Well, that was no use. And then I remembered the little e beings'
comments on a food flood due in the spaceway. A sunburst, no doubt. A
magnetic storm on the sun would certainly send a harvest out through
space for e beings. But it would louse up the planetary radio system.
And there I had an answer. All I had to do was remove the radio
interference in a planned way and every receiver on half the world
would receive my signals. How easy it was!
So I went back up to the first layer of the doughnut round the Earth
where there was a field of fresh energy. As the food came flooding in
from the sun I gobbled it up. Mouthful. Pause. Mouthful, mouthful.
Pause. Mouthful, mouthful, mouthful. Pause.
I worked up and down the numbers in progression, swallowing every lump
of solar radiation within reach.
But I guess I was carried away by the enjoyable eating. A lot more time
passed than I had intended; and when I came down again to read a few
thoughts, the world was freezing in parts, and the sea was boiling in
others, and the mush lay flat as a desert in wide patches.
I worked it out, eventually. No energy means no evaporation, thus no
clouds and no rain for vegetation. And that means no carbon dioxide
layer to protect the planet, in turn leading to excessive radiation
when I stopped eating, hence deserts and a boiling ocean and parts of
the land frozen solid.
Not a very good message.
* * * * *
Well, I cleaned up as best I could, but it was drudgery sipping up
the dull, flat-tasting thermal energy of the oceans. Tidal forces and
magnetic flows are stodgy, uninteresting diets. You might as well eat
straight mush.
I decided not to try that again. It had too many repercussions. What I
wanted was a nice simple signal.
A volcano would do excellently, I thought--Indian smoke signals on a
vast scale.
So I hunted over the mush until I came to a reasonably active fountain,
probably Vesuvius but I'm not sure; one blob of mush looks like
another. And I drank the whole internal fire in bursts. Anyone with any
sense could have seen the Morse-coded eruptions that I let go through.
But they didn't.
They missed my signals altogether. Chiefly because I had disturbed the
balance of stresses down at the foot of the volcano, deep in the mush,
and when I came out it was dancing about in ripples and shakes. I don't
suppose many people would stop in the middle of an earthquake to note
the signals coming out of the local volcano. Anyway, no one did.
As you know, the damage was quite widespread. So I went round to the
other side of the mush, where they were less distracted. What I needed
was a test-piece. Something which was already the focus of serious
scientific interest. Something being carefully observed already.
The nuclear power plant in the nearest city mush-blocks seemed a
reasonable choice. And good eating it made, too. Pure unadulterated
flavor, strong and pulsing with vitality. I've never had a better meal.
But when I came out of the reactor and let it continue its food ...
its energy production, all the humans had vanished. They hadn't seen
a thing. I found them miles away under the surface of the mush-level
expecting to be blown up. They assumed that when the pile ceased its
output it was building up internally, so they broadcast an emergency
and took to their bunkers. And then they were busy for weeks correcting
the false alarm and dealing with complaints from freezer companies and
householders and utility commissions. So I left the area to sort itself
out.
Very well, I thought. This time, I'll choose a nuclear device that
_is_ expected to explode and eat it before it does, while everyone is
watching.
It wasn't difficult to find. There was a long smear of food in the air
all round the world, as if a lot of clumsy e eaters had dribbled. The
main source was easy to locate.
* * * * *
I found a long stalk thing of mush and a mush shed on top and sat
there waiting. Eventually, a team of mushes hoisted up a device with
delicate little tidbit cores, and hurried away. So this was a fusion
bomb, was it? I waited until it was triggered off, took a strong hold
and ate the lot at the moment of burst.
For the record, swallowing a nuclear explosion is not very comfortable.
I had indigestion for weeks. But I made it.
It was a waste of time.
As usual, I had overlooked something. The conversion was as massive
as the energy I ate, and I found out what the silver beads Doctor
McPherson had put in the jar were. Energy eaten by e beings converts
into sound and ozone. And the conversion of the nuclear explosion sent
great balls of sound rolling over the country, deafening the people,
flattening structures by vibration, and releasing flows of raw ozone,
which promptly started fires; and that in turn disturbed the cloud
masses and produced unprecedented floods.
I was munching quietly on a power line, overlooking the great stretch
of level mush of water up to and over the horizon, when Doctor
McPherson found me.
A repair man drove him up, let him off the mush vehicle and drove off
fast.
"You nutty old coot, you wanted to see the next breakdown and here it
is," the repair man's thoughts shot away.
"I may be nuts," Doctor McPherson said to himself, standing underneath
me, "but I have an odd idea there's intelligent mischief behind all
this."
He sat on a rock-shaped mound of mush nearby.
"So here I am, following a idiotic hunch," he thought, and held out
a large jar with a most entrancing tidbit of radioactivity, cobalt
flavor, in the bottom.
Naturally, I went down happily and gobbled it up.
And Doctor McPherson put the lid on. A lid of thick-meshed mush, leaden
and inedible. It took me some time of fruitless revolving to discover I
was locked in a Leyden jar with a complicated series of non-conducting
layers.
I'm starving.
* * * * *
Oh, he feeds me now and then, and the other day he put in a one-way
circuit so that I could operate this electric typescripter.
But he says I can't come out until war is declared and the Pentagon
signals him on emergency. Then he'll take the lid off and I can eat the
nearest rocket heading this way. He's promised me that.
He needn't worry. I'm so hungry I'll eat the lot. But who wants to be a
secret air defense weapon locked in a Leyden jar?
Fellow e, keep away from this mush and these mush-men! They are
dangerous.
What's more, they have no finer feelings!