The Rotifers Page 4

could see me too.... Andthey kept signaling, swimming and turning.... I won't tell you how totalk to them, because nobody ought to talk to them ever again. Becausethey find out more than they tell.... They know about us, now, and theyhate us. They never knew before--that there was anybody but them.... Sothey want to kill us all."

  "But why should they want to do that?" asked the father, as gently as hecould. He kept telling himself, "He's delirious. It's like Sally says,he's been wearing himself out, thinking too much about--the rotifers.But the doctor will be here pretty soon, the doctor will know what todo."

  "They don't like knowing that they aren't the only ones on Earth thatcan think. I expect people would be the same way."

  "But they're such little things, Harry. They can't hurt us at all."

  The boy's eyes opened wide, shadowed with terror and fever. "I told you,Dad--They're growing germs, millions and billions of them, _new_ones.... And they kept telling me to take them back to the pond, so theycould tell all the rest, and they could all start getting ready--forwar."

  He remembered the shapes that swam and crept in the green water gardens,with whirling cilia and great, cold, glistening eyes. And he rememberedthe clean, empty fish bowl in the window downstairs.

  "Don't let them, Dad," said Harry convulsively. "You've got to kill themall. The ones here and the ones in the pond. You've got to kill themgood--because they don't mind being killed, and they lay lots of eggs,and their eggs can stand almost anything, even drying up. _And the eggsremember what the old ones knew._"

  "Don't worry," said Henry Chatham quickly. He grasped his son's hand, ahot limp hand that had slipped from under the coverlet. "We'll stopthem. We'll drain the pond."

  "That's swell," whispered the boy, his energy fading again. "I ought tohave told you before, Dad--but first I was afraid you'd laugh, andthen--I was just ... afraid...."

  His voice drifted away. And his father, looking down at the flushedface, saw that he seemed asleep. Well, that was better than the sickdelirium--saying such strange, wild things--

  Downstairs the doctor was saying harshly, "All right. All right. Butlet's have a look at the patient."

  Henry Chatham came quietly downstairs; he greeted the doctor briefly,and did not follow him to Harry's bedroom.

  When he was left alone in the room, he went to the window and stoodlooking down at the microscope. He could not rid his head ofstrangeness: A window between two worlds, our world and that of theinfinitely small, a window that looks both ways.

  After a time, he went through the kitchen and let himself out the backdoor, into the noonday sunlight.

  He followed the garden path, between the weed-grown beds of vegetables,until he came to the edge of the little pond. It lay there quiet in thesunlight, green-scummed and walled with stiff rank grass, a lonedragonfly swooping and wheeling above it. The image of all the stagnantwaters, the fertile breeding-places of strange life, with which it wasjoined in the end by the tortuous hidden channels, the oozing pores ofthe Earth.

  And it seemed to him then that he glimpsed something, a hitherto unseenmiasma, rising above the pool and darkening the sunlight ever so little.A dream, a shadow--the shadow of the alien dream of things hidden insmallness, the dark dream of the rotifers.

  The dragonfly, having seized a bright-winged fly that was sporting overthe pond, descended heavily through the sunlit air and came to rest on abroad lily pad. Henry Chatham was suddenly afraid. He turned and walkedslowly, wearily, up the path toward the house.

  *END*

  _Transcribers note_: This etext was produced from IF Worlds of ScienceFiction March 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.