Earth Is The Strangest Planet

by Robert Silverberg

  Now he let Harry find the glass slide with a cup ground into it, and another smooth slip of glass to cover it. Then he half-showed, half-told him how to scrape gently along the bottom sides of the drifting leaves, to capture the teeming life that dwelt there in the slime. When the boy understood, his young hands were quickly more skillful than his father’s; they filled the well with a few drops of water that was promisingly green and murky.

  Already Harry knew how to adjust the lighting mirror under the stage of the microscope and turn the focusing screws. He did so, bent intently over the eyepiece, squinting down the polished barrel in the happy expectation of wonders.

  “Have you got it, Harry?” asked his father after two or three minutes during which the boy did not move.

  Harry took a last long look, then glanced up, blinking slightly.

  “You look, Dad!” he exclaimed warmly. “It’s—it’s like a garden in the water, full of funny little people!”

  Mr. Chatham bent to gaze into the eyepiece. This was new to him too, and instantly he saw the aptness of Harry’s simile. There was a garden there, of weird, green transparent stalks composed of plainly visible cells fastened end to end, with globules and bladders like fruits or seed-pods attached to them, floating among them; and in the garden the strange little people swam to and fro, or clung with odd appendages to the stalks and branches. Their bodies were transparent like the plants, and in them were pulsing hearts and other organs plainly visible. They looked a little like sea horses with pointed tails, but their heads were different, small and rounded, with big, dark, glistening eyes.

  All at once Mr. Chatham realized that Harry was speaking to him, still in high excitement.

  “What are they, Dad?” he begged to know.

  His father straightened up and shook his head. “I don’t know, Harry,” he answered slowly, casting about in his memory. He seemed to remember a microphotograph of a creature like those in the book he had studied, but the name that had gone with it eluded him.

  He bent over once more to immerse his eyes and mind in the green water-garden on the slide. The little creatures swam to and fro as before, growing hazy and dwindling or swelling as they swam out of the narrow focus of the lens; he gazed at those who paused in sharp definition, and saw that, although he had at first seen no visible means of propulsion, each creature bore about its head a halo of threadlike, flickering cilia that lashed the water and drew it forward, for all the world like an airplane propeller or a rapidly turning wheel.

  “I know what they are!” exclaimed Henry Chatham, turning to his son with an almost boyish excitement. “They’re rotifers! That means ‘wheel-bearers,’ and they were called that because to the first scientists who saw them it looked like they swam with wheels.”

  Harry had got down the book and was leafing through the pages. He looked up seriously. “Here they are,” he said. “Here’s a picture that looks almost like the ones in our pond water.”

  “Let’s see,” said his father. They looked at the pictures and descriptions of the Rotifera; there was a good deal of concrete information on the habits and physiology of these odd and complex little animals. It said that they were much more highly organized than Protozoa, having a discernible heart, brain, digestive system, and nervous system, and that their reproduction was by means of two sexes like that of the higher orders. Beyond that, they were a mystery; their relationship to other life forms remained shrouded in doubt.

  “You’ve got something interesting here,” said Henry Chatham with satisfaction. “Maybe you’ll find out something about them that nobody knows yet.”

  He was pleased when Harry spent all the rest of that Sunday afternoon peering into the microscope, watching the rotifers, and even more pleased when the boy found a pencil and paper and tried, in an amateurish way, to draw and describe what he saw in the green water garden.

  Beyond a doubt, Henry thought, here was a hobby that Harry loved.

  Mrs. Chatham was not so pleased. When her husband laid down his evening paper and went into the kitchen for a drink of water, she cornered him and hissed at him: “I told you you had no business buying Harry a thing like that! If he keeps on at this rate, he’ll wear his eyes out in no time.”

  Henry Chatham set down his water glass and looked straight at his wife. “Sally, Harry’s eyes are young and he’s using them to learn with. You’ve never been much worried over me, using my eyes up eight hours a day, five days a week, over a blind-alley bookkeeping job.”

  He left her angrily silent and went back to his paper.

  Once the boy glanced up from his periodic drawing and asked with the air of one who proposes a pondered question: “Dad, if you look through a microscope the wrong way is it a telescope?”

  Mr. Chatham lowered his paper and bit his underlip. “I don’t think so—no, I don’t know. When you look through a microscope, it make things seem closer—one way, that is; if you looked the other way, it would probably make them seem farther off. What did you want to know for?”

  “Oh—nothing.” Harry turned back to his work. As if in afterthought, he explained, “I was wondering if the rotifers could see me when I’m looking at them.”

  In the following days his interest became more and more intense. He spent long hours, almost without moving, watching the rotifers. For the little animals had become the sole object which he desired to study under the microscope, and even his father found it difficult to understand such an enthusiasm.

  During the long hours at the office to which he commuted, Henry Chatham often found the vision of his son, absorbed with the invisible world that the microscope had opened to him, coming between him and the columns in the ledgers. And sometimes, too, he envisioned the dim green water garden where the little things swam to and fro, and a strangeness filled his thoughts.

  On Wednesday evening, he glanced at the fishbowl and noticed that the whirligig beetle was missing. Casually, he asked his son about it.

  “I had to get rid of him,” said the boy with a trace of uneasiness in his manner. “I took him out and squashed him.”

  “Why did you have to do that?”

  “He was eating the rotifers and their eggs,” said Harry, with what seemed to be a touch of remembered anger at the beetle.

  “How did you find out he was eating them?” inquired Mr. Chatham, feeling a warmth of pride at the thought that Harry had discovered such a scientific fact for himself.

  The boy hesitated oddly. “I—I looked it up in the books.”

  His father masked his faint disappointment. “That’s fine,” he said. “I guess you find out more about them all the time.”

  “Uh-huh,” admitted Harry, turning back to his table.

  There was undoubtedly something a little strange about Harry’s manner; and now Mr. Chatham realized that it had been two days since Harry had asked him to “Quick, take a look!” at the newest wonder he had discovered. With this thought teasing at his mind, the father walked casually over to the table where his son sat hunched and, looking down at the litter of slides and papers—some of which were covered with figures and scribblings of which he could make nothing. He said diffidently, “How about a look?”

  Harry glanced up as if startled. He was silent a moment; then he slid reluctantly from his chair and said, “All right.”

  Mr. Chatham sat down and bent over the microscope. Puzzled and a little hurt, he twirled the focusing vernier and peered into the eyepiece, looking down into the green water world of the rotifers.

  There was a swarm of them under the lens, and they swam lazily to and fro, their cilia beating like miniature propellers. Their dark eyes stared, wet and glistening; they drifted in the motionless water, and clung with suckerlike pseudo-feet to the tangled plants.

  Then, as he almost looked away, one of them detached itself from the group and swam upward, toward him, growing larger and blurring as it rose out of the focus of the microscope. The last thing that remained defined, before it became a shapeless gray blob and v
anished, was the dark blotches of the great cold eyes, seeming to stare full at him —cold, motionless, but alive.

  Henry Chatham drew suddenly back from the eyepiece, with an involuntary shudder that he could not explain to himself. He said haltingly, “They look interesting.”

  “Sure, Dad,” said Harry. He moved to occupy the chair again, and his dark young head bowed once more over the microscope. His father walked back across the room and sank gratefully into his armchair—after all, it had been a hard day at the office. He watched Harry work the focusing screws, then take his pencil and begin to write quickly and impatiently.

  It was with a guilty feeling of prying that, after Harry had been sent reluctantly to bed, Henry Chatham took a tentative look at those papers which lay on his son’s worktable. He frowned uncomprehendingly at the things that were written there; it was neither mathematics nor language, but many of the scribblings were jumbles of letters and figures. It looked like code, and he remembered that less than a year ago, Harry had been passionately interested in cryptography. But what did cryptography have to do with microscopy, or codes with—rotifers?

  Nowhere did there seem to be a key, but there were occasional words and phrases jotted into the margins of some of the sheets. Mr. Chatham read these, and learned nothing. “Can’t dry up, but they can,” said one. “Beds of germs,” said another. And in the corner of one sheet, “1—Yes. 2— No.” The only thing that looked like a translation was the note: “rty34pr is the pond.”

  Mr. Chatham shook is head bewilderedly. Why should Harry want to keep notes on his scientific hobby in code? He went to bed still puzzling, but it did not keep him from sleeping, for he was tired.

  Then, only the next evening, his wife maneuvered to get him alone with her and burst out passionately:

  “Henry, I told you that microscope was going to ruin Harry’s eyesight! I was watching him today when he didn’t know I was watching him, and I saw him winking and blinking right while he kept on looking into the thing. I was minded to stop him then and there, but I want you to assert your authority with him and tell him he can’t go on.”

  ‘‘All right, Sally,” said Mr. Chatham wearily. ‘T11 see if I can’t persuade him to be a little more moderate.”

  He went slowly into the living room. At the moment, Harry was not using the microscope: instead, he seemed to be studying one of his cryptic pages of notes. As his father entered, he looked up sharply and swiftly laid the sheet down—face down.

  Perhaps it wasn’t all Sally’s imagination: the boy did look nervous, and there was a drawn, white look to his thin young face. His father said gently. “Harry. Mother tells me she saw you blinking, as if your eyes were tired, when you were looking into the microscope today. You know if you look too much, it can be a strain on your sight.”

  Harry nodded quickly, too quickly, perhaps. “Yes. Dad,” he said. “I read that in the book. It says there that if you close the eye you’re looking with for a little while, it rests you and your eyes don’t get tired. So I was practicing that this afternoon. Mother must have been watching me then, and got the wrong idea.”

  “Oh.” said Henry Chatham. “Well, it’s good that you’re trying to be careful. But you’ve got your mother worried, and that’s not so good. I wish, myself, that you wouldn’t spend all your time with the microscope. Don’t you ever play baseball with the fellows any more?”

  “I haven’t got time.” said the boy. with a curious stubborn twist to his mouth. “I can’t right now. Dad.”

  ‘‘Your rotifers won’t die if you leave them alone for a while. And if they do. there’ll always be a new crop.”

  “But I’d lose track of them.” said Harry strangely. “Their lives are so short—they live so awfully fast. You don’t know how fast they live.”

  “I’ve seen them.” answered his father. “I guess they’re fast, all right.” He did not know quite what to make of it all, so he settled himself in his chair with his paper.

  But that night, after Harry had gone to bed, he stirred himself to take down the book that dealt with life in pond-water. There was a memory pricking at his mind; the memory of the water beetle, which Harry had killed because, he said, he was eating the rotifers and their eggs.

  Mr. Chatham turned through the book; he read, with aching eyes, all that it said about rotifers. He searched for information on the beetle, and found there was a whole family of whirligig beetles. There was some material here on the characteristics and habits of the Gyrinidae, but nowhere did it mention the devouring of rotifers or their eggs among their customs.

  Harry must have lied. But why in God’s name should he say he’d looked a thing up in the book when he must have found it out for himself, the hard way?

  Henry Chatham slept badly that night and dreamed distorted dreams. But when the alarm clock shrilled, jarring him awake, the dream in which he had been immersed skittered away to the back of his mind.

  During the morning his work went slowly, for he kept pausing, sometimes in the midst of totaling a column of figures, to grasp at some mocking half-memory of that dream. At last, elbows on his desk, staring unseeingly at the clock on the wall, his mind went back to Harry, dark head bowed motionless over the barrel of his microscope, looking, always looking into the pale green water gardens and the unseen lives of the beings that …

  All at once it came to him, the dream he had dreamed. He had been bending over the microscope, he had been looking into the unseen world, and the horror of what he had seen gripped him now and brought out the chill sweat on his body.

  For he had seen his son there in the clouded water, among the twisted grassy plants, his face turned upward and eyes wide in the agonized appeal of the drowning; around him had been a swarm of the weird creatures, and they had been dragging him down, blurring out of focus, and their great dark eyes glistening wetly, coldly… .

  He was sitting rigid at his desk, his work forgotten; all at once he saw the clock and noticed with a start that it was already eleven a.m. A fear he could not define seized him, and his hand reached spasmodically for the telephone on his desk.

  But before he touched it, it began ringing.

  After a moment’s paralysis, he picked up the receiver. It was his wife’s voice that came shrilly over the wires.

  “Henry, you’ve got to come home right now. Harry’s sick. He’s got a high fever, and he’s been asking for you.”

  He moistened his lips and said, “I’ll be right home. I’ll take a taxi.”

  “Hurry!” she exclaimed. “He’s been saying queer things. I think he’s delirious.” She paused, and added, “And it’s all the fault of that microscope you bought him!”

  “I’ll be right home,” he repeated dully.

  His wife was not at the door to meet him. He paused in the living room and glanced toward the table that bore the microscope; the black, gleaming thing still stood there, but he did not see any of the slides, and the papers were piled neatly together to one side. His eyes fell on the fishbowl; it was empty, clean and shining. He knew Harry hadn’t done those things; that was Sally’s neatness.

  Abruptly, instead of going straight up the stairs, he moved to the table and looked down at the pile of papers. The one on top was almost blank; on it was written several times: rty34pr … rty34pr … His memory for figure combinations served him; he remembered what had been written on another page: “rty34pr is the pond.”

  A step on the stairs jerked him around.

  It was his wife, of course. She said in a voice sharp-edged with apprehension: “What are you doing down here? Harry wants you. The doctor hasn’t come; I phoned him just before I called you, but he hasn’t come.”

  He did not answer. Instead he gestured at the pile of papers, the empty fishbowl, an imperative question in his face.

  “I threw that dirty water back in the pond. It’s probably what he caught something from. And he was breaking himself down, humping over that thing. It’s your fault, for getting it. Are you coming?”
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br />   “I’m coming,” he said heavily, and followed her upstairs.

  Harry lay back in his bed. His head was propped against a single pillow, and his eyes were half-closed, the lids swollen looking, his face hotly flushed. He was breathing slowly as if asleep.

  But as his father entered the room, he opened his eyes as if with an effort, fixed them on him, said, “Dad … I’ve got to tell you.”

  Mr. Chatham took the chair by the bedside, quietly. He asked, “About what, Harry?”

  The boy’s eyes shifted to his mother, at the foot of his bed. “I don’t want to talk to her. She thinks it’s just fever. But you’ll understand.”

  Henry Chatham lifted his gaze to meet his wife’s. “Maybe you’d better go downstairs and wait for the doctor, Sally.”

  She looked hard at him, then turned abruptly and closed the door softly behind her.

  “Now what did you want to tell me, Harry?”

  “About them … the rotifers,” the boy said. His eyes had drifted half-shut again, but his voice was clear. “They did it to me… .”

  “Did what?”

  “I don’t know… . They used one of their cultures. They’ve got all kinds: beds of germs, under the leaves in the water. They’ve been growing new kinds, that will be worse than anything that ever was before… . They live so fast, they work so fast.

  “It was only a little while, before I found out they knew about me. I could see them through my microscope, but they could see me, too… . They know about us, now, and they hate us. They never knew before—that there was anybody but them. … So they want to kill us all.”