Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes Read Online Free

of many curves like buttocks or breasts, depending on how one chose to interpret them. Some won prizes. One nearly-abstract resembled a plump woman holding a beach ball; another of a seated figure was called “Maternity.”
    The cemetery ground, though lower, continued to throw up its strange fruit. Masked and gloved workers—old pensioners mainly—hacked at their bases with hoes, as they might have hacked at stubborn weeds in their gardens at home. The roots of some growths were so deep that the workmen were inspired to suggest that the ground be excavated and burnt again. The town authorities were sick of it. They had already spent millions of schillings. They would simply keep the whole area fenced off and try to forget it. The road there didn’t go anywhere except past the empty hospital and up into the mountains where it became a lane used mostly by hikers. The cemetery would be forgotten. The press had already fallen silent on the subject. It was known that doctors had been conducting experiments relating to cancer in the National Hospital, but the blame for the cemetery’s condition was spread over so many, that no doctor or hospital administrator was charged with responsibility.
    The authorities were wrong in thinking that the cemetery would be forgotten. It became a tourist attraction, surpassing by far the popularity of the Geburtshaus in G— of a minor poet. Postcards of the cemetery sold fantastically well. Artists came from many lands, scientists too (though their tests on specimens taken from the cemetery yielded no further information on the causes and cures of cancer). Artists and art critics commented that nature’s designs, as manifested in the cemetery’s growths, surpassed those of crystals in ingenuity and were not to be despised aesthetically. Some philosophers and poets compared the grotesque shapes to a man-made wreckage of his own soul, to an insane tinkering with nature, such as that which had resulted in the accursed atomic bomb. Other philosophers countered: “Is cancer not natural to man?”
    Oktavian remarked to Marianne that they were safe in asking such a question, because the answer could be yes and no, or yes or no to various people, and the talk about it could go on forever.

Moby Dick II; or the Missile Whale
     
    It was the middle of the warm season, when the sun lay bright on the blue water, and the little fish swam near the surface. He cruised along near his mate, basking in the warming waters as she did, sounding sometimes for pleasure, rising to leap like a dolphin in full sunshine before crashing back into the soft sea. His mate was soon to have her pup, and she swam more slowly, nudging curiously into coves of islands. Both knew islands were dangerous, men lived on islands, but a mother whale likes to give birth in shallow water.
    The South Pacific held not many ships where they were, and these few were long low things that kept a steady course. The little islands, so harmless looking, were more sinister, because of the catamarans and even canoes that sometimes set out after them, not to mention the occasional boat with a motor, sometimes equipped with a harpoon gun.
    The whale and his mate had been together all their adult lives. This would be her second pup. The first, a female, having swum with them a long while, got lost a few times and been found again, thanks to the voices of the anxious parents, had in due time swum away on her own.
    On one sunny afternoon, his mate turned toward a low-lying stretch of yellow land, and he followed at a distance. The water was not deep, and diving just a little way he could scrape the sand with his belly. Yellow-and-black-striped fish twitched and flitted out of his way with all the power in their tiny bodies. He might have captured several, strained the water out of his mouth, and enjoyed a titbit, but with a delicate wave of his tail he moved closer to the island and hung motionless in the water, listening for his mate. He heard a