tales volume 32 number 01.djvu/75

One of them who was a candid camera enthusiast even managed to slip out a photograph of the infant. Smeary as it was, that photograph did unmistakably show a child with wings of some sort growing from its back.

The hospital became a fort, a place besieged. Reporters and photographers milled outside its doors and clamored against the special police guard that had been detailed to keep them out. The great press associations offered Doctor Harriman large sums for exclusive stories and photographs of the winged child. The public began to wonder if there was anything in the yarn.

Doctor Harriman had to give in, finally. He admitted a committee of a dozen reporters, photographers and eminent physicians to see the child.

David Rand lay and looked up at them with wise blue gaze, clutching his toe, while the eminent physicians and newspapermen stared down at him with bulging eyes.

The physicians said, "It's incredible, but it's true. This is no fake—the child really has wings."

The reporters asked Doctor Harriman wildly, "When he gets bigger, will he be able to fly?"

Harriman said shortly, "We can't tell just what his development will be like, now. But if he continues to develop as he has, undoubtedly he'll be able to fly."

"Good Lord, let me at a phone!" groaned one newshound. And then they were all scrambling pell-mell for the telephones.

Doctor Harriman permitted a few pictures, and then unceremoniously shoved the visitors out. But there was no holding the newspapers, after that. David Rand's name became overnight the best known in the world. The pictures convinced even the most skeptical of the public.

Great biologists made long statements on the theories of genetics which could explain the child. Anthropologists speculated as to whether similar freak winged men had not been born a few limes in the remote past, giving rise to the world-wide legends of harpies and vampires and flying people. Crazy sects saw in the child's birth an omen of the approaching end of the world.

Theatrical agents offered immense sums for the privilege of exhibiting David in a hygienic glass case. Newspapers and press services outbid each other for exclusive rights to the story Doctor Harriman could tell. A thousand firms begged to purchase the right to use little David's name on toys, infant foods, and what not.

And the cause of all this excitement lay and rolled and crowed and sometimes cried in his little bed, now and then vigorously flapping the sprouting wings that had upset the whole world. Doctor Harriman looked thoughtfully down at him.

He said, "I'll have to get him out of here. The hospital superintendent is complaining that the crowds and commotion are wrecking the place."

"But where can you take him?" Morris wanted to know. "He hasn't any parents or relatives, and you can't put a kid like this in an orphan asylum."

Doctor Harriman made decision. "I'm going to retire from practise and devote myself entirely to observing and recording David's growth. I'll have myself made his legal guardian and I'll bring him up in some spot away from all this turmoil—an island or some place like that, if I can find one."

Harriman found such a place, an island off the Maine coast, a speck of barren sand and scrubby trees. He leased it, built a bungalow there, and took David