The Bear Who Saved the World

L. Sprague de Camp

Johnny Black pulled Volume 5 of the Britannica off the library shelf and opened it to the article on "Chemistry." Adjusting the elastic that held his spectacles in place, he worried his way through a few paragraphs before he decided, sadly, that he could go no farther until his man, Professor Mettin, explained things to him. And he wanted so much to learn all about chemistry and the chemicals that had made it possible for him to read at all!

Johnny Black was not human, and he knew it. He was, instead, a fine specimen of the American black bear, Euarctos americanus, upon whose brain Professor Mettin, chief of staff at the North American Biological Research Station, had performed a remarkable experiment. Mettin had injected a chemical compound that lowered the resistance of the synapses between the cells of his small bear's brain so that the complicated electrical process called thought became as easy for Johnny as for a man.

The bear continued to turn the pages of the encyclopedia carefully with his paw. He had once tried using his tongue, but the sharp edges of the paper had cut it. Besides, his master had scolded him for dampening the pages of a valuable book. After Johnny had read the article on "Chess," he stowed his spectacles in the case attached to his collar and ambled outdoors.

The island of St. Croix sweltered under a Caribbean sun. The blue of the sky and the green of the hills were lost on Johnny, who, like all bears, was color-blind. He regretted that his bear's eyesight was not keen enough to make out the boats in Frederiksted harbor. His poor eyesight together with a lack of fingers to manipulate things and lack of vocal organs adapted to speech were Johnny's chief grievances. He sometimes wished that if he had to be an animal with a human brain, he were an ape like McGinty, the chimpanzee.

Johnny began to wonder about McGinty. He hadn't heard a peep out of him all morning, whereas the old ape usually shrieked and threw things at everybody who went by. Curious, Johnny shuffled over to the cages. The monkeys chattered at him as usual, but the ape sat with his back to the wall, staring blankly. When Johnny growled a little, McGinty's eyes swung at the sound, his limbs stirred, but he did not get up. He must be pretty sick, thought Johnny, then comforted himself with the fact that within the hour Pablo would be around to feed the animals and would report McGinty's strange behavior to Professor Mettin.

Thinking about food reminded Johnny that it was high time for Honoria, the cook, to ring the Station bell that summoned the scientists to lunch. But no bell rang. In fact, the place seemed unnaturally quiet. Besides the chirping of the birds and the chattering of the monkeys, the only sound he heard was the put-put-put of a stationary engine at Bemis' place, beyond the grounds of the Biological Research Station.

Bemis was a botanist who had recently received a U. S. Government grant to set up a laboratory on St. Croix. He had settled in on a property next to the Research Station. Johnny knew that the scientists at the Research Station did not like Bemis. They called him "eccentric" and wondered about the little plump man who swaggered around in riding boots when there wasn't a horse in the area. Johnny wanted to investigate the stationary engine, but he remembered the fuss Bemis had made the last time he had wandered over.

He decided instead to investigate the delayed luncheon. Trotting over to the Station kitchen, he put his muzzle in the door. He did not go farther, remembering the cook's unreasonable attitude toward bears in her kitchen. He smelled burning food and saw Honoria, mountainous as ever, sitting by the window looking at nothing.

Alarmed, Johnny set out to find Mettin. Although the professor was not in the social room, the rest of the staff were gathered there. Dr. Breuker, an authority on the psychology of speech, sat in an easy chair, a newspaper across his lap. He didn't move when Johnny sniffed his leg. He had dropped a lighted cigarette on the rug, where it had burned a large hole before going out. Doctors Markel and Ryerson and Ryerson's wife were there too, sitting like so many statues.

Eventually, Johnny found the lanky Mettin, clad in underwear, lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling. He did not look sick, but he didn't move unless prodded or nipped. An hour later, Johnny gave up trying to get a sensible reaction out of any of the people at the Station. He went outside to think. He would call a physician if only he could speak. He might go down to Frederiksted to try to get one, but he would likely get shot for his pains.

Happening to glance toward Bemis' laboratory, Johnny was surprised to see something round rise into the sky, slowly dwindle, and vanish. He guessed that this was a small balloon, for he had heard that Bemis was planning a botanical experiment involving the use of balloons. Another sphere followed the first, then another, until they formed a continuous procession dwindling into nothingness.

This was too much for the curious bear. He had to find out why anyone would want to fill the heavens with balloons a yard in diameter. Besides, he hoped that Bemis might come over to the Station and see about the entranced staff.

Approaching the Bemis house, he saw a truck, a lot of machinery, a pile of unfilled balloons, and two unfamiliar men. The men inflated the balloons, one by one, attached a small box to each, and released them into the air.

One man caught sight of Johnny, yelled, "Hey!" and reached for his holster. Although Johnny rose on his hind legs and gravely extended his right paw in greeting, the man shouted, "Get out of here, you!"

When Johnny, puzzled, hesitated, the man jerked out his pistol and fired. Johnny felt a stunning blow as the. 38 slug glanced off his thick skull. The next instant, gravel flying, he streaked for the Station.

Back home, he found a bathroom mirror and inspected the gash on his forehead. Since he could not apply a bandage, he ran cold water over the wound until the bleeding stopped. Weak with hunger, he made his way to the kitchen. There he used his claws as natural can openers and poured a can of peaches down his throat. A moment later, he heard a truck back up to the kitchen door. He slipped noiselessly into the dining room.

The kitchen door slammed. The raw voice of the man who had shot at him spoke to Honoria, "What's your name, huh?"

Toneless, the woman replied, "Honoria Velez."

"Okay, Honoria, you help us carry this food out to the truck." Johnny could hear the slapping of Honoria's slippers as she moved about, arms full of provisions, docilely piling cans into the truck. When the men said, "That's all," she sat down on the kitchen steps, dazed and unmoving. The truck drove off.

It had occurred to Johnny, as he watched through the crack of the dining room door, that these men, their balloons, and the trancelike state of the people at the Station were somehow related. More curious than ever, he hurried out and headed for a clump of trees standing on a rise at the end of the Station property.

From this hidden observation post, he watched as more and more balloons sailed off into the sky. Eventually, the two men at work were joined by two others from the bungalow. The stocky figure, Johnny decided, was Bemis. If that were so, the botanist must be the mastermind of the gang of swaggering ruffians. And he, Johnny, had at least four enemies to deal with. How, he didn't know.

First, he considered Honoria's actions. The cook, normally a strong-minded person of granite stubbornness, had carried out every order without a peep. Yet Honoria had remembered her name and understood orders well enough. Evidently, the disease—or whatever it was—seemed not to affect the victim mentally or physically except to deprive him of initiative and willpower. Johnny wondered why he had not been affected also. Then, remembering the chimpanzee and the monkeys, he concluded that the disease was specific to the higher anthropoids.

Night descended, but in his hideaway Johnny had difficulty sleeping. Plans for attacking the bungalow swarmed like bees through his mind. He knew a night raid would be impossible because his eyesight was especially poor at night and because all four of his enemies would be together through the dark hours.

At sunrise, Johnny saw the two tough fellows start up the little engine and begin to inflate more balloons. Making a long detour, he sneaked up to the bungalow from the far side and crawled under the house. Like most houses in the Virgin Islands, the building had no cellar. He crept around softly until the scrape of feet on the thin floor above told him he was directly under the men within. Bemis was talking.

"... and those fools are caught in Havana with no way of getting down here, because transportation all over the Caribbean is tied up by now."

A British voice answered, "I suppose that in time it will occur to them to go to the owner of a boat or plane and simply tell the chap to bring them here. That's the only thing for them to do with everybody in Cuba under the influence of the molds by now, what? How many more balloons should we send up?"

"All we have," replied Bemis.

"But, I say, oughtn't we keep some in reserve? It wouldn't do to have to spend the rest of our lives sending spores up into the stratosphere, in the hope that the cosmic rays will give us another mutation like this one."

"I said we'll send up all the balloons, not all the spores, Forney. I have plenty of those in reserve, and I'm growing more from my molds all the time. Anyway, suppose we did run out of molds before all the world is infected—which it will be in a few weeks. There wasn't one chance in a million of that first mutation, yet it happened. That's how I know it was a sign from above. I have been chosen to lead the world out of its errors and confusions, and I shall do it. The Lord gave me this power over the world, and He shall not fail me!"

So, thought Johnny, that was it. He knew that Bemis was an expert on molds. The botanist must have sent a load of them up into the stratosphere where the cosmic rays could work on them. One of the mutations thereby produced had the ability to attack the human brain when the spores were inhaled and to destroy the victim's willpower. And now Bemis was broadcasting these mold spores all over the world so that he could take charge of Earth and order the inhabitants to do whatever he wished. And the man was mad.

Still, since Bemis and his assistants were not affected by the spores, there must be an antidote of some sort, and Bemis must keep it handy. If only he could force Bemis to tell where it was... but that wasn't practical.

One of the men working on the balloons said, "Ten o'clock, Bert. Time to go for the mail."

"Won't be no mail, Jim boy. Everybody in Frederiksted's sitting around, looking dopey."

"Yeah, that's so. We ought to start organizing them before they all croak of starvation. We've got to have somebody to work for us."

"All right, smart guy, you go ahead and organize. Suppose you try to get the telephone service workin' again, while I have a smoke."

From beneath the house, Johnny saw one pair of booted legs disappear into the truck, which presently rolled out of the driveway. The other pair of legs settled themselves on the front steps.

Johnny remembered a sea almond tree behind the bungalow with a trunk that passed close to the eaves. Four minutes later, he padded silently across the roof and looked down on the smoker. As Bert threw away his cigarette and stood up, Johnny's five hundred steel-muscled pounds landed on his back and flung him prone. Before he could fill his lungs to shout, the bear's paw landed with a pop on the side of his head. Bert quivered and subsided, his skull looking peculiarly lopsided.

Johnny listened; the house was quiet. But the man called Jim would soon be coming back in the truck. Johnny dragged the corpse under the house. Then, cautiously opening the screen door with his paws, he stole in, holding his claws up so that they would not click against the floor. He quickly located the room from which Bemis' voice wafted through the half-opened door.

Johnny slowly pushed the door open. The botanist's laboratory was full of flowerpots, glass cases of plants, and chemical apparatus. Bemis and the young Englishman were sitting at the far end, talking animatedly.

Johnny was halfway across the room before they saw him. They jumped up, Forney crying, "Good Gad!" Bemis gave one awful shriek as Johnny's right paw, working like an ice-cream scoop, tore into his abdomen. Bemis, now a horrible sight, tried to walk, then to crawl, then sank into a pool of his own blood.

Forney snatched up a chair, hoping to fend off Johnny like a lion tamer in a circus. Johnny, however, was not a lion. He rose five feet tall on his hind legs and batted the chair across the room, where it came to rest with a crash of glass. Forney broke for the door, but Johnny was on his back before he had gone three steps.

Johnny wondered how to dispose of Jim when he returned. The bear knew the man was armed, and he had a healthy dread of stopping another bullet. Then he noticed four automatic rifles in the umbrella stand in the hall. He opened the breech of one gun, found that it was loaded, then positioned himself behind a window that commanded a view of the driveway. When Jim got out of the truck, he never knew what hit him.

Johnny next set out to find the antidote for the spores. Bemis' desk seemed a logical place to start. Although the desk was locked and made of sheet steel, it was not designed to keep out a determined and resourceful bear. Johnny hooked his claws under the lowest drawer, braced himself, and heaved. The steel bent, and the drawer pulled forward. The others responded in turn. In the third drawer, he found a biggish squat bottle and two hypodermic syringes. Putting on his spectacles, he read "Potassium iodide."

This was the antidote, he decided, and it worked by injection. But how was a bear to work it? He carefully extracted the bottle stopper with his teeth and tried to fill one of the syringes. By holding the barrel of the device between his paws, and working the plunger with his mouth, he at last succeeded.

Carrying the syringe in his mouth, Johnny trotted back to the Station. He found Professor Mettin, still in his underwear, sitting in the kitchen dreamily eating the scraps left by the plug-uglies' raid. The others were utterly helpless without orders and would sit like vegetables until they starved.

Johnny tried to inject the solution into Mettin's calf, holding the syringe crosswise in his teeth and pushing the plunger with a paw. But at the prick of the needle, the man jerked away. When the bear held the man down, he squirmed so that the syringe broke.

A discouraged black bear cleaned up the broken glass. He knew that soon he would be the only thinking being left on Earth who had any initiative at all. He did not much care what happened to the human race, but he did have a certain affection for his lanky boss. Moreover, he didn't like the idea of spending the rest of his life rustling his own food like an ordinary wild animal. Such an existence would be far too dull for a bear of his intelligence.

So Johnny returned to Bemis' bungalow and brought back both the bottle and the remaining hypodermic syringe. He considered knocking one of the scientists unconscious and injecting him, but he did not know how hard to hit a human in order to stun without killing. He dared not try any rough stuff for fear of breaking the only remaining syringe.

Johnny sat down to think. Suddenly, he had an idea. In their present state, the humans would do anything they were told. If someone ordered one of them to pick up the syringe and inject himself, he would do it. But Johnny couldn't talk. His attempt to say "Pick up the syringe" came out as "Fee-feekopp feef-feef," and the Professor looked blankly away. Johnny put the syringe and precious chemical on a high shelf and started to roam through the rooms of the Research Station.

In Dr. Ryerson's room, he saw a typewriter. He couldn't handle a pencil, but he could, after a fashion, operate one of these machines. The chair creaked alarmingly under his weight as he took a piece of paper between his lips, dangled it over the machine, and turned the platen with both paws until the paper started through. The paper was in crooked, but that could not be helped. Using one claw at a time, he tapped out "PICK UP SIRINGE AND INJECT SOLUTION INTO YOUR ARM." The spelling of "siringe" didn't look quite right, but he couldn't be bothered with that now.

Carrying the paper in his mouth, he shuffled back into the kitchen. He placed the syringe in front of the Professor, squalled to attract his attention, and dangled the paper in front of his eyes. The scientist, completely dazed, paid no attention.

Johnny went out and walked around in the twilight, thinking furiously. It seemed absurd—even his bear's sense of humor told him so—that the spell could be broken by a simple command, that he alone in all the world knew the command, and that he had no way of giving it.

If the whole human race died off, leaving him the only intelligent creature on Earth, could he make his way to the mainland and seek out others of his species? Perhaps he could, but they, resenting his strangeness, might turn away from him or even kill him. That night he slept fitfully, knowing that time ran against him. He woke before dawn, thinking of Dr. Breuker's portable recording apparatus, though he could not imagine why.

He wandered into Breuker's room, found the tape recorder, and spent two hours learning how to operate the switches. He finally adjusted the thing for recording, yelled, "Wa-a-a-a-ah!" into it, threw the playback switch, and the machine yelled, "Wa-a-a-a-ah!" right back at him. Johnny squealed with pleasure.

Of course, a tape recording of his cry would be no better than his cry itself, but maybe among Breuker's tapes there might be some words he could use. He started to read the labels: "Bird cries," "Infant Babble," "Lancaster Dialect." He tried this latter tape and listened to a monologue about a little boy who was swallowed by a lion. From his experience with little boys, Johnny decided this would be a good idea, but there was nothing on the tape that would be of any use.

The next cassette he picked up was labeled "American Speech Series No. 72-B." It started out with a silly story: "Once there was a young rat who couldn't make up his mind. Whenever the other rats asked him if he'd like to come out with them, he'd answer, 'I don't know. ' One day his aunt said to him, 'Now look here! No one will ever care for you if you carry on like this... '

The player ground on, but Johnny's mind was made up. If he could get the machine to say "Now look here!" to Professor Mettin, his problem would be solved. He couldn't play the whole tape, because those three words did not stand out from the rest of the discourse. If he could make a separate recording of just those three words... But how to do this? He needed two machines—one to play the tape and one to record the desired words. He squealed with exasperation. To be licked when he had gotten this far!

Like a flash, the solution came to him. He dragged the recorder over to the social room, where there was a small tape deck used by the scientists for their evening amusement. Johnny put the "American Speech" cassette in this machine, put a blank tape on the recorder, and started it. He kept a claw on the recorder switch to start the tape at just the right moment.

Two hours and several ruined tapes later, he had what he wanted. He nosed the recorder into the kitchen, laid the syringe and the typed paper in front of Mettin, and started the machine. It scraped along for ten seconds and then said sharply, "Now look here! Now look here! Now look here!" As the tape resumed its scraping, the Professor's eyes snapped back into locus. He looked intently at the sheet of paper with the single line of typing across it, and without a flicker of emotion, picked up the syringe and jabbed the needle into his biceps.

Johnny shut off the machine. He would have to wait to see whether the solution took effect. As the minutes passed, he had an awful feeling that maybe this was not the antidote after all.

A half hour later, Professor Mettin passed a hand across his forehead. His first words were barely audible, but they grew louder like a television set warming up."What in heaven's name happened to me, Johnny? I remember everything that's taken place during the past three days, but I didn't seem to have any will of my own."

Johnny beckoned and headed for Ryerson's room and the typewriter. Mettin, who understood his Johnny, inserted a sheet of paper for him. Time passed as Johnny typed.

Finally, Mettin said, "What a sweet setup for a would-be dictator! With the whole world obeying orders implicitly, all he had to do was to select a few subordinates and have them give directions to everyone. Of course the antidote is potassium iodide—that's the standard fungicide. It cleared the mold out of my head in a hurry. Come on, old-timer, we've got a lot of work ahead of us. Hard to believe—a bear has saved the world!"

A week later everyone on St. Croix had been treated, and teams had set off for the mainland to carry on the mind-saving work.

Johnny, finding little to arouse his curiosity around the nearly deserted Biological Research Station, shuffled into the library. He took Volume 5 of the Britannica off the shelf, opened it to "Chemistry," and set to work again. He hoped Mettin would get back in a month or so to explain the hard parts to him. Meanwhile, he would have to wade through the article as; best he could.

Content

The Bear Who Saved the World
L. Sprague de Camp