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{\noindent}
{\centering
{\LARGE\strut{THE ROTIFERS}}
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\noindent
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the \hyperlink{project-gutenberg-license}{Project Gutenberg License}
included with this eBook or online at
{https://www.gutenberg.org/license}.
\par

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\noindent
Title: The Rotifers
\par

\noindent
Author: Robert Abernathy
\par

\noindent
Release Date: April 16, 2011 {[}EBook \#35879{]}
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\noindent
Language: English
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Character set encoding: UTF-8
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*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ROTIFERS ***
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Produced by Frank van Drogen, Greg Weeks, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at {http://www.pgdp.net}.
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{\LARGE\strut{THE ROTIFERS}}\par}
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{\vl BY Robert Abernathy\par}
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{\vl {\itshape{Beneath the stagnant water shadowed by water lilies Harry found the fascinating world of the rotifers—but it was their world, and they resented intrusion.}}\par}
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{\itshape{Illustrated by Virgil Finlay}}\par}

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Henry Chatham knelt by
the brink of his garden pond,
a glass fish bowl cupped in his thin,
nervous hands. Carefully he dipped
the bowl into the green-scummed
water and, moving it gently, let
trailing streamers of submerged
water weeds drift into it. Then he
picked up the old scissors he had
laid on the bank, and clipped the
stems of the floating plants, getting
as much of them as he could in the
container.\par

When he righted the bowl and
got stiffly to his feet, it contained, he
thought hopefully, a fair cross-section
of fresh-water plankton. He
was pleased with himself for remembering
that term from the book
he had studied assiduously for the
last few nights in order to be able
to cope with Harry's inevitable
questions.\par

There was even a shiny black
water beetle doing insane circles on
the surface of the water in the fish
bowl. At sight of the insect, the eyes
of the twelve-year-old boy, who
had been standing by in silent expectation,
widened with interest.\par

"What's that thing, Dad?" he
asked excitedly. "What's that crazy
bug?"\par

"I don't know its scientific name,
I'm afraid," said Henry Chatham.
"But when I was a boy we used to
call them whirligig beetles."\par

"He doesn't seem to think he has
enough room in the bowl," said
Harry thoughtfully. "Maybe we
better put him back in the pond,
Dad."\par

"I thought you might want to
look at him through the microscope,"
the father said in some surprise.\par

"I think we ought to put him
back," insisted Harry.
Mr. Chatham held the dripping
bowl obligingly. Harry's hand, a
thin boy's hand with narrow sensitive
fingers, hovered over the water,
and when the beetle paused for a
moment in its gyrations, made a
dive for it.\par

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But the whirligig beetle saw the
hand coming, and, quicker than a
wink, plunged under the water and
scooted rapidly to the very bottom
of the bowl.\par

Harry's young face was rueful;
he wiped his wet hand on his trousers.
"I guess he wants to stay," he
supposed.\par

The two went up the garden
path together and into the house,
Mr. Chatham bearing the fish bowl
before him like a votive offering.
Harry's mother met them at the
door, brandishing an old towel.\par

"Here," she said firmly, "you
wipe that thing off before you bring
it in the house. And don't drip any
of that dirty pond water on my good
carpet."\par

"It's not dirty," said Henry Chatham.
"It's just full of life, plants
and animals too small for the eye
to see. But Harry's going to see
them with his microscope." He accepted
the towel and wiped the
water and slime from the outside of
the bowl; then, in the living-room,
he set it beside an open window,
where the life-giving summer sun
slanted in and fell on the green
plants.\par

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The brand-new microscope
stood nearby, in a good light. It
was an expensive microscope, no
toy for a child, and it magnified
four hundred diameters. Henry
Chatham had bought it because he
believed that his only son showed a
desire to peer into the mysteries of
smallness, and so far Harry had not
disappointed him; he had been ecstatic
over the instrument. Together
they had compared hairs from their
two heads, had seen the point of a
fine sewing needle made to look
like the tip of a crowbar by the
lowest power of the microscope,
had made grains of salt look like
discarded chunks of glass brick, had
captured a house-fly and marvelled
at its clawed hairy feet, its great
red faceted eyes, and the delicate
veining and fringing of its wings.\par

Harry was staring at the bowl of
pond water in a sort of fascination.
"Are there germs in the water,
Dad? Mother says pond water is
full of germs."\par

"I suppose so," answered Mr.
Chatham, somewhat embarrassed.
The book on microscopic fresh-water
fauna had been explicit about
{\itshape{Paramecium}} and {\itshape{Euglena}}, diatomes
and rhizopods, but it had
failed to mention anything so vulgar
as germs. But he supposed that
which the book called Protozoa, the
one-celled animalcules, were the
same as germs.\par

He said, "To look at things in
water like this, you want to use a
well-slide. It tells how to fix one in
the instruction book."\par

He let Harry find the glass slide
with a cup ground into it, and another
smooth slip of glass to cover
it. Then he half-showed, half-told
him how to scrape gently along the
bottom sides of the drifting leaves,
to capture the teeming life that
dwelt there in the slime. When the
boy understood, his young hands
were quickly more skillful than his
father's; they filled the well with a
few drops of water that was promisingly
green and murky.\par

Already Harry knew how to adjust
the lighting mirror under the
stage of the microscope and turn
the focusing screws. He did so, bent
intently over the eyepiece, squinting
down the polished barrel in the
happy expectation of wonders.\par

Henry Chatham's eyes wandered
to the fish bowl, where the whirligig
beetle had come to the top again
and was describing intricate patterns
among the water plants. He
looked back to his son, and saw that
Harry had ceased to turn the screws
and instead was just looking—looking
with a rapt, delicious fixity.
His hands lay loosely clenched on
the table top, and he hardly seemed
to breathe. Only once or twice his
lips moved as if to shape an exclamation
that was snatched away
by some new vision.\par

"Have you got it, Harry?" asked
his father after two or three minutes
during which the boy did not move.\par

Harry took a last long look, then
glanced up, blinking slightly.\par

"You look, Dad!" he exclaimed
warmly. "It's—it's like a garden in
the water, full of funny little people!"\par

Mr. Chatham, not reluctantly,
bent to gaze into the eyepiece. This
was new to him too, and instantly
he saw the aptness of Harry's simile.
There was a garden there, of weird,
green, transparent stalks composed
of plainly visible cells fastened end
to end, with globules and bladders
like fruits or seed-pods attached to
them, floating among them; and in
the garden the strange little people
swam to and fro, or clung with odd
appendages to the stalks and
branches. Their bodies were transparent
like the plants, and in them
were pulsing hearts and other organs
plainly visible. They looked a
little like sea horses with pointed
tails, but their heads were different,
small and rounded, with big, dark,
glistening eyes.\par

All at once Mr. Chatham realized
that Harry was speaking to
him, still in high excitement.\par

"What are they, Dad?" he
begged to know.\par

His father straightened up and
shook his head puzzledly. "I don't
know, Harry," he answered slowly,
casting about in his memory. He
seemed to remember a microphotograph
of a creature like those in the
book he had studied, but the name
that had gone with it eluded him.
He had worked as an accountant
for so many years that his memory
was all for figures now.\par

He bent over once more to immerse
his eyes and mind in the
green water-garden on the slide.
The little creatures swam to and
fro as before, growing hazy and
dwindling or swelling as they swam
out of the narrow focus of the lens;
he gazed at those who paused in
sharp definition, and saw that, although
he had at first seen no visible
means of propulsion, each creature
bore about its head a halo of
thread-like, flickering cilia that
lashed the water and drew it forward,
for all the world like an airplane
propeller or a rapidly turning
wheel.\par

"I know what they are!" exclaimed
Henry Chatham, turning
to his son with an almost boyish excitement.
"They're rotifers! That
means 'wheel-bearers', and they
were called that because to the first
scientists who saw them it looked
like they swam with wheels."\par

Harry had got down the book
and was leafing through the pages.
He looked up seriously. "Here they
are," he said. "Here's a picture
that looks almost like the ones in
our pond water."\par

"Let's see," said his father. They
looked at the pictures and descriptions
of the Rotifera; there was a
good deal of concrete information
on the habits and physiology of
these odd and complex little animals
who live their swarming lives
in the shallow, stagnant waters of
the Earth. It said that they were
much more highly organized than
Protozoa, having a discernible
heart, brain, digestive system, and
nervous system, and that their reproduction
was by means of two
sexes like that of the higher orders.
Beyond that, they were a mystery;
their relationship to other life-forms
remained shrouded in doubt.\par

"You've got something interesting
there," said Henry Chatham
with satisfaction. "Maybe you'll
find out something about them that
nobody knows yet."\par

He was pleased when Harry
spent all the rest of that Sunday
afternoon peering into the microscope,
watching the rotifers, and
even more pleased when the boy
found a pencil and paper and tried,
in an amateurish way, to draw and
describe what he saw in the green
water-garden.\par

Beyond a doubt, Henry thought,
here was a hobby that had captured
Harry as nothing else ever had.\par

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Mrs. Chatham was not so
pleased. When her husband
laid down his evening paper and
went into the kitchen for a drink of
water, she cornered him and hissed
at him: "I told you you had no
business buying Harry a thing like
that! If he keeps on at this rate,
he'll wear his eyes out in no time."\par

Henry Chatham set down his
water glass and looked straight at
his wife. "Sally, Harry's eyes are
young and he's using them to learn
with. You've never been much worried
over me, using my eyes up
eight hours a day, five days a week,
over a blind-alley bookkeeping job."\par

He left her angrily silent and
went back to his paper. He would
lower the paper every now and then
to watch Harry, in his corner of the
living-room, bowed obliviously over
the microscope and the secret life
of the rotifers.\par

Once the boy glanced up from
his periodic drawing and asked,
with the air of one who proposes a
pondered question: "Dad, if you
look through a microscope the
wrong way is it a telescope?"\par

Mr. Chatham lowered his paper
and bit his underlip. "I don't think
so—no, I don't know. When you
look through a microscope, it
makes things seem closer—one way,
that is; if you looked the other way,
it would probably make them seem
farther off. What did you want to
know for?"\par

"Oh—nothing," Harry turned
back to his work. As if on after-thought,
he explained, "I was wondering
if the rotifers could see me
when I'm looking at them."\par

Mr. Chatham laughed, a little
nervously, because the strange
fancies which his son sometimes
voiced upset his ordered mind. Remembering
the dark glistening eyes
of the rotifers he had seen, however,
he could recognize whence
this question had stemmed.\par

At dusk, Harry insisted on setting
up the substage lamp which
had been bought with the microscope,
and by whose light he could
go on looking until his bedtime,
when his father helped him arrange
a wick to feed the little glass-covered
well in the slide so it would
not dry up before morning. It was
unwillingly, and only after his
mother's strenuous complaints, that
the boy went to bed at ten o'clock.\par

In the following days his interest
became more and more intense. He
spent long hours, almost without
moving, watching the rotifers. For
the little animals had become the
sole object which he desired to
study under the microscope, and
even his father found it difficult to
understand such an enthusiasm.\par

During the long hours at the office
to which he commuted, Henry
Chatham often found the vision of
his son, absorbed with the invisible
world that the microscope had
opened to him, coming between
him and the columns in the ledgers.
And sometimes, too, he envisioned
the dim green water-garden where
the little things swam to and fro,
and a strangeness filled his thoughts.\par

On Wednesday evening, he
glanced at the fish bowl and noticed
that the water beetle, the
whirligig beetle, was missing. Casually,
he asked his son about it.\par

"I had to get rid of him," said
the boy with a trace of uneasiness
in his manner. "I took him out and
squashed him."\par

"Why did you have to do that?"\par

"He was eating the rotifers and
their eggs," said Harry, with what
seemed to be a touch of remembered
anger at the beetle. He
glanced toward his work-table,
where three or four well-slides with
small green pools under their glass
covers now rested in addition to the
one that was under the microscope.\par

"How did you find out he was
eating them?" inquired Mr. Chatham,
feeling a warmth of pride at
the thought that Harry had discovered
such a scientific fact for himself.\par

The boy hesitated oddly. "I—I
looked it up in the book," he answered.\par

His father masked his faint disappointment.
"That's fine," he
said. "I guess you find out more
about them all the time."\par

"Uh-huh," admitted Harry, turning
back to his table.\par

There was undoubtedly something
a little strange about Harry's
manner; and now Mr. Chatham
realized that it had been two days
since Harry had asked him to
"Quick, take a look!" at the newest
wonder he had discovered. With
this thought teasing at his mind,
the father walked casually over to
the table where his son sat hunched
and, looking down at the litter of
slides and papers—some of which
were covered with figures and scribblings
of which he could make nothing.
He said diffidently, "How
about a look?"\par

Harry glanced up as if startled.
He was silent a moment; then he
slid reluctantly from his chair and
said, "All right."\par

Mr. Chatham sat down and bent
over the microscope. Puzzled and
a little hurt, he twirled the focusing
vernier and peered into the eyepiece,
looking down once more into
the green water world of the rotifers.\par

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There was a swarm of them
under the lens, and they swam
lazily to and fro, their cilia beating
like miniature propellers. Their
dark eyes stared, wet and glistening;
they drifted in the motionless
water, and clung with sucker-like
pseudo-feet to the tangled plant
stems.\par

Then, as he almost looked away,
one of them detached itself from
the group and swam upward, toward
him, growing larger and blurring
as it rose out of the focus of the
microscope. The last thing that remained
defined, before it became a
shapeless gray blob and vanished,
was the dark blotches of the great
cold eyes, seeming to stare full at
him—cold, motionless, but alive.\par

It was a curious experience.
Henry Chatham drew suddenly
back from the eyepiece, with an involuntary
shudder that he could not
explain to himself. He said haltingly,
"They look interesting."\par

"Sure, Dad," said Harry. He
moved to occupy the chair again,
and his dark young head bowed
once more over the microscope. His
father walked back across the room
and sank gratefully into his arm-chair—after
all, it had been a hard
day at the office. He watched Harry
work the focusing screws as if trying
to find something, then take his
pencil and begin to write quickly
and impatiently.\par

It was with a guilty feeling of
prying that, after Harry had been
sent reluctantly to bed, Henry Chatham
took a tentative look at those
papers which lay in apparent disorder
on his son's work table. He
frowned uncomprehendingly at the
things that were written there; it
was neither mathematics nor language,
but many of the scribblings
were jumbles of letters and figures.
It looked like code, and he remembered
that less than a year ago,
Harry had been passionately interested
in cryptography, and had
shown what his father, at least, believed
to be a considerable aptitude
for such things.... But what did
cryptography have to do with
microscopy, or codes with—rotifers?\par

Nowhere did there seem to be a
key, but there were occasional
words and phrases jotted into the
margins of some of the sheets. Mr.
Chatham read these, and learned
nothing. "Can't dry up, but they
can," said one. "Beds of germs,"
said another. And in the corner of
one sheet, "1—Yes. 2—No." The
only thing that looked like a translation
was the note: "rty34pr is the
pond."\par

Mr. Chatham shook his head bewilderedly,
replacing the sheets
carefully as they had been. Why
should Harry want to keep notes on
his scientific hobby in code? he
wondered, rationalizing even as he
wondered. He went to bed still
puzzling, but it did not keep him
from sleeping, for he was tired.\par

Then, only the next evening, his
wife maneuvered to get him alone
with her and burst out passionately:\par

"Henry, I told you that microscope
was going to ruin Harry's
eyesight! I was watching him today
when he didn't know I was watching
him, and I saw him winking
and blinking right while he kept on
looking into the thing. I was
minded to stop him then and there,
but I want you to assert {\itshape{your}} authority
with him and tell him he
can't go on."\par

Henry Chatham passed one nervous
hand over his own aching eyes.
He asked mildly, "Are you sure it
wasn't just your imagination, Sally?
After all, a person blinks quite normally,
you know."\par

"It was not my imagination!"
snapped Mrs. Chatham. "I know
the symptoms of eyestrain when I
see them, I guess. You'll have to
stop Harry using that thing so
much, or else be prepared to buy
him glasses."\par

"All right, Sally," said Mr. Chatham
wearily. "I'll see if I can't persuade
him to be a little more moderate."\par

He went slowly into the living-room.
At the moment, Harry was
not using the microscope; instead,
he seemed to be studying one of his
cryptic pages of notes. As his father
entered, he looked up sharply and
swiftly laid the sheet down—face
down.\par

Perhaps it wasn't all Sally's imagination;
the boy did look nervous,
and there was a drawn, white look
to his thin young face. His father
said gently, "Harry, Mother tells
me she saw you blinking, as if your
eyes were tired, when you were
looking into the microscope today.
You know if you look too much, it
can be a strain on your sight."\par

Harry nodded quickly, too quickly,
perhaps. "Yes, Dad," he said. "I
read that in the book. It says there
that if you close the eye you're looking
with for a little while, it rests
you and your eyes don't get tired.
So I was practising that this afternoon.
Mother must have been
watching me then, and got the
wrong idea."\par

"Oh," said Henry Chatham.
"Well, it's good that you're trying
to be careful. But you've got your
mother worried, and that's not so
good. I wish, myself, that you
wouldn't spend all your time with
the microscope. Don't you ever
play baseball with the fellows any
more?"\par

"I haven't got time," said the
boy, with a curious stubborn twist
to his mouth. "I can't right now,
Dad." He glanced toward the
microscope.\par

"Your rotifers won't die if you
leave them alone for a while. And
if they do, there'll always be a new
crop."\par

"But I'd lose track of them," said
Harry strangely. "Their lives are so
short—they live so awfully fast. You
don't know how fast they live."\par

"I've seen them," answered his
father. "I guess they're fast, all
right." He did not know quite what
to make of it all, so he settled himself
in his chair with his paper.\par

But that night, after Harry had
gone later than usual to bed, he
stirred himself to take down the
book that dealt with life in pond-water.
There was a memory pricking
at his mind; the memory of the
water beetle, which Harry had
killed because, he said, he was eating
the rotifers and their eggs. And
the boy had said he had found that
fact in the book.\par

Mr. Chatham turned through the
book; he read, with aching eyes, all
that it said about rotifers. He
searched for information on the
beetle, and found there was a whole
family of whirligig beetles. There
was some material here on the characteristics
and habits of the Gyrinidae,
but nowhere did it mention the
devouring of rotifers or their eggs
among their customs.\par

He tried the topical index, but
there was no help there.\par

Harry must have lied, thought his
father with a whirling head. But
why, why in God's name should he
say he'd looked a thing up in the
book when he must have found it
out for himself, the hard way?
There was no sense in it. He went
back to the book, convinced that,
sleepy as he was, he must have
missed a point. The information
simply wasn't there.\par

He got to his feet and crossed the
room to Harry's work table; he
switched on the light over it and
stood looking down at the pages of
mystic notations. There were more
pages now, quite a few. But none
of them seemed to mean anything.
The earlier pictures of rotifers
which Harry had drawn had given
way entirely to mysterious figures.\par

Then the simple explanation occurred
to him, and he switched off
the light with a deep feeling of relief.
Harry hadn't really {\itshape{known}}
that the water beetle ate rotifers;
he had just suspected it. And, with
his boy's respect for fair play, he
had hesitated to admit that he had
executed the beetle merely on suspicion.\par

That didn't take the lie away, but
it removed the mystery at least.\par

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{\noindent}
Henry Chatham slept badly
that night and dreamed distorted
dreams. But when the alarm
clock shrilled in the gray of morning,
jarring him awake, the dream
in which he had been immersed
skittered away to the back of his
mind, out of knowing, and sat there
leering at him with strange, dark,
glistening eyes.\par

He dressed, washed the flat
morning taste out of his mouth with
coffee, and took his way to his train
and the ten-minute ride into the
city. On the way there, instead of
snatching a look at the morning paper,
he sat still in his seat, head
bowed, trying to recapture the
dream whose vanishing made him
uneasy. He was superstitious about
dreams in an up-to-date way, believing
them not warnings from
some Beyond outside himself, but
from a subsconscious more knowing
than the waking conscious mind.\par

During the morning his work
went slowly, for he kept pausing,
sometimes in the midst of totalling
a column of figures, to grasp at
some mocking half-memory of that
dream. At last, elbows on his desk,
staring unseeingly at the clock on
the wall, in the midst of the subdued
murmur of the office, his mind
went back to Harry, dark head
bowed motionless over the barrel of
his microscope, looking, always
looking into the pale green water-gardens
and the unseen lives of the
beings that....\par

All at once it came to him, the
dream he had dreamed. {\itshape{He}} had
been bending over the microscope,
{\itshape{he}} had been looking into the unseen
world, and the horror of what
he had seen gripped him now and
brought out the chill sweat on his
body.\par

For he had seen his son there in
the clouded water, among the
twisted glassy plants, his face turned
upward and eyes wide in the agonized
appeal of the drowning; and
bubbles rising, fading. But around
him had been a swarm of the weird
creatures, and they had been dragging
him down, down, blurring out
of focus, and their great dark eyes
glistening wetly, coldly....\par

He was sitting rigid at his desk,
his work forgotten; all at once he
saw the clock and noticed with a
start that it was already eleven a.m.
A fear he could not define seized on
him, and his hand reached spasmodically
for the telephone on his
desk.\par

But before he touched it, it began
ringing.\par

After a moment's paralysis, he
picked up the receiver. It was his
wife's voice that came shrilly over
the wires.\par

"Henry!" she cried. "Is that
you?"\par

"Hello, Sally," he said with stiff
lips. Her voice as she answered
seemed to come nearer and go farther
away, and he realized that his
hand holding the instrument was
shaking.\par

"Henry, you've got to come home
right now. Harry's sick. He's got a
high fever, and he's been asking for
you."\par

He moistened his lips and said,
"I'll be right home. I'll take a taxi."\par

"Hurry!" she exclaimed. "He's
been saying queer things. I think
he's delirious." She paused, and
added, "And it's all the fault of that
microscope {\itshape{you}} bought him!"\par

"I'll be right home," he repeated
dully.\par

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――――
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\vs{1}
{\noindent}
His wife was not at the door
to meet him; she must be upstairs,
in Harry's bedroom. He
paused in the living room and
glanced toward the table that bore
the microscope; the black, gleaming
thing still stood there, but he
did not see any of the slides, and
the papers were piled neatly together
to one side. His eyes fell on
the fish bowl; it was empty, clean
and shining. He knew Harry hadn't
done those things; that was Sally's
neatness.\par

Abruptly, instead of going
straight up the stairs, he moved to
the table and looked down at the
pile of papers. The one on top was
almost blank; on it was written several
times: rty34pr ... rty34pr....
His memory for figure combinations
served him; he remembered what
had been written on another page:
"rty34pr is the pond."\par

That made him think of the
pond, lying quiescent under its
green scum and trailing plants at
the end of the garden. A step on the
stair jerked him around.\par

It was his wife, of course. She
said in a voice sharp-edged with apprehension:
"What are you doing
down here? Harry wants you. The
doctor hasn't come; I phoned him
just before I called you, but he
hasn't come."\par

He did not answer. Instead he
gestured at the pile of papers, the
empty fish bowl, an imperative
question in his face.\par

"I threw that dirty water back in
the pond. It's probably what he
caught something from. And he
was breaking himself down, humping
over that thing. It's {\itshape{your}} fault,
for getting it for him. Are you coming?"
She glared coldly at him,
turning back to the stairway.\par

"I'm coming," he said heavily,
and followed her upstairs.\par

Harry lay back in his bed, a low
mound under the covers. His head
was propped against a single pillow,
and his eyes were half-closed, the
lids swollen-looking, his face hotly
flushed. He was breathing slowly as
if asleep.\par

But as his father entered the
room, he opened his eyes as if with
an effort, fixed them on him, said,
"Dad ... I've got to tell you."\par

Mr. Chatham took the chair by
the bedside, quietly, leaving his wife
to stand. He asked, "About what,
Harry?"\par

"About—things." The boy's eyes
shifted to his mother, at the foot of
his bed. "I don't want to talk to
her. {\itshape{She}} thinks it's just fever. But
you'll understand."\par

Henry Chatham lifted his gaze to
meet his wife's. "Maybe you'd better
go downstairs and wait for the
doctor, Sally."\par

She looked hard at him, then
turned abruptly to go out. "All
right," she said in a thin voice, and
closed the door softly behind her.\par

"Now what did you want to tell
me, Harry?"\par

"About {\itshape{them}} ... the rotifers,"
the boy said. His eyes had drifted
half-shut again but his voice was
clear. "They did it to me ... on
purpose."\par

"Did {\itshape{what}}?"\par

"I don't know.... They used one
of their cultures. They've got all
kinds: beds of germs, under the
leaves in the water. They've been
growing new kinds, that will be
worse than anything that ever was
before.... They live so fast, they
work so fast."\par

Henry Chatham was silent, leaning
forward beside the bed.\par

"It was only a little while, before
I found out they knew about me. I
could see them through my microscope,
but they could see me too....
And they kept signaling, swimming
and turning.... I won't tell you how
to talk to them, because nobody
ought to talk to them ever again.
Because they find out more than
they tell.... They know about us,
now, and they hate us. They never
knew before—that there was anybody
but them.... So they want to
kill us all."\par

"But why should they want to do
that?" asked the father, as gently as
he could. He kept telling himself,
"He's delirious. It's like Sally says,
he's been wearing himself out,
thinking too much about—the rotifers.
But the doctor will be here
pretty soon, the doctor will know
what to do."\par

"They don't like knowing that
they aren't the only ones on Earth
that can think. I expect people
would be the same way."\par

"But they're such little things,
Harry. They can't hurt us at all."\par

The boy's eyes opened wide,
shadowed with terror and fever. "I
told you, Dad—They're growing
germs, millions and billions of them,
{\itshape{new}} ones.... And they kept telling
me to take them back to the pond,
so they could tell all the rest, and
they could all start getting ready—for
war."\par

He remembered the shapes that
swam and crept in the green water
gardens, with whirling cilia and
great, cold, glistening eyes. And he
remembered the clean, empty fish
bowl in the window downstairs.\par

"Don't let them, Dad," said
Harry convulsively. "You've got to
kill them all. The ones here and the
ones in the pond. You've got to kill
them good—because they don't
mind being killed, and they lay lots
of eggs, and their eggs can stand almost
anything, even drying up. {\itshape{And
the eggs remember what the old
ones knew.}}"\par

"Don't worry," said Henry Chatham
quickly. He grasped his son's
hand, a hot limp hand that had
slipped from under the coverlet.
"We'll stop them. We'll drain the
pond."\par

"That's swell," whispered the
boy, his energy fading again. "I
ought to have told you before, Dad—but
first I was afraid you'd laugh,
and then—I was just ... afraid...."\par

His voice drifted away. And his
father, looking down at the flushed
face, saw that he seemed asleep.
Well, that was better than the sick
delirium—saying such strange, wild
things—\par

Downstairs the doctor was saying
harshly, "All right. All right. But
let's have a look at the patient."\par

Henry Chatham came quietly
downstairs; he greeted the doctor
briefly, and did not follow him to
Harry's bedroom.\par

When he was left alone in the
room, he went to the window and
stood looking down at the microscope.
He could not rid his head of
strangeness: A window between
two worlds, our world and that of
the infinitely small, a window that
looks both ways.\par

After a time, he went through the
kitchen and let himself out the back
door, into the noonday sunlight.\par

He followed the garden path, between
the weed-grown beds of vegetables,
until he came to the edge of
the little pond. It lay there quiet in
the sunlight, green-scummed and
walled with stiff rank grass, a lone
dragonfly swooping and wheeling
above it. The image of all the stagnant
waters, the fertile breeding-places
of strange life, with which it
was joined in the end by the tortuous
hidden channels, the oozing
pores of the Earth.\par

And it seemed to him then that
he glimpsed something, a hitherto
unseen miasma, rising above the
pool and darkening the sunlight
ever so little. A dream, a shadow—the
shadow of the alien dream of
things hidden in smallness, the dark
dream of the rotifers.\par

The dragonfly, having seized a
bright-winged fly that was sporting
over the pond, descended heavily
through the sunlit air and came to
rest on a broad lily pad. Henry
Chatham was suddenly afraid. He
turned and walked slowly, wearily,
up the path toward the house.\par

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\endgraf}
\par

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{\centering
{\scshape{Transcribers note}}: This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction March 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
\endgraf}
\par}
\end{verse}

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