The world turned red, the last drop of acid found the center of his soul. He lifted a heavy claw hammer sitting by the boxes of seedlings. Alan Gifford fell. John Laker's real torment began.
* * *
The first hours were a frenzy of activity. When darkness fell he carried Gifford's body in a wheelbarrow to the deep trench in the front garden. A crescent moon gave just enough light to drop it in and cover it with a foot and a half of topsoil. Then he went again and again over the house and garden to remove all evidence of Gifford's visit. The cleaning woman arrived at eight the next morning and found him slumped in an armchair in the living room, eyes fixed on the flowerbeds. He roused himself to call his office and explain he was sick, then call his gardener and give him a month's wages in lieu of notice. He had, he explained, a relative down on his luck who needed the job. No need to come by, he would have the gardener's tools sent over to him.
The next few days were spent in mindless waiting. Nothing happened. After a week he had a new problem. He could allow no one to work on the garden, especially the front flower beds.
"When's the gardener coming back?" asked his cleaning woman. "It's getting really raggy out there."
"I'll be doing it myself. Doctor's idea. Thinks I can do with the fresh air and exercise."
That was easily accepted. He did indeed look terrible. First thing in the morning and last thing at night his thoughts went to the flower bed and the hidden body. At four in the morning he would wake from a recurring dream. Alan Gifford's arm had risen from the home-made grave and was pointing up, visible from the street. Each time he had a compulsion to get up and go out into the garden. It was no more than a nightmare—but sleep came hard after it.
Fall turned slowly to winter. He was forced to work on the garden himself, raking leaves, cleaning up withered raspberry canes and dry iris stems. At first he was clumsy and inefficient. He read books and consulted his acquaintances on the theory and practice of gardening. For the first time since early youth envy and work were not the twin centers of his life. In their place had come concealment of his crime. This meant constant tending of the garden and private grave.
Evenings and week-ends now were spent working outside. "It's doing him a lot of good, working in the garden," the cleaning woman told her sister. "He's getting some color in his cheeks. The best advice his doctor could have given him, I'd say."
Winter came and work on the yard slowed. Then the first promise of spring and renewed frantic activity. Little by little, the slow pulse of the seasons was marking its rhythm in John Laker. His mental agony grew less, fear of discovery gave way to understanding of the motive for the crime and remorse at his actions. Spring became summer and the garden exerted its healing influence. Alan Gifford's grave was a bright mass of flowers, planted and tended by Laker's careful hands.
Eleven months after Gifford's death, in mid-August, it came. A polite, neatly-dressed man was waiting for Laker when he returned from work one Friday evening.
"Mr. John Laker? My name is Porson." He presented his credentials. "With your permission I'd like to ask you a few questions regarding the disappearance of Alan Gifford."
Laker felt the lifting of a long-held burden. "Let's go inside. I think I can help you in your inquiry."
When they came out half an hour later John Laker stopped by the coat rack to pick up a jacket. He expected to be away some time. His reflection in the full-length mirror showed a grey-haired, tanned man, relaxed and fit. On their way to the front gate the two men stopped briefly by the front flower bed, soon to be disturbed by police officials.
"Tell me one thing would you," said Laker. "How did you find out? And what took you so long?"
"You can't rush Nature, Sir." Porson turned again to the flower bed. "The day he disappeared Alan Gifford had visited a friend, Mr. Donald Thomson, at the Arboretum down the road from here. Thomson knew Gifford liked gardening so he gave him a couple of bulbs from the flower he'd been developing. A new variety of stem-rooting lily—dwarf, with crimson flowers.
"Thomson never saw that flower growing anywhere outside the Arboretum test beds—until he walked past your house last week on a lunchtime stroll. He knew Gifford had disappeared. After stewing on it for a few days he called us.
"A stem-rooting lily likes to be planted good and deep." Porson pointed at the flower bed, where a brilliant Turk's Head contrasted sharply with the array of bright annuals. "As you see, it comes up through eighteen inches of good soil with no trouble at all."
As they left Laker took a last look round. His eyes had an inward-looking and peaceful expression.
"I hope the prison has a garden, Mr. Porson," he said.
The years of contentment were beginning for John Laker.
AFTERWORD: FROM NATURAL CAUSES.
I'm afraid this is not a very American story, "Le vice Anglais", the English vice, was believed in France to be homosexuality. It is actually gardening. Until you have been trapped in the west rose garden by an English enthusiast explaining the virtues of Mermaid over Dorothy Perkins, or have experienced the prize leek contests in Northumberland, you have never seen real passion.
One nice thing about gardening, its vocabulary is the best in the language. In no other hobby will you meet names as beautiful as Jasmine, Love-in-a-mist, Columbine, Snowdrop, Larkspur, Honeysuckle, Forget-me-not, and Canterbury Bell, or as evocative as Soapwort, Snapdragon, Witch Hazel, Quickthorn, Purple Loosestrife, Red Hot Poker, Toadflax, and Bleeding Heart.
If I could live parallel lives, one of them would be as a full-time gardener.
LEGACY
The monsters first came to public attention off the coast of Guam. They stood quietly on the sea bed, three of them abreast, facing west towards the Guam shore. Behind them, plunging away rapidly to the abyssal depths, lay the Mariana Trench. Faint sunlight fled about their shadowy sides as they stirred slowly in the cold, steady upwelling.
To the startled eyes of Lin Maro as he cruised along in his new gilled form, they seemed to be moving forward, slowly and purposively breasting the lip of the coastal shelf and gliding steadily from the black deeps to the distant shore. Lin gasped, forgetting his long months of training and bio-feedback control, and pulled a pint of warm sea water into his lungs. Coughing and spluttering, with gills working overtime, he surged one hundred and fifty feet to the surface and struck out wildly for the shore and safety. A quick look back convinced him that they were pursuing him.
His glance caught the large, luminous eyes and the ropy tendrils of thick floating hair that framed the broad faces. He was in too much of a hurry to notice the steel weights that held them firmly and remorselessly on the sea bed.
The reaction onshore was somewhere between amusement and apathy. It was Lin Maro's first time out in a real environment with his gilled form, and everybody knew there was a big difference between simulation and the real thing. A little temporary hallucination, a minor trompe l'oeil from the central nervous system; that wasn't hard to believe on the first time out with a new BEC form. BEC guaranteed against physical malfunctions but sensory oddities weren't in the warranty. It took long, hard arguing before Maro could get anyone to show even polite interest. The local newsman who finally agreed to take a look did so as much from boredom as from belief. The next day they swam out, Maro in his gills, the reporter in a rented scuba outfit.
The monsters were still there all right. When they swam down to look at them, it became clear that Lin had been fleeing from three corpses. They swam around them, marvelling at the greenish scaled skin and the great dark eyes.
When the story went out over the ComSat connections, it was still a long way down the news lists. For three hundred years, writers had imagined Monsters of the Deep coming out of the Mariana Trench and tackling human civilization in a variety of nasty ways. Silly season reports helped to fill the blanks between famines and the real crises, but they got scant interest from the news professionals. Nobody reported panic along the coast, or fled to the high ground.
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The three monsters got the most interest from the Guam aquarium and vivarium. A party of marine biologists inspected them on the sea bed, lifted them—shackles and all—to the surface, quick-froze them and whipped them back to shore on the Institute's hovercraft. The first lab examinations showed immediate anomalies. They were land animals, not marine forms, lung breathers, with tough outer skins and massive bone structure. As a matter of routine, tissue microtome samples were taken and a chromosome I.D. run for matches with known species. The patterns were transmitted to the central data banks.
At that point every attention light on the planet, figuratively speaking, went on, the whistles blew and the buzzers buzzed. The computer response was unambiguous and instantaneous. The chromosome patterns were human.
* * *
The information that moves ceaselessly over the Earth, by cable, by ComSat Link, by Martin Link, by laser and by microwave, is focused and redistributed through a small number of nodes. At one of these nodes sits the Office of Form Control; and in this office, delicately feeling the vibrations and disturbances of the normal patterns that flow in along the strands of the information web, sits Behrooz Wolf. The spider analogy would not displease him, though he would point out that his is only one of many webs, all interlocking. Not by any means the most important one: Population, Food and Space Systems all have much bigger staffs and bigger webs. But he would argue that his problems have the shortest response times and need a reaction speed that the others can manage without.
Take the Mariana Monsters—the Press dubbing—as an example. As soon as the chromosome patterns were revealed as human, the Form Control office was alerted. It looked as though a group of humans had been using the bio-feedback machines in unsuccessful form-change experiments. Were the experiments authorized, and were the resulting forms on the forbidden list? Was quick action needed to stop the appearance of a new illegal form?
Behrooz Wolf sat in his office as the data began to flow in. None of the official and approved form-change experiments was anything like the one found off the shore of Guam. In addition, cell tests were looking strange in both chemistry and structure. The lungs were modified, showing a change in alveolar patterns, as though the creatures were adapting to high pressure. And the big eyes, although sensitive to low light levels, were most sensitive in the near infrared wavelengths that are cut off almost completely under water.
Bey Wolf liked to approach his job using very basic questions. What was the objective of a form? Where would it operate most effectively? From those answers, he could usually guess the next step in the form-change sequence. The Marina Monsters were breaking the rules. They did not seem to be adapting to any environment at all.
All right, let's try another tack. The Monsters hadn't got there by themselves. After they had died, apparently of asphyxiation, they had been weighted with steel, then dropped, probably from a ship, to the sea bed. Where had they come from? Bey had a complete list of the world's form-change centers at his fingertips, especially the ones that were elaborate enough to need special life support systems. That offered no clues either.
Wolf's unsuccessful initial probing was interrupted by the arrival of his assistant John Larsen, back from a routine meeting on the certification of new BEC forms. He poked his cheerful face in the door, then stopped, surprised by the mass of new listings and piles of form-change tabulations that had appeared in Bey Wolf's already cluttered office.
"Come in, John." Wolf waved an arm. "What did you pick up at your meeting? Anything interesting?"
Larsen dropped into a chair, pushing a pile of listings out of the way and marvelling as usual at Bey's ability to operate cleanly and logically in the middle of such a mess.
"Two good ones," he replied. "C-forms, both of them, adapted for long periods in low gravity. They'll revolutionize asteroid work. There were the usual formal protests from the Belter representatives."
"There'll always be Luddites." Bey Wolf had a weakness for outmoded historical references. "That law will have to change soon. The C-forms are so much better than the old ones that there's no real competition. Capman has changed space exploration forever, as soon as the Belters will let his work be accepted. Here, let me fill you in on our latest headache."
He ran rapidly over the background to the Mariana discoveries, finishing with the question of where they had come from.
"I suspect that they got into the general area of the Marianas through one of the Martin Links. The question is, which one? We have twenty to choose from."
John Larsen went over to the wall display, which was showing the locations of the Mattin Link entry points.
"We can rule out a few of them; they're open ocean and only act as transfer points. Have you correlated the form-change lab locations with the Mattin Link entry points?"
"I'm waiting for that to come back from the computer. I've also asked for an identification of the three individuals whose bodies were found on the sea bed. I don't know why that's taking so long. Central Records knows that it's a high priority item."
He joined Larsen at the wall charts, and they reviewed the locations of the Mattin Links that serve as the twenty pivot points for the global transportation system. When the communicator screen beeped for attention Larsen went to it, leaving Wolf engrossed in the wall charts. He watched the first words of the message scroll onto the screen, then whistled softly.
"Come and look at this, Bey. There's the reason Records took a while to get us an I.D. from the chromosome pattern."
The message began: 'I.D. Search completed and identification follows: Individuals are: James Pearson Manaur, age 34, Nationality U. S. F.; Caperta Leferte, age 26, Nationality U. S. F.; Lao Sarna Prek, age 30, Nationality U. S. F. Continue/Halt?'
Wolf hit 'Continue' and the detailed I.D. records appeared—education, work history, family. But their attention was already elsewhere. The three dead men were all members of the United Space Federation; that spelled out a mystery.
The United Space Federation had declared its sovereignty fifty years earlier, in 2142. With headquarters at the Tycho lunar base, it represented the interests of all the humans living off-Earth, in the Belt, on the Moon, and in the Earth-Moon Libration Point colonies. U. S. F. citizens were rarities on Earth, and the disappearance of three of them should have roused an outcry long before their changed bodies had been found off Guam.
The two men looked at each other. Wolf nodded at Larsen's puzzled expression. "It makes no sense. The U. S. F. has an out-and-out ban on form-changes. If they won't accept the C-forms, it's even less likely they'd be doing independent development of new forms. One thing is for sure, I'll have to get a U. S. F. man in here—it's too sensitive now."
He looked gloomy. The investigation had just grown two orders of magnitude. There was no way to go further without involving U.S.F representatives. Already they were on the verge of an interplanetary incident.
The communicator continued to pump out information, in display and hard copy. Wolf noticed that it was giving the correlation he had asked for between form-change centers and Mattin Link entry points. It was going to be a long and confusing day.
Not surprisingly, BEC was getting into the act too. An incoming news release set out their official position on the Mariana Monsters.
'Biological Equipment Corporation (BEC) today released a formal statement denying all knowledge of the human bodies discovered recently off the coast of Guam. A BEC representative said that the bodies had clearly been subject to form-change, but no BEC program developments, past or present, could lead to forms anything like those found. In an unusual procedure, BEC released records showing forms now under development in the Company and invited Government inspection of their facilities. BEC is the pioneer in and world's largest manufacturer of purposive form-change equipment utilizing biological feedback control methods.'
Bey read the release through and passed it to Larsen.
"It looks as though BEC is in the clear but running scared. I've been waiti
ng for them to plead innocent or guilty. That's another prospect off the list of possibles."
* * *
Larsen trailed out with yards of listings. Bey Wolf sat back again to wait for a pattern to emerge. The facts were suggestive. One name kept coming into his head, haunting him out of the past. Robert Capman, inventor of the C-forms, recognized without dispute as the greatest-ever expert on form-change methods. Robert Capman, ex-Director of Central Hospital and advisor to the Planetary Coordinators. But also Robert Cap-man, branded as a mass murderer and officially dead for six years.
* * *
Top U. S. F. men, like top kanu players, are usually on the small skinny side. It was a surprise to greet a wrestler, two meters tall, and find he was the U. S. F. man assigned to work with Form Control on the Guam case. Bey Wolf glanced up at him and bit back the question on the tip of his tongue.
Park Green was regarding him closely, a smile on his big, baby face.
"Go on, Mr. Wolf, ask me," he said. "Most people do eventually. In fact, let me answer you in advance. No, I don't use the bio-feedback equipment and form-change myself this way. It's completely natural. But it makes life hard when you're trying to act as representative to the U. S. F., and form-change is illegal off-Earth."
Bey Wolf nodded appreciatively. "On the mark. I didn't think I was so easy to read."
"I've had lots of practice on that question. Let me ask you some. What's new on the Guam case? I've got to give a report back to Tycho City tonight. Do you know the time and cause of death yet?"
"Three days ago. They all died within about twelve hours of each other, of asphyxiation—and here's the strange part. Their lungs were full of normal air. No gaseous poisons, no contaminants. They shouldn't have choked. They were dropped off Guam about twenty-four hours after they died, almost certainly at night. My guess is that they died somewhere a long way from there."
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