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Cover art © Wayne D. Barlowe

This is the July 1983 Timescape / Pocket Books edition of Empire of the Atom. This is another one of those great covers that goes uncredited, but not unnoticed. I once had the suspicion that this may be Gerry Daly's work, but I wasn't certain. Interestingly, it was Gerry Daly himself who informed me that it's the work of Wayne D. Barlowe, which makes my criticisms of Barlowe's other depiction of Clane rather ironic.
I originally contrasted this cover with Barlowe's painting for the Timescape / Pocket Books edition of The Wizard of Linn, assuming the two were by different artists, and criticized Barlowe's version for being inferior. Now, of course, I know it's not a matter of comparing two artists as it is a matter of comparing two works by the same artist.
On page 13 of the novel Clane's mutations are described in a fair amount of detail:
The child had a big head for its frail body. Its shoulders and arms were the major visible deformity. The shoulders sloped down from the neck at a steep angle, making the body appear almost triangular. The arms seemed twisted, as if the bone—and the muscle and skin with it—had been given a full turn. It seemed as if each arm needed to unwind in order to be right. The boy's chest was extremely flat, and all the ribs showed through the stretched skin. The rib cage spread out in a web of bone that extended down too far for normalcy.
I really like this envisioning of Clane—all the elements are present: the head, the twisted arms, and the deformed chest with the strangely proportioned ribcage. It's been carried out imaginatively and flawlessly executed. However, I don't at all care at all for the cover he did for The Wizard of Linn. There, the twisted arms look not like bunched-up rolls of skin but rather like layered scales. I suppose Barlowe must've been experimenting with a different look for the sequel, but I must say the depiction here is by far the more faithful and more successful. Whenever I read either of these two novels, and Clane is involved in a scene, I invariably imagine him as he is pictured above.

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