Button, Button(36)

Other "precipitation postulations" as they were then known in investigative parlance can be safely relegated to the category of "crackpotia."4 These include theories that excess commercial airflights were upsetting the natural balance of the clouds, that deranged Indian rainmakers had unwittingly come upon some lethal condensation factor and were applying it beyond all sanity, that strange frost from outer space was seeding Earth's overhead and causing this inordinate precipitation.

And, as seems an inevitable concomitant to all alien deportment in nature, hypotheses were propounded that this heavy rainfall presaged Deluge II. It is clearly recorded that several minor religious groups began hasty construction of "Salvation Arks." One of these arks can still be seen on the outskirts of the small town of Dry Rot, New Mexico, built on a small hill, "still waiting for the flood."5

Then came that memorable day when the name of farmer Cyrus Mills became a household word.

Tarnation!" said farmer Mills.

He gaped in rustic amazement at the object he had come across in his cornfield. He approached it cautiously. He prodded it with a sausage finger.

"Tarnation," he repeated, less volubly.

Jason Gullwhistle of the United States Experimental Farm Station No. 3, Nebraska, drove his station wagon out to farmer Mills's farm in answer to an urgent phone call. Farmer Mills took Mr. Gull-whistle out to the object.

"That's odd," said Jason Gullwhistle. "It looks like an orange tree."

Close investigation revealed the truth of this remark. It was, indeed, an orange tree.

"Incredible," said Jason Gullwhistle. "An orange tree in the middle of a Nebraska corn field. I never."

Later they returned to the house for a lemonade and there found Mrs. Mills in halter and shorts wearing sunglasses and an old chewed-up fur jacket she had exhumed from her crumbling hope chest.

"Think I'll drive into Hollywood," said Mrs. Mills, sixty-five if she was a day.

By nightfall every wire service had embraced the item, every paper of any prominence whatever had featured it as a humorous insert on page one.

Within a week, however, the humor had vanished as reports came pouring in from every corner of the state of Nebraska as well as portions of Iowa, Kansas and Colorado; reports of citrus trees discovered in corn and wheat fields as well as more alarming reports relative to eccentric behavior in the rural populace.

Addiction to the wearing of scanty apparel became noticeable, an inexplicable rise in the sales of frozen orange juice manifested itself and oddly similar letters were received by dozens of chambers of commerce; letters which heatedly demanded the immediate construction of condominiums, supermarkets, tennis courts, drive-in theaters and drive-in restaurants and which complained of smog.

But it was not until a marked decrease in daily temperatures and an equally marked increase of unfathomable citrus tree growth began to imperil the corn and wheat crop that serious action was taken. Local farm groups organized spraying operations but to little or no avail. Orange, lemon and grapefruit trees continued to flourish in geometric proliferation and a nation, at long last, became alarmed.

A seminar of the country's top scientists met in Ragweed, Nebraska, the geographical center of this multiplying plague, to discuss possibilities.

Dynamic tremors in the alluvial substrata," said Doctor Kenneth Loam of the University of Denver.

"Mass chemical disorder in soil composition," said Spencer Smith of the Dupont Laboratories.

"Momentous gene mutation in the corn seed," said Professor Jeremy Brass of Kansas College.

"Violent contraction of the atmospheric dome," said Professor Lawson Hinkson of MIT. "Displacement of orbit," said Roger Cosmos of the Hayden Planetarium.

"I'm scared," said a little man from Purdue.

What positive results emerged from this body of speculative genius is yet to be appraised. History records that a closer labeling of the cause of this unusual behavior in Nature and Man occurred in early October of 1982 when Associate Professor David Silver, young research physicist at the University of Missouri, published in The Scientific American an article entitled, "The Collecting of Evidences."

In this brilliant essay, Professor Silver first voiced the opinion that all the apparently disconnected occurrences were, in actuality, superficial revelations of one underlying phenomenon. To the moment of this article, scant attention had been paid to the erratic behavior of people in the affected areas. Professor Silver attributed this behavior to the same cause which had effected the alien growth of citrus trees.

The final deductive link was forged, oddly enough, in a Sunday supplement of the now defunct Hearst newspaper syndicate.6 The author of this piece, a professional article writer, in doing research for an article, stumbled across the paragraph recounting Doctor Grimsby's discovery. Seeing in this a most salable feature, he wrote an article combining the theses of Doctor Grimsby and Professor Silver and emerging with his own amateur concept which, strange to say, was absolutely correct. (This fact was later obscured in the severe litigation that arose when Professors Grimsby and Silver brought suit against the author for not consulting them before writing the article.)