Orbit 13 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Knight

  It was refreshing to return to a multi-colored society, and the vegetables are a week to ten days fresher. People say that California is the world of the future, but when I feel low, I’m sure that Maryland is. The natives there are like french fries without ketchup to someone who has grown up with Filipinos, blacks, Portuguese, Germans, Italians, Japanese, Yugoslavs and all the others. While Marian and I are neither vegetarians nor frugiverous, the produce in our supermarkets does not make me want to weep—oh well—the shellfish on the East Coast is outstanding. At Point Loma I renewed a high-school friendship with Lance Yanabu when he came to mow my mother’s lawn.

  Lance was third- or fourth-generation Japanese. I said, “Hello, Yellow Peril!” and he said, “Harry Watson! Banzai, charge!” and we shook hands. He would not enter the house. “Are you out of your stupid gourd?” I asked. “I got spooky lady clients up and down the street,” he said, and mowed the lawn and trimmed the hedges and pinched chrysanthemums for half an hour. Then I made him drive over to a bar with me and I plied him with beer. “Have you got an acute attack of race prejudice?” I asked.

  “It’s the mystique, you plick.”

  “And flied lice up your gunny-budger.”

  “It’s this way,” said Lance. “I am an inscrutable Oriental and I want to keep it that way. I knock back eighteen thousand dollars by not fraternizing with you bleached Americans. Harry, old buddy, I went to UC Davis and got a bachelor’s degree in agronomy. I saved all my pennies and went farming. I lost my ass. And then it occurred to me I was being stupid. I will tell you what my wise old father said. ‘Kid,’ he said, ‘what you want to be selling is what people want to be buying.’ Now goddammit, that’s wisdom.”

  “So where’s the mystique?”

  “Go along with it, I told myself. You got a ready-made role to fill, you got the world by the short hair on a downhill pull. I practiced grunting—ugh—and how to insuck a hiss politely. I practiced holding my hands over my stomach and saying, ‘Ten dollah a week, Missy,’ and I got fifty-two customers with more waiting to press sawbucks into my hand. I put in a nice eight-hour day outdoors. The overhead is small except for tax purposes. I got it made, Harry.”

  “That’s more than eighteen thousand a year.”

  “And up your gunny-budger. Some pay cash—I mean ugh! No sprick Engrish velly good.”

  “Mr. Moto or Dr. Fu Manchu?”

  “But many man smoke—I learned to talk like this from television. Cherchez la femme, but catch the mystique!”

  Ugh! That’s how I became a gardener.

  Fortunately my eyes are dark brown. With a short hair-cut and a dye job, and suitable skin coloring I made quite a tolerable Japanese. When I bought a narrow-brim straw hat with a bright Paisley band, I had no trouble establishing a clientele in the Fletcher Hills area. I developed a nice additional income with exotics, such as jujube trees and peento peaches, the bitterish-sweet saucer peach from southern China, conversationally sophisticated if not gastronomic ally so, and they do have a low chilling requirement.

  Well, my first year in business under the nom de guerre of Haru Watsonabe I equaled my former income as an organic chemist. Marian and I bought an isolated old house and ten acres near Spring Valley. I built yards of bookcases, because she comes from a family of collectors, and began my experimental garden to gratify my interest in insecticides of plant origin, such as nicotine, nornicotine, anabasine, rotenone, deguelin and related rotenoids, quassin and the pyrethrins. Marian did her crewel work, read books, threw pots, read books, and we took an extension course at UCSD and another at San Diego State. The next year we put in the swimming pool and became involved with ZPG, Zero Population Growth. Like-minded people were our friends and we lived an intellectually satisfying, ordered life.

  Then the beetles came.

  They were about three feet tall and obviously intelligent. I am a chemist, not an entomologist. Marian described them as half-size Professor Wogglebugs, an imaginary creature from her childhood reading. They stood on their hind legs and dipped water from the swimming pool with buckets and carried them to the spaceship. It was beetle-shaped. There was a pullout spout and they poured water into this until I showed them how the hose worked. They had no trouble understanding the hose bib. They filled their tanks while we stood around and gawped at each other.

  Marian started off to make sandwiches but I called her back, pointing out that while hospitality was in order, our new friends were better equipped to sample foliage than feast on peanut butter. I picked a dozen leaves from the garden and offered them on the redwood picnic table—geranium, olive, avocado, ginger, all the common plantings around the house.

  They showed interest in coreopsis and cosmos, and one of the beetles lifted his antennae and walked to my experimental garden and brought back a dried Chrysanthemum cinerariaefolium, which is also called pyrethrum. It contains Pyrethrins I and II, and cinerins I and II. Pyrethrin acts directly on the central nervous system; the paralysis is a result of blocking of transmission of nerve impulses. It is nontoxic to warm-blooded animals.

  Another beetle picked seedheads, of Sesamum indicum, from which sesame oil is extracted. It is a powerful synergist for pyrethrum, acting essentially in the same relationship as a sound system to an electric guitar. Others sampled Schoenocaulan officinale, which is sabadilla, and Tephrosia virginiana, devil’s shoestring. It is a pretty little plant at the top of my garden, preferring dry, open sandy places. Marian brought out Coca-Cola and our new friends enjoyed dipping their beaks in that, so we had quite a nice social gathering.

  “But aren’t all those plants insecticidal?” Marian whispered. “Are we truly being friendly?”

  Marian and I can talk together about anything, and too often that’s all we do. We subscribe to journals of opinion, such as The Nation and The Atlantic Monthly and we take the Sunday New York Times. If there is one thing on which we and these publications agree, it is good interracial relationships. With the beetles gathered about us at the picnic table (it is not polite to stare at others eating) I pointed out that freedom and liberty imply an assumption that the other person (or beetle) knows what he is doing.

  “I am happy to share the fruits of my garden,” I said calmly. “The analogy occurs to me of the famous temperance lecture. You fill a glass with water and another with whisky, and drop a worm into each. After the demise of the worm in the booze, the lecturer asks, what does this prove? And the voice from the rear says, ‘If you don’t want worms, drink whisky!’ My dear, a question of size is involved. If a thirty-foot anaconda drank the whisky, how could you say whisky is bad for worms?” Perhaps I was more excited by our visitors than I knew at the time.

  But I grew alarmed when they lay on their backs with all six legs in the air. Their aristae, the feathery projections of the antennae, curled and uncurled briskly. For mankind to poison his intellectual peers upon meeting would be rather a blot on history. Then they began to rock back and forth, turned affectionate, and toward morning began mating like mad. This made Marian blush and she excused herself and went into the house. Our guests recovered from their frenzy before dawn. They were obviously pooped as they clambered into their ship. One of them returned to the door and handed me a packet of seeds. Then the ship lifted, caught sunlight a thousand feet up, diminished to a twinkle and was gone in the sky.

  It was not exactly a packet of seeds. It was more like a bulb of transparent plastic the size of a golf ball. The seeds were ordinary in appearance, round and dark brown with a matte finish, somewhat larger than ordinary brassdcas, such as cabbage or kale or broccoli.

  While I believe in friendship and reciprocity, I wouldn’t want my sister to marry a beetle if I had a sister. Nor would I want beetles for neighbors. Not because of property values, but neighbors should have some common standards, and Marian and I do not approve of orgies beside our swimming pool. Under a microscope the seeds were seeds and not beetle eggs—the thought had crossed my mind—and Marian mentioned a frivolous story by H. G.
Wells about a carnivorous orchid, so I took reasonable care.

  Plant diseases, virus, bacteria and fungi—the pathogens, in short—were not at all my business at Beltsville. I worked with organic insecticides, but I knew a little about precautions. I divided the seeds into three parts, wrapped one-third in plastic and put them into a screwtop can, sealed it and had Marian lock it in our safety-deposit box. I treated another third the same way and put the tin into a Mason jar at the back of the refrigerator. The last third I soaked in 120° water for an hour, dried, fumigated and coated with a mercurial dust.

  I sterilized my potting mixture in the oven. It is a somewhat different mix of vermiculite, sand and peat than is recommended by the University of California. I planted the seeds two diameters deep and waited. I did not attempt to control the humidity in my little greenhouse, but shaded the seeds, assured good air circulation and kept the soil moist.

  Germination took twenty-three interminable days with a soil temperature at about 68°. Tomato seedlings emerge in eight days and lettuce in three, cabbage in six days. I became irritable and morose and unlike my usual self. I told a woman at a pot-luck dinner of our ZPG chapter that this preoccupation with sex was a vicarious voyeurism like reading vulgar novels; Marian’s purchase of Portnoy’s Complaint made me wish she had her money back and the writer had the book stuffed—”What is a gunny-budger?” she asked, and I said it was all sublimation, and complained that the success of ZPG would limit births of the very people who should reproduce. Twenty-three days is a long, long time.

  When the seedlings did show, I thought of telling my customers I was going to Honoruru, but with eighty-eight percent germination and growth proceeding normally, there was no real need to give my plants hour-by-hour attention. The U.S. standards of germination for the brassicas run seventy-five to eighty percent and the seed had survived my action against the pathogens, though that may have accounted for the long germinal period.

  Growth was rapid. Wherever the seeds came from, our location was an approximate region of adaptation. Four weeks after sprouting, I transplanted to the garden. I used ethylene dibromide as a treatment against nematodes and certain soil fungi. I varied the distance between plants from six to thirty-six inches and the rows were five feet apart. I used furrow irrigation. The best fertilizer response was to a liquid fish preparation, 4-10-4, but the five rows with different treatment (and even the check row) showed, in fact, little difference.

  Marian’s reaction to this absorbing enterprise was ambivalent. She is not a person to avoid responsibility, but more than once she suggested turning the seed over to a U.S. Experiment Station. She was comme ci comme ca as the oracle at Delphi. And at the same time I noted a resemblance to the goddess Demeter as she looked at the plants, brooding and enigmatic, with a faint mysterious smile and a subtle shift in body stance which I was at that time unable to interpret.

  The plants threw up a central shaft, a fluted column on the order of anise but a great deal thicker in relation to height. Leaves occurred at intervals, cupped around the column and tapered to three-fingered lobes at the tips. The root structure was creeping, matted and heavy. The stem and leaves were covered with a natural wax to reduce transpiration, an adaptation to low or variable humidity. Our conditions in the dry hills ten air miles from the ocean seemed to suit them admirably.

  “How do you know they’re not poisonous?” said Marian.

  I borrowed a mouse from a young acquaintance whose parents’ lawn I tended, and it ate the leaves with no reluctance and no particular enthusiasm. I borrowed a guinea pig and a rabbit for a few days and returned them to their owners in good health. The sap of the leaves had a spicy odor I found attractive, though, once again, Marian’s reaction was mixed.

  San Diego County has some good men at the operations Center on Kearney Mesa, but all agricultural experts are necessarily evasive. “There are two thousand named varieties of apples,” the man told me apologetically, “and heaven alone knows how many plants like yours. Are you troubled by bugs?”

  “I had some beetles, but no problem. How about a guess?”

  “It could be a primitive cabbage or a kind of stem lettuce,” he said doubtfully, and went on to explain that asparagus lettuce had long harrow leaves and a tall, thick edible stem. Not close, and no cigar.

  The plants were a foot tall and it was obvious that those at six-inch intervals would be overcrowded, so I cut four of them. I boiled the leaves separately for five minutes until tender. The stalks resembled solid stems of broccoli, except they were a lighter green. Cut up, they took ten minutes to become fork-tender. The cooking fragrance was not cabbagy but something promising, equal to but totally other than celery.

  The flavor was distinctive as pepper or parsley is distinctive. The leaves had a sharper flavor, but there was no doubt in my mind that the stalk was the piece de resistance. The texture was between that of artichoke heart and celeriac, the root form of celery. There was a ghost of a sweet, spicy aftertaste, immediately obvious when you took a sip of water.

  Marian said, “We might as well go together when we go,” and sampled the portion I served her. She grew very thoughtful and squeezed a lemon on the leaves, and tried the stem with mayonnaise. She ran the tip of her tongue over her upper lip. “I don’t feel like waving my six legs in the air,” she said. “I wonder how it is fresh?” That’s what we had for dessert, with olive oil and vinegar dressing. We did not stay up late that night.

  The next morning I slipped out of bed and went to the phone in the kitchen. I called Don Pashard, a doctor friend, who said it was all nonsense: no chemical agent in food can effect a direct physiological reaction upon the genito-urinary tract. Powdered blister beetles are an irritant of the mucous membrane and the individual response varied so greatly, as did the active ingredient of the material, that cantharides was downright dangerous. “Don’t fool around with Spanish fly,” he said. “You might scratch yourself to death. As for the old wive’s tales—no pun—they’re ridiculous—oysters—truffles— avocados. I have a suspicion the Avacado Advisory Council tried that route twenty years ago—a whispering campaign— but the allegation has no base in fact. Harry, there’s no such thing as an aphrodisiac. Except—maybe—a stacked and willing blonde.”

  “Thanks—uh—”

  Marian took the phone from my hand and cradled it. Her straw-gold hair was touseled. Her lips were full, her eyes heavy-lidded. “Come back, baby,” she said.

  An inhibitory factor in our marital relationship has been Marian’s reluctance to consider herself in other than a coldly physiological light, though she abhors the diagrams and step-by-step procedures so popular today. She contends they are revolting. This attitude has been distressing to me, especially when she sniggers at the wrong moments. This peculiarity no longer pertained. Fortunately it was Saturday.

  We had a pot luck scheduled the next evening at our house. We developed a system of purchasing entire filets in Tijuana from our general fund, while the hostess provided the other items of the meal. Our ZPG group is heavily larded with gourmets—though in fact they tend to watch their weight—and Marian’s salad and casserole excited their admiration. I had thinned more of the six-inch plantings.

  “Out of this world!” said Hazelrigg. He teaches at UCSD.

  “What is the special scrumptiousness?” Connie Wechsler is secretary to a corporation, with secretaries under her.

  “Or is it a f amily secret?”

  “Perfectly delicious!”

  “A rare Oriental spice?”

  “How could it be a family secret when we don’t have a family?” I said. Marian’s eyes were inscrutable.

  “It’s not yohimbine. It’s zilphion,” just as if she knew.

  Our guests were restless and the meeting broke up early that night. I was eager to see them go. Yohimbine is a crystalline alkaloid substance with a chemical analysis of C21 H26 N2 O3. It derives from the bark of the yohimbe tree Corynanthe yohimbe, found in central Africa, where it has been used for
centuries by the natives to increase sexual powers. A plant explorer sent it to Beltsville when I was there, but it had no appreciable insecticidal properties. Those of us who in the interests of science personally checked out its reputed attributes, found it to be without merit. Well, when I got Marian alone we were distracted somehow, and it was not until much later that I remembered to ask her about zilphion.

  “The silver didrachma coins of Cyrene,” she said drowsily.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Snuggle-pup, Cyrene was a Greek city in Libya and made its fortune exporting zilphion, which grew wild in the hills. The plant was in such demand that a syrup made from the stem and root cost a pound of silver for a pound of syrup. This commerce went on during the golden age of Greece. The plant was never brought under cultivation. By three hundred A.D. zilphion had been exterminated at Cyrene and what little grew in Syria was also gone. It was extinct, and Pliny the Elder mumbles about the cure of hemorrhoids and scrofulous sores. Absurd!”