The Water Eater Read online

  Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

  Transcriber's Note:

  This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

  the water eater

  By WIN MARKS

  Illustrated by BALBALIS

  _Most experiments were dropped because they failed--and some because they worked too well!_

  * * * * *

  I just lost a weekend. I ain't too anxious to find it. Instead, I surewish I had gone fishing with McCarthy and the boys like I'd planned.

  I drive a beer truck for a living, but here it is almost noon Mondayand I haven't turned a wheel. Sure, I get beer wholesale, and I havebeen known to take some advantage of my discount. But that wasn't whathappened to this weekend.

  Instead of fishing or bowling or poker or taking the kids down to theamusement park over Saturday and Sunday, I've been losing sleep overan experiment.

  Down at the Elks' Club, the boys say that for a working stiff I have avery inquiring mind. I guess that's because they always see me reading_Popular Science_ and _Scientific American_ and such, instead ofheading for the stack of _Esquires_ that are piled a foot deep in themiddle of the big table in the reading room, like the rest of them do.

  Well, it was my inquiring mind that lost me my wife, the skin of myright hand, a lot of fun and sleep--yeah, not a wink of sleep for twodays now! Which is the main reason I'm writing this down now. I'veread somewheres that if you wrote down your troubles, you could getthem out of your system.

  I thought I had troubles Friday night when I pulled into the drivewayand Lottie yelled at me from the porch, "The fire's out! And it'sflooded. Hurry up!"

  Trouble, hah! That was just the beginning.

  * * * * *

  Lottie is as cute a little ex-waitress as ever flipped the suds off aglass of beer, but she just ain't mechanically minded. The day UncleAlphonse died and left us $2500 and I went out and bought a kitchenand shed full of appliances for her, that was a sad day, all right.She has lived a fearful life ever since, too proud of her dishwasherand automatic this and that to consider selling them, but scared stiffof the noises they make and the vibrations and all the mysteriousdials and lights, etc.

  So this Friday afternoon when the oil-burner blew out from the highwind, she got terrified, sent the kids over to their grandmother's ina cab and sat for two hours trying to make up her mind whether to callthe fire department or the plumber.

  Meanwhile, this blasted oil stove was overflowing into the fire pot.

  "Well, turn it off!" I yelled. "I'll be in right away!"

  I ducked into the garage and got a big handful of rags and a hunk ofstring and a short stick. This I have been through before. I went inand kissed her pretty white face, and a couple of worry linesdisappeared.

  "Get me a pan or something," I said and started dismantling the frontof the heater.

  These gravity-flow oil heaters weren't built to make it easy to drainoff excess oil. There's a brass plug at the inlet, but no one inhistory has been able to stir one, the oil man told me. I weigh 200pounds stripped, but all I ever did was ruin a tool trying.

  The only way to get out the oil was to open the front, stuff rags downthrough the narrow fire slot, sop up the stuff and fish out the ragswith the string tied around one end of the bundle. Then you wring outthe rags with your bare hands into a pan.

  "Hey, Lottie," I yelled, "this is your roaster! It'll be hard toclean out the oil smell!"

  But, of course, it was too late. I had squeezed a half-pint of oilinto it already. So I went on dunking and wringing and thinking howlousy my cigarettes were going to taste all evening and feeling gladthat I delivered beer instead of oil for a living.

  * * * * *

  I got the stove bailed out and lit with only one serious blast of sootout the "Light Here" hole. Then I dumped the oil out in the alley andset the roaster pan in the sink. Lottie was peeling potatoes fordinner, and she snuggled her yellow curls on my shoulder kind ofapologetically for the mess she had caused me. I scrubbed the soot andoil off my hands and told her it was all right, only next time, forgosh sakes, please turn the stove off at least.

  The water I was splashing into the roaster gathered up in littleshrinking drops and reminded me that the pig-hocks I brought home forSunday dinner were going to rate throwing out unless we got the oilsmell out of the pan.

  "Tell you what you do," I said to Lottie. "Get me all your cleaningsoaps and stuff and let's see what we got."

  Lottie is always trying out some new handy-dandy little kitchen helpercompound, so she hefted up quite an armload. Now, when I was in highschool, I really liked chemistry. "Charlie, Boy Scientist," my palsused to sneer at me. But I was pretty good at it, and I been readingthe science magazines right along ever since. So I know what adetergent is supposed to do, and all about how soaps act, and stuffthat most people take the advertisers' word for.

  "This one," I told Lottie, "has a lot of caustic in it, see?"

  She nodded and said that's the one that ruined her aluminum coffeepot. She remembered it specially.

  I poured some very hot tap water into the roaster and shook in thestrong soap powder. "This is to saponify the oil," I explained.

  "What's saponify?" Lottie asked.

  "That means to make soap. Soap is mainly a mixture of some causticwith fat or oil. It makes sudsy soap."

  "But we got soap," she said. "Why don't you just use the soap we got?"

  We went into the business of soap-making pretty deep. Meanwhile, Iread some more labels and added pinches of this and that detergent anda few squirts of liquid "wonder-cleaners" that didn't say what was inthem.

  In her crisp Scotch way, Lottie got across to me that she thought Iwas wasting soap powder and my time and cluttering up the sink whileshe was busy there, so I wound up with half a cup of Doozey soapflakes, filled the pan to the brim and set the concoction at the backof the drain board to do its business.

  * * * * *

  When dinner was over, I was in the living room reading the paper whenI heard Lottie muttering at the sink. Lottie doesn't usually mutter,so I went out to see what was wrong.

  "Nice mess," she said and pointed at the roaster. The stuff had cooledand jelled into a half-solid condition.

  "Hah!" I said. "We had a supersaturated solution. When it cooled off,it coagulated."

  Lottie scowled. It makes her nervous when I use big words which I onlydo when I'm talking about chemistry and the like.

  "Well, uncoogalate it and dump it out of my roaster," she told me.

  My scientific inquiring mind was stirred as I lifted the pan over tothe table under the center light. We had here a gelatin of variouscleaners, and every one of them claiming to be best ever. What wouldthis new combination do?

  I grabbed a pan off the stove that had a mess of scorched carrotleavings in the bottom. Lottie had been soaking it with about a halfinch of water. As I reached for a tablespoon, Lottie objected. "Look,now, if you are going to start another _experiment_, dump that messout first and let me work on the roaster."

  I saved about a cupful of the slimy gunk and she went back to herdishes.

  "You'll be sorry," I said under my breath, "if this turns out to bethe only batch of the finest cleaner in the whole world. And us withonly a cupful."

  A minute later, I was glad she hadn't heard me. When I dropped alittle glob of the stuff into the carrot pan and stirr
ed it around abit, instead of dissolving and diluting in the extra water, themixture seemed to stay the same density after swallowing up the water.

  "Give me a pie tin," I demanded.

  Lottie sighed, but she got a shallow pan out of the pantry and handedit to me. Then I poured the jelly out of the carrot pan and I made myfirst important discovery.

  The stuff was not good for cleaning out scorched carrots.

  The pot was bone-dry. So were the carrots. They had a desiccated lookand were stuck worse than ever to the bottom. I brushed them with myfinger and the top layers powdered to dust. Then I noticed that not adroplet or smidgin of the jelly remained in the pot. When I had pouredit out, it had gone out all at the same time, as if it was trying tohang together.

  The carbonized carrots at the very bottom were hard and dry, too. Ascrape job if I ever saw one.

  * * * * *

  The pie tin was now full almost to the rim. The globby stuff sort ofrolled around, trying to find a flat condition, which it finally did.The motion was not as startling as the sudden quiet that settled overthe surface after a last ripple.

  The stuff looked like it was waiting.

  The temptation was worse than a park bench labeled "wet paint," so Istuck my finger in it. Right in the middle of it.

  A ripple flashed out from the center like when you drop a pebble in apool, and the ripple hit the brim and converged back to my finger.When it hit, the surface climbed up my finger about an eighth of aninch. Another ripple, another eighth of an inch, and about now I feltsomething like a gentle sucking sensation. Also, another feeling I canonly tell you was "unclammy."

  I jerked away fast and shook my finger hard over the pan, but itwasn't necessary. None of the stuff had stayed with me. In fact, myfinger was dry--powdery dry!

  Then I got the feeling that someone was staring over my shoulder.There was. It was Lottie, and she had a look of horror on her facethat didn't help my nerves a bit.

  "Get rid of it, Charlie!" she cried. "Get rid of it! Please throw itout!"

  "Now, now, honey," I said. "It ain't alive."

  "It is!" she insisted.

  Lottie chatters quite a bit and pretty well speaks her mind. But shedoesn't go around making assertions. When she does come outflat-footed with a serious statement, it is always from the bottom ofher 22-carat womanly intuition, and she is practically always right.

  "How could it be alive?" I argued. I often argue when I know I'mwrong. This time I argued because I wanted to wipe that awful look offmy wife's face. "Come on in the living room and relax," I said.

  * * * * *

  And then sweet-natured, honey-haired little Lottie did a violentthing. Still staring over my shoulder at the pie tin, she screamedwide-open and ran out of the house. A second later, I heard her startthe car out the driveway at 30 miles an hour in reverse. She burnedrubber out in front and was gone.

  I hadn't moved an inch. Because when she screamed, I looked back atthe jelly to see why, and the stuff had oozed over the edge and wasflowing slowly toward me.

  I know a little about Korzybski and how he wanted everybody to makewhat he called a cortico-thalamic pause whenever they get scared ashell. So I was making this cortico-thalamic pause, which is reallycounting to ten before you do anything, while Lottie was leaving thehouse. When I got through with my pause, I jumped backward over mykitchen chair so hard that I must have knocked my head on the tilesink-board.

  When I came to, it was after midnight. The kitchen light was still on.Lottie was still gone. I knew it. If she was here, she'd have had mein bed. No matter how much of my employer's product I have sampled,never has Lottie let me sleep it off on the kitchen floor. Her 110pounds is a match for my 200 in more ways than one, and she takes goodcare of her man.

  Then I realized that this was not a stag beer-bust. There wassomething about a pot of soap-jelly.

  It was still there. A long slug of the half-transparent stuff hadstrung down off the edge of the table and still hung there like anasty-looking icicle.

  The knob on the back of my head throbbed so much that at first Icouldn't figure what was wrong with the air. Then my aching dry throattold me what the matter was. The air was dry like the summer we spentat a dude ranch in Arizona. It made my nostrils crimp, and my tonguefelt like a mouthful of wrinkled pepperoni.

  When I got to my feet and looked at the top of the kitchen table, Ialmost panicked again. But this time the pause worked and I got betterresults.

  Alive or dead, the gunk was the most powerful desiccant I'd ever heardof. It had drunk up the water in the carrot pot, sucked the surfacemoisture from my finger and then spent the past few hours feeding onthe humidity in the air.

  It was thirsty. Like alcohol has affinity for water, this stuff wasthe same way, only more so. In fact, it even reached out towardanything that had water in it--like me.

  That's why it had oozed over the pan the way it did.

  * * * * *

  What's so frightening about that, I asked myself. Plants grow towardwater.

  But plants are alive!

  That's what Lottie had said--before she screamed.

  "So you're thirsty?" I asked it out loud. "Okay, we'll give you a_real_ drink!"

  I got a bucket from the service porch and took the pancake turner toscrape the gooey nightmare into it. I even caught the drip off theedge, and it seemed quietly grateful to sink back to the parent globin the pail, which by now amounted to about a quart.

  I set the pail in the laundry tray and turned on the faucet hard. Inabout a second and a half, I almost sprained my wrist turning it off.Not only did the jelly drink up the water without dissolving, but itstarted creeping up the stream in a column about three inches indiameter, with the water pouring down its middle.

  When I got the water shut off, the unholy jelly-spout slopped backdisappointedly.

  And now the bucket was over half full of the stuff.

  I dropped in an ice-cube as an experiment. It didn't even splash. Thesurface pulled away, letting the cube make a pretty good dent in it,but then only gradually did the displaced goo creep back around it asif to sample it cautiously.

  I couldn't stand the dry air any more, so I threw open the doors andwindows and let the cool, damp night air come in. The ice-cube haddisappeared without even a surface puddle. Now, as the humidity cameback, I thought I noticed a restless shimmering in the jelly.

  The phone rang. It was Lottie's mother wanting to know why Lottie hadcome over there in hysterics, and where had I been since seveno'clock. I don't remember what I answered, but it served the purpose.Lottie hasn't returned and they haven't called up any more.

  When I returned to the bucket, it seemed that the stuff was deeperyet, but I couldn't tell because I hadn't marked the level. I gotLottie's fever thermometer out of the medicine chest and took thejelly's temperature. It read 58 degrees F. The wall thermometer read58 degrees, too. Room temperature, with the windows open. What kind of"life" could this be that had no temperature of its own?

  But then what kind of a fancy-pants metabolism could you expect out ofan organism that fed on nothing but Lake Michigan water, right out ofthe reservoir?

  * * * * *

  I got a pencil and notebook out of Lottie's neat little desk andstarted making notes.

  I wondered about the density of the stuff. Ice floated in it and thebucket seemed heavy. I broke the thermometer and tapped a drop ofmercury onto the restless surface. The droplet sank slowly to thebottom with no apparent effect either way.

  Heavier than water. Lighter than mercury.

  I took a beer out of the refrigerator and swallowed it. The last dropsI sprinkled into the pail. The drippings sizzled across the surfaceuntil only a fine dust was left. A tiny ripple flipped this dust overto the edge of the pail as if clearing the thirsty decks for action.But this drew my eyes to the rim of the liquid. There was no meniscus,either up or down.
>
  Remembering back, I figured this meant there was no surface tension,which reminded me that part of this mixture was made of detergent.

  But had I created a new form of life? Like Lottie said, was it reallyalive? Certainly it could reproduce itself. It had brains enough toknow the direction of more water, like when it took off after me onthe table.

  Not long ago, there was this important physicist who wrote about howlife probably got started away back when the Earth was just forming.He argued that special creation was more or less a lot of hogwash, andthat what actually took place was that as the Earth cooled, all thehot chemicals mixing around sort of stumbled onto a combination or twothat took on the first characteristics of life.

  In other words, this guy left off where Mr. Darwin began his theory ofevolution.

  Now me, I don't know. Lottie makes me go to church with the kids everySunday and I like it. If this chemical theory about life gettingstarted is right--well, then, a lot of people got the wrong idea aboutthings, I always figured.

  But how would I or this physicist explain this quivering mess ofprotoplasm I got on my hands by accident this particular Friday night?

  I experimented some more. I got out the kids' junior encyclopedia andlooked up some things I'd forgot, and some I had never learned in thefirst place.

  * * * * *

  So it got to be Saturday morning. Fred and Claude phoned about thefishing trip and I made an excuse. No one else bothered me. All daySaturday, I studied. And all Saturday night and Sunday. But I couldn'tfigure out any sensible answers that would make peace with myminister.

  It looked like I had created some form of life. Either that or somelife-form in the stove oil that had been asleep a billion years hadsuddenly