“His voice rose into a shriek of agony. What was left of one arm had sloughed off—the other was almost gone. A little mound of gray grew larger at his feet. His flesh was consumed; skin, blood and bone, absorbed by that vile gray Thing, and he shrieked in agony and prayer. Both arms were gone, and the stuff at his feet had already begun to cut through his boots.
“I shot him—between his eyes. I saw him fall, and I fainted. When I came to, there was only a mound of tiny gray fungi, greedily reaching their hellish tentacles for sustenance and slowly shriveling up into tiny light gray specks of dust on a glossy patch of sand.”
Savants No Longer Know All Things
“Men in the business of knowing things have taken a tip from the plumbers, carpenters and plasterers,” announced Friar McCollister, one of the University of Chicago literati. “No longer is it possible to go to a hoary old gentleman with a pile of books and a skull on his desk and ask him any question, from the date of the birth of Copernicus to the conjugations of the verb ‘to know’ in Sanscrit, and get an answer. The scholar nowadays has learned to say what the plumber says when you ask him to fix the hole he has made in the wall: ‘That is not in my department.’ I found this out the other day when I tried to get some information on the discovery of a human skull three million years old.
“First, I went to the information office of the University. There I encountered a sprightly young man who turned out to be a professor of sociology. But he didn’t know anything about men three million years old. He only studied living men, he said. ‘Better go over to Haskell Museum,’ he told me. ‘They have some skulls and mummies over there.’
“I ran up three flights of stairs and into a dusty old room where I saw a Dr. Edgerton. He was copying strange characters out of a book yellow with age. When I put my question he replied that the only ancients he knew were Egyptian mummies. He said I should see an anthropologist. Back to the information office to see where they kept the anthropologists.
“They sent me up to Walker Museum, where a bland young man said, ‘Freddie Starr is not in, but you don’t want an anthropologist, anyway. You want to see an ethnologist.’
“When I found one, after dogging him all over the campus, he told me that the matter really belonged in the department of geology. From there they sent me to see the department of paleontology. At last I located it in a cubby-hole of a museum which I didn’t even know was there, although I have been on the campus three years.
“‘But, my dear sir,’ replied the head of the department to my question, ‘that is not in my department. What you want is a vertebrate paleontologist, and I am only a plain paleontologist. At present we have no vertebrate paleontologist at the University. The last one died a few years ago.’
“Well, I gave up my search,” said Mr. McCollister. “This age of specialization is too much for me.”