by John Boyd
“Ah, I see.” Doctor Gaynor’s eyes were beginning to glow. “Doctor Berkeley, I think, was overimpressed by a nostalgia that will pass, like the memory of a pleasant country we visited when we were young.”
“Student Polino and I discussed the alienation effect, as Doctor Berkeley calls it, and as you just expressed more poetically and accurately.” Freda was rewarded by another blink and nod. “But Mr. Polino’s reaction was entirely different. He thinks the planet is malevolent, that there is evil beneath its beauty. He described it in terms which turned my concern away from the planet and toward him. He is so distraught that he considers the planet a menace to human life. I thought it might be advisable to place him under covert psychiatric observation, for the good of the Bureau as well as his own. If the Senate Committee were to conduct an in-depth investigation of your petition, a field interviewer might approach the young man. If he were under psychiatric observation, of course, any testimony given by him would be voided. Possibly a bonus vacation might be arranged.”
“No. That would be too obvious. If I sent him off the base, and an in-depth investigation were held, he would be the first the field investigator would interview… Polino, Hal… Let me see.”
He swiveled in his chair, his silver-gray smock rustling with starch, and pulled a file from his desk drawer. “Polino, Harold,” he said again, looking at a file card he had selected. “Harold Michelangelo Polino, to be exact.” He inserted the card into a computer typewriter, pressed a button, and the typewriter began to hum with the flick of its type ball. A sheet of paper slowly emerged from the typewriter.
Leaning sideways, intent on the record of Harold Michelangelo Polino, in his silver hair and his silver smock with his dead white face immobile, Doctor Gaynor reminded her of a bust cast from platinum as he scanned the record. Suddenly he looked over and smiled. “As you know, Doctor Caron, these reports are confidential, but since I repose special trust and confidence in you as a department head, and since this report was turned in by Paul Theaston, I will read you an excerpt: ‘Subject student has wide-ranging imagination which permits him to observe phenomena from varying points of view. In pure research, this faculty might be valuable. Certainly it adds to his intrinsic interest as a person, but it detracts from his ability to focus on details. His responses are more weighted toward the emotional rather than the intellectual side of his nature—an artistic rather than scientific response. Barring difficulties of adjustment, he is overqualified as a zoologist, although he would probably be more happy and stable in that branch of the plant sciences. In line with his present studies, I have recommended that he apply for a degree in cystology preparatory to a further degree in cell biology. His greatest handicap in this schedule would be his weakness in methodology. He is impatient with a step-by-step analysis of phenomena and reluctant to maintain precise records, but if his training could be extended to eliminate these tendencies, his potential contribution to the plant sciences is immeasurable.’ ”
“I’m somewhat confused,” Freda admitted. “Is Paul damning him with faint praise, or praising him with faint damns.”
“Basically, Paul’s saying he’s a brilliant student, if his nose can be kept to the grindstone. That he bears watching.”
Gaynor turned and strummed his fingers across the polished top of his desk, lost for a moment in speculation. “Keeping his nose to the grindstone, I suspect, would anchor his flights of fancy… Since I’ve taken you this far into my confidence, Doctor Caron, permit me to take you a little farther. You have met with favorable response in many circles because of your precise methodology. Your record-keeping is both precise and comprehensive.”
Suddenly Freda Caron felt herself beneath an alpine overhang with a thaw setting in. Ominously, Doctor Gaynor continued. “You are concerned about the student, and your concern augments the official record. I commend your perspicacity… Now, I see by your work projection for February that you intend to hand-pollinate the Caron tulips. This is a happy juxtaposition of events. I’m not infringing on your prerogatives as department head, but I couldn’t think of a more painstaking and detailed task than the hand-pollinating of… er… sixty-three tulips, twice to the thirty-second power. Your student-rotation memorandum has been approved by the Suggestion Box Committee, and I’m going to assign Hal Polino to you, not only to maintain a covert psychiatric watch but also to apply the therapy of painstaking work to a student who needs training in methodology.”
She was crushed by the avalanche triggered by her own memorandum: to save Paul, she had sacrificed herself. Polino was hers. One never objected to assignments given personally by Doctor Gaynor. On the contrary, one was supposed to show restrained enthusiasm.
“Why, Doctor, I hadn’t thought of that,” she said truthfully. “Hand-pollination will keep him so busy he won’t have time to brood.”
That, too, was a true statement. Hal Polino would not have time to focus his antagonisms on the planet Flora. They would all be focused on his taskmistress. The prophecy in graffiti had been prematurely fulfilled: they hadn’t started for Washington, and Charlie had already “done it” to Freda.
Polino’s reaction was precisely as she assumed it would be—chagrin and disappointment; but she had prepared a face to meet the glower that confronted her. “This was an administrative decision, Mr. Polino, and you have no choice but to follow through. I grant you it’s tedious work, but it’s necessary, and you’ll be working alone for the next two weeks. All thirty seeds you picked from the floor, plus the thirty-two which Paul sent, are flourishing. The tulip I removed from the pot seems to accept outside conditions, so I’m confident you can transplant the seedlings outside within the next day or two. If they can adapt to earth conditions and temperature changes, your work within the next two weeks will be vastly increased but likewise more meaningful.”
“Increased is absolutely correct, Doctor. I’ll be overwhelmed.”
“Your attitude is wrong!” she snapped. “You will be adding to the beauty of earth’s flora if those plants adapt.”
“Then, Doctor, you’d better correct my attitudes now.” He was almost truculent. “If those beasts adapt, I won’t have time to have any attitudes corrected.”
“Number one, I want a log recording every fact relative to the Caron tulips, the time of each observation, and a record of barometric pressures, thermometer readings, or any climatic change that affects the flowers.” He was gazing down on her with his hurt fawn eyes, and she relented slightly. “And I don’t want the entries recorded in blank verse!”
He grinned at her sally and whirled away, singing:
He’s as busy as a bee!
Who’s as busy as a bee?
That little old pollinator, me!
To handle him, she thought, would take firmness and authority. And she would not tolerate any familiarity from a student who had twice been drunk in her presence.
“One other item, Mr. Polino,” she said, and he turned. “This telephone is for business use only.”
“Aye, aye, ma am.”
Freda’s visit to Washington began on a pleasant note, principally because Doctor Hans Clayborg joined the group at Bakersfield for the flight to Washington. He was a dynamic little man with a brain so charged with wit and ideas that his hair stuck out at right angles from the static electricity his brain generated. It was his Swedish-Watusi hairstyle, he told her, immediately after introductions, worn to distract attention from his beautiful teeth. When she commented on the perfection of his teeth, he took them out to give her a closer view. She was reassured and amused by his gesture: he wasn’t stuffy, and he was too old to be a menace to her health and welfare.
She was pleased also that Doctor Berkeley had recanted from his previous position, despite the fact that he had filed only a neutral report on Flora’s psychological effects on human beings. “I have reservations about the planet,” he said to her during the flight, “but little stronger than my reservations about earth. Young Doctor Youngblood filed such an
enthusiastic opinion in the other direction that he convinced me. Far from decrying the danger of earth-alienation on the planet, he said that the gorgeous scenery—his words, not mine—might straighten out the kinks in the necks of the stargazers. As a matter of fact, he recommended Flora as a sanatorium for neck-snappers… I’ll let you read his report.”
Freda was surprised to find reporters waiting at the Washington airport, and they were bustled immediately to the Senate Hearings Chamber to meet the members of the committee, with the press in attendance. She was charmed by Senator Heyburn, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Planet Classification. “I would recommend that the young lady adviser for the Athenians be kept in the background,” he told all present, who were mostly newspapermen, “because I function on this committee as the devil’s advocate, and I fear my duties might be imperiled with an angel in the house.”
Senator Heyburn exuded an aura of benignity. His large gentle eyes, his slow hand movements, his massive head with its lion’s mane of hair, were fitting backdrops for his voice. She had never heard another voice quite like it: though low-pitched, it rolled with a gravelly resonance that filled the chamber. Afterward Doctor Clayborg said it reminded him of a foghorn sounding through velvet, but Berkeley said it sounded like he was talking with a mouthful of mush.
Press reaction startled Freda. Heyburn’s remark about the Athenians insinuated that there were Spartans somewhere. The Spartans, she learned from the newspaper, were the southern senators on the committee who opposed opening any new planet to human colonization, since the manpower drain affected their section of the country more than others. Essentially, they were fighting to keep down the wages of their kitchen help, and Freda thought such a stand untenable; but the newspaper columnists were split down the middle. Some of them, even northerners, were supporters of the Spartans.
She had assumed that the petition hearing would be a gentlemanly get-together with Doctor Gaynor merely presenting his petition. Reports from Section Able had barely hit the newspapers, yet opposition was forming. On the first afternoon of the preliminary hearings, the attorney for the committee requested a four-day delay in order to assemble antipetition witnesses opposing a permanent scientific station on Flora. Freda asked Doctor Clayborg, who seemed to know politics, why anyone should oppose the station. “It sets a precedent,” he explained, “which the UN usually follows, and the UN, from Russian pressure, would throw it wide open. Russia’s unloading her Uzbek dissidents who’re pushing for local self-determination.”
In granting the delay, Heyburn made a rather long speech, Freda thought, giving as his reason “to further the continuing dialogue, pro and con, which makes this country great.”
“He means monologue,” Clayborg whispered to her. “Heyburn s cornered corn, and that ain’t hay.”
At the hotel, the Athenians lingered in the alcove reserved for them to discuss strategy. Doctor Gaynor—Freda never called him “Charles”—was disappointed by the delay. “I hoped to get my petition through before anyone could organize.”
“Charlie,” Clayborg snorted, “the battle lines were drawn before Flora was a gleam in Ramsbotham-Twatwetham’s telescope.”
“Maybe we ought to have a backup plea,” Berkeley said, “that’s not purely scientific, something to appeal to the bleeding hearts on the committee.”
“What about Doctor Youngblood’s idea,” Freda suggested, “for using Flora as a sanatorium for the earth-alienated. At least, they wouldn’t be falling down and breaking their kneecaps when they wander around at night.”
“I’d hate to give the young sprout a swelled head,” Doctor Berkeley said, “but, Charles, you mentioned you had confidence in him.”
“As a potential administrator, Jim,” Gaynor said. “I’m no judge of his professional know-how.”
“If you use that approach,” Clayborg interrupted, “I have a true ace in a real hole—Rosentiel. He’s confined over at Saint Elizabeth’s, and Rosie was Heyburn’s fair-haired boy before he took up stargazing.”
“Frankly, I wanted to avoid space madness,” Gaynor said, “but what do you think, Jim?”
“It would have shock value. As I remember, he was an excellent speaker and popular with the press.”
“That depends on which press you mean,” Gaynor said thoughtfully. “He was controversial in the established press.”
“But solid with the underground,” Clayborg said, “which is the only press with power in Washington.”
Suddenly Freda realized they were speaking of Henry Rosentiel, formerly Secretary of Space, confined these last five years to Saint Elizabeth’s with the raptures of space. As Secretary, Rosentiel’s perfectionism and sense of duty led him to ride the bridges of the space cruisers while awake, and there he had contracted that strange awe of distances called variously space madness, space rapture, and earth-alienation. In fact, he had attempted to defect from earth—an impossibility for one so prominent—and had been apprehended stowing away on a starship.
Unfortunately, the government bungled the affair. Even as the President’s press secretary was announcing Rosentiel’s resignation “for personal reasons,” his picture was appearing in the underground press showing him emerging from the ship between two S.P.s, his head bent back in the characteristic neck-snap of a “night crawler.” The photograph, taken from above him, had caught the wistfulness and hunger in his eyes with such poignancy that Freda remembered it to this day, remembered even the caption beneath it: “Like a Sick Eagle Looking at the Sky.”
“What about Rosie’s… er… oddity?” Gaynor asked Clayborg.
“He has control for extended periods,” Clayborg answered, “particularly when no one mentions stars or the night. But Jim here can go to Saint Elizabeth’s with me in the morning to vouch for his stability. If Rosie’s willing, Jim agrees, and you give the go-ahead, you’ve got your Gaynor Station, and I have an entropist on its staff.”
“Is it legal for a deranged person to testify?” Freda asked.
“It’s not a legal hearing,” Gaynor explained. “We’re simply trying to persuade Heyburn… Go ahead, Hans. But if Rosentiel agrees to testify, it must be stated plainly that his opinions do not reflect the official attitude of the Bureau.”
“I should have brought my tulip along to testify,” Freda said. “It could persuade Heyburn.”
“Freda and her talking tulips,” Gaynor said, patting the top of her hand with avuncular humor. By an act of will, Freda did not jerk her hand back but let him pat.
After the strategy conference she retired to her room to read, but her mind kept returning to Gaynor’s pat and her distaste toward it. She awaited the inevitable tap on the door or the ring of her telephone as she might have awaited the in-swinging spikes of an Iron Mary. Once Gaynor started his maneuvers in private, it would be impossible to conceal her revulsion toward being touched. She tried to think of him as a Shasta daisy, but her mind rejected the subterfuge. She arose and paced the room. Once his hand touched her thigh, all that she had worked for, chairmanship of the Bureau, elevation to the Department, eventual Cabinet membership, would be lost in a shriek of horror that could not be disguised as delight.
She paced harder, thinking she was letting herself be driven mad by a scribble on a washroom wall. Gaynor was married with three children, and he flashed his platinum wedding band at the slightest opportunity—and those men were the worst kind! Well, she decided, she would simply tell him that she had contracted a case of leprosy.
Leprosy was such an absurd straw to cling to that she smiled, and temporarily relaxed. At the precise moment her smile was broadest, the telephone rang.
She jumped, then hopped and skipped toward the instrument, standing over it for a moment to let it ring a second time. At least she wanted him to know she wasn’t eager.
She picked up the telephone and attempted a coo that ended in a croak, “Freda Caron speaking/’
“Hi, Freda. This is Hans Clayborg. I’m interested in your tulip. How about drop
ping down to the Rendezvous Room for a nightcap?”
“Hans! You bet your sweet burro I will!”
“What do you want to drink? I’ll order now.”
“Whatever you’re having, but make mine double.”
Hans awaited her in a corner booth, and he said, “They tell me you’ve got a tulip that’s out of this world.”
“It used to be. It’s near Fresno now.”
He was fascinated by her description of the Caron tulips. By the second nightcap, she was telling the entire story of Paul and his orchids, Hal and his trees, and the conspiracy they both suspected on the planet. Wide-eyed and supercharged, Hans could only say, “Wonderful!… Incredible!… Superb!”
Hans was as confused as Paul about the orchid pollinators. “Paul’s using the methodology I would use, and his deduction’s the same as mine; through some illogical inconsistency, the facts aren’t making themselves available. But your idea is good, too. Study the tulips and compute their solutions on a seven-foot level.”
When she finished and they commenced their third nightcap, Hans in a spluttering spray of words told her how he had come to study entropy: “Because I lost so much reserve energy chasing women when I was young, I grew interested in energy as a thing in itself.”
He tried to explain to her the reason for the past century’s rash of exploding stars in relation to Goldberg’s Law of Diminishing Entropy, but she could not share his horror at the death of stars. What if the life of the universe be shortened by forty billion years? As her psychiatrist would say, she couldn’t relate to forty billion years. If a few thousand stars blinked out over the weekend, there were still millions left.
He surprised her more by agreeing with Hal that the plants of Flora might be more intelligent than men, but he almost tipped her with the suggestion that Paul’s orchids were evolving away from—not toward—an ambulatory species. “That’s my reason for wanting an entropist on Flora. Somebody has to plan for the day the sun dies, and the planning has fallen, by default, to entropists. Those plants know about their dying sun from the weakened quanta jump in their chlorophyll process, and they could be preparing their species to survive the long winter of dying and the heat of rebirth.”
