The Pollinators of Eden (21 page)

Formula 256, Freda remembered as she hung up, was $2.80 a gallon. Fourteen hundred dollars would buy a lot of carbon paper. She hoped Gaynor’s economy drive was successful, because she was going to need every dime he could save.

As she wrote out the requisition for the typist, Freda recalled that Peter Henley had said the tulips had manipulated her through her maternal instincts. Her mama-and-papa games with Hal had been an outgrowth of that manipulation. Hokada’s death confirmed to her that the flowers were polarized along a germinal-maternal axis. But their scheme had boomeranged. Only by informing on the tulips could she get to Flora and rescue Paul Theaston from the orchids.

Hal had said that the orchids could not attack Paul’s weaknesses because he had none. Hal was wrong. The orchids would attack Paul’s weakest point, his unaroused libido.

Within her, a synthesis of intuition and analysis had occurred, and she knew with certainty that unless she went there and presented Paul with a counterattraction, he would vanish on Flora forever as the two Navy men had vanished.

Paul had not invited Hal Polino back into the orchid groves because he did not want some other man fooling around with his women. The orchids had aroused his libidinal drives, and he would wander among them, as love-smitten as an overhormoned sixteen-year-old, until his hands grew too palsied with age to draw the blossoms down to him and gaze at them with the ardor she remembered from the film.

It mattered little to Freda how the orchids pollinated. She had lost her scientific curiosity in the aroused femininity of a woman whose maternal drives were in danger of being thwarted. Paul’s libido belonged to her, and she was in danger of losing her lover to flowers polarized along a carnality-romance axis.

Gaynor had denied her passage to Flora for economy reasons. He was threatening her with a sanity hearing, which she had already taken steps to thwart. Armed with the Bloody-Grant-Clayborg methodology, she would kangaroo-hop Gaynor and bash his platinum head in with her hind paw as she hopped. She was going to Flora with the Charlie Section, despite the fact that it was already in quarantine and being prepared for hibernation. She would manipulate the manipulator.

Freda turned and handed the requisitions to the typist, saying, “Miss Manetti, would you agree to work overtime this evening, if I gave you the remainder of the week off?”

“Certainly, Doctor!”

Dining with old space dogs would be a boon to weight-watchers, Freda decided at lunch. The appetite was ruined. Commodore Minor and Captain Barron were blasé about
An Inquiry into Plant Communication
. “I’ve never heard of plants communicating,” Minor admitted, “but plants thinking… Say, Phil, were you ever on Gorki 3?”

“Ah, yes,” Captain Barron nodded. “The noose vines. Remarkable plants.”

“What were the noose plants of Gorki 3?” Freda asked.

“A tree-growing liana,” Minor explained, “with hollow thorns—bloodsuckers. They would let a line of men pass along a jungle trail below; but let there be one Chinese in the line, he would be lassoed, hoisted, and emptied of body fluids. Chinese were excluded from the second expedition, but the noose vines claimed one victim, a Caucasian. We ran a check on his file card and found that he had been a vegetarian and an inordinate rice eater. Some vitamin deficiency caused by eating polished rice attracted the noose vines.”

By the grins, she knew they practiced Navy humor, but the events of the past few days had dulled the edge of Freda’s appreciation. However, they were happy to provide the deposition she sought. Seated at the table, Minor wrote in longhand: “I hereby depose that on or about 12:00, January 17, 2237, in the presence of Doctor Freda Caron and Captain Philip Barron, USSN, I did sing ‘Anchors Aweigh’ in a duet with a Caron tulip. John A. Minor, Commodore, USSN.”

“I hereby depose that I did join in the chorus with Commodore Minor and the Caron tulip. Philip R. Barron, Capt., USSN.”

“This will help acquit you,” the Commodore remarked. “It’s good to be tried and acquitted. It’s best to have never been tried. The whole purpose of this farce, of course, is to get the entry on your record.”

Freda knew the purpose of the hearing, but she was confident it would never be entered on her record.

Commodore Minor was on hand at thirteen hundred with a sailor in a communications jeep. Freda outlined her wishes to the Commodore and suggested that they park the jeep under the tool shed to avoid the spray. “I can hose down the greenhouse after he makes his pass.”

Minor contacted the plane at its base, where the pilot was standing by to take off, and it was a relief to hear the Commodore’s terse orders, impersonal and objective. He kept her mind off the tulips, bending in the hot gusts of the Santa Ana’s east wind.

“Hello, angel, this is base. Do you hear me? Over.”

“Hello, base, this is angel. I hear you five by five. Over.”

“Angel, I propose to drop a purple flare. When you see it, approach the flare on a course two hundred and seventy-three degrees true, altitude one hundred feet. Commence spray one hundred yards east of wire fence and cut spray when dead over greenhouse. Circle south and fly north along eastern edge of wire fence, commencing spray fifty yards south of former spray’s line when water tower is abeam. Cease spraying fifty yards north of spray line. Over.”

“Roger. Wilco. Am taking off. Out.”

“It will be about ten minutes, Freda,” the Commodore said, and turned to the enlisted man to direct him where to plant the flare. Freda, as rapt as a nun, hardly heard him; she was holding her last communion with the flowers.

She knew they had manipulated her by her maternal instinct, but human children were capable of pulling the same deceit, so who could blame tulips? Mother love was the mother’s responsibility. Children were children the universe over. These tulips were particularly delightful children. Had they been able to control their homicidal impulses, they might have supplanted cats in the affections of old maids.

If Hal had only been content to remain a firm but loving father, this beauty would not have perished from the earth. But he had insisted on rushing the experiment to get Peter out of town before Saturday night in order to get her alone to play a song he had composed in a Mexican bordello. Now, though Hal was dead and buried in Fresno, he was living proof that Old Town was no place to spend one’s Saturday nights. In a sense, it was fitting that his funeral announcement had appeared on the bulletin board beneath a placard reading “haste makes waste.”

Looking over her tulips for the last time, Freda felt like some child-murdering Medea, with unbeaten breast and unpulled hair. Not only would this beauty be lost, but the golden band which had wedded her spirit to Hal’s would be severed forever. Looking out over the beds, she was suddenly aware that the wedding was less valuable to her than the wedding ring, but the drone of an aircraft helped stiffen her spine against the blandishments before her, and she lifted her gaze to the sky. Out of this welter of wilted green and gold, a new Freda would arise, no longer the career girl, but devoted wife and mother. She just hoped Paul Theaston appreciated her sacrifice.

Eastward, the spray plane was banking to commence its run. Over the squawk box, the pilot announced that he had picked up the flare, and she watched as he dropped altitude. Despite her resolution, Freda stole one last peek at the tulips, dancing and bending before the wind… No, they were bending into the wind! As she watched in horror, the slender necks of the stalks above the air chambers arced over, focusing the blooms of the tulips toward the east, and she screamed, “Commodore! The tulips!”

“You’re on course and coming…” the Commodore was telling the pilot, when Freda’s cry brought his attention to the beds. His voice never changed tempo. “Abort mission, angel. Abort! Condition red. I say again, abort.”

From one thousand yards out, the pilot replied, “Roger, base. Wilco.”

He banked the little plane slowly toward the south, and Freda breathed a sigh of relief, which escaped in a gasp of horror when the down wing crumpled and fell from the plane. Too low to eject, the pilot rode his craft down. Falling in a lazy arc, the plane struck the ground nose first, cartwheeled on its remaining wing and its tail, to plunge with a rending impact and a geyser of plant stain into the very ditch that contained the Bureau’s plow.

Still with unhurried haste and unperturbed pace, the Commodore switched channels and was calling, “Away, fire and rescue party. Away, fire and rescue party. Angel down, Plot area D, coordinates L-21, I say again, Plot area D, coordinates L-dash-two-one. Away, fire and rescue party.”

Freda, moving toward the office and out of earshot of the Commodore, heard the beginning wail of the sirens from the Base Security Center as she entered the office. Miss Manetti, grown accustomed to greenhouse five, had not wavered in typing the cancellation of the canvas request. Freda dialed the coroner’s office and said, “This is Doctor Caron. I have a dead man—”

“I know, Doctor,” the duty coroner answered. “With or without a stile?”

“With stile,” she answered, “and a ten-foot ladder.”

“Well, I suppose that clinches the Caron-Polino theory,” Commodore Minor commented as he entered the office behind her.

“Commodore, you’ll have to turn in a deposition on this incident to the Navy, will you not?”

“Certainly,” the Commodore replied. “It involved a civilian fatality. And I’ll need your testimony as a corroborating witness. I’ll have to make the statement with ten copies.”

“May I offer the services of Miss Manetti? We can make the statements while the incident is still fresh in our minds. And I would like an eleventh copy as an addenda to my monograph.”

“Certainly, Freda. While I make the statement, will you call Maintenance and put in a verbal requisition for a remote-controlled bulldozer with a television viewer. And have them sandbag the carburetor and ignition system. Well have to tear down the fence and scrape the area clean of tulips. If any of those plants are left on this planet by tomorrow, I’m defecting to Mars.”

As the Commodore dictated the clincher to
An Inquiry into Plant Communication
, Freda phoned her requisition into Maintenance. For the first time in her career, she found a flaw in Gaynor’s allegedly efficient administration of the base. “Doctor Caron,” the maintenance supervisor said, “I’ve got three crews still repairing greenhouses, one crew assigned to hoist a plow out of the drainage ditch, and now I’ve just got a call from Security to go hoist a plane out of the ditch. That is my last crew.”

“Sir, I’m not advising you on how to handle your duties,” she snapped, “but the same hoist for the plow can be used for the plane. They’re not ten yards apart in the ditch.”

“Oh,” the chagrined supervisor said. “In that event, I can get the bulldozer rigged, sandbagged, and over within the hour, but it will take me some time to repair the fence. I can get to it before nightfall, I think.”

“See that you do,” Freda snapped, and hung up.

Talk about efficiency! The first rule in the first primer on administrative techniques was: be prepared for all contingencies. Such problems were supposed to be pretested, stress-analyzed, and response procedures mapped in advance by computer banks. And Charles Gaynor was going to give her a sanity hearing. If she had not already decided on his execution, she would have written her congressman, but by the time the letter arrived, she would be complaining about a dead man.

Even as she fumed, the base messenger entered, bearing an envelope marked “Immediate and Urgent.” She tore it open and read:

To Doctor Freda Caron the Executive Director of the Bureau of Exotic Plants sends his greeting. You are hereby directed to report before me between the hours of 4:58 and 5:24, Tuesday, March 21, 2237, to show cause why you should not be relieved of all duties for reasons of mental and/or emotional incapacity. Hearings will be held in the presence of Bureau medical authority.

Doctor Charles C. Gaynor
Executive Director
Bureau of Exotic Plants
U.S. Department of Agriculture

She had read the oracle aright. She put the letter in her briefcase and turned to Miss Manetti to complete her portion of the deposition regarding the crash and death of the pilot. After Miss Manetti had commenced to type, Freda commented on the sad condition of the Maintenance Department to the Commodore. He shared her indignation. “The Navy would never permit such inefficiency,” he said.

She accompanied the Commodore to his jeep, and they stood for a moment in silence, watching the litter bearers from the coroner’s office cross the fence on their stiles, lugging their ladder with them. Commodore Minor assured her he would stop by the maintenance office to keep an eye on the scraping to see that they did not bulldoze her greenhouse to the ground. Before he saluted her good day, he sniffed the air. “Looks like the cold front’s here. The Santa Ana is broken.”

She thanked Commodore Minor for his efforts and returned to the office, remarking to herself on the peculiar methodology of the Navy. Commodore Minor had sniffed the air to determine if the Santa Ana was broken, while a cold wind was blowing in from the ocean, a high haze had covered the sun, and the temperature was dropping like a Caron soufflé.

Time was the essence of victory now, and she plunged into completion of
An Inquiry into Plant Communication
, She was grateful for the anodyne of work when she heard the clank of a bulldozer beyond the fence and eventually the clink of the fence itself as the shearing blade ripped into it. Above the drone of Miss Manetti’s typewriter, the heavy tread of the tractor slashing into the loam was shearing an image of beauty that had sprouted in gold from her heart.

Freda tried to avoid thinking of events outside the door, but when Miss Manetti asked for and received a well-deserved break from her typing, the operation outside was brought in to Freda in a particularly abhorrent manner. The typist had stepped outside to watch the bulldozer, and she returned with an armload of Caron tulips.