by John Boyd
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.
She turned and strode toward the greenhouse, eyes blazing, jaw set. As she started to swing open the door and open the questioning, she saw a purple smudge on the white paint of the glass near the door. Her fear subsided, but a residual kickback of anger remained at the sight of the smudge. Somebody had wiped his pollinating finger near the door.
Hal opened the door. “Welcome back, Doctor.”
“Hal, what are those horrid purple stains on the tulips?”
“You used dye on my tulips, when you know it kills them?”
“I figured they were vulnerable only from the root system, so I took a chance.”
“Took a chance?” she flared. “What kind of procedure is that?”
“It worked.” He shrugged. “If I’d killed a few, what difference would it make? We have thousands of the brutes, and we may have to exterminate them all.”
“Over my dead body! You wait here. I want to look at the log.”
“May I remind Doctor Caron that this is Sunday, my day off,” he said, stooping to plug in the electric lead line.
“As of right now, it isn’t! Please remain in the area until I’ve checked your records.”
“Yes, ma’am. I intend to,” he said, almost insolently, backing toward the beds and uncoiling the line. “But all you’ll find in the log are observations. The deductions are up here.” He tapped his brow with his fingers, slowly, ominously, as he stooped to pick up a small, battery-powered electric fan.
He turned and walked away, dragging the heavy extension cord down the canvas path. Under the tension of his effort, she noticed, the muscles of his back were long and striated, like the muscles of a distance swimmer. It was almost indecent the way his torso rippled when he bent and swayed, and she made a mental note to post a notice on the greenhouse bulletin board that all personnel must be properly clothed while working in the seed beds.
Chapter Seven
At first Polino’s log was meticulous, even to his penmanship. After Tuesday, January 24, two days after she had left for Washington, his penmanship faltered. Since his first seed harvest occurred that day, she could forgive his subsequent haste. He had been busy pollinating. For the twenty-seventh she noticed an entry: “Detected sugar in nectar. No sugar before. Tulips must be aware bees are pollinators, and sugar attracts bees. How did they find out?”
On January 30 Polino had made another entry relative to sugar content of nectar: “Lab analysis shows sugar content of nectar now 22%. The bees are coming.”
Then the entries grew interesting from several points of view: as scientific observations and nonscientific observations, errors in record keeping, faulty use of nomenclature, and flights of fancy. This ingenue, Freda thought, is reading her first movie scenario.
February 2: Bees won’t do! Four honeybees got their heads crushed by the calyptra of female tulips.
February 4: A wasp laid an egg in a calyx.
February 5: More wasps arriving. They might serve. Found four wasps dead. Identified wasps as Masaridae, or Mexican ground wasps—the only species of wasps that feeds its larvae on honey and pollen.
February 6: Stained abdomen of a wasp purple. Stain showed on oviduct of 68 tulips before wasp died of fatigue. Caron tulips are conning wasps into thinking that they are laying eggs.
February 8: No wasp fatalities today. Stained another wasp green. Only ten stains showed on tulip oviducts. Tulips have learned not to work wasps to death.
February 10: More wasps arriving (From Mexico?) A beds germinating, B beds pollinated. C beds blooming. D beds growing. Preparing E and F beds for planting.
Freda closed the logbook with a thump and stalked into the garden. Polino was sprawled on the canvas between the blooming C beds and the green shoots of the D row. He had set up the portable fan to blow in the hundred-degree arc onto the blooms, and he was adjusting dials on the black box. As the fan blew against the tulips, they fluted and sang.
“What’s that?” Freda asked.
“A high-fidelity, stereophonic recorder,” he answered. “I tape their music and splice it into illogical progressions, and play the notes until I get disharmonies I like. I write them down and play them on Friday and Saturday nights at the Mexicali Café. These babies have turned me into the top guitar soloist in Fresno. Aficionados of dissonant jazz come from as far away as Madera and Dinuba to hear me play.”
“How interesting,” she snapped. “I must attend one of your recitals… At the moment, Mr. Hal Polino, there’s a matter of record keeping I’d like to discuss.”
“Doctor,” he said, rising, “I can tell from your expression it’s not something I want recorded. You might damage my equipment.”
“Come to the office!”
She turned and strode back to the greenhouse. When she entered, went to her desk, and opened the logbook, she turned to him and tapped the entry for February 6. “Flowers do not ‘con’ insects into ‘thinking.’ A manual of scientific observations is not a journal of wild speculations in the dialect of another century. Young man, you were assigned to me for one principle reason: to improve your methodology. Not only is this slipshod record keeping, it reveals a cavalier attitude toward scientific nomenclature and complete indifference to precision. I want you to understand that this logbook is an official record. It is signed by me and forwarded to the Department of Agriculture archives. All I want in this book are observed facts. Leave the synthesis of those facts to the computers, which are far better qualified to relate them to the existing body of knowledge than you or I. I want these pages rewritten Monday, without any references to plants indoctrinating insects or other theories, hypotheses, pipe dreams, or fantasies. Is that clear?”
“Yes, ma am.”
“Now, what’s this mumbo-jumbo about wasps? Sit down.”
He sat, uneasily. “I don’t know how to tell you, without using conjecture…”
“Polino, you’re talking off the record to me. Say what you please. I can discount it as you go along.”
“All right, I’ll tell you straight! For the first three days, after I moved the seedlings outside, I pollinated them, as you instructed, with a medical swab. But I found my little finger was more efficient, since cotton stuck in the plants. Inadvertently, I licked my finger, which didn’t matter. But one day I thought I tasted sugar, so I took some of the pollen nectar over and had it analyzed. The lab tests are entered.”
“That’s a reasonable observation,” she conceded, “and it was handled correctly.”
“Working with the plants all day, naturally I kept them under close observation. Doctor, you can take it or leave it, but they were experimenting, not me. One day, after the nectar turned sweet, I saw a hummingbird hovering over a bloom. Now, I’m not allowed to enter into the log what doesn’t happen, and that hummingbird didn’t touch the bloom. The tulip didn’t like the looks of the sharp-pointed spear, and, zap, the hummingbird took off. It didn’t come back. What’s more,” he added emphatically, “no hummingbird ever will.”
Freda restrained a smile at his emphasis and asked, “What’s your theory for that?”
“The air chamber of the tulip is sort of a Helmholtz resonator with a high pass filter. The tulip bopped the bird in the head with a high-frequency soundwave when it saw that needle point probing at its stigma.”
“Saw?” she asked.
“Sensed,” he corrected. “They emit their sounds from their calyx, and their petals could be echo detectors.”
This boy was mad, she decided. He was approaching the tulips from a perfectly irrational point of view… The same point of view, she suddenly recalled, that Hans Clayborg had suggested she adopt. Perhaps Polino might be of value to her, after all.
“There’s a possibility,” she agreed, “that an echo-ranging mechanism might be employed by the tulips, though purely as reactive behavior. Sunflowers are light-ranging devices, but I’ve never met a ‘thinking’ sunflower. What about the bees?”
“They worked all right with the males, but their hairs irritated the oviducts of the females. So out went the bees.”
“And in came the wasps,” Freda said.
“Yes, ma’am. When I first noticed the wasps, one was crawling up the stem and backing into the oviduct. I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t flying. I had seen a few flying around. So I took it over to ‘Bugs’ and had them identify it. When the wasp rested up a little while, it flew back to the tulip beds. So, I stained one, and found the t
ulips were working them to death.”
“Hal, quit personifying plants. All that happened is that the wasps found an ideal cell for laying their eggs.”
“Doctor,” he protested. “These tulips are intelligent. They found the only species of wasp on earth that could do them any good. Through some understanding of the ovulation processes of wasps, they’ve hypnotized the insects into believing that they are laying eggs. They lay some eggs, and the tulips let them hatch, but the wasps keep right on backing into the tulips long after they’ve quit laying. The tulips know more about the wasps than I do, so they’re smarter than I am. What’s more, those wasps have been laying their eggs in the ground for thousands of years. In less than a week, the tulips changed behavior patterns which took aeons to evolve, so they’ve pulled a trick beyond the power of human intelligence. I’m not a methodologist, and I’ll admit it, but I’ll bet you Paul Theaston knows these plants think. And I’ll bet that when Paul gets back, he’ll be bringing seeds of the damndest orchid this planet has ever seen.”
Freda couldn’t repress a smile, and Polino relaxed slightly. “I’m convinced he’s right, ma’am. Those orchids walk at night to do their own courting.”
“Hal, there’s not one item you’ve touched on here which cannot be explained logically… Have you discussed these tulips with anyone but me?”
“Certainly not, Doctor.”
“Why the ‘certainly’?”
“I don’t want a one-way trip to Houston. And I’m getting credit for their musical compositions. I like the money and the glory.”
“You mentioned your fear that these plants will have to be exterminated.”
“I think they’re dangerous. They’ve learned to adapt, and to those babies out there, the earth is an easy mark… They could eliminate the birds, the earthworms, and all the insects they don’t need.”