Soft come the dragons

the relative center of his bony, misshapen head. There was his skin: waxy yellow like some artificial fruit and coarse with large, irregular pores that showed like dark pinpricks bottomed with dried blood. There were his ears: very flat against his head and somewhat pointed like the ears of a wolf. There were other things that would show up on a closer, more intimate examination, things like his hair (which was of an altogether different texture than any racial variant among the normal human strains), his nipples (which were ever so slightly concave instead of convex), and his genitals (which were male, but which were contained in a pouch just below his navel and not between his truncated limbs). There was only one way in which Timothy was remotely human, and that was his brain. But even here, he was not entirely normal, for his IQ was slightly above 250.
    He had been a product of the Artificial Wombs, a strictly military project which intended to produce beings usable as weapons of war, beings with psionic abilities that could bring the Chinese to their knees. But when such gnarled results as Timothy rolled from the Wombs, the scientists and generals connected with the project threw up their hands and resigned themselves to more public condemnation.
    Timothy was placed in a special home for subhuman productions of the Wombs where he was expected to die within five years. But it was in his third year there that they came to realize that Timothy (he was the "T" birth in the fifth alphabetical series, thus his name) was more than a mindless vegetable. Much more. It happened at feeding time. The nurse had been dutifully spooning predigested pablum into his mouth, cleaning his lips and chin as he dribbled, when one of the other "children" in the ward entered its death throes. She hurried off to assist the doctor who was injecting some sedative into the mutant hulk, leaving Timothy hungry. Due to the training of a new staff nurse that afternoon, he had inadvertently been skipped in the previous feeding. As a result, he was ravenous. But the nurse did not return in response to his caterwauling. He tossed and pitched on his foam mattress, but legless and armless as he was, there was nothing he could do to reach the bowl of food that rested on the table next to his crib, painfully within sight of his one, misplaced eye. He blinked that eye, squinted it, and lifted the spoon without touching it! He levitated the instrument to his mouth, licked the pablum from it, and sent it back to the bowl for more. It was during his sixth spoonful that the nurse returned, saw what was happening and fainted dead away.
    The same night, Timothy was moved from the ward.
    Quietly.
    He did not know where they were taking him. Indeed, having lacked most of the sensory stimulation afforded normal three-year-olds, he did not even care. Without proper stimulation, he had never developed rational, logical thought processes. He understood nothing beyond his own basic desires, the desires of his body: hunger, air, water, excretion. It never occurred to him to wonder where he was going—if he even knew he was going anywhere.
    But he wasn't ignorant for long. The military was hungry for another success (they had had only two others) and hurried his development along. They tested his IQ as best they could and found it was slightly above normal. That was a good sign. There had been fears that they would have to work with a psionically gifted moron. Next, the computers devised an educational program suited to his unique history. The program was initiated.
    He was expected to be talking in seven months.
    He was talking in five weeks.
    He was expected to be able to read in a year and a, half.
    He was reading on a college level in three months.
    Not surprisingly, they found his IQ was rising. An IQ is based on what an individual has learned as well as what he innately knows. When Timothy had first been tested, he had learned absolutely nothing. His slightly above normal score had been garnered solely on what he innately knew. Excitement at the project grew until Timothy had reached an IQ of 250 plus. It was now eighteen months since he had lifted his spoon without hands. He devoured books. But he switched from topic to topic, from two weeks of advanced physics texts to a month of 19th Century British Literature. But the military didn't care. They did not expect him to be a specialist. They only wanted him to be educated and conversant. At the end of eighteen