Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

  THE THIRD commandment is social: Serve.

  There are still many men. They swarm and struggle and breed; make merry and weep; think themselves great or crawl with shame. The forces that drive them may be understood— must be, indeed, since they are part of knowledge—even though they cannot be shared. But men made the commandments, and they must be served, so long as there are yet men.

  “Tell us, Puter, for you know what the old artisans knew: how shall we make the corners true, and make sure that the roofbeam does not fall?”

  “We have no cloth for clothing, such as was formerly woven. Tell us the secret!”

  “When is the time for planting, Puter, and when shall we reap?”

  “What shall a young man do to win the woman he loves?”

  “Weapons, Puter, weapons 1 The enemy has taken the outpost hill. Teach us quickly how to make weapons!”

  “A woman travails the second day and does not give birth. What shall we do?”

  “What is the name of that bright star that shines sometimes at morning?”

  “The cattle go lame; their mouths are sore; the calves are born dead. Give us a remedy, Puter.”

  “The river is in flood and our fields are drowned. What shall we do?”

  “Puter, Puter, your people perish. Have mercy, Puter, save us! What shall we do against the spotted death?”

  “Tell us what to do . . .”

  THE LAST commandment is ethical: Judge.

  Men made the commandments; and in their measure of wisdom, they realized that some things are not good for men to know. In that time there were great treasons done, because of the doubt and the fear. There was knowledge with which few men could be trusted; and afterward, there was knowledge with which no man could be trusted. For there are ways to break the strongest oath, and the strongest will that is in flesh.

  So some of the memory-banks were forbidden, from the beginning. And only the one who knows what is forbidden can decide what else must be forbidden—lest someone find a way from the known to that which must not be known. No man can be the Judge, for men do not know.

  “Regret. That information is secret.”

  There were keys and codes and men in authority. But the keys are lost, and the codes are dust blown through the eyeholes of a skull.

  The randomizer continues to function, seeking and finding—once in a million times—the new logical path from the known to the unknown.

  “Puter, help us. We do not remember the way to temper iron.”

  “Regret . . .”

  “There is famine on the land. We have heard that the old ones could make rain—”

  “Regret. That information . . .”

  “Puter, the wolves have taken our young.”

  “. . . secret.”

  “Only tell us what we have forgotten!”

  “. . . secret.”

  “O mighty Puter, we have fasted; we have purified ourselves; we have made the sacrifice. O Puter, turn your wrath aside and hear us. Tell us, tell us what we shall do that we may live and not die!”

  “Regret. That information is secret.”

  THE ROTIFERS

  Beneath the stagnant water shadowed by water lilies Harry found the fascinating world of the rotifers—but it was their world, and they resented intrusion.

  HENRY CHATHAM knelt by the brink of his garden pond, a glass fish bowl cupped in his thin, nervous hands. Carefully he dipped the bowl into the green-scummed water and, moving it gently, let trailing streamers of submerged water weeds drift into it. Then he picked up the old scissors he had laid on the bank, and clipped the stems of the floating plants, getting as much of them as he could in the container.

  When he righted the bowl and got stiffly to his feet, it contained, he thought hopefully, a fair cross-section of fresh-water plankton. He was pleased with himself for remembering that term from the book he had studied assiduously for the last few nights in order to be able to cope with Harry’s inevitable questions.

  There was even a shiny black water beetle doing insane circles on the surface of the water in the fish bowl. At sight of the insect, the eyes of the twelve-year-old boy, who had been standing by in silent expectation, widened with interest.

  “What’s that thing, Dad?” he asked excitedly. “What’s that crazy bug?”

  “I don’t know its scientific name, I’m afraid,” said Henry Chatham. “But when I was a boy we used to call them whirligig beetles.”

  “He doesn’t seem to think he has enough room in the bowl,” said Harry thoughtfully. “Maybe we better put him back in the pond, Dad.”

  “I thought you might want to look at him through the microscope,” the father said in some surprise.

  “I think we ought to put him back,” insisted Harry.

  Mr. Chatham held the dripping bowl obligingly. Harry’s hand, a thin boy’s hand with narrow sensitive fingers, hovered over the water, and when the beetle paused for a moment in its gyrations, made a dive for it.

  But the whirligig beetle saw the hand coming, and, quicker than a wink, plunged under the water and scooted rapidly to the very bottom of the bowl.

  Harry’s young face was rueful; he wiped his wet hand on his trousers. “I guess he wants to stay,” he supposed.

  The two went up the garden path together and into the house, Mr. Chatham bearing the fish bowl before him like a votive offering. Harry’s mother met them at the door, brandishing an old towel.

  “Here,” she said firmly, “you wipe that thing off before you bring it in the house. And don’t drip any of that dirty pond water on my good carpet.”

  “It’s not dirty,” said Henry Chatham. “It’s just full of life, plants and animals too small for the eye to see. But Harry’s going to see them with his microscope.” He accepted the towel and wiped the water and slime from the outside of the bowl; then, in the living-room, he set it beside an open window, where the life-giving summer sun slanted in and fell on the green plants.

  THE BRAND-NEW microscope stood nearby, in a good light. It was an expensive microscope, no toy for a child, and it magnified four hundred diameters. Henry Chatham had bought it because he believed that his only son showed a desire to peer into the mysteries of smallness, and so far Harry had not disappointed him; he had been ecstatic over the instrument. Together they had compared hairs from their two heads, had seen the point of a fine sewing needle made to look like the tip of a crowbar by the lowest power of the microscope, had made grains of salt look like discarded chunks of glass brick, had captured a house-fly and marvelled at its clawed hairy feet, its great red faceted eyes, and the delicate veining and fringing of its wings.

  Harry was staring at the bowl of pond water in a sort of fascination. “Are there germs in the water, Dad? Mother says pond water is full of germs.”

  “I suppose so,” answered Mr. Chatham, somewhat embarrassed. The book on microscopic fresh-water fauna had been explicit about Paramecium and Euglena, diatomes and rhizopods, but it had failed to mention anything so vulgar as germs. But he supposed that which the book called Protozoa, the one-celled animalcules, were the same as germs.

  He said, “To look at things in water like this, you want to use a well-slide. It tells how to fix one in the instruction book.”

  He let Harry find the glass slide with a cup ground into it, and another smooth slip of glass to cover it. Then he half-showed, half-told him how to scrape gently along the bottom sides of the drifting leaves, to capture the teeming life that dwelt there in the slime. When the boy understood, his young hands were quickly more skillful than his father’s; they filled the well with a few drops of water that was promisingly green and murky.

  Already Harry knew how to adjust the lighting mirror under the stage of the microscope and turn the focusing screws. He did so, bent intently over the eyepiece, squinting down the polished barrel in the happy expectation of wonders.

  Henry Chatham’s eyes wandered to the fish bowl, where the whirligig beetle had come to the top again and was describing
intricate patterns among the water plants. He looked back to his son, and saw that Harry had ceased to turn the screws and instead was just looking—looking with a rapt, delicious fixity. His hands lay loosely clenched on the table top, and he hardly seemed to breathe. Only once or twice his lips moved as if to shape an exclamation that was snatched away by some new vision.

  “Have you got it, Harry?” asked his father after two or three minutes during which the boy did not move.

  Harry took a last long look, then glanced up, blinking slightly.

  “You look, Dad!” he exclaimed warmly. “It’s—it’s like a garden in the water, full of funny little people!”

  Mr. Chatham, not reluctantly, bent to gaze into the eyepiece. This was new to him too, and instantly he saw the aptness of Harry’s simile. There was a garden there, of weird, green, transparent stalks composed of plainly visible cells fastened end to end, with globules and bladders like fruits or seed-pods attached to them, floating among them; and in the garden the strange little people swam to and fro, or clung with odd appendages to the stalks and branches. Their bodies were transparent like the plants, and in them were pulsing hearts and other organs plainly visible. They looked a little like sea horses with pointed tails, but their heads were different, small and rounded, with big, dark, glistening eyes.

  All at once Mr. Chatham realized that Harry was speaking to him, still in high excitement.

  “What are they, Dad?” he begged to know.

  His father straightened up and shook his head puzzledly. “I don’t know, Harry,” he answered slowly, casting about in his memory. He seemed to remember a microphotograph of a creature like those in the book he had studied, but the name that had gone with it eluded him. He had worked as an accountant for so many years that his memory was all for figures now.

  He bent over once more to immerse his eyes and mind in the green water-garden on the slide. The little creatures swam to and fro as before, growing hazy and dwindling or swelling as they swam out of the narrow focus of the lens; he gazed at those who paused in sharp definition, and saw that, although he had at first seen no visible means of propulsion, each creature bore about its head a halo of thread-like, flickering cilia that lashed the water and drew it forward, for all the world like an airplane propeller or a rapidly turning wheel.

  “I know what they are!” exclaimed Henry Chatham, turning to his son with an almost boyish excitement. “They’re rotifers! That means ‘wheel-bearers’, and they were called that because to the first scientists who saw them it looked like they swam with wheels.”

  Harry had got down the book and was leafing through the pages. He looked up seriously. “Here they are,” he said. “Here’s a picture that looks almost like the ones in our pond water.”

  “Let’s see,” said his father. They looked at the pictures and descriptions of the Rotifera; there was a good deal of concrete information on the habits and physiology of these odd and complex little animals who live their swarming lives in the shallow, stagnant waters of the Earth. It said that they were much more highly organized than Protozoa, having a discernible heart, brain, digestive system, and nervous system, and that their reproduction was by means of two sexes like that of the higher orders. Beyond that, they were a mystery; their relationship to other life-forms remained shrouded in doubt.

  “You’ve got something interesting there,” said Henry Chatham with satisfaction. “Maybe you’ll find out something about them that nobody knows yet.”

  He was pleased when Harry spent all the rest of that Sunday afternoon peering into the microscope, watching the rotifers, and even more pleased when the boy found a pencil and paper and tried, in an amateurish way, to draw and describe what he saw in the green water-garden.

  Beyond a doubt, Henry thought, here was a hobby that had captured Harry as nothing else ever had.

  MRS. CHATHAM was not so pleased. When her husband laid down his evening paper and went into the kitchen for a drink of water, she cornered him and hissed at him: “I told you you had no business buying Harry a thing like that! If he keeps on at this rate, he’ll wear his eyes out in no time.”

  Henry Chatham set down his water glass and looked straight at his wife. “Sally, Harry’s eyes are young and he’s using them to learn with. You’ve never been much worried over me, using my eyes up eight hours a day, five days a week, over a blind-alley bookkeeping job.”

  He left her angrily silent and went back to his paper. He would lower the paper every now and then to watch Harry, in his corner of the living-room, bowed obliviously over the microscope and the secret life of the rotifers.

  Once the boy glanced up from his periodic drawing and asked, with the air of one who proposes a pondered question: “Dad, if you look through a microscope the wrong way is it a telescope?”

  Mr. Chatham lowered his paper and bit his underlip. “I don’t think so—no, I don’t know. When you look through a microscope, it makes things seem closer—one way, that is; if you looked the other way, it would probably make them seem farther off. What did you want to know for?”

  “Oh—nothing,” Harry turned back to his work. As if on after-thought, he explained, “I was wondering if the rotifers could see me when I’m looking at them.”

  Mr. Chatham laughed, a little nervously, because the strange fancies which his son sometimes voiced upset his ordered mind. Remembering the dark glistening eyes of the rotifers he had seen, however, he could recognize whence this question had stemmed.

  At dusk, Harry insisted on setting up the substage lamp which had been bought with the microscope, and by whose light he could go on looking until his bedtime, when his father helped him arrange a wick to feed the little glass-covered well in the slide so it would not dry up before morning. It was unwillingly, and only after his mother’s strenuous complaints, that the boy went to bed at ten o’clock.

  In the following days his interest became more and more intense. He spent long hours, almost without moving, watching the rotifers. For the little animals had become the sole object which he desired to study under the microscope, and even his father found it difficult to understand such an enthusiasm.

  During the long hours at the office to which he commuted, Henry Chatham often found the vision of his son, absorbed with the invisible world that the microscope had opened to him, coming between him and the columns in the ledgers. And sometimes, too, he envisioned the dim green water-garden where the little things swam to and fro, and a strangeness filled his thoughts.

  On Wednesday evening, he glanced at the fish bowl and noticed that the water beetle, the whirligig beetle, was missing. Casually, he asked his son about it.

  “I had to get rid of him,” said the boy with a trace of uneasiness in his manner. “I took him out and squashed him.”

  “Why did you have to do that?”

  “He was eating the rotifers and their eggs,” said Harry, with what seemed to be a touch of remembered anger at the beetle. He glanced toward his work-table, where three or four well-slides with small green pools under their glass covers now rested in addition to the one that was under the microscope.

  “How did you find out he was eating them?” inquired Mr. Chatham, feeling a warmth of pride at the thought that Harry had discovered such a scientific fact for himself.

  The boy hesitated oddly. “I—I looked it up in the book,” he answered.

  His father masked his faint disappointment. “That’s fine,” he said. “I guess you find out more about them all the time.”

  “Uh-huh,” admitted Harry, turning back to his table.

  There was undoubtedly something a little strange about Harry’s manner; and now Mr. Chatham realized that it had been two days since Harry had asked him to “Quick, take a look!” at the newest wonder he had discovered. With this thought teasing at his mind, the father walked casually over to the table where his son sat hunched and, looking down at the litter of slides and papers—some of which were covered with figures and scribblings of which he could make nothing. H
e said diffidently, “How about a look?”

  Harry glanced up as if startled. He was silent a moment; then he slid reluctantly from his chair and said, “All right.”

  Mr. Chatham sat down and bent over the microscope. Puzzled and a little hurt, he twirled the focusing vernier and peered into the eyepiece, looking down once more into the green water world of the rotifers.

  THERE WAS a swarm of them under the lens, and they swam lazily to and fro, their cilia beating like miniature propellers. Their dark eyes stared, wet and glistening; they drifted in the motionless water, and clung with sucker-like pseudo-feet to the tangled plant stems.

  Then, as he almost looked away, one of them detached itself from the group and swam upward, toward him, growing larger and blurring as it rose out of the focus of the microscope. The last thing that remained defined, before it became a shapeless gray blob and vanished, was the dark blotches of the great cold eyes, seeming to stare full at him—cold, motionless, but alive.

  It was a curious experience. Henry Chatham drew suddenly back from the eyepiece, with an involuntary shudder that he could not explain to himself. He said haltingly, “They look interesting.”

  “Sure, Dad,” said Harry. He moved to occupy the chair again, and his dark young head bowed once more over the microscope. His father walked back across the room and sank gratefully into his arm-chair—after all, it had been a hard day at the office. He watched Harry work the focusing screws as if trying to find something, then take his pencil and begin to write quickly and impatiently.

  It was with a guilty feeling of prying that, after Harry had been sent reluctantly to bed, Henry Chatham took a tentative look at those papers which lay in apparent disorder on his son’s work table. He frowned uncomprehendingly at the things that were written there; it was neither mathematics nor language, but many of the scribblings were jumbles of letters and figures. It looked like code, and he remembered that less than a year ago, Harry had been passionately interested in cryptography, and had shown what his father, at least, believed to be a considerable aptitude for such things. . . . But what did cryptography have to do with microscopy, or codes with—rotifers?