by Earl
P-322-M-505 was the number of the life boat that had been tossed away from the asteroid of the triangular rock, containing the doomed Jeremiah Timothy!
THE END
1934
THE SPORE DOOM
l There is no doubt that the scientists will play a large part in the nest war. They are even now developing new poisonous gases and death rays. The destruction that may be wrought with such forces can hardly be conceived. Great cities may be devastated of human life in mere hours—nations wiped off the face of the earth. It is horrible to anticipate such events, and yet their occurrence is more than a possibility.
In this story, we are shown the results of the Great War of 1975. Biologists had developed a fungus growth that was meant only to poison the ground of the enemy, preventing crops from maturing, thereby starving the populace. Such a thing is ghastly enough in itself. But the fungus goes much farther! In our author’s own words, “It starts on a campaign of its own.”
l If a man of the twentieth century, cruising about in some sort of aircraft, looked down on the world of the middle twenty-second century, he would be immeasurably astonished. He would see with unbelieving eyes a vast jungle of plant life, of a different evolution from any he had ever known. Send his ship where he would, there would be nothing but scrubby bushes, tangling vines and interlocked festoons. Even the old desert spots that had once grown naught but hardy cacti, would reveal the same maze of undulating jungle. Our hypothetical traveller would find all earth in the grip of rooted life; every square mile of land would be under its dominance.
In horror and awe he would realize that some super-prolific evolution of plant life had overrun the world, unchecked and invincible. Hovering just above the swaying branches, he would recognize none of their forms. He would see gnarled growths bearing fruits and berries that looked like fruits of old but with the stamp of new species in their form, size, and color. There would be a bewildering array ‘of varieties’ as though some necromantic agriculturist had spread a million different kinds of seeds to the winds. Supposing he were a botanist, he would gasp at the strange mixture of ferns, low trees, grasses, and fungi that sometimes grew from the same spot of ground. To his orderly scientific brain it would be madness to see this aimless pot pourri of growing things of the soil.
A vast jungle. Humid mists constantly rising from the foot-thick layer of rotting debris on the ground. A uniform carpet of greens and grays, with here and there spots of brighter color. Seeds and spores, tufted or feathered, swirling in countless myriads in the wind. An endless hothouse of Nature. But the. most dominant form of plant was unmistakably a fungus. Its uprearing bulbous head with prongs that glowed with ghostly luminosity seemed everywhere, as though it were a royal race surrounded by many different tribes of enslaved subjects. And the tallest trees of former ages were singularly absent, as though they had succumbed to the new vegetation.
The traveller would arouse from his stupor. Where was Mankind? Where was animal life? Was it a purely vegetable world? “Impossible,” he would think, “for then what would complete the carbon-dioxide oxygen cycle?” But he would search the forests in vain for vertebrate life! He would find insects galore, some of them familiar, most of them new. . . . but no creatures of feathers or fur.
But Man? Where was human life?
Our traveller would then orient himself by the Great Lakes and follow the shores of Lake Michigan till he came to the old site of great Chicago. If he had survived all the previous wonders without a nervous breakdown, now surely he would fall to his knees in hysteria. The former city of miles upon miles of streets and buildings would be a shambles, deluged beneath botanical hordes. Cracked and crumbling and rusted, the giant buildings would barely rear above the jungle top. But they were dead, desolate, untenanted. Even the sturdy concrete pavements were upflung, triumphant grasses and bushes growing in cracks. It would avail the traveller nothing to seek a habitable city on the face of the earth—all. . . . all were as this one!
l In the year 1975, the nations of earth, taking no heed of the lessons of history, had again flown at one another’s throats in a devastating war that outshone all past performances in destruction. Each side armed with frightful scientific armament, the war became a holocaust. In titanic struggle, they hurled their might at each other, loosing vicious death rays, thunderous cannon, terrifically powerful bombs, and insidious poison gases. Each wanted mastery of the world; each wanted the enemy wiped out. Yet it was an equal struggle for many years and lives sacrificed amounted to hysterical numbers.
Finally one enemy gained supremacy. Defeat seemed inevitable to the other side. Into their retreating armies was poured a ceaseless deluge of destruction. In desperation, the war-lords of the retreating armies cast about for a straw of hope. And they undertook something that promised victory. Their scientists, who had all along prepared cultures of disease germs to spread amongst the enemy, developed a new form of fungi parasitic to most food plants.
Faced with the doom of extinction, the nearly defeated belligerent hesitated not in the least to sow the spores of the new fungus in their opponent’s lands, dropping them in countless numbers from high in the stratosphere. The effect was noticeable in a few months, just at harvest time. The almost victorious enemy awoke to the fact that their crops did not yield as they should. Through that next winter, starvation so depleted their numbers that the other side again mustered forces and flew to the attack. The next year was a horror not fit to record.
Suffice it to say that a deadlock resulted. One side was reduced by starvation; the other by lack of resources. Armistice was signed and the stupendous task of recovery begun.
But something was wrong! Gradually the whole world came to feel it. The war-scientists had tampered with dynamite. The parasitic fungus that they had so desperately and thoughtlessly loosed on the world began a campaign of its own. Do what they would, mankind saw with growing fear that the new fungi could not be eradicated. Its spores blew with the four winds and infested all lands, till it was seen everywhere. Immediately, Mankind, reunited under this threat, pooled its science and grappled with the problem of staving off universal starvation. For the new freak fungus had attacked and destroyed most forms of edible plant life.
It was not many years after, that the threat of starvation vanished, however. No one knew the reason; no one cared to know. The fact itself brought a breath of relief to all humans the world over. It was noticed that the new fungi, possessed of some strange property never before seen in plant life, had changed, from a parasite to a blender of species! It seemed able to cross-breed itself with any and all forms of vegetation, producing grotesque and freakish forms. It became a universal “solvent,” in a botanical way, drawing together and interbreeding other forms of vegetable life. The scientific world saw all this in stupified astonishment. The queer fungus seemed to be a new form of life with properties all its own. Some few far-seeing individuals predicted that a Nemesis had been loosed on the face of the earth.
In a few more years, the doom of earth announced itself. The new fungi, in its Machiavellian ramblings, going through cycles of evolution in short months, which ordinarily took thousands of years, evolved suddenly a freak growth that absorbed oxygen direct from the air!
Why it, a plant, should do that, no one knew. And then, as if the malignant fungus had reached an acme or a goal, the new oxygen-consuming freak burst out in full strength and overran the earth.
Thus Mankind was faced with a black future—where the precious oxygen was being sucked from the air and cast to the ground in combined form. The oxygen end of the carbon-dioxide oxygen cycle was going to be taken over by a plant, leaving animal life in the lurch. The new freak fungi grew so rapidly and so widely, that it became obvious all the rest of the vegetation could never keep up the balance of oxygen in the air. Mankind waited a while, hoping the new freak would die out, as so many had before. But it seemed a goal had been reached, like a balanced reversible chemical reaction—the goal that the amazing
fungi had striven toward. Sometimes it was whispered that the freak fungus had an intelligence of its own. . . .
Then the scientists acted. Estimates showed that within fifty years, at the rate then in progress, most of the oxygen would be gone. By the turn of the century, Mankind had begun to dig, and by the middle of the next century, human life had deserted the asphyxiated outside world. Living in the bowels of the earth, they had become human moles. . . .
CHAPTER II
An Enemy in the Making
l In Underground City Number 16, which was located in the reformed and extended caverns of Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, Roy Cantwell stopped his labors and rested chin in hands, deep in thought. He was a fruit-analyzer in the Food Department, just one of the dozens of others. But a sudden thought had come to him in the midst of his routine work.
His eyes had fastened on the long tray of sample fruits that had to be analyzed for possible poisons (for the breed-blender fungus had mixed all products indiscriminately, poisonous with edible). With a strange fascination, he looked at the widely different fruits and something seemed to click in his mind. The day before he had analyzed a batch of samples similar to this, and had been puzzled at a certain ordered succession of properties.
“There’s something in that!” he muttered to himself. The next moment he jerked from his revery as a harsh voice, just behind his ear, spoke. “No loafing, Cantwell. Can’t allow it in my department.”
Roy looked up, confused, at the superintendent. “Sorry, Mr. Winter. I. . . . I. . . . just . . .”
“Forget it, whatever it is,” boomed the superintendent. “And get to work. That bunch of samples must go out today.”
“Yes, sir,” and Roy bent to his work as Winter eyed him a moment and then left. Roy sighed. Life was sometimes so provoking and drudge-like. In the underground life, each man and woman must work hard and long all his life to keep humanity from dying out.
In another two hours, he had finished his analysis and sent the tray of samples on with the reports on their edibility and vitamin content. Below, in the huge storerooms, the original batches from which the samples had been taken would be handled according to the analysis. If poisonous, they were converted into paper and cloth; if edible, they were sent to the food distribution center.
After a covert glance around to see that Winter was not near, Roy placed his duplicate analysis sheet before him and examined it eagerly. A low whistle came from his lips. Then he saw the superintendent turning a corner on his periodical round of the huge laboratory, and hastily crammed the paper into a pocket of his belt. Then he resumed his work.
Roy Cantwell, born and raised in the underground city, was a typical human specimen of the time: skin a light tan from the compulsory ultra-violet treatments that everybody took twice a week; clothing simple and thin because of the constant temperature and humidity; health superb because of the city’s scientific methods of vitamin control and medicinal protection.
He was, however, something fuller and stronger than most men, who, in general, were flat-chested and weak-muscled because of the lifetime confinement in an artificial environment. Pleasing of manner, passably good-looking, and quiet nature, he was all in all a pleasant fellow. But sometimes his keen blue eyes, beneath a shock of curly hair, smoldered with secret ideas of his own. The confined life of the underground city irked him and made him long for a happier, more expansive life . . .
But he sighed again as the signal released him from duty. What was the use of yearning for a different life? All earth was the same; all human life completed its cycles underground. Yet he knew it had been different. Once a friend of his had secretly lent him an ancient book, a forbidden book, that told of life two centuries before. He read almost incredulously, hardly daring to believe that once upon a time men had roamed the face of the earth freely. But it was true, and it brought him pain to know that he could never do it. When the friend offered another book of ancient times (which he had pilfered from the locked chambers of ancient relics, being a helper in the building) Roy refused it. One had stirred up enough emotion in his fettered heart.
Roy traversed the wide corridors moodily, scarcely noticing the crowds that passed him by, people returning and departing to their shift of work, or paying social calls. He offered dull greetings as now and then a casual friend hailed him while passing. When he reached his home, which he shared with two other young men, he was accosted by his room-mates.
“We’re going to the Plaza. Coming along, Roy?” asked one of them. The “Plaza” was the community recreation center, of which the city had three. There music was played and dancing went on, and most of the young people congregated there at certain hours for entertainment.
“Not tonight,” declined Roy abstractedly. “I feel like taking a little rest.”
Thereupon, the two left. Alone, Roy pressed the food button. In ten minutes, a panel opened in the wall to reveal a tray of simple, hot foods. He ate and put the tray back. Then he flung himself on a couch and took the report sheet from his belt pouch. Again he became thoughtful, brow puckered in concentration.
l Life in that day and age was mere existence. It required the combined efforts of every adult man and woman to keep their collective artificial civilization functioning smoothly. Over all earth there were only some two hundred underground cities, each of perhaps a half million people, and all were practically identical, except in the difference of race.
The great war had decimated tens of millions. By the time that the engineering efforts had been completed after the war, many more tens of millions had died from lung ailments due to the lowering of the atmosphere’s oxygen content by dreaded freak fungi. What was left of humanity then, a paltry fifty million, descended into the man-made caverns and therein took up the thread of human existence. In the meantime, the outer surface became a desolation of constantly mutating plant life and its attendant insect life.
After Mankind relinquished the surface, the vegetable hordes came to a certain balance, all forms producing the gas of life for the oxygen-eating fungus. It, in turn, produced carbon dioxide as though it were an animal form of life. But the strange spark of promiscuous interbreeding, having seeped into all botanical life, never died out. The surface became a vast experimental garden where new species and freaks sprang to life and as quickly died to allow new forms to procreate.
It had been hard at first for Mankind in his new home, especially for those of the first generation who had known life on the surface. Much had to be done to make things function smoothly. Government, of course, changed completely. All the cities were independent of one another, but at the same time, co-operative in things scientific. The old monarchies, republics, and democratic states of the surface were no more. The new rule was socialism of an advanced sort never dreamed of by the surface generations. In this new government, everybody was on practically the same footing. The world-wide predicament leveled caste—obliterated it entirely. Each had his work, without exception. Such persons as kings, nobles, and other parasites of former civilization had no counterpart in the underground life. They had leaders, of course, but they had no dictatorial powers.
City No. 16 was essentially a typical city. Its inhabitants were all white people, descended from American citizens. Its many miles of corridors, rooms, and passages honeycombed a vast expanse of land. The original builders had cemented and reinforced the old Mammoth Caves; but since that time, the steadily growing population had cut new territory from living rock.
Only three prime essentials were recognized in the new civilization: food (and water), recreation, and the continuance of the race. Food was the greatest problem. Underground gardens (although they had a few) were cumbersome and impracticable. So machines had been constructed that could ascend to the surface through air-locks, and these scoured about the verdant plant world interminably, picking up the abundance of fruits and vegetables that the freak fungus had evolved in its endless cross-blendings. Animal life having died out, they knew nothing of meat as a
food. They were strict vegetarians. For water they tapped the Echo River, leading its precious fluid to the city by long conduits.
Recreation became a vital necessity because of the ceaseless drudgery that everyone experienced throughout his or her life. But the city could not spare much—resources were so poor. The best they could devise was a group of three social centers, where people could gather in their meager spare time and comfort one another. Crowds give comfort, so does music, dancing, and amateur theatricals. All these were to be found in the underground city.
Continuance of the race was treated with sensible broad-mindedness. Monogamy was the rule, and marriages were prohibited before maturity, which was the age of twenty. Couples lived in private quarters and their children (whose number was regulated by law) with them till they were of maturity. Then, if no marriage took place, the daughters were transferred to new homes, likewise the sons. Unmarried young people remained in company with two other single people of the same sex till marriage took place, when they were assigned new homes, to live in domestic privacy.
Money and competitive business were non-existent. All things were distributed by an iron-bound system, supplying only the necessary things of life. Luxuries were unknown, practically undreamt of, especially by the later generations. Education was extinct as it had been known on the surface. Only the prime things of life were taught: how to run machines, practice trades, perform work of various sorts, and how to live in harmony with the social system. Electrical power—the only type of power used—was obtained from machines that extracted limitless energy from rock atoms and molecules.
Yet in this narrow, trying environment, Mankind thrived and gained slowly in number. Marvelously flexible as the human mind is, the later generations were mildly happy and content, mainly because they knew nothing different. And the intelligent leaders knew better than to open the forbidden library of ancient books and teach history.