The Taking

21

WHEN DEREK HAD ASCERTAINED THAT THE MEN'S room was unoccupied, he propped the door open with a trash can and motioned for Molly and Neil to enter.

A strong piney scent rose from the perfumed cakes in the two urinals. Under that astringent fragrance, the odor of stale urine persisted.

The room had three inner doors. Two offered access to toilet stalls, and the third opened on a janitorial closet.

"I had just washed my hands," Derek said, "and realized there were no paper towels in the dispenser. I opened the closet to look for some…"

A light came on automatically when the closet door was opened, and would go off when it was closed.

The closet contained metal shelves laden with supplies. A broom. A sponge mop and a rag mop. A bucket on wheels.

"I noticed the leak at once," said Derek.

The ceiling Sheetrock at the back of the closet was saturated. A blister had formed, then broken, and rain had dripped down through the open metal shelving, gradually saturating the supplies stored there.

When Derek removed the bucket, broom, and mops, the closet proved large enough to allow the three of them to crowd inside.

At the sight of Derek's promised evidence on the wet tile floor, Molly drew back a step, bumping against Neil. She thought the thing must be a snake.

"It's probably a fungus," said Derek, "or the equivalent, I think. That would be the closest word we'd have for it."

On reconsideration, she realized that a colony of mushroomlike fungi lay before her, fat and round and clustered in such a way that they resembled the coils of a gathered serpent.

"It was the size of a round loaf of bread when I first saw it," Derek said. "That was hardly an hour ago, and already it's half again as big."

The fungus was black overall, as shiny black as oiled rubber, with bright yellow ameboid spots edged in orange. That she could have mistaken it for a snake was no surprise, because it looked poisonous and evil.

"The rain isn't a weapon," Derek said, stooping beside the fungus. "It's an instrument of radical environmental change."

Crouching behind him, peering over his shoulder, Molly said, "I'm not sure I follow you."

"The water is drawn out of the ocean and processed… somewhere, I don't know, maybe in hovering ships more immense than we're able to comprehend. The salt must be removed because the rain isn't salty. And seeds are added."

"Seeds?" Neil asked.

"Thousands of millions of tiny seeds," Derek said, "microscopic seeds and spoors, plus the nutrients necessary to nourish them and the beneficial bacteria needed to sustain them-all washing down across the world, on every continent, every mountain and valley, into every river, lake, and sea."

In a near whisper, his voice thickened by a fearful awe, Neil said, "The entire spectrum of vegetation from another world."

"Trees and algae," Derek speculated, "ferns and flowers, grasses and grains, fungi and mosses, herbs, vines, weeds-none of them ever before seen by any human eye, seeded now ineradicably in our soil, in our oceans."

Shiny black with yellow spots. Glistening. Fecund. Infinitely strange.

Had this unwholesome thing indeed grown from a spoor transported with much planning and purpose through the dark cold and the empty desolation of interstellar space?

The chill that spread through Molly was different from any that she had experienced previously. It was not a quivery thing localized along the spine or the nape of the neck, did not shiver through her like a vagrant breath of eternity, but lingered. A coldness seemed to be spawned in the very cavities of her bones, in the red-and-yellow mush of marrow, from which it spread outward to every cell in every extremity.

Derek said, "If these extraterrestrial plants are aggressive-and judging by this creepy specimen, I suspect they're going to be relentlessly in-cursive-then they will sooner than later crowd out and perhaps even feed upon every species of flora that's native to Earth."

"This beautiful world," Molly murmured as the chill spreading through her carried with it a piercing grief, a sense of loss that she dared not contemplate.

"All of it will vanish," Derek said. "Everything we love, from roses to oaks, elms and evergreens-eradicated."

Black and yellow, the plump fungi coiled upon one another, tubular mushrooms nestled in the form of an eyeless snake. Smooth, glistening with an exuded film of oil. Luxuriant. Proliferous and merciless.

"If by some miracle," Derek continued, "some of us were to survive the initial phase of alien occupation, if we were able to live in primitive communities, furtively, in the secret corners where the world's ruthless new masters wouldn't see us, how soon would we be left without any familiar food?"

Neil said, "The vegetables and fruits and grains of another world wouldn't necessarily be poisonous to us."

"Not necessarily all of them," Derek agreed, "but surely some would be."

"And if they weren't poisonous," Molly wondered, "would we find them palatable?"

"Bitter," Derek guessed. "Or intolerably sour, or so acidic they would sicken us. Even if palatable, would they nourish us? Would the nutrients be in chains of molecules that our digestive systems could break down and utilize? Or would we fill our stomachs with food… and nevertheless starve to death?"

Derek Sawtelle's cultured voice, reverberant by nature, rich with dramatic technique polished by decades in the classroom and on the lecture-hall stage, had half mesmerized Molly. She shook herself to shed the bleak spell that his grim words had cast upon her.

"Damn," he said, "I talked myself sober, and I don't like it on this side of the gin curtain. Too scary."

Desperate to refute Derek's vision of their future, Molly said, "We're assuming that this thing, this fungus, is from another world, but we don't really know that. I'll admit I've never seen anything like it… but so what? There are lots of exotic funguses I've never seen, some probably stranger-looking than this."

"I've another thing to show you," Derek said, "something much more disturbing-and unfortunately more sobering-than what you've seen so far."