All Flesh Is Grass and Other Stories

by Clifford D. Simak

  "Dead," he said.

  And in the silence that followed, he said again:

  "All dead!"

  They found the others in the living quarters back of the locked control room. All four of them were dead — had been dead for days. Andy Smith's skull had been crushed by a mighty blow.

  Jimmy Watson had been strangled, with the blue raised welts of blunt fingers still upon his throat. Elmer Paine's body was huddled in a corner, but upon him there were no marks of violence, although his face was contorted into a visage of revulsion, a mask of pain and fear and suffering. Thomas Delvaney's body sprawled beside a table. His throat had been opened with an old fashioned straight-edge razor. The razor, stained with blackened blood, was tightly clutched in the death grip of his right hand.

  In one corner of the room stood a large wooden packing box. Across the smooth white boards of the box someone had written shakily, with black crayon, the single word «Animal». Plainly there had been an attempt to write something else — strange wandering crayon marks below the single word. Marks that scrawled and stopped and made no sense.

  That night Jerry Cooper died, a raving maniac.

  A banquet, planned by the city to welcome home the conquering heroes, was cancelled. There were no heroes left to welcome back.

  What was in the packing box?

  "It's an animal," Dr. Gilmer declared, "and that's about as far as I would care to go. It seems to be alive, but that is hard to tell. Even when moving fast — fast, that is, for it — it probably would make a sloth look like chain lightning in comparison."

  Jack Woods stared down through the heavy glass walls that caged the thing Dr. Gilmer had found in the packing box marked "Animal".

  It looked like a round ball of fur.

  "It's all curled up, sleeping," he said.

  "Curled up, hell," said Gilmer. "That's the shape of the beast. It's spherical and it's covered with fur. Fur-Ball would be a good name for it, if you were looking for something descriptive. A fur coat of that stuff would keep you comfortable in the worst kind of weather the North Pole could offer. It's thick and it's warm. Mars, you must remember, is damned cold."

  "Maybe we'll have fur-trappers and fur-trading posts up on Mars," Woods suggested. "Big fur shipments to Earth and Martian wraps selling at fabulous prices."

  "They'd kill them off in a hurry if it ever came to that," declared Gilmer. "A foot a day would be top speed for that baby, if it can move at all. Oxygen would be scarce on Mars. Energy would be something mighty hard to come by and this boy couldn't afford to waste it by running around. He'd just have to sit tight and not let anything distract him from the mere business of just living."

  "It doesn't seem to have eyes or ears or anything you'd expect an animal to have," Woods said, straining his eyes the better to see the furry ball through the glass.

  "He probably has sense-perceptions we would never recognize," declared Gilmer. "You must remember, Jack, that he is a product of an entirely different environment — perhaps he rose from an entirely different order of life than we know here on Earth. There's no reason why we must believe that parallel evolution would occur on any two worlds so remotely separated as Earth and Mars.

  "From what little we know of Mars," he went on, rolling the black cigar between his lips, "it's just about the kind of animal we'd expect to find there. Mars has little water — by Earth standards, practically none at all. A dehydrated world. There's oxygen there, but the air is so thin we'd call it a vacuum on Earth. A Martian animal would have to get on very little water, very little oxygen.

  "And, when he got it, he'd want to keep it. The spherical shape gives him a minimum surface-per-volume ratio.

  "This makes it easier for him to conserve water and oxygen. He probably is mostly lungs. The fur protects him from the cold. Mars must be devilish cold at times. Cold enough at night to free carbon dioxide. That's what they had him packed in on the ship."

  "No kidding," said Woods.

  "Sure," said Gilmer. "Inside the wooden box was a steel receptacle and that fellow was inside of that. They had pumped out quite a bit of the air, made it a partial vacuum, and packed frozen carbon dioxide around the receptacle. Outside of that, between the box and the ice, was paper and felt to slow up melting. They must have been forced to repack him and change air several times during the trip back.

  "Apparently he hadn't had much attention the last few days before they got here, for the oxygen was getting pretty thin, even for him, and the ice was almost gone. I don't imagine he felt any too good. Probably was just a bit sick. Too much carbon dioxide and the temperature uncomfortably warm."

  Woods gestured at the glass cage.

  "I suppose you got him all fixed up now," he said. "Air conditioned and everything."

  Gilmer chuckled.

  "Must seem just like home to him." he replied. "In there the atmosphere is thinned down to about one-thousandth Earth standard, with considerable ozone. Don't know whether he needs that, but a good deal of the oxygen on Mars must be in the form of ozone. Surface conditions there are suitable for its production. The temperature is 20 degrees below zero Centigrade. I had to guess at that, because I have no way of knowing from what part of Mars this animal of ours was taken. That would make a difference."

  He wrangled the cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other.

  "A little private Mars all his own," he stated.

  "You found no records at all on the ship?" asked Woods. "Nothing telling anything at all about him?"

  Gilmer shook his head and clamped a vicious jaw on the cigar.

  "We found the log book," he said, "but it had been deliberately destroyed. Someone soaked it in acid. No chance of getting anything out of it."

  The reporter perched on a desk top and drummed his fingers idly on the wood.

  "Now just why in hell would they want to do that?" he asked.

  "Why in hell did they do a lot of things they did?" Gilmer snarled. "Why did somebody, probably Delvaney, kill Paine and Watson? Why did Delvaney, after he did that, kill himself? What happened to Smith? Why did Cooper die insane, screaming and shrieking as if something had him by the throat? Who scrawled that single word on the box and tried to write more, but couldn't? What stopped him writing more?"

  Woods nodded his head toward the glass cage.

  "I wonder how much our little friend had to do with it," he speculated.

  "You're crazier than a space-bug," Gilmer snapped. "What m blue hell could he have had to do with it? He's just an animal and probably of a pretty low order of intelligence. The way things are on Mars he'd be kept too damn busy just keeping alive to build much brain. Of course, I haven't had much chance to study it yet. Dr. Winters, of Washington, and Dr. Lathrop, of London, will be here next week. We'll try to find out something then."

  Woods walked to the window in the laboratory and looked out.

  The building stood on top of a hill, with a green lawn sweeping down to a park-like area with fenced off paddock, moat-protected cliff-cages and monkey-islands — the Metropolitan Zoo.

  Gilmer took a fresh and fearsome grip on his cigar.

  "It proves there's life on Mars," he contradicted. "It doesn't prove a damn thing else."

  "You should use a little imagination," chided Woods.

  "If I did," snarled Gilmer, "I'd be a newspaperman. I wouldn't be fit for any other job."

  Along toward noon, down in the zoo, Pop Anderson, head-keeper of the lionhouse, shook his head dolefully and scratched his chin.

  "Them cats have been actin" mighty uneasy," he declared. "Like there was something on their minds. They don't hardly sleep at all. Just prowl around."

  Eddie Riggs, reporter for the «Express», clucked sympathetically.

  "Maybe they aren't getting the right vitamins, Pop," he suggested.

  Pop disagreed.

  "It ain't that," he said. "They're gettin" the same feed we always give "em. Plenty raw meat. But they're restless as all git-out. A cat is a lazy critter.
Sleeps hours at a stretch and always takin" naps. But they don't do that no more. Cranky. Fightin" among themselves. I had to give Nero a good whoppin" the other day when he tried to beat up Percy. And when I did he made a pass at me — me, who's took care of him since he was a cub."

  From across the water-moat Nero snarled menacingly at Pop.

  "He's still got it in for me," Pop said. "If he don't quiet down, I'll give him a raw-hidin" he'll remember. There ain't no lion can get gay with me."

  He glanced apprehensively at the lion-run.

  "I sure hope they calm down," he said. "This is Saturday and there'll be a big crowd this afternoon. Always makes them nervous, a crowd does, and the way they are now there'll be no holdin"

  "em."

  "Anything else you heard of going on?" Riggs asked. Pop scratched his chin.

  "Susan died this morning," he declared.

  Susan was a giraffe.

  "Didn't know Susan was sick," said Riggs.

  "She wasn't," Pop told him. "Just keeled over."

  Riggs turned his eyes back to the lion caves. Nero, a big black-maned brute, was balancing himself on the edge of the water ditch, almost as if he were about to leap into the water. Percy and another lion were tusseling, not too good-naturedly.

  "Looks like Nero might be thinking of coming over here after you," the reporter suggested.

  "Shucks," snorted Pop. "he wouldn't do that. Not Nero. Nor no other lion. Why, them cats hate water worse" n poison."

  From the elephant paddock, a mile or more away, came the sudden angry trumpeting of the pachyderms. Then a shrill squeal of elephantine rage.

  "Sounds like them elephants was actin" up, too," Pop declared calmly.

  Pounding feet thundered around the corner of the walk that circled the cat-cages. A man who had lost his hat, whose eyes were wild with terror, pounded past them. As he ran on he cried:

  "An elephant has gone mad! It's coming this way!"

  Nero roared. A mountain lion screamed.

  A great gray shape, moving swiftly despite its lumbering gait, rounded a clump of bushes and moved out on the smooth green sward of the park. It was the elephant. With trunk reared high, emitting screams of rage, with huge ears flapping, the beast headed for the cat-cages.

  Riggs turned and pounded madly toward the administration building. Behind him Pop puffed and panted.

  Shrill screams rent the air as early visitors at the zoo scampered for safety.

  Animal voices added to the uproar.

  The elephant, turning from his original direction, charged through the two acre paddock in which three pairs of wolves were kept, taking fence, trees and brush in his stride.

  On the steps of the administration building. Riggs looked back.

  Nero, the lion, was dripping water! The water that theoretically should have kept him penned in his cage as securely as steel bars!

  A keeper, armed with a rifle, rushed up to Riggs.

  "All hell's broken loose," he shouted.

  The polar bears had staged a bloody battle, with two of them dead, two dying and the rest so badly mauled that there was little hope they would live. Two buck deer, with locked horns, were fighting to the death. Monkey Island was in an uproar, with half of the little creatures mysteriously dead — dead, the keepers said, of too much excitement. A nervous condition.

  "It ain't natural," protested Pop, when they were inside. "Animals don't fight like that."

  Riggs was yelling into a telephone.

  Outside a rifle roared.

  Pop flinched.

  "Maybe that's Nero." he groaned. "Nero, that I raised from a cub. Bottle-fed him, I did."

  There were traces of tears in the old man's eyes.

  It was Nero. But Nero, before he died, had reached out for the man who held the rifle and had killed him with a single vicious blow that crushed his skull.

  Later that day, in his office, Doctor Gilmer smote the newspaper that lay open on his desk.

  "You see that?" he asked Jack Woods.

  The reporter nodded grimly. "I see it. I wrote it. I worked on it all afternoon. Wild animals turned loose in the city. Ravening animals. Mad with the lust to kill. Hospitals full of dying people. Morgues with ripped humanity. I saw an elephant trample a man into the earth before the police shot the beast. The whole zoo gone mad. Like a jungle nightmare."

  He wiped his forehead with his coat sleeve and lit a cigarette with shaking fingers.

  "I can stand most anything," he said, "but this was the acme of something or other. It was pretty horrible, Doc. I felt sorry for the animals, too," he said. "Poor devils. They weren't themselves. It was a pity to have to kill so many of them."

  Doc leaned across the table. "Why did you come here?" he asked.

  Woods nodded toward the glass cage that held the Martian animal. "I got to thinking," he said. "The shambles down there today reminded me of something else —»

  He paused and looked squarely at Gilmer.

  "It reminded me of what we found in the "Hello Mars IV"."

  "Why?" snapped Gilmer.

  "The men on board the ship were insane," declared Woods. "Only insane men would do the things they did. And Cooper died a maniac. How he held onto his reason long enough to bring the ship to a landing is more than I know."

  Gilmer took the mangled cigar out of his mouth and concentrated on picking off the worst of the frayed edge. He tucked it carefully back into the corner of his jaw.

  "You figured those animals were insane today?"

  Woods nodded.

  "And for no reason," he added.

  "So you up and suspicioned the Martian animal," said Gilmer. "Just how in blue hell do you think that defenseless little Fur-Ball over there could make men and animals go insane?"

  "Listen," said Woods, "don't act that way, Doc. You're on the trail of something. You broke a poker date tonight to stay here at the laboratory. You had two tanks of carbon monoxide sent up. You were shut in here all afternoon. You borrowed some stuff from Appleman down in the sound laboratory. It all adds up to something. Better tell me."

  "Damn you," said Gilmer, "you'd find out anyway even if I kept mum."

  He sat down and put his feet on the desk. He threw the wrecked and battered cigar into the waste-paper basket, took a fresh one out of a box, gave it a few preliminary chews and lit it.

  "Tonight," said Gilmer, "I am going to stage an execution. I feel badly about it, but probably it is an act of mercy."

  "You mean," gasped Jack, "that you are going to kill Fur-Ball over there?"

  Gilmer nodded. "That's what the carbon monoxide is for. Introduce it into the cage. He'll never know what happened. Get drowsy, go to sleep, never wake up. Humane way to kill the thing."

  "But why?"

  "Listen to me," said Gilmer. "You've heard of ultrasonics, haven't you?"

  "Sounds pitched too high for the human ear to hear," said Woods. "We use them for lots of things. For underwater signaling and surveying. To keep check on high-speed machines, warn of incipient breakdowns,"

  "Man has gone a long way with ultrasonics," said Gilmer. "Makes sound do all sorts of tricks. Creates ultrasonics up to as high as 20 million vibrations per second. One million cycle stuff kills germs. Some insects talk to one another with 32,000 cycle vibration. Twenty thousand is about as high as the human ear can detect. But man hasn't started yet. Because little Fur-Ball over there talks with ultrasonics that approximate thirty million cycles."

  The cigar traveled east to west.

  "High frequency sound can be directed in narrow beams, reflected like light, controlled. Most of our control has been in liquids. We know that a dense medium is necessary for the best control of ultrasonics. Get high frequency sound in a medium like air and it breaks down fast, dissipates. That is, up to twenty million cycles, as far as we have gone.

  "But thirty million cycles, apparently, can be controlled in air, in a medium less dense than our atmosphere. Just what the difference is I can't imagine, although ther
e must be an explanation. Something like that would be needed for audible communication on a place like Mars, where the atmosphere must be close to a vacuum."

  "Fur-Ball used thirty million cycle stuff to talk with," said Jack, "That much is clear. What's the connection?"

  "This." said Gilmer. "Although sound reaching that frequency can't be heard in the sense that your auditory nerves will pick it up and relay it to your brain, it apparently can make direct impact on the brain. When it does that it must do something to the brain. It must disarrange the brain, give it a murderous complex, drive the entity of the brain insane."

  Jack leaned forward breathlessly.

  "Then that was what happened on the "Hello Mars IV". That is what happened down in the park today."

  Gilmer nodded, slowly, sadly.

  "It wasn't malicious," he said. "I am sure of that. Fur-Ball didn't want to hurt anything. He was just lonesome and a little frightened. He was trying to contact some intelligence. Trying to talk with something. He was asleep or at least physiologically dormant when I took him from the ship. Probably he fell into his sleep just in time to save Cooper from the full effects of the ultrasonics. Maybe he would sleep a lot. Good way to conserve energy.

  "He woke up sometime yesterday, but it seemed to take some time for him to get fully awake. I detected slight vibrations from him all day yesterday. This morning the vibrations became stronger. I had put several different assortments of food in the cage, hoping he would choose one or more to eat, give me some clue to his diet. But he didn't do any eating, although he moved around a little bit. Pretty slow, although I imagine it was fast for him. The vibrations kept getting stronger. That was when the real hell broke out in the zoo. He seems to be dozing off again now and things have quieted down."

  Gilmer picked up a box-like instrument to which was attached a set of headphones.

  "Borrowed these from Appleman down in the sound laboratory," he said. "The vibrations had me stumped at first. Couldn't determine their nature. Then I hit on sound. These things are a toy of Appleman" s. Only half-developed yet. They let you «hear» ultrasonics. Not actual hearing, of course, but an impression of tonal quality, a sort of psychological study of ultrasonics, translation of ultrasonics into what they would be like if you could hear them."