by John Boyd
“What I felt with the maples was spiritual communion. That’s all! The sailor’s naked behind was desecrating my shrine, for, in rites beyond ritualism, I had achieved rapport with the spirit of the grove. Freda, you observe before you the last surviving druid priest.”
She was observing that and more. “Logic beyond logic” was another airy phrase Paul had borrowed from this boy. Harold Polino was the moral equivalent of the Napoli’s lasagne, she thought, but, as Paul had said, he did produce usable insights.
“Do you think Paul would be as impressionable?”
“No, Paul’s a morphologist. He studies the structure of plants. He’s not primarily interested in their spiritual qualities or their personalities. He might favor a certain orchid in a grove. So would you. So would I. On the scale of plant evolution, the orchids are demigods compared to the trees. I’m not saying he’s completely indifferent to plants. But it would have to be a very dark night before old Paul would try to make love to a mandrake root.”
“Eat your lasagne before it gets cold!”
Rebuffed by her tone, he withdrew into his lasagne, and she let him eat, slowly sipping her Chianti. She was drinking more, by far, than she usually drank, but it was not impairing her judgment. The wine only relaxed her, made her feel more open. When he was almost finished, she said, “If you think my mind is stretched sufficiently, I feel ready for Hypothesis X.”
“Let me refill your glass,” he said. “You’ll need it.”
“You’re the doctor,” she said curtly.
“Got your seat belt buckled, Freda?”
“Belt’s buckled.”
“All right, here comes Hypothesis X.” He almost smirked as he pronounced his sentences slowly and carefully. “Your boy, Paul, believes the orchids are ambulatory. He’s convinced that the male orchids do a little nocturnal woo-pitching. He thinks they walk by night.”
Chapter Three
Hal’s grin could not cushion words that knocked the euphoria out of her.
All evening she had toyed with ideas, formed theories, framed explanations, not a one of which would have earned her a merit badge from the Girl Scouts; but what Polino suggested, she had not even considered; her fiancé was a stark, raving lunatic!
“Did you give Paul that idea?”
“I can’t claim full credit.” He was actually modest. “But on my last visit, Paul kept harping about pollination, and when he showed me a bifurcated root system, I told him that if the sun lived long enough, the orchids would grow feet. Paul launched from that pad, I guess; but, believe me, Freda, I never thought he’d take me seriously.”
She knew Hal spoke the truth, not through observed evidence but from a deeper knowledge contained as much within the nerve ends of her body as the neurons of her brain—a knowledge beyond knowledge. Hal’s motives were clear to her now. This marvelous boy had brought her here, beguiled her with tall stories, teased, shocked, and delighted her, to fungo her emotions rather than her mind, to prepare her for this final shock.
Paul needed her on Flora!
Paul’s offhand invitation for her to visit Tropica was a plea for help.
Paul needs me, she thought. Wrong! Paul thinks he needs me. What Paul really needs is institutional care… He had tried to hint to her in his letter that unless she came for him, for him it was either Flora or Houston.
Any man with a shred of sanity left would prefer Flora to Houston, so what was Paul worried about, if it weren’t that shred of sanity? Personally she preferred the sulfurous stench of the sunlit side of Venus to any spot you could name in Texas, but right now she wanted her euphoria back.
She shoved her empty glass toward Hal, pointed to the bottle, and said, “Kill it!”
“We’ll split this one and order another.”
“Then split it!”
He split it, and there was still enough left for two full glasses. In the manner of Italy, Hal said, they locked arms across the table and took a sip, bolstered on each other’s stanchion, and Hal said, “Ciao!”
Still hooked to her arm, he added, “Your eyes are pools of blue water. I’d like to take off my clothes and dive in.”
“I’ll drink to that,” she said, and did so, adding, “Chow chow!”
Her expression unhooked him. “What the hell’s chow chow?”
“Chopped green tomatoes. But we’re not here to discuss recipes. Paul needs our help. The problem is: how are we going to smuggle a maximum-care psychiatric ward to Flora without letting the National Space Agency know what we’re up to?”
“He isn’t crazy yet, Freda,” Hal reassured her. “He’s just beginning to flip. If he could solve the one problem—how the orchids pollinate—he might be as normal as you and me, unless the orchids do walk. Then we’re crazy and he’s sane, and he could be right.”
“He wanted me to relieve him on Tropica,” she pointed out.
“I couldn’t think of a better place!” Hal said.
“If it weren’t for our confounded wedding, I’d like to go to Flora. I think I could show Paul a thing or two about pollination.”
“I don’t know.” Hal shook his head dubiously. “Paul’s so damned pure. Why don’t we both go to Flora and show him how it’s pulled off?”
“No, Hal. You haven’t got your Ph.D. yet, and Paul and I aren’t married.”
“In my circles, both of those problems are purely academic.”
“But you don’t understand, Hal. I’m a virgin.”
“If you’re bragging, I’ll go along with your little joke. If you’re complaining, I’d like to assure you that there’s no conflict between sex and morality—one girl’s defloration is another girl’s efflorescence.”
“You still don’t understand, Hal. It’s not ethics. My analyst tells me I have a deep-seated phobia for human contact.”
“Freda, I hate to make generalities, but anything a psychiatrist tells you is probably moonshine. I can prove you have no such phobia. Drink that bottle of wine, and wait.”
“No, we’ll split it,” she protested. “After all, you’re driving.”
Leaning back while Hal poured, her mind was acutely clear and functioning at the highest level. She knew, for instance, why Italian restaurants always had red-checked tablecloths: volatile Italians were always spilling their wine.
Considering the problem of the tulips with the omniscience she now owned, Freda realized that the vein patterns she had seen on the fluoro screen could have been exactly that. If so, the plants were little animals. Little animals had animal instincts. Paul said the tulip males mixed with the females. It might be possible to train the tulips to pollinate directly—stamen to oviduct—as the sun trained sunflowers to follow the sun. Her ideas needed refining, admittedly, but they sparked her with inspiration, and the course she must take lay suddenly as clear before her as the Great Circle route from Fresno to the Witwatersrand.
Lowering her voice, she leaned forward. “We’ve been assuming too much here, with too little information. I’m going to hand-pollinate those tulips, get me a bed started, and give them controlled opportunities to breed. If they could do it with koala-shrews on Flora, they can do it with Freda Caron on earth! Then, I’m going to insert their solution on a seven-foot level into the computers, and solve all of Paul’s problems right here on earth. When he lands, I’m going to present him with a typed and bound thesis, Methods of Pollination Used by the Orchids of Flora. My thesis will serve two purposes—to restore his sanity and to show him who’s the boss.”
She was waving her fork at Hal, an act that indicated to her that she was coming under the influence of Chianti. “Dinners over, Polino,” she snapped. “Let’s go.”
Riding home with the top down diminished Freda’s euphoria and restored her wariness. By the time he pulled the car up into the circle before the Bachelor Ladies’ Quarters, she had readied a counteroperation to forestall Hal’s Operation Anaconda.
When he inquired with a veiled threat, “Is it merely ‘Good night, Doctor Caron,’
or has Galatea come alive?” she answered promptly, “Keep your seat.”
She slid out, snapped the door shut smartly, and swung around in front of the car to come and stand beside and above him. “First, you’re not a Greek. You’re a Latin, and Latins are lousy lovers. I don’t say this from personal experience—I read the graffiti in the ladies’ lounge… Now, keep your hands beneath the dashboard.”
Dazed, he followed her instructions. She reached down, clamped his head top and bottom, then bent and kissed him with a succulence that left him rigid with shock. Quickly she released him and said, “Good night.”
He almost yelped, “Good night.”
She ran up the steps, turned, and waved at the boy, who still sat dazed, and entered the building. She was amused at his reaction and amazed by her own. In a spirit of playfulness she had acted the wanton, but she had not expected to send him into adrenalin shock, and she had certainly not expected his shock waves to ripple back and shiver her own musculature.
Tomorrow she might regret her coltishness, but tonight she had given the lie to a psychiatrist who had once said, “Miss Caron, you abhor physical contact. This fits you ideally for the plant sciences; but it will make a marriage difficult for you, unless you find a man as austere and as self-disciplined as your father.”
But maybe he had not lied, she reconsidered. Paul’s profile had matched her father’s precisely, and she was genuinely fond of Paul.
Smiling to herself, she brushed her teeth. She had discovered nothing about Hal Polino at the dinner that she didn’t know already. She liked the boy, but he was a bad influence, and not merely on Paul’s methodology. Another six months in the student’s company might find Paul sneaking off to Old Town with the boy on field trips to prove there was no conflict between sex and morality. Hal Polino had been given his trial, he had been condemned, and her conscience was assuaged by judicial procedure. Crawling aboard her bed, Freda muttered aloud, “Hell, I didn’t even violate his constitutional rights!”
After three cups of black coffee for breakfast, Freda went to her office and carried out two searches for the missing seeds. Her first search was logical, figured from the recalled trajectory of the other seeds and from the possibility of ricochets from the fluoro screen. Her second search was general, section by section of the floor, and Mr. Hokada, her field foreman, reporting for duty, found her on hands and knees. She rose to tell him she wanted the two acres between the greenhouse and the fence plowed and gave him the dead tulip to take to the laboratory for chemical analysis. The two seeds must have stuck to the bottoms of Polino’s shoes, she concluded, as he retrieved their podmates.
Next she sat down and carefully phrased her recommendation that student assistants be rotated on a semester rather than a term basis. The reason: “To give them a broader and more general overall view of the interrelationships existing among and between the various departments of the Bureau of Exotic Plants, from an administrative point of view, and to achieve an in-depth awareness of the function of the plant sciences as an integral but distinct subphylum of the full spectrum of the biological sciences, their methodology, procedurology, and history in the development of the technological society, from an educational point of view.”
That should rid Paul of Hal Polino! She was a success at the suggestion box, and most of her success, she felt, came from the clarity of her wording.
She wrote an additional memo suggesting that noise dampers be placed over compressors in the greenhouse air-conditioning units, since the noise was distracting. Doctor Gaynor had a tally sheet in his office which listed the number of contributions to the suggestion box, as well as the number acted on by management personnel. Freda habitually placed at least two suggestions in the suggestion box at each administrative meeting. Currently her name led all the rest in both number of suggestions submitted and in number acted upon by the Suggestion Box Committee.
All during her busy morning she had been sustained and soothed by the duckings, cooings, and whistlings of the surviving tulip. When time for the meeting approached, she left for the administration hall with little remaining of her hangover except a throbbing in her temples and a tendency for the world to expand and contract slightly.
She stopped by her room to wiggle into her tailored jersey, the conservative dress Doctor Gaynor favored in female department heads—thinking an added advantage might accrue to her in the student-rotation program. It was possible that Suzuki Hayakawa might be assigned to her, and she could use Suzuki’s deft hands in the cross-pollination program she planned for the tulips. It would be a task, if all sixty-two seeds germinated, but Japanese girls were docile, cheerful, and obedient. Her present student assistant, Mary Henderson, presently on term’s-end leave, was not trustworthy. Mary was a girl who would plant marihuana in the alien daisy patch if supervision grew slack.
For Freda it was a morning of triumphs. Doctor Gaynor opened the administration session by listing the schedule for the week’s seminars by resident specialists on their findings on Flora. Next, a procedural question was raised relating to a complaint from the San Joaquin Land Company regarding the control of pollen. During last fall’s harvest, it had been discovered that pollen from an alien corn had crossed the fence into the San Joaquin Land Company’s cornfield, and the resulting hybrid had damaged their milling equipment. Freda rose to suggest that glycol carburetors be affixed to the nozzles of the irrigation spray to form a film over the Bureau’s pollen to prevent it from being airborne. Her suggestion was so apt and prompt that it was greeted by applause and passed unanimously.
Next, during a lively discussion concerning the placement of refuse bins, Freda saw Doctor Gaynor’s secretary walk to the podium and hand him a slip of paper. He glanced at it, then rapped for attention and rose to announce: “My secretary, Mrs. Weatherwax, after two years on a standby status, has finally handed me a suggestion that student assistants be rotated on a semester rather than a term basis. As long as this does not conflict with the continuing project, I consider this action eminently advisable. Heretofore, I have not installed the policy by directive. I wanted the suggestion to spring from my management team, to reassure me of your awareness that the Bureau functions not only as a research-and-development arm of the Department of Agriculture, but as an educational facility as well. I shall recommend to the Suggestion Box Committee that this suggestion be passed forthwith, to enable us to commence graduate-student rotation with commencement of the next semester. For this long-awaited recommendation, I wish to commend Doctor Freda Caron.”
As the audience cast glances in her direction, Freda knew a rough morning was slipping into a sweet afternoon. She had no idea how sweet until Doctor Gaynor announced, “After we’ve adjourned, I wish to see Doctor Freda Caron, head of the Department of Cystology, and Doctor James Berkeley, head of the Department of Psychiatry, in my office.”
Since she couldn’t assist in the placement of trash bins, Freda left the hall and went to take an aspirin, continuing on to Doctor Gaynor’s office. Mrs. Weatherwax, small but motherly, gray but efficient, waved her into the inner office with a smile of greeting. Inside, she found Doctor Berkeley had arrived ahead of her and was slumped in a chair, working a crossword puzzle. “Hi, Freda,” he said. “Reach any decision, yet, on my memorandum of last November?”
“No, Jim,” she answered, but he had already slunk back into his crossword puzzle.
Despite a course in “The Evaluation of Management Personnel,” Berkeley confused her. He did not fit the patterns of behavior analyzed in her class. He was a psychiatrist of the Frommian school who wished to practice the art of loving, he had told her, but he lacked sex appeal, and no one would cooperate. He had been rejected so often that his libido had turned inward so completely that his wife had divorced him and threatened to sue him for alienation of his affections.
Freda suspected him of fetishism or a peculiar sense of humor. Once he had wandered into her greenhouse looking for a woman’s garter. When she asked which woman, he
had replied absently, “Any woman’s.”
He had never tried to touch her, overtly or covertly, but he had sent her an interoffice memo requesting permission to pinch her thigh. At first slightly peeved, she had considered turning his memorandum over to Doctor Gaynor; but, after reflecting, she tore it up. Not only would public knowledge of the memorandum embarrass her, it might inspire Doctor Gaynor to attempt to show her shortcuts to higher policy levels.
Now, the author of the memo, rejected again, sank into the depths of his crossword puzzle.
Doctor Gaynor, slender, silver-haired, handsome, entered briskly, nodded to their greetings, and pulled up the chair behind his desk. He abstractedly studied his manicure, pulled a buffing brush from his desk, and buffed his folded hand. In his presence Freda grew more alert to details, and she noticed that his pale-blue suit matched his pale-blue eyes and that the irregular silver threads in the weave matched the silver of his hair. In the ladies’ lounge, the cryptic lines had once appeared, “If Charlie Gaynor isn’t red-haired, something is being dyed.”
Looking now at his silver threads among the blue, Freda had the sudden intuition that the note had not been wrong. Gaynor was much younger than his appearance. The hair on his head was dyed to match the platinum sheen of the thread and to lend the authority of age to his office.
Doctor Gaynor looked up suddenly. He put the fingernail buffer back into the drawer with a military snap, spread his arms wide to grip the edge of his desk, and leaned forward, looking briefly at Doctor Berkeley and at Freda with the half-proud, half-doting air of a teacher regarding his favorite pupils. “I consider you two tops on my team. When I am called to higher responsibilities in Washington, I expect one of you to take over this Bureau. But, before I leave for the Department, I want to leave something down here for you to remember me by…” He paused for dramatic effect. “This morning I got a call from Clayborg at Santa Barbara.”
