of the finest cleaner in the whole world. And us with only a cupful.”
A minute later, I was glad she hadn’t heard me. When I dropped a little glob of the stuff into the carrot pan and stirred it around a bit, instead of dissolving and diluting in the extra water, the mixture seemed to stay the same density after swallowing up the water.
“Give me a pie tin,” I demanded.
Lottie sighed, but she got a shallow pan out of the pantry and handed it to me. Then I poured the jelly out of the carrot pan and I made my first important discovery.
The stuff was not good for cleaning out scorched carrots.
The pot was bone-dry. So were the carrots. They had a desiccated look and were stuck worse than ever to the bottom. I brushed them with my finger and the top layers powdered to dust. Then I noticed that not a droplet or smidgin of the jelly remained in the pot. When I had poured it out, it had gone out all at the same time, as if it was trying to hang together.
The carbonized carrots at the very bottom were hard and dry, too. A scrape job if I ever saw one.
* * * *
The pie tin was now full almost to the rim. The globby stuff sort of rolled around, trying to find a flat condition, which it finally did. The motion was not as startling as the sudden quiet that settled over the surface after a last ripple.
The stuff looked like it was waiting.
The temptation was worse than a park bench labeled “wet paint,” so I stuck my finger in it. Right in the middle of it.
A ripple flashed out from the center like when you drop a pebble in a pool, and the ripple hit the brim and converged back to my finger. When it hit, the surface climbed up my finger about an eighth of an inch. Another ripple, another eighth of an inch, and about now I felt something like a gentle sucking sensation. Also, another feeling I can only tell you was “unclammy.”
I jerked away fast and shook my finger hard over the pan, but it wasn’t necessary. None of the stuff had stayed with me. In fact, my finger was dry—powdery dry!
Then I got the feeling that someone was staring over my shoulder. There was. It was Lottie, and she had a look of horror on her face that didn’t help my nerves a bit.
“Get rid of it, Charlie!” she cried. “Get rid of it! Please throw it out!”
“Now, now, honey,” I said. “It ain’t alive.”
“It is!” she insisted.
Lottie chatters quite a bit and pretty well speaks her mind. But she doesn’t go around making assertions. When she does come out flat-footed with a serious statement, it is always from the bottom of her 22-carat womanly intuition, and she is practically always right.
“How could it be alive?” I argued. I often argue when I know I’m wrong. This time I argued because I wanted to wipe that awful look off my wife’s face. “Come on in the living room and relax,” I said.
* * * *
And then sweet-natured, honey-haired little Lottie did a violent thing. Still staring over my shoulder at the pie tin, she screamed wide-open and ran out of the house. A second later, I heard her start the car out the driveway at 30 miles an hour in reverse. She burned rubber out in front and was gone.
I hadn’t moved an inch. Because when she screamed, I looked back at the jelly to see why, and the stuff had oozed over the edge and was flowing slowly toward me.
I know a little about Korzybski and how he wanted everybody to make what he called a cortico-thalamic pause whenever they get scared as hell. So I was making this cortico-thalamic pause, which is really counting to ten before you do anything, while Lottie was leaving the house. When I got through with my pause, I jumped backward over my kitchen chair so hard that I must have knocked my head on the tile sink-board.
When I came to, it was after midnight. The kitchen light was still on. Lottie was still gone. I knew it. If she was here, she’d have had me in bed. No matter how much of my employer’s product I have sampled, never has Lottie let me sleep it off on the kitchen floor. Her 110 pounds is a match for my 200 in more ways than one, and she takes good care of her man.
Then I realized that this was not a stag beer-bust. There was something about a pot of soap-jelly.
It was still there. A long slug of the half-transparent stuff had strung down off the edge of the table and still hung there like a nasty-looking icicle.
The knob on the back of my head throbbed so much that at first I couldn’t figure what was wrong with the air. Then my aching dry throat told me what the matter was. The air was dry like the summer we spent at a dude ranch in Arizona. It made my nostrils crimp, and my tongue felt like a mouthful of wrinkled pepperoni.
When I got to my feet and looked at the top of the kitchen table, I almost panicked again. But this time the pause worked and I got better results.
Alive or dead, the gunk was the most powerful desiccant I’d ever heard of. It had drunk up the water in the carrot pot, sucked the surface moisture from my finger and then spent the past few hours feeding on the humidity in the air.
It was thirsty. Like alcohol has affinity for water, this stuff was the same way, only more so. In fact, it even reached out toward anything that had water in it—like me.
That’s why it had oozed over the pan the way it did.
* * * *
What’s so frightening about that, I asked myself. Plants grow toward water.
But plants are alive!
That’s what Lottie had said—before she screamed.
“So you’re thirsty?” I asked it out loud. “Okay, we’ll give you a real drink!”
I got a bucket from the service porch and took the pancake turner to scrape the gooey nightmare into it. I even caught the drip off the edge, and it seemed quietly grateful to sink back to the parent glob in the pail, which by now amounted to about a quart.
I set the pail in the laundry tray and turned on the faucet hard. In about a second and a half, I almost sprained my wrist turning it off. Not only did the jelly drink up the water without dissolving, but it started creeping up the stream in a column about three inches in diameter, with the water pouring down its middle.
When I got the water shut off, the unholy jelly-spout slopped back disappointedly.
And now the bucket was over half full of the stuff.
I dropped in an ice-cube as an experiment. It didn’t even splash. The surface pulled away, letting the cube make a pretty good dent in it, but then only gradually did the displaced goo creep back around it as if to sample it cautiously.
I couldn’t stand the dry air any more, so I threw open the doors and windows and let the cool, damp night air come in. The ice-cube had disappeared without even a surface puddle. Now, as the humidity came back, I thought I noticed a restless shimmering in the jelly.
The phone rang. It was Lottie’s mother wanting to know why Lottie had come over there in hysterics, and where had I been since seven o’clock. I don’t remember what I answered, but it served the purpose. Lottie hasn’t returned and they haven’t called up any more.
When I returned to the bucket, it seemed that the stuff was deeper yet, but I couldn’t tell because I hadn’t marked the level. I got Lottie’s fever thermometer out of the medicine chest and took the jelly’s temperature. It read 58 degrees F. The wall thermometer read 58 degrees, too. Room temperature, with the windows open. What kind of “life” could this be that had no temperature of its own?
But then what kind of a fancy-pants metabolism could you expect out of an organism that fed on nothing but Lake Michigan water, right out of the reservoir?
* * * *
I got a pencil and notebook out of Lottie’s neat little desk and started making notes.
I