Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

  Nowhere did there seem to be a key, but there were occasional words and phrases jotted into the margins of some of the sheets. Mr. Chatham read these, and learned nothing. “Can’t dry up, but they can,” said one. “Beds of germs,” said another. And in the corner of one sheet, “1—Yes. 2—No.” The only thing that looked like a translation was the note: “rty34pr is the pond.”

  Mr. Chatham shook his head bewilderedly, replacing the sheets carefully as they had been. Why should Harry want to keep notes on his scientific hobby in code? he wondered, rationalizing even as he wondered. He went to bed still puzzling, but it did not keep him from sleeping, for he was tired.

  Then, only the next evening, his wife maneuvered to get him alone with her and burst out passionately:

  “Henry, I told you that microscope was going to ruin Harry’s eyesight! I was watching him today when he didn’t know I was watching him, and I saw him winking and blinking right while he kept on looking into the thing. I was minded to stop him then and there, but I want you to assert your authority with him and tell him he can’t go on.”

  Henry Chatham passed one nervous hand over his own aching eyes. He asked mildly, “Are you sure it wasn’t just your imagination, Sally? After all, a person blinks quite normally, you know.”

  “It was not my imagination!” snapped Mrs. Chatham. “I know the symptoms of eyestrain when I see them, I guess. You’ll have to stop Harry using that thing so much, or else be prepared to buy him glasses.”

  “All right, Sally,” said Mr. Chatham wearily. “I’ll see if I can’t persuade him to be a little more moderate.”

  He went slowly into the living-room. At the moment, Harry was not using the microscope; instead, he seemed to be studying one of his cryptic pages of notes. As his father entered, he looked up sharply and swiftly laid the sheet down—face down.

  Perhaps it wasn’t all Sally’s imagination; the boy did look nervous, and there was a drawn, white look to his thin young face. His father said gently, “Harry, Mother tells me she saw you blinking, as if your eyes were tired, when you were looking into the microscope today. You know if you look too much, it can be a strain on your sight.”

  Harry nodded quickly, too quickly, perhaps. “Yes, Dad,” he said. “I read that in the book. It says there that if you close the eye you’re looking with for a little while, it rests you and your eyes don’t get tired. So I was practising that this afternoon. Mother must have been watching me then, and got the wrong idea.”

  “Oh,” said Henry Chatham. “Well, it’s good that you’re trying to be careful. But you’ve got your mother worried, and that’s not so good. I wish, myself, that you wouldn’t spend all your time with the microscope. Don’t you ever play baseball with the fellows any more?”

  “I haven’t got time,” said the boy, with a curious stubborn twist to his mouth. “I can’t right now, Dad.” He glanced toward the microscope.

  “Your rotifers won’t die if you leave them alone for a while. And if they do, there’ll always be a new crop.”

  “But I’d lose track of them,” said Harry strangely. “Their lives are so short—they live so awfully fast. You don’t know how fast they live.”

  “I’ve seen them,” answered his father. “I guess they’re fast, all right.” He did not know quite what to make of it all, so he settled himself in his chair with his paper.

  But that night, after Harry had gone later than usual to bed, he stirred himself to take down the book that dealt with life in pond-water. There was a memory pricking at his mind; the memory of the water beetle, which Harry had killed because, he said, he was eating the rotifers and their eggs. And the boy had said he had found that fact in the book.

  Mr. Chatham turned through the book; he read, with aching eyes, all that it said about rotifers. He searched for information on the beetle, and found there was a whole family of whirligig beetles. There was some material here on the characteristics and habits of the Gyrinidae, but nowhere did it mention the devouring of rotifers or their eggs among their customs.

  He tried the topical index, but there was no help there.

  Harry must have lied, thought his father with a whirling head. But why, why in God’s name should he say he’d looked a thing up in the book when he must have found it out for himself, the hard way? There was no sense in it. He went back to the book, convinced that, sleepy as he was, he must have missed a point. The information simply wasn’t there.

  He got to his feet and crossed the room to Harry’s work table; he switched on the light over it and stood looking down at the pages of mystic notations. There were more pages now, quite a few. But none of them seemed to mean anything. The earlier pictures of rotifers which Harry had drawn had given way entirely to mysterious figures.

  Then the simple explanation occurred to him, and he switched off the light with a deep feeling of relief. Harry hadn’t really known that the water beetle ate rotifers; he had just suspected it. And, with his boy’s respect for fair play, he had hesitated to admit that he had executed the beetle merely on suspicion.

  That didn’t take the lie away, but it removed the mystery at least.

  HENRY CHATHAM slept badly that night and dreamed distorted dreams. But when the alarm clock shrilled in the gray of morning, jarring him awake, the dream in which he had been immersed skittered away to the back of his mind, out of knowing, and sat there leering at him with strange, dark, glistening eyes.

  He dressed, washed the flat morning taste out of his mouth with coffee, and took his way to his train and the ten-minute ride into the city. On the way there, instead of snatching a look at the morning paper, he sat still in his seat, head bowed, trying to recapture the dream whose vanishing made him uneasy. He was superstitious about dreams in an up-to-date way, believing them not warnings from some Beyond outside himself, but from a subsconscious more knowing than the waking conscious mind.

  During the morning his work went slowly, for he kept pausing, sometimes in the midst of totalling a column of figures, to grasp at some mocking half-memory of that dream. At last, elbows on his desk, staring unseeingly at the clock on the wall, in the midst of the subdued murmur of the office, his mind went back to Harry, dark head bowed motionless over the barrel of his microscope, looking, always looking into the pale green water-gardens and the unseen lives of the beings that. . . .

  All at once it came to him, the dream he had dreamed. He had been bending over the microscope, he had been looking into the unseen world, and the horror of what he had seen gripped him now and brought out the chill sweat on his body.

  For he had seen his son there in the clouded water, among the twisted glassy plants, his face turned upward and eyes wide in the agonized appeal of the drowning; and bubbles rising, fading. But around him had been a swarm of the weird creatures, and they had been dragging him down, down, blurring out of focus, and their great dark eyes glistening wetly, coldly. . . .

  He was sitting rigid at his desk, his work forgotten; all at once he saw the clock and noticed with a start that it was already eleven a.m. A fear he could not define seized on him, and his hand reached spasmodically for the telephone on his desk.

  But before he touched it, it began ringing.

  After a moment’s paralysis, he picked up the receiver. It was his wife’s voice that came shrilly over the wires.

  “Henry!” she cried. “Is that you?”

  “Hello, Sally,” he said with stiff lips. Her voice as she answered seemed to come nearer and go farther away, and he realized that his hand holding the instrument was shaking.

  “Henry, you’ve got to come home right now. Harry’s sick. He’s got a high fever, and he’s been asking for you.”

  He moistened his lips and said, “I’ll be right home. I’ll take a taxi.”

  “Hurry!” she exclaimed. “He’s been saying queer things. I think he’s delirious.” She paused, and added, “And it’s all the fault of that microscope you bought him!”

  “I’ll be right home,” he repeated dul
ly.

  HIS WIFE was not at the door to meet him; she must be upstairs, in Harry’s bedroom. He paused in the living room and glanced toward the table that bore the microscope; the black, gleaming thing still stood there, but he did not see any of the slides, and the papers were piled neatly together to one side. His eyes fell on the fish bowl; it was empty, clean and shining. He knew Harry hadn’t done those things; that was Sally’s neatness.

  Abruptly, instead of going straight up the stairs, he moved to the table and looked down at the pile of papers. The one on top was almost blank; on it was written several times: rty34pr . . . rty34pr. . . . His memory for figure combinations served him; he remembered what had been written on another page: “rty34pr is the pond.”

  That made him think of the pond, lying quiescent under its green scum and trailing plants at the end of the garden. A step on the stair jerked him around.

  It was his wife, of course. She said in a voice sharp-edged with apprehension: “What are you doing down here? Harry wants you. The doctor hasn’t come; I phoned him just before I called you, but he hasn’t come.”

  He did not answer. Instead he gestured at the pile of papers, the empty fish bowl, an imperative question in his face.

  “I threw that dirty water back in the pond. It’s probably what he caught something from. And he was breaking himself down, humping over that thing. It’s your fault, for getting it for him. Are you coming?” She glared coldly at him, turning back to the stairway.

  “I’m coming,” he said heavily, and followed her upstairs.

  Harry lay back in his bed, a low mound under the covers. His head was propped against a single pillow, and his eyes were half-closed, the lids swollen-looking, his face hotly flushed. He was breathing slowly as if asleep.

  But as his father entered the room, he opened his eyes as if with an effort, fixed them on him, said, “Dad . . . I’ve got to tell you.”

  Mr. Chatham took the chair by the bedside, quietly, leaving his wife to stand. He asked, “About what, Harry?”

  “About—things.” The boy’s eyes shifted to his mother, at the foot of his bed. “I don’t want to talk to her. She thinks it’s just fever. But you’ll understand.”

  Henry Chatham lifted his gaze to meet his wife’s. “Maybe you’d better go downstairs and wait for the doctor, Sally.”

  She looked hard at him, then turned abruptly to go out. “All right,” she said in a thin voice, and closed the door softly behind her.

  “Now what did you want to tell me, Harry?”

  “About them . . . the rotifers,” the boy said. His eyes had drifted half-shut again but his voice was clear. “They did it to me . . . on purpose.”

  “Did what?”

  “I don’t know. . . . They used one of their cultures. They’ve got all kinds: beds of germs, under the leaves in the water. They’ve been growing new kinds, that will be worse than anything that ever was before. . . . They live so fast, they work so fast.”

  Henry Chatham was silent, leaning forward beside the bed.

  “It was only a little while, before I found out they knew about me. I could see them through my microscope, but they could see me too. . . . And they kept signaling, swimming and turning. . . . I won’t tell you how to talk to them, because nobody ought to talk to them ever again. Because they find out more than they tell. . . . They know about us, now, and they hate us. They never knew before—that there was anybody but them. . . . So they want to kill us all.”

  “But why should they want to do that?” asked the father, as gently as he could. He kept telling himself, “He’s delirious. It’s like Sally says, he’s been wearing himself out, thinking too much about—the rotifers. But the doctor will be here pretty soon, the doctor will know what to do.”

  “They don’t like knowing that they aren’t the only ones on Earth that can think. I expect people would be the same way.”

  “But they’re such little things, Harry. They can’t hurt us at all.”

  The boy’s eyes opened wide, shadowed with terror and fever. “I told you, Dad—They’re growing germs, millions and billions of them, new ones. . . . And they kept telling me to take them back to the pond, so they could tell all the rest, and they could all start getting ready—for war.”

  He remembered the shapes that swam and crept in the green water gardens, with whirling cilia and great, cold, glistening eyes. And he remembered the clean, empty fish bowl in the window downstairs.

  “Don’t let them, Dad,” said Harry convulsively. “You’ve got to kill them all. The ones here and the ones in the pond. You’ve got to kill them good—because they don’t mind being killed, and they lay lots of eggs, and their eggs can stand almost anything, even drying up. And the eggs remember what the old ones knew.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Henry Chatham quickly. He grasped his son’s hand, a hot limp hand that had slipped from under the coverlet. “We’ll stop them. We’ll drain the pond.”

  “That’s swell,” whispered the boy, his energy fading again. “I ought to have told you before, Dad—but first I was afraid you’d laugh, and then—I was just . . . afraid. . . .”

  His voice drifted away. And his father, looking down at the flushed face, saw that he seemed asleep. Well, that was better than the sick delirium—saying such strange, wild things—

  Downstairs the doctor was saying harshly, “All right. All right. But let’s have a look at the patient.”

  Henry Chatham came quietly downstairs; he greeted the doctor briefly, and did not follow him to Harry’s bedroom.

  When he was left alone in the room, he went to the window and stood looking down at the microscope. He could not rid his head of strangeness: A window between two worlds, our world and that of the infinitely small, a window that looks both ways.

  After a time, he went through the kitchen and let himself out the back door, into the noonday sunlight.

  He followed the garden path, between the weed-grown beds of vegetables, until he came to the edge of the little pond. It lay there quiet in the sunlight, green-scummed and walled with stiff rank grass, a lone dragonfly swooping and wheeling above it. The image of all the stagnant waters, the fertile breeding-places of strange life, with which it was joined in the end by the tortuous hidden channels, the oozing pores of the Earth.

  And it seemed to him then that he glimpsed something, a hitherto unseen miasma, rising above the pool and darkening the sunlight ever so little. A dream, a shadow—the shadow of the alien dream of things hidden in smallness, the dark dream of the rotifers.

  The dragonfly, having seized a bright-winged fly that was sporting over the pond, descended heavily through the sunlit air and came to rest on a broad lily pad. Henry Chatham was suddenly afraid. He turned and walked slowly, wearily, up the path toward the house.

  ———— THE END ————

  LIFEWORK

  It is a terrible thing, when the being who has exalted you returns and tells, you that you have accomplished little . . .

  FOR GENERATIONS, the People had inhabited the valley, scarcely venturing beyond the great rock mountains that wailed it. To the east, they knew, lay the waterless desert; no one could say how wide. In the west, were greener and more fertile valleys, and an alien horde of a darker race. These, in a time that was fading from men’s memories, had driven the People to their last refuge on the desert’s edge.

  Southward also was desert; but to the north, the land rose higher and higher, mountain above mountain, to the great pine-clad tablelands. There dwelt giants and gods; no man living had seen them.

  The People lived hardly from the arid land; only once a year they enjoyed abundance, when the rains came and the earth was green. To hold starvation from them, they cast lots at the birth of every child; if the omen was evil, the child was carried into the desert to die.

  Once in high summer, in the days when Henzen was leader of the People, three youths climbed the eastern mountains to look for birds’ eggs. The People feared the mountains, and only in d
esperation invaded the hollow crags where owls and hawks nested; but the rains had come late, and there was famine in the valley. So the three climbed trembling, clutching spears and axes, their gathering baskets slung about their necks.

  The oldest and strongest of them was Kiin, firstborn of Sorim.

  In a ravine of the mountain’s slope, half-choked with rock-fragments from above, they met their terror in bodily form. A monster had made its dwelling in a cave under fallen boulders, and it heard them and waited. Then it came crabwise, swiftly, out of its hiding, and before the boys could find footing to make a stand it had taken two of them in its mighty seizing arms and squeezed out their lives.

  Only Kiin leaped recklessly backward into space beyond the thing’s ten-foot reach, striving to break his fall with his spear. Bruised and half-stunned among the rocks, he saw the monster carry his dead companions into its hole. When the shadow hid it, he tried to rise; but his leg had wedged into a crevice, and the effort to move it made the brilliant day swim and grow dark before his eyes. Beneath the blazing sun he felt cold creeping within him; but he gripped his broken spear and waited.

  A scuffing and rattling of rocks in the burrow. The monster sidled into the open, turning its hairless head from side to side with sotted eyes. It saw Kiin. It dropped to all fours and scuttled awkwardly, yet agilely, across the rock-slide toward him.

  At that moment, the god Kasson—who, three days before, had left the northern forest land and was skirting the valley along the backbone of the range—had halted on the jutting cliff-edge above the monster’s cave. He saw the trapped youth facing his death with courage, and, god though he was, felt pity. As the monster hesitated an instant before the splintered spear, Kasson lifted the weapon he carried.