Such charges gained credence owing to the fact that the Black Blight first appeared in USA. It was even said that the massive American effort at relief (which was not to endure very long) was evidence of bad conscience. There might even have been wars among the leading nations over these and other, wilder charges. There is evidence that China had actually targeted its nuclear missiles on major cities in USA—and only failed to launch them, apparently, because famine and then death struck down the military and scientific men able to do the launching before the word to fire was passed down from Peking.
The delay in finding the cause of this plague was owing largely to the early certainty that it would resemble other rots, smuts, wilts and blights in some manner. By the time (February 1988) the Lerner-Samuels-Zworkin group announced, in Science Today, their finding of a small molecular chain on the stems of some least-afflicted plants they had chosen to work with, even the plantings in scientifically housed structures equipped with every known filtering and disinfecting device were showing signs of death. Thus the last supplies of healthy or merely afflicted plants were scarce; and the people in charge of research were beginning to feel that rice might vanish from the earth forever.
That molecular chain, soon known as the “LSZ radical,” had also been identified by various chemists in the waters of all oceans and it occurred in rainfall, world-wide, evidently. But the chemists did not then know a world blight was coming. They merely listed the complex stuff as “widely distributed, origin not known, observable effects: nil.” From the LSZ note, however, it became possible for the same team to show that the molecular chain spent only a short time, hours, on rice plant leaves, then it vanished. Under the surface, they found no such radical. The molecular chain itself, meantime, was found to be self-made in sea waters at a wide range of temperatures owing to the energy of sunlight, which enabled several common pollutants to recombine and form the novel compound.
The Lerner group with the collaboration of a number of specialists from MIT, finally showed how this supposedly innocuous chain molecule was able to dissolve the cell wall minutely—the “outside” of the rice plant—at any point, and, after more combining with leaf material, enter the plant through the “hole” it created. It then added three parts of three molecular structures in the plant to create a longer but tightly wrapped and very inconspicuous new substance closely resembling various carbohydrates that appear in plants during photosynthesis and are known, technically, as “sugars.” Its close resemblance to those natural sugars doubtless accounted for its long oversight. But the new substance, once in its final form, powerfully interfered with the plant’s mechanisms, its enzyme chemistry, doing so in a matter of minutes, or an hour at most, after which it disintegrated into, this time, molecular chains again normal to the tissues of victim or host on death with initial decomposition.
In short, this was the first event of that magnitude among the many predicted for at least three decades by scientists. Man was pouring hundreds of thousands of chemical matters into the oceans, none there naturally, and of these (not studied or even known, really) there would be recombinations. The seas were like a chemical warehouse factory, with a million compounds in stock that were stirred together, outcome unknowable.
I ended this part with several accounts of mobs looting cities, granaries, any place where food might be kept or stored. The whole takes some seventy pages.
My abstract, here, is for advice, from you, Miles, from the Board, from any persons you deem able to help with my problems.
In the part beyond the eighties and up to my final chapter, a long one, itself, on the ultimate cataclysm, and in addition to twenty-seven shorter entries, I have covered the other “great cataclysms,” as I and most others call them, at the length indicated by the foregoing outline of the Rice Deaths.
These are, and I hope all agree:
1. The battles within cities.
2. The radioactive excess findings, world-wide mortalities, etc., and the resolution of that somber situation.
Those two occurred in the nineties.
3. Also starting in the nineties is the world-wide epidemic of homicidal mania. I have nothing in the Foundation Records to indicate the cause of that dreadful epidemic was ever found. If anybody at the New Congress has data I would like to add it to the book. It finally seemed to burn itself out but there must be some explanation, whether found by now or not.
4. My already noted and personally written account of the last, greatest cataclysm runs to another long as well as separate effort: my Part VII, sent with this.
What I seek counsel on, then is the following:
1. Granting that the telesponder time permits the sending of the work, to this point, plus that final section, what is the general opinion of this much? More cogently, what is the probable reaction to the part that will not reach Paris for a week, and perhaps much longer, if what I hear of the world communications load is true? The World Federation material surely has priority over all else!
2. Assuming it is decided all the material I will now send is roughly okay, what about the part yet to come? Can we put out so huge a book in one volume? Is it readable for moderately literate (high school by old standards) people?
3. Little has been recorded so far of successful efforts at staving off disaster. They were many and the Foundation’s share could fill a book. I haven’t tried to portray it—too much like patting our own backs. Besides, the efforts to halt pollution, etc., even when successful, were almost invariably temporary. Commercial interests waited till their opponents died, or got into something else, were bought off or were persuaded against prior conviction, etc. Then the projects to save environments were stopped.
4. How much of the actual inhumanity, cruelty, violence, the selfish and murderous behavior of our generation can be set forth without scarring later readers; without, perhaps, giving them a sense that man, themselves included, must still be the omni-predator he became? It worries me to present history as a tale of human degradation, ignorance and hate, of disinterest, apathy and absence of compassion. Am I wrong there?
I am adding, before the final essay, one further incident of the eighties, again with questions. It appears as an account of the “vibes.” Should the horror prevailing in that event be given this full an exhibit? What I offer is true. But I get sickened by these things. There’s so little compensatory nobility, so little simple compassion in these events.
Questions, then, about many things, the last entry before my final chapter, with other questions and uncertainties. Take the vibes. Did you know the first surviving witness to their onshore movement was a somewhat retarded Fort Lauderdale kid, a small-boat mate and dock boy? Here’s his verbatim narrative on tape, recorded soon after his rescue by a Dr. Samuel Sniggins, a psychiatrist in Pensacola, who got on to the existence of this eyewitness, God knows how.
6. An Eyewitness of World Cataclysm Two
SNIGGINS: Your name is Oliver Washington Williams? You’re nineteen?
(Mumble of assent.)
You lived in Lauderdale with an uncle and had a job as a mate or else a dock clean-up boy—man. (Assent.) You were in a skiff with an outboard when the vibes appeared, on June 17? (Assent.) The skiff was one of your uncle’s but in bad shape. You had aboard a five-gallon can of kerosene? And you let the boat drift about on the marina waters while you cleaned off tar? (Assent.) But you were wearing rubber boots in that hot weather? Why?
WILLIAMS: Kerosene and gas is why. That dratted boat was a sieve. I had it a week in water to swell the seams. Then this cleaning job came up. I got rags, gloves, put on boots and shoved off.
SNIGGINS: Why—
WILLIAMS: To get far enough from shore so my dratted uncle wouldn’t hoot at me to work faster, and such.
SNIGGINS: Why the boots, I mean?
WILLIAMS: So I’m having to stand in a skiff where the water keeps rising and I gotta bail, now and then. On top of the water is kerosene, and more coming, and maybe some gas.
S
NIGGINS: You wore boots to keep from contact with the kerosene and gasoline?
WILLIAMS: Ever try standing in kerosene, gas, for a few hours? It scalds you, about.
SNIGGINS: Oh. I see. Well, in your own words, what happened?
WILLIAMS: For an hour or so, nothing. I drift over toward Elysian Fields Island. Rich folks. You know? (Grunt of assent) Sea wall and riprap. Oh? Riprap is loose rocks piled up to hold a shore line. They got that, and a double cement sea wall, too. Lot of trash and garbage on the riprap. Birds at it. Rats.
SNIGGINS: Rats? On that island?
WILLIAMS: Rats wherever there’s folks. Rich or poor. There’d been a real wet blow, not much wind for a hurricane, but it sure did litter the canals and bay and marina and all with trash. Them big houses—the people own ’em are up north. Caretakers and such, private cops, all there is around, this time of year. And some maids and so on are pretty lazy about putting out garbage cans regular. The water’s right there—so they—
SNIGGINS: Yes. Well, you are in your skiff, working—or just staring around—and there are those estates, with a few people about, and gulls, rats, on the bank. Then?
WILLIAMS: Then the vibes come in.
SNIGGINS: Let’s have it fully. What you saw, felt, did, everything! You’re an eyewitness to what was the first invasion of the creatures. Only one, maybe. So you saw what?
WILLIAMS: Well—a sort of swell in the bay water, coming at the boat. Then under it. You know, Lauderdale water isn’t gin-clear. A great shadow, lightish, goes under my boat and past it for, maybe, like a hundred feet. Something pokes up a million times near the boat but it has this oil slick all around. Fish, minnows, I thought. Then that wave moves on to the riprap. And the vibes start squirming out by the million. Look like macaroni—
SNIGGINS: We all know what they look like!
WILLIAMS: So okay. But I never seen none before! It’s a new varmint to me. Inch and a half. Two inches. Like worms, all white, more a maggot color. The birds take off and then the first rat screams.
SNIGGINS: Screams? A rat?
WILLIAMS: Okay. Squeals. But loud. Then another. Then I see a couple and they got these worms on ’em and they are a-hollering. Squealing. I come in closer, use a oar for a stob pole, to see better.
SNIGGINS: Foolhardy!
WILLIAMS: Look. I ain’t no fool. Not too bright, sure. Four years in grade six and quit. Okay. But I never seen nothing like worms coming out of the sea and hanging onto rats, okay? Do I even think I could be in trouble? Not then, I don’t Okay? So I see these worms—like a rug of ’em, moving, and I see one nail a rat. First to get that rat, see? Well, the rat doesn’t know it’s got a worm on it, then. Like ticks. You feel nothing and come home and got a dozen bastards on you! Same thing with leeches. Wade in, feel nothing, step out and you’re a-dangling.
SNIGGINS: I’m a scientist, young man. I understand the mechanisms or chemical processes by which biting species can anesthetize the site. Bats, for example, some. Proceed.
WILLIAMS: So you know all the answers. So how come they call ’em “vibes”? They got no vibrations I could feel.
SNIGGINS: Typical student error. One of the university’s Marine Laboratory summer students gets shown a dead something that the peasant who found it believed to be Negeedulatia Cornuta horribilis—the correct name. The girl brightly said it was a vibraculum, absurd on the face of it. Showing off. What she probably saw, in any case, was a bryozoan. But the ignorant boatman started telling everybody they were “vibes”—all he remembered from the lady’s triple blunder—and it spread—so, continue, please.
WILLIAMS: Yeah. Sure. Thanks for nothing. If you don’t mind, I’ll go on saying “vibes.” Can’t rightly remember that Nitwitted corny terriblest name, nohow. Okay? Okay. Where was I?
SNIGGINS: The rats. The rat with a single attached specimen.
WILLIAMS: Oh. Yeah. That. Well, I seen what he did. But that’s not when I caught on. It was later. You want it all? Okay. So, like I said, there’s this one rat, a big old-timer, and one of them white worms, leeches, them vibes, has got it on the leg. Like where a man’s thigh is. And for a while the rat goes right on eating. Chicken gut, it was, I think. Then, I’d say, it sees the worm and takes a look and grabs it in its teeth to yank it off, see? Pro’ly not even thinkin’ it was alive. And that’s when it screams, I mean, squeals.
SNIGGINS: Instantly? The instant it bit the thing?
WILLIAMS: I ain’t holding a stop watch but I’d say, from seeing the same thing over and over, that as soon as the vibe feels teeth, it does something that hurts whoever bit it, and anybody that grabs at it, too, he gets hurt awful. The first rat did what everybody would. Here’s a thing don’t bother you when let alone but if you try pinchin’ it to pull it off, Jasus! Stings like twenty scorpions—and you ever been hit by a scorpion?
SNIGGINS: Yes, my boy, that I have! And not these mildly venomous species you have in Florida. Some real killers, nearly. Go on.
WILLIAMS: Well, now, did I say, I’m poling in pretty close to see what the hell is going on. I’d of thought they was maybe ten rats on that curved strip of riprap—hundred feet—two—something like that, what I can see of the stretch. But as them vibes start flowing ashore, like a white rug dragged over the riprap, up the wall and onto the lawn—big rug—maybe nearly as wide as what I can see of the wall from where I pushed in the boat—the vibes must of scared up about a hunnert rats. You know what they say. Rats is real smart. You see one around the place, they say, an’ it means you got eleven living there. Like that. For every rat I spotted there was ten more, anyhow, camouflaged like, or behind rocks, gorgin’ on the garbage that got stranded by the tide, or dumped from the nearest house, behind the tree, place belonged to an up-North banker named Robert L. Kipper.
(At this point SNIGGINS took up the tale and described the area young Williams discussed. It was one of the newest and most luxurious developments in the Fort Lauderdale area—comprising five islands, all artificial. Intricate canals and waterways set the islands apart and made private channels for several estates in the usual Florida style that gives thousands of homes, mostly expensive places, a “waterfront.” Just beyond the marina and behind a concealing stand of mangroves was a slum, where Williams lived and where, too, many of the people who did summer care jobs in this and other luxury areas had shacks. Perhaps nine hundred persons, the majority children, then occupied the hidden slum or nearby areas that hot, clear, early summer day, black and white and all shades between. Before returning to Oliver Williams’ account, it should be kept in mind that his was, at this period, the only record of a “vibe” descent as seen by a close observer. The invading organism was a brand-new genus and species to science. Not a marine worm, mollusc, borer or oceanic leech, not a close relative of any known form of life that quickly suggested its evolutionary relationship, Negeedulatia Cornuta horribilis appeared as suddenly and in as vast numbers as this account suggests. It later proved to have one close relative, N.C. boreas.)
WILLIAMS (having paused lengthily, produced a crumbled cigarette and used Dr. Sniggins’ desk lighter, blew smoke, and—his nerves evidently steadied by that—went ahead): So here’s them rats, bitin’, screaming and a-rolling in the wet rocks, rough as they are, slimy with green guck, too. And some rats rushing into the water, swimming around with the plain idea that’ll maybe get the vibes to let loose of them. Right around the boat! Everywhere. And then, I see, some rats are starting to lie quiet. So I watch an old fellow with vibes hanging on him, like, say, ten, as I see he’s weakening. In a minute he falls down, kicks awhile, and he’s stone dead. Then, vibes cover him. That’s what’s now going on with all of ’em.
SNIGGINS: Let’s get this in order. First, a single—vibe—attaches itself to a rat. The rat feels nothing until it sees and tries to bite off the thing—
WILLIAMS:—or pull it off with a paw—
SNIGGINS: Exactly. Any effort to pull away a specimen that has attached its mouth parts to the host results in
a reaction by the parasite that causes intense pain. Something like a venom injection, or a sting. Then as other vibes attach themselves and the process is repeated, the victim stops trying to remove its attackers just to avoid stings, and once a certain number of them have fixed themselves on a creature, it dies, quite rapidly, as if, now, from a neurotoxin.
WILLIAMS: Yeah. But look! Some of them rats kept a-tryin’ to pull off the worms no matter how it hurt, and once they got to hauling on about three, they died like they was shot. I figured that out, in the first—well—it seemed an hour—it was actually maybe ten minutes.
SNIGGINS: Ten minutes? From when to when?
WILLIAMS: From when I see that low bow wave, like, hit the riprap till there ain’t a rat movin’. Just a million worms on the bodies and the rest slowly moving up the lawn, like acting careful, as if they never been in grass afore. Well, next thing, Amy Teetle comes around the palms to see what the screaming is all about. It’s her day, or one of ’em, to open up an’ air and clean the Kipper place. Amy’s a blonde and real good-lookin’, twenty-one, and about every guy from our town has slept with her from sixth grade up, because she purely adores to bex . . . excuse me.
SNIGGINS: A nymphomaniac.
WILLIAMS: Amy ain’t no maniac of any sort! She don’t charge nothin’, Doc. She just loves to furnish poontang around, is all. She broke in a lot of the winter folks’ millionaire boys, too. She’s real friendly. Generous. And she can do things make a old hooker look like a beginner!
SNIGGINS: Go on. The—vibes—in the lawn? Did they see her? Sense her, somehow?
WILLIAMS: I been trying to say! I seen Amy afore the vibes did a thing. And I yelled at her to go back to the house fast and either drive away or lock herself in. I tried to say all about the rats and vibes. But she’s under them palms they planted to hide the house from the water, I guess, and there’s this breeze, so she can’t hear good and keeps coming closer, realizing I got something to say important, by the way I was a-hollering and a-waving.
End of the Dream Page 21