"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."