Leo Frankowski - Copernick's Rebellion

In six weeks each food plant would cover forty acres of land. Trees and other plants that were in the way were absorbed with remarkable rapidity. Animals found their leaves to be bitter and spat them out; those that persisted, died. Farmers who tried to uproot the new weed found that it recovered in hours. Herbicides were ineffective.

In two months the dense ground cover would start to rise as tree trunks grew in a triangular pattern every fifteen feet. The trunks would grow to be eight feet tall. Only then, three months from planting, once there was enough photosynthetic area, would they start to produce food gourds on their trunks. But each tree could feed a thousand people.

“The bridge is out,” Senator Beinheimer said.

A farmer had driven the ten of them into town, at which point the truck’s engine failed due to a larva hole in the oil gallery.

Three days in Bristol, Colorado, convinced von Bork that transportation was not available, and would probably never be available.

Striking out on foot, they headed west.

The two men and six women who were subordinate to von Bork were all Rejuves. They all had more than sixty years of experience. They all had healthy twenty-year-old bodies. Among them, they had a vast array of useful knowledge. How to pick mushrooms, how to dig roots, how to trap rabbits, and how to build shelter. Traveling upstream along the Arkansas River, they survived well. The senator was able to keep up, though his bones ached.

It took them a month to cross the Colorado Plains and the Rocky Mountains. Now, on the downhill side, the road came quite literally to an end.

“I said the bridge is out.”

“Obviously,” von Bork said. “But that is the Gunnison River, and the Gunnison empties into the Colorado, and the Colorado pours into Lake Mead, spitting distance from Life Valley.”

“You crazy, boy? You’re talking about maybe a thousand miles of white water.”

“True. I’m also talking about riding instead of walking. Personally, I’m sick of walking. Who’s with me?”

“We’re always with you, Mr. von Bork.”

Senator Beinheimer was the last one down.

Within a mile, they found an abandoned twelve-man rubber raft.

Antenna towers are held stable by long steel cables, and when these were eaten through, the towers fell. Radio and TV stations went off the air.

The orbiting communications satellites still operated but their crews could give no useful information to the people below because they themselves had no way of finding out what was happening.

These stations, and those on the moon, were largely self-sufficient, and could survive several years without help from Earth. But they could provide no help in return.

The world’s electrical power was cut off, as power towers crumpled and high-voltage wires crashed to the Earth. There was no way for most people to listen to the satellite broadcasts.

No insects had been spread over the oceans, so ships at sea were generally not affected until they came to land. There they were promptly plagued by egg-laying mosquitoes. Most of them sank at the docks, their hulls riddled with holes. Some left and tried to make it to their home ports, and, of these, some made it back. But those that didn’t went down with all hands, as the lifeboats were in worse shape than the ships themselves.

Small sailing craft, with plastic hulls and brass fittings, were largely unaffected. Most of these left port with jury-rigged wooden masts and manilla stays, their owners, or those who had stolen them, planning to eke out some sort of survival by fishing.

The old, the infirm, the hospitalized were the worst affected. In some cases, the doctors resorted to euthanasia. In most, the ill were simply abandoned when nothing more could be done for them. In a few cases, dedicated medical staffs stayed with their patients.

Several thousand self-proclaimed messiahs, quoting the Bible, the Talmud, the Koran, or one of a hundred similar texts, or claiming special divine, scientific, or political knowledge, gathered flocks eager to follow anyone who seemed to know what he was doing. Their net effect was beneficial, for many of these leaders led their people out of the cities.

Without electrical power or water, cities became uninhabitable. Sanitation became nonexistent, and plagues broke out on a scale unknown since the Middle Ages.

Mindless looting, murder, and rape became commonplace. Those authorities that still existed had neither communications nor weapons nor transportation. They were largely powerless, and few could do anything but protect themselves.

Most people formed into small, local groups and were able to maintain some form of order within their tiny territories as the lawbreakers were no better armed and generally less well coordinated.

A great, silvered parabolic dish was constructed in Life Valley, targeted on a functioning communications satellite, and a message transmitted. With nothing else to transmit, the operators relayed it all over the globe on the commercial VHF and UHF frequencies.

Consumer electronics contain little or no ion or aluminum. And those with battery-operated radios and televisions heard it.

The voice was Heinrich Copernick’s, although, for linguistic reasons, the speaker was the CCU.

“I am Heinrich Copernick. I have a message that is vital to your welfare. Be patient, and it will be repeated in your own language. An English-language broadcast will begin in ten minutes.” These lines, with appropriate broadcast times, were then repeated in Russian, Chinese, French, German, Hindustani, and fifty-three other languages and dialects.

“We are in the midst of a devastating and historically unprecedented plague,” it continued in English. “As you are doubtless well aware, it is caused by an insect that is capable of metabolizing iron and aluminum. It has spread with incredible rapidity across the entire globe.

“The biological metabolism of metals is not unprecedented. Iron bacteria have plagued corrosion engineers for many years. It is possible that these insects carry such bacteria, or have somehow incorporated DNA from these bacteria into their chromosomes.

“It seems a law of nature that everything that can be eaten eventually will be eaten. Every possible ecological niche is eventually filled. Nature has finally caught up with us, at least insofar as our two most common metals are concerned.

“Mankind is indeed fortunate that my uncle, Dr. Martin Guibedo, has developed a means of supplying food and shelter that does not depend on the metals we once used. I am speaking, of course, of the tree houses.

“You are doubtless familiar with them. Just previous to the plague, an estimated three percent of the world’s population was living in them. These tree houses are capable of supporting, for a few months and at a bare sustenance level, ten times the number of people currently living with them. There is room for one third of humanity in the adult trees that already exist, and for all of humanity in the young trees that are now maturing.

“Those of you now living in tree houses are urged to be generous. You must do this because all men are brothers; we cannot allow our brothers to starve needlessly.

“And you must do this for your own self-protection, for a hungry man with a hungry family is a dangerous man. The people you invite into your homes can help protect you from the marauding gangs that now infest our world.

“As mayor of a tree-house city growing in what was once Death Valley, I invite anyone who can come to join us. Our citizens are planting tree houses to accommodate you. We will do what we can to make your walk here as comfortable as possible.

“In addition to this, we have planted ten million food trees across the Earth. Each of these trees will, in two months’ time, be able to feed one thousand people. Alone they will be able to feed all of humanity. Eat only the food pods that grow from the trunks. The leaves and branches are poisonous. These trees were designed by Dr. Martin Guibedo to combat the present crisis. One of them should now be growing for every five square miles of our Earth’s land. As each covers forty acres of land, they will be easy enough to spot. Each leaf has a small red cross in the center.