Note: "Mounds" was written over twenty years ago, shortly after I was arrested for lying down behind a herbicide tanker thus preventing it from spraying my townhouse complex in Montreal. The story was intended for Omni, a now defunct Sci-Fi magazine. In the resulting confusion of handcuffs ( I'm not kidding .... they actually hand-cuffed me as I sat there in the Gandhian "satyagraha" posture .... which is the ultimate non- resistance pose. And loaded me into the police car, with the obligatory thrusting of my head down to avoid being clipped by the cuiser door. Sheeesh ... why not just knock me out for good measure!)
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I finished " Mounds" and in the days before the miracle of Microsoft Word and electronic submissions, procastinated sending it to Omni as I awaited the trial date. I was already in the process of immigrating to the United States, so everything was on hold pending the result of that trial. I sat there chewing my nails to the quick and promising myself if I got off this time, I'd never engage in any other protest .... ever .... ( a vow which has since been broken ... legally so far ... many times)
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I had a double victory at the trial. Not only did I win, but as my lawyer did cartwheels across the parking lot .... I learned I'd made legal history in Quebec ... winning "defense of necessity".
Heaving a huge sigh of relief, I packed my bags, crated my piano, signed the final papers transferring ownership of my condo to the new buyers and headed for the airport. I reasoned that I'd better get moving before something else arose to tempt me to action ... and more trouble.
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I tossed "Mounds" into a box .... and forgot about it.
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Until a month ago when I learned that 'Authonomy" ... an online site for aspiring writers set up by Harper Collins, was holding a competition for stories and poetry based on the theme of environmental pollution. So I retrieved "Mounds" from an old file box. Typed on an old Smith Corona, the paper was yellowed and some details no longer valid. Heck we've discovered a whole lot of new elements in the periodic table ... some 118 are listed now. At the time I wrote this story there were 105.
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But I liked the story .... and with a few tweaks to bring it up to date and with that wonderful new Microsoft Word .... I think it's worth a shot.
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So here it is! Enjoy ...... and leave comments if you feel so inclined. I have a thick skin ...
"MOUNDS"
The first one appeared in New York in Central Park right behind the Metropolitan Museum. Actually it made a pretty subtle debut, considering the damage it eventually caused. It must have been slowly, almost imperceptibly, pushing up the pathway behind the Egyptian Wing for nearly three weeks before Murphy spotted it. And even then, he wasn’t quite sure.
It was a late September afternoon … almost closing time … when Murphy glanced out the window in the Temple Gallery and noticed that two of the Dutch elms, which normally cast their spidery evening shadows across the East Wall of the reconstructed Temple of Dendura, weren’t aiming those shadows very accurately. After fifteen years on guard duty, he had become so accustomed to the seasonal play of Manhattan light on antique sandstone, that he could nearly set his watch by the delicate tonal variations.
Something was clearly amiss. Murphy walked over to the window and peered up at the trees. Two of them were tilting precariously forward, throwing their branches against the sheet glass and blotting out the familiar patch of smoggy sky. Sky which punctually directed the last frail beams of autumn sunlight against the gallery floor every afternoon between four and five.
As he glanced down at the grassy area around their trunks, he was puzzled to see that both trees appeared to have been partially ripped out of the ground. Their enormous pale gnarled roots were already drying and covered with a patina of dust. And there seemed to be something pushing up the earth around them. The whole scene conjured up a vision of some celestial giant bent on petty vandalism.
Murphy rubbed his chin meditatively and eyed his watch. In exactly seven minutes, the whistle would sound and he could begin shepherding the last stragglers out of the Temple wing. Then he would investigate.
Fifteen minutes later, the little museum guard stood under the larger of the two elms and tentatively poked the tip of his boot into one of the fissures running from the root system along the grass and under the asphalt walkway. It was surprisingly deep and after a few moments of futile probing, he picked up a dead branch which he cautiously introduced into the crack. Even after he had pushed it in a good three feet, he could feel no resistance whatsoever. It was apparently a very deep hole.
He transferred his attention to the pedestrian path which circled the museum towards the park. As it veered off into the trees, he could see that its surface had cracked so badly that several large pieces of asphalt seemed to teeter like ice floes atop the undulating surface of the grass. There seemed to be some sort of fierce pressure pushing upwards, forcing the path to stretch and rise over a very large hillock. Murphy was quite sure that the hillock was a new topographical feature in Central Park. It definitely hadn’t been there a week ago.
He walked slowly over to the mound and surveyed it dubiously. The grass surrounding it was yellow and dying. Even the ubiquitous dandelions had curled up into miserable little balls of crumpled ochre petals. Running from the apex of the mound was a maze of cracks and fissures which bit into the earth, uprooting and apparently killing everything within its grasp.
Murphy felt his stomach contract uneasily. This was certainly not authorized scrub clearance or a new landscaping project by the NYC Parks Division. This was a big hill and a lot of dead vegetation. And it was clearly pushing up the pavement as well as the area around those two elms. It was only about twenty or thirty feet from the gallery wall.
He would have to report this tomorrow to the Museum Director. The thought of knocking on that huge wooden door with Dr. Stein’s name and title written in bold script on a spotlessly buffed brass plaque filled him with dread. Murphy was a reticent man who lived a tentative sort of life, defined by schedules, uniforms and a predictable diet which always included poached fish on Fridays.. He hated change. Even switching from his old Bulova clock to a digital had distressed him for months. Somehow there was security in winding up the old time piece and placing it carefully next to his bed. He knew it would jolt him awake at precisely 6.15 each morning. He could rely on it.
Murphy spent a fitful night trying to reason with himself that perhaps the large mound had been there all along and he had just overlooked it. But there was no way to explain those trees, now leaning over the side of the galley wall. Or the cracked pavement. He would have to say something.
****
Early next morning. Murphy presented himself outside the museum Director’s office where he was kept waiting just long enough to render him nearly inarticulate. When he was finally ushered inside, he could barely stammer out his story about the tilting trees, the cracked pathway and the strange mound. Dr. Stein, a diplomatic man, made a show of scribbling notes on a memo pad.
“Yes, yes …. thank you. I’ll send someone to investigate,” the Director said as he put down his pen and pushed back the chair, rising just enough to extend his hand across the desk to Murphy. He had in those brief moments forgotten the guard’s name and was only vaguely aware that Murphy was an old-timer, as silent and colorless as the walls of the Dendura he had watched over every day for fifteen years. A more perceptive man might have valued the effort such a shy man had made to give his report. Might at least have investigated.
But Dr. Stein had other more important things on his mind. There was an upcoming exhibition of Etruscan pottery and it was arriving in only two days.
Murphy hesitated a moment, aware he was being dismissed and desperate to somehow let the Director know that there really was something very strange happening in Central Park.
“The hill is really very large and seems to be growing or something. It’s pushing over the two trees very close to …… “ he added.
But Dr. Stein’s head was already bent over his papers.
####
Ten days later, the larger of the two elms suddenly crashed through the plate glass window onto the East wall of the Temple of Dendura.
The museum authorities snapped to attention as Dr. Stein suddenly made himself quite visible, waving his arms about and barking out orders to a posse of workmen who somewhat belatedly chopped the second elm down to a harmless stump. Then he cordoned off the section of the park adjacent to the damaged Egyptian wing and brought in a team of armed guards to prevent looting. Meetings were quickly held to discuss the dismantling of the Temple and the removal of most of the exhibits to a safer place for temporary storage.
The Press of course, was swift to respond with a series of dramatic photographs and several reporters arrived to interview Dr. Stein, who since he had ignored Murphy’s report of the mound, knew absolutely nothing beyond the fact that the tree had crashed through the gallery window. Murphy took a somewhat uncharacteristic pleasure in the Director’s embarrassment and even went so far as to approach one of the reporters as he was leaving to offer his own account. But the story had to be filed on time and the reporter merely smiled and waved him away.
There was a considerable amount of speculation in the following weeks. As the mound behind the building continued to bulge steadily upwards and three more trees toppled over, it was obvious that something very peculiar was happening deep under Central Park and it was obviously not a water pipe leak. The fear that the mound might actually erupt was voiced repeatedly in the press and on the evening news.
After two weeks or so, several geologists from Lamont arrived on the scene and were quickly followed by a seismologist from San Francisco. Armed with a battery of complicated measuring devices, calculators and sample bottles, they eagerly perambulated the area, tabulating and theorizing.
Finally the seismologist declared that there was absolutely no danger of a volcanic eruption … a fear which had been voiced by the New York Times almost daily. And that the pressure build-up seemed to involve only the surface strata. But the geologists firmly disagreed and warned that the areas around the mound should be strictly cordoned off and neighboring museum buildings evacuated. Nevertheless, inquisitive crowds grew to unmanageable proportions and the NYC police department was strained to its limit merely controlling the hordes of people milling around the park.
As the first mound behind the Museum swelled relentlessly, toppling tress and tearing away fragments of the West Wing, several other mounds popped up all over Manhattan within the month. Three of the hillocks appeared in Riverside park, one of which eventually all but demolished Grant’s Tomb. Two smaller ones erupted on the Columbia campus grounds just outside the administration building and one large one, growing very rapidly, arose in the Battery.
The appearance of more mounds changed the public mood from curiosity to apprehension. Fear began to spread, well fueled by the tabloids and television, which scrupulously documented each new mound and provided a daily updated catalogue of buildings damaged and trees uprooted. However no lives had been lost and the mounds did provide a novel excitement to a city numbed by long sultry summer days and routine urban crimes.
But after a few weeks, reports began to trickle in of mounds appearing in such far-flung places as Singapore and Nairobi. Canada announced a positive rash of the excrescences along Lake Ontario between Toronto and Hamilton, while Los Angeles claimed a total of sixty-three in the space of less than a week. There were rumors that several had appeared in Moscow, but there was no mention of the fact in Pravda and Russian officials insisted that the Soviet Union had not been afflicted.
China admitted to three in the garden of the old Winter Palace in Beijing, but seem unperturbed by the situation. India reported several near the Union Carbide site in Bhopal and reiterated its long-standing complaint against foreign multinationals. And Japan, after a long period of vacillation, finally owned up to a crop of ninety-five mounds mainly concentrated around Tokyo and its most heavily industrialized suburbs.
But it wasn’t until the first one actually erupted, that the magnitude of the situation was fully realized. One of the earliest mounds near the southern limits of Central Park, took the honors one afternoon about four o’clock. Apart from a low rumbling sound, the climactic moment was unannounced. Suddenly the mound exploded, hurling tons of a nauseous, bile-green substance hundreds of feet into the air, where it hovered for only a moment before descending in a seething hot mass onto the ground below.
That first eruption engulfed fourteen by-standers, three dogs, two cars and the back portion of a bus. A total of twenty-three people succumbed, not including the three dogs.
Terror promptly set in.
Mass evacuations began. Parks closed, offices and homes were temporarily abandoned as people fled to safer areas. Even the slightest elevation of the earth began to be viewed with suspicion as paranoia took firm hold of the populace. The media doubled its efforts to inform the public and statistics were hastily compiled and hourly bulletins issued in which each mound, its location, its growth rate and its estimated eruption time were announced.
All this frenetic publicity instantly galvanized the international community. Realizing that what had occurred in Central park might very well have its sequel in their own countries, world leaders eagerly joined forces scientists to combat the new menace. And of course their fears proved quite justified . In a few weeks, eruptions were recorded around the globe. Every country seemed to be equally helpless against a situation without precedent.
The truth was, no one had the lightest idea what caused the mounds, why they seemed to pop up in specific areas or in fact, what they actually were. They obviously weren’t ordinary volcanic eruptions … they were much too small and grew much too quickly in places not normally conducive to volcanic activity. Even the weird substance they produced looked more like pus than lava.
Further compounding the confusion was the fact that the mounds seemed to erupt at random. Sometimes a very small one would suddenly explode, hurling a disproportionate amount of the seething goo into the air, while a much larger mound might simply subside and gradually disappear. There appeared to be no way to predict their behavior.
Samples of the noxious exudate were of course immediately dispatched to laboratories across the globe. The results were surprisingly unanimous amongst a community not noted for it homogeneity of opinion.
The substance was a totally new compound.
It consisted of all known hundred and five elements in varying proportions, plus several undiscovered ones. At different temperatures, it exhibited the properties of a liquid, gas or solid, with several intermediate stages of viscosity. Ejaculated at very high temperatures, it gave off an indescribably foul smell, yet when it hardened it was odorless. Extremely caustic when hot, it lost those corrosive properties entirely as it cooled. And it ran through a whole gamut of consistencies before finally reaching an almost glass-like state twenty four hours after eruption.
It defied analysis.
But the lethal effects on anyone unfortunately near enough to one of the mounds to be engulfed by it, were beyond dispute.
The great migrations began, even as more of the mounds appeared daily and more of them erupted. It was obvious now that the entire globe was afflicted. And it quickly became apparent that urban areas were at highest risk. So people began steadily moving out of the cities towards rural areas, heading for open farmlands, mountain areas, dessert and scrublands … anywhere beyond the range of the mounds.
Meanwhile, most of the scientific community, unable to decipher the exact formulation of the foul discharge, discreetly shifted their emphasis towards finding the reason why the mounds seemed to favor urban areas. And the answer was reasonably forthcoming. The mounds evidently thrived on industrial pollution. The murkier, smokier and smellier the air, the more likely the mounds were to make their appearance and the percentage of them which erupted was much larger. But a cure for the problem was nowhere in sight. So the migrations away from the cities swelled relentlessly as the public gradually sensed the utter hopelessness of the situation.
####
Several months passed before an anthropology student at McGill University in Montreal finally stumbled upon the illusive antidote. Literally.
Two hours before his fortuitous discovery, Maxwell Hartford had been experimenting with a pretty red-capped mushroom which a colleague had brought back from a trek to Vermont. After identifying it as a large and exceptionally fine specimen of Amanita Muscaria, he set about preparing it for ingestion. Assiduously peeled, sliced, boiled and then soaked in three changes of cold water, the resulting pale ivory slices of macerated fungus were unexpectedly bitter to the tongue.
Maxwell threw up twice, then found himself falling slowly through a kaleidoscope of moving colored shapes, each of which he seemed to be able to hear as a definite note on the musical scale. He thought that the cherry red might be an A flat.
“Synesthesia … the transposition of sense experiences ……” he muttered to himself as he reached futilely for his notebook.
After some time, the colours and their corresponding tones seem to fade and Maxwell decided that a stroll through the campus might clear his head and bring him down. So he was still in the pleasantly euphoric stage of his trip when he stepped outside the students’ residence and wobbled off the path into a formidable dog mess. He promptly sat down on the lawn and minutely examined the pile of excrement. The surrounding grass seemed exceptionally lush, green and healthy. He crooned to the little heap for a few moments before stretching out on his back and falling asleep.
Several hours later, Maxwell awoke to find himself curled protectively around a small pile of dog shit. He was both cold and sober. But as he jumped up and wheeled around towards the dorms, something about the lushness of the grass framing the feces caught his attention. Most of the turf on that particular area of the campus had turned yellow and dried up when a small mound erupted beside the residence about a month earlier. The building had been briefly evacuated and the glass-like exudate cleared away. But since the raised mound had been subsiding very slowly and no one wanted to go anywhere near it, the dead grass had not been replaced.
Staring down at the small green patch, he realized that several other canine contributions dotted the entire area. And the grass around each pile of droppings was rich and green and healthy.
Glancing at the now moribund mound, he noticed that it was slightly asymmetrical. In fact it seemed to curve around the green areas like raised scar tissue. Something about the excrement might be somehow protective, Maxwell reasoned. Perhaps … if one smeared organic waste … like fertilizer …?
####
Maxwell Hartford was of course quite correct. In a matter of days, the entire university was busily testing its brilliant young researcher’s theory. Students eagerly shoveled truckloads of manure cadged from the Agriculture Department all over the campus lawns. And when a small new protuberance made its appearance in Victoria Square near the heart of Montreal city, it was duly smothered with several truckloads of horse manure. The mound obligingly subsided. And in a matter of hours the news was out.
A cure had been found!
And it was simple. So simple that many esteemed scientists wrestling with the problem for the past few months, felt just a little cheated. True, they has quite quickly pinned down the conditions which appeared to promote the horrible eruptions. Areas where there were concentrations of several very common chemicals. Carbon dioxide was the main culprit. Followed by sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, methane, a whole range of organo-phosphates and various by-products of plastics manufacturing.
The cause was relatively simple to track down, but the cure had proven to be much more elusive, until an unknown student came up with a solution which seemed too simple to be true.
Organic waste.
Just organic waste. Incredible! And almost any mélange would suffice, so long as it contained no traces of raw chemical matter. Animal waste was very effective. But so was any combination of rotting organic material. Paper apparently contained some chemicals which inhibited its protective value, while plastics were of course useless. But ordinary kitchen scraps were just perfect.
####
In a matter of days, compost heaps sprang up all over North American suburbs and neighbors eagerly began trading information and temperature readings over their back fences. On the other hand, city dwellers were inundated by an avalanche of pamphlets printed by a mind-numbing array of interested parties. From churches, stores and schools to political candidates and the Boy Scouts.
Elaborate blueprints for building apartment-sized compost heaps, utilizing everything from large plastic trash bins to the family bathtub appeared everywhere. There were detailed instructions on alternate methods of reducing garbage to easily assimilated sludge. Bulky booklets meticulously tabulated every conceivable waste item as either “Organic” or “Non-organic”. And finally there was the inevitable moral warning that one ought to be generous with one’s garbage, to spread a portion of it on nearby parks and to share it with a needy neighbor.
“REMEMBER … A MOUND CAN APPEAR ANYWHERE. Save yourself and your neighborhood by spreading generously.”
Community “spreads” were organized every weekend in the public parks and playground areas. At first, these occasions were well attended and there was often a frankly festive feeling as families pulling large plastic bags of garbage, flocked to deposit their contributions over the open public spaces. But after a few months, attendance began to flag in many areas and it became necessary to divide larger urban spaces into smaller zones and assign each residence individual responsibility for a proportionate public areas. Huge fines were posted for laggards in the matter and petty squabbling broke out in epidemic proportions.
But in the initial enthusiasm for this simple and effective solution to the problem of the mounds, another major problem had been overlooked. As incidents of fresh mounds declined and fewer began to appear, a certain sense of relief began to filter through the populace. There was a feeling that they had some control over the menace. And as they felt less threatened, they also became much more critical. And alternate methods of controlling the mounds began to be voiced quite loudly.
Because there was no doubt about it. The stench was horrendous!
####
At this point a businessman from Bombay introduced an idea calculated to line his pockets and cater to the unseemly sensitivity of Western noses. The stench factor of decaying organic waste had gone relatively unnoticed in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, cities long inured to open sewers and unreliable garbage collections. Of the hundreds of mounds scattered over the entire Indian subcontinent, only five had actually erupted. One in Delhi’s posh Connaught Circus shopping area, one near Howrah train station in Calcutta, two in Bombay and a particularly large one in Bhopal.
Obviously there was a good balance of organic waste protecting these huge metropolises and as Motilal Kapoor’s shrewd eyes wandered over the smoggy Bombay skyline one evening, he decided that his small plastic extrusion company should diversify.
Quickly. Because even if he had recently managed to steer the pollution control inspector away with a fat roll of rupee notes, there was no doubt about it … the future wasn’t in plastics.
It was definitely time to branch out a bit. Motilal Kapoor promptly jumped into the export business. He was supremely confident of his product. Shredded and pulverized, tons of urban garbage and municipal sewage began the tortuous journey from Bombay to acres of sludge pans some two hundred miles north of the city. After several days’ exposure to the broiling sun and a series of ‘secret” sanitizing and deodorizing processes, the resulting desiccated grayish material was duly packed into environmentally correct burlap sacks. Which gave a tremendous boost to two villages which eagerly resuscitated a dying burlap business.
“Two birds with one stone,” gloated Kapoor with more accuracy than originality.
“MADRAS MULCH” became an instant success. In a matter of months, Kapoor was forced to go public to finance his rapidly expanding enterprise and within six months, he had extended his operations to fifteen major cities in India and was considering offering franchises to Pakistan and China.
The stock value rose so rapidly that the Indian government stepped in and levied surcharges on share transfers to curb the hectic speculation. But nothing seemed to deter investors. Non-residents applied for each new share issue in such large umbers that eventually they were allotted only a certain percentage of the available shares.
It was inevitable that competitor around the world would begin to marshal their forces and move in on the action. In a year, no less than fifteen new sludge companies featured on the New York stock exchange and their shares rose astronomically. But demand outpaced supply and Motilal Kapoor’s “Madras Mulch” remained the hot favorite. And he raised his prices in perfect tandem with that demand.
But consumer complaints about shortages and high prices were minimal as people quickly accepted the proper priorities. The dried and sanitized mulch was miraculously effective, reports of eruptions became rarer and rarer. Gradually people began to sense a return to normality. In public parks and private gardens., the occasional blade of fresh green grass pushed its way warily through layers of professed sludge and here and there, one could sport a welcome dandelion or two. There was a feeling of hope lurking in the air as the dun-colored earth began to display small signs of life.
Exactly a year after the last mound in America slowly receded and was absorbed back into the morphology of Mother Earth, the U.S. Government Environmental Agency declared the emergency over. The other governments around the world quickly followed suit.
The world had somehow been given a reprieve.
####
A few months later, a wealthy publisher form Boston donated a huge sum of money to the New York Metropolitan Museum to help repair the damage to the Egyptian Wing. He also financed the erection of a large marble obelisk directly over the site of the first eruption in Central Park.
Murphy was relieved of his rather tedious guard post and upgraded to a guide for the Temple of Dendura. He became something of a celebrity and the museum Director chose to overlook his penchant for diverting visitors away from the exhibit towards the commemorate obelisk in Central Park. Murphy had after all reported that first mound.
Dr. Maxwell Hartford graduated from McGill and took over the Anthropology Department. He became particularly interested in the tribal use of psychotropic substances in religious ceremonies and wrote numerous papers on expanded consciousness and transpersonal awareness. His office walls were lined with jars of various dried plant specimens, which he ingested from time to time … in search of what he referred to as “gratuitous grace’. He was frequently spotted roaming around the campus at off hours, scuffing the grass and intently observing the turf. But since he was the man who’d found the solution to the mounds and had even been short-listed for the Nobel prize, his eccentricities were tolerated.
Motilal Kapoor became a very wealthy man indeed, with a business empire stretching well beyond the boundaries of his native India. When the demand for his processed sludge waned as the situation stabilized, he was in a fine position to diversify. But somehow he felt a certain disappointment. There had been something very satisfying in the whole situation, something which appealed to his sense of social justice.
The detritus of the Third World begin lovingly packed and shipped around the world. On a priority basis. Eagerly awaited and quickly utilized. Something more satisfying in the situation than the actual profits.
But it was a situation he was pretty sure wouldn’t recur.
Gaiea had simply suffered from a bad case of acne.
*Gaiea … Earth or Earth Mother. The Gaiea hypothesis suggests that the planet Earth is a single multi-cellular living organism.
