Mutants Read online

  The politicos stopped robbing the treasury and sending monies to banks in foreign lands to live in luxury after the revolutions they engineered to give them excuse to leave the country had succeeded. They began to build of the schools and roads for the people instead.

  In all Guatemala there was no unhappiness, no laziness, no evil. Every day was a fiesta, for fiesta was most of all the time for enjoyment. What greater enjoyment could there be than that of growing the dahlia? Each day the market place must be piled high with the tubers so that every city dweller might receive his share of the miracle food.

  And the market place was constantly filled with tourists as from all the world who bought of the plant to send to their homes and friends for the growing there.

  As everywhere, at the embassies at Guatemala City there had been the endless game of spying and counter-spying. No norteamericano businessman made a move but what a countermove was made by the English counterpart. Every Hindu watched a Moslem, and every Moslem watched a Hindu. Even Wun Sing Low, laundryman for twenty years, was now known to be a Red spy, sending out his messages by marks upon the shirts of businessmen. All were enemies to the Soviet, and that embassy chose to see a world threat in the blink of every peon’s eyes.

  The governments of the world were accustomed to these voluminous reports, and they sifted through them with yawns of boredom. A man’s diplomatic worth was judged by the poundage of his reports and the frequency of the crises he might uncover. Even so, it took some time before the governments became aware of the cessation of such reports from Guatemala.

  Peace and prosperity and goodwill permeated all the reports from all the spy headquarters. No man could believe ill of his neighbor, for no man could partake of evil, or evil thought, where the dahlia was to be eaten.

  Moscow, ever wary in its inferiority complex, and never ceasing to jockey for position, was the first of the capitals to summon its embassy’s return. It demanded an account of these un-Marxian reports of serenity and peace in a capitalistic country. It wished to know why if there was no indigenous trouble some had not been manufactured.

  The embassy took with it a plentiful supply of the tubers of the dahlia and ate heavily of them. It had been learned that the human body could store the food value of the dahlia for months and they were taking no chances. Throughout the routine of their torture, they maintained their rapture. Finally their inquisitors had no course left but to taste of the dahlia itself to check these fantastic tales and so give the lie to the diplomats.

  Then the inquisitors in turn must endure the torture, for they no longer wished to carry forth their duties, and in turn their questioners ate. It became that there were none left but the Politbureau itself to carry on the torture since there were none others to be trusted to carry out the true democratic blessings upon their fellow men.

  So it came about that one by one the members of the Politbureau tasted of the dahlia, even to the leader himself.

  All of this took much time, and meanwhile the heads of other nations who were not so suspicious of every shadow, and not so inaccessible, were eating regularly of the dahlia.

  When finally the sincere word of peace and goodwill came ringing from Moscow to all the world, it was echoed back with all sincerity.

  By the end of twelve years, over all the world the dahlia grew and thrived and was eaten. The Bering Strait Eskimo, the Congo Pigmy, the Australian Bushman, the Tibetan yak herder, each had his carefully bred offshoot of the dahlia. For the first time within written history the wretched masses of India and the famine-accustomed Chinese knew the Ml belly and peace and progress.

  So it became in the world. There was but goodwill and happiness for all.

  Pepe was now seventeen, and well beyond the age to marry. But there was not the economic urgency there once had been and children were permitted to remain without so much responsibility a little longer.

  But today he was seventeen and today was his wedding day. Today was a most important day and he would not be called Pepe. He would be called for this one day by his true name of Juan Rafael de la Medina Torres. Now he was a grown man and his village was prosperous and everyone was happy.

  Dimly he was aware that there was a world beyond his own village. But like all his forebears it had no reality for him. In truth he still knew only the path leading down the side of the volcano to the village; or the path up the mountain to where they once had brown com and beans and now grew dahlias; or the path around the volcano and down to the coffee finca.

  Barefoot still, but with his finest knee breeches striped like peppermint candy, with his red cummerbund wrapped around his slender waist, he trotted down the path toward the mission where Maria waited and where the good Padre Tomas would make them as one person. This was his world.

  Half walking, half running in eagerness, the sight of the particular glade where he had first found the dahlia recalled his memory of himself as a little boy.

  He laughed joyously and threw his shoulders back and breathed the mountain air of the morning in ecstasy. “What a one I was,” he called aloud and shouted again with laughter. “I remember I was so fierce in those days. Why, I was going to conquer all the world!”

  Liquid Life

  Ralph Miine Farley

  “Ralph Milne Farley” was the pseudonym of the late Roger Sherman Hoar, a man of many careers. Under his rightful name he acquired three degrees at Harvard and distinguished himself as an engineer, a physicist, and a patent attorney. He was an expert on ballistics who served as a technical officer in World War I and was responsible for many inventions, including a device for aiming large guns. Late in life he held high political office in Wisconsin. Meanwhile, as “Farley/9 he was one of the most prolific and popular writers of imaginative fiction of the 1920’s and 1930”s, delighting the readers of Argosy, Top Notch, and many other magazines with such novels as The Radio Man, The Golden City, and The Radio Planet.

  Farley’s “Liquid Life/’ a lighthearted account of a mutated virus that attains intelligent consciousness, was first published in 1936. Most science-fiction stories of that era are unreadable today, but the charm and good humor of Farley’s storytelling have kept his work alive.

  Millionaire Metcalf drew his Inverness cape more tightly about his tall, spare frame and shivered slightly, although it was a warm June day.

  “That’s Salt Pond, Dee!” he announced, with a wave of his hand.

  His companion, a broad-shouldered blond young man, stared with interest at the little body of water flanked by pine-clad slopes.

  Its dark and turbid surface seemed to absorb, rather than cast back, the reflection of the fleecy clouds floating lazily overhead. The water heaved and rolled slightly, though there was no perceptible breeze. Dee remembered having once seen just this sort of sluggish, undulant motion in a maggoty cistern full of liquid swill. He, too, shivered.

  A grim smile spread across the lean face of his millionaire patron.

  “So you feel it too, eh?” asked Metcalf. “Well, you haven’t yet seen the half of it. Not a lily pad nor a reed, you will note. The fish are all gone. There are not even any bugs on the surface.” Then, as Dee approached the water’s edge, “Careful there! Don’t let any of the spray get on you—it burns like an acid.”

  Dee knelt on the beach and gingerly filled several glass-stoppered bottles with water from the pond. Then he and Metcalf walked slowly and thoughtfully down the road until they came to a pasture at the end of the pond.

  “Here is the latest victim,” Metcalf announced. “It has not been disturbed,”

  Lying on the grass, about fifty feet from the water, was a dead, half-eaten cow. Dee stooped down to examine it.

  “See how the legs and tail taper off to a point at their upper ends, as though they had been dipped in acid,” he said. “I pulled a half-dead frog out of a snake’s mouth once, and the whole rear end of the poor frog had been dissolved to a point, just like that. You don’t suppose—”

  “No,” Metcalf replied. �
��There is nothing in that pond large enough to eat a cow. I have had it dredged with dragnets from end to end. The nets were eaten away, and several of the men got badly burned by drops of water, but not a thing did they bring to the surface.”

  “Well,” Dee said, “I’ve seen enough to start on. Let’s get me back to Boston, so that I can analyze these samples.”

  Dee entered the laboratory of John Dee Service, Inc., and placed his glass-stoppered bottles on the long central table strewn with chemical paraphernalia.

  Along the right-hand wall ran a table containing a radio set and some partially dissected cats. A white-coated young man, dark and with a pointed black moustache, laid down the scalpel with which he had been working on one of the cats and strolled over to the central table.

  Along the left-hand wall ran a table, littered like the central one with beakers, test tubes, and such. Here a stocky, bearded young man in a gray smock was working. He too got up and joined the group about the new arrival.

  “Well, fellows,” Dee announced, “old man Metcalf has given us a chance to repay him for the money he advanced to us.”

  “I hope,” the tall cat-dissector stated seriously, “that the assignment is something which will be of some real use to the world.”

  “Bah!” spat the stocky bullet-headed one. “You two fellows make me tired. AH that Jack thinks about is playing square with an old friend. All that Ivan thinks about is the welfare of the so-called human race. Me, I’m practical. I hope that this job will get the load of debt off our heads. Go on and tell us about it, Jack.”

  Dee rapidly sketched the lethal effect of the waters of Salt Pond and the strange fate of the partially devoured cows. “It looks to me altogether too pat,” he insisted. “The acid effect of the water, for the chemist Jack Dee to investigate; its lethal effect, for the biochemist Hans Schmidt; and the cow-eating entity, for the biologist Ivan Zenoff. Just a kindly invention of Metcalf’s so as to free us of our debt without insulting us by merely canceling it.”

  “Salt Pond?” asked Zenoff interestedly. “Is it really salt, Jack? Way up in the White Mountains?”

  “Yes, Ivan,” Dee replied. “Almost like seawater. Metcalf transplanted a lot of flounders, eels, crabs, and mussels there about ten years ago; and they all did very nicely until this year.”

  “Salt water, eh?” Zenoff said thoughtfully. “The elixir of life. Life originated in the sea, and when it had evolved enough so that it could crawl out onto dry land, it carried the sea with it in its bloodstream. Every living cell of our bodies is lapped by the waves of the sea, or it could not survive.”

  “But from what you say, Jack,” Schmidt interposed, “I don’t believe that you will find that it analyzes like ordinary seawater now. Your description of the remains of the dead cows sounds to me as though they had been dissolved in some very powerful, burning acid.”

  “We’ll soon see.” Dee pulled a laboratory smock over his head. “Ivan, you get back to your cats’ brains; and Hans, you get back to your filterable virus. Let me tackle this. This seems to be a question in inorganic chemistry.”

  He sat down at his work bench, poured some of one of his samples of pond water into a test tube, and set to work. His two partners returned to their own benches. For about an hour there was silence in the laboratory.

  Then suddenly Dee cried out in pain. “Burned myself!” he shouted, and looked frantically around for an antidote.

  Then Schmidt rushed over and poured something from a small brown bottle onto Dee’s hand.

  “Dilute carbolic,” he announced, in response to a questioning look.

  “What! An acid to counteract an acid? How absurd!” Dee declared.

  “Well, it worked!”

  “But what on earth made you think of using carbolic, Hans?”

  “I merely acted instinctively,” Schmidt rather sheepishly replied. “When anything goes wrong, a bacteriologist instinctively reaches for his carbolic acid. That’s all.”

  Ivan Zenoff joined them.

  “Let me see the hand. Um! Pretty badly burned. I’ll dress it for you.” He returned to his own bench, got some gauze bandage and salve, and neatly wrapped up the injured member.

  “How far had you got, Jack?” Schmidt inquired.

  “Nowhere,” Dee admitted. “It is nothing but seawater, with—well-perhaps a slight excess of organic residue. But no acid; nothing to account for its burning effect.”

  “How does it react to litmus?”

  “Why, I never tried. Took it for granted that it was acid.” He dipped a small piece of lavender paper in the sample. If anything, it turned even bluer. “Hm! Certainly not acid. Perhaps it’s some caustic alkali, and that’s why the carbolic acid neutralized it.”

  “Too quick-acting for a caustic alkali, if you’d ask me,” Schmidt commented. “Give me a sample with which to experiment. I have an idea.”

  For several days Dee and Schmidt worked on their analyses, while Zenoff busied himself with his cats.

  Finally Dee admitted himself licked.

  “It’s nothing but seawater,” he maintained.

  “So?” asked Schmidt, his pale-blue eyes twinkling. “Chemically, perhaps yes. But foochemically, no.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that Salt Pond is infected with some new sort of very deadly filterable virus.”

  “And just what is a filterable virus?”

  “Up until recently it was supposed that a filterable virus was merely a culture of germs so minute that even the finest porcelain filter could not remove them from the liquid. But early in 1936 it was discovered that the reason why these germs wouldn’t filter out was that there were no germs there. The liquid itself was alive—a sort of living colloidal crystalline solution.”

  “Living?” exclaimed Zenoff, looking up from his dissection. “How can a liquid live?”

  “What is life?” Schmidt countered. “Life is the ability to grow, to assimilate food, and to reproduce. Filterable viruses do all of that. A filterable virus is a living liquid.”

  “And you think that Salt Pond is infected with such a virus?” Dee asked.

  “Yes. In fact, I’ve been able to grow some of the Salt Pond virus in a culture. That would account for the fact that a germicide saved your hand the other day.”

  “Say, look here,” interposed Zenoff, getting up from his dissected cats, and joining them. “Here’s a chance to try my experiment on a new form of life.”

  “You mean your proof that anesthesia does not dull the brain?” asked Dee.

  “Exactly! By sinking two electrical contacts in the auditory center of the brain of an anesthetized cat, and by amplifying their impulse by means of radio tubes, I have reproduced in the loudspeaker whatever sounds enter the cat’s ear. Unconsciousness doesn’t affect the brain at all—it merely disconnects the mind. The cat’s physical body keeps right on thinking, but she doesn’t know it!”

  “Well?” Dee encouraged.

  “Well, it occurred to me that perhaps the riving tissues of the brain merely served as a sort of aerial to pick up the sounds; and so I tried every other sort of living tissue I could obtain. But no go. My apparatus can pick up a sound only from the auditory center of a living brain. Now I shall make one final try with the—”

  A crash on the table beside them caused the three men to look hastily around. One of Ivan Zenoff’s cats, not yet operated upon, had jumped onto the bench, knocked over one of the bottles of Salt Pond water, and was now busily engaged in lapping it up, evidently relishing its saline taste.

  “Why, the poor beast! She’ll be horribly burned!” cried Dee. “Quick, Hans, the antiseptic!”

  But too late! For with a shriek of pain the cat began turning somersaults on the bench.

  To save his apparatus from destruction, Dee cuffed the cat into the sink, where it twitched convulsively for a moment, and then lay still.

  “Quick-working poison!” Zenoff dryly observed, twirling his moustache. “Now, as I was saying w
hen I was interrupted, I’m going to take my apparatus, and see if a filterable virus can pick up sounds. If not, and as I have already tried about everything else, then we are pretty safe in assuming that my phenomenon is one of brain activity.”

  “Look!” exclaimed Dee, pointing to the dead cat lying in the sink. For the cat’s belly had opened up, and a slimy colorless liquid was oozing out.

  Hastily he placed a glass stopper in the drain hole of the sink. Then, as the three men stood and watched, the cat slowly dissolved, until presently the sink was filled with nothing but a sluggish opalescent liquid, the surface of which throbbed and heaved.

  “Liquid life!” Dee exclaimed. “This explains the dead cows.”

  “But,” Schmidt objected, “the cow’s head and legs and tail remained!”

  “And so would the cat’s have done,” said Zenoff, “if the liquid had run down the drain. When it oozed out of the cow’s belly, it undoubtedly sank into the ground before it had time to dissolve any more than the upper ends of the legs and tail.”

  “Let’s dish this out,” Dee suggested.

  Schmidt brought over a two-gallon cylindrical glass jar and very carefully bailed up all the liquid with a granite-ware dipper.

  “Now for my experiment,” Zenoff announced, carrying the jar with its slimy, heaving contents over to his own bench and setting it down beside his radio. Switching on the current, he picked up a slender black rubber rod with two sharp metal points at its end connected to the radio set by two wires, and carefully dipped the contacts into the liquid.

  “Hello there!” he shouted. But no sound came out of the loudspeaker.

  “Well,” said Hans Schmidt, shrugging his shoulders, “I guess this is the last proof necessary—”

  “Hello there!” boomed the loudspeaker.

  Zenoff jumped, and nearly dropped his contact points into the seething liquid.