trees

by fred flynn

once upon a time there was a mad scientist named professor glumm. he decided to conquer the world by developing an army of creatures called shmucks who would regard him as a god and do his bidding. he rented a farm outside watertown new york, and with his assistant, grub, began breeding and raising the shmucks. in order to feed the shmucks, the professor and grub planted a number of morb trees and an equal number of mumm trees. the morbs contained vitamin b and the mumms contained vitamin c. things went well at first, as the young shmucks absorbed their early lessons. the professor and grub noted that the little shmucks seemed to prefer the fruit of the morb trees to the fruit of the mumm trees, but as they generally ate what they were given, this was not seen as a problem. but as the shmucks got bigger and older, they began to show a distinct preference for the morbs over the mumms. they began leaving their dormitories at night, and stripping the morb trees bare. the mumm fruit began to pile up and rot under the mumm trees, because the shmucks refused to help grub gather them. the professor himself took hours off from writing his papers to help his overworked assistant, but it was to no avail. nothing the professor or glum could do or devise could persuade the shmucks to eat the mumm fruits. deprived of their necessary amounts of vitamin c, the shmucks grew restless, inattentive, and surly in class, and even more restless and surly at night in their dormitories, and they began plotting against professor glumm. finally, a leader emerged among the shmucks, and they broke into the professor’s mansion and murdered him in his bed and escaped into the countryside. glum and a young shmuck female hitchhiked into syracuse. they got married and opened a convenience store which aggressively promoted the sale of lottery tickets. the rest of the human race, not realizing what a close escape it had had, went about its business.