She enjoyed it all.
“Angelica,” whispered the gray-haired man, “your father is a flying fool and so is his little baby.”
“Angie fly birdie,” cooed the little one.
Robert Smith shut his eyes. At last he had come to the parting of the ways. Here was freedom and adventure and perhaps romance, and he was sure that, with the baby in his arms, the romance would be of the purest variety. His heart began to beat faster; he held the baby so tight that she began to whimper—and then he pressed the starter button.
And waited.
Nothing happened—not a thing was different—sickened with disappointment, he realized that nothing was going to happen. Somewhere there had been a mistake.
As he sat there, the little girl went to sleep. Tired of waiting, anaesthetized by the fresh air, perhaps a little cold, she had cuddled close to her father and gone to sleep. Almost as in a dream, Robert Smith unstrapped himself and carried his sleeping daughter to her crib. She simply relaxed and kept on sleeping. Then Smith undressed—he put his new suit back in the moth bag and hung it up—and then he prepared for bed. Somehow, his wife awoke. It was a rather unusual thing for her to do this, and Smith did not understand it till she started to talk to him.
“You know, Robert, a most unusual thing happened this week, and I have been trying to find time and the right occasion to tell you about it. You know how I have planned and saved for that new suit, and how proud I was to think that at last you were going to have one tailor-made instead of a hand-me-down. Well, when that suit came, I examined it very carefully, and it had the most peculiar wire threaded through it, long pieces. I worked and worked at it and finally got it all out, and I took it to a dealer in old metals and he said he would give a dollar a pound for it, and it weighed just five pounds. So, there I had five dollars, and I spent it for stockings for you. I bought you six pairs, and they are guaranteed to be hole-proof. You needed some new stockings. I have tried to darn them as carefully as I could, but I really don’t see how you could wear them, being on your feet the way you are all day. Now, how can you explain that wire in that new suit? I called up the tailor and I believe he was puzzled himself; at least, he acted so.”
“It certainly is odd,” answered her husband. “But I am glad you bought me the new stockings. You sew too much. Did you buy me striped or colored ones?”
“No. I thought for your ribbon and lace work it would be better to have black ones. Do you know, I am wide-awake? I want to talk. I was reading today about a man’s claiming that someday men would float through the air. What do you think of that?”
“I think that any man who wanted to do a thing like that would be a flying fool!” said Robert Jones slowly. Then he forced himself to go to sleep, for the next day he would be busy, selling ribbons and laces.
THE IVY WAR
Originally published in Amazing Stories, May 1930.
“You are just plain drunk, Bill!” exclaimed the genial Mayor of the town of Yeastford, to one of the habitual alcoholics of the vicinity. “Just a little too much this time, or you would not be talking such nonsense. Go home and to bed and you will feel differently about it tomorrow, and laugh at yourself when your dog comes back from his hunt.”
“I am drunk!” admitted William Coonel, “but anyone would get drunk after seeing what I saw. You go down to the old swamphole yourself and see how your nerves are afterward. Go on, Major Young, and then tell me whether I am drunk or not.” He staggered out of the office, leaving the Mayor smiling at his persistency.
“This job of being Mayor of a small town and friend to all the friendless is some job for an old soldier,” mused Major Young to himself. “Guess I might as well close up the office and spend the rest of the day over in New York. A few hours at the University Club will restore my cosmopolitan viewpoint of life.”
Two hours later he walked into the reading-room of the Club, just in time to hear hearty gales of laughter coming from a closely clustered group of men. When the laughter ceased, he heard a determined voice.
“In spite of your laughter,” it said, “I want to repeat what I said. The next great war will be waged between the human race and some form of plant life, rather than between different nations of humanity.”
“You mean bally little smellers, like roses and violets?” asked a man in uniform. He was Captain Llewellen, at the present assigned to duty with the British Consul.
“That is what I mean,” answered the first speaker. Elbowing his way through the circle of amused listeners, Jerkens, freelance reporter of a dozen wars, reached the center of the crowd, and holding up his hands, demanded silence.
“I want to report that war,” he cried. “What headlines I could produce! How about this for the front page—
“Five Divisions of Infantry In New Mexico Surrounded by the Cactus Enemy. One Thousand Tanks Ordered to Their Relief… Heavy Casualties in Maryland. Our Troops Gassed by Lily-of-the-Valley and Tuberose Enemy Battalions. Generals Orchid and Gardenia Captured. They Admit That Their Morning Glory Division Was Wiped Out by Our Labor Battalions, Armed with Hoes. Patriotic Women Forming Regiments to Fight Violets and Roses. They Will Furnish Their Own Scissors. Golden Rods Massing to Attack Hay Fever Regiments.”
And then the fun started and the laughter became too much for some of the older members of the Club who demanded silence. Soon the atmosphere of the place became normal. White, the plant biologist, who had been the butt of the fun, kept on smiling. But two strangers at once demanded his attention.
One handed him a card, saying, “I am Milligan, the explorer. I came across the ocean to see you.”
“And I am just Mayor Young of Yeastford. I am a charter member of this Club.”
“I do not know which of you I am the most pleased to meet,” declared White. “Milligan has always been a hero of mine because he has gone to all the places in the world I have wanted to visit, while (and here he turned to the Mayor) if you are Major Young, of the Lost Battalion, let me tell you that when I was a boy I saw you play full-back on the Columbia team the year we defeated Pennsylvania. Ever since then you have been a hero to me.” And he extended a hand to each of the men.
“Since all three of us seem to want to know each other better, suppose you take supper with me here at the Club?” proposed Major Young. “I will arrange a little room where we can be by ourselves and do all the talking we want to do. The boys were having a lot of fun at your expense, White.”
“Yes, I was foolish enough to make a statement that was unusual and of course they all gave the ha-ha to me.”
“And the peculiar part about it was that that statement was the very reason for my coming here from England to talk to Mr. White,” said the explorer.
“Well, let’s eat and talk,” exclaimed the old football player.
Later on, in the little private room, Major Young started the conversation.
“Now, Mr. Milligan,” he said, “suppose you tell us just what you want to find out from this famous scientist White. Yes, you need not object to that word famous, White. I have had a few minutes to myself and I looked you up and find that you have over twelve letters after your name and are considered the authority on plant life in America. You are as big a man in your laboratory as Milligan is in Gobi and Honduras. I looked you up also and find that you have written a dozen books about places that hardly any other white man has ever visited. So, here I am, just plain Charley Young, eating supper with two big men. Go ahead with your story, Milligan.” The Englishman took his cigarette and pushed its lighted end carefully against the ash tray. When he spoke it was with slow, carefully selected words, beautifully pronounced,—as though he were dictating to his stenographer or addressing a gathering of scientists in London.
“In the course of my travels,” he began, “I have been to a great many dead cities, great, ancient cities, that once swarmed with life. I have spent weeks in places like Angkor in Cambodia, once the home of a million Asiatics, but so completely forgotten, that none k
new of its existence till the Frenchman Mouhot stumbled upon it in his quest for Asiatic butterflies.
“And down in Honduras I have seen the Mayan cities silently pass the centuries in the jungles; they thrust through the green forest the white marbled crests of their pyramidal temples. I have lived in those dead cities, places like Lubaantum and Benque Viejo. In all those places I asked myself the same questions: Why did they die? What killed them? In some places it seemed as though the inhabitants simply decided to migrate. But why?
“The more I asked myself that question, the more puzzled I was. I saw something in Cambodia, and to my surprise, I saw the same thing in Central America. It was something that I thought I was sure of but it was so fantastic, so utterly weird and impossible, that I could not trust myself to put it into words. I am not like our friend White. I do not like to be laughed at. So I kept it to myself. Then, back in dear old England, I ran across the same thing; and at the same time I heard about the great work that was being done with plants by an American named White; so, here I am.”
“What was it you saw in England?” asked the biologist.
“It happened when I went down to see my friend, Martin Conway. He had inherited a nice old house and a lot of money; so, he made up his mind to restore the place and live there. It was Allington Castle, near Maidstone. It might have been a nice place for him to live in, but the ivy made him stop. That entire estate was full of ivy, and on the Castle walls the growth was from six to ten feet thick and had branches over six inches in diameter. It spread all through the woods. It climbed up the oak trees, one hundred feet into the air, and literally suffocated them with its dense foliage.
“The stuff was growing all over the Castle, inside and out. Conway put a hundred men to work and it grew faster than they could tear it loose and cut it to pieces. They worked a month, and when they came back from a holiday, it was hard to tell just what they had done. It was discouraging, to say the least.
“Conway took me over to see a ruined Castle about seven miles from the one he inherited. This other Castle had literally been torn to bits. The ivy had grown over the masonry, sending its roots into every little crack. Then it had grown up to the top of the building, forming a thick mat over every square foot of the wall. Once it reached the top, it started to pull, and the whole building just crumpled, overnight. When we saw it, Leybourne Castle was just a ruin, covered so completely with ivy that all anyone could see was simply a large mound of green.
“And what made matters all the worse, it seemed that nothing else could live where that ivy lived. The woods around Leybourne, years before, had been filled with the most beautiful wild flowers and shrubs, but they were all gone, and the little wild things, like rabbits and birds, were all gone too. That gave me room for thought. It made me see that right in England there might be as wonderful things to look into as there were in the Gobi Desert.
“Because it was not the lack of money that made Conway stop with his plans for the restoration of Allington Castle. He had the money and the ambition, but he could not get the men to work there anymore. You see, three of them had taken too much liquor, and instead of going back home at the end of the day, they slept there all night, and when morning came and the Coroner and his jury, why laboring men just did not want to work there anymore, and Conway had to stop. But it made him mad and he asked me to come down and visit him. I went over the entire problem with him, and it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps something like that had happened at Angkor and down in Honduras. In other words, the same horrible thought came to me, came back to my consciousness, no matter how hard I tried to ignore it. I am an explorer, not an expert on plants, so I came over here to America to see if White could help me solve the problem.
“Just talking about it makes me tremble. Think of that! I have, and I say it in explanation and not to boast, faced death in a dozen places and in as horrible ways as a man can face it, but when I think that there is a possibility that my suspicion is true, it makes me tremble. Look at that hand,” and he held out his fingers to show them a fine tremor.
“That is all right,” said Major Young, in almost a soothing manner—“The braver a man is, the more apt he is to feel afraid. It is not the feeling but the actions that count.”
“You say that three men were killed?” asked White.
“Yes. I guess you could use that word. At least, they were dead when morning came.”
“And they thought the ivy—was that the Coroner’s verdict?”
“No. I do not know what he thought; of course he could not say that—not in so many words. But Conway told me how the bodies looked, and we decided to do a bit of experimenting. We drove an old cow into the woods where the ivy was the thickest and tied her to a tree. Yes, we went in while the sun was shining, and the next day, when we went back, the cow was dead—and Conway—of course he was not a physician, but he said that the cow’s body looked the same as the bodies of the three dead men.
“This all happened in a poorly settled part of England. You can drive miles without seeing a cottage, and the few people who used to live there left, and some of them in a hurry, and none of them talk very much about why they left, because they do not like to be laughed at.”
“Just ivy—just common ivy?” asked White, leaning across the table, and pushing aside the plates of food. “You mean that it was just the ordinary ivy that grows as an ornament on old buildings?”
“No!” almost shouted Milligan, as he looked point blank into the eyes of the biologist. “If it had been, we would have understood. In the first place, it was big. Conway and I stumbled over branches that were over a foot in diameter, and those branches ran for miles through what had once been the woods. We never could be sure just where they started from. Every few feet the branches sent out lateral rootlets, and coiling twining tendrils replaced every third leaf, but we never were sure that we found anything like a central root. We did find something, however, that made us think. All these big branches seemed to come from one place, and we never were able to get within a mile of that place. We located it rather accurately on our map and this is what we found.
“Ten years ago there was not a bit of ivy in those woods; but there was a large hole in the center of the forest. The maps called it a swamp-hole. It had always been there. Some of the old men told Conway about it. Tradition had it as the home of a large snake. Silly idea that. Now, here is what happened. I mean to say this is what I think happened. This new kind of ivy started to grow out of the swamp-hole. Where did it come from? Why, out of the hole. And in ten years’ time it had captured seventy square miles of England. And here is the thing that makes me tremble. Nobody knows about it, and nobody is doing anything about it. Conway and I talked about that phase of it; and I came over here. How about it, White?”
But the biologist did not have an opportunity to answer the question then, because the Mayor of Yeastford suddenly galvanized into life, as he asked, “Were the leaves a peculiar combination of white and green? Did those tendrils wave around in the air? Do you think that they sucked the blood out of the cow?—and the three men? Did you find swamp-holes like that in Honduras?”
The explorer and the biologist looked at the ex-soldier in astonishment. At last White asked, “What are you driving at, Major?”
“Simply this. Up in the town, where I am the Mayor, we have a hole that we call the swamp-hole. And today noon a hunter came in and told me his dog had been killed down there. But he was drunk; so, I did not credit his story. But he said he saw something like a large vine come out of the hole and strangle the dog. Now do you two men suppose that the same kind of ivy is right here in America? We have a hole there at Yeastford and something is coming out of it. You said that you never saw the center of this plant, never were able to come near the real roots of it. Here is your chance. Suppose we go up to my town and go down into that hole?”
Milligan took another drink and then started to pull up his pants to the knees, and let down his stockings.
&
nbsp; “Look at those legs,” he said.
Livid scars encircled his limbs. Ugly ulcers, just healing, were scattered along the scarlet lines. Milligan smiled as he explained, “I fell down one day. Fortunately, Conway was able to stay on his feet, and he had an ax and cut me loose. I was in bed for days. I want to see your little pet vines in that hole in your old home town, Major, but I want to be very careful about how I go near them. What do you think about it, Mr. White? Any connection between Angkor and the English ivy?”
“There may be. The reason for the sudden desertion of those dead cities has been a puzzling one to scientists. Some say it was a change of climate, others diseases, carried by insects. Terrible wars might have been at the bottom. But suppose, just for the sake of argument, that near each large city there was a swamp-hole and out of this hole came some antediluvian form of plant life? Let us further suppose that this plant life was carnivorous. Fear might have then led to the desertion of the cities and violent, unreasonable panic depopulated them.
“Thousands of centuries ago life on this world was bizarre, weird and utterly terrible. Everything grew big. Earth worms twenty feet long and bats with a wing-spread of sixty feet. Ferns grew into trees, two hundred feet high. Animals grew a hundred feet from snout to tail. Then everything changed, and the big things died and gave place to little things and at present man, the King of the Earth, is a little soft thing under six feet tall. But the dreamers have told us their suspicion that in the out-places of the earth, under the ocean or in unexplored caverns, the giants of antiquity lie, silently sleeping, waiting for the time to come when they can once again rule as Lords of the Earth. Perhaps in these centuries of waiting they have developed characteristics that we have not even considered as possibilities. For example. Can plants think? Can they plan and act according to any plan? If they can, and I think that I can show you something very much like it in my plant laboratory, then what is to keep some form of plant life from deliberately making war on the human race? I made that statement in the reading-room, today and they laughed at me. And I did not know then about Milligan and his legs. I think that we had better go with Major Young to Yeastford and see what he has to show us, and then—I want to go with Milligan back to England—unless things start over here.”
The Twelfth Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK™: David H. Keller, M.D. Page 9
