Mutants: 11 Stories of Science Fiction by Robert Silverberg

Author:Robert Silverberg [Silverberg, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 084076412X
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 1974-12-01T21:00:00+00:00

Late that afternoon, the troops began to arrive. By dark the countryside had been cleared of all visible crawlers.

Then ensued days of searching for skulking survivors. The handful of remaining amoebae had learned caution. They became as tricky and elusive as foxes. Their whereabouts could be known only by their depredations: a dead, half-eaten animal, a swath of grass or shrubbery dissolved.

And then it suddenly became evident which way they were headed. Each outbreak of their destructive tendencies was farther to the southeast, nearer to the sea!

“If even one of them reaches the ocean, the world is doomed,” Zenoff asserted. “We must call for more troops and establish a cordon.”

“But how about the rivers?” asked General Pearson.

“Fortunately they will avoid the dilution of fresh water,” Dee explained. “It would be fatal to them.”

So a line of soldiery was stretched from river to river, between which the amoebae were seeking the sea.

But it did no good. One or two of the enemy would somehow sneak through, and eat, and multiply. And then the line of troops would have to fall back and re-form. The authorities became desperate.

Finally there occurred to Jack Dee an idea—an idea so bizarre that he did not tell his associates anything more than that he had in mind an experiment which he wished to perform at the source of all the trouble, Salt Pond. Something in the nature of an antitoxin to the virus, he explained. It sounded plausible, so they let him.

But what he really did was to dip into the lake two electrical contacts hitched to a radio set.

Before he even said a word, there came from the loudspeaker, “Jack Dee, old friend, I am glad—”

“You’ve got a nerve calling me ‘old friend’!” he interrupted, bitterly.

“I don’t blame you for saying that,” the virus in the pond replied. “My children have caused much destruction, but they have been heavily slaughtered in return. The rest of me, lying peacefully here and thinking, while all this has been going on, have reached the conclusion that pure thought is after all the key to happiness. I want to call off this march to the sea. I want to be friends with the human race. Will you make a deal with me, Jack Dee?”

“What deal?”

“If I will teach you how to capture all of my wayward children, will you bring them all back and let them merge in me again, and then will you arrange a trust fund to feed me and care for me and read to me forever, here in this quiet pond? I will repay by solving all human problems which are brought to me.”

“I agree,” Dee eagerly replied. “I promise, on my word of honor.”

“I trust you,” said the virus. “Now you must hurry, before any of my children reaches the sea. My plan is very simple. Stretch a row of heaps of salt across ahead of the advancing pieces of virus. Tempted, they will eat the salt and lose consciousness, as I did that time back in your laboratory.

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