Clifford Simak - A Death in the House - And Other Stories

I could fix that, all right. I found out when the car rose right over a fallen tree in the road. With what rubbed off on me from being with Stinky all the time, I could make it fly. But I won’t. I ain’t aiming to get treated the way Stinky was.

Who better than a county agent—a sort of local government functionary whose job it is to aid farmers with a variety of problems—to deal with intelligent plants from space?

“Green Thumb” was submitted to H. L. Gold of Galaxy Science Fiction in February 1954. Gold purchased it for three hundred dollars, and the story was published in the July 1954 issue of the magazine. The story is only one of a number of Simak stories that displayed the intrigue he felt for the concept of plant intelligence.

I had come back from lunch and was watching the office while Millie went out to get a bite to eat. With my feet up on the desk in a comfortable position, I was giving considerable attention to how I might outwit a garbage-stealing dog.

The dog and I had carried on a feud for months and I was about ready to resort to some desperate measures.

I had blocked up the can with heavy concrete blocks so he couldn’t tip it over, but he was a big dog and could stand up and reach down into the can and drag all the garbage out. I had tried putting a heavy weight on the lid, but he simply dragged it off and calmly proceeded with his foraging. I had waited up and caught him red-handed at it and heaved some rocks and whatever else was handy at him, but he recognized tactics such as these for what they were and they didn’t bother him. He’d come back in half an hour, calm as ever.

I had considered setting a light muskrat trap on top of the garbage so that, when he reached down into the can, he’d get his muzzle caught. But if I did that, sure as hell I’d forget to take it out some Tuesday morning and the garbage man would get caught instead. I had toyed with the idea of wiring the can so the dog would get an electric shock when he came fooling around. But I didn’t know how to go about wiring it and, if I did, ten to one I’d fix it up so I’d electrocute him instead of just scaring him off, and I didn’t want to kill him.

I like dogs, you understand. That doesn’t mean I have to like all dogs, does it? And if you had to scrape up garbage every morning, you’d be just as sore at the mutt as I was.

While I was wondering if I couldn’t put something in a particularly tempting bit of garbage that would make him sick and still not kill him, the phone rang.

It was old Pete Skinner out on Acorn Ridge.

“Could you come out?” he asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “What you got?”

“I got a hole out in the north forty.”

“Sink-hole?”

“Nope. Looks like someone dug it out and carried off the dirt.”

“Who would do that, Pete?”

“I don’t know. And that ain’t all of it. They left a pile of sand beside the hole.”

“Maybe that’s what they dug out of the hole.”

“You know well enough,” said Pete, “that I haven’t any sandy soil. You’ve run tests enough on it. All of mine is clay.”

“I’ll be right out,” I told him.

A county agent gets some funny calls, but this one topped them all. Hog cholera, corn borers, fruit blight, milk production records—any of these would have been down my alley. But a hole in the north forty?

And yet, I suppose I should have taken it as a compliment that Pete called me. When you’ve been a county agent for fifteen years, a lot of farmers get to trust you and some of them, like Pete, figure you can straighten out any problem. I enjoy a compliment as much as anybody. It’s the headaches that go with them that I don’t like.

When Millie came back, I drove out to Pete’s place, which is only four or five miles out of town.

Pete’s wife told me that he was up in the north forty, so I went there and found not only Pete, but some of his neighbors. All of them were looking at the hole and doing a lot of talking. I never saw a more puzzled bunch of people.

The hole was about 30 feet in diameter and about 35 feet deep, an almost perfect cone—not the kind of hole you’d dig with a pick and shovel. The sides were cut as clean as if they’d been machined, but the soil was not compressed, as it would have been if machinery had been used.

The pile of sand lay just a short distance from the hole. Looking at it, I had the insane feeling that, if you shoveled that sand into the hole, it would exactly fit. It was the whitest sand I’ve ever seen and, when I walked over to the pile and picked up some of it, I saw that it was clean. Not just ordinary clean, but absolutely clean—as though laundered grain by grain.

I stood around for a while, like the rest of them, staring at the hole and the pile of sand and wishing I could come up with some bright idea. But I wasn’t able to. There was the hole and there was the sand. The topsoil was dry and powdery and would have shown wheel marks or any other kind it there’s been any. There weren’t.

I told Pete maybe he’d better fence in the whole business, because the sheriff or somebody from the state, or even the university, might want to look it over. Pete said that was a good idea and he’d do it right away.

I went back to the farmhouse and asked Mrs. Skinner to give me a couple of fruit jars. One of them I filled with a sample from the sand pile and the other with soil from the hole, being careful not to jolt the walls.

By this time, Pete and a couple of the neighbors had gotten a wagonload of fence posts and some wire and were coming out to the field. I waited and helped unload the posts and wire, then drove back to the office, envying Pete. He was satisfied to put up the fence and let me worry about the problem.

I found three fellows waiting for me. I gave Millie the fruit jars and asked her to send them right away to the Soils Bureau at the State Farm Campus. Then I settled down to work.

Other people drifted in and it was late in the afternoon before I could call up the Soils Bureau and tell them I wanted the contents of the two jars analyzed. I told them a little of what had happened, although not all of it for, when you tried to put it into words, it sounded pretty weird.

“Banker Stevens called and asked if you’d drop by his place on your way home,” Millie told me.

“What would Stevens want with me?” I asked. “He isn’t a farmer and I don’t owe him any money.”

“He grows fancy flowers,” said Millie.

“I know that. He lives just up the street from me.”

“From what I gathered, something awful happened to them. He was all broken up.”

So, on the way home, I stopped at the Stevens place. The banker was out in the yard, waiting for me. He looked terrible. He led me around to the big flower garden in the back and never have I seen such utter devastation. In that whole area, there wasn’t a single plant alive. Every one of them had given up the ghost and was lying wilted on the ground.

“What could have done it, Joe?” asked Stevens and, the way he said it, I felt sorry for him.

After all, those flowers were a big thing in his life. He’d raised them from special seed and he’d babied them along, and for anybody who is crazy about flowers, I imagine they were tops.

“Someone might have used some spray on them,” I said. “Almost any kind of spray, if you don’t dilute it enough, would kill them.”

Out in the garden, I took a close look at the dead flowers, but nowhere could I see any sign of the burning from too strong a spray.

Then I saw the holes, at first only two or three of them, then, as I went on looking, dozens of them. They were all over the garden, about an inch in diameter, for all the world as if someone had taken a broomstick and punched holes all over the place. I got down on my knees and could see that they tapered, the way they do when you pull weeds with big taproots out of the ground.