The Pollinators of Eden (12 page)

“Oh,” he dismissed the incident, “Heyburn was simply provoking the moral equivalent of a street riot. You have to give the crowd its bread and circuses. Stripped of rhetoric, Heyburn knew that I was behind the Flora petition, and he would have known it if I had been in South Africa during the hearings… I liked that ‘Easter egghead’ he tagged on Charlie… Of course, I’m sorry you were involved. I should have suspected Gaynor was up to something when I met you in Bakersfield, but, hell, I can’t worry about anybody’s plots but my own.”

He held the taxi door for her, and as he slid into the seat beside her, she asked, “What was the argument about cheating God and breaking the circle?”

“Some more barnyard oratory. The universe collapses and explodes, in and out, like this.” He moved his hands like an accordion player’s. “And he wants me to rev up a starship to a velocity that will send it out of space and out of time. In that condition, you are nothing and no longer subject to natural laws—beyond God, in Heyburn’s language.

“It would be a simple matter, according to Goldberg’s Law of Diminishing Entropy, to figure when the next explosion will occur and make a round trip into nothingness with preset controls to come back during the next cycle with fully evolved human beings, their technology microfilmed and ready. But I can’t buy it—lurking outside the law, waiting to pounce on a virgin universe.

“We’d control evolution, and then what would the next cycle produce? More Heyburns? Who among us is qualified to twist the helix?”

“Surely there must be some worthy persons. You even mentioned me.”

“Would you like to go?” he asked seriously.

“Certainly not! I’d be a very defective specimen.”

“Your answer qualifies you for the voyage and proves my point. At Santa Barbara, we call it Catch-69. Those who are qualified to go won’t go. Only predators, the greedy and power hungry, would be willing to wait outside the law and pounce on a virgin universe. They would have absolute power over the wellsprings of creation. Since absolute power corrupts absolutely, who wants a totally corrupt God? No, Freda, my ship won’t carry no fakers, marihuana smokers, or acid-trip takers.”

For a moment he paused, then added, “So, I’m sending no ship.”

“What about your seeds?” she asked.

“Seeds? Oh, they conform to law.”

When she and Hans got back to the hotel, there was another telegram from Hal: “Am getting assistance from unexpected source. God bless the grass of Flora! Soon, tulips will be in Bakersfield; tomorrow, the world! Strumming a dissonant guitar in Old Town. Having a wonderful wish. Time you were here.”

Both vexed and amused by his language, she noticed the dateline was Friday night and that it had been sent from Fresno. She handed the telegram to Hans, who was checking out at the desk, and said, “Interpret this.”

Hans glanced at it. “The tulips are adapting to earth so fast they need controls. ‘Tomorrow, the world’ was the slogan of twentieth-century Nazis, who set out to conquer the world. Since he’s been freed of stoop labor by some undesignated pollinator, he’s playing a guitar in a jazz joint.”

“Do you think he was drunk when he wrote it?”

“No,” Hans said, “His spoonerism is too apt. The boy has a man-sized crush on you.”

“Oh, Hans.” She blushed. “He knows I’m engaged.”

“Which only makes you more of a challenge… Keep in touch with me about those tulips, Freda, but don’t feel hurt if I don’t answer your letters. When I’m solving impossible problems, I tend to get absentminded.”

Because of the blizzard, there was a two-hour delay in the takeoff for the land of irrigated geraniums. As Gaynor and Berkeley dozed in the seats ahead, Freda and Hans enjoyed their last double martini together on the one-cocktail flight. Between them lay the bittersweetness of parting for two, Freda thought, who had loved not wisely and not too well.

Hans tended more toward the bitter. “I feel guilty about you, Freda,” he complained, “because you reflect on my chess playing. I tried to sacrifice a pawn, Gaynor, but Heyburn jumped him to capture the queen, you.”

“Gaynor was responsible for the sacrifice/’

“Yeah, he got in the game. But the game’s still in progress. Clayborg hasn’t lost.”

“Caron has,” she said.

“If life were played by chess rules, yes,” Clayborg admitted. “Heyburn’s unofficial reprimand hurt you. As time passes and his august reputation grows and senility hardens his dislikes, he might block your appointment to the bureaucracy—if you can get by Gaynor.”

“I’m a realist, Hans. Gaynor will assign me to pure research, and I’ll end my days puttering around among potted plants.”

“There’s another way to go—my way,” he said. “If you can come up with an authentic contribution to the plant sciences, you can win an appointment to one of the Think Factories—Princeton, Santa Monica, or Santa Barbara—which will make you the peer of the chief executive.”

“I doubt my capabilities,” she said.

“I don’t! Listen, Freda. I have a hunch about those tulips. They may be your key out of the administrative cellar. Here’s the crux of my suggestion. Observe those flowers from every possible angle. Assume, for instance, that they evolved from field mice, and look for facts to prove the theory.”

“You sound like a psychiatrist.”

“Maybe,” he admitted. “But it’s not enough to ‘see life steady and see it whole.’ You have binocular vision, and to use it you have to keep shifting your head. A student of mine in Australia has created a successful methodology merely by attributing impossible causes to phenomena.

“You
must
practice the suspension of disbelief, for the universe is illogical, and you yourself are a mathematical impossibility. You were a million-to-one shot on the night you were conceived—project those odds back through the generations!”

Freda pinched herself. She was there.

“Here’s my suggestion,” he continued. “If you find anything about the tulips which merits a monograph, write the treatise and send it through channels. The channels will protect your authorship even though every bureaucrat who reads it will add a dissenting opinion to show he’s thought about the subject in even greater depth.

“Now, this is important: send a copy of your dissertation to me. The Institute for Advanced Studies will rule on the validity of your theorems without the handicap of forty-eight different negative endorsements. I’ll see to that. You know I’m a manipulator, and you have no reason to trust me; but you do, don’t you?”

“For some reason, Hans, I do.”

“I could verbalize your reasons.” He grinned. “But I won’t.”

Freda let him have his moment of self-indulgent triumph, but she knew very well why she trusted him. With or without his false teeth, he loved her; and, she could have added truthfully, in an abstract, impersonal, and highly sanitary manner, she returned his love.

After a farewell dinner for Clayborg in Bakersfield, Gaynor’s group returned to the base in the Bureau’s helicab. In the cabin, with the friendship and protection of Hans gone, she could feel the beginning chill of Gaynor’s estrangement. He had apologized at the dinner, but his apology had been a reprimand. “I’m sorry, Freda. I should have turned the pleading over to a more experienced administrator.”

“Oh, no, Doctor,” she said. “You made no administrative error in giving me the assignment. Our cause was lost as soon as the Navy moved against us.”

Now, leaning back, gazing idly down on the Coastal Range, she could feel the beginning chill of his estrangement, and she could plot its course from the textbooks. He was opening with polite hauteur, known in some circles as
Sic Semper Illegitami
. Feeling herself apart from the competition now, she could watch Berkeley’s maneuvering with cynical amusement. Gaynor said little, but what he said was quickly seconded by the psychiatrist. He smoked little, but the cigarettes were quickly lighted by Berkeley with a movement called by some “the brown-fingered flick.”

As the helicab hovered over the Bureau Chiefs garage, Freda noticed the parking lot was empty; obviously, memories of their old love were gone from Section Able. As the helicab descended, she glanced eastward. Through the deepening twilight over the San Joaquin Valley she could see the lights of Fresno twinkling on. South of those towers, she mused, it was promenade time in Old Town.

Suddenly her mind was flooded with longings. Literally, she could hear the heel clicks of señoritas on the cobbled plaza, the fading diphthongs of Spanish, the half-suppressed laughter from under lace mantillas. She could feel the sway of their hips in her hips as they strolled, clockwise, around the fountain, ogled by lean-flanked boys in sequined trousers strolling counterclockwise in the outer circle. She could see the sun-pinked solidity of adobe walls and smell the musky mealiness of cooking tortillas. She could hear the strumming of guitars through the oaken half-doors of cantinas as musicians readied their rhythms for Saturday night in Old Town. Overwhelmed by the imagery, she achieved a hauteur of her own as she bade the two men good night after the helicab had landed. Walking alone down the mall to her quarters, she found her footfalls gliding into the one-two-THREE (½), one-two-THREE (½) syncopations of a dissonant tango.

No power of analysis Freda could summon explained this surge of joy and sadness which pulsed through her like a current from an anode in search of a cathode. Perhaps, she mused, something more than nothing had occurred in her hotel room in Washington and this was a delayed reaction. Perhaps, subconsciously, she was bidding farewell to her dream of a career. Or, perhaps, her feeling was the conscious knowledge that she was coming to her tulips.

Sunday morning, after breakfast, she took only time enough to stop by the ladies’ lounge to check the bulletin board before hurrying over to the greenhouse, but she was so shaken by what she found, that she was delayed longer than she had planned.

Scribbled in that now familiar handwriting, she read: “Charlie did it to Freda in Washington, without love. Hans couldn’t do it, with love. Hal’s closing fast. Who’ll beat Paul to the wire?”

She was so irked by the scrawl that she ripped the February sheet from the wall, tore it to bits, and flushed it toward the Paso Robles outfall.

Her act was not good form, she knew. Graffiti sheets eased social tensions as gossip surrogate, but whoever wrote those squibs about her was taking unfair advantage. Obviously the scribbler was a reporter on the underground press and had picked up the snoop from the UP wire service. Freda sat fuming in the lounge until her boil dropped to a low simmer, trying to force all negative thoughts from her mind before greeting her tulips.

To a degree, she succeeded, and the walk across the lawn in the warm sunlight, with the green grass underfoot, helped restore her further.

As she rounded the corner of the greenhouse, she was brought to a dead stop by the shimmer of gold and green which greeted her, the colors and the magnitude. Four beds wide and six beds deep, the tulips stretched a quarter of the distance to the fence, and the first twelve beds were blooming.

Hal had separated the beds with strips of canvas, four feet wide, to catch the seeds, which would have fallen on the footpaths, but inside the beds he had planted each tulip with care, almost precisely six inches apart. Whatever sins Hal Polino might commit in his thinking, his practical procedures had been as carefully planned as the moves of a three-dimensional chess champion. Her garden radiated beauty.

She walked slowly toward the center of the plots, watching the golden spokes revolve to the motion of her eyes, listening to the soft murmur arising in the air chambers, caused by the slight turbulence of her passing. She could feel the radiations infuse her cells and corpuscles with quanta of joy from the shimmering greens, the singing, and the gold. The sound was a fluttering purr, but more sibilant, like the slithering of silk from the falling raiment of a vestal.

Suddenly a breeze stirred in the garden, and she had to lift her eyes from the flowers to focus her senses on the sound. She stood, head up, ears alert, as the eddy passed through the blossoms, and the tulips sang.

They sang an oratorio to gods of gentler climes, Jupiters without lightning, Thors without thunder, ungibbeted Galileans. Not until their diapasons had swelled around her and died across the garden did she dare lower her eyes to their beauty. Adoration in their singing had touched her with a Sabbath awe, giving new dimensions to—

“They never sang to me like that!” Hal Polino was calling. He stood by the corner of the greenhouse, sun-burned, shirtless, wearing Bermuda shorts, with a coil of electric line wrapped over his shoulder and some object in his hand.

“Hal Polino, they’re just gorgeous!” she called. “Go away! Go inside! Let me commune with them alone.”

“I’ll give you five minutes to commune with the little beasts, then I’m setting up for some controlled music.” He went into the greenhouse and closed the door.

She was alone again. On a whim, she bent to her knees and sang, “I come to the garden alone…”

Her voice activated the closer tulips with a rustling echo of her words. With both knees on the canvas, her arms spread in the manner of a choir leader, she conducted them, three notes at a time, “While the dew… is still on… the roses. And the voice… I hear… falling on… my ear… the Son of God… discloses.”

She laughed with happiness, her laughter rippling through the tulips. She had scored a first in the history of humankind. She had led a choir of flowers.

“Try a waltz.” Hal stuck his head from the doorway. “They really swing to a four-beat measure.”

“Back in your hole, mole!” she shouted.

She still had the first hymn-singing of flowers on record, she felt, looking at the tulips from knee level along the farthest expanse of the flowerbeds. She raised and lowered her head to get the best possible angle of vision, making new arrangements of green and gold. By raising her head and looking down, she could crop the distant brown trunks of the eucalyptus out of her vision. From this position, her line of sight downward and focused in close, she spotted a flaw that horrified her with its implications. Not three feet from her, the lower-interior petals of a female were spotted with purple. Against the iridescence of the gold, the purple canker was loathsome. Rising, Freda looked around her. Over there was another. Here, another. If a blight had struck these tulips, and if Hal Polino was making no attempt to control it, she would see to it that he’d be strumming his dissonant guitar in the cantinas of Mars.