by John Boyd
On their way down, she asked, “Do you think Hal was a genius?”
He considered for a moment. “No. His methodology was too weak. You might be a genius. I might be a genius. Hans Clayborg is certainly a genius.”
Still thinking as they crossed the lobby, Henley added a postscript to his thoughts. “Hal was something better. He was the last Renaissance man.”
Freda lunched in Fresno, dawdling over a meal she couldn’t taste to avoid the midday heat and regaining her sense of reality from the gaily voiced vacuities of housewives and clubwomen in the tearoom. She was suffering retroactive jitters from the sounds she had heard in the darkened room and chills from the ice-mind of an Australian who considered a boy’s life less important than the linguistic clues his death revealed. She was choking on empirical pragmatism.
It was two-thirty before she left the air-conditioned room to face ninety-eight degrees of heat, and the thermometer was not dropping. It was the hottest March 18 on record, the announcer said over her car radio as she pulled into the base parking lot. She fled to the greenhouse to assemble Hal’s final notes on An Inquiry into Plant Communication.
She was putting the monograph into the office safe when an explosion shook the greenhouse, staggering her, and she heard the tinkle of falling glass. She first thought the tulips had attacked, but a rush of hot air drew her attention to the corner of the greenhouse, where a hole gaped in the corner of the roof. Beneath it, the wheeze and click of the air-conditioner, working against impossible odds, restored her faith in normalcy. It also drew her gaze to the air-conditioner, which had heretofore been silent.
The sound damper over the condenser had disappeared, through the roof, carrying a goodly portion of the roof glass with it.
Freda reacted to the crisis with the same calm with which she had reacted to Hal’s death. She walked to the phone and called Maintenance. “This is Doctor Caron in greenhouse number five. The noise damper on my air-conditioner has blown through the roof.”
“Oh, hell,” a tired voice said at the other end of the line. “Very well, Doctor Caron. I’ll have a crew over to repair the roof, but I’m refusing to put the damper back on the condenser. Some fool came up with that bright idea in January… Very well, Doctor, I’ll get a crew over, but stay away from the other greenhouses.”
With a sinking heart, Freda recalled her double triumph at the Suggestion Box in January, student rotation and noise dampers on the air-conditioners. She walked to the doorway. Far down the slope, she heard what must have been greenhouse number ten blow. She couldn’t determine exactly if it had been ten or eleven. It was hard to place the explosion exactly. In a few minutes, it didn’t matter. There was a rolling barrage up and down the line as condensers blew dampers through rooftops. She actually saw number six blow. The heavy, asbestos-lined box sailed through the roof, cleared the building by twenty feet, and fell back through another section of the roof.
Freda turned and walked slowly inside. Figuring $228.00 per pane, and averaging a pane and a half per greenhouse to take into consideration the dampers which fell back through the roofs, she estimated the cost at $5,010, exclusive of labor. Her two suggestions had cost the Bureau $5,010 in breakage, and one promising graduate student. Perhaps Doctor Gaynor had been correct in assuming she was inexperienced as an administrator. Her future did not look too promising.
She smiled grimly to herself. Humor was a wonderful defense against adversity, but it got bloody tiring, this snickering behind grave clothes.
Her greenhouse was untenable in the heat, though none of the plants was in danger, and Freda returned to her room to work on her portion of the monograph. Except for the addenda to be added by Henley, she finished the actual composition of An Inquiry into Plant Communications that evening, concluding it with a paragraph: “It is with reported and extreme regret that the coauthor of this treatise, Harold Michelangelo Polino, graduate student in zoological botany, passed away on the eve of its publication.”
She was almost obsessed with the urge to add, “killed in the line of duty.” She would love to see Papa Polino retired to a comfortable old age, but not at the expense of the Caron tulips.
Human needs were fleeting. Beauty was forever.
Monday at breakfast Doctor Gaynor stopped by her table for the first time in two weeks to wish her good morning. “Well, Doctor Caron, it looks like our noise dampers didn’t work out quite as we expected. Glass breakage alone came to over ten thousand dollars over the weekend, and right at the height of my economy drive… Well, we live and learn, Doctor.”
He moved away chuckling, and she commented to herself that this was the first time she had one of his trite expressions muttered with such full-bodied satisfaction and deep-down delight, and without the filter of administrative urbanity. Somehow he had managed to get a sinister quality into a chuckle.
Freda was late to the greenhouse Monday. She had to stop by the secretarial pool to select a temporary office helper until a new student assistant was assigned to her. Out of four she interviewed, she chose a dark-haired girl by the name of Jacqueline Manetti, whose brown eyes reminded her of Hal’s and who could take dictation at a “fantastic” rate, according to the pool supervisor.
She had another stop to make—at the ladies’ lounge, driven there by the inscrutable smile on the face of Doctor Charles Gaynor. And her sibyl had not failed her. Across the top of the wall sheet was written in a large, spidery scrawl, “Freda, Beyond this place of wrath and fears looms but the Horror of Big H… A Friend.”
Big H was the slang term for Houston, Texas, and the Horror was the neuropsychiatric institute for mental ailments. Though the institute was nominally reserved for space-incurred aberrations, NASA extended its custodial facilities as a courtesy to employees engaged in extraterrestrial projects peripheral to the Space Agency.
Gaynor was planning a sanity hearing for her, and, oh, what a sly trick. For him to dismiss Freda outright would be an admission that he erred in placing her in a supervisory capacity in the first place. And the first rule of the administrator was to shift the blame for an error. Gaynor was trying to shift the blame to a malfunction in Freda’s own psyche.
At the greenhouse she found the repairs had been made and the air-conditioner shamelessly and nakedly whirring away against the third full day of the Santa Ana. She walked into the tulip field to check on the B patch, noticing the activity of the wasps as she walked, to find that the patch had blown prematurely, no doubt because of the heat. But the wasps were active over the D patch and E patch. Curious, she went to investigate. D and E had also blown, and delivery beds had been prepared only for B. The heat had proven a tremendous stimulant to the germinating process in the plants, she realized, but whither had gone the seeds?
A quick investigation of the prepared beds, which had been designed as the K and L patch to take the B seeds, showed the shoots already an inch high and planted in geometrical harmony by the wasps. Not only germination but growth had been stimulated. Freda became concerned for the seeds from D and E patch. No doubt the wasps had moved them into the grass, where the earth had not been treated to accept them. She walked out onto the grass and was rewarded by spotting the shimmering green shoots of Flora among the drabber greens of earth. Raising her eyes to the gray, freshly plowed loam of the San Joaquin Land Company, she saw a shimmer of green spreading like an alluvial delta beyond the Cyclone fence. The Caron tulips had encroached onto the Land Company’s property.
Freda returned to the office and called Ground Keeping and asked for Mr. Hokada. It took him several moments to get to the phone, and she knew a fan-tan game was in progress in the nurseryman’s shack. “Mr. Hokada, as soon as possible, take a disc plow outside the fence and bring it up to five. The tulips exploded over the weekend and have encroached on the Land Company’s property. They haven’t planted yet, have they?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Thank heaven for small favors!… Get hopping, Mr. Hokada, and plow those shoots under. All I
need now is a complaint from the San Joaquin people.”
She went back to the office to search through the papers stuck on Hal’s spindle to see if he had jotted down a sketch of the tarpaulin wall he had planned, but she could find nothing.
Hal’s poor methodology was returning to haunt her, she thought, as she sat down at her desk and began to figure out the materials she would need. As the figures slowly emerged, Freda felt a pang of sympathy for administrators. Just at the height of Gaynor’s economy wave, when he was exhorting the base to save on toilet tissue, fifteen greenhouse roofs had been wrecked and the erstwhile favorite member of his team was putting in a requisition for two thousand square yards of canvas and twenty eight-by-eight poles at least thirty feet in height, she figured, to allow for a third of the depth to be sunk into the ground, forty sacks of cement, and two hundred seven-inch nails.
Calculating as she wrote, she was finishing the requisition form and getting it ready for the arrival of the typist when she heard the putt-putt of Mr. Hokada’s approaching disc plow coming up the hill from the north gate. She laid a note on the requisition instructing Miss Manetti to type it immediately and send it to Supply.
Through the doorway she could see the Japanese, wizened, shirtless, and wearing a flapping straw hat, driving the plow up the grade toward the peninsula of green jutting beyond the fence. She moved out to direct him, thinking that at his angle he might not detect all of the wispy green she wished plowed under. He could plow the area outside the fence, first to get rid of the evidence, and then plow the inside at his leisure, unless the Santa Ana continued to blow.
Apparently he could see well enough. He lowered the discs in front of the plow to approach the eastern, or outer, rim of the encroachment. She was thinking that it must be terribly hot for him, mounted atop all that steel, when almost in response to her thought he removed his hat and started to fan himself as he steered the plow. He was using some peculiar Oriental method of fanning, because he was fanning away from himself. But as his movements grew more rapid, as he swung the straw hat in wider and wider arcs, she ran toward the fence, shouting, “Mr. Hokada, drive away from the shoots. Turn back, Mr. Hokada!”
Obviously he did not hear her. He leaped from the seat to the ground, whirling, as the machine moved on toward the shoots. In the bright sunlight, his figure grew more and more indistinct in the gray fog growing around him. “Run north, Mr. Hokada! Don’t fight them. Run!”
He did not hear her. By the time she reached the fence, the gray fog was rising from his lifeless body. It was doubtful, she knew, if he had ever heard her calling to him above the swarm of angry wasps that were stinging him to death.
Gripping the fence, Freda watched as the tractor continued to head south, swinging eastward from the slope of the hill and heading downward toward a concrete drainage ditch. She watched as it rolled to the lip of the ditch, and from two hundred yards away she heard the sound of the impact as it demolished itself against the floor of the ditch. Vaguely she was aware that those tractors cost in the area of seventeen thousand dollars, give or take a few thousand; but she was more interested in a phenomenon she had observed: not a wasp had neared the tractor as it cut a swath through the eastern edge of the seedlings. The tulips had not been acquainted with Mr. Hokada. Theoretically, they didn’t know him from a plow. Obviously, the tulips knew their enemy on sight, and their enemy was man.
Freda turned and trudged toward the office, seeing Miss Manetti emerge around the corner and enter the office. She paused at the B beds, looking down at the blossoms dancing in the sunlight. The flowers were mothers who had protected their children as any mother would have done; but the maternal feelings they had aroused in her foreshadowed future conflicts of interest. Mr. Hokada’s death had created a present conflict of interests. If NASA agents found her protecting exotic plants hostile to the welfare of man, she would be charged with a felony.
She could not conceal Mr. Hokada’s death.
Still, she let her hands play over the blooms as she walked, feeling the sadness of farewell. All that she could do for the flowers, now, she would do: she would grant them a peaceful death.
Miss Manetti was typing away at the requisition when Freda entered and went to the phone to dial the coroner. “This is Doctor Caron. I have a dead man at greenhouse number five, Ralph Hokada, a gardener.”
“Didn’t we pick up a body there Thursday, Doctor?”
“Yes, but bring a stile for this one. It’s lying outside the fence.”
She called Equipment to tell them where to find the wreckage of the plow, and then called Base Security and asked for Commodore Minor.
“To what do I owe this pleasure, Freda?”
“Havoc and destruction, Commodore. My tulips are running amok. If you and Captain Barron care to join me for lunch, I’ll give you the details.”
“Affirmative.”
“However, at the moment I need a spray plane with five hundred gallons of Formula 256 plant dye to spray my yard and a small area outside the fence. And I need the plane quickly, Commodore.”
“Generally a plane takes two or three hours; they’re flown by civilians under Navy contract. But I think I can have one over your yard by thirteen-thirty. There’s a cold front from the northwest due to hit here around fourteen hundred, and the coming turbulence might help shake the lead out of the pilots pants. I’ll go ahead on the order, but send along the req sheets, Freda.”
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!”
Chapter Eleven
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.