ROOT OF EVIL

Originally appeared in Science Stories, December 1953.

No one, it seems, can explain away the vanishing of Wilmer Kootz without dragging in the supernatural by its bedraggled tail. No one, that is, if you leave out me. And because I know you want to weigh the evidence for yourself, I’ll give you the events leading up to the vanishing point—and let you take it from there. Here goes:

I was leaning out of the window to look down at the figure struggling across the campus under a heavy load. Dusk blurred everything in the scene into almost uniform grayness, but I got the feeling that poor Wilmer was cracking up. I pulled my head back into the room as he doggedly moved with his burden through the dormitory arch below. I returned to my seat and doodled sundry luscious curves on my chemistry notes while waiting for him to stagger upstairs and into the room we shared.

He elbowed the door open and gave me a perfunctory nod. Before he could set the bushel basket down it slipped from his weary grasp, tumbling out its contents as it crashed.

I clicked my pencil against my teeth. I examined my fingernails. I gazed at the ceiling. I cleared my throat. I said, “Turnips.”

Wilmer busied himself wiping a film of sweat from his glasses. His naked eyes blinked rapidly. He said softly, “I hope you don’t mind my bringing them here. I promise I’ll keep them out of your way.”

I was severely silent. Wilmer hurriedly replaced his glasses and peered at me. He evidently found reassurance because a smile kneaded his doughy face. He stowed his jacket in his locker. On the way back he looked over my shoulder at my notes. A puzzled frown crossed his countenance. “Hum,” he said. “I must’ve dozed through part of today’s lecture.”

I watched him round up the turnips. Finally I said, “Wilmer, I can’t hold out any longer. Why turnips? Or perhaps I’d better put it this way: why turnips?”

Wilmer’s instinctive look of sheepishness gave way to one of holy fanaticism. He lifted up a maverick turnip and said, “You may not know that some vegetable tissue that grows at top speed radiates a kind of energy, energy that stimulates living tissue. For instance, if you place a turnip root at right angles to another root, with the tips one-fourth of an inch apart, the turnip will excite the growth of the other vegetable. Result, the number of cells on the vegetable’s near side will increase by as much as seventy percent. And I’m going to—” For no reason that I could figure, he let his voice trail off.

I’d never thought of a turnip as being particularly exciting—even to another turnip. But Wilmer Kootz seemed to be going overboard.

“Wilmer,” I said kiddingly, “some day I’ll tell my grandchildren, as the little tykes accumulate around lovable old gramps, that I was the college chum of the great Kootz when he began his world-shaking turnip experiment.” So help me, his eyes gleamed moistly behind the thick lenses. And, as always, I was surprised. Wilmer so bordered on caricature of the bespectacled, befuddled, bookish type that I often had trouble thinking of him as a human being with human feelings. His pathetic gratitude shamed me.

To break a mood that was embarrassing both of us, I said heartily, “What say we cook up a mess of turnip greens, Wilmer?” He sprang protectingly in front of his turnips. Hastily I said, “After you’re through with your experiment, of course. Wouldn’t harm them for the world, Wilmer.” He relaxed. “What is your experiment? You didn’t finish telling me.”

But he was evasively vague, and I wasn’t sufficiently rapt about turnips to press him. And because both of us were tired we soon hit the sack.

* * * *

Wilmer was going through the motions of shaving his fledgling beard when I woke. I sat up in bed and stretched my arms. I froze in the middle of a yawn.

On Wilmer’s pillow, a fraction of an inch from the impression of his head, a turnip reposed.

I cut into Wilmer’s cheery greeting. “Wilmer,” I said, “are you part of the experiment?”

His eyes flashed to the turnip then back to me defiantly. “Yes!”

I suppose I gaped; for the first time since I’d known him, Wilmer had shown something like temper. “Sorry I flared,” he said more calmly. “I guess you had to find out sooner or later. And now you may as well know it all.” He paused, but not for dramatic effect; Wilmer was histrionically anemic. He visibly marshaled his thoughts, then said, “Just because I look the student, people think I’m brainy. But my IQ is nowhere near the genius mark. You’ve no idea how I’ve sweated to get good grades, all because my folks were always telling me what heights I’d reach some day. It’s a bitter thing to know your own limitations—and have others expect more of you than those limitations will allow.”

I felt my face burn as I realized that what I’d taken for Wilmer’s pathetic gratitude the night before could as easily have been an agony of humiliation if he had been aware that I was twitting him.

Wilmer was saying, “While I was in the library the other day I came across an old Science—the June 15, 1928 issue, I think. In it was an article called ‘Emission of Rays by Plant Cells;’ I’ve already told you the gist of it. Well, this thought hit me: here’s this strange, untapped form of energy and here are the inadequate twelve billion nerve cells in my brain…

“Now you know. I’m trying to increase my mental capacity so I can do things that are far beyond me now, maybe even surpass Einstein.”

My first impulse was to laugh. Instead I said, and I meant every word, “Wilmer, I hope it works.” And when a warm smile shined his face I found myself blinking hard.

* * * *

In the following weeks the only noticeable change in Wilmer was the appearance of bags under his eyes, the effect of nights spent uncomfortably rigid. It had become a ritual: Wilmer would ease his head into a kind of clamp he’d rigged, then I’d strap his body to the bed, leaving his hands free, and he’d hold a mirror to watch anxiously while I placed a turnip root exactly one quarter of an inch from his right temple. Days and evenings Wilmer spent all his spare time testing fertilizers on the turnips growing in the pots that had whittled down our lebensraum. Whew! I still remember the reek.

I could see no visible reason for Wilmer’s increasing cheerfulness, but one day he assured me that he had narrowed the field to a particular breed of turnip. He said he felt “in tune” with it.

It was about two months after the beginning of the experiment. I was positioning a turnip when I noticed a slight swelling of Wilmer’s temple. I asked the immobilized subject, “Bump yourself today?”

He sounded surprised. “Why, no.”

I touched a finger gingerly to the spot. “Feel any soreness, Wilmer? Any pain?”

“No.” He reached up and prodded the swelling. And suddenly his skinny frame trembled with emotion too big for it, and he said in a choked voice, “It’s begun! It’s begun!”

* * * *

To forestall a lopsided development Wilmer decided to alternate the point of stimulus: one night the right temple got the benefit of turnip emanations, the next night the left. And Wilmer continued to respond. The swelling grew uniformly now, steadily but imperceptibly. You became aware of it only when normal objects proved inadequate, as when Wilmer could no longer hook his glasses over his ears. He held them in place with loops of string tied to the side-pieces, but he gave up wearing them altogether when the flesh of his bulging brow began to overhang his eyes. The most outsize of hats was soon unequal to the project of covering that shining dome. Shining, because Wilmer had lost hair rapidly as his scalp expanded. That acreage was an inverted dust bowl, at the end of the third month.

Wilmer had to give up going to classes. His gait was too unsteady and the great bulbous head bobbled dangerously on its pipe-stem support. I feared that his neck would snap, and I urged him to recline in bed. He agreed willingly enough, because that meant he could undergo continuous turnip-excited cell development.

More than once I started to beg Wilmer to abandon the experiment, but always I fell silent when I looked into the depths of his eyes. Beady little things as they now appeared to be, the thought of the tremendous intelligence behind and almost enveloping them struck me dumb with awe and fear.

But it couldn’t last.

The campus was a bee-hive of rumor, and one day the dean dropped in. He ignored the clutter of the room and directed his attention at the blank wall above Wilmer’s recumbent form.

“Kootz,” he said briskly, “I don’t know what you’re doing. I don’t want to know. You’ll have to pack up this—this equipment and leave. Whispers have begun to reach Senatorial ears that something queer is going on here. We want no investigations, Kootz.” He whisked out.

He was a good old boy at heart, however, and he arranged for Wilmer to take sole charge of an agricultural experimental sub-station out in the middle of nowhere.

Although I was sorry to see Wilmer go, now I was able to attack my studies fully. For the rest of the semester I was busy making up for lost time, but as soon as exams were through I sped toward Wilmer’s station. I felt both humble and exalted as I drove nearer to that mighty brain, for Wilmer might prove to be the hope of the world.

* * * *

The custodian stopped his lawn-mower and scratched an armpit thoughtfully. “Nope,” he said, “come to think of it I ain’t seed that feller for couple-three weeks now. Always keeps to his-self. You can look around, if you want.” He started his machine again.

In Wilmer’s living quarters I found only strewn clothes and a few rotting turnips. I started a tour of the greenhouses, hoping to find him at work. I strolled through one given over to hydroponics experiments. Neatly aligned tanks, containing a variety of growing plants, stretched to the far end of the structure. As I passed, I glanced approvingly at the luxuriating vegetables. I paused before the huge tank at the end.

There, with a vestigial expression of contentment, was the biggest turnip in the world.