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Read Ebook: The Useless Bugbreeders by Stamers James
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Ebook has 204 lines and 6848 words, and 5 pages
"Naturally, Your Honor. But Mr. Lood's race can survive without extraplanetary aid. Provided they have sunshine and water, they can breed their spores and bacteria with no other resources."
"You mean," said the thin Commissioner with a dark leer, "that almost any sunny planet would do for them?"
Somewhere along the line my point seemed to have been swept away, so I added hurriedly:
"I offer this evidence purely to show the high degree of civilization of my clients' culture, as cause why they should not be deprived of their native land."
"Oh, yus," my client agreed.
"Mr. Lood," intoned the bald Commissioner, "to stay on your present asteroid you will have to prove that your race offers something that cannot be found elsewhere in the Galactic Community. Now have these funguses of yours any special medicinal values, for example?"
"Please?"
"Can you cure diseases with them?"
"Oh, no."
"Ah," said the thin and fat Commissioners together. "Proceed, Mr. Jones."
That put Lood somewhere back behind the twentieth-century discoverers of penicillin and the myecins, and even back behind the pioneer Pasteur. Five hundred years back, in fact.
"Yes. Well. Let's see how my clients handle housing, Your Honors. I think you'll find this quite revolutionary. Mr. Lood?"
Lood hopped off the witness seat and trotted up to the long table normally reserved for attorneys. Lately, I have found my professional colleagues strangely reluctant to stay in court when I have a case, so Lood had the entire table to himself.
He pulled a small jar out from under the table and spread a pile of dust on the tabletop. Then he unscrewed the jar and gently poured nothing out of it onto the dust. Nothing visible, that is. But I assumed it was teeming with viruses and such.
"While Mr. Lood gets this started, Your Honors," I said, hoping the viruses or whatever were not fatal to humans, "may I submit the usefulness of fungus foods for space-travel and for pioneers on inhospitable planets?"
"Are we having difficulties with General Food-Concentrates, the Travelers Capsule Combine and the other ten thousand concerns in this line, Mr. Jones?" the bald Commissioner asked quietly.
You can't say I didn't try. I shut up and watched Lood fuss with the dust on the table.
It started moving as if it were bubbling and Lood stood back.
Slowly, the dust on the table formed itself into a brick, a long eight by six by three inch brick. Lood smiled happily.
"And here, Your Honors," I said triumphantly, "here is automatic housing."
"One brick does not make a house, Mr. Jones."
"If Your Honors will just watch...."
The brick slowly elongated and split into two perfect bricks, lying on the table end to end.
"Mass colony action of bacteria," said Lood wisely. "Oh, yus."
The two bricks each split into two further bricks. These divided and multiplied themselves while we watched, out to the end of the table.
"I would like Your Honors to observe the way these bricks overcome natural hazards," I said, getting into my stride.
I pointed to the bricks drooping over the end of the table. A brick fell onto the floor at each end, then built itself up until it joined the line of bricks on the table, forming a perfect arch at each angle. The line on the table was now three bricks high, so I walked round and stood behind the wall.
"You see, Your Honors, suppose I need a house. I merely combine these suitable microbes and dust. And there we are, a house."
I had to stand on tiptoe to finish the sentence because of the mathematics involved. Every brick was doubling and redoubling itself in just under a minute. And the wall was getting quite impressively high.
"Mr. Jones," called one of the Commissioners.
It was not until I tried to walk round the end of the wall that I found I had been out-flanked.
I ran to the nearest wall of the courtroom but the bricks got there first. I heard a rending noise that suggested the other end had gone clean through the opposite wall. As a matter of fact, I saw the astonished face of an attorney entering the main door of the Justice Building as the wall advanced towards him. Then he saw me. He grinned and waved.
I was in no mood to wave back.
"Mr. Lood, Mr. Lood," I yelled. "Can you hear me?"
"Wall too thick, yus," came a muffled answer.
And indeed it was. I had not noticed it, but the wall was expanding sideways as well. I was calculating the approximate thickness when it went up and through the roof of the courtroom.
Fortunately it was a nice sunny day.
However, this was no time to sunbathe and I dashed towards the hole in the courtroom wall, where Lood's wall had gone through.
I just got out before a buttress, coming out the wall at right angles, blocked the gap. I remembered something Lood had said about the automatic creation of full-scale houses on a simple standard plan: two rooms, a toilet and a patio.
Outside, the wall was well on the way towards completing its second simple house. This side of the wall was, that is. I could only assume it was doing something similar on the other side. There was no way of getting round and seeing, except by outstripping the wall in a sprint.
I gathered my breath and dignity and ran very rapidly down the length of the wall, round the far mounting tiers of brick, advancing now on the State Library, and back to where I had left the Commissioners and Mr. Lood.
I was faced by a thicket of patios and arched doorways and low-roofed houses.
"Your Honors, Your Honors," I called hopefully, walking into the maze, in the general direction of what appeared to be an old and ruined war monument. It then occurred to me that this was the outer wall of the courthouse. It stood far off, pointing a stone finger to the sky, as if going down in a sea of brick for the third time.
"Your Honors, Your Honors...."
I met them turning a corner.
Unfortunately, they seemed to have found it necessary to crawl through a broken gap of some sort. They were very dusty and had a slightly shredded appearance.
"Ah, Mr. Jones," they said grimly, dusting each other off.
A tremendous crash announced the falling in of the roof of the State Library.
"Well," said the thin Commissioner, "he did say it was revolutionary."
I smiled politely.
"Don't giggle, Mr. Jones, or we'll hold you in contempt."
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