The Box: Uncanny Stories (14 page)

Werner shook his head. It was a pity. The boy was without his parents, without his talent, even without his name.

He had lost everything.

Well, perhaps, not everything.

As he walked, Werner sent his mind back to the house to discover them standing at the window of Paal’s room, watching sunset cast its fiery light on German Corners. Paal was clinging to the sheriff’s
wife, his cheek pressed to her side. The final terror of losing his awareness had not faded but there was something else counterbalancing it. Something Cora Wheeler sensed yet did not fully realize.

Paal’s parents had not loved him. Werner knew this. Caught up in the fascination of their work they had not had the time to love him as a child. Kind, yes, affectionate, always; still, they had regarded Paal as their experiment in flesh.

Which was why Cora Wheeler’s love was, in part, as strange a thing to Paal as all the crushing horrors of speech. It would not remain so. For, in that moment when the last of his gift had fled, leaving his mind a naked rawness, she had been there with her love, to soothe away the pain. And always would be there.

“Did you find who you were looking for?” the gray-haired woman at the counter asked Werner as she served him coffee.

“Yes. Thank you,” he said.

“Where was he?” asked the woman.

Werner smiled.

“At home,” he said.

THESIS SUBMITTED AS PARTIAL
 REQUIREMENT FOR MASTER OF ARTS DEGREE

The phenomenon
known in scientific circles as the Los Angeles Movement came to light in the year 1982 when Doctor Albert Grimsby, A.B., B.S., A.M., Ph.D., professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology, made an unusual discovery.

I
have made an unusual discovery,” said Doctor Grimsby
.

“
What is that?” asked Doctor Maxwell
.

“
Los Angeles is alive
.”

Doctor Maxwell blinked
.

“
I beg your pardon,” he said
.

“
I can understand your incredulity,” said Doctor Grimsby. “Nevertheless
. . .”

He drew Doctor Maxwell to the laboratory bench
.

“
Look into this microscope,” he said, “under which I have isolated a piece of Los Angeles
.”

Doctor Maxwell looked. He raised his head, a look of astonishment on his face
.

“
It moves,” he said
.

H
aving made this strange discovery, Doctor Grimsby, oddly enough, saw fit to promulgate it only in the smallest degree. It appeared as a one-paragraph item in the
Science News Letter
of June 2, 1982, under the heading:
CALTECH PHYSICIST FINDS SIGNS OF LIFE IN L.A
.

Perhaps due to unfortunate phrasing, perhaps to normal lack of interest, the item aroused neither attention nor comment. This unfortunate negligence proved ever after a plague to the man originally responsible for it. In later years it became known as “Grimsby’s Blunder.”

Thus was introduced to a then unresponsive nation a phenomenon which was to become in the following years a most shocking threat to that nation’s very existence.

O
f late, researchers have discovered that knowledge concerning the Los Angeles Movement predates
Doctor Grimsby’s find by years. Indeed, hints of this frightening crisis are to be found in works published as much as fifteen years prior to the ill-fated “Caltech Disclosure.”

Concerning Los Angeles, the distinguished journalist, John Gunther, wrote: “What distinguishes it is . . . its octopus-like growth.”
¹

Yet another reference to Los Angeles mentions that: “In its amoeba-like growth it has spread in all directions. . . .”
²

Thus can be seen primitive approaches to the phenomenon which are as perceptive as they are unaware. Although there is no present evidence to indicate that any person during that early period actually knew of the fantastic process, there can hardly be any doubt that many
sensed
it, if only imperfectly.

Active speculation regarding freakish nature behavior began in July and August of 1982. During a period of approximately forty-seven days the states of Arizona and Utah in their entirety and great portions of New Mexico and lower Colorado were inundated by rains that frequently bettered the ten-inch mark.

Such waterfall in previously arid sections aroused
great agitation and discussion. First theories placed responsibility for this uncommon rainfall on previous southwestern atomic tests.
³
Government disclaiming of this possibility seemed to increase rather than eliminate mass credulity to this later disproved supposition.

Other “precipitation postulations” as they were then known in investigative parlance can be safely relegated to the category of “crackpotia.”
⁴
These include theories that excess commercial airflights were upsetting the natural balance of the clouds, that deranged Indian rainmakers had unwittingly come upon some lethal condensation factor and were applying it beyond all sanity, that strange frost from outer space was seeding Earth’s overhead and causing this inordinate precipitation.

And, as seems an inevitable concomitant to all alien deportment in nature, hypotheses were propounded that this heavy rainfall presaged
Deluge II
. It is clearly recorded that several minor religious groups began hasty construction of “Salvation Arks.” One of these arks can still be seen on the outskirts of the small town of Dry Rot, New Mexico, built on a small hill, “still waiting for the flood.”
⁵

Then came that memorable day when the name of farmer Cyrus Mills became a household word.

T
arnation!” said farmer Mills
.

He gaped in rustic amazement at the object he had come across in his cornfield. He approached it cautiously. He prodded it with a sausage finger
.

“
Tarnation,” he repeated, less volubly
.

Jason Gullwhistle of the
United States Experimental Farm Station No. 3,
Nebraska, drove his station wagon out to farmer Mills’s farm in answer to an urgent phone call. Farmer Mills took Mr. Gull-whistle out to the object
.

“
That’s odd,” said Jason Gullwhistle. “It looks like an orange tree
.”

Close investigation revealed the truth of this remark. It was, indeed, an orange tree
.

“
Incredible,” said Jason Gullwhistle. “An orange tree in the middle of a Nebraska corn field. I never
.”

Later they returned to the house for a lemonade
and there found Mrs. Mills in halter and shorts wearing sunglasses and an old chewed-up fur jacket she had exhumed from her crumbling hope chest
.

“
Think I’ll drive into Hollywood,” said Mrs. Mills, sixty-five if she was a day
.

B
y nightfall every wire service had embraced the item, every paper of any prominence whatever had featured it as a humorous insert on page one.

Within a week, however, the humor had vanished as reports came pouring in from every corner of the state of Nebraska as well as portions of Iowa, Kansas and Colorado; reports of citrus trees discovered in corn and wheat fields as well as more alarming reports relative to eccentric behavior in the rural populace.

Addiction to the wearing of scanty apparel became noticeable, an inexplicable rise in the sales of frozen orange juice manifested itself and oddly similar letters were received by dozens of chambers of commerce; letters which heatedly demanded the immediate construction of condominiums, supermarkets, tennis courts, drive-in theaters and drive-in restaurants and which complained of smog.

But it was not until a marked decrease in daily
temperatures and an equally marked increase of unfathomable citrus tree growth began to imperil the corn and wheat crop that serious action was taken. Local farm groups organized spraying operations but to little or no avail. Orange, lemon and grapefruit trees continued to flourish in geometric proliferation and a nation, at long last, became alarmed.

A seminar of the country’s top scientists met in Ragweed, Nebraska, the geographical center of this multiplying plague, to discuss possibilities.

D
ynamic tremors in the alluvial substrata,” said Doctor Kenneth Loam of the University of Denver
.

“
Mass chemical disorder in soil composition,” said Spencer Smith of the Dupont Laboratories
.

“
Momentous gene mutation in the corn seed,” said Professor Jeremy Brass of Kansas College
.

“
Violent contraction of the atmospheric dome,” said Professor Lawson Hinkson of MIT
.

“
Displacement of orbit,” said Roger Cosmos of the Hayden Planetarium
.

“
I’m scared,” said a little man from Purdue
.

W
hat positive results emerged from this body of speculative genius is yet to be appraised. History records that a closer labeling of the cause of this
unusual behavior in Nature and Man occurred in early October of 1982 when Associate Professor David Silver, young research physicist at the University of Missouri, published in
The Scientific American
an article entitled, “The Collecting of Evidences.”

In this brilliant essay, Professor Silver first voiced the opinion that all the apparently disconnected occurrences were, in actuality, superficial revelations of one underlying phenomenon. To the moment of this article, scant attention had been paid to the erratic behavior of people in the affected areas. Professor Silver attributed this behavior to the same cause which had effected the alien growth of citrus trees.

The final deductive link was forged, oddly enough, in a Sunday supplement of the now defunct Hearst newspaper syndicate.
⁶
The author of this piece, a professional article writer, in doing research for an article, stumbled across the paragraph recounting Doctor Grimsby’s discovery. Seeing in this a most salable feature, he wrote an article combining the theses of Doctor Grimsby and Professor Silver and emerging with his own amateur concept which, strange to say, was absolutely correct. (This fact was later obscured in the severe litigation that arose when Professors Grimsby and Silver brought suit against the author for not consulting them before writing the article.)

Thus did it finally become known that Los Angeles, like some gigantic fungus, was overgrowing the land.

A period of gestation followed during which various publications in the country slowly built up the import of the Los Angeles Movement, until it became a national byword. It was during this period that a fertile-minded columnist dubbed Los Angeles “Ellie, the Meandering Metropolis,”
⁷
a title later reduced merely to “Ellie”—a term which became as common to the American mind as “ham and eggs” or “World War II.”

Now began a cycle of data collection and an attempt by various of the prominent sciences to analyze the Los Angeles Movement with a regard to arresting its strange pilgrimage which had now spread into parts of South Dakota, Missouri, Arkansas and as far as the sovereign state of Texas. (To the mass convulsion this caused in the Lone Star State a separate paper might be devoted.)

R
EPUBLICANS DEMAND
F
ULL
I
NVESTIGATION
Claim L.A. Movement Subversive Camouflage

After a hasty dispatch of agents to all points in the infected area, the American Medical Association promulgated throughout the nation a list of symptoms by which all inhabitants might be forewarned of the approaching terror.

S
YMPTOMS OF
“E
LLIEITIS
”
⁷

1.	An unnatural craving for any of the citrus fruits whether in solid or liquid form.
2.	Partial or complete loss of geo graph i cal distinction. (i.e., A person in Kansas City might speak of driving down to San Diego for the weekend.)
3.	An unnatural desire to possess a motor vehicle.
4.	An unnatural appetite for motion pictures and motion picture previews. (Including a subsidiary symptom, not all-inclusive but nevertheless a distinct menace. This is the insatiable hunger of young girls to become movie stars.)
5.	A taste for weird apparel. (Including fur jackets, shorts, halters, slacks, sandals, blue jeans and bathing suits—all usually of excessive color.)

This list, unfortunately, proved most inadequate for its avowed purpose. It did not mention, for one thing, the adverse effect of excess sunlight on residents of the northern states. With the expected approach to winter being forestalled stalled indefinitely, numerous unfortunates, unable to adjust to this alteration, became neurotic and, often, lost their senses completely.