Half-Breed (short story)

Jefferson Scanlon, a struggling scientist, is trying, and failing, to develop a cheap and reliable method of generating atomic power.

While he is taking a walk to think over his work, he rescues a nineteen-year-old orphan "Tweenie", the off-spring of human and Martian parents, from a gang of teenagers.

Tweenies are despised and treated as subhuman by the general population, but Scanlon takes pity on Max, and invites him into his home.

Max has picked up a scientific education at the orphanage, and within a week his insight helps Scanlon solve his problem and develop a workable atomic power source.

Scanlon decides to use his wealth to adopt all the other homeless Tweenies on Earth, and to establish a town in Ohio, Tweenietown, where they can run their own society free from prejudice.

Max also reveals that the Tweenies have spent the past five years building three interplanetary spaceships, and that they are determined to leave Earth and settle on Venus.

This in turn implies that interplanetary travel is also a recent phenomenon, an implication supported by Scanlon's description of pre-atomic trips to Mars and Venus as "hazardous gambles".

Their human parents (probably the crew of Earth ships who have traveled to Mars) have abandoned them, and they have become wards of the state, being raised in state-run orphanages.

Fifty years later, Tweenietown has a population of 1,154, some of which is undoubtedly due to natural increase by the original Tweenie population, and some of which is equally undoubtedly due to the arrival of more orphaned Tweenies from Mars (since Scanlon and Max's discovery of atomic power makes interplanetary travel more common).

The Tweenies lack, as Scanlon notes, political, legal, economic, and social equality with humans (and, for that matter, with native Martians).

[2] As with his earlier story "The Weapon Too Dreadful to Use", the theme of "Half-Breed" is the prejudice faced by minorities, something Asimov himself was familiar with due to his Jewish heritage.

"I kept coming back to this theme very frequently," he wrote in The Early Asimov, "something not surprising in a Jew growing up during the Hitler era.