by Anthology
But the crowd evidently agreed with Mrs Dinkman's verdict, for there were mutterings of "It's a farmer's job." "Get somebody with a scythe." "That's right--get a scythe." "Got to have a scythe to cut hay like that." These remarks, uttered loudly enough for him to hear, so discouraged the gardener that after three more futile tries he reloaded his equipment and left amidst jeers and expressions of disfavor without attempting to collect any of the money.
For some reason the failure of the powermower lightened the atmosphere. Everyone, including Mrs Dinkman, seemed convinced that scything was the solution. Tension relaxed and the bystanders began talking in something above a whisper.
6. "This will just about ruin our sales," I said.
Miss Francis suspended the toothpick before her chin and looked at me as though I'd said dirty words in the presence of ladies.
"Well it will," I argued. "You can't expect people to have their lawns inoculated if they find out it's going to make grass act this way."
Her eyes might have been microscopes and I something smeared on a slide. "Weener, youre the sort of man who peddles Life Begins at Forty to the inmates of an old peoples' home."
I couldnt see what had upset her. The last idea had sound salesappeal, but it was a low income market.... Oh well--her queer notions and obscure reactions undoubtedly went with her scientific gift. You have to lead individuals of this type for their own good, otherwise they spend their lives wandering around in a dreamy fog, accomplishing nothing.
"I still believe youve got something," I pointed out. "You yourself said it wasnt perfected, but perhaps you havent realized how far from marketable it actually is yet. Now then," I went on reasonably, "youre just going to have to dilute it or change it or do something to it, so while it will make grass nice and green, it won't let it grow wild like this."
The fixed look could be annoying. It was nearly impossible to turn your eyes away without rudeness once she caught them. "Weener, the Metamorphizer is neither fertilizer nor plant food. It is a chemical compound producing a controlled mutation in any treated member of the family Gramineae. Dilution might make it not work--the mutation might not take place--but it couldnt make it half work. I could change your nature by forcibly injecting an ounce of lead into your cerebellum. The change would not only be irrevocable, but it wouldnt make the slightest difference if the lead were adulterated with ironpyrites or not."
"But, Miss Francis," I expostulated, "you'll have to do something."
She threw her hands into the air, a theatrical gesture even more than ordinarily unbecoming. "Why?"
"Why? To make your discovery marketable, of course."
"Now? In the face of this?"
"Miss Francis," I said with dignity, "you are a lady and my selfrespect makes me treat you with the courtesy due your sex. You advertised for a salesman. Instead of sneering at my honest efforts to put your merchandise across to the public, I think youd be better advised to worry about such lowbrow things as keeping faith."
"Am I to keep faith in a vacuum? You came to me as a salesman and I must give you something to sell. This is simple morality; but if such a grant entails concomitant evils, surely I am absolved of my original contract."
"I don't know what youre talking about," I told her frankly. "Your stuff made the grass grow too fast, that's all. You should change the formula or find a new one or else ..."
"Or else youll have been left with nothing to sell. I despair of making the point about changing the formula; your trust in my powers is too reverent. Again, I'm not an arrogant woman and I'll admit to some responsibility. Make the world fit for Alfred Weener to make a living in."
"It's Albert, not Alfred," I corrected her. I'm not touchy, goodness knows, but afterall a name's a piece of property.
"Your pardon, Albert." She looked down at me with such a placatory and genuinely feminine smile I decided I'd been foolish to be offended. She's a nut of course, I thought indulgently, someone whose life is bounded by theories and testtubes, a woman with no conception of practical reality. Instead of being affronted it would be better to show her patiently how essential my help was to her.
"Of all people," she went on, searching my face with those discomfiting eyes, "of all people Ive the least cause for moral snobbery. Anxious to get a few dollars to carry on my work--and what was such anxiety but selfindulgence?--I threw the Metamorphizer to you and the world before I realized that it was not only imperfect, but faulty. Hell is paved with good intentions and the first result of my desire to benefit mankind has been to injure the Dinkmans. Meditation in place of infatuation would have shown me both the immediate and ultimate wrongs. I doubt if youd been gone an hour yesterday when I knew I'd made a blunder in permitting you to go out with danger in both hands."
"I don't know what youre getting at," I said stiffly, for it sounded as though she were regarding me as a child.
"Why, as I was sitting, composing my thoughts toward extending the effectiveness of the Metamorphizer beyond gramina, it suddenly became clear to me I'd erred about not knowing how long the effect of the inoculations would last."
"You mean you found out?" If she brought the thing under control and the effect lasted a specified time there might be repeat business afterall.
"I found out a great deal by using speculation and logic for a change instead of my hands and memory. I sat and thought, and though this is an unorthodox way for a scientist to proceed, I profited by it. I reasoned: if you change the genetic structure of a plant you change it permanently; not for a day or an hour, but for its existence. I'm not speaking of chance mutations, you understand, Weener, coming about over a course of generations, generations which include sports, degenerates, atavars andsoforth; but of controlled changes, brought about through human intervention. Inoculation by the Metamorphizer might be compared to cutting off a man's leg or transplanting part of his brain. Albert--what happens when you cut off a man's leg?"
I was tired of being talked to like a grammarschool class. Still, I humored her. "Why, then he has only one leg," I answered agreeably if idiotically.
"True. More than that, he has a onelegged disposition. His whole ego, his entire spirit is changed. No longer a twolegged creature, reduced, he is another--warped, if you like--being. To come to the immediate point of the grass: if you engender an omnivorous capacity you implant an insatiable appetite."
"I don't catch."
"If you give a man a big belly you make him a hog."
A chevvy coupe, gently breathing steam from its radiator cap, interrupted. From its turtle hung the blade of a scythe and on the nervously hinged door had been hopefully lettered Arcangelo Barelli, Plowing & Grading.
While the coupe was trembling for some seconds before quieting down, I sighed a double relief, at Miss Francis' forgetfulness of the money due her and the soothing of my fears for the lawn's eating its way downward to China or India. The remark about gluttonous abdomens was disturbing.
"And of course there will be no further sale of the Metamorphizer," she concluded, her eyes now totally concerned with the farmer who was opening the turtle with the air of a man expecting to be unpleasantly astonished.
Mr Barelli came as to a deathbed, a consoling but hopeless smile widening his narrow face only inconsiderably. At the scythe cradled in his arms someone shouted, "Here's old Father Time himself." Mr Barelli wasnt amused. Brushing his forehead thoughtfully with tender fingers he surveyed with saddened eye the three graduated steps of grass. The last step, unessayed by his predecessors, rose nearly four feet, as alien to the concept of lawn as a field of wheat.
"Think you can cut it?" one of the audience asked.
Mr Barelli smiled cheerlessly and didnt answer. Instead, he uprooted from his hip pocket a slender stone and began phlegmatically to caress the blade of the scythe with it.
"Hay, that stuff's not goin to stop growin while you fool around."
"Got to do things right," explained Mr Barelli gently.
The rhythmic friction of stone agai
nst steel prolonged suspense unbearably. All kinds of speculation crowded my mind while the leisurely performance went on. The grass was growing rapidly; faster than vegetation had ever grown before. Could it grow so quickly the farmer's scythe couldnt keep up with it? Suppose it had been wheat or corn? Planted today, it would be ready to harvest next week, fully ripe. The original dream of Miss Francis would pale compared with the reality. There was still--somewhere, somehow--a fortune in the Metamorphizer....
Ready at last, Mr Barelli walked delicately across the stubble as if it were a substance too precious to be trampled brutally. Again he measured the rippling, ascending mass with his eye. It was the look of a bridegroom.
"What you waitin for?"
Unheeding, he scraped bootwelt semicircularly on the sward as though to mark a stance. Once more he appraised the grass, crooked his knee, rested his hands lightly on the two short, upraised handholds. Satisfied at length with his preparations, he finally drew the scythe back with a sweeping motion of both arms and curved it forward close to the ground. It embraced a sudden island lovingly and a sheaf of grass swooned into a heap. I was reminded of old woodcuts in a history of the French Revolution.
The bystanders sighed in harmony. "Nothing to it ... should a had him in the first place ... can't beat the old elbowgrease. No, sir, musclepower'll do it every time ... guess it's licked now all right, all right...." Mr Barelli duplicated his sweep and another sheaf fell. Another. And another....
"One of the oldest human rituals," remarked Miss Francis, swaying her body in time with the farmer's. "An act of devotion to Ceres. But all this husbandman reaps is Cynodon dactylon. A commentary."
"Progress," I pointed out. "Now they have machines to harvest grain. All uptodate farmers use them; only the backward ones stick to primitive tools and have to make a living by taking on odd jobs."
"Progress," she repeated, looking from the scythewielder to me and back again. "Progress, Weener. A remarkable conception of the nineteenth century...."
The less intense spectators began to move off; not, to be sure, without backward glances, but the metronomic swing of Mr Barelli's blade indicated it was all over with the rank grass now. I too should have been on my way, writing off the Metamorphizer as a total loss and considering methods for making a new and more profitable connection. Not that I was one to leave a sinking ship, nor had I lost faith in the potentialities of Miss Francis' discovery; but she either wasnt smart enough to modify her formula, or else ... but there really wasnt any "or else". She just wasnt smart enough to make the Metamorphizer marketable and she was cheating me of the handsome return which should be rightfully mine.
She'd made the stuff and deceived me by an unscrupulously worded advertisement, now, no longer interested, she asked airily if further effort were essential. Who wouldnt be indignant? And to cap it all she suddenly ejaculated, "Can't dawdle around here all day" and after snatching up a handful of the scythings, she left, rolling her large body from side to side, galloping her untidy hair up and down over her neck as she took rapid strides. Evidently the attractions of her messy kitchen were more to her taste than the wholesome air of outdoors. Pottering around, producing another mare's nest and eventually, I suppose, getting another victim....
7. But I couldnt leave so cavalierly. Every leaf, stem, and blade of the cancerous grass held me in somewhat the same way Miss Francis' intense eyes did. It wasnt an aesthetic or morbid attraction--its basis was strictly practical. If it could have been controlled--if only the growth could be induced on a modified and proper scale--what a product! A fury of frustration rocked my customary calm....
The stretch and retraction of the mower's arms, the swift, bright curving as the scythe cut deeper, fascinated me. An unscrupulous man--just as a whimsical thought--might go about in the night inoculating lawns surreptitiously and appear with a crew next day to offer his services in cutting them. Just goes to show how easy it is to make dishonest speculations ... but of course such things don't pay in the long run....
The lush area was being reduced, but perhaps not with the same rapidity as at first when Mr Barelli was at the top of enthusiastic--if the adjective was applicable--vigor. Oftener and oftener and oftener he paused to sharpen his implement and I thought the cropped shocks were becoming smaller and smaller. As the movement of the scythe swept the guillotined grass backward, the trailing stolons entangled themselves with the uncut stand, pulling the sheaves out of place and making the stacks ragged and inadequate looking.
Behind me a cocky voice asked, "What's cooking around here, chum?"
I turned round to a young man, thin as a bamboo pole, elegantly tailored, who yawned to advertise gold inlays. I explained while he looked skeptical, bored and knowing simultaneously. "Who would tha flummox, bah goom?" he inquired.
"Ay?"
He took a pack of playingcards from his pocket and riffled them expertly. "Who you kidding, bud?" he translated.
"No one. Ask anybody here if this wasnt a dead lawn yesterday and if it hasnt grown this high since morning."
He yawned again and proffered me the deck. "Pick any card," he suggested. To avoid rudeness I selected one. He put the pack back and said, "You have the nine of diamonds. Clever, eh?"
I didnt know whether it was or not. He accepted the pasteboard from me and said, peering out from under furry black eyebrows, "If I brought in a story like that, the chief would fire me before you could say James Gordon Bennett."
"Youre a reporter?"
"Acute chap. Newspaperman. Name of Gootes. Jacson Gootes, Daily Intelligencer, not Thrilling Wonder Stories."
I thought I saw an answer to my most pressing problem. One has to stoop occasionally to methods which, if they didnt lead to important ends, might almost be termed petty; but afterall there was no reason Mr Jacson Gootes shouldnt buy me a dinner in return for information valuable to him. "Let's get away from here," I suggested.
He fished out a coin, showed it to me, waved his arm in the air and opened an empty palm for my inspection. "Ah sho would like to, cunnel, but Ahve got to covah thisyeah sto'y--even if it's out of this mizzble wo'ld."
"I'm sure I can give you details to bring it down to earth," I told him. "Make it a story your editor will be glad to have."
"'Glad'!" He pressed tobacco into a slender pipe as emaciated as himself. "You don't know W R. If he got a beat on the story of Creation he'd be sore as hell because God wanted a byline."
He evidently enjoyed his own quip for he repeated several times in different accents "... God wanted a byline." He puffed a matchflame and surveyed the field of Mr Barelli's effort. "Hardworkin feller, what? Guess I better have a chat with the bounder--probably closest to the dashed thing."
"Mr Gootes," I said impressively, "I am the man who applied the inoculator to this grass. Now shall we get out of here so you can listen to my story?"
"Sonabeesh--thees gona be good. Lead away, amigo--I prepare both ears to leesten."
I drew him toward Hollywood Boulevard and into a restaurant I calculated might not be too expensive for his generosity. Besides, he probably had an expenseaccount. We put a porcelaintopped table between us and he commanded, "Give down." Obediently I went over all the happenings of yesterday, omitting only Miss Francis' name and the revealing wording of the ad.
Gootes surveyed me interestedly. "You certainly started something here, Acne and/or Psoriasis."
Humor like his was beneath offense. "My name's Albert Weener."
"Mine's Mustard." He produced a plastic cup and rapidly extracted from it a series of others in diminishing sizes. "I wouldnt have thought it to look at you. The dirty deed, I mean--not the exzemical hotdog. O K, Mister Weener--who's this scientific magnate? Whyre you holding him out on me?"
"Scientists don't like to be disturbed in their researches," I temporized.
"No more does a man in a whorehouse," he retorted vulgarly. "Story's no good without him."
That was what I thought and I'm afraid my satisfaction appeared on my fac
e.
"Now leely man--no try a hold up da press. Whatsa matter, you aready had da beer and da roasta bif sanawich?"
"Maybe you better repeat the order. You know in these cheap places they don't like to have you sit around and talk without spending money."
"Money! Eh, laddie--I'm nae a millionaire." He balanced a full glass of water thoughtfully upon a knifeblade, looking around for applause. When it was not forthcoming he meekly followed my suggestion.
"Listen, Gootes," I swallowed a mouthful of sandwich and sipped a little beer. "I want to help you get your story."
He waved his hand and pulled a handkerchief out of his ear.
"The point is," I commenced, sopping a piece of bread in the thick gravy, "if I were to betray the confidence involved I couldnt hope to continue my connection and I'd lose my chances to benefit from this remarkable discovery."
"Balls," exclaimed Gootes. "Forget the spiel. I'm not a prospect for your lawn tonic."
I disregarded the interruption. "I'm not a mercenary man and I believe in enlightening the public to the fullest extent compatible with decency. I'm willing to make a sacrifice for the general good, yet I--"
"--'must live.' I know, I know. How much?"
"It seems to me fifty dollars would be little enough--"
"Fifty potatoes!" He went through an elaborate pantomime of shock, horror, indignation, grotesque dismay and a dozen other assorted emotions. "Little man, youre fruitcake sure. W R wouldnt part with half a C for a tipoff on the Secondcoming. No, brother--you rang the wrong bell. Five I might get you--but no more."
I replied firmly I was not in need of charity--ignoring his pointed look at the remains on my plate--and this was strictly a business proposition, payment for value received. After some bargaining he finally agreed to phone his managingeditor and propose I'd "come clean" for twenty dollars. While he was on this errand I added pie and coffee to the check. It is well to be provident and I'd paid for my meal in more than money.
Jacson Gootes came limply from the phonebooth, his bumptiousness gone. "No soap." He shook his head dejectedly. "Old Man said only pity for the lower mammals prevented him from letting me go to work for Hearst right away. Sorry."