by John Boyd
“Who is Clayborg, Doctor Gaynor?” Freda asked.
Doctor Gaynor seemed surprised. “Doctor Hans Clayborg, at the Santa Barbara Institute for Advanced Studies. The world’s leading expert on entropy. He specializes in galactic-energy loss. Doctor Clayborg has been up all night reading the minifacted briefs on the Flora expedition, and he’s wild with excitement. He suggested that I petition the Senate’s Planet Classification Committee to declare the Planet of Flowers an open planet—at least for experimental studies—until the International Agency acts. The Institute doesn’t function except in an advisory capacity, but he says he’ll personally lend his weight to the petition.”
“That would give us a jump on the Russians,” Freda said.
“Exactly. And from all reports, that planet is a botanical paradise. Clayborg’s interested in plant evolution on a dying planet to see how the plants… er… solve certain problems. He recommends establishment of a permanent botanical experimental station on the planet—the Gaynor Research Institute. His suggestion, not mine.”
“Maybe we should give Flora to the Russians,” Berkeley remarked.
Gaynor ignored the remark. “I’m taking two members of my management team to Washington with me—you, Doctor Berkeley, because you can support me with the opinion of one who has been there; and you, Doctor Caron, because you weren’t and can support my petition without planetary bias. Thus, you see, my advisory staff will be completely balanced, and you, Doctor Berkeley, might advance a few theories supporting the psychological benignity of Flora, as icing on the cake.”
“What kind of theories do you want from me, Charles?” Doctor Berkeley grunted, and Freda noticed with horror that he had gone back to his crossword puzzle.
Gaynor looked at him, vexation flicking behind his composure. “You could shape the picture in a therapeutic direction, say—hit them with a few ideas from the mental-health angle.”
“I’d have to take that suggestion under careful advisement. I’m not sure of my own reactions yet, and the reactions I’ve gotten from others point toward a few indices indicating earth alienation.”
“Nonsense, Jim! If any member of Able Section has suffered at all, it’s from a surfeit of honey. There are always a few malcontents in any administrative group… What could you possibly object to?”
“The few malcontents who’ve tasted honey. I don’t wish to sign any petition that might be construed later as an escape clause… from earth. How much time are you giving us to prepare an opinion?”
“Ten days is the most I can allow. I want to strike while the iron’s hot, and send the Gaynor Station out with the Charlie Section.”
“Ten days should be enough, one way or the other.”
“One way or the other? Are you telling me, Jim, that I can’t unequivocally count on a supporting opinion from your department?”
“Oh, you can get that… Whatever I come up with, Doctor Youngblood is bound to come up with a dissenting opinion.”
“Ah, yes,” Gaynor said. “I’ve been favorably impressed by Doctor Youngblood. I think the lad’s managerial timber.”
From her course in management techniques, Freda knew that Gaynor’s remark was figuratively a knife against Berkeley’s throat. Although she felt empathy for the Frommian, another thought had occurred to her: an experimental station included on its Table of Organization a maximum-care psychiatric ward.
Although she did not for one minute think Paul aberrant, any man who even considered that orchids might be ambulatory had potentials. “Doctor Gaynor, I would be honored to condense and summarize the findings in favor of the Gaynor Station.”
Without being dismissed, Doctor Berkeley arose and walked toward the door, grunting as he went, “Yep, beat the Russians!”
Doctor Gaynor shook his head sadly as the psychiatrist went through the door. “One would think he was presenting the petition. Sometimes I can’t fathom Doctor Berkeley.”
To that remark Freda breathed a silent “Amen.”
In four days the mystery of the missing seeds solved itself. Two shoots sprang up from the base of the plant hanging from the rack—shoots with the unmistakable green of Flora. Freda had been so busy planting the seed boxes that the plants were three inches high before she discovered them. She was so excited that when she saw Hal waiting in a cafeteria line the next day she went to tell him.
He listened with a furrowed brow and said, “Doctor, the male plant was seven feet off the floor and twenty feet away.”
“I know; that’s why I didn’t find the shoots until yesterday.”
“You don’t understand,” he said, putting his empty tray down. “The female shot the seeds at the male plant… Is your greenhouse locked?”
“Yes, but the seeds are glider seeds. They can sail twenty yards. It was an accident that they landed in the pot.”
“No, ma’am,” he said emphatically. “When a man makes two holes-in-one on a thirty-two-hole course, that’s luck, yes. But at least you can figure the man was shooting for the green… May I have your key?”
“What do you want the key for?”
“To stop a murder! When did you last see the shoots?”
“Yesterday afternoon. But if you think something’s wrong, I’ll go over with you.”
“All you can do is unlock the door, but let’s go.”
As they cut across the lawn, she had to hurry to match his long stride. When she opened the door, he took the pot from its hook and brought it to the table by the doorway. Two tiny tulips with perfectly formed blooms had stood at the foot of the adult plant, and the female still stood. The male had fallen limply to the sod. Hal looked down and said, “Well, he got it.”
“Paul told me the male root system drained the sod of chemicals necessary to other males,” Freda said.
“Paul didn’t want to upset you, but I’m not so sensitive. Look at this!”
He probed beneath the root system of the dead tulip with his finger. Cupping the bloom in his palm, he pulled the tiny stalk from the sod. Clinging to its roots was a tightly compressed nodule of extenders from the root system of the larger tulip that had destroyed the small male.
As if he were laying out the body of a dead child, Hal placed the tulip on the table and stood back, hands on hips, and said, “The big bull killed his competition early.”
Sensing that he was emotionally shaken, she said, “Purely a behavioristic response to chemical stimuli in the root systems, Hal. The tulips can’t think.”
“Freda, you’re choking on your own methodology,” he said. “The big brute killed the baby. Of course it was a behavioristic response to chemical stimuli. What else is thinking?”
Silence was the better part of discretion, she reasoned, but she knew that disappointment had blunted his perception. Looking down at the tulip, burnished by the sunlight, she knew such beauty could never wantonly destroy other beauty.
“Maybe I am oversensitive,” Hal said, “but I have a feeling for miniature plants. I’m going to Bakersfield Saturday to a bonsai exhibition. The tulip wasn’t dwarfed. It was just a baby, but it would have caused a sensation.”
He was coming out of his grief, and she offered, “You were right about the rare earths. Chemical analysis of the dead tulip showed an unusual rate of phosphorus, fluorine, and potassium, also. Of course, such analyses reveal nothing of the life-support system.”
“Yes,” he said. “When I feel egotistical I remind myself that I’m essentially nothing more than a bucket of water.”
He rehung the tulips and locked the door for her, saying, “Doctor, you might be interested in the bonsai exhibit. Would you care to join me Saturday? I heard you were going to Washington… If you’re not committed to Doctor Gaynor’s program, I’ve had second thoughts about Flora. I guess that was my real reason for wanting you to join me.”
“I keep an open mind, of course. But so far, all the reports that I’ve summarized on the Planet of Flowers have been favorable.”
“I know,” he said
. “The specialists can’t see over the walls of their specialties… And I’m only a poor druid priest.”
Walking along beside him, she did not have to ask where he had gotten information on a trip that had not been announced officially. On checking the bulletin board in the ladies’ lounge this morning, she had read the scrawled notation, “Charlie’s going to do it to Freda, without love, when they get to Washington.”
“Somehow or other,” Hal said, “I’ve got the idea that Doctor Gaynor’s experimental station may turn out to be a Siberia for Bureau employees who don’t measure up to the doctor’s standards of administrative excellence, and I’d resign from the profession before I’d go back.”
Here was an attitude quite different from the earth alienation that Doctor Berkeley had feared. Freda alerted to an opportunity. “I would like to hear a dissenting opinion,” she remarked, “particularly from a druid priest. Call me Friday. If I can get away, I’ll go to Bakersfield with you.”
If the choice of Bureau chief rested between her and Doctor Berkeley, she decided, she certainly merited the job over Berkeley. She had seen the writing on the wall, and the writing said Berkeley had an Oedipus fixation on all girls under sixteen and that he collected pornographic Rorschach inkblots.
Chapter Four
Because first blooms were budding on her seedlings Saturday, Freda hated to leave for the bonsai exhibition in Bakersfield; even so, her outing would have been delightful if Hal had stayed sober.
The dwarfed plants were exhibited in a Japanese pavilion retained from some past World’s Fair, and she was enthralled by a model railroad that ran among forests of live oaks, past corn and wheat fields, and whose trains pulled up at stations landscaped with live roses—all grown to HO scale. Looking down on the exhibit, arranged against a backdrop of painted scenery, she felt so much like some god of the twentieth century that she forgave such discrepancies as the Santa Fe Chief thundering past Fujiyama.
Afterward they took tea beneath wisteria in a garden overlooking a bamboo-framed lagoon arched by a stone bridge. A Japanese girl in kimono and obi clattered up on wooden clogs, bowed, and introduced herself as Haki. Haki announced, in the fluting intonations of Japan-learned English, that she was ready to pour ceremonial tea. Freda felt herself so much a part of Japan that she could virtually hear temple bells, until Hal ordered, “Pour the lady tea, Haki-san, but fix me a double martini.”
“But, Hal,” Freda protested, “this is the Orient.”
“I hold no brief against the Orient, but I’m loyal to Martini, the greatest Italian since Marconi.”
“Very well, but give me your negative report on Flora while you can still talk. Doctor Berkeley hinted that there might be side effects from a voyage to Flora, mental allergies, nostalgia, even earth-alienation.”
“That headshrinker wouldn’t have the faintest idea what’s bothering me.”
“Hal, at times you irritate me. You’ll denigrate a whole field of study with one sweep.”
“There is no field of plant psychiatry, and, I tell you, the plants of Flora are sane to a degree that makes them dangerous to beings on our level of sanity, as they are dangerous to each other.”
“Doctor Hector,” she reminded him, “said the plant life of Flora was noncompetitive.”
“Superficially only. Soil conditions, drainage, prevalence of moisture, give a slight advantage to certain plants, but to seize on that advantage, they have to fight. There’s not an inch of Flora not fought over. The soil is drenched with the sap of slaughtered flowers. As a druid priest, I tell you, the spirit of those plants, including my tree, is not benign.”
“Are you telling me you’ve reevaluated your impression of a tree any jaybird would trust?”
“Yes,” he said seriously. “I’m convinced the tree intended to kill me.” His flat voice, sounding deep in his throat, alarmed her. Paranoia, she thought.
Haki clip-clopped to their table for the ceremonial tea-pouring, and Freda was grateful for the interruption as she watched the girl’s movements, fluttering with a ceremonial charm which interpreted the briskness of tea. And Haki was versatile. She poured Hal’s martini with motions that captured the sparkle of gin.
“What does Paul think of this?” Freda asked.
“Paul never commits himself,” Hal said, sipping his drink, “but he’s not fooled by appearances. You’re proof of that.”
Over her delicately poised teacup Freda asked, “Are you saying he doesn’t find me attractive?”
“I’d be a maple-loving Florian to imply that!” He was beginning to gesticulate. “But a man doesn’t marry a woman for the shape of her earlobes. Beauty vanishes, passion flees, and ardor can die within an hour. Give me fifteen minutes with Mona Lisa and she would be out the door, smile and shoes.”
This boy was truly upset, she decided.
“A man likes to dip a spoon, now and then, into deep-dish apple pie,” Hal continued, “but he marries for meat and potatoes.”
“Are you complimenting me?”
“Yes, and Paul knows there’s something rotten on Flora. He told me the blooms were originally to attract insects, but there are no insects. What happened to the insects? The flowers ate them!”
He paused, and his voice sank. “That tree was probing my weakness. It had found my libido. I would have died in that maple grove, a horrible death, in a way you can’t imagine… But they won’t get Paul! They’ve found the wrong weakness—his pure, aseptic, scientific curiosity. They figure that’s a weakness, so they aren’t superplants. Yet, how many Paul Theastons are there compared to the Hal Polinos. Paul has no weakness.”
Fascinated, Freda listened. Paul had said the orchids were concealing secrets. Hal’s ideas were incoherent, but he was groping toward a theory which supported Paul. Paul had said that Hal was brilliant, but he wasn’t too brilliant. She could certainly imagine what death awaited this semideranged lover in the maple grove.
He had finished his second martini and was waving for another. “Take animal life,” he said. “All the substructure for an animal kingdom exists on Flora, particularly for herbivorous animals, and after the grass eaters come meat eaters. What happened to the meat eaters?”
He left the question unanswered, waving his glass. “There’s a dolphin in the oceans of Flora, and the big fish eat the little fish… But I can’t be too optimistic, even there. If the sun doesn’t die too soon, the seaweed will be eating the fish.”
“Are you suggesting the plants are carnivores?”
“No, because the grass is cagey. It would poison grazing animals. When a seed falls in that grass, it just melts away. And the grass is right! Any plant on Flora is dangerous, because it has won all its evolutionary wars. Any plant you see on Flora is a victor, a hero, a champion killer.”
He paused and cast a glance behind him. “I tell you, Freda, the plants are waiting. The flowers are watching. The trees are probing. Far back in their racial memories are recollections of a biped who swung from their limbs, ate their berries and nuts, pulled up their tender shoots. The memory of a biped whom they conquered once, and destroyed, and who has returned, is still with them, and they will strike again.”
He paused over the remnants of his martini. “Yet, your chief and mine, the good Doctor Gaynor, ninety percent water and ten percent hot air, for the sake of perpetuating a meaningless name, wants to station human beings on that planet. That stupid ass! That administrator!”
He was teetering on the edge, and she snapped, “Polino, I can’t permit you to discuss the chief of the Bureau in such terms, not in my presence.”
Haki had come again with another martini. “Haki-san, do you know a pompous old ass by the name of Doctor Charles Gaynor who would low-bridge his grandmother for a political advantage?”
“He throw spit barrs, sir?”
“Right, Haki-san! He’s the grandfather of all spit ballers.”
“Hal, I insist! Pay the girl and let’s go.”
As submissive as a child, he
struggled to his feet, totaled the check with one eye closed, and crumpled a handful of bills onto the table. He turned and held out his hand to Freda, who led him from the pavilion. When they reached the car, she took the driver’s seat, and Hal spoke one sentence, sounding hollow in his throat, “Don’t help Gaynor, Freda.”
Freda had no intention of not helping Doctor Gaynor, and she likewise had no intention of not helping Hal Polino. Monday morning she arranged with Mrs. Weatherwax for an immediate appointment with Doctor Gaynor.
Although she deferred to him as Bureau Chief, she enjoyed talking to Doctor Gaynor. His manners that Hal had called pompous were courtly, almost majestic, and he, more than anyone else, was responsible for Freda’s promotion to higher levels. He wrote her fitness reports. For that reason she dropped by his office less often than she would have liked, because some executives would grade an administrator down for currying favor.
However, Gaynor appreciated flattery insinuated unobtrusively into the conversation. Freda had detected his pleasure from his habit of blinking his eyes slowly and nodding slightly when a compliment was concealed in the conversation. Also, he was handsome, and he seemed to like her.
“How was your weekend?” he asked as a polite prelude when she entered.
“Interesting in more ways than one,” she answered, “and that’s why I called. I appreciate you working me into your busy schedule so promptly.”
With an imperceptible nod and a slow blink, he said, “My door is always open.”
“Saturday I visited a bonsai exhibit in Bakersfield in the company of Hal Polino, Paul’s graduate-student assistant.”
“Ah, I see.” There was an implied rebuke in his remark. “You accompanied Mr. Polino?”
“Yes. He was basically my reason for going. As a student, I felt his interest would be stimulated by specific examples of applied plant science. But more, when Mr. Polino originally reported to me of Paul’s progress on Tropica, I thought I detected in his remarks an attitude toward the Planet of Flowers quite different from the nostalgia of beginning earth-alienation which Doctor Berkeley mentioned.”