The Brat

In a future where mutants are hunted and despised, a strange childlike being called the brat escapes a hostile farmhouse and begins to discover the world through uncanny senses, even hearing insects speak. His wanderings lead him into a hidden tunnel, where he finds another boy with the same gray, alien features and a fragile, startling kinship begins to form. At the same time, government protector Ward Remington is drawn into a sinister inquiry by Alfred Turesco of the Committee for Human Advancement. Turesco reveals the history of Ars Tenz Li, a gray-skinned alien who married human woman Bess Marshall before being lynched by a mob, and hints that their missing children may still exist. A dead child with alien traits and a buried birth record book suggest a bloodline the Committee is desperate to erase. As Ward investigates, he realizes Turesco is really Herman Lewis, a former race agitator using civic respectability to mask eugenic hatred. Behind the Committee's public charity lies a plan to locate the Marshall children and destroy them as a "race problem." Against this grim campaign, the brat's gentle act of reviving the gray boy offers a haunting possibility: understanding across the boundaries of fear, prejudice, and species. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.