More Than Human

Theodore Sturgeon

1953

Once upon a time there was born a boy. Unfortunately for him, as he grew, it became clear that he was an idiot, completely unable to relate to those around him. Left to bring himself up alone he manages to survive; a strangeness in his core forces those who face him to help him without knowing why.

There's a little girl who lives alone with her mother as her father is off fighting a war, but her mother is rarely alone. Her lovers don't like the girl for some reason, though. Surely nothing to do with the way that she looks at them with near adult understanding, and it's strange, the way they rarely notice that she never touches the things she throws.

In the basement flat of her apartment block, there are a couple of young girls who have the ability to teleport themselves from place to place.

When the boy had become a man he lived for a while with a farmer and his wife, but they eventually had a child of their own and it was time for him to move on again. This time he moved into the forest where he makes a hideout. One day, he finds that his hideaway has been compromised; a young girl and two toddlers have taken up residence with him. Initially unhappy, he soon adjusts to their presence and an apparently severely retarded baby soon joins them. Put together, though, they become something else. Something new in the history of humanity.

But there is more for them to learn before they can truly be said to have taken that next step!

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This is a part of the Science Fiction Masterworks series.

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