“The funny thing,” said Gerrod cheerfully, ignoring Davis’ evident gloom, “is that they seem to be able to move about. See this test tube? They’ve climbed up the sides of the glass until they almost reach the top.”
“I know,” said Davis uninterestedly. “When we took the crew off that yacht, they showed us where the jellylike mass seemed to be slowly creeping up the sides of the ship. Looked like exaggerated capillary action.”
Gerrod listened with a thoughtful frown.
“I wonder—” he began, but Davis turned to him suddenly.
“Look here, Teddy, I’m in a mess. I want your advice.”
Gerrod put down his test tubes and sat on one of the tables in the laboratory, swinging his legs and preparing to be properly sympathetic with Davis’ plight, which he already knew perfectly well.
“Go ahead.”
“It’s like this,” said Davis reluctantly. “I liked Nita tremendously the first time I saw her, and she seemed to like me, too. I called on her, and she seemed to like me better. And I kept on calling. I must have pretty well infested her house, but she didn’t seem to mind it, you know—”
Gerrod nodded sympathetically.
“I know.”
“Well,” said Davis savagely, “I found out I was pretty badly gone on her, and last week I was just getting up the nerve to propose—and I know she wouldn’t have been displeased—when that infernal father of hers began to interfere.”
“He asked you quite pleasantly,” said Gerrod with a faint smile, “exactly why it was that you were coming around so often.”
“And I told him,” said Davis, suddenly plunged into gloom again. “It was rather premature, because I hadn’t talked to Nita, but I told her father I wanted to marry her, and I loved her and all that.”
“And her father,” suggested Gerrod, “asked what your prospects were, and the rest of it. It takes a millionaire to be really middle class.”
“That’s what he did,” admitted Davis miserably. “I told him my pay amounted to something, and I had about two or three thousand a year income from stocks and bonds and such things, and he laughed at me. Told me how much Nita cost him. Damn it, I don’t care about how much Nita pays for dresses!”
“We men are deuced impractical,” said Gerrod with a smile. “But what was her father’s next move?”
“Oh”—Davis looked as if he could weep—” “he was polite and all that, and said how much he liked me and such rot. Then he asked me not to see Nita again until I was in a position to offer her the things she had been raised to expect. You see the idea. He put it that he didn’t want Nita to learn to care for me unless it were possible for me to make her happy and so on. It made me sick.”
“I know.” Gerrod nodded again. “He practically put you on honor to preserve Nita’s happiness at the cost of your own.”
“Damn him, yes!” Davis clenched his fists. “But Nita does care something about me. I know she does!”
Gerrod watched Davis with eyes from which he had banished every trace of a twinkle, until Davis had calmed down a little. Then he said cheerfully:
“Let’s go ask Evelyn about it. His late majesty, King Solomon, once remarked that women should have the wisdom of the serpent, among other qualifications. We’ll see if Evelyn comes up to Solomon’s specifications.”
He led the morose Davis out of the room.
* * * *
The great American public became alarmed and rather resentful when its harbors were blocked by the silvery jelly. It felt, though, that the Silver Menace was more of an imposition on the part of mother nature than anything else.
Passenger traffic with Europe could be maintained by air, and freight could probably be routed through the far Northern seas to which the Silver Menace had not yet penetrated. The public considered it an annoyance, and those who were accustomed to go to the seashore lot their vacations were disgusted that the mountains would receive them that summer.
They were quite sure they did not want to go down where that slimy, disgusting, musklike odor from the stilly, silent silver sea would make their days unpleasant and the nights unendurable. Fresh fish, too, became almost prohibitive in price, as the fishing fleets were immured in the harbors that had now become mirrorlike masses of the disgusting jelly.
The public resented those things, but was not really afraid. It was not until nearly a week, after the closing of the harbors had passed that the world was informed of the Silver Menace’s real threat to the human race, and began to feel little shivers of horror-stricken apprehension when it looked at the morning papers.
The news was at first passed about in swift, furtive rumors, but half believed as something too horrible to be credited. The rumors grew, however, and became more circumstantial, but the newspapers remained silent.
It is known now that the government had ordered that no hint of the new danger be allowed to become public, while its scientists worked night and day to discover a means of combating this silent, relentless threat that menaced our whole existence. Whispers flew about and became magnified, but the facts themselves could not be magnified.
At last the government could keep silence no longer, and the world was informed of the true malignity of the Silver Menace. The silvery jelly had reached the American coasts, invaded and conquered the harbors, and was even then rapidly solidifying the rivers, but its threat did not end there.
Just as it had crept up the sides of Gerrod’s test tubes, and as it had overwhelmed the yacht, now it crept up the beaches. Slowly and inexorably die slimy masses of jelly crept above the water line. The beaches were buried below thick blankets of sticky, shimmering animalcules and still the menace grew.
They overwhelmed all obstacles placed in their path. The whole green, fertile earth was threatened with burial beneath a mantle of slimy, silvery, glistening horror!
CHAPTER V.
Gerrod watched Davis walking hastily down to the little summerhouse, and laughed.
“Evelyn,” he said, still chuckling, “you have truly the wisdom of the serpent and the gentleness of the dove. Davis falls in love with Nita. Nita’s father forbids Davis the house, and then you resurrect a college friendship and invite Nita down here so their little romance can be completed. Why are women so willing to go to so much trouble for mere men?”
Evelyn slipped her arm in her husband’s, and smiled up at him.
“Well-l-l,” she said in mock hesitation, “perhaps this time it was because Davis is so handsome I wanted to keep out of the temptation of falling in love with him myself.”
Gerrod looked after Davis. He had vanished inside the little vine-covered summerhouse, where Nita was waiting. Evelyn lifted her lips invitingly, and Gerrod responded to the invitation instantly. Both of them laughed together.
“As a husband of some six months’ standing,” said Gerrod with severity, “I protest against this undignified conduct you encourage me to continue.”
Evelyn rubbed her cheek against his.
“We really ought to be getting back to work on those silly animals,” she said reluctantly. “It’s beginning to look rather serious. It may be just panic, though.”
“Don’t believe it.” Gerrod was in earnest. “They’ve covered all the beaches with their sticky slime, and they’re creeping inland. The rivers are choked with them, and floods are already threatening to become destructive.”
“But it’s so silly!” protested Evelyn. “Just because some little animalcule decides to multiply and keep on multiplying—”
“We have to get to work,” finished Gerrod. “Come on into the laboratory.”
They went into their workshop arm in arm. Evelyn and her husband worked together upon the problems in which they were interested, and indeed Evelyn was nearly as capable a physicist as was Gerrod. Her suggestions had helped him immensely when he and Davis battled with the cold bombs Varr
hus had used in his attempt to bring the whole earth under his sway. Now they were laboring together to try to find a means of combating the silver menace that threatened the world.
“You’re sure there’s no exaggeration in the fear that the silver animals will actually grow up on solid ground?” asked Evelyn as she slipped into the long white apron that covered her from head to foot.
“Not much chance,” said Gerrod, shaking his head. “I went down to Davis’ aviation station last week. They’ve had to abandon the hangars nearest the water. The slimy stuff has covered the whole beach and is still creeping up. The smell is over everything, and the animals grow and grow. They’ve reached one of the buildings and crawled up the sides. They plastered the walls with a thick coating and even covered the roof. Height doesn’t seem to bother them. They’ll creep up a straight wall, and nothing seems to stop them.”
“Well, they don’t grow very fast,” said Evelyn slowly. “There’s still a lot of time left to fight them in.”
“Don’t believe it. They covered the Atlantic in three months. How long will they take to cover the continent?”
“You make me shiver,” protested Evelyn.
“I’m doing a little shivering myself,” said Gerrod grimly. “Every river in the United States is choked up with them, and they grow upstream without the least difficulty. They’re creeping up the banks of the streams just as they creep over the beaches. The banks of the Hudson are a mass of silvery slime that’s still expanding.”
Evelyn began to look a trifle worried.
“But how far can they go from the rivers—from water?”
“They have gone three miles inland,” said Gerrod grimly, “along the Carolina coast, where the shore slopes down gently to the sea. Up in Maine there are places where they have only covered a quarter of a mile. In both places, though, they are still creeping inland.”
He picked up one of the test tubes.
“Something must be done to stop them. How does the cauterizing seem to work?”
“Not at all; it doesn’t even make them pause.”
Since their discovery that the jelly formation was caused by the tiny animalcules fusing themselves into one organism, Gerrod had thought of searing the edge of the silvery mass with a hot flame. The heat had baked and killed the animalcules for a distance of some two or three inches into the mass, and he had hoped that by that means their growth might be stopped. They had simply absorbed the seared portion into themselves as food, however, and grown on outward as before. Their means of reproduction made such a proceeding perfectly possible. Under favorable conditions of moisture and food, each of the animalcules multiplied itself by as many times as the number of tentacles it possessed. The animals themselves were tiny, jellylike creatures incased in a spherical, silicious shell from dozens of holes in which fat, restless tentacles protruded. Normally the tentacles provided the microscopic creature with the means of securing its food. Gerrod had discovered now that it was by those tentacles that they reproduced. One of the tentacles began to swell and grow a round spot at the tip. A shimmering, silvery shell appeared around the swollen portion. Within an hour from the appearance of the shimmer that showed that the protecting shell had been formed tiny, fat, jellylike tentacles protruded themselves from openings in the newly formed shell. With almost incredible rapidity the creature grew to the size of its single parent. Then the connecting tentacles snapped and a new silvery animalcule prepared to reproduce in its turn.
“And Davis is just as oblivious of the Silver Menace as if it did not exist,” remarked Gerrod suddenly some time later, apropos of nothing.
Evelyn smiled indulgently and did not answer. She was trying to find if it were not possible that upon exhaustion of the food supply the animalcules would attack each other and so destroy themselves. She had sealed up small quantities of the evil-smelling jelly in test tubes where they could not possibly find fresh supplies of food. When the available nourishment was exhausted, however, they simply joined their tentacles and remained absolutely at rest, their tiny forms immobile. They did not starve, because they were using up no energy in movement. She had kept some of them for over a week in just this state of inactivity, but on being supplied with fresh water they resumed their interrupted multiplication with feverish energy.
On the beaches the slimy, silvery menace lay in absolute repose. No tremor of waves disturbed its placidity. The whole sea as far as the eye could reach was a mass of utterly quiet silver, reflecting perfectly the cloudless sky. Only at the edges of the mass was any movement visible, and that movement was a slow but inexorably sure creeping inland. Whole colonies of houses were garbed in the glistening, shining horror, and the jellylike stuff filled the roads between. And over all hung the foul, musklike odor as of slime dredged up from the bottom of the ocean.
The sun shone down perpetually from a clear blue sky now. Its fierce heat had dried out the upper surface of the silver sea into a shining mass like glistening parchment, and the breezes that blew were hot and dry. There was no longer evaporation from the sea, and the winds that blew to the shore from the ocean were like blasts from an arid desert. At night, too, the ocean no longer exerted its former function of moderator of the climate. The sun’s heat was no longer absorbed by the water by day, to be given up to the breezes again at night. The winds of the ocean by day were hot, dry, foul-smelling blasts, and at night were chill and penetrating. Already the crops—which threatened to be the last ever garnered on the planet—were failing from lack of rain, and there was no relief in sight. It looked as if that part of the population which was not overwhelmed by the slimy masses of the Silver Menace would face death by starvation. Some few enterprising farmers had gone to the shore and filled wagons with the horrible jelly to spread on their farms as fertilizer. The whole world knew that the Silver Menace was simply a mass of microscopic animals, and the farmers thought they would provide their plants with animal humus by plowing the glistening stuff underground.
They soon learned their mistake. What little moisture remained in the earth was absorbed by the greedy animalcules, who multiplied exceedingly. The farmers learned of their error when they tried to cross their fields. The ground had become spongy and exuded quantities of the Silver Menace at every pore. The crops were covered with a glistening film of the horrible, sticky stuff, which weighted down and finally buried the green plants under its shining masses.
The mantle of shining horror flowed inland, always inland. It rose in thick sheets from the now solidified rivers and crept up the banks, overwhelming everything that came in its way. It clambered up tall trees, and then dripped down in long, thick ropes from their branches. Formless things, shining of silver, showed where forests had come in its way. Gangs of men were working desperately on the docks of New York, shoveling the ever-climbing masses of slimy mess back into the Hudson. Already the drains of the city were solid masses of evil-smelling liquid, and the gutters were choked with their effort to relieve the streets of the trash that was being deposited upon them. The hydrants were flushing the streets regularly now, and the fire and water departments were growing gray in their efforts to keep any fragment of silvery stuff from reaching the water-supply pipes. If that occurred the city would be helpless. As it was, the authorities were beginning to realize that they could not keep up indefinitely the fights against the ever-encroaching horror, and plans were being secretly prepared by which the entire population could be shipped away from the town when the Silver Menace could be fought off no longer.
And all this time, when the government of the greatest city in the world was recognizing the hopelessness of the city’s plight and was preparing means to abandon the tall skyscrapers to the evil-smelling slime that would creep upon all the buildings and fill air the streets with glistening horror; all this time Davis and Nita spent gazing into each other’s eyes, oblivious to everything but each other.
The world breathed a sigh of relief when the g
overnment announced with a fanfare of trumpets that it had found—not a way of destroying the Silver Menace, but a means of checking it. Tall board fences would be built and covered with lubricants, with greases, and other water-resisting substances. The Silver Menace would creep up to them and be helpless to clamber over them. The world would protect itself by means of dykes a thousand times more extensive than those of Holland. Men set to work frantically to build these defenses against the creeping silver flood. Five hundred miles of fencing was completed within a week, and ten thousand men increased the force of laborers day by day. Men stood behind these bulwarks and watched the slowly approaching silver tide. It crept up to the base of the oily, greasy boarding. It checked a moment.
Then it slowly and inexorably began to climb them. The lubricants were absorbed as food by the microscopic animals, who flowed over the tall defenses and resumed their slow advance over the whole earth!
CHAPTER VI.
Davis smiled expansively and idiotically as he looked across the dinner table at Nita. Gerrod and Evelyn tried to join in his happiness, but they were both worried over the ever-increasing threat of the Silver Menace. The government’s tall dykes had proven useless, and even then there were creeping sheets of the sticky slime expanding over the whole countryside. Davis and Nita, however, were utterly uninterested in such things. They gazed upon each other and smiled, and smiled. Evelyn looked at them indulgently, but Gerrod began to be faintly irritated at their absorption in each other when the world was threatened with suffocation under a blanket of slimy horror.
“It is indeed wonderful,” he said with a quizzical smile, “that you two have decided to marry each other, but has it occurred to either of you that there is quite an important problem confronting the world?”
“Yes,” said Davis quite seriously. “Nita’s father has to be placated before we can marry.”
“Please!” said Gerrod in a vexed tone. “Please stop looking at each other for one instant. I know how it feels. Evelyn and I indulge even at this late date, but for Heaven’s sake think of something besides yourselves for a moment.”
The Third Murray Leinster Page 16