Dynasty of the Small

by John Russell Fearn

  Pernambuco, Brazil.

  September 27, 2018

  Our South American correspondent sets on record perhaps the queerest ‘Act of God’ legal case in Brazilian history, taking place now in the Pernambuco law courts. Señor D’Alverez, former proprietor of the Hotel Catalan on the coast of Pernambuco, which commands one of the world’s most unique views of the ocean from every window, is endeavoring to sue the authorities of Pernambuco for causing, presumably by pollution, the blackness of the sea on the coast line.

  The Hotel Catalan’s greatest attraction is its view of the luminous sea breakers of the South Atlantic after nightfall. The phosphorescent glitter of waves in the dark must be familiar to almost everybody on the Pernambuco coast, the effect, up to a month ago, was such as this, but far more brilliant than most other places in the world. The darkness of the sea now has caused Señor D’Alverez to lose nearly all his extensive clientele. Case proceeding.

  That, verbatim, was the case—and later it was reported that the unfortunate Señor D’Alverez lost it! The authorities had certainly not polluted the sea, or caused the odd sliminess on the beach in front of the hotel. Poor D’Alverez was further confounded in his efforts by the surprising evidence that not only the shores of Pernambuco, but also those of Natal, Bahia, Victoria, and Rio de Janeiro were affected as well. From then onward there was a gradual smattering of increasingly puzzling reports that still did not convey anything save a very deep enigma to the scientific brains of the world.

  Beyond that, though, the seas at night were utterly and absolutely dark. From California, Florida, England, and Bombay came definite assurance of the fact, whilst seagoing men, many amongst them being famous, hard-headed captains, declared that the seven seas of the world, at night, were inky black. Always, they explained, the sea possessed a faint and hazy light, but now that had gone for the first time in history.

  Solemn, Stygian water passed beneath the liners of the earth; sullen, unrelieved black breakers thundered on the shores of five continents. Luminosity had gone from the sea—and nobody knew why—then.

  * * * *

  The minister of agriculture for Great Britain in June of 2019, was gravely troubled. His gaunt, austere form, framed in the summer sunlight of the window, was rigid in the intensity of his concentration upon a report in his hand.

  “Incredible!” he breathed at last. “It utterly defies my comprehension!”

  Quietly he turned and summoned his secretary.

  “Benson, did you prepare this report?” he asked steadily.

  Benson nodded. “Yes, sir. I am aware that it is extraordinary, but it is based entirely on authentic reports from the farmers and agriculturists throughout the country.”

  The minister’s gray eyes narrowed. “Authentic, Benson? What sort of fools are they that dare to say they have grown wheat stalks seven feet high, and roses larger than cabbages? The thing is unheard of! Preposterous!”

  “Maybe so, sir, but I am given to understand that the power of the saltpeter has become enormously increased through some unknown agency. At present this period of gigantism seems to be confined to this country, but I have unconfirmed reports of similar occurrences in America.”

  “Saltpeter increase!” The minister frowned. “Most unusual! Has it been analyzed?”

  “By our own chemists, sir. It seems that there is a vast increase in the bacteria, which virtually create saltpeter. This, naturally, is the basis of wheat cultivation, and—”

  “Quite so, but that doesn’t explain the giant roses. It seems as though a wave of Gargantuan growth is affecting the entire country. Even trees are not immune from it. They are growing to enormous proportions this year. You must have noticed?”

  “Indeed, sir, I have. But I am still unable to explain—”

  “Very well, thank you,” the minister interrupted, in a tone of quiet dismissal. “I must look into this matter very carefully.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  * * * *

  The minister of agriculture did look into the matter, with a desperation born of genuine alarm. In his position of eminence all agricultural bodies looked to him for suggestions and advice, but the problem was quite beyond the understanding of this matter-of-fact man. Not that he was alone in his perplexity, for the same startling conditions manifested themselves also in the United States, Canada, and Africa, spreading afterward to South America.

  The wheat markets of the world were completely glutted with monstrous crops. In many instances burning was adopted, but without much success. The surplus still remained. Somewhere, deep down in the earth, had come a change—a terrific, amazing stimulation was at the base of all plant life.

  Growth, formerly an orderly and unostentatious process, had suddenly become a wild and haphazard expansion in the midst of which man moved with a gnawing, deadening conviction of futility. To the average man, the panic of the stock markets apart, it was distinctly unsavory shock to find his favorite oak tree bursting all former bounds and thrusting into the earth roots of tremendous and devastating power.

  Accidents became more numerous; walls were smashing down beneath this enormous force. Solid flags of concrete were smashed and broken to expose eager, hungry branches seeking the sun.

  Vast crop yields, enormous elongation of the verdure of tropical countries—a change in the soil. Mighty flowers that mocked in their very vastness; the birth of a second yield before the first had hardly been cleared away. The canker of incredible growth was the sole focus of talk. In two short months it became a very far cry from a worried British minister of agriculture. The matter was one of world concern.

  Botanists of every country examined the problem with a fevered efficiency, but only reached conclusions that were singularly startling. A condition of excessive osmosis was appearing, the process by which plants normally convey moisture from the ground against gravity to the top of their stems.

  These erudite experts instanced a plant in Java, which is used for practical purposes as a fountain. The stem is cut at several feet off the ground, and from the severed pipe pours a continuous jet of pure water, refined by the plant’s own natural laboratory. This, they explained, was normal osmosis, but in the prevailing conditions of giantism this effect, visible in a mild formation in any growing plant, was now increased ten-thousand fold.

  The ground was being sucked dry! Vast and plentiful yields would be inevitably followed by the world’s worst drought. Even rain made no difference, for as fast as it fell to earth the plants utilized it and grew all the stronger thereby. A threat of the extinction of the human race gradually took grave form and portent.

  Such matters of paramount concern could hardly fail to reach so industrious a body as the Explorations, Inc., yet even so they had no inkling of the real truth. Captain Northern was puzzled, and rightly so; Dr. Blair was interested—but nothing more than that. Probably the matter would have continued to evade their real attention had not grave and deadly disease reared its ugly head amongst the masses and demanded of Cures, Inc., a possible relief from its fatal ravages.

  “Disease?” repeated Blair, facing the newly established controller of health for the United States. “It depends on what sort of disease it is. We can stop all protozoic disease, of course, but—”

  “Doctor—listen!” Michael Grant’s cadaverous face was deadly earnest as he spoke. Here was no normal, pleasing controller, but a man harried by relentless trouble, the entire onus of saving a stricken country reposing on his bowed shoulders. “Dr. Blair, in Heaven’s name, you’ve got to invent something! I’ve seen the—the most horrible things! The ravages of the disease pale the Bubonic Plague into insignificance! People are dying by the hundreds, especially here and in England. Hospitals are crammed to the doors; there are not enough doctors and nurses to go round. People with the disease seem to choke, strangle to death—then, horribly enough, they burst asunder as though blown up with gas! It’s as though some dreadful after-death hypertrophy or elephantiasis sets in. It’s—it�
��s ghastly!”

  “Terrible,” agreed Captain Northern, who was also present. “But after all, Grant, we cannot undertake to—”

  “Wait!” Blair interrupted suddenly, thinking. “I’m just getting the dim glimmerings of an idea. Tell me, Grant, have these people with the disease eaten any of the hypertrophied wheat, in bread form?”

  “Why, yes. What else could they do?”

  “In the circumstances, nothing else, but I just wanted to verify the point. I can give you no actual assurance, but we’ll do our best to help.”

  “Ah! You have a clue for a cure?” the controller asked hopefully.

  “I have a clue as to the cause,” Blair corrected quietly. “I will telephone you the instant I find anything effective—if I do! In the interval, get every well-known bacteriologist to work on the problem. Get them to analyze the wheat, the trees, the flowers, the soil. It is not a botanical problem, but a bacteriological one. Murcatz of Austria, Professor Libby of England—get all of them busy and have them send their reports, to me. If we don’t work fast—”

  “Well?” Grant questioned gravely.

  “If we don’t work fast I’m afraid I foresee the destruction of all humanity, and of all civilization. Already many of our buildings are in danger of collapse through the undermining of giant roots—and now comes the disease! The situation is critical, Grant—critical. However, do as I have advised and I’ll keep in touch with you.”

  Grant nodded worriedly and went off with quick, nervous strides. The instant he had disappeared the captain turned in surprise to Blair. The elderly savant seemed to have actually shrunk in stature. His shoulders were hunched, his face pale and haggard.

  “Why, Blair, what on earth’s the matter? Do you feel ill, too?”

  Blair turned two burning, sunken eyes. “Eh?” he asked listlessly—then seemed to recover himself. “Oh, no, I’m not ill. It’s just that I’ve linked up the recent incredible happenings of plant hypertrophy and deadly disease with something I did in the early December of 2017, over two years ago.”

  “What! Utter rubbish, doctor! Something you did!”

  “Yes,” Blair groaned, shrugging hopelessly. “You remember that antitoxin I sent you by air mail which went down in the Atlantic?”

  “Why, of course, but what—”

  “Lord! What a blind fool I’ve been, wrapped up in my petty experiments—this pointless money making. That infernal animalcule of mine had never before been outside a laboratory—never been in contact with anything. Only direct from phial to syringe, and thence into the patient’s blood. You know yourself how careful we have been in supplying the stuff to hospitals, to make sure it doesn’t contact anything but human blood? You know the rigid adherence to our instructions which is observed everywhere?”

  “Certainly. Well?”

  “It never occurred to my stupid brain what would happen to the stuff in the Atlantic. Now I know! I can trace back every event. You remember when the seas went dark? Beyond doubt my animalcule escaped from the package and made an attack on the infinite swarms of Protozoa existing about them. You see, the animalcule, only kept alive in the first place by the fluid in which they move, would finally exhaust their supply, and the demand of hunger would drive them to expansion. They must find more food. Clearly then they burst their bonds and escaped into the sea.

  “Naturally, they found food unlimited and began their fission process. Two, four, eight, sixteen—in the course of twenty-four hours one descendant of my animalcule would have multiplied to over a million! In four days to one hundred and forty billions.”

  “Good Lord!” Northern cried, his red face losing some of its color as the stunning probabilities began to smite him.

  “It is scientific fact that the destruction of Protozoa would cause the dark seas, and those slimy beaches would be my spawned animalcule continuing their devilish search for edible things.”

  “But—but do Protozoa exist everywhere?” Northern asked helplessly, and Blair gave a grim smile.

  “Do they! Good heavens, man, they swarm in every sea, at every depth, in the icy seas of the polar regions, in the hot waters of the tropics; they teem in the soil, in the water we drink, in the food we eat!”

  “Then—then—”

  “You begin to see? In the retrospect we can see that those shores touching the Atlantic were the first to be affected. It spread afterward to the land. In the soil the Protozoa have always killed bacteria; now, though, the Protozoa have been annihilated by something stronger than themselves—my animalcule! That means that the bacteria have a free field and can use all their energies.

  “That logically means that all soil, trees, and plants have become inconceivably vast through the energy of unopposed bacteria. The enemy are missing, and so bacteria have the chance to develop—a chance they’ve never had since the beginning of time—until I started to meddle!”

  “And the disease?”

  “Surely it is obvious?” Blair snapped impatiently. “Enormously energetic bacteria in bread, for instance—quite unharmed by the heat of baking ovens; unharmed bacteria in every drink, in every scrap of food, are now pursuing their own deadly and mysterious course. The balance is destroyed; Protozoa have almost gone. And the bacteria are growing!

  “That has never happened before because of the constant Protozoa war; but now humans are being choked and rent asunder; enormously stimulated trees are wrecking our cities; osmosis is sucking the land dry. Ultimately the bacteria will be large enough to view! But disease—ordinary disease, that is, formerly restrained by Protozoa—will now be rife, besides this strangling plague. We’re in a horrible trap, Northern, and I don’t know the way out!”

  “But is it possible for bacteria to grow?”

  “Of course, with all opposition removed. The spores of bacilli or bacteria are the most difficult things on earth to destroy. I have interfered in a most unforgivable, tragic manner. No organism lives unto itself, captain. Nature is a perfect unity, incredibly complicated, but everything plays some part in the economy of the whole.

  “Just as each living organism represents a delicate balance of forces, so does nature; just as the forces within the organism are perpetually changing, necessitating continuous readjustments to maintain the essential equipoise, so in nature from day to day, year to year, aeon to aeon, organisms wax and wane and the balance of life is continually changing. But, destroy one iota of that balance, remove one tiny part of it, and outraged Nature takes her revenge—like this!”

  “Then that means that, in finding a new equipoise, the most terrific things may happen.”

  “Are happening!” Blair amended grimly. “Consider the position! We have left, apparently, bacteria and fungoid spores, perhaps the most indestructible forms of life. Bacteria, as you may know, can survive both the temperature of space and that of molten metals. How do you propose we fight that?”

  “Damned if I know! I’m more used to killing big game. Really, it’s this universal illness that’s worrying me. We’ve got to do something, Blair.”

  The little scientist grunted. “We can’t, Northern. We’re faced with the most unimaginable difficulties. Bacteria are free, man—absolutely free to develop. In that very fact lies our undoing.”

  “Can’t you invent something to kill the bacteria, then?”

  “I’ve been trying to for years, and I’m afraid it would take several more years to complete my work. I’ve hardly scratched the surface of the problem yet.” Blair’s voice was colorless; then, with unexpected savagery, “Oh, the idiocy of it all! What a fool I’ve been! I’ve torn life and civilization out by the roots! In killing one disease I’ve released another, infinitely more horrible and complex.”

  “But, Blair, something—”

  “There is only one thing, Northern. We have no cure, but we can use preventives. Antiseptic suits, covering everybody from head to foot, may arrest the onslaught—special suits, which I shall design. All food and drink must be completely and scientifically s
terilized, as near as possible, by a bureau which Congress itself shall appoint.

  “There is nothing else that can be done. Every living soul must unite in fighting the menace. We can’t stop its progress, but at least we can, I think, save those who so far have escaped. I’ll get in touch with the President himself right now.”

  CHAPTER 3

  During the history of his career, man has been confronted with many major catastrophes, from the Deluge to the black death, but certainly nothing so completely devastating as the free evolution of bacteria ever befell him before.

  The efforts of Blair were at least successful in advising the countries of the world as to what had occurred. At first he became the target for numberless attacks, but later on those gifted with more common sense than the majority saw quite clearly that he had acted entirely unwittingly in the matter, and therefore turned to him for orders.

  There came, inevitably, a tremendous shuffling of social and governmental orders. The usual topics of a sadly depressed and war-threatened world were hastily shelved in order that plans might be matured to battle with the new and incredible enemy. To the vast majority the idea of emancipated bacteria conveyed no meaning, but they were willing, nonetheless, to act on the advice of the great scientists working in cooperation with Blair.

  There grew up after weeks of arrangement specially built edifices devised with walls prepared to confound the invaders—walls that were saturated automatically with antiseptics of the most pungent kind known to science. Every scrap of provisions and water was sterilized completely—or as nearly as possible. Suits tested to withstand the ravages of all known bacterial germs were manufactured in the tens of thousands and supplied to the now numbered and indexed populations of every country.

  And whilst all this proceeded, death walked through the countries of the world, in particular strangling the life blood of America and England, twin dominations of the earth. In that late fall of 2019 the disease claimed tens of thousands; it swept through New York in a merciless, terrible tide. Always there was the final bursting apart of the victim. The rotting dead could not be moved quickly enough; all efforts to make decent burial or cremation were useless.