by Don Wilcox
The graduate microbes, however, were intelligent enough to make their own adjustments to those massive creatures who had provided this world for them.
“It is a new age for us,” they would say. “There was a time when we lived in the darkness of our masters’ ignorance. In those times all microbes were viewed with suspicion, but now our masters know that we are many species and classes, and in each class we have our own individual differences. Now that they have segregated the more intelligent of us, we have come into our rightful glory.”
If the microbes were somewhat amazed at their success in contributing to the knowledge of their great masters, it was purely because they had worked under the handicap of smallness. It was no easy matter to communicate with creatures so large that they could not see you. Generations of effort had gone into the building of a system of common symbols. There had been wasteful trial and error before the first signs of success.
But the graduate microbes were exultant for another reason. If they boasted and strutted and ballyhooed their success in glowing terms, one of the reasons was that they had acquired the services of another race of creatures.
“We are wonderful business men. We have the traits of genius,” they would say. “We have not done this work ourselves. We have found subordinates to do it for us—tiny creatures to whom the microbes seem to be giants.”
The civilization of the graduate microbes was dominated by this psychology. It made up for their smallness in comparison to their masters. It gave them a sense of domination which compensated for everything.
Though the big creatures were their masters, they in turn were the masters of this subordinate race—the civilized fleas.
There was a proverb in the language of these intelligent microbes which ran: “The two-legged flea is the lowest of all creatures. It is an abomination, deserving nothing but destruction.”
This proverb had been handed down from those dark ages of the forgotten past when all fleas were thought to be pests.
But time had changed the status of the lowly flea.
It was, in fact, the development of scientific instruments in the laboratory of the microbes which led to this discovery. These parasites, so tiny they could hop over the bodies of microbes without being noticed, were found to be industrious. They boasted a language of their own. They had energetic, green-coated bodies which were capable of leaping through a distance many times their own height.
In size they were only about one ten-thousandth the weight of their masters, the graduate microbes—very insignificant little creatures indeed.
But to the eye of the microbe they were visible. Therefore, they could never hope to be out of mind. There had been trouble, of course, but as time went on the badly behaved members of the flea race had been killed off, while those showing a capacity for adjustment had found a place for themselves in this heterogeneous social system.
The fruits of this relationship were at last being harvested. The knowledge of the fleas was being passed up the line to their gigantic masters, the microbes, who in turn would communicate this knowledge to their mammoth superiors.
When the biggest of these varied forms of life decided to investigate the nature of matter, they called upon their servants to provide the fineness of their microscopes and other atom-splitting equipment.
The microbes themselves were much too large to see into atoms, but their servants, the civilized fleas, looked into the matter.
The fleas reported what they saw. Their discovery was far more startling than the most daring theory had suggested.
Yes, there were component parts to be discerned within the atom itself. There was a nucleus—a comparatively tiny ball at the center—surrounded by several spinning balls of slighter dimension. This whirligig of energy—mostly space—was what the fleas found the atom to be. Around them was an immense and boundless universe of atoms—known to the greatest creatures as a bit of pink dust!
But the exciting details which they added to this description were that some of these tiny whirling bodies were inhabited!
The amazing discovery skyrocketed upward through a series of jumps, to penetrate the minds of the great creatures who had prompted this investigation.
“How do you know? What evidence did you find to suggest that these tiny electrons can be inhabited planets?” The question filtered down by way of the microbes to their parasite slaves.
“How do we know that those balls are inhabited?” The civilized fleas hopped around nervously before they would answer the question which caused them considerable agitation. They were not sure whether they wanted to give away their secret.
“We know it is true,” they would reply. “Take our word for it.”
Their microbe masters bore down upon them with renewed pressure—pressure which had been applied from above. When pressure failed, they appealed with an argument for fair play. This sort of friendship demanded the utmost frankness and honesty. There should be no secrets.
“Our very security in this laboratory—our universe—depends upon our cooperation with the great creatures above us,” they warned. “For your own survival you dare not break the chain of friendship.”
The fleas saw the reasonableness of this argument. They walked the wide floors of their boundless world (which was nothing more nor less than the broad table-top in the corner of this wide room). They joined in parades for or against the policy of revealing their secrets. Their green bodies might have been seen by their master microbes massed in throngs of thousands, assembled to listen to the arguments, pro and con.
And if the microbes had taken the time to follow the details of this conflict they could have witnessed many a fist fight, many a life and death struggle with metal weapons. For these little green two-legged creatures realized that this was a crisis. Their independence was at stake.
Some would argue that it would be impossible ultimately to withhold any secrets from the master race. “We are vulnerable. They can see us with their naked eyes. If we cheat them of our most important secret, they may bring our idyllic existence to an end.”
“But they cannot afford to do that. They need us.”
“There are other fleas. We are not indispensable.”
In the end a compromise was reached. The lively, headstrong, conceited leaders persuaded their masses that a small amount of information could be imparted, but not all.
“Let’s admit to our giant masters, the microbes, that we possess high-grade scientific instruments of our own. Let us acknowledge that we have learned to carry on our own investigations through the use of lenses, telescopes and microscopes. This will be enough to tell them.”
And so an agreement was reached. But the most important secret was withheld. All the fleas agreed that they would not reveal that they, too, had a set of living servants—the “one-cells”—little invisible lives who were all nerve and brain.
CHAPTER VIII
Starfish Outward Bound
Lester Allison had been something of a legend to Kirk Riley until now.
First, he had been a picture in the papers and on the television screen. Then he had been the hero in the mayor’s car that paraded down the streets under a deluge of ticker-tape.
He had been the subject for inspirational lectures, movies, and books for schoolboys. He had been these things because of his supreme achievements in two great crises which could have been surmounted only by a genius of space.
But now Kirk was seeing the real Lester Allison—a hero in a jam. In comparison to the valiant space man, Kirk himself felt helpless, paralyzed.
His interest in watching the elder man’s schooled hands play over the controls made him a useless spectator.
He came to life when Allison shot a sharp glance at him. It was a look that said, “Do something!”
Kirk looked around helplessly, made several false starts, found himself completely bewildered. According to the dials the ship was suspended at an elevation of 750 miles.
“What am I supposed to
do? Grab an ax and chop away an invisible jungle?”
“Get on the radio,” Allison snapped. “We will try to get a call through to June.”
Beside the radio controls there was a small chart, and Kirk found the wave-lengths listed. In a moment the instrument came to life and the receiver began to hum.
“Calling June Allison . . . calling June Allison . . .”
“Up a little higher on your rheostat,” Allison advised. “That’s O.K. Hold it right there. Keep on trying.”
“Calling June Allison . . . calling June Allison . . .”
This routine went on for many minutes. It gave Kirk freedom to watch Allison as he tried to shoot the ship out of this dead spot.
The countermotors roared. The dials showed that the ship was achieving a slight lateral motion. Then the accelerators went down, and the big rocket motors bounded and there was a brief forward jerk. The ship might have been lurching into a vast invisible elastic ribbon. Its momentum was lost in a cushion.
“We are getting nowhere fast,” Allison grumbled. “Whatever this thing is, it is getting thicker. We had better head for the open spaces.”
“Or can you? I figured we were all tangled up in a mess of invisible wire or something.”
“Keep on that radio,” said Allison.
The boat ceased to plow the space in a vertical direction with the Earth as the goal. Little by little it nosed around, until it was going into the invisible band of obstruction on a shallow angle.
Kirk jumped with enthusiasm. “That’s it, Allison. Give her the old works—er—calling June Allison . . . calling June Allison . . .”
The boat swept back and forth and was at last rocketing along at a moderate speed.
“Are we out?” Kirk asked.
“We are in,” said Allison. “We have nosed through like a rat through a maze. Take a look, since you are not doing anything else. See that yellow air?”
“Gollies! If it wasn’t for the color I’d think the Milky Way was closing in on us.”
“The tail of a comet would be more like it,” said Allison. “The next time you have an evening off you had better brush up on your astronomy.”
“The girl friend in Brooklyn gets all my evenings off.”
They drifted along at what Allison called his atmosphere speed—snail travel compared to his normal pace through the great skyways, but a safe speed for penetrating the friction-producing air that hovered around several of the solar planets.
But Kirk saw that they were not heading for a port. If he read his hero’s expression correctly, he guessed that this mysterious challenge had got under Lester’s skin.
Now the radio came through: “This is June Allison . . . this is June Allison . . . are you there, Lester?”
Allison took the microphone. “Hello, June. I am calling from the Battering Ram. Altitude 650 miles. Kirk Riley and I have just pulled out of a tangle with the atmosphere. I don’t understand it. Did you and the astronomers get up this way?”
“We have just now landed,” came June’s voice. “We reached 700 and skirted along the under side of that yellow layer, whatever it is.”
“What did the astronomers make of it?”
“They tried to take dimensions and measurements, and you never heard such a conglomeration of mathematics. But they don’t have any idea what it is.”
“You didn’t have any trouble getting away?”
“When we got our samples of atmosphere from the highest elevation, I thought I was running into a belt of friction. But I pulled right out. When do I see you, Lester?”
“In a few hours, honey. There is only half a globe to surround before I will be home.”
They sent the Battering Ram on a bee-line, and Lester continued at the radio, trying to contact a few of his business associates.
What news he could gather was no more than he had found for himself. The astronomers all over the Earth were in a state of amazement. Chemists had arced over the stratosphere to capture a few samples of what they thought might be a poisonous or explosive gas. Newspapers were said to be screaming headlines warning of some impending catastrophe. Inevitably the news made comparisons to the gas war which Sasho had brought to the Earth only a year ago. America was still rebuilding as the result of the wide-scale explosions. The terrors of the past were on tap.
Allison grew grave as he contemplated these things.
“There will be a regular panic of fear,” he said, “but in twenty-four hours we may know. If the chemists analyze their samples of the yellow atmosphere and find it harmless, there will be nothing to do but wait. After all, the color may not be a gas at all. It may be some curious accumulations of planetary magnetism, coming together in a new combination.”
Kirk was seeing his hero now as a person afflicted with normal human weaknesses. Like anyone else, Allison was given to optimistic gropings. But no hypothesis sounded at all hopeful.
The Battering Ram swung back to the Rocky Mountain area just as the pink of dawn was showing on the horizon. As the ship settled down, Kirk, seated at the telescope, gave an exclamation of surprise.
“Come here a minute, Allison. Take a look at this.”
“What have you got?”
“The biggest flying bat you ever saw. Or is it a starfish?”
“Give me that telescope!”
Allison’s eyes narrowed on the lens, and he kept the instrument turning slowly along the northward line of the horizon.
“Good eye there, Kirk. I’ll fill your chest with medals for this.”
Allison leaped back to the controls and set the ship in motion.
“Wait a minute. Where we going?” Kirk gasped.
“There’s no time to change to a plane,” Allison snapped. “Get on the radio and call June. Tell her we’re on the trail of something and I won’t be home until I get a photograph.”
CHAPTER IX
Shadow Out of Nowhere
The “flying starfish” hovered along at an elevation of two or three miles, so close to the Earth that an observer might have thought it an odd-shaped space ship looking for a spot to land. It was seeking the twilight zone. It moved along just fast enough to keep ahead of the rays of the rising sun.
“Do you ever get hungry?” Kirk asked.
“I could do with some eggs and bacon,” said Allison. “Why?”
“Because in three hours we are going to be over the wide Pacific at the rate we’re going. And there won’t be a restaurant in sight.”
They were skimming along at an elevation even lower than that of the flying starfish. Allison’s object was to find a way around without attracting the creature’s attention, so that he could catch a picture against the white eastern sky.
“Why don’t you want it to see us? I hope you don’t figure it’s big enough to do any damage to the Battering Ram.”
“Certainly not,” said Allison, “but if it has a nest somewhere over these mountains, I’d like to know it, and if it’s just taking an easy swing around the globe for exercise, I’d like to know that, too. We can eat breakfast when we get back.”
“Twenty-four hours to breakfast!”
Kirk pressed his hand against his forehead and pretended to pass out.
“All right, Hungry. Trot yourself back to the kitchen and see what you can find in those upper drawers. There should be a few packages of food concentrates.”
For the next half hour Kirk puttered around in the kitchen. This was another new luxury for him—eating on board a space ship. It was a cinch that a grease monkey in a space port missed out on all the fun.
He found coffee, too, among the shelves of food pills, and was soon preparing the breakfast, that would have made all the boys back in the space port jealous. He would tell his girl friend in Brooklyn about this.
Not until he brought a tray of food to Allison did he realize that the ship had been accelerated.
“My stars and comets! We are rocketing along at 100,000 miles an hour! When did that happen?”
; “Get your blinkers up against the telescope,” said Allison. “Tell me if you see anything.”
Kirk obeyed. “I don’t see anything but space. There’s Uranus off to the left. Where the devil are we? It’s all velvety black.”
Kirk tried to turn the telescope back to the Earth’s atmosphere, but if he wanted to see the Earth now, he would have to view it from the tail of the ship. He was gasping.
“Did you mean to do it, Allison? You have got us leaping straight across the solar system. I thought you were chasing a starfish.”
Allison drew a worried breath. “I’ll be blasted if I can figure what it is all about. But a few minutes ago, the most gigantic object I ever saw reached through this space between planets, and by George, the sailing starfish zigzagged until he got aboard that thing.”
“What thing?”
“That long bar that came reaching out of space. As nearly as I can describe it, it was a long, straight shadow. But it must have had substance. Somehow it took the flying starfish aboard, and then it pulled away.”
“Pulled away to where?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out. I am right on the line of its retreat. But my honest opinion is it has swung clear out of the solar system.”
“And you are trying to chase it?” Kirk gasped. “My stars! Is my gal friend in Brooklyn going to miss me!”
Whether the world of green fleas was afflicted with a larger share of conceited personalities than any other society of intelligent creatures, may be a subject of interest for some social analyst in the future. It may be found that this race of two-legged, two-armed, twin-horned animals had reasons for developing along the lines of self-glorification.
“We are the ones who do the work. Without us, the fine plans of those masters who overshadow us would come to nothing.”
This announcement, expressed by one of the most voluble of the civilized fleas, was a sort of keynote. It expressed what all of the hard-working fleas felt. They were the gropers, the toilers, the over-proud executors of this chain of scientific investigation.
