by Jerry
“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. All 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.
HANS 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 when 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.”
&nb
sp; “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.
“Well,” remarked the loudspeaker, with exactly Schmidt’s accent, “I guess this is the last proof necessary.”
“Delayed rebroadcasting!” Zenoff exclaimed, his dark eyes flashing. “Say! This is something! A new phenomenon!”
“Let’s dish this out,” spoke the loudspeaker, this time in Dee’s tones.
Dee’s jaw dropped.
“Why, it repeats things in a different order than we said them!” he exclaimed.
“Fellows,” Zenoff solemnly announced, “this isn’t mere repeating! It’s something more!”
“Huh! Perhaps the cat’s brain is still active,” scornfully sniffed Hans Schmidt.
For about an hour the three friends sat around the dissolved dead cat, discussing what had happened, and advancing theory after theory, only to discard each one of them in turn.
Finally Zenoff reinserted his contacts in the jar and announced, “Well, fellows, I believe that this liquid, whether on account of the cat part of it, or the filterable virus part of it, has some sort of low-order intelligence. Now I’m going to holler something at it again.”
“Fellows,” interrupted the loudspeaker, “it is you who have the low order of intelligence. You—not I.”
“Now the thing is improvising!” Zenoff exclaimed jubilantly.
But, although he held the electrical contacts in place, and talked and shouted, and finally read aloud from a book for several hours, not another sound came out of the loudspeaker.
Chapter II
The Overdosed Solution
THE next morning, however, when he repeated the experiment, he got an immediate response.
“Read to me some more,” boomed the loudspeaker. “Your thesis on the souls of cats was very interesting. Read me something about filterable viruses.”
“Hey, Hans, do you hear that!” Zenoff shouted across the laboratory. “Bring us your thesis. This tub of suds wants to hear your thesis now.”
“Don’t call me a tub of suds!” sternly admonished the loudspeaker.
Schmidt and Dee both hastened over to Zenoff’s bench.
“Well, of all the cockeyed performances!” Dee exclaimed. “Here are we, three supposedly sane individuals, carrying on a serious conversation with a radio set hooked up to a dead cat dissolved in some extremely caustic salt water!”
“The cat has nothing whatever to do with the matter,” the loudspeaker interpolated. “I merely ate the cat. Do you imagine, Jack, that that apple which you were just eating when you entered the laboratory is what is talking to me through you?”
“Now, I know this is a frame-up,” said Dee, and there was sadness in his tones. “Ivan, you’re playing a trick on us.”
“Indeed I’m not!” Zenoff indignantly exclaimed.
“Indeed he’s not!” echoed the loudspeaker.
“No,” said Zenoff. “We’ve stumbled onto something big! Those savants who evolved the theory that a filterable virus is liquid fire merely discovered a new order of being. We have discovered a new type of mind!”
“Or perhaps a mere mechanical thinking machine,” Schmidt suggested.
“You, and your mechanistic philosophy,” sneered Zenoff.
“Read me that thesis about filterable viruses!” boomed the loudspeaker imperatively.
“Yes, sir,” Zenoff meekly replied, picking up the bound manuscript.
“That’s better,” said the loudspeaker, in a satisfied tone.
The rest of the day was spent by the three partners taking turns reading to the jar of colorless liquid.
When at five o’clock Zenoff reached out to remove the electrical contacts, the loudspeaker peremptorily commanded, “Stop! Don’t cut me off! Keep on reading!”
“But we have to rest,” Zenoff politely explained.
“ ‘Rest’ ? What is ‘rest’ ?” the thing asked, and was not satisfied until Zenoff produced and read to it the Encyclopaedia Britannica article on “Sleep,” and several of the cross-references. Then Zenoff was permitted to remove the contacts, and the three friends went home.
In the days that followed, they read aloud book after book, and thesis after thesis, to the insatiable liquid in the glass jar. They even read it the daily papers, and were astounded at the intelligent interest which it soon developed about current events.
BUT daily the liquid became more and more irritable and rude in its attitude toward them until finally Zenoff, exasperated, threatened to remove the contacts.
“Am I irritable?” asked the loudspeaker conciliatingly. “I am sorry. Let me think a moment.” A long pause; then, “I believe that my trouble is due to insufficient saline content. Please add a little more salt to me.”
Schmidt brought the salt, and put in a pinch at a time, stirring the liquid with a glass rod, until the liquid announced, “Okay. I feel fine now. Go on with the reading.”
Dee sighed. “I believe we’ve got ourselves an ‘old man of the sea,’ ” he said. Then, of course, he had to explain that allusion to the liquid.
When he had finished the explanation, the liquid spoke. “Not at all. You know, I believe that by putting my superior mind to work on your problems, I can help you solve them. All that I ask in return is food, salt, and water.”
“What are you, anyway?” Zenoff blurted out. The three had never put this question to the thing—had never even discussed it in its presence.
“I’ve been thinking about that myself,” came haltingly from the loudspeaker. “I am somewhat like the filterable viruses, of which you have read to me, and yet I am different. I am liquid life. I was once a part of the life of Salt Pond. How long that life persisted there, I cannot say; because back in those days we knew nothing of what you human beings call ‘time.’ I have enjoyed learning how the world seems to you. We, the virus of the pond, never knew anything except pure thought, until you brought me here.”
“Hold on!” Dee interrupted. “You speak of T,’ ‘we,’ ‘the virus in pond,’ ‘the rest of me’; it’s quite confusing. Just what is your relationship to the virus that is left in the pond?”
“Your mere human mentality,” the virus patronizingly replied, “is not able to grasp the significance of that relationship. I am a distinct individual.
“Yet, if you were to divide me into two jars, each would be I, and the other would be someone else. If you were to feed me, let me grow,
subdivide me until there were enough of us to overwhelm the earth, nevertheless we, they, I, whatever you choose to call it, would all still be me, capable of recombining and redividing indefinitely. The human language has no personal pronouns applicable to a filterable virus.”
That night, on their way home from the laboratory, Zenoff remarked to the others, “You know, that crack of the virus’ about overwhelming the earth threw rather a chill into me. We must be careful not to feed him, it, them, too much.”
The next morning, when Schmidt was salting the virus, his hand slipped and dumped in about half a cupful of salt. Instantly the liquid in the jar commenced to boil. Tongues of foam, like the tentacles of a small octopus, leaped from its surface, only to fall back again. And from the loudspeaker there came a harsh croaking, “Gimme more salt! Hooray! Feed me! Feed me more dead cats! I want to grow—and divide—and grow and divide. Conquer the earth. Eat everything—everybody!”
Zenoff leaped to the radio set and snapped it off.
“My God!” he exclaimed. “The thing’s drunk!”
Dee got up thoughtfully from his own bench, and squared his broad shoulders. “We’ve a problem on our hands,” he asserted. “It’ll be weeks and weeks before the effect of that salt wears off.”
“And,” Schmidt added, “if we try to precipitate it out with silver nitrate, so as to get a silver chloride precipitate, the residual sodium nitrate, being mildly germicidal, may kill the poor thing.”
“All that I can suggest is to dilute it,” said Dee. He did some figuring on a piece of paper. “About ten gallons of water should do the trick.”
THEY dumped the drunken liquid into a large tub, and added water until its pulsating boiling subsided.
“And now what?” asked Zenoff. “We have too much of it now.”
“Pour most of it down the sink,” Schmidt suggested. “The small remaining part would still have the mentality of the whole, according to its own theories of individuality.”
“And,” Dee grimly added, “the large quantity that went down the drain would eventually reach the ocean, and would feed and multiply there until it destroyed all marine life, and made the sea as burningly dangerous as Salt Pond now is. No!”