When will there be an east wind?

A Scent of New-Mown Hay (1958)

[….]He led them out of the hall to the small anteroom that stood behind it.

In the back of the room was a huge metal chest, lying on its side, and vaguely reminiscent of an old type traveling trunk. The Russian stood beside it like a showman about to reveal the big act. He did not bow, but you felt he would have liked to.

He bent down and rested his hand on a lever at the side of the case.

“Draw closer, please, gentlemen. There is no danger, there is a glass screen behind the steel. You have nothing to fear. Ah! much better, now you will all be able to see.

“What I am going to show you is a specimen of the thing you saw so indistinctly just now.”

He pulled the lever.

The steel top moved back slowly, and as he had said, there was a glass panel behind. The light shone clearly through the glass and lit up the inside of the case and the thing it held.

Tony looked through the glass, and suddenly his head seemed to swell. There was a roaring in his ears and his eyes were very painful. He gripped the case and forced himself to go on looking.

So that was it. That was what stood at the end of the maze. That was the skeleton in the cupboard, the fly in the ointment, the nigger in the woodpile. That was the thing that ran behind you in the dream and that you must never see. That was the Gorgon who turned you to stone.

He turned blindly away from the case, groping for a chair and fighting his desire to vomit.

Hearn’s office gleamed with steel and plate glass. He waved Kirk and Tony to seats of synthetic leather and pulled open a cupboard.

“I think we can do with some of this,” he said, and placed a bottle and glasses on the table.

“Too good a brandy to treat lightly, but in the circumstances.” He lifted the half-full tumbler to his mouth and drained it at a gulp.

Kirk followed suit, and his color began to improve. “Ah! thank you, Doctor, that’s much better. Now, gentlemen, we’ve seen it. You’ve been through the available information. What is it? How does it work? Can we stop it?” His voice was once more calm and authoritative.

“May I?” Tony glanced at Hearn, and at his nod picked up the house phone.

“Hullo, is that you, Marsh? Look, it’s Heath here. I want you to go down to the basement, where Mr. Jacobs keeps his mycelium cultures. Ask him to give you a tray at the fruiting stage and bring it up here. That’s right, to the director’s room. Thank you.”

He put down the phone and turned to Kirk.

“Now, General, when we get these specimens I shall try and put you in the picture. As far as we are ourselves, that is. While we’re waiting for them, I’ll run through the general history of the disease, as we have it from the Russians. I use the term disease for want of a better.”

He looked at the thick buff folder and went on.

“Firstly, if you are to understand anything, you have to realize that what you saw just now, could not even loosely be called a human being. That is absolutely essential. There is nothing human about it. True it has once been a young woman of about twenty years of age. It has the remains of arms, legs. Possibly it even had some form of thought processes before it was killed. But it could no more be called human than... than that.” He pointed to the rubier plant in the corner of the room.

Kirk nodded. In spite of the brandy, the horror was coming back.

“Good, now let’s see how it started. About two months ago the entire population of a fishing village became ill. Not gravely at first. There was some difficulty in breathing and slight internal discomfort. This was followed by a violent fever, which soon cleared up and the patient recovered completely.

“That was in the case of the males. Where women were attacked, the infection spread and you get that.” He waved his hand to the door.

“No woman has died from it, and no woman has been known to have recovered. The female glandular structure seems to be more easily assimilated than the male. As I said that was once a young woman.”

He rubbed his hand across his eyes as if to blot out the horror he had seen.

“Ah, thank you, Marsh, put it down there.”

The white-coated assistant placed the tray gently on the table and went out.

“Now, General. This thing is some form of fungoid mutation. What form we do not know. But to give you an idea of what has happened I would like to show you a fungus on a large scale.” He picked up a pencil and pointed to the container.

The tray was filled with rich black compost and the surface dotted with pale, shapely domes.

“These are mushrooms.” He ran his pencil almost lovingly across them.

“But this,” he stirred the compost and revealed a tangle of fine white threads below the surface. “This is the mycelium, the creature itself.

“The mushroom, we know, is only the fruiting body, the reproductive device. These are the roots, the branches, the leaves. These threads grow rapidly under the surface, questing everywhere. They have extraordinary powers of penetration for food. Most other organisms make their own food from the atmosphere with the aid of light, or devour other plants or animals.

“These mushrooms are saprophytes. They live on the dead. The rotting remains of other organisms, of which a fertile soil contains so much.

“Here you see the threads of the mycelium spreading everywhere, invading every cubic inch of territory that can yield them anything, until at last, when it is well established, the creature thrusts up its fruiting bodies to the surface, where they can scatter their spores, and start all over again.”

The pencil moved in his hand and gently split one of the domes, revealing the pinkish gills beneath.

“These are the spores. In certain conditions they may be almost indestructible. There are records of them remaining fertile for over a thousand years. Is that clear so far?”

“Yes, I think so,” said Kirk.

Very slowly his unscientific brain was beginning to understand the relationship between the familiar, loved mushroom and the dreadful thing in the case. Bacon and mushrooms. Toadstools, yellow and musty in a damp wood. White threads in timber, and a carpenter shaking his head and pronouncing dry rot. He became more and more certain that the reality was going to far exceed his worst imaginings.

“Good, then we’ll go on. I have shown you these so that you can get some idea of the general working of a fungus.

“Now, you have heard of course of mutations. The change in the habits, and in some cases the actual structure of an organism into a completely different form. This is obviously a mutation of some kind, though far in advance of anything we have yet experienced. Some form of fungus, we don’t know which, at the moment, has either changed, or more likely been changed into a completely different species.

“With its altered structure and nature it attaches itself to warmblooded animals. Its spores enter the body by the lungs and establish themselves there. In the case of the lower animals and the human male it appears unable to survive long and soon dies out. In a woman it spreads.

“It takes control of the nervous system, absorbing the human cells and blending them with its own molecules. The by-products it produces soon destroy the hormones, the substances that control the balance and life rhythm of the victim, so that you get the terrible physical distortions, the giantism you saw just now. In the last stage when it has almost assimilated its victim, the fruiting bodies are pushed out through the skin and begin to spread the spores afresh. You saw that too.

“The most dreadful thing about it is this. In no instance does the victim die. Oh yes, the thing you saw was dead, but only because it had been kept in that case and deprived of air. That had killed it. Given normal conditions it would still be alive.”

“Just a minute. You mean alive, in a human sense.”

“Well, hardly human as we mean the word. But as far as the Russians know, the basic human structure is not destroyed. This thing does not kill. It doesn’t need to. It is against its interest to kill. It blends its cells with those of the victim, incorporates itself with it.

“In the final form you have a creature that retains a basic human structure and yet its, how shall I put it, its material is purely fungoid. You have a thing that can see and move and very possibly retain some thought processes. Thoughts that, if they do exist, will have one aim and one alone. That of spreading itself to others.”

“I see. And a cure, a means of checking it?” Kirk spoke thickly like a drunken man.

“A cure, no chance. No chance at all. Once the spores have established themselves in the system nothing can be done. As for destroying the original organism, possibly. But only if we can get some idea as to the original cause of the mutation. Then we might do something.”

“And you have no idea of what they could be?”

“Idea. I’ve a hundred ideas and not one of them makes sense. This thing is not natural. It’s made. It’s been made by a guiding intelligence. It doesn’t follow any natural laws, it doesn’t work like any normal structure. If I were a miracle worker I might be able to do something. But I’m not. I’m just a poor, bloody scientist and I know nothing. God! We’ve seen what it can do and we sit here and give you a nice little talk on mushrooms. Hearn and I have spent hours over these reports and we know nothing. And all the time, every second we sit here that stuff is spreading.”

He bent forward and buried his face in his hands.

“Take it easy, old boy, just take it easy.” Kirk’s voice was very gentle and his hand was on Tony’s shoulder. “Take it easy, we’ll make it. We’ll lick it all right. Now just tell me this. How quickly does it spread?”

“How quickly? In the body we don’t know; probably about a month from the first stage to the fruiting period. Before that when the spores are floating in the air, contamination in even a sparsely populated area would be very rapid. Remember these things are minute. Smaller than any similar organisms we have known.”

“I see, then how long would they float?”

“I don’t know, but remember the dust from Krakatoa went round the earth three times.”

“My God,” said Kirk slowly. “Then the question is, how long have we got?”

“The question now, General,” it was Hearn who spoke. “The question now is, when will there be an east wind?”

A Scent of New-Mown Hay (1958)