He could see the sluggish glint of the water now, and, at one end, the stoop-shouldered, shambling figure of Professor Weidbold. Then he saw the servant start across the fields and noted his grim, precise walk. The man contrasted humorously with the surly ruffian, Sam Klegg, who had worked here ten years ago.
Sharpe went downstairs to the laboratory. Weidbold spent most of his waking hours here. He would expect to meet his ex-pupil there.
The tanned, powerful African explorer blinked as he entered the cool dimness of the laboratory. Then he saw that all was unchanged.
There was the delicate device for registering the minute quantities of electricity generated by a growing plant. There was the little glass case in which Weidbold had kept a bit of muscle from the heart of a chicken, a lump no larger than the head of a match, living and growing in a salt solution for sixteen years. Here was the complicated apparatus with which Weidbold increased the chlorophyll content in plants with ultraviolet rays. Then came cases of zoological monstrosities—newts with three eyes, salamanders with tails where their legs should be, and heads grafted on where their tails should be.
THE DOOR of the laboratory opened.
“Gordon!” exclaimed Professor Weidbold, coming in. “It’s good to see you again. You’re looking fine.”
“Nothing seems changed,” said Sharpe heartily. “I might have stepped out yesterday instead of ten years ago. The only new thing is your servant. You fired Sam Klegg at last, eh?”
“Yes,” said the professor, a muscle twitching in his cheek. “A few weeks after you’d left. I wrote you about it, I think.”
“You did. And you wrote me, too, that the sullen fellow took a mean revenge by dumping several casks of chemicals and some of your most valuable laboratory equipment into Greer’s Pond.”
The professor looked so distressed that Sharpe put his big arm affectionately over the thin shoulders.
“It’s ancient history now,” he said. Then: “Why on earth did you ask me to bring an elephant gun when I came for the visit? Are you going into ballistics now?”
Weidbold did not smile back. “Not exactly,” he murmured, avoiding Sharpe’s gaze.
“Then,” Sharpe returned, laughing, “it must be you wanted me to use it on the monster in your pool.”
Professor Weidbold did not smile at this, either. “So you’ve heard,” he said.
“I’ve heard of little else in the last twenty-four hours,” Sharpe responded, gazing at the professor with worried eyes. “The Associated Press got the story. The whole country is laughing at the hoax. You’ll probably have pilgrims to Greer’s Pond by the thousands in a few days.”
“What did the papers say about the—the hoax?”
Sharpe lighted his pipe, his eyes continuing to probe Weidbold’s. “The New York papers say there is a dinosaur alive down here. The Chicago sheets think it’s a sea serpent. But of course nobody really believes there’s anything cooped up in your spoonful of water. It’s just another tall tale, like that of the monster in the Scottish loch a few months ago.”
Again the muscle twitched in Weidbold’s cheek. Sharpe’s fingers tightened on the bowl of his pipe. The old man looked as if he actually put credence in this silly story of a monster in Greer’s Pond. He must have broken recently in mind as well as in health not to laugh with a scientist’s skepticism at such talk.
A monster! In Greer’s Pond!
“Of course there may actually be some big beast, like an alligator, in the pool,” said Sharpe, keeping his tone light. “It’ll be sport to find out. We’ll go hunting tomorrow. We’ll take your spaniel, Spot.”
“Spot’s dead,” Weidbold interrupted heavily.
Sharpe whistled. “Too bad! Run over by an automobile?”
“No,” said Weidbold; “drowned. In Greer’s Pond. It was three nights ago. I heard him barking as if his throat would split, out by the pond. Then, suddenly, the barking ceased.”
The professor stared abstractedly at a glass case in which a curious monstrosity, a newt with two heads, from an egg cell half divided in embryo, was preserved.
“I went back to sleep, thinking little of it. But next morning Spot didn’t appear, so I wandered over to the pond. I saw his tracks in the soft mud next to the water’s edge. They went into the water and disappeared.”
“That sounds like a ’gator, all right,” Sharpe nodded. “They go for dogs.”
“An alligator?” mused Weidbold. “Possibly. But Raeburn, who owns the land behind mine, doesn’t think so. He thinks that if a big alligator was in the pool, it would be seen often on the surface of the water or on the bank. And Raeburn has never actually seen anything. Nor have I.”
“Why not drain the pond?” asked Sharpe.
Weidbold sighed. “I am a poor man. Due to the lie of the land, draining would cost more than my entire fortune.” He cleared his throat. “Come on out and look around now, will you? I saw something rather interesting this noon. I was out looking at it again when you arrived.”
“Certainly,” said Sharpe. “Shall I take my gun?”
He had tried to make his voice careless, but some tone in it must have sounded wrong.
“You think I’m a little mad, don’t you?” said Weidbold. “Well, no matter. Come along.”
THEY went out by the laboratory door and started across the neglected acreage behind the house to Greer’s Pond. Far off was the country road. They saw several cars slow down as they passed.
“Sight-seers will be swarming here pretty soon to look at the monster in the pond,” predicted Sharpe.
Weidbold shivered as if he were cold. “I know. Dozens of people crowding around the edge of the pool. Something must be done at once.”
They reached the scum-flecked pond. Sharpe remembered it well. He and Weidbold had seined out many a wriggling subject for laboratory experimentation. Oddly, he saw no small life now.
“Here,” said Weidbold, in a low, strained tone. “This is what I wanted to show you.”
Sharpe gazed where the old professor pointed. He saw cow tracks—ordinary cow tracks etched in the mud by the water. A fresh wave of pity for Weidbold grew in his breast.
Then he moistened his lips as he peered closer at the tracks, and he forgot to pity Weidbold so tolerantly.
The cow tracks led from the property on Raeburn’s side of the pond to the edge of the pool. Indistinct till they reached the mud, they were only too clear there.
The tracks were deep. They were slurred and close-bunched. The animal that had made them had been pulling back frantically, straining back with deep-planted hoofs from the water and being inexorably hauled into it just the same.
The tracks all pointed one way— into the pond. None came back from it.
“It must have been a monster ’gator,” muttered Sharpe stubbornly. “It must have been.”
But there were no ’gator tracks anywhere to be seen. Instead, half effacing the cow tracks in some places, there was something the like of which he had never observed in all his big-game hunting days.
The mud around some of the cow tracks had been pressed flat and smooth as if a heavy, fat body had slithered across there.
“Here comes my neighbor,” he heard Weidbold say.
He looked up and saw a man approaching them. He was a big, burly fellow in faded-blue overalls. He was striding toward them aggressively, swiftly, glaring at the professor as he came.
“I might have knowed I should look here first for my cow,” he shouted when he was still fifty yards from them. “Spent the hull day phoning around to see if she’d gone into some one else’s barn. But I should have knowed where she’d disappeared to!”
He reached them with the last words and took just one look at the tracks. His black eyes glittered with rage.
“Perfessor,” he grated, “what the hell’s in this pond? What in tarnation”—he glared at the tracks—“can drag a full-grown Guernsey down into the water?”
“Who knows, Raeburn!” said Weidbold, his old voic
e tremulous. “I lost my dog, you know, a few nights ago.”
“It’s probably a ’gator,” Sharpe offered.
Raeburn whirled on him. “A ’gator! Whoever you are and wherever you come from, I reckon you must know better than that. You don’t see any tracks, do you? And nobody’s ever seen one sunnin’ itself, have they? And what would one ’gator do with a hull cow?”
He whirled back to Weidbold, and his voice tensed Sharpe’s muscles angrily.
“Perfessor, we’ve been mighty tolerant around here about the devil’s work you do alone in that lab’atory of your’n. We ain’t said nothing and we ain’t done nothing, though we all knew your work was agin’ nature. Now I reckon it’s time to think of acting. You know—there has been folks lynched around this part of the country.”
Sharpe’s fists clenched, but he remembered that this man had just lost a valuable animal.
“Why do you talk like that to me?” faltered the old professor. “Whatever is in this pond—”
“Perfessor,” Raeburn interrupted, “you know what’s in that pond! I don’t, and no one else does—but you do. I can see it in your face. I been seein’ it there for a month.”
“I assure you—” mumbled Weidbold.
But Raeburn didn’t stop to hear. He turned on his heel and walked away.
Sharpe gazed at Weidbold.
“You see,” murmured the professor wearily, “I have something actual to fear, regardless of what may or may not be in that slimy water.”
Sharpe’s gaze held steady. “What is in there, professor?”
“I—I haven’t the faintest idea. As a scientist I simply cannot admit that—”
“What?” Sharpe rapped out, as the old man stopped.
“Nothing.” Weidbold sighed. And he would say no more.
SHARPE turned from him to stare at the pond again. Covered in spots with green scum, clear in spots like a black mirror, the surface of the opaque water lay without a ripple to feather it. The eye could not penetrate more than a foot or so down into the motionless, silt-filled pool.
Sharpe stared harder.
No movement? No ripples? But there were.
In the center of the pond a faint stir of water grew regularly into being—so faint that Sharpe had not caught it till now. It ringed out, wider and wider, barely stirring the scum, till it reached the shores.
In slow, rhythmic succession, the ripples ringed from the center of the pond to stir at last along the shore. As if something down under there was breathing, with a slow heave of sides or gills. Or as if a mighty heart was beating down there, with each slow pulsation registering on the recording surface of the pool. That was more apt. The water was stirring faintly, regularly, like a huge, slow pulse.
Sharpe’s finger nails pressed into the palms of his hands; but his voice was even as he said: “Got any meat in your refrigerator?”
Weidbold glanced at him quickly. It was impossible to guess whether his old eyes had been alert enough to catch the steady stir of the water.
“I have a slab of bacon and some beef,” he said.
“Good!” Sharpe’s voice was incisive. “We won’t wait till to-morrow to hunt. Visitors might be crowding in by then, and that might be—unhealthy. Would you mind stepping to the house and asking your man to bring my gun and the meat here to me?”
Weidbold nodded and turned away. Sharpe watched him shamble across the field, then turned back to watch the enigmatic surface of the pond. Down in its mysterious, black depths-
Weidbold brought the meat and gun back himself. Sharpe frowned at him.
“No need for you to stay around, sir. Nothing may rise to this bait at all, since the cow was dragged in so recently.”
“I will stay,” said the old professor.
“There might be danger-”
“I will stay, Gordon.”
Sharpe shrugged, and loaded the big gun. They went to the edge of the pond, not speaking to each other, not looking at each other.
Sharpe threw the slab of bacon as near to the center of the pool as he could. It splashed in the green scum.
There was no answering splash. Ripples welled, out from the disturbance and gradually subsided. That was all.
“It—it might be that the—the thing has such a low nervous organization that it can’t tell when food or prey is near,” faltered Weidbold. His face was white and his hands were shaking.
“We might ask the cow what her opinion is,” said Sharpe.
He picked up the chunk of beef and sent it after the bacon. It hit the scum even nearer the center of the pool.
The slimy surface of the pond boiled a little near the meat. It seemed to hump up slightly. Grimly, silently, the commotion in the water grew. With strained intensity the two men stared.
Something broke the surface of the pond; something that was pallidly pink and smooth and glistening ; something that was hollowed in the center like a gigantic cup.
The monstrous cup closed around the meat just as Sharpe’s gun roared out. Both men saw a hole torn in the pink fringe of the cup. Both men saw the fringe continue to clamp down over the meat as if nothing had happened. Then the thing sank silently under the water. There was a soft sucking noise as an eddy whirled above. The eddy died down and there was nothing.
Sharpe wiped the palms of his hands on his trouser legs.
“It didn’t even feel it!” he breathed, his eyes wide and staring.
“A slug that would have stopped an elephant, and it didn’t even feel it!”
Weidbold’s trembling fingers were plucking at his lips.
“Like firing into a sofa cushion,” Sharpe went on. “No chance for the explosive bullet to get in its work. It simply tore through—”
He stopped abruptly. Weidbold’s hand clutched convulsively at his arm. The two glared at the water before them.
A commotion was growing there. Once again the green scum was humping upward as something sluggishly sought the surface. And the commotion rippled the stagnant, warm water in a straight line for the spot where Sharpe and Weidbold stood.
WITH a hoarse exclamation, Sharpe jerked his arm from the professor’s clutch and ripped the bolt of his gun out and back. He leveled it toward the seething water.
The surface of the water broke at last, almost at their feet. Something pallidly pink shone wet and sleek above the green scum. It was coming steadily through the water toward them.
It reached the shore—rather, the front of it reached the shore. The rear of it trailed back out of sight in the black water. It began, with a queer hitching movement, to climb out onto the mud.
Something roughly oblong and fiat, like an undulating pink blanket—something that was simply a blind, sluggish lump, without limbs or tentacles, exuding mucus to protect its tender-looking surface from twigs and pebbles in the mud.
As the thing crawled farther and farther up on the bank it seemed to slough off chunks of itself. But in an instant it was apparent that the chunks were half-dissolved bits of meat. A horn dropped, and some whitened bones, and the skull of a cow.
“Shoot!” cried the professor.
Sharpe only stood there, peering over his sights at the thing. It hitched toward them, progressing by humping itself up in folds and then straightening out—expanding and contracting in rhythmic waves of movement. And still its bulk trailed endlessly from the pond.
“Shoot!” screeched Weidbold.
Sharpe pressed the trigger.
Again the heavy-caliber gun roared out in the silent afternoon. Again a big bullet tore into the viscous, tender-looking pink mass. And again it sliced right through, with not enough resistance offered for the explosion of the bullet.
A jagged hole, oozing straw-colored fluid, yawned in the loathsome pinkish mass. The bulk of it stirred as the bullet exploded in the mud beneath. But it kept on coming.
Both men ran, sweat streaming down their faces—ran as if pursued by fiends.
A hundred yards away they stopped and looked back.
“Maybe—it’s dead,” quavered Professor Weidbold.
Sharpe drew a long breath, and then began to stride purposefully toward the house.
“You know better than that,” he said quietly. “That thing could never die. It could be blown to bits and still not die. Because it isn’t alive; not as a complete organism, anyhow. It has no nervous system; it has no vital organs; it simply has cellular, multifarious life. Isn’t that right, professor?”
Weidbold said nothing. He hurried to keep pace with Sharpe’s long strides.
“What are you going to do, Gordon?” he asked as they neared the house.
“I’m going to do some telephoning,” he said. “I am going to order some dynamite and about a carload of sulphuric acid, and I’m going to have a contractor come out first thing in the morning. We’ll dynamite the pool at dawn. Then the contractor can put up a high fence. After that we’ll sluice the pool with sulphuric acid and keep sluicing it. That’s the only way I can think of to destroy utterly the thing in the pond. And if it isn’t destroyed,” he added grimly, “I see no reason why it shouldn’t keep on growing indefinitely, till it’s the size of a ten-story building. Do you?”
Weidbold only looked at him, miserably, imploringly.
NEXT morning, with pearl first streaking the east, the two went back to the pond. Sharpe walked carefully, carrying half a dozen sticks of dynamite tied in a bundle with a short fuse attached.
The pond looked like a great, green-flecked fire opal in the early morning. Sharpe stared at it. Off center a little, perhaps thirty yards from where they stood, a faint ripple formed regularly on the still surface, to ring the stagnant water and subside gently on the shores. Beat, beat, beat.
Sharpe lighted the fuse and threw the bundle of dynamite.
It fell with a splash in the center of the rhythmic ripples. Both men ran from the pool, covering their ears, holding their mouths open.
My Best Science Fiction Story Page 19