“So there is a poison in the fruits?” Kadir snapped.
“A poison? Rubbish! How would you or anyone feel if you had been forced to eat three dozen enormous green apples, to say nothing of unripe greenbeefos? I’ll stake my reputation against yours that Juan is hiding in the forest and being very sick right now. And I’ll bet anything you like that nobody ever sees him again. By the way, do you know which road he was to follow you by? The one through the clearing, or the cut-off through the forest?”
“I told him to take the cut-off, so as to get here quicker.”
“Fine. Let’s go and meet him—only we shan’t. As for what I saw when I opened that door, I’ll forget it if you will. I know Consuelo has already forgotten it. We are all quarantined here together in Amazonia, and there’s no sense in harboring grudges. We’ve got to live together.”
Relieved at being able to save his face, Kadir responded with a generous promise.
“If we fail to find Juan, I will admit that you are right, and that Juan has been drinking.”
“Nothing could be fairer. Come on, let’s go.”
Their way to the Dictator’s “palace”—formerly the residence of the superintendent of the gold mines—lay through the tropical forest.
The road was already beginning to choke up in the gloomier stretches with a rank web of trailing plants feeling their way to the trees on either side, to swarm up their trunks and ultimately choke the life out of them. Kadir’s followers, soldiers all and new to the tropics, were letting nature take its course. Another two years of incompetence would see the painstaking labor of the American engineers smothered in rank jungle.
Frequently the three were compelled to abandon the road and follow more open trails through the forest till they again emerged on the road. Dazzling patches of yellow sunlight all but blinded them temporarily as they crossed the occasional barren spots that seem to blight all tropical forests like a leprosy. Coming out suddenly into one of these blinding patches, Kadir, who happened to be leading, let out a curdling oath and halted as if he had been shot.
“What’s the matter?” Consuelo asked breathlessly, hurrying to overtake him. Blinded by the glare she could not see what had stopped the Dictator.
“I stepped on it.” Kadir’s voice was hoarse with disgust and fear.
“Stepped on what?” Beetle demanded. “I can’t see in this infernal light. Was it a snake?”
“I don’t know,” Kadir began hoarsely. “It moved under my foot. Ugh! I see it now. Look.”
They peered at the spot Kadir indicated, but could see nothing. Then, as their eyes became accustomed to the glare, they saw the thing that Kadir had stepped on.
A foul red fungus, as thick as a man’s arm and over a yard long, lay directly in the Dictator’s path.
“A bladder full of blood and soft flesh,” Kadir muttered, shaking with fright and revulsion. “And I stepped on it.”
“Rot!” Beetle exclaimed contemptuously, but there was a bitter glint in his eyes. “Pull yourself together, man. That’s nothing but a fungus. If there’s a drop of blood in it, I’ll eat the whole thing.”
“But it moved,” Kadir expostulated.
“Nonsense. You stepped on it, and naturally it gave beneath your weight. Come on. You will never find Juan at this rate.”
But Kadir refused to budge. Fascinated by the disgusting object at his feet, the Dictator stood staring down at it with fear and loathing in every line of his face.
Then, as if to prove the truth of his assertion, the thing did move, slowly, like a wounded eel. But, unlike an eel, it did not move in the direction of its length. It began to roll slowly over.
Beetle squatted, the better to follow the strange motion. If it was not the first time he had seen such a freak of nature, he succeeded in giving a very good imitation of a scientist observing a novel and totally unexpected phenomenon. Consuelo joined her father in his researches. Kadir remained standing.
“Is it going to roll completely over?” Consuelo asked with evident interest.
“I think not,” Beetle hazarded. “In fact, I’ll bet three to one it only gets halfway over. There—I told you so. Look, Kadir, your fungus is rooted to the spot, just like any other plant.” In spite of himself, Kadir stooped down and looked. As the fungus reached the halfway mark in its attempted roll, it shuddered along its entire length and seemed to tug at the decayed vegetation. But shuddering and tugging got it nowhere. A thick band of fleshy rootlets, like coarse green hair, held it firmly to the ground. The sight of that futile struggle to move like a fully conscious thing was too much for Kadir’s nerves.
“I am going to kill it,” he muttered, leaping to his feet. “How?” Beetle asked with a trace of contempt. “Fire is the only thing I know of to put a mess like that out of its misery— if it is in misery. For all I know, it may enjoy life. You can’t kill it by smashing it or chopping it into mincemeat. Quite the contrary, in fact. Every piece of it will start a new fungus, and instead of one helpless blob rooted to the spot, you will have a whole colony. Better leave it alone, Kadir, to get what it can out of existence in its own way. Why must men like you always be killing something?”
“It is hideous and—”
“And you are afraid of it? How would you like someone to treat you as you propose treating this harmless fungus?”
“If I were like that,” Kadir burst out, “I should want somebody to put a torch to me.”
“What if nobody knew that was what you wanted? Or if nobody cared? You have done some pretty foul things to a great many people in your time, I believe.”
“But never anything like this!’
“Of course not. Nobody has ever done anything like this to anybody. So you didn’t know how. What were you trying to do to my daughter an hour ago?”
“We agreed to forget all that,” Consuelo reminded him sharply.
“Sorry. My mistake. I apologize, Kadir. As a matter of scientific interest, this fungus is not at all uncommon.”
“I never saw one like it before,” Consuelo objected.
“That is only because you don’t go walking in the forest as I do,” he reminded her. “Just to prove I’m right, I’ll undertake to find a dozen rolling fungi within a hundred yards of here. What do you say?”
Before they could protest, he was hustling them out of the blinding glare into a black tunnel of the forest. Beetle seemed to know where he was going, for it was certain that his eyes were as dazed as theirs.
“Follow closely when you find your eyes,” he called. “I’ll go ahead. Look out for snakes. Ah, here’s the first beauty! Blue and magenta, not red like Kadir’s friend. Don’t be prejudiced by its shape. Its color is all the beauty this poor thing has.”
If anything, the shapeless mass of opalescent fungus blocking their path was more repulsive than the monstrosity that had stopped Kadir. This one was enormous, fully a yard in breadth and over five feet long. It lay sprawled over the rotting trunk of a fallen tree like a decomposing squid.
Yet, as Beetle insisted, its color was beautiful with an unnatural beauty. However, neither Consuelo nor Kadir could overcome their nausea at that living death. They fled precipitately back to the patch of sunlight. The fleshy magenta roots of the thing, straining impotently at the decaying wood which nourished them, were too suggestive of helpless suffering for endurance. Beetle followed at his leisure, chuckling to himself. His amusement drew a sharp reprimand from Consuelo.
“How can you be amused? That thing was in misery.”
“Aren’t we all?” he retorted lightly, and for the first time in her life Consuelo doubted the goodness of her father’s heart.
They found no trace of Juan. By the time they reached the Dictator’s palace, Kadir was ready to agree to anything. He was a badly frightened man.
“You were right,” he admitted to Beetle. “Juan was lying, and has cleared out. I apologize.”
“No need to apologize,” Beetle reassured him cordially. “I knew Juan was lying.”
“Please honor me by staying to lunch,” Kadir begged. “You cannot? Then I shall go and lie down.”
They left him to recover his nerve, and walked back to the laboratory by the long road, not through the forest. They had gone over halfway before either spoke. When Beetle broke the long silence, he was more serious than Gonsuelo ever remembered him having been.
“Have you ever noticed,” he began, “what arrant cowards all brutal men are?” She made no reply, and he continued. “Take Kadir, for instance. He and his gang have tortured and killed thousands. You saw how that harmless fungus upset him. Frightened half to death of nothing.”
“Are you sure it was nothing?”
He gave her a strange look, and she walked rapidly ahead. “Wait,” he called, slightly out of breath.
Breaking into a trot, he overtook her.
“I have something to say that I want you to remember. If anything should ever happen to me—I’m always handling those poisonous snakes—I want you to do at once what I tell you now. You can trust Felipe.”
Felipe was the Portuguese foreman of the native workers.
“Go to him and tell him you are ready. He will understand. I prepared for this two years ago, when Kadir moved in. Before they left, the engineers built a navigable raft. Felipe knows where it is hidden. It is fully provisioned. A crew of six native river men is ready to put off at a moment’s notice. They will be under Felipe’s orders. The journey down the river will be long and dangerous, but with that crew you will make it. Anyhow, you will not be turned back by the quarantine officers when you do sight civilization. There is a flag with the provisions. Hoist it when you see any signs of civilization, and you will not be blown out of the water. That’s all.”
“Why are you telling me this now?”
“Because dictators never take their own medicine before they make someone else taste it for them.”
“What do you mean?” she asked in sudden panic.
“Only that I suspect Kadir of planning to give me a dose of his peculiar brand of medicine the moment he is through with me. When he and his crew find out how to propagate the greenbeefos, I may be bitten by a snake. He was trying something like that on you, wasn’t he?”
She gave him a long doubtful look. “Perhaps,” she admitted. She was sure that there was more in his mind than he had told her.
They entered the laboratory and went about their business without another word. To recover lost time, Consuelo worked later than usual. Her task was the preparation of the liquid made up by Beetle’s formula, in which the greenbeefos were grown.
She was just adding a minute trace of chloride of gold to the last batch when a timid rap on the door of the chemical laboratory startled her unreasonably. She had been worrying about her father.
“Come in,” she called.
Felipe entered. The sight of his serious face gave her a sickening shock. What had happened? Felipe was carrying the familiar black satchel which Beetle always took with him on his solitary walks in the forest.
“What is it?” she stammered.
For answer Felipe opened his free hand and showed her a cheap watch. It was tarnished greenish blue with what looked like dried fungus.
“Juan’s,” he said. “When Juan did not report for work this afternoon, I went to look for him.”
“And you found his watch? Where?”
“On the cut-off through the forest.”
“Did you find anything else?”
“Nothing belonging to Juan.”
“But you found something else?”
“Yes. I had never seen anything like them before.”
He placed the satchel on the table and opened it.
“Look. Dozens like that one, all colors, in the forest. Doctor Beetle forgot to empty this bag when he went into the forest this morning.”
She stared in speechless horror at the swollen monstrosity filling the satchel. The thing was like the one that Kadir had stepped on, except that it was not red but blue and magenta. The obvious explanation flashed through her mind, and she struggled to convince herself that it was true.
“You are mistaken,” she said slowly. “Doctor Beetle threw the snake away as usual and brought this specimen back to study.”
Felipe shook his head.
“No, Senhorina Beetle. As I always do when the Doctor comes back from his walk, I laid out everything ready for tomorrow. The snake was in the bag at twelve o’clock this morning. He came back at his regular time. I was busy then, and did not get to his laboratory till noon. The bag had been dropped by the door. I opened it, to see if everything was all right. The snake was still there. All its underside had turned to hard blue jelly. The back was still a snake’s back, covered with scales. The head had turned green, but it was still a snake’s head. I took the bag into my room and watched the snake till I went to look for Juan. The snake turned into this. I thought I should tell you.”
“Thank you, Felipe. It is all right; just one of my father’s scientific experiments. I understand. Goodnight, and thank you again for telling me. Please don’t tell anyone else. Throw that thing away and put the bag in its usual place.”
Left to herself, Consuelo tried not to credit her reason and the evidence of her senses. Then inconsequential remarks her father had dropped in the past two years, added to the remark of today that dictators were never the first to take their own medicine, stole into her memory to cause her acute uneasiness.
What was the meaning of this new technique of his, the addition of a slight trace of chloride of gold to the solution? He had talked excitedly of some organic compound of gold being the catalyst he had sought for months to speed up the chemical change in the ripening fruit.
“What might have taken months the old way,” he had exclaimed, “can now be done in hours. I’ve got it at last!”
What, exactly, had he got? He had not confided in her. All he asked of her was to see that the exact amount of chloride of gold which he prescribed was added to the solutions. Everything she remembered now fitted into its sinister place in one sombre pattern.
“This must be stopped,” she thought.
It must be stopped, yes. But how?
The next day the banquet took place.
“Festal Thursday” slipped into the past, as the long shadows crept over the banquet tables—crude boards on trestles—spread in the open air. For one happy, gluttonous hour the bearers of the “New Freedom” to a benighted continent had stuffed themselves with a food that looked like green fruit but tasted like raw pork. Now they were replete and somewhat dazed.
A few were furtively mopping the perspiration from their foreheads, and all were beginning to show the sickly pallor of the gourmand who has overestimated his capacity for food. The eyes of some were beginning to wander strangely. These obviously unhappy guests appeared to be slightly drunk.
Kadir’s speech eulogizing Beetle and his work was unexpectedly short. The Dictator’s famous gift for oratory seemed to desert him, and he sat down somewhat suddenly, as if he were feeling unwell. Beetle rose to reply.
“Senhor Kadir! Guests, and bearers to Amazonia of the New Freedom, I salute you! In the name of a freedom you have never known, I salute you, as the gladiators of ancient Rome saluted their tyrant before marching into the arena where they were to be butchered for his entertainment.”
Their eyes stared up at him, only half-seeing. What was he saying? It all sounded like the beginning of a dream.
“With my own hands I prepared your feast, and my hands alone spread the banquet tables with the meat-fruits you have eaten. Only one human being here has eaten the fruit as nature made it, and not as I remade it. My daughter has not eaten what you have eaten. The cold, wet taste of the snake blood which you have mistaken for the flavor of swine-flesh, and which you have enjoyed, would have nauseated her. So I gave her uncontaminated fruit for her share of our feast.”
Kadir and Consuelo were on their feet together, Kadir cursing incoherently, Consuelo s
peechless with fear. What insane thing had her father done? Had he too eaten of— But he must have, else Kadir would not have touched the fruit!
Beetle’s voice rose above the Dictator’s, shouting him down.
“Yes, you were right when you accused me of injecting snake blood into the fruit. Juan did not he to you. But the snake blood is not what is making you begin to feel like a vegetable. I injected the blood into the fruit only to delude all -you fools into mistaking it for flesh. I anticipated months of feeding before I could make of you what should be made of you.
“A month ago I was relying on the slow processes of nature to destroy you with my help. Light alone, that regulates the chemistry of the growing plant and to a lesser degree the chemistry of animals, would have done what must be done to rid Amazonia and the world of the threat of your New Freedom, and to make you expiate your brutal past.
“But light would have taken months to bring about the necessary replacement of the iron in your blood by magnesium. It would have been a slow transformation, almost, I might say, a lingering death. By feeding you green beef I could keep your bodies full at all times with magnesium in chemically available form to replace every atom of iron in your blood!
“Under the slow action of photosynthesis—the chemical transformations induced by exposure to light—you would have suffered a lingering illness. You would not have died. No! You would have lived, but not as animals. Perhaps not even as degenerated vegetables, but as some new form of life between plant and the animal. You might even have retained your memories.
“But I have spared you this—so far as I can prophesy. You will live, but you will not remember—much. Instead of walking forward like human beings, you will roll. That will be your memory.
“Three weeks ago I discovered the organic catalyst to hasten the replacement of the iron in your blood by magnesium and thus to change your animal blood to plant blood, chlorophyll. The catalyst is merely a chemical compound which accelerates chemical reactions without itself being changed.
My Best Science Fiction Story Page 44