Old Friends Are the Best

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  OLD FRIENDS ARE THE BEST

  By JACK SHARKEY

  [Transcriber note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories March1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.copyright on this publication was renewed.]

  [Sidenote: Are you one of those people who save the best things for thelast ... who eat all the chocolate sundae away from under the maraschinocherry? If so, you are very like the Peter W. Merrill Moonplant.]

  It had no awareness of time, and so did not know nor concern itself withthe millennia that passed since it first drew up the dissolved silicatesfrom the shifting grey remnants of soil and arranged them inside thewalls of the thousand green pods that were its body cells, and settleddown to wait. Somewhere within its fragile cortex, a tiny pulse of lifebeat. It was a feeble pulse, to be sure, and one that a man, unless hecould observe it for a thousand years without blinking, would not beaware of. As the normal human heart beats seventy-two times a minute, sodid this tiny swelling of tube contract once each hundred years; fiftytireless years of contraction, then fifty soothing years of relaxation,bringing the walls of the slender tube together, then letting them easeapart.

  But it was sufficient for its life.

  The pallid yellow sap was moved about inside the plant, once eachhundred years, and the plasm of the silicon-protected cellular structureabsorbed just the needed amount, bleeding off the waste products betweenthe very molecules of the silicon buttresses, and patiently waiting thecentury out till the second helping came oozing around.

  And so it lay dormant, through heat that could send a man intoconvulsions of agony in seconds, through cold that fractional degreelower than can be achieved in a scientific laboratory. It did not knowwhere it was, nor what it was, nor how precarious--by cosmicstandards--was its chance of survival, with sap enough stored in thestiff, coarse roots for only a few more million years.

  It simply was, and knew that it was, and was satisfied.

  Such a tiny organism can have only the most rudimentary of memories, butit remembered. Once--Once long before, there had been ... more.

  * * * * *

  Life had been the same, but somehow fuller. When it tried to recallexactly in what this fullness lay, the memory just was not there; only avague recollection of comfort, motion, satiation.

  When the men landed upon the moon in the twentieth century, they did notfind it at first. Locating it would have been comparable to stumblingupon a solitary blade of grass, imbedded in ice at the South Pole. Mencame to the moon, though, and began to settle there. The first homesthey knew were mere metal shacks, filled with life-giving gases of theirplanetary atmosphere, and devoid of all comforts save those necessaryfor maintenance of life.

  But men have a way of rising above the status quo, and so, within half apulsebeat of the plant, the surface of the moon became dotted with theseiglooic shacks, then pressurized tunnels radiated out in a unifyingnetwork, and soon the Domes began to grow; immense translucentlight-weight structures of enormous strength bubbled up on the moon, andsoon cities were being built beneath them, strange towering fairylandcities on this satellite where people and architecture alike boasted sixtimes the power possessed on Earth. The cities soared upward inglinting, stalagmitic pinnacles whose tapering ends seemed to threatenthe fabric of the Domes themselves, but were in reality still far belowthe blue-white curving surface.

  Machines lay buried now in the grey pumice that was the surface of themoon; machines that drained gases from the oxides and nitrates withinthe planetoid and filled the Domes for the people with the life-givinggases. And still the moon grew more Domes, and more.

  And then, three motions of the tiny plant after the primal landing ofmen on the moon, three half-cycles later, a pulse-and-a-half--It wasfound.

  The man who found it was an engineer, a man of high intelligence. For,building on the moon was a perilous undertaking. A man had to knowstresses and strains, had to be able to read gauges that warned ofvacuum pockets beneath the crust of the moon that--if broken into--couldsuck the life-giving gases from the metal caissons within which the menlaid the foundations of new Domes. Had it been on Earth, and the workmanunionized and possibly unlettered, it would have had the fate of adandelion that stands in the path of a growing subway tube.

  Unfortunately, the man--as mentioned--had intelligence.

  Carefully, the fossil--so he presumed--was cut away from the rock inwhich it was rooted, and laid gently in a bed of soft cotton, and thatbed in a plastic casing, and the casing in a metal box. The box wasloaded aboard a spaceship and sent to a man back on Earth.

  This man was an eminent botanist, and--eminent or not--he nearly jumpedwith joy when he'd opened the box, unsealed the container, plucked awaythe cotton, and saw the plant lying there. It was dead, insofar as heknew, and apparently useless except perhaps as a club, but the botanistwas delighted to receive it. Through his head passed notions of cuttingit in two, then polishing the twin cut surfaces, and studying the cellstructure, so that he might compare its construction with similar--ifthere were any--plants of Earth, and then write a learned thesis aboutit which would be read only by other eminent botanists, who would allthen curse their luck for not having been friends with any engineers onthe moon. The whole procedure--taking the cosmic view--was almostpointless, but it would make the botanist happy, at least.

  * * * * *

  However, after setting up his instruments, and placing the plant in asort of padded vise to steady it against the invasion of its privacy, hechanced to see a bit of root, broken off by sheer unaccustomed weight onthe planet, lying upon the lab table, and he placed that beneath theglass lens of his microscope and studied it instead.

  "I'll be damned!" he said. "The plasm is _liquid_!"

  A few dozen of the shattered cells had indeed let their contents spillout onto the slide of his 'scope.

  "I wonder," he mused, "if it is viable?"

  Wouldn't _that_ make for an interesting paper, he went on, building hisdreams upon dreams. A moonplant! Growing in my garden! He decided, asis the way with botanists, to name his--it was now "his"; havingabandoned liberty when it abandoned the moon--to name his plant afterhimself.

  And that's how it came to be called the "Peter W. Merrill Moonplant." Heput it in his garden, arranged a small protective wire cylinder aroundit, and sprinkled it with water. Then he went into the house to starttyping up his notes for that forthcoming paper.

  * * * * *

  As he lay there in the soft loam, feeling the cool trickling of thewater passing over his stiff tendrils, the newly christened Pete felt astirring within himself. The sunlight that now struck him was filteredby an atmosphere, and gentle in its action upon him. Pete prodded hismemory, and suddenly decided that silicates, after all, are not the mostcomfortable of linings for one's tender green cells. He seemed to recalla state of lush, sybaritic softness, in pre-silicate times. Decidedly,the silicates must go, thought Pete.

  And go they did, molecule by molecule, down into the earth through hisroots, which were now acting as tiny spigots, getting rid of thescratchy stuff that had bolstered the cell walls against change formillennia past, leaving Pete softer, greener, livelier, and a constantdelight to the heart of Peter W. Merrill the First, whenever he came outto tend his plant, between pages of his thesis.

  Pete, after spewing the last hateful molecule away, reversed his tinyfibre engines, and began to draw in. He drew in all sorts of things, asthe days passed. A lot of minerals, and just enough water to float themin. Most
ly, Pete's growing hunger sought out iron. Pete didn't know whyhe wanted iron, any more than a smoker knows why he wants anothercigarette, but Pete's interest in iron was as intense as any smoker's intobacco.

  Above the ground, he grew very few inches larger, merely broadening hisdark, green spiral leaves a bit to catch the tiny amount of warmth herequired for growth. But beneath the soil, as with any tuberous plant,his roots were spread in a rough circular spoke-like pattern thatreached about ten miles in every direction.

  Pete Senior, had he tried to dig his plant up, would have been very muchsurprised to find he could not do it. But he didn't try, so his lifewent on as usual, with no surprises, which is the way he preferred it,so he was happy enough.

  It wasn't until his paper had been duly published, and botanical cronieshad shaken the dust from their whiskers and toddled around to see thisenviable possession, that something of the root structure wasdiscovered.

  "Seems to spread underground," one remarked.

  "Kind of a lunatic crab-grass," another jibed.

  "Sure you're not pulling our leg, Merrill?" said a third. "Seems a bitstunted."

  "Gravity," said Pete Senior. "Not used to it yet."

  Then they all had coffee and cake, shook hands with Pete Senior, andwent to their homes and laboratories.

  By this time, of course, at the farthest reaches of Pete's root network,duplicate Petes were popping up above ground, quietly andunostentatiously (Pete stood barely five inches high), and much liketheir parent. They, too, began sending out spoke-like root networks.Some of them, stronger than others, sent roots for a radius of a hundredmiles, others for a few leagues and no more.

  Eventually, Pete Senior reached an age where his body cells died morerapidly than they were replaced, that is, he achieved old age, and hepassed from his life, leaving a wife, three children, and an unpaidfertilizer bill.

  Pete himself, by now was pulsing considerably faster. In fact,incredibly faster, after his once-a-century contraction of short yearsbefore. His pulse rate was now in the neighborhood of ten per second,which is a pretty good increase. It soon reached hundreds per second.

  And his offspring weren't far behind him either.

  Since the whole planet was now as interwoven with Pete-type networks asthe inside of a baseball with string, this constant vibration--whichslowly began to beat in a united concentration--began to make itselffelt.

  People started to complain about it.

  * * * * *

  So scientists with seismographs, and even dousers with willow twigs,began to seek out the source of this unnerving, almost supersonic,thrilling of the planet crust. Eventually, they located the tiny greenplants with the spirally leaves at the center--the loudest point--ofeach network. Someone recognized the plant, and they confirmed thissomeone's suspicions by a check of the Public Library's back issues of_Botanist's Quarterly_. It was the moonplant, all right.

  The Peter W. Merrill Moonplant. Yes sir. That's what it was.

  The public, though, was not satisfied with the finding of a _name_ forthe disturbance, and insisted that it be brought to a _halt_ somehow.Naturally, the International Society of Botanists, Biologists andBiochemists raised one hell of a fuss about this, but on a democraticplanet they were summarily outvoted, and all spirally little green PeterW. Merrill Moonplants were--well, not _uprooted_; that would beimpossible--But they were all cropped flush with the earth whereverfound, and salt, acid, and all manner of nasty things poured into thestumps.

  * * * * *

  However, nothing happened at all to the vibrations.

  People began to get fidgety, and started petitioning theirrepresentatives in government to _Do Something_. A lot of speeches werethen made, all over Earth, about the noise and general disturbance ofthe moonplant roots, but none of them offered a solution to theincreasing racket.

  It was about this time that plumblines started hanging crooked. Oh, itwasn't detected at first. How could it be, at first? Because you judgethings by plumblines, not vice-versa. However, in a month, wheneverything was about five degrees off the vertical, notice began to betaken.

  When oranges began rolling off the ground in the California and Floridagroves, and huddling in a mound here and there upon the countryside, theSpirit of Worry injected itself into the public consciousness. NiagaraFalls' spectacular skew-wise splashing toward the Canadian side didn'tset many hearts at ease, either.

  And then someone remembered the moonplants, and saw that each newapparent gravity-tug was coming from the stump of one of the plants, anda leading scientist figured out the answer, after getting a snipped-offsegment of moonplant root and testing the hell out of it.

  "It seems," he announced to the world, or that portion of the world thatwas watching his appearance on TV; there being considerable competitionwith a new series of NBC Specials on another channel, "It seems thatthis Peter W. Merrill Moonplant is--er--magnetic, to a certain degree.Though not magnetism as we know it. It's more as though each plant,through the positioning of its roots, and the coiling of same, plus aheavy concentration of iron in its physical makeup, has managed to makeitself--or, rather, the stump of itself, since all such plants were cutdown, a short while back--to make itself the center of an artificialgravity field. This field seems to grow--Rather, these _many_ fieldsseem to grow in strength by the hour, and they have a tendency to topplethings, the gravitational 'tug' being most disastrous near the centersof the fields. The rims, though the angle of gravity is sharper there,are safer for stability only because they are balanced by more 'tugs'from adjoining fields...."

  Well, he went on this way for an hour or so, and soon hislisteners--those who stayed tuned in--knew what the problem was: "Down"wasn't going to be "down" much longer. It was going to depend on whichmoonplant stump you happened to be near.

  * * * * *

  The prospect didn't seem too much fun, and people started selling theirhomes and such, and booking passage to the moon, where life wascontrolled, but carefree, and free of annoying vibrations and rollingoranges.

  Lunar Real Estate enjoyed a fabulous boom for weeks after the telecastby the scientist, but it was soon "all filled up," and furtherimmigrations would have to await the construction of more Domes to housethe newcomers.

  The laggards, understandably, raised a fuss about this callous attitude,and went moonward anyway until about two-thirds of the Earth'spopulation was on the moon, the place becoming so hopelessly crowdedthat people had to half-rent rooms there, sleeping in alternating shiftswith other half-renters, and spending their waking hours wandering thestreets.

  "Things," sighed one realtor to another, "can't get much worse."

  And that's when the first meteor landed on Earth. In the generalexcitement, first about vibrations, then about gravitational fields,then about packing up and going to the moon, most newspapers had pushedto the want-ad pages little articles by eminent astronomers, in whichwere noted the odd behaviors of certain large planetoids in the asteroidbelt between Earth and Mars. These cosmic hunks of rock seemed to be"peeling off" the general formation of the ellipse followed by theirfellows, and moving sunward[1] singly or in small homogenous groupings.

  [Footnote 1: (Ergo: Earthward)]

  Well, the first one landed and left a dent on Earth where the Congo usedto be, the shock being felt as far north as Oslo, to add to theirvibrational, gravitational and evacuational difficulties.

  Scientists on the moon--being as singleminded as scientistsanywhere--became ecstatic. At last the mystery of the ages was solved:Who put the pocks in the face of the moon? A Peter W. Merrill Moonplant,of course! They looked down in rapture as meteor after meteor--drawnacross the countless miles of space by the pulsating gravity fields,plunged into the Earth, leaving pocks visible to the naked moondweller'seye. And darned if each meteor didn't strike dead center of each plantnetwork.

  * * * * *

  After about a month, E
arth looked almost exactly like the moon had oncelooked, with the exception of one locale: Australia, and much of thePacific Ocean surrounding it.

  "It will indeed be a titanic meteor that hits there!" the moonscientists enthused. For their careful check of the records showed thatonly one plant had been found on the whole continent of Australia,toward the eastern coast; which meant that its network probably extendedbeneath the Pacific itself, with a gigantic field reaching its hungrymagnetic fingers into space.

  And then someone noticed that no more asteroids had peeled from theformation. The void between the asteroid belt and Earth was barren ofhurtling rock.

  "Wonderful!" the scientists enthused. "It means that each field downthere on Earth ceased its tug the moment its meteor struck it. Thatmeans that once the final meteor lands, the Peter W. Merrill Moonplantwill be dead, and we can get some of the crowd off this place. Earth's abit ragged-looking, but after all, it's Home."

  "Funny," said one of the younger scientists, "that the moonplant went sofar afield for meteors, and yet did not disturb the delicategravitational balance between Earth and the moon, its own Satellite."

  "Let us hope," said an older scientist, "that this enormous Australiannetwork has not been saving itself for us." He laughed at this littlepleasantry, but no one joined him, because someone had just peeredthrough a telescope and noticed that Australia seemed to be gettinglarger.

  "You know what?" said the young scientist, finally. "We're falling tothe Earth, to form the largest pockmark of all!"

  "What a spectacle!" cried another scientist. "Pity we won't be alive towitness it. I wonder why the Peter W. Merrill Moonplant saved us forlast?"

  "Possibly," said the young scientist, "because--as with a