THE
margenes
BY MIRIAM ALLEN DE FORD
The tiny, live, straw-colored circles
were mysterious but definitely harmless.
Yet they were directly responsible for
riots, revolution and an atomic war....
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, February 1956.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
There is a small striped smelt called the grunion which has oddegglaying habits. At high tide, on the second, third, and fourth nightsafter the full of the moon from March to June, thousands of femalegrunions ride in on the waves to a beach in southern California nearSan Diego, dig tail-first into the soft sand, deposit their eggs, thenride back on the wash of the next wave. The whole operation lasts aboutsix seconds.
On the nights when the grunion are running, hordes of people used tocome to the beach with baskets and other containers, and with torchesto light the scene, and try to catch the elusive little fish in theirhands.
They were doing that on an April night in 1960. In the midst of theexcitement of the chase, only a few of them noticed that something elsewas riding the waves in with the grunions.
Among the few who stopped grunion-catching long enough to investigatewere a girl named Marge Hickin and a boy named Gene Towanda. They wereUCLA students, "going together", who had come down on Saturday from LosAngeles for the fun.
"What on earth do you think these can be, Gene?" Marge asked, holdingout on her palms three or four of the little circular, wrigglingobjects, looking like small-size doughnuts, pale straw in color.
"Never saw anything like them," Gene admitted. "But then my major'spsychology, not zoology. They don't seem to bite, anyway. Here let'scollect some of them instead of the fish. That dingus of yours willhold water. We can take them to the Marine Biology lab tomorrow andfind out what they are."
Marge Hickin and Gene Towanda had started a world-wide economicrevolution.
None of the scientists at the university laboratory knew what thelittle live straw-colored circles were, either. In fact, after apreliminary study they wouldn't say positively whether the creatureswere animal or vegetable; they displayed voluntary movement, but theyseemed to have no respiratory or digestive organs. They were completelyanomalous.
The grunion ran again that night, and Gene and Marge stayed down tohelp the laboratory assistants gather several hundred of the strangenew objects for further study. They were so numerous that they wereswamping the fish, and the crowds at the beach began to grumble thattheir sport was being spoiled.
Next night the grunion stopped running—but the little doughnutsdidn't. They never stopped. They came in by hundreds of thousands everynight, and those which nobody gathered wriggled their way over the landuntil some of them even turned up on the highways (where a lot of themwere smashed by automobiles), on the streets and sidewalks of La Jolla,and as far north as Oceanside and as far south as downtown San Diegoitself.
The things were becoming a pest. There were indignant letters to thepapers, and editorials were written calling on the authorities to dosomething. Just what to do, nobody knew; the only way to kill thecircular little objects from the sea seemed to be to crush them—andthey were too abundant for that to be very effective.
Meanwhile, the laboratory kept studying them.
Marge and Gen