The tomato rolled across my coffee-spattered notes from the previous night's school board meeting and fetched up against my Garfield cup with a clink. I stared at the fruit, then tapped it with the end of my pen.
Yes, definitely a clink.
I looked up at the elderly woman who had brought me this unsolicited gift, and winced--she wore a yellow-and-red floral-print dress under a man's bright blue nylon ski jacket. "What can I do for you, Mrs. Annaweis?"
"I want you to take a picture of my tomato and put it in the paper."
I had already guessed as much. As editor of the Drinkwell, Saskatchewan, Herald (circulation 1,100) for three years, ever since I graduated from journalism school, I had seen enough four-pound potatoes, heart-shaped tomatoes, foot-long cucumbers and two-headed stalks of wheat to last any sane or insane man a lifetime. Every autumn these bizarre bits of vegetation were delivered in triumph to the Herald office by an unending procession of proud gardeners and farmers like Mrs. Annaweis, now glaring at me through her bifocals. I call it funny vegetable season, and here it was starting again--if in a bizarre manner. "Mrs. Annaweis, this is a lovely bit of ceramic, but..."
"Young man, it grew like that."
I bit my lip. Mrs. Annaweis's stern face defied disbelief. I opted for stalling. "Really?"
"Mr. Harkness, I am not crazy. I picked that tomato and a bushel more just like it from my garden this morning."
"Of course you did, Mrs. Annaweis," I said soothingly, while thinking sad thoughts about senility. I played my ace-in-the-hole. "It's just that I don't think it would photograph well, so--"
Mrs. Annaweis snatched up the tomato. "I'll prove it. Outside."
"What?"
"Outside!" She marched away with such authority I had no choice but to follow, shrugging at my bemused receptionist on the way out.
The lot adjacent to the the Herald's ramshackle office was given over to Drinkwell Community Park, an acre of patchy grass and scraggly trees equipped with four red picnic tables, a single blackened barbecue and a rusting baseball backstop. "Watch," commanded Mrs. Annaweis, and tossed the tomato at the barbecue.
It exploded with a sound like a shotgun blast, spraying barbecue, tables and grass with blackened pulp. A cloud of greasy brown smoke mushroomed skyward.
I found I was holding Mrs. Annaweis's hand. "See?" she said smugly.
I released her. "Uh--yes, ma'am."
"Good. Get your camera."
"Yes, ma'am." Numb, I did as I was told, photographing Mrs. Annaweis standing with propietary glee next to the mess on the grass. Then I went back inside and stared at the phone.
I had a contact in the University of Saskatchewan's College of Agriculture, but couldn't quite bring myself to call her. Somehow I didn't fancy telling a university professor someone had just brought me a fresh-picked hand grenade.
Finally I decided to run the story and photo without comment, like a UFO sighting or Phil Nutterworth's annual report of Bigfoot raiding his chicken coop. "Freak mutation," I muttered as I typed it up. "Pollution. Toxic waste. Ozone depletion."
The next day was Wednesday, paper day, and as usual my morning was devoted to frantically laying out the last few pages while the pressman glared at me over folded, ink-blackened arms, and the advertising manager and his assistant sat at the coffee table and told jokes at my expense. In the afternoon I went home and went to bed. The tomato was momentarily forgotten.
But Thursday morning as I sat yawning at my desk, leafing gingerly through the paper in expectation of finding some horrible typographical error, the story caught my eye: "Local woman gets bang out of tomatoes." I chuckled.
I chuckled again when Art Kapusianyk brought in the radishes--until he cut one open, and I had to waste a cup of coffee to douse my burning blotter.
And Art was only the first of half-a-dozen people stirred by Mrs. Annaweis's fleeting fame. Three more exploding tomatoes, two acid- filled cucumbers and a glow-in-the-dark electric potato followed. The parade of peculiar produce was only ended by the onion someone tossed through the open window above my desk. It took us the rest of the afternoon to clear the gas out of the office, and my eyes were still bloodshot and burning when I drove home.
"It's gotta be a hoax," I muttered, then coughed, and restricted myself to silent black thoughts. Someone was trying to make me look like a fool--that had to be it. Maybe it was an elaborate attempt to discredit the newspaper.
But by whom? That town councillor arrested for growing marijuana in his greenhouse? The used car dealer caught rolling back the odometers? Abigail Runne, irate because her last name was spelled "Runny" in her daughter's wedding write-up?
None of them seemed likely candidates for high-tech humor of this kind. But somebody was behind it, and I intended to find out who.
After gnawing a half-thawed TV dinner, I spread a map of the Rural Municipality of Drinkwell on my kitchen table and began marking the farms of the people who had brought me violent vegetables. A pattern emerged at once.
All six farms abutted on a seventh, belonging to a Nelson Roysum. "What did I ever do to you, Mr. Roysum?" I muttered, reaching for the phone.
"Hello?" said a voice creaky as a rusty gate.
"Mr. Nelson Roysum?"
"Yes?"
"This is Steven Harkness, the editor of the Drinkwell Herald."
"You don't say?"
"Mr. Roysum, we've had reports of some--um, strange vegetables grown by your neighbors. I was wondering if you've noticed anything."
"Strange vegetables?" Roysum sounded puzzled. "Well, no, but then, I don't keep a garden. Just my field crops."
I had a sudden vision of kernels of wheat popping like firecrackers. "Mr. Roysum, may I come out tomorrow and take a look around?"
"Well, sure, young man, if you like. Be my guest."
"Thank you, Mr. Roysum. I'll be out first thing."
That proved to be slightly imprecise, since to reach Roysum's farm I had to first follow one of the grid roads that crisscross Saskatchewan in geometric fashion, then find precisely the right turnoff, and finally keep the oilpan of my 10-year-old Toyota intact over ruts apparently made by the kind of pickups you see crushing cars on T.V.
But at last I drove into Roysum's yard, which was surrounded on three sides by the ubiquitous poplar windbreaks of the prairies, in an advanced stage of autumnal yellowing. The old-fashioned farmhouse, tall and narrow, might have once been painted blue; behind it stood a sagging, weatherbeaten barn, possibly painted red at the same time as the house. In the yard a thirty-five-year-old swather leaned for support against an even older tractor. Four slope-roofed sheds and three shabby granaries completed the farm assets. No one was in sight.
A knock on the door of the house brought no answer, nor did repeated calls of "Mr. Roysum! Mr. Roysum?", so I set off across the farmyard to see what evidence I could find that Roysum was involved in terrorist truck farming. After hearing his Will Geer voice on the phone, I no longer thought he had done it deliberately, but I still had some vague notion of an illegal dump of pesticide containers leaking mutagens into the water table.
I went first into the barn, permeated with the odor of dust, moldy grain and old hay peculiar to its species. The sunlight streaming through holes in the old walls cast narrow beams of dancing motes through the darkness.
In one corner were a couple of horse stalls, sans horses. But something moved, shuffling into the light from the doorway--and resolving into a bent old man in dirty overalls, the prerequisite baseball cap of the Saskatchewan farmer perched precariously on his grizzled head. He squinted at me. "Who are you?"
"Steven Harkness, from the Drinkwell Herald." I held out my hand and he crushed my fingers for me. I revised my mental estimate of his frailty. "Nelson Roysum, I presume?"
"That's right."
"Mr. Roysum, are you all alone out here?"
"Never saw much use for a wife--"
"I mean, do you have any farmhands?"
"Never saw much use for them, either. Been farming this land 60 years on my own. Why, you looking for work?"
I sighed. "No, Mr. Roysum. I'm the editor of the Herald, remember?"
"'Course I remember. Ain't lost my memory yet. Just thought you might be ready for a real job." He guffawed, revealing yellowing teeth.
I managed a small smile. "Ha, ha."
"Now, what was it you were looking for... ?"
"Strange vegetables, Mr. Roysum."
He squinted at me. "Are you sure you're not looking for honest work, son?"
"Mr. Roysum--"
"Poke around all you like. Have fun. But you won't find anything strange on this farm." He shuffled out.
"I already have," I muttered, and followed him. He disappeared into the house, while I continued my search, with depressingly consistent results--all negative. The sheds and granaries were as innocent- looking and empty as the barn. A fruitless hour later I stood at the edge of the farmyard, beyond the windbreak, staring across the acres of ripe wheat that glowed in the morning sunshine like a quilt of pale gold, broken only by the winding, bush-lined path of a creek and the bump of a large haystack alongside it.
Roysum's tractor had been on and off all through my search, as he tinkered with the engine. For the past few minutes it had been idling; now it died again, and in the sudden silence I could hear the cool wind whispering in the trees behind me and hissing, with a more high-pitched, urgent note, through the wheat. It was a beautiful, crisp, absolutely ordinary Saskatchewan autumn day.
I was about to turn away from the field when I glimpsed movement among the bushes along the creek. A deer? I thought, then saw it again. No deer, unless Mr. Roysum liked to spray-paint wildlife bright green. "Some green venison with your exploding tomatoes?" I muttered. Feeling like I'd wandered into a Dr. Seuss book I set off toward the haystack, about half a mile away, aiming to intercept whatever-it-was.
The wheat was tall and strong, the best I'd seen in the region, though it had been dry all summer. Almost reaching my waist, it rustled normally as I pushed through it: no exploding heads, tear gas, fires, smoke or electric shocks. But something was wrong, and it took me only a moment to realize what. There wasn't a grasshopper in sight, though the splattered front of my car bore witness to their numbers elsewhere. That's it! I thought, with the smugness of every journalist who thinks he's solved a mystery. Roysum has sprayed so heavily he's polluted his neighbors' land.
Of course, that still didn't explain the green thing in the bushes, but I was confident my theory would have a place for it--once I knew what it was.
I was halfway to the haystack before it occurred to me to wonder why Roysum had one, when he had no cows or horses. I frowned, but only for a moment. I was on a roll. "Of course!" I said out loud. "He's using the hay to cover the pesticide containers!" Pleased with myself, I redoubled my pace. This could be big news. It might even bump the Saturday night bridge club results from their time-honored front-page spot.
Then the glowing potato whizzed by my ear and struck the ground behind me with a miniature thunderclap. I stared at the black, scorched wheat where it had landed and whipped around just in time to see a tomato heading for my head. Frantically I ducked, and it exploded nearby with enough force to knock me down. Red, pulpy matter dripped from the back of my neck as I raised myself up. I'm dying! I thought; then, crazily, blood really does look just like ketchup. Then I saw the seeds in it. It was ketchup--or, more precisely, tomato paste. I scrambled to my feet, dazed but unhurt.
Both potato and tomato had been bigger than anything brought to the office. I wondered what kind of fertilizer Roysum used.
Another tomato soared overhead, but exploded harmlessly several yards away. This time I marked where it came from--further up the creek, near the haystack--and dashed toward it, urging myself to remember Ernie Pyle and other famous war correspondents.
My unseen assailant fortunately seemed to be short of both tomatoes and potates, but a barrage of round, white objects hurtled toward me, trailing blue smoke. Onions! I gulped air and held it--but there were too many of the vile vegetables. I had to breathe before I made it through the pall of gas, and dropped to my knees, coughing and choking, still twenty yards from the haystack.
Or rather, where the haystack had been.
Doubled over, gasping for breath, I saw through streaming eyes an enormous green oval, pulsing with light. From an irregular opening in the side a tongue-like brown ramp extended, and up it scampered something the size and shape of a small Christmas tree, bright green, upright, with a dozen white, wriggling feet like animated roots and four upper limbs ending in splayed, twig-like fingers. A leafy canopy spread from its pointed top, and six glowing red circles on its body glared at me for a long moment before it ducked inside. Then the ramp disappeared with a wet, sucking sound, the opening closed, and the green oval blasted skyward in a whirlwind of loose hay.
And me? Well, I staggered back to the farmyard, bid an incoherent farewell to Roysum, somehow drove home without killing myself--and never told a soul until now. I have a journalistic reputation to maintain, after all, and the Herald is not the National Enquirer. As for the strange vegetables--people took them in stride, and wrote them off like they did that substitute schoolteacher once seen dancing naked under the full moon to the music of the Four Tops, or the ghostly figure Eddie Macoun swears he saw flitting around the United Grain Growers elevator last July.
But now I know I can't keep quiet any longer.
Try this for an explanation: a wandering, intelligent being discovers Earth--a being which is not an animal, but a plant. What does it find here? A world where plants are completely subjugated to animals, that's what.
Being a green-blooded patriot, naturally it decides to help. It does a little genetic tampering, adding genes that code for an unstable compound here, an increased mineral content there. When it is discovered, it flees. The end.
But I kept asking myself, why exploding tomatoes and electric potatoes? Why create what are essentially weapons when there's no one around to use them? And why didn't the creature do anything to Roysum's wheat?
Then last week I ran into him at the Co-op, and he told me he had the best harvest in all his 60 years, which, he said, was good news not only for him but for a lot of other people--because Roysum grows registered seed.
That means that next spring, hundreds of farmers across the prairie are going to be planting what grew in his field this summer.
When do you need weapons? When you have to outfit an army, of course.
I hope I'm wrong--but next year may be the funny vegetable season to end all funny vegetable seasons.
Watch your weekly newspaper.