The Twelfth Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK™: David H. Keller, M.D.

by David H. Keller

  “What do you mean?”

  “They have been cutting off that ivy. What did they do with the pieces?”

  “They must have carted them away. I know. They took them in carts and dumped them into the creek. Some they took up on Fox Hill.”

  “They were fools and so were we. They should have been warned. Fire! That was what was needed! Fire! Perhaps it is too late now. Every piece that had an aerial rootlet and had a chance has started to grow. Broadhead’s Creek is full of it. It is starting to run up into the mountains around the Gap. Unless we act at once we are lost.”

  “But I do not understand,” cried Milligan. “I thought it all came from a central plant of some kind, a variety of plant animal that lived in the hole. Don’t the pieces die when cut off, as my fingers would if they were amputated?”

  “No! That is going to be the trouble of it for this country. I have been working with it. Even the smallest piece, if it can obtain water, will start growing and make a new ‘animal.’ I wish I could escape from the word ‘animal’ but I cannot. The ‘thing’ seems to have everything that we have in the way of vital systems, and I think that it has some kind of a mind. It can think. All that it has lacked so far is mobility. It seems to be attached to a central root and it just moves forward and grows as it moves, but the main body stays in the hole. That was the impression I obtained from what you told me, Milligan, and even in England, where no one fought it, it took a long time for it to cover just a small area. Here is a different story. We have been helping it. We threw hundreds of pieces into water and that water carried it down for miles. Perhaps some branches are drifting to Philadelphia at this minute. I am sure the whole Gap area is infested.”

  After that, fire was added to the weapons used. It seemed to work for a while, at least around South Yeastford. But in the woods of the Water Gap it was a different story. There the forests were filled with small summer cottages and large hotels. There was a great investment. Fire in the woods meant burning buildings. The hotel owners started legal proceedings. There were injunctions and counter-injunctions. It all meant delay.

  * * * *

  Even at that time America was not air-minded. Had she been, the use of bombing airplanes would have been thought of at once. As it was, over two weeks passed before it occurred to anyone to try the extermination of the central plant-animal by bombing from the air.

  Once thought of, everyone wondered why it had not been used the first day. Ton after ton of T.N.T. were dropped into the Swamp-Hole. The town of Yeastford was shaken by the explosions. Windows were shattered. When the attack ended, the hole was just a mass of pulverized rock and shattered trees. There was nothing green left. The victory was so easy that the authorities wondered at their fright of the past weeks.

  Yeastford seemed safe. If the Water Gap was in trouble, it was their own fault. The Governor of the State turned the matter over to a special committee and started to build his fences for the next election. Up on the barren mountains of the Gap the ivy seemed to lose its terror. People simply learned to stay away from it.

  Meanwhile it was growing in the Delaware river. In this period of the war the attacking animal showed its diabolic cleverness. Of course, it was a thousand separate animals under the river, but each one, originating from the same parent stem, seemed to partake of the original central nervous system, and one of the remarkable points in the entire Ivy War—for so it was to be termed in the histories of the future—was the ability of all the plants to work in perfect synchronized harmony with each other.

  The plants grew down the river. Biologists later on stated that the original home was in deep subterranean lakes, where it lived the part of an aquatic animal. It certainly showed its ability to live under the waters of the Delaware. It gave no evidence of its existence. Not a leaf appeared above the surface of the water. It simply stretched its long branches southward along the bed of the river, and as those branches grew into long submarine cables, they grew thicker until many of them were over a foot in diameter and looked like large water snakes, as their whitish brown sides appeared through the boiling waters of the occasional rapids.

  The branches grew down the river till Philadelphia was reached. Once more the combined intelligence of the plant-animal showed itself in not making an immediate attack. With flame, dynamite and ax, regiments of men were fighting the menace on the slopes of the mountains around the Delaware Water Gap. But no one thought of searching the Delaware River between Philadelphia and Camden; and had anyone thought of it, it would have been difficult, almost impossible to exterminate a mass of tangled roots stretching for miles along the river front and thirty feet deep in the channel mud. Meantime the stranger was growing, gathering strength, preparing for the conquest of the city.

  In spite of the many conjectures and surmises, no one ever determined positively whether the ivy had a language or some method of communicating with its various parts. One thing is certain and that is the fact that during the whole war it showed the intelligence of a thinking unit of life. For example, instead of concentrating its forces on a small town, it deliberately passed Portland, Easton, Trenton, and waited till it reached one of the great cities of the East, Philadelphia. Once there, it did not send a single attacking branch to the east side of the river, to Camden, but put all its energy into the conquest of the larger city.

  The time that it selected for the attack was opportune. It was a night in early spring, cold and damp with fog. No one was out on the street, save from necessity. The street lights gloomed like sullen stars overhead. The wet streets and the moist air served as a blanket to deaden every sound. Then, at midnight, when every watchman was hunting the warmth and dryness of shelter, the plant sprang forward to the attack. One plant, perhaps, but with a thousand parts; one animal, it might easily be, but with a thousand arms; one intellect, but with a thousand deadly attributes.

  Up Market, Walnut, Arch and many streets running west from the river the plant advanced to the attack. It was silent in its growth, murderous in its desires. Watchman after watchman died with the horrid coil around his neck, giving, through a hundred punctuate wounds, his life fluid to feed the plant and passing out of consciousness without the least idea of what was killing him. Into the cellars, the bootlegger’s joints, the cheap boarding and rooming houses, the laterals spread and collected therein their harvest of death.

  And as the “animal” tasted more and more blood it worked faster, gathering its harvest of death. It worked faster and even more silently. The city east of Broad Street was surrendering to the enemy without even knowing that there had been a battle waged. Aerial rootlets fastened to the stone buildings, and up these buildings the terminals grew, searching for their prey through every open window, every unlocked door.

  Morning came, a lovely spring morning. Before the kisses of the sunbeams the mist melted in gentle resignation. The city awoke, feeling that it was good to be alive, and not till then, when the first living people started to invade the district east of Broad Street, did the city and the nation realize what had happened during the silent watches of the night.

  Those in that portion of the city who had escaped death during the dark hours gaily walked out into the street without the least intimation that anything was wrong, and once there, died quickly. And whether they died quietly or with screams made no difference to the “animal” that closed around them and sucked out their fluids.

  Even in the daylight it took the forces of Philadelphia some time to realize what had happened and was happening to them. It was not till nine in the morning that the scientists suddenly appreciated the fact that the ivy of Yeastford, the plant that was still being fought on the mountains of the Water Gap had in some peculiar way reached Philadelphia and was taking the city by storm.

  * * * *

  It was something greater than the business of a city or the affairs of a state. This was something that menaced the life of the nation. If an unsuccessful fight were made against the plant in Philadelphia, what was t
o hinder it from attacking other cities? Wilmington? Baltimore? And even Washington?

  The defense was slow in starting because it could see, at first, nothing but the advanced portion of the enemy. It was plain to be seen that Market, Chestnut, Arch and Walnut Streets were slowly filling with a mass of green leaves, but it was not until daring aviators had made an aerial survey of the situation that the defenders realized the important fact that the attack had been inaugurated from the river. Later on, when ship after ship had been surrounded, pulled down into the river mud and everyone of the crew killed, the real significance of this became apparent.

  The ivy grew upward as well as onward. Front Street, within twenty-four hours, was a mass of green embowered houses, and some of the older ones were already beginning to be pulled to pieces.

  The Governor of the State heard the news and he recalled the three men from Yeastford. He lost no time in trying to get in touch with them over the long-distance telephone. Here more time was lost. The Mayor had gone to New York for a rest. White was working in his laboratory, trying to find some method of fighting the ivy. Milligan had strangely disappeared. Unable to locate any of the three, the Governor was momentarily at a loss as to what to do next. In despair he sent the entire National Guard of the State to Philadelphia, under the command of the Adjutant General of the State, while he went to State College to talk matters over with the Dean of the Agricultural Department. To his surprise he found that gentleman had left for New York. Not till later did he realize that the Dean had gone to White for help as soon as he had heard of the trouble, realizing that White, of all men, was the one most likely to be of real assistance.

  The first day and the next the same tactics were employed in fighting the ivy; that is, that had been used in South Yeastford. The effort was made to keep it east of Broad Street. The terminal branches were cut off as they tried to cross the dead line. As company after company of the guards derailed they were marched to the fighting line and put on sentry duty. No one was allowed to even try to enter the doomed area. Death, by this time omnipresent, kept anyone from leaving. As though satisfied with its day’s work the ivy stopped going westward, and seemed satisfied to solidify its position in the east of the city.

  It had captured the subways, putting an end to all travel there. The defense had an idea that it was working silently through the sewers of the city, but the danger was so new, the problem so intense that no one had the courage to speak openly about what might be going on under the city. The end of the second day came, with Broad Street clear and a strange battle going on between the military and financial forces of the city. The air forces were anxious to drop depth-bombs into the Delaware River, to try and blow the enemy to bits at its headquarters. They wanted to throw T.N.T. into the great green masses on Market and Arch Streets. They were anxious to start a war to the death. And the money interests, the financiers who had their millions invested in real estate and stores of precious goods east of Broad Street protested. They appealed to the Governor, they cried to the President, they even sent messages to the Allwise demanding less harsh measures.

  Meantime, the ivy rested. At least, it seemed to rest.

  What it really did was to send a hundred roots up the Schuylkill River and on the third night invade the city from the west. The dawn broke with every bridge, every railroad track covered with ivy and evidences of having been rather rapidly pulled to pieces. The Pennsylvania, the B. and O., the Reading were all forced to suspend operation. The city could no longer be fed.

  Conferences began. Interviews were given. Great personalities ventured asinine opinions. Every Tom, Dick and Harry, who was able to do so, rushed into print. There were a thousand remedies offered, none of which could be of any possible use. The Red Cross, the Regular Army, the Grand Old Party and the Amalgamated Labor Unions each started in to do their bit. But everybody was working in a different way to accomplish the same thing, and no one was quite sure of just what he really wanted to do.

  Meantime the plant was growing, the “animal” was becoming more powerful. It was gradually gathering in its forces on every side of the city. The citizens started to leave; there was little suffering, and after the first day, there were practically no deaths, but the President’s advisers realized that a panic would start just as soon as the city dwellers knew the possibility of their being entirely surrounded. So, they silently encouraged the depopulation of the city.

  At last the national danger was so plainly seen, that orders were given to bomb the rivers and the city east of Broad Street. That order would have been carried out had not White arrived in Philadelphia and asked for a delay. He made a peculiar figure before the important personages gathered at Army Headquarters in City Hall. He was rather cheaply dressed, was without a hat and carried a Boston bag in one hand and gallon demijohn in the other. It took a good deal of introducing to make the Generals realize that the man before them was the leading expert in plant physiology in the Western Hemisphere.

  * * * *

  “Ever since this ivy war started in the swamp-hole in South Yeastford,” he began, “I have been trying to devise some scientific method of fighting it. I have felt the uselessness, the utter hopelessness of making a frontal attack on it in force. We were able in Monroe County to cut it to pieces, but each little piece simply started in to make a new plant with all the devilish brains of the mother ‘animal.’

  “I started to study this peculiar form of ivy. I found that it had a nervous system and through this nervous system it was able to communicate with its various parts. But, most important of all, was the discovery that it had a circulation that was rather like that of the fetal cardiovascular system. It actually pumps fluid from one end of its body to the other.

  “Before I arrived at this conclusion, the scientists who studied plants were at a loss to explain the movement of sap in the larger forms of vegetative life. Atmospheric pressure would only raise the sap thirty-four feet, the height of the water barometer. Osmotic pressure might play a part, but it is so slow that in the giant Eucalyptus Amygdalina it would take a year of osmotic pressure to take sap to the top, four hundred and fifty feet above the ground. Nothing explained this movement of sap till I found in this ivy a propulsive tissue very much like the heart muscle.

  “Once I found that, I realized that the ivy had a circulation in two directions. Much of the time I have been wondering whether I was working with an animal or with a plant, but that does not make any difference, because I have found the thing to kill it with.”

  “Well, what is it?” yelled an irritated General.

  “Simply this,” and White held up the gallon demijohn. “This is the stuff that will do the work. But I ought to tell you that I think this ivy is more of an animal than it is a plant. At least its sap has cells in it, different from our red corpuscles, yet, at the same time, a little like them. When I found that out I started to make a haemolytic toxin, something that would have the same effect on the sap of the ivy that poison of the cobra serpent has on the blood of man. It was not very easy, but I found it, and for the last three days Milligan and I have been over in Wolf Hollow north of the Gap, experimenting with it. And I tell you one thing: it kills the ivy and it kills it quickly. Inject it into this blood stream at the terminal end of the animal and it travels back through the animal-plant like fire and literally kills as it travels.

  “You give me a company of soldiers to help me and Milligan and I will liberate this city in a few days, and then I am going to advise the President to start a war of extermination against every ivy in this country, no matter how harmless and innocent it may seem.”

  One of the Generals turned to another.

  “Is it worth trying?” he asked.

  “I think so,” was the reply. “We will wait twenty-four hours and at the end of that time if there are no results, we will start the bombing planes.”

  Half an hour later a peculiar event was taking place at Broad and Market Streets, on the northwest corner of Wanamaker’s s
tore. A company of soldiers had isolated a branch of the ivy, had cut off all the tendrils and had pulled it out till it lay like a writhing snake, its end almost touching City Hall. It twisted and pulled and squirmed and almost got away from the hundred men holding it fast. Sitting on it was White, with Milligan helping him fill a 25 c.c. glass septic hypodermic syringe. At last it was filled and the three-inch hollow needle was plunged into the bark of the ivy, the toxin being slowly injected into the circulatory vessels. Instantly the leafless branch dropped to the pavement. Back of its attachment to the store the green leaves were turning brown, the waving tendrils, seeking in everlasting motion their human food, dropped uncoiled and lifeless. A thick swarth of green ceased moving and hung dead on the side of the great emporium.

  Walking a hundred feet across Market, White picked out another branch for attack. The same procedure brought the same results. Ten doses were given and then twenty. The aviators reported that long streaks of brown were appearing among the green and that these streaks were going back to the river. White asked for a few physiologists, whom he could train to give the injections. The men whom he wanted appeared as though by magic. Milligan directed the work while White went back to New York for a larger supply of the haemolytic poison.

  Now that a means of defense was assured and a definite program arrived at, everybody worked in harmony. System grew out of chaos. Hope took the place of gloom. The nation, interested at last, financed the rest of the war. White was made a General, Milligan was decorated, and Major Young, promoted to a Colonelcy, was placed in charge of the Monroe County portion of the battle.

  The war ended with the same rapidity with which it had begun. From the first the living organisms must have realized the hopelessness of the struggle, because they made a definite and orderly retreat. Tearing off their branches, they withdrew to their place of security in the rivers, and even there, realizing that they would be hunted for with grappling hooks, fled hastily to the ocean.