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Title: The Useless Bugbreeders
Author: James Stamers
Release Date: December 20, 2019 [EBook #60981]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE USELESS BUGBREEDERS ***
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THE USELESS BUGBREEDERS
BY JAMES STAMERS
TO THE SPACE COUNCIL, ASTEROID 4722
WAS JUST ANOTHER ROADBLOCK IN THE
WAY OF INTERPLANETARY TRAFFIC. BUT
TO THE USELESS BUGBREEDERS IT WAS HOME!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, May 1961.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The previous case was a Weeper, and he lost. So the Space Zoning
Commissioners were damp and irritable before I opened pleadings for my
client. I tried not to squelch as I approached the bench.
"Not the Flammables again, Mr. Jones?" the fat Commissioner asked
nastily, sponging his suit with a sodden handkerchief.
"This was last week, Your Honor."
The thin dark Commissioner stared pointedly at the charred end of the
bench nearest the witness seat.
"Indeed it was, Mr. Jones."
The middle Commissioner poised his fingers and looked at the court
ceiling; moisture gleamed diamond like on his bald head.
"Now let me see," he intoned. "Correct me if I err, Mr. Jones, but I
seem to observe you have a habit of representing somewhat spectacular
aliens. Including, in the past six months alone, the Drillers, Whirling
Tombs, Fragile Glasses, Erupters, Vibrational Men, Transparent
Women--and of course let us not forget the Flammables."
"I assure Your Honor, my present clients will be found to be sober,
hardworking, desirable members of the Galactic Community, seeking only
to live on their own asteroid in peace under a democratic system,
which...."
"Thank you, Mr. Jones. Shall we proceed?"
"And perhaps," added the fat Commissioner, "you may be good enough to
leave us with most of our courtroom intact on this occasion."
The thin Commissioner sighed and shuffled his papers.
"You appear, Mr. Jones, to contest a Space Council ruling for the
elimination of Asteroid Four Thousand Seven Hundred and Twenty-Two on
the grounds, which you allege, that it is a peaceful dwelling of an
adult and responsible alien race."
"Yes, Your Honor."
"Then let us see your adult, um, Bugbreeder."
I shuffled uncomfortably and splashed the court stenographer who gave
me a dirty look.
"A space tramp's name given in the early days of Space, Your Honor.
More properly, my clients are the Selective Culturists of Bacteria and
Lesser Life."
The fat Commissioner sniffed.
"Bugbreeders will do," he said. "Produce one."
My client hopped off the table and ran nimbly up to the witness seat.
He sat there like a small green snowball with large and pointed ears.
"Happy, happy to be here, I'm sure," he said.
Fortunately he had a hand to raise and looked reasonably humanoid as
he was sworn in. The caterpillar and semi-jelly cultures make a less
favorable first impression, and at this point the Driller had gone
excitedly through the floor.
"You are a representative member of your race?" I asked formally.
"Oh, yus. Much."
"And you reside on Asteroid Four Thousand Seven Hundred and Twenty-Two,
the permanent dwelling of your race?"
"Oh, yus. Home."
"And although your home presents certain technical difficulties for
interplanetary vehicles on the spacerun to the greater planets, you
maintain it should be preserved because of your contribution to the
culture of the Galactic Community?" I asked.
"Oh, yus."
"Does he understand a word you're saying, Mr. Jones?" asked the bald
Commissioner.
"Oh, yus. Not much," said my client cheerfully.
"Hurrmph," I said, and coughed.
"Perhaps I may assist," suggested the thin Commissioner, with a nasty
look at me. "What exactly does your race do?"
"Breed bugs, I'm sure. Am head bacteriophysicist name of Lood. Am good
scientist."
"And what exactly do you do with these bugs you raise?"
"Most everything."
* * * * *
"Your Honors," I interrupted. "At this point I propose a few simple
demonstrations of what Mr. Lood and his people can do."
"May I inquire if either of my learned brethren know any way in which
we can charge Mr. Jones with rebuilding costs, if necessary?" asked the
bald Commissioner.
"Your Honors, I assure you...."
"Proceed at your peril, Mr. Jones."
I walked over to the exhibit table and pointed to a row of jars.
"Exhibits A through G, Your Honors. Samples of food and beverages
produced by my clients without raw materials and from the expert
culture of bacteria."
I held up a jar full of mauve fungus. It was the most attractive
example.
"I would hardly call feeding on funguses a sign of a responsible
humanoid race, Mr. Jones."
"Perhaps Your Honor will recall the part played by bacteria in making
milk, cheese, wine, beer, bread."
The Commissioners looked at each other and nodded reluctantly. So I
passed the jars up to them, secure in the knowledge they had been
tested by the Alien Foods Bureau. I watched the Commissioners unscrew
the lids and taste the contents somewhat hesitantly.
"Not bad," confessed the fat Commissioner eventually.
"Quite palatable."
"Of course we already have honey and similar foodstuffs, Mr. Jones."
"Naturally, Your Honor. But Mr. Lood's race can survive without
extraplanetary aid. Provided they have sunshine and water, they can
breed their spores and bacteria with no other resources."
"You mean," said the thin Commissioner with a dark leer, "that almost
any sunny planet would do for them?"
Somewhere along the line my point seemed to have been swept away, so I
added hurriedly:
"I offer this evidence purely to show the high degree of civilization
of my clients' culture, as cause why they should not be deprived of
their native land."
"Oh, yus," my client agreed.
"Mr. Lood," intoned the bald Commissioner, "to stay on your present
asteroid you will have to prove that your race offers something that
cannot be found elsewhere in the Galactic Community. Now have these
funguses of yours any special medicinal values, for example?"
"Please?"
"Can you cure diseases with them?"
"Oh, no."
"Ah," said the thin and fat Commissioners together. "Proceed, Mr.
Jones."
* * * * *
That put Lood somewhere back behind the twentieth-century discoverers
of penicillin and the myecins, and even back behind the pioneer
Pasteur. Five hundred years back, in fact.
"Yes. Well. Let's see how my clients handle housing, Your Honors. I
think you'll find this quite revolutionary. Mr. Lood?"
Lood hopped off the witness seat and trotted up to the long table
normally reserved for attorneys. Lately, I have found my professional
colleagues strangely reluctant to stay in court when I have a case, so
Lood had the entire table to himself.
He pulled a small jar out from under the table and spread a pile of
dust on the tabletop. Then he unscrewed the jar and gently poured
nothing out of it onto the dust. Nothing visible, that is. But I
assumed it was teeming with viruses and such.
"While Mr. Lood gets this started, Your Honors," I said, hoping the
viruses or whatever were not fatal to humans, "may I submit the
usefulness of fungus foods for space-travel and for pioneers on
inhospitable planets?"
"Are we having difficulties with General Food-Concentrates, the
Travelers Capsule Combine and the other ten thousand concerns in this
line, Mr. Jones?" the bald Commissioner asked quietly.
You can't say I didn't try. I shut up and watched Lood fuss with the
dust on the table.
It started moving as if it were bubbling and Lood stood back.
Slowly, the dust on the table formed itself into a brick, a long eight
by six by three inch brick. Lood smiled happily.
"And here, Your Honors," I said triumphantly, "here is automatic
housing."
"One brick does not make a house, Mr. Jones."
"If Your Honors will just watch...."
The brick slowly elongated and split into two perfect bricks, lying on
the table end to end.
"Mass colony action of bacteria," said Lood wisely. "Oh, yus."
The two bricks each split into two further bricks. These divided and
multiplied themselves while we watched, out to the end of the table.
"I would like Your Honors to observe the way these bricks overcome
natural hazards," I said, getting into my stride.
I pointed to the bricks drooping over the end of the table. A brick
fell onto the floor at each end, then built itself up until it joined
the line of bricks on the table, forming a perfect arch at each angle.
The line on the table was now three bricks high, so I walked round and
stood behind the wall.
"You see, Your Honors, suppose I need a house. I merely combine these
suitable microbes and dust. And there we are, a house."
I had to stand on tiptoe to finish the sentence because of the
mathematics involved. Every brick was doubling and redoubling itself in
just under a minute. And the wall was getting quite impressively high.
"Mr. Jones," called one of the Commissioners.
It was not until I tried to walk round the end of the wall that I found
I had been out-flanked.
I ran to the nearest wall of the courtroom but the bricks got there
first. I heard a rending noise that suggested the other end had gone
clean through the opposite wall. As a matter of fact, I saw the
astonished face of an attorney entering the main door of the Justice
Building as the wall advanced towards him. Then he saw me. He grinned
and waved.
I was in no mood to wave back.
"Mr. Lood, Mr. Lood," I yelled. "Can you hear me?"
"Wall too thick, yus," came a muffled answer.
And indeed it was. I had not noticed it, but the wall was expanding
sideways as well. I was calculating the approximate thickness when it
went up and through the roof of the courtroom.
Fortunately it was a nice sunny day.
* * * * *
However, this was no time to sunbathe and I dashed towards the hole in
the courtroom wall, where Lood's wall had gone through.
I just got out before a buttress, coming out the wall at right angles,
blocked the gap. I remembered something Lood had said about the
automatic creation of full-scale houses on a simple standard plan: two
rooms, a toilet and a patio.
Outside, the wall was well on the way towards completing its second
simple house. This side of the wall was, that is. I could only assume
it was doing something similar on the other side. There was no way of
getting round and seeing, except by outstripping the wall in a sprint.
I gathered my breath and dignity and ran very rapidly down the length
of the wall, round the far mounting tiers of brick, advancing now on
the State Library, and back to where I had left the Commissioners and
Mr. Lood.
I was faced by a thicket of patios and arched doorways and low-roofed
houses.
"Your Honors, Your Honors," I called hopefully, walking into the maze,
in the general direction of what appeared to be an old and ruined war
monument. It then occurred to me that this was the outer wall of the
courthouse. It stood far off, pointing a stone finger to the sky, as if
going down in a sea of brick for the third time.
"Your Honors, Your Honors...."
I met them turning a corner.
Unfortunately, they seemed to have found it necessary to crawl through
a broken gap of some sort. They were very dusty and had a slightly
shredded appearance.
"Ah, Mr. Jones," they said grimly, dusting each other off.
A tremendous crash announced the falling in of the roof of the State
Library.
"Well," said the thin Commissioner, "he did say it was revolutionary."
I smiled politely.
"Don't giggle, Mr. Jones, or we'll hold you in contempt."
We wound out of the maze in single file. A pattering behind us
announced Lood bringing up the rear.
Once we were out, and about two hundred yards ahead of the advancing
walls, patios and houses, the three Commissioners turned on me.
"Mr. Jones," they said with restraint. "You will now stop this reckless
building project."
I turned to Lood.
"You must stop it," I said.
"Oh, yus," he agreed, nodding happily. "Most marvelous, no. Ample
housing for all and sundry. Homes for peoples. Immediate occupancy. You
like basic plan house, yus?"
"Mr. Lood," snarled the fat Commissioner. "The problem on every
habitable planet so far has been to find room to build. Earth is
congested...."
Distant crashing informed me that an unprecedented houseclearing was
still going on.
"... And so are all authorized planets yet discovered. I speak for my
learned brethren in saying that this ... this anthill of yours is one
thing the Galactic Community can do without."
"And do without right now," added his bald colleague.
"You wish to stop?" asked Lood.
Small tears filled the periphery of his round eyes.
"Yes," I confirmed brutally. "Can you stop it?"
"Oh, yus. Must have antiseptics."
* * * * *
It took the fire department four hours of spraying from their copters
to reduce the entire housing estate to dust. And then an even blanket
of brown feathery residue lay unbroken for several acres, save here
and there where the shells of previous buildings stood up gauntly and
accusingly.
"All bugs gone," said Lood sadly.
"But what about this mess?" demanded the bald Commissioner.
"Comes out of air. Floating particles. Process cleans air, too."
A fresh wind from across the blanket of dust came inopportunely to
punctuate Mr. Lood's remark. As soon as they could talk again, the
Commissioners suggested resuming in another city.
"Assuming, Mr. Jones, you wish to produce further aspects of your, hum,
case."
Six red and bleary eyes stared at me from a coating of brown dust of
only vaguely judicial appearance.
"I think, Your Honors, the next evidence had better be delivered in the
open," I said, and pointed to a nearby park.
Much, if not all, of the dust fell off us as we walked over to the
small green hill in the center of the park. The birds twittered, the
sun shone, the breeze was fresh; and after the Commissioners had
settled on convenient tree stumps, I felt quite hopeful about the third
line of evidence. Lood stood optimistically by.
"Your Honors," I said, "you are aware that Earth suffers a grave
shortage of metals. Almost all economical quantities have been mined
out. Yet, Your Honors--" I paused dramatically--"in the haematin
of human blood alone, whose main function is to carry oxygen to the
system, there is nearly twice as much iron by weight as oxygen."
"Precisely which of us, Mr. Jones, do you propose to mine first?"
I cleared my throat and let the thin Commissioner's remark pass.
"Merely making the point, Your Honor, that the metal-carrying
properties of bacteria have been hardly considered."
This was stretching it a bit because selective breeding of microbes
for the recovery of metals in tailings have been developed back in the
nineteen-fifties. But so far as I knew, no one had carried it as far as
my client race.
"Mr. Lood," I commanded.
"Just one moment, Mr. Jones," said the bald Commissioner drily. "Let us
have an outline of this _before_ we start."
"Certainly, Your Honor. Mr. Lood will now extract gold from a sample of
ocean water we have obtained."
I signalled to the waiting carrier and it came trundling softly over
the grass and deposited a large tank on the grass.
"Genuine untouched ocean water, Your Honors," I said, slapping the
tank. "Go ahead, Mr. Lood."
The little fellow hopped up to the side of the tank and emptied
another invisible horde from a test tube into the water.
We waited.
"Oh, yus," he said.
And there on the bottom of the tank was an unmistakable sludge of
metallic gold, shining speckled in the rays of sunlight bending through
the water.
I scooped out a sample and handed it round for the Commissioners to
inspect.
"Subject to analysis," grunted the fat one, "this certainly seems to be
gold."
"Of course, there is no reason why this should not be done on Earth, as
a starting point."
The thin Commissioner paused and looked at my client.
"Does this process affect fish?"
"Oh, yus," said Lood. "Kills all parasites. Fish, reptiles, and such."
"Thank you," said the Commissioner drily.
* * * * *
Mr. Lood looked at me apologetically.
"My people too small to tolerate fish," he explained. "Fish most
dangerous wild beasts. Oh, yus."
"Never mind," I reassured him. "Your Honors, I feel the court will take
a more favorable view of the dry-land operation, then. Taking place as
it does in the bowels of the earth, there is no danger to valuable
livestock. And here we can demonstrate, for example, simple aluminum
extraction, by the progressive reduction and oxidation and reduction of
bacteria on a molecular scale.
"I hope," I added, "this experiment will produce visible evidence of
this great boon to mankind, though I must ask Your Honors to watch
closely."
Lood produced another test-tube, pressed a small hole in the grass with
his finger and emptied the tube. The hole darkened.
We all bent over to watch.
Nothing happened.
"Perhaps a dud batch?" I asked eventually.
"Oh, no," said Lood.
We peered intently into the small hole without seeing anything.
Then a faint wisp of steam came out of the hole. I walked over the
grass, picked up a long twig, walked back and thrust it into the hole.
I could not touch bottom, so something was going on down there.
The edges of the hole began to gleam with white metal. I was about to
explain the alumina content of common clay, when the thin Commissioner
and the tree stump he was sitting on went down with a whistling sound
into a sudden pit that opened beneath him.
I only just caught the third and last Commissioner in time. We watched
his tree stump sinking out of sight together.
The ground began to quiver uneasily.
"Let us get out of here with all haste."
I followed the direction of the court with proper professional zeal.
And we just made it to the safe stressed-concrete surface of the old
freeway when the park melted completely into a stark framework of
aluminum. Seated in the middle and peering at us through the aluminum
cage were the other two Commissioners. They did not seem particularly
happy.
Around them in a widening belt there opened up a pit of gleaming
aluminum, melting, so to speak, towards the horizon on all sides.
"You realize, I suppose, Mr. Jones," said the bald Commissioner beside
me, "that your client is in the process of eating up the Earth." He
breathed heavily.
Lood was beaming and hopping up and down at the success of his
experiment. I touched him in the general area of a shoulder. He looked
at me.
"No," I said firmly, shaking my head.
"No?"
"No!"
His round eyes became tearful and his little green body shook.
"Oh, dear. Oh, dear. Oh, dear."
"Antiseptics?" I asked.
"Oh, yus," he confirmed sadly.
* * * * *
Very fortunately, the fire department was still observing my
client--and me, I suspected afterwards, ridiculous as that may seem.
This time it took them several hours of deep spraying and drilling to
confine the area. A vast saucer of aluminum remained.
"Useful for signalling to stars, oh, yus?" asked Lood, hopefully.
"Oh, no," I said.
A threatening cough made me turn round to see the three Commissioners
staring at me.
"Mr. Jones...."
"... you have now destroyed the Courthouse, the Public Library and five
city blocks...."
"... and buried them under a filthy layer of dust...."
"and reduced a park into a great garbage pit...."
"... we therefore refuse your claim and give you and your client six
hours to get off Earth...."
"... and kindly do not trouble to advise us where the Space Council
moves you. We will sleep more soundly for believing that it will be
many, many light-years away."
And they turned and walked away, leaving me with my client--and,
apparently, my traveling companion.
A quiet and suppressed sobbing made me turn and look at Lood. He wept
dolefully.
"We have nothing," he said. "Oh, no. We have nothing to offer. Nothing
that you humans want."
"Well," I said, "that's the way it goes sometimes."
And what, I wondered, was I going to do for a living now?
"Free food," gulped Lood. "Free housing. Free gold and metals. We had
all hoped so much from this. Oh, yus."
There did not seem any point in telling him his people were several
hundred years too late. Once upon a time he would have been hailed
as a savior of a starving and poor human race, a great benefactor of
mankind. Now he was just a nuisance. And I was another for letting him
loose.
"Well," I assured him, "you have got one guest until they shift you off
your asteroid. Me. Free food and housing will suit me fine. And maybe
we'll find some very backward part of the Galaxy where they need gold
and such.
"It's a pity," I added, as we started to walk towards the spaceport,
"that you can't control these bacteria of yours."
"Can control."
"It didn't look like it, my friend."
"Oh, yus. Can control bodily leucocytes, corpuscles and such. Perfect
cell replacement easy."
I looked down at him.
"If it's all that easy," I said. "I suppose your old men can run faster
than your houses."
"No old men," said Lood.
"Well, old whatever-you-are's."
"No old. Not die. Oh, yus. Perfect cell replacement."
I stood very still.
"Do you mean you never die?" I asked.
"Oh, yus. Never die."
"Can teach?" I asked.
"Oh, yus. Most simple," smiled Lood. "Can teach all men not die. Not
ever."
But I was off running after the three Commissioners, yelling until they
stopped and stood waiting for me....
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