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Global Warming Fun 1:
Saved By Right-Handed Grass
“That won’t do it, neighbor,” Ed heard a familiar voice say from much too-short a distance.
Ed Rumsfeld turned towards the voice and to his regret confirmed that yes, there he was: Jerry Green, five and a half feet of skinny, middle-aged, black bearded, pipe-smoking nerd extraordinaire. Jerry was exactly who Ed didn’t need to see on an otherwise terrific Saturday morning in early summer. Weekends were his time to unwind and relax alone in his yard in a quiet suburb of a suburb of an obscure small Virginia town. If he wanted to talk with someone, relaxed conversations with his flowers and shrubbery were preferred over yacking it up with Jerry.
Ed had innocently stopped cutting his grass for a minute to pull a nasty gigantic weed out of his beloved petunia flowerbed. Ed wasn't ideologically opposed to weeds the way that most people seemed to be, but his wife Mary had pointed out this particular weed to him for execution only the day before. He had never seen its like; it was probably one of those tropical mutant weeds that he read about on the internet. The thing was almost as tall as he was and had seemed to spring up almost overnight like Jack's magic beanstalk. It seemed a shame to pull it out; the thing was just starting to bud, and Ed had been curious to see what sort of flowers it would make. But pull it out he did, even though the petunia/exotic weed bed was positioned inconveniently close to Jerry’s yard.
That was apparently enough of an invitation for Jerry. As a rule Ed liked his neighbors to be less social, especially Jerry. Jerry wasn’t really a bad sort, but Ed generally regarded him to be a boring know-it-all with some very strange ideas. “Won’t do what?” he had to respond to Jerry, though even as he said it he knew that he was asking for trouble.
“What you’re doing won’t address the right-handed grass issue, of course,” Jerry retorted cheerily, after pulling a big, profusely smoking corn-cob pipe from his mouth. The billowing smoke pouring from it drifted around Ed, and though he was a non-smoker himself he rather liked the sweet woodsy smell, as long as it didn't reach choking levels. “I noticed you mowing in figure eight patterns this morning, and deduced that was the reason. Your unusual mowing pattern won’t make much difference you should know, since you’re still using a mower that cuts right-handed with respect to the mower, and the marvelous symmetry of the figure-eight pattern makes it rather neutral from a handedness point of view anyway. Perhaps that seems counter-intuitive, but I could show you the math.”
Ed hated math. “I was mowing in figure-eights out of boredom, Jerry. As to your math, I’m a seventh grade history teacher and wouldn’t understand it.”
“I suppose not,” Jerry conceded, looking disappointed. Ed noticed that Jerry always seemed eager to talk with him but was subsequently always somewhat disappointed with their conversations. Jerry needed more nerdy friends, Ed supposed.
“I explained left-handedness and right-handedness to you last year, Ed; remember? Make your right hand into a fist and point your thumb up along the axis of rotation of an object. The direction that your fingers curl defines right handed rotation with respect to that axis. North-latitude grass is becoming right handed with respect to an axis pointing up out of the Earth. Of course the right-handed grass phenomenon itself isn’t a big deal; global warming is causing much worse problems. Worse even than gigantic weeds in flower-beds!”
To make Jerry happy Ed formed a fist with his right hand, and pointed his thumb up and wiggled it, as if he knew what the hell had just been explained to him. He knew that he shouldn’t encourage Jerry further, but he couldn’t help himself. “Worse like that 250 pound Burmese Python they found last week up the street at the Holcomb place? In my view giant pythons shouldn’t be allowed to live here in Virginia unless they help pay the property taxes.”
“It was merely a 200 pound juvenile python, not even a fully grown constrictor," Jerry noted, shaking his head gravely as if pythons were a painful topic for him. "They've mutated much bigger now you know; five hundred pounds isn't uncommon, and even bigger ones are rumored to be in Florida, gobbling up alligators and retired oldsters. This one had just eaten Holcomb’s 50 pound golden retriever when they weighed it the first time, so it was actually a mere two hundred-pounder. But yes, there are plenty of climate change effects worse than right-handed grass, including the displacement of people and spread the spread troublesome exotic mutant animals. Giant mutant pythons and pumas and so forth running amok are rather dramatic and get the headlines lately, but more subtle, quieter things like mutant plants, fungi, bacteria, viruses, parasites and insects actually pose far more serious issues.”
Ed agreed with him there. The Asian ticks and South American mosquitoes were terrible, as winter hadn’t been cold enough to thin them out at all. He was thinking of moving to New England, where winters were actually getting harsher; here in wet, warming Virginia it was becoming as buggy as a swamp. That’s why even though it was already over ninety degrees this morning he and Jerry were both wearing long pants tucked into heavy socks, light colored long-sleeved shirts, and largely ineffective bug repellent. “So what about the right-handed grass?” he muttered. In for a dime, in for a dollar, he figured. Maybe if he talked with Jerry about it now he wouldn’t be bothered about it by the nerd for another entire year or more. “What is the big deal about it?”
“You don’t remember?”
OK, Ed remembered a little of it. Memory is like that, he had noticed. Stuff you need to remember is gone forever, but meaningless crap seems to stick in your head all of your life. “I could use a refresher. It’s an example of that Lamarckian evolution business of yours, isn’t it?”
That returned a teeth-flashing smile to Jerry's thin, hairy face! “Correct! As I explained to you previously, right and left handedness is a way of describing the direction of rotation of objects by scientists and engineers. Much life on Earth is right-hand oriented despite the left-handed orientation of organic molecules. The left-handed molecule orientation was established purely by chance sometime in the distant past when life on Earth started, approximately four billion years ago. Our brains are made of that stuff, but through another quirk of chance that happened only a few hundreds of millions of years ago, our left-brains control our right sides and our right-brains control our left sides. Subconsciously we can’t escape such orientations. This has perhaps biased subsequent mechanical device design, including perhaps even the direction of the spin of the blades in lawn-mowers.”
“Right,” Ed said, even though he didn’t really know what the hell his neighbor was talking about. “So normal grass is right-handed then?”
“No, actually because of the Earth’s rotation, in order to follow the sun, plants in the northern hemisphere managed to evolve left-handed behavior with respect to the Earth because of the right-handed spin of the Earth. That made grass highly vulnerable to the leading edges of blades of mowers that are right-handed with respect to themselves. But recently because of the right-handed lawn-mowers and the advent of stronger Lamarckian aspects to evolution triggered by stressful events such as global warming, northern latitude domestic grass is rapidly becoming right-handed as an adaptation."
"What exactly is this Lamarckism business again?" Ed had to ask, mostly to get Jerry off the dizzying topic of left and right handedness of things that didn't even have hands.
"The degree of scientific ignorance in the public is astounding," Jerry responded, shaking his hairy head in sad disapproval. "In short Lamarckism means that individual traits developed by an organism can be passed on to its offspring. Often such traits are in response to environmental conditions. Of course on the face of it that sounds absurd from the accepted genetic inheritance point of view; just think about it!"
Ed thought about it hard but came up with absolutely nothing. However he had confidence that Jerry would explain it all anyway, not that he would understand it or wanted to understand it.
Jerry drew in several long deep inhalations
of sweet smelling smoke from his pipe before continuing. "Lamarckism is of course totally counter-intuitive to the normal mechanics of evolution. It suggests that traits developed in an individual can somehow be reverse engineered into genetic changes in order to be passed on to offspring. What an absolutely crazy idea! At first glance that's essentially opposite to normal mutation and natural selection driven evolution. Genes engineer traits, not the other way around! Any scientist proposing it without having plenty of proof would be made a laughing stock."
"Sure!" Ed agreed, as if he followed what Jerry was saying.
"Except that it happens."
"It does?"
"Yes, and I figured out how. Certain proteins and genes serve to control other genes, and stress encountered by the organism can chemically increase the influence of one sequence of genes over another during mitosis. A sort of environmentally influenced survival of the fittest at the molecular level happens that becomes reflected in the genes that are passed on to descendants, particularly if sex occurs at a stressful moment."
Ed couldn't imagine a more stressful moment than sex.
"It isn't tremendously specific," continued Jerry, "but acquired traits of the individual do somewhat influence what is passed on. Epigenetic effects become genetic effects. And presto change-o there it is! Right-handed grass!"
Ed had no idea how grass accomplished stressful sex but decided not to ask Jerry. “That sounds reasonable, I suppose. So what’s that minor problem with grass becoming right-handed that you mentioned?”
“That’s obvious. Aside from grass growing slower because it doesn’t respond to sun directionality quite as well, haven’t you noticed that your grass cutting isn’t as effective?”
Ed had noticed. “I figure my blades need sharpening again.” Sharpening the mower blades was somewhere on his handy 'to do' list, which provided a convenient means of putting off things that he didn't want to do.
“That was also my initial hypothesis over two years ago, when I ineffectively cut my own grass. When that hypothesis proved false I looked deeper into the grass issue and other phenomena, ultimately leading to my discovery that the process of evolution itself has evolved towards Lamarckism, probably in response to pressures induced by global warming. Mowing with right-handed mowers is causing grass to become right-handed as a defensive measure. To a significant extent the grass lies down in the direction of the blade motion and escapes being cut."
"Say! Maybe most of my weeds have been right-handed and laying down that way all along! I've never been able to cut my weeds very good at all! But those blades move pretty damn fast, Jerry, and I've never seen my grass move by itself at all. Hard to believe it could move fast enough or even know which way to duck."
"The grass determines that the blade is coming by ground vibration and air motion caused by the approaching blades, after first being alerted by chemicals in the air."
"Chemicals?"
"The grass essentially smells the organic hydrocarbons released by cut grass. That warns it that a leading edge of a lawn mower blade is coming and it gets ready to move to avoid being cut. The grass tenses up, you might say."
"Grass that smells cut grass and gets tense? Wow! I can sort of picture that part, I guess. I still have a hard time picturing grass suddenly ducking down though," Ed mused, "even if it does smell trouble coming."
"It doesn't have to move very far to provide a significant effect statistically. And it doesn't duck or lay down as much as it does a quick little rolling-twisting motion. I've got high speed videos of it all happening. It's a remarkable discovery!"
"Sure seems like it," Ed said, mostly to humor him. He always felt it best to humor crazy people, smart people, and especially crazy smart people. Ever since Jerry moved next door three years ago, Ed had the man pegged as all three.
"The negative effects of this right-handedness are bothersome but minor.”
“I'm sure that's right,” Ed responded, not even trying to be puny.
“Correct,” Jerry agreed, not even noticing the pun. “The right-handed grass isn’t in itself a big problem unless you're a lawn neatness freak, but it was critical to my discovery of Lamarckian evolution mechanisms at work. Environmentally induced traits influence inherited genetics more directly now. Even without the added stress of global warming there always was something akin to that in the process due to environmental effects during the embryonic stage, such as embryotic temperature determining male or female crocodiles. Scientists have been studying epigenetic effects on inheritance for quite some time now. But now the effects have gotten more pronounced and widespread. Somewhere some living thing developed an enhanced ability modify genes based on traits established by individuals, presumably in response to global warming pressures. In brief I have actually discovered the long sought mechanism for punctuated evolution, only due to global warming, now it appears to be punctuated evolution on steroids.
"What's more, I conjecture that Lamarckian evolution abilities are rapidly spreading throughout the biosphere. I suspect that it’s spread genetically by some sort of virus, because practically everything now seems to be showing pronounced Lamarckian tendencies. I suspect that's why insects are suddenly more resistant to man-made insecticides and pollution, and pumas are even larger than they used to be."
"Sounds really nasty," Ed remarked.
"Very nasty indeed. The combination of Lamarckian evolution effects and global warming will make life on this old Earth quite an adventure, I fear. I suspect that it isn’t just warming that’s causing evolution mechanisms to be thrown into high gear; it’s a lot of other things as well: pollution and nuclear waste and so forth. It’s taking hard work to convince the scientific community of all of this though. They’re a rather stogy, skeptical lot.”
“How’s that working out for you?” Ed asked.
“Pretty good! Though still highly controversial, you’ll see my articles in Nature and Scientific American in a couple of months. You’d think that this would be as much of a story as global warming itself, but such publications are usually months or even years behind cutting edge research though decades or even centuries ahead of understanding by the general population. And of course there’s a lot of other research going on nowadays to report on.”
“Of course, what with the crazy weather and giant pythons and so-forth all over the damn place,” Ed agreed.
“Yes there are indeed other very interesting things going on, Ed. My most interesting current project has to do with communicating with ants,” Jerry announced, after a particularly robust puff from his pipe.
“I’ve got a couple of aunts that I have great difficulty communicating with," Ed admitted. "Or did you mean ants of the insect sort? Hey, are you claiming that you actually talk to insects?”
“And more importantly these insects also talk back to me,” Jerry answered affirmatively as he grinned widely. “I’ve used environmental stimulation techniques and Lamarckian principles to accelerate evolution of their collective consciousness and communications abilities.”
“You’ve got to be putting me on!”
Jerry grinned even wider. “Think of hundreds of thousands of ants that contribute to a collective consciousness that can communicate. Like plants, insects rely heavily on chemical processes to produce behavioral results that merely mimic our neuron supported intelligence driven actions. That's a huge field of study now you know, determining the biochemical influences on behavior in so-called lower life-forms as well as the influences on so-called higher evolved life forms such as us. Of course we mammals create many of these influences by manufacturing our own hormones within ourselves. In essence we drug ourselves!"
"That sounds very handy, but all that still seems a long way from talking ants," Ed noted.
"In my ant friends there is a community neural net influencing behavior, as well as primitive chemical-based reactions. They think together as a super organism and consciously control their collective behavior. That should allow them to adapt to
climate change and so-forth even better, I believe. Ants were such fascinating creatures to begin with that I wanted to give them a leg up in this climate crisis that we humans have created.”
“Six legs up, in this case!" Ed quipped. "Well that's nice of you, Jerry, to give one of the already most successful and adaptable life forms on Earth a helping hand that way. But if they could talk wouldn't their voices be just a bit too high-pitched and weak for us to hear? I'm just a lay-person, but ants are sort of small, I've always noticed."
"We communicate through mental telepathy," Jerry explained.
"Of course!" Ed acknowledged. "That explains it! I should have figured that!" This man was a confirmed loon, Ed figured. Ed didn't believe in mental telepathy or any other psychic hog-wash. "But insects with brains? What a concept! Wouldn’t someone have noticed something as radical as intelligence beginning to show up in insects before now?”
“It didn’t exist until I helped create it over the last couple of years. That’s my point.”
Ed shook his head. He noticed what he thought was a flaw in what Jerry was telling him and decided to expose it. “Even I know that’s impossible, Jerry. Even if this new evolution on steroids thing of yours is faster, it would still have to take longer than that, wouldn’t it? Intelligence in humans took billions of years and life-times involving thousands of ancestor species in order to evolve naturally.”
Jerry grinned even wider. “OK, you've caught me red handed! You surprise me with your scientific insight, Ed! Although the new Lamarckism swiftness blows conventional punctuated evolution out of the water by several orders of magnitude, in the case of the ants I've also thrown extensive gene splicing into it. As an analogy, if the speed of conventional evolution is like a rollercoaster, with periods of so-called punctuation when stronger selection pressures favor and lock in mutations more quickly and conventional epigenetic effects are analogous to speeding down little hills, the speed of the new Lamarckian-driven evolution is more like sky diving or riding in a rocket ship, and my gene slicing is like Star Trek warp-drive.”
Ed smiled. He could relate to Star Trek warp-drive.
Jerry's grin suddenly disappeared. "But please keep the gene-spicing part of my venture to yourself, Ed. The authorities would likely frown upon me gene splicing in my garage."
"Sure, no problem," Ed agreed. He hadn't planned on talking with anyone about any of this crazy stuff. Not even his wife Mary. Especially not Mary!
The gene-splicing business had gotten Ed's head spinning even more, but Jerry continued talking anyway. “Now we understand something of the mechanism by which evolution has been accelerated, and it all started with my understanding the right-handed grass. It was the conceptual break-through that I needed! I might have never conceived of Lamarckism and the need for my sentient telepathic ants without the insights and motivation provided by the right-handed grass phenomenon.”
“And what do the ants have to say for themselves?” Ed asked, humoring the man. Always humor a lunatic; that was one of Ed's most firm rules of life. Jerry had to be delusional. Sentient ants? Gene splicing in his garage? No way! Ed happened to know that it took millions of waste-prone tax dollars and dozens of scientists in white lab-jackets working in huge modern buildings to do gene-splicing. He saw it on TV once.
“My ant friends are as worried about invasive and evolving exotic species as much as we are," Jerry continued. "It’s an ant-eat-ant world out there you know, especially now. I’ve arranged a sort of alliance with them.”
“That sounds very promising,” Ed agreed amiably, glancing at his watch. “Well Jerry, it’s been really nice chatting with you about alliances with genetically modified telepathic sentient ants and so forth, but I’ve got to finish cutting my grass before it gets too hot out here.”
“That’s highly advisable, Ed. It should break a hundred degrees again this afternoon, plus we may get more thunderstorms. That’s what the ants say anyway. They have an uncanny ability to predict weather. They directly sense humidity, atmospheric pressure, and the voltage difference between their antennae, and they can actually taste ozone.”
“They would, of course,” Ed agreed, simply to close out the conversation.
Jerry probably went back to his loony ant project and Ed was pleased to return to cutting his grass and weeds. "Look out grass, here I come!" he announced, just in case evolution had gotten even more loony than Jerry thought, and sentience had somehow been passed on to grass from Jerry's ants.
Being able to cut grass again was the only good thing that had come of that nasty Holcomb python business. Four days ago the grass cutting ban had been lifted for the county as a safety precaution. Short grass should make the invading giant pythons much easier to spot, the local authorities figured. Unfortunately, so far grass cutting was their most aggressive response to the terrible climate change problems. Everywhere in the county now, mowers were cutting into overgrown grass and weeds, despite the resulting undesirable increase in atmospheric hydrocarbons.
Oooops! Wasn't this sort of thing pretty much how humans got into the climate change mess to begin with, Ed mused? Do we need to do something that causes just a little more carbon emissions? Sure, let's go ahead and do it! What could only a little more C-O-2 hurt? Go on, cut that grass folks! Reduce carbon fixing by plants and spew more C-O-2 into the atmosphere! And use up that oil! After all, it only took 300 million years to make it! But that was the long view, Ed realized. Humans almost never considered the long view. The short view was that his grass needed-a-cutting so here he was a-doing it with a gas-powered mower.
As Ed resumed cutting, he thought of what he would do if he actually spotted one of the giant reptiles on his property. He quickly settled on a Plan A. In summary, Plan A prescribed that he run screaming into his house and warn his wife Mary not to go outside. Then they would phone the cops. It seemed so simple and effective that he didn’t figure that he needed a Plan B.
“Now what?” he asked himself after a short time. Despite the heat, he had been cheerfully mulching grass with his lawn-tractor near the Smithfield border. Mark Smithfield was the nice quiet old guy that lived alone next-door on the side of his property opposite from Jerry's. Mark's grass, still likely left-handed due to a lack of cutting Ed supposed, had been cut much earlier that morning by the early-rising oldster, and was half a foot shorter than most of Ed's.
However, though there was no breeze to speak of, Ed noticed that over a wide expanse of Mark's yard the shortened grass appeared to be undulating in slow wave-like motions, with many of the waves moving steadily in the direction of his own yard. The mysterious motion was over much too wide an area to be caused by even a giant Burmese Python, and Mark's cut grass wasn’t tall enough to conceal a big fat snake anyway. So what could be the cause? Curious, Ed turned off his lawn tractor/mower, dismounted, and walked closer.
As he topped a small rise he noticed that Smithfield’s yard wasn’t completely cut, and that Mark’s old rusty green Craftsman lawn tractor was quietly sitting unattended in a patch of remaining taller grass not far from where he stood. That’s when he noticed something lying motionless next to the mower.
It looked like a human body, a roughly Mark-sized body. “Mark?” he called out several times, as he apprehensively walked closer. Odd dark shadows seemed to movie across the body, but otherwise there was no response. He finally stepped within a few feet of it.
“What the hell?” Ed muttered, as his mind finally put together what he was seeing. Mark or whomever was obviously dead. The body was a grotesque mass of shredded clothes and raw torn flesh. Atop the remains thousands of big black ants swarmed, creating what looked like flickering shadows as they ripped away tiny chunks of Mark-flesh and carried them away.
Ed stood slack jawed and paralyzed for several seconds until a sharp burning pain to his left ankle abruptly motivated him to look down. All around him thousands of inch-long, dark-black ants swarmed over the lawn, causing the grass to move slightly in wave-like patter
ns. Dozens of them were already on his shoes and working their way up his socks and blue jeans. Though noxious to him his bug repellent didn’t seem to bother them at all. From the news reports he recognized them to be the mutant army/fire-ants that were said to be spreading north from Florida across the country. The tiny Lamarckian mutant on his left ankle was repeatedly driving its mutant stinger-armed rear-end into him right through his thick cotton tube-socks! Crap! Ants with stingers! Who'd-a-thunk-it?
It was time for Plan A. Ed hopped about, brushing ants off of himself as he scrambled back towards his yard, screaming in terror and pain as he went, particularly each time his poor legs were stung again, right through his socks or blue jeans. He had occasionally been stung by bees and wasps before, but this was worse, far worse. Each sting was a hammer-like blow, followed by intense prolonged burning pain, followed by spreading numbness. “Crap,” he yelped, when he slowed his forward limping motion to focus on brushing ants off of himself again. Even as he stumbled forward more of the damn things were getting onto his sneakers, particularly each time he slowed to brush them off. They stung his hands now too, as he brushed them away. Despite his best efforts he was painfully stung again and again, especially on legs and hands!
He had to get away from them, but how? Every square foot of grassy ground in every direction was covered with the damn things! His legs were already going numb and heavy; he didn’t see how he could possibly limp through all of them. Looking about frantically for a Plan B, he noticed his nearby plum tree. He stumbled towards it, expecting to climb it to escape the ants, only to find that it was already crawling with thousands of the nasty little beasts, happily devouring his ripest plums. He was stung repeatedly as he resumed Plan A, though he knew that his house was much too far away – almost a hundred yards. He was tired and numb and already slowing down, which allowed yet more ants to attack him. His poor left leg was stung so many times he was having serious trouble using it at all, and he was panting and gasping for breath in the hot humid air.
There were only a few ants on his uneatable lawn tractor as he stumbled near it, so he hobbled aboard. He reckoned that he would soon be thundering towards home on his Yard-Dude mower powered by a twenty horsepower Briggs and Stratton engine, while his mower mulched thousands of the little bastard ant invaders! He was saved!
Except that his mower wouldn’t start! It turned over and sputtered, but that was it. Somehow the ants had to be gumming up the engine! Meanwhile they had relocated him on the tractor, and dozens of them were swarming up the tractor tires, petals and steering wheel and onto him. His thin cotton shirt provided even less protection than his jeans. Despite his brushing efforts he was stung again and again, on legs, back, chest, arms, and hands. Each time he was stung he screamed. He was saving his screams for special moments like that now; he was too tired to do otherwise. At thirty-five he was still a relatively young man but now he felt like he was eighty. His heart and mind were racing but his body was rapidly losing function.
He knew that he couldn’t stay where he was, but he knew that he couldn’t make it to the house either. From his seat on the tractor through his teary eyes he could see waves of ants advancing throughout his yard. He couldn’t possibly limp through them all. He was in real trouble, and when the ants reached the house Mary would be too! If he had a cell phone he’d call and warn her, and seek rescue by dialing 9-1-1, but he didn’t have his blasted cell phone with him, since he was simply out in his own yard cutting his own grass, in part to escape cell phones.
He struggled to stand atop the hood of his lawn tractor, as it was the only place he didn’t see any ants at the moment. He could barely stand now; he felt like he weighed a ton. He was certainly too heavy for the mower hood; the thin fiberglass obviously wasn’t designed to hold a hundred-eighty panicky pounds of desperate overfed human flesh. It dented and cracked, and probably pushed down onto the engine, but it held him, though unsteadily.
As he bent to brush the remaining ants off of his legs, Ed was dismayed to see that by now hundreds more of them were swarming up the tractor and onto what remained of the hood. He kicked and stomped them with his sneakers, but the squashed insects were slippery and the hood was giving-way further such that he nearly fell down into the waiting hordes of man-eating ants that now completely surrounded the tractor. His left leg gave-way completely and he dropped painfully to his knees, barely managing to not fall off the hood and onto the ground where countless thousands of the monstrous ants waited. Again and again he brushed hundreds of ants off the hood and himself with sting-swollen, blistered hands, but there were far too many of them to stop.
He could feel them swarm all over him now, moving in for the kill. He squashed some that were under his pants and shirt, aggravating stings that were already causing mind-numbing pain. He didn't have the strength to even shout now, he could only moan and blather weakly. He would have to try one more desperate sprint for home and Mary, he decided, even though it would be a hopeless gesture. How many steps would he get, before he collapsed and died like Mark? One step? Two?
“Close your eyes and hold your breath, Ed,” he heard someone yell urgently, over his moaning and sobbing.
“What?” he mumbled.
“Just close your eyes, hold your breath, and hold still,” said the voice, Jerry’s voice.
It was difficult to do, anything was difficult now, but Ed did as the voice asked. He felt something soft brush against his skin and clothing, and he realized that Jerry was throwing something powdery all over him and the tractor.
“You can open your eyes now and breathe,” Jerry said shortly. “Let’s sit you down on the lawn tractor seat again,” he added, as he helped Ed off the tractor hood, and then gently onto the tractor seat. Ed was so unsteady that he couldn't have possibly done it without Jerry's help. His entire body was awash with pain and numbness.
“The ants!” Ed protested, his voice weak and distorted.
“Don’t worry, I’ve taken care of most of the ones attacking you,” Jerry answered. “Too late for poor Smithfield though. My ant friends warned me that this was coming, so I’ve been preparing, but the event came days sooner than we expected. Still, I should have warned you earlier today that this was coming. I suppose that I was too excited about my research.”
“Is this stuff poison?” Ed croaked. Everything nearby was covered in gritty white powder, including himself and Jerry. He had no idea what it was, but it seemed to be tasteless and odorless. However, on and around the tractor thousands of ants were covered in it and writhing about in apparent agony.
“It's diatomitous earth, Ed: trillions of tiny crushed diatom fossils. It's essentially harmless to us if you keep it out of eyes and so forth, but it’s like broken glass to insects, except for my special ant friends. I’ve gene-spliced extra-strong exoskeletons for them. They are completely protected from both diatomitous earth and from army/fire ant stings.”
Jerry held a big sharp-looking syringe and was holding Ed's left arm, obviously with the intent of injecting him with something. That wasn’t what scared Ed though. With sudden desperate strength he stood up on the tractor and pulled his arm away. “Ants Jerry; there are giant ants all over you! Huge ugly bruisers!”
Indeed, Ed had finally noticed that Jerry was himself covered with monstrous dark-brown ants, dozens of them! Each was several times as large as an army/fire ant. They were swarming all over Jerry's body, arms, legs and head, ignoring the white powder. A few could even be glimpsed tunneling through Jerry's thick black beard and head hair as he grinned. “Not to worry, Ed; these are the ant allies I told you about earlier. Any enemy army/fire ant that gets through the powder has to deal with them. Here, I’ll leave a few on the tractor for you.”
"Gosh thanks," Ed muttered, as Jerry placed a hand on his lawn tractor hood and several dozen of the giant brown ants scrambled onto it, where they dashed about and sliced to bits the few surviving army/fire ants, using their over-sized mandibles.
“Try not to
squash any of them if you can help it,” Jerry advised. “I've already told them that you are a friend, and they aren’t as focused on individuality as humans are, but if they view you as a threat that could lead to nasty trouble. You better simply sit back down until this anti-venom takes effect. Relax and my ant friends will give you a good going-over.”
Ed sat back down in his tractor seat numbly as Jerry gave him a shot with the too-large syringe. He was already in so much pain that he hardly felt the needle in his venom-numbed arm, but over the next few seconds pain and numbness began to miraculously recede throughout his body. Meanwhile several dozen Jerry-ants swarmed over him, removing dead and dying army/fire ants and ant parts.
“Thanks Jerry,” he told his neighbor sincerely. “I feel a little better already.” Indeed, he could feel the comforting warmth of the serum continue to spread through his body, as the pain and numbness from the army/fire ants faded away rapidly!
”No problem. I’ll leave you for a bit now to recover while I spread more powder. By the way, my ant friends can read minds, so try to think pleasant thoughts about them.”
“Sure thing,” he acknowledged. “Relax and think pleasant thoughts about mind-reading giant ants all over and around me. What could be easier?”
With that Jerry marched off towards his own lawn tractor, which now that he was less preoccupied by murderous insects killing him Ed noticed was sitting quietly nearby. The big green John Deere had a big rotary spreader in tow. Behind it a wide swath of white powder cut across the yard. Ed realized that Jerry must have already been spreading the gritty white powder in his own yard when he saw that he was in trouble. Jerry then drove straight to him with the spreader and powder to save him. However, he noticed that throughout the rest of his yard on either side of the motionless powdered grass, grass still waved about as swarms of killer-ants marched North across his front yard, and towards Jerry’s yard beyond it.
Not for long, however. Jerry’s Deere started right up without incident. Jerry circled Ed once first, creating a wide protective zone of white powder, and then he proceeded to powder Ed's entire yard and then Smithfield’s. After that he methodically powdered every inch of his own yard, stopping only periodically to reload the spreader‘s hopper with more bags of diatomitous earth from where they were piled high in the back of the pickup truck in his driveway.
“DUCK DOWN, ED,” said a strange voice in his head.
Several of Jerry’s giant ants stood in front of Ed on his tractor’s hood, waving their little antennae at him in apparent alarm! “What’s that?” he asked, as he bent down closer to them to 'hear' better, feeling very silly as he did so.
“Swoosh!” Something hard skimmed the top of his head, and a sudden rush of wind blew white powder and ants about. A giant, black, vulture-like bird had narrowly missed solidly hitting him. After a few flaps of its great wings it landed on Smithfield’s body, where it commenced tearing what was left of Smithfield to bits with its enormous beak. From news reports Ed recognized it as a giant condor; nothing else had a twelve-foot wingspan. He suspected that the huge bird must have seen or smelled the corpse, and figuring to bag two corpses with one bird, tried to knock him out along the way. As he watched, a second great bird landed next to the first one and also dug into Smithfield with its big beak.
“Hey!” Ed shouted at them weakly. “Get the hell away from there!” Years earlier, Ed had donated money to a 'save the condors' fund. Apparently the effort had succeeded beyond all expectations. Right now Ed was re-thinking the wisdom of his contribution.
One of them squawked shrilly, but otherwise the huge birds completely ignored him. Maybe they were saving him for desert. Moments later Jerry thundered past on his Deere, driving straight towards the Smithfield munching condors. The huge birds fled skyward at an almost leisurely pace, slowly lifting into the air as they squawked harshly in protest.
Jerry circled back to Ed and shut down his engine. “How you doing, Ed?” he asked.
“Pretty damn good, thanks to you and your ant buddies. They told me to duck just now, you know.”
“That was a message from me passed to you through them. I’ve been on high alert; I suppose that’s why I spotted the condors.”
“Good thing you did,” Ed acknowledged. “That’s twice today that you saved my bacon.”
“No problem. The powder will provide good protection from the ant invaders until rain softens it up and washes it away. My ant friends will take care of any invaders that get through. Do you feel well enough to drive your tractor home?”
“Strangely enough I do, but my tractor won’t start.”
“My ant friends have cleared away the invading army/fire ants that plugged up your engine's air intakes; it should start now.”
Sure enough, it started right up, though the bashed-in hood rattled noisily. After a shrug and wave goodbye to his pal Jerry, Ed drove it straight home. He never even finished cutting his grass. Let the pythons come, he figured. Maybe that would give the condors and pumas and whatever else something to attack besides him. Besides, he didn’t want to mulch Jerry’s ants, which were by now advancing through the fallen ranks of their smaller enemies, happily carrying countless thousands of their broken little bodies away. It's an ant-eat-ant world after all, Ed mused, as he drove his mower towards his shed very slowly, giving the Jerry-ants a chance to clear out of his path.
He parked the mower in the shed and brushed all the few remaining army/fire ants that he could find off of himself and the mower. Most were dead but a few were still alive under his clothes, and he crushed them, receiving an additional sting or two for his troubles. The stings barely hurt now, he noticed. The shot Jerry gave him was working incredible miracles on his body!
"Oops!" he exclaimed, when he noticed that he had inadvertently crushed one of Jerry's big ant friends. It managed to bite him painfully before it died though, so he figured that they were even. "Sorry about that," he announced aloud, just in case there were other such ants nearby listening. "That was an accident my ant friends; I'll try to be more careful."
Ed wearily entered his home and found Mary propped comfortably on the sofa in front of the TV, watching the latest news reports on the global warming disaster as she munched on potato chips. He was beginning to feel very much better, but he was still quite a sight, given the white powder, ant-sting and bite welts, and smashed ant remains all over him, because when she saw him Mary's jaw dropped. “What the hell happened to you, Ed?”
“No biggie,” Ed replied, not wishing to alarm her. “I had some global warming fun, but in the end I suppose I was saved by right-handed grass."
"Are you alright?"
Ed smiled his most reassuring smile. "Actually I feel just fine. Nothing to make a fuss about, my Love."
“Cool,” she remarked as she returned to watching the news. “Make sure to wash up and vacuum away that mess.”
First Ed phoned 9-1-1 and told them about poor Smithfield and the ant invasion. They didn't seem to be surprised. When he took his shower he was astonished to find that most swelling around stings had receded, and most of the sting marks were by now only smallish red spots that were hardly even painful or itchy. The blisters and welts on his poor hands were almost gone! What the hells was in that shot that Jerry gave him?
Half an hour later after his shower was complete Ed noticed through his bedroom window a strange pickup truck in Smithfield's yard. He dressed in clean clothes and hurried out to the porch to intercept any investigators that would come to talk to him about Smithfield and the ants. He would have to soon tell Mary what happened of course, but he would break it to her gently. She had liked old Mark a lot. He sat in his most well-cushioned, most comfortable porch chair, thinking about how to best break the news about Mark to her. He would have to explain the half-cut lawn to her also, he realized, as well as the fact that the yard was covered in white powder and battling ant armies.
Much to his surprise the pick-up truck pulled out of the Smithfield place in
only a few minutes and was gone. No investigators had sought him out and he could hear no further sounds from next-door. Although he wasn't at all eager to go out into the yard again after his close-call with death that morning, curiosity got the best of him. Though he was still very tired he took a quick hike to where he had discovered Mark's body.
To his surprise there was no yellow crime-site tape marking the area like they traditionally did in the good-old days, and there were no investigators or reporters. Mark's body was gone of course, what was left of it. The ants were mostly gone also, both good ants and bad. A lone condor circled high overhead, looking for more dead Marks, but otherwise the only thing that remained to signify where his neighbor had died was the old rusty Craftsman lawn tractor. The Mark Smithfield Memorial Mower Ed dubbed it then and there, out of respect for the man.
Times they are a-changing, Ed mused as he returned to the house, and not for the better. With so much death, life seemed to be cheapened. A year or two earlier Mark's death due to invading mutant ants would have been sensational national news. Now at most it would only get brief mention as local news. Nationally hundreds of people were dying each day due to erratic weather, animals gone wild, and so forth, and globally many thousands died daily, often as a result of chaotic violence related to the migration of people and wildlife from flooded coastal lowlands and inland areas of drought or flood. What was one more death?
Mark didn't have any family and Mary and Ed were perhaps his closest friends. Ed reluctantly finally told Mary about Mark's death and she became as upset as he knew she would. Together they shed a few tears and said some prayers just in case there was a God, but that was about all that they could do. Mark was gone.
So were Ed's bug bites and stings! By evening there was absolutely no swelling, blisters, redness, or itching, only a tiny red mark where each sting occurred! That was wonderful but highly unnatural. Usually even small bug bites took a week or two to heal. In this case Ed had hundreds of toxic stings that nearly killed him and he probably should have needed to be in a hospital for at least a week, but he felt so good so quickly that it never even occurred to him to even see a doctor, let along go to a hospital. The more Ed thought about it though, the more it bothered him. What was going on? He decided that he would have to ask his friend Jerry.