The Pollinators of Eden (22 page)

“They were so beautiful, Doctor, I picked a bunch, but look how they droop.”

Freda looked down at the dead tulips, and her dream of beauty died. Singly, they had been pathetic in death. Their massed corpses produced only revulsion in her mind. Stalks which had once been gleaming and stalwart shone with a putrescent green, and the heads drooped from the girl’s arms with a slimy limpness. “Oh, throw those horrid things away, Miss Manetti. In an hour they’ll be smelling.”

As Miss Manetti complied, moving with impunity alongside the still intact A bed to the trash bin, Freda recalled that no one had warned the typist of danger, and for her there had been none. Freda glanced through the glass pane of the door to the outside thermometer. It read sixty-eight degrees, and she stifled a gasp of dismay. The crop duster had died racing to beat a cold front which would have made his work unnecessary. The bulldozer, clanking now outside the door, after tearing down the fence, could have been replaced by three Japanese stoop gardeners working in absolute safety in the sixty-eight-degree weather. Mr. Hokada had met death in the morning, when, if he had been permitted to finish his fan-tan game, he would have been alive in the afternoon.

Haste had truly made waste!

Her thoughts swirled around the dead pilot and Mr. Hokada. Something of them would remain, she consoled herself, at least in the records of the civil courts. The two dead men, not counting Hal Polino, whom she had already counted, represented an additional two million dollars in damage suits against the Bureau, once the Caron-Polino monograph on her desk was published. Mr. Harold M. Polino, senior, would be asking at least that much, alone, if he heeded the typewritten advice of “A Friend” that he would receive in tomorrow’s mail.

After an hours break for dinner, Freda and the typist were back at work. By ten p.m. the monograph and four copies lay completed and bound before her on the desk: the original for Bureau Archives, one for NASA, one for Agriculture, one for the Government Printing Office, and one for Doctor Hans Clayborg. Four she took to the night duty officer in the administration building in the company of Miss Manetti, and signed them in for Doctor Gaynor’s attention. Alone, she took Hans’s copy by the post office and dropped it into the “Urgent” slot. It was past eleven when she finally crawled into bed. It had been a busy five days, she thought, and the busiest sixth was due to arrive tomorrow.

Like an executive should, Doctor Gaynor made a habit of reporting early to his office each morning, to get in a “solid” hour before breakfast. Doctor Gaynor was particularly interested in publications by scientific personnel. In fact, if a member of his “team” did not publish something at least once a year, that team member was in for a lot of good-natured chiding from Doctor Gaynor, for a part of any Bureaus prestige rested on the number of publications it submitted to the Government Printing Office. Freda went to breakfast early and stayed late, waiting to greet the administrator, but Doctor Gaynor did not show up for breakfast.

Doctor Gaynor also skipped lunch.

Somewhere in the Administrators’ Translation of the Holy Bible, it was written: “What profits it an executive to gain a Bureau and lose a Cabinet post thereby?” Leaving the ladies’ lounge for her hearing before Gaynor, Freda walked in doubt of the Scripture. The Bible’s maxim was an exhortation to care and to keep caring; on the evidence of her feelings, the Bible was dead wrong. Not caring released energies, destroyed inhibitions, and gave one a better perspective on codes of ethics. The best administrator was the one whose symbol of authority was the second finger extended vertically from a clenched fist.

Drawing the mantle of unrighteousness about her light-green dress, Freda bounced toward the executive suite in her green-suede shoes, her buoyancy heightened by a message the sibyl had left on the wall: “Dear Freda, by a book too deep for reading, the white-haired boy is laid. A Friend.”

Hauteur of such coldness lapped around Mrs. Weatherwax that Freda feared the prim but efficient secretary might crack her neck with the nod she vouchsafed when Freda entered the reception office. “As goes Weatherwax, so goes Gaynor,” Freda remembered. The chill extended to the executive secretary’s voice as she said, “Doctor Caron, Doctor Gaynor is presently occupied in his inner sanctum. However, Doctor Berkeley has arrived for your hearing, and I am to show you in.”

As she escorted Freda to the door, Mrs. Weatherwax spoke from the corner of her mouth without moving her lips, “They intended a dart game with you as the target, but you lobbed a grenade. The tinhead’s been here since midnight.”

She held open the door. Her features were a model of formality, but from those ventriloquist’s lips Freda heard, “Shaft the bastards, Freda!”

The psychiatrist was sitting in the straight-back chair, working a crossword puzzle attached to a clipboard. His legs were crossed, and he was half-turned to the seating device reserved for Freda in front of the desk. The device was a black-leather contour lounge so highly suggestive of a psychiatrist’s couch that she imploded with fury: psychological warfare, a crude attempt at intimidation if she had ever seen one!

Instead of seating herself demurely and swinging, knees together, into position on the lounge chair, she mounted it from Berkeley’s side with a free swing to her legs that offered him a quick flash of inner thighs. She sprawled indolently as she spoke without a tremor, “How’s the advice to the lovelorn coming, Jim?”

“So-so.” He had tensed at the whirl of legs, and he continued to force his eyes into her eyes as he said, with studied nonchalance, “Have you decided to take any action on my memo?”

“No, but I’m open to persuasion. There’s a charming café in Old Town, the Mexicali, with rooms upstairs for private dining. Do you like Mexican music?”

“I could use a little right now!” he exclaimed. “Why don’t I call you after the hearing?”

“Sounds wonderful, provided I’m not found incompetent. You know what happens to psychiatrists who take advantage of incompetent patients.”

“Between you and me, and Gaynor’s microphone, I don’t think the old man’s got a case against you, and I’m beginning to think so with emphasis… But why the sudden change of heart toward my memo?”

“Oh, Jim,” she said, “I’ve seen so much death and destruction this past week, three men and fifty thousand tulips, that I’ve been reevaluating life along Frommian lines. If I can do anything to bring a note of happiness into this world, I would like, in my little way, to do so… I was thinking of you this morning, Jim, when I wiggled into my dress, thinking of your philosophy of loving. I know you’ve had trouble getting your program launched, and I thought to myself, everyone brings his problems to the psychiatrist, but no one stops to consider that the psychiatrist has problems. So I resolved to declare my own personal little ‘Be Kind to Psychiatrists Week’ and help Doctor Berkeley with his problem.”

“Freda”—he was leaning forward, tense, beads of sweat beginning to ooze from his forehead despite the air-conditioner—“one of the first rules of analysis is to be honest with your analyst, so I’m putting it to you roundly: I’ve had a psychiatric cover on you since March fifteenth”—(Ah, Freda thought, the ides of March!)—“and some of your actions have been a little odd, not particularly from my point of view, I deal in odd behavior, but from an administrative point of view, which is bad, because the weight of analysis nowadays is swinging to administrative aberrations, and some of your requisitions have been dillies, there’s just no other word for it, they’ve been dillies, but between you and me and Charles’s microphone, I’m a member of the A.M.A., and I took that Greek oath… Hippo… Hippi…”

“Hippocrates,” Freda helped him.

“Yeah, that’s the one I mean. And I’m not violating my hypocritic oath nor the A.M.A.’s Code of Ethics. Not for Charlie, I’m not! Now, with you, it’s a different matter. In my clinical opinion, Freda, you’re normal… You’re not average, but normal… To tell you the truth, Freda, I have never seen a woman as normal as you in twenty years of practice. Now, about that Mexican music… I have to cha-cha before I can rumba, rumba before I can tango, but after I’ve tangoed, I’ve got about the smoothest-gliding bolero you’ve ever known, believe me! It’s sort of a cross between a waltz and a flamenco, and I can dance to that rhythm—”

He was primed, she thought. He was licking his lips in time to his hips, which were already moving to unheard mariachis, when the door of the inner sanctum opened and Doctor Gaynor advanced to his desk. It was a Doctor Gaynor Freda had never seen before.

His executive’s urbanity was set like an invisible mask over his features, holding them rigid, but the eyes in the mask recoiled from an abyss, and beneath its transparency a stubble of pink whiskers showed through. The washroom wit had been correct: Gaynor was red-haired.

He brought with him a copy of
An Inquiry into Plant Communication
, holding it gingerly before him, and he placed it on the desk, squaring it with his blotter pad. He raised his eyes after the book was adjusted to his satisfaction and said, “Good morning, Doctor Caron.”

“Good afternoon, Doctor Gaynor.”

He glanced over at Doctor Berkeley, and still standing, said, “James, I know your testimony will be of little value to me. In any event, the competency hearing has become a purely administrative problem, which I’m capable of conducting without assistance. You may go now.”

“Thank you, Charles,” Doctor Berkeley said, rising. “And I’ll be seeing you, Freda.”

He departed, humming “Mexicali Rose” softly to himself.

Once the door was closed, Gaynor sat down, looked at her, and said, “Doctor Caron, you must admit that I have ample grounds for finding you incapable and aberrant on the basis of your requisitions alone. You tell me, Doctor, where in the world am I going to find two thousand square yards of canvas and twenty-eight oversized telephone poles, squared?”

“A cancellation for that requisition is in channels,” Freda said.

“Very well, strike that one! Now, the breakage: fifteen greenhouse roofs, one greenhouse fence, one mechanical plow, five hundred gallons of sodium citrate, a fence, one airplane! I dare say, Doctor, there has not been a breakage expense of such proportion since the San Pedro pile blew up.” He leaned forward and tapped her monograph with chewed fingernails. “But all of our little differences vanish with this! This treatise leaves the Bureau responsible for a conservative four million dollars in lawsuits.”

“That is an administrative concern, Doctor Gaynor,” Freda pointed out, “superimposed onto a scientific treatise, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the validity of the Caron-Polino experiment.”

“Granted, Doctor Caron… Granted! But it puts me over a barrel. If I forward this monograph with approval, I’m admitting the Bureaus responsibility. Using this, the claimants could collect in a small-claims court.”

“In this instance, Doctor Gaynor, I prefer not to have your approval. Lay approval of a scientific work imparts a vulgar popularity to the treatise, endows an otherwise dignified work with the stigma of sensationalism. I suggest you forward it without approval.”

Freda felt that she wasn’t getting through to him. His eyes were fixed on her but not focused on her. Catatonia, she thought, and when he spoke, his voice had the hollow resonance of schizophrenia. “If I do not approve, and the work is given public recognition, which Doctor Hector assures me it will, and the theories are found to be valid, which Acoustics assures me they will, then questions will be raised in certain quarters regarding my fitness as chief of a scientific bureau, and the government’s case will still be in peril… Ah, yes, Freda, you and that young man—Peter Henley?—have placed me squarely between an evacuation and a transpiration.”

“You knew about Mr. Henley?”

“Ah, yes. You were under a psychiatric cover. There’s little on this base that escapes your executive administrators notice… I fully expect an override on the Linguistic veto in a week or ten days… Now, in the psychiatric area, you must admit that there was some questionable behavior, despite Bob Berkeley’s admiration for your normalcy. Yes, some odd activities there, too.”

“Such as?” Freda interjected.

“Well, you
did
talk to the tulips. You whispered sweet nothings to them, in fact. There’s nothing in this monograph”—he tapped her treatise again—“that says you could speak their language. That they communicated between each other, yes. That they could talk to you, no! Even an unbiased opinion might consider it rather odd of a woman that she should go around talking to flowers. Assumptions could be made, Doctor. Assumptions could be made.”

“Then, such assumptions would have to include these two gentlemen.”

She took the deposition from Minor and Barron from her briefcase and handed it to him. “It’s hardly a reflection on my sanity, alone, when two such eminent gentlemen can join in singing ‘Anchors Aweigh’ with one Caron tulip.”

“Oh, the Navy!” He shoved the deposition back to her with obvious distaste. She leaned forward on the couch to pick it up, and rose to sit on the chair, dragging it closer to his desk. Doctor Gaynor obviously needed the couch more than she.

“But you never mentioned that little black box you and Polino had on the hill with you,” he said cagily, “when the coroner was investigating Polinos death.”

“There’s nothing in the standard operating procedure regarding coroner’s investigations which says that I must answer questions not asked. There was no formal investigation. To them, it was an open-and-shut case of a natural death, until the little black box is mentioned in the monograph, where it is covered in full detail.”

“Yes, yes. I know.” He looked around him, as if expecting to find an eavesdropper, lowered his voice, and said, “Doctor Caron, lets both be reasonable. I’ll drop all charges—”

“What charges? I’m here for a competency hearing.”

“I don’t mean it quite that way… Look, I’m a man. I have hopes and fears and, yes, ambitions, like everyone else. When I started out, I wasn’t particularly gifted, or talented, or intelligent. But I was shrewd! I majored in administration. People like you, and Hector, and Polino… Yes, even Polino. He was talking behind my back too. You were all after me… And there’s Berkeley, flaunting his Latin crossword puzzles in my face… How’s an old country boy going to compete in this league? I didn’t make this system, Doctor Caron. But I could see where the power lay, at the crossroads, where decisions come together, conflict. I choose the decisions; if I’m right, I win. If I’m wrong, the man who made the decision loses—”