by John Boyd
Commodore Minor was on hand at thirteen hundred with a sailor in a communications jeep. Freda outlined her wishes to the Commodore and suggested that they park the jeep under the tool shed to avoid the spray. “I can hose down the greenhouse after he makes his pass.”
Minor contacted the plane at its base, where the pilot was standing by to take off, and it was a relief to hear the Commodore’s terse orders, impersonal and objective. He kept her mind off the tulips, bending in the hot gusts of the Santa Ana’s east wind.
“Hello, angel, this is base. Do you hear me? Over.”
“Hello, base, this is angel. I hear you five by five. Over.”
“Angel, I propose to drop a purple flare. When you see it, approach the flare on a course two hundred and seventy-three degrees true, altitude one hundred feet. Commence spray one hundred yards east of wire fence and cut spray when dead over greenhouse. Circle south and fly north along eastern edge of wire fence, commencing spray fifty yards south of former spray’s line when water tower is abeam. Cease spraying fifty yards north of spray line. Over.”
“Roger. Wilco. Am taking off. Out.”
“It will be about ten minutes, Freda,” the Commodore said, and turned to the enlisted man to direct him where to plant the flare. Freda, as rapt as a nun, hardly heard him; she was holding her last communion with the flowers.
She knew they had manipulated her by her maternal instinct, but human children were capable of pulling the same deceit, so who could blame tulips? Mother love was the mother’s responsibility. Children were children the universe over. These tulips were particularly delightful children. Had they been able to control their homicidal impulses, they might have supplanted cats in the affections of old maids.
If Hal had only been content to remain a firm but loving father, this beauty would not have perished from the earth. But he had insisted on rushing the experiment to get Peter out of town before Saturday night in order to get her alone to play a song he had composed in a Mexican bordello. Now, though Hal was dead and buried in Fresno, he was living proof that Old Town was no place to spend one’s Saturday nights. In a sense, it was fitting that his funeral announcement had appeared on the bulletin board beneath a placard reading “haste makes waste.”
Looking over her tulips for the last time, Freda felt like some child-murdering Medea, with unbeaten breast and unpulled hair. Not only would this beauty be lost, but the golden band which had wedded her spirit to Hal’s would be severed forever. Looking out over the beds, she was suddenly aware that the wedding was less valuable to her than the wedding ring, but the drone of an aircraft helped stiffen her spine against the blandishments before her, and she lifted her gaze to the sky. Out of this welter of wilted green and gold, a new Freda would arise, no longer the career girl, but devoted wife and mother. She just hoped Paul Theaston appreciated her sacrifice.
Eastward, the spray plane was banking to commence its run. Over the squawk box, the pilot announced that he had picked up the flare, and she watched as he dropped altitude. Despite her resolution, Freda stole one last peek at the tulips, dancing and bending before the wind… No, they were bending into the wind! As she watched in horror, the slender necks of the stalks above the air chambers arced over, focusing the blooms of the tulips toward the east, and she screamed, “Commodore! The tulips!”
“You’re on course and coming…” the Commodore was telling the pilot, when Freda’s cry brought his attention to the beds. His voice never changed tempo. “Abort mission, angel. Abort! Condition red. I say again, abort.”
From one thousand yards out, the pilot replied, “Roger, base. Wilco.”
He banked the little plane slowly toward the south, and Freda breathed a sigh of relief, which escaped in a gasp of horror when the down wing crumpled and fell from the plane. Too low to eject, the pilot rode his craft down. Falling in a lazy arc, the plane struck the ground nose first, cartwheeled on its remaining wing and its tail, to plunge with a rending impact and a geyser of plant stain into the very ditch that contained the Bureau’s plow.
Still with unhurried haste and unperturbed pace, the Commodore switched channels and was calling, “Away, fire and rescue party. Away, fire and rescue party. Angel down, Plot area D, coordinates L-21, I say again, Plot area D, coordinates L-dash-two-one. Away, fire and rescue party.”
Freda, moving toward the office and out of earshot of the Commodore, heard the beginning wail of the sirens from the Base Security Center as she entered the office. Miss Manetti, grown accustomed to greenhouse five, had not wavered in typing the cancellation of the canvas request. Freda dialed the coroner’s office and said, “This is Doctor Caron. I have a dead man—”
“I know, Doctor,” the duty coroner answered. “With or without a stile?”
“With stile,” she answered, “and a ten-foot ladder.”
“Well, I suppose that clinches the Caron-Polino theory,” Commodore Minor commented as he entered the office behind her.
“Commodore, you’ll have to turn in a deposition on this incident to the Navy, will you not?”
“Certainly,” the Commodore replied. “It involved a civilian fatality. And I’ll need your testimony as a corroborating witness. I’ll have to make the statement with ten copies.”
“May I offer the services of Miss Manetti? We can make the statements while the incident is still fresh in our minds. And I would like an eleventh copy as an addenda to my monograph.”
“Certainly, Freda. While I make the statement, will you call Maintenance and put in a verbal requisition for a remote-controlled bulldozer with a television viewer. And have them sandbag the carburetor and ignition system. Well have to tear down the fence and scrape the area clean of tulips. If any of those plants are left on this planet by tomorrow, I’m defecting to Mars.”
As the Commodore dictated the clincher to An Inquiry into Plant Communication, Freda phoned her requisition into Maintenance. For the first time in her career, she found a flaw in Gaynor’s allegedly efficient administration of the base. “Doctor Caron,” the maintenance supervisor said, “I’ve got three crews still repairing greenhouses, one crew assigned to hoist a plow out of the drainage ditch, and now I’ve just got a call from Security to go hoist a plane out of the ditch. That is my last crew.”
“Sir, I’m not advising you on how to handle your duties,” she snapped, “but the same hoist for the plow can be used for the plane. They’re not ten yards apart in the ditch.”
“Oh,” the chagrined supervisor said. “In that event, I can get the bulldozer rigged, sandbagged, and over within the hour, but it will take me some time to repair the fence. I can get to it before nightfall, I think.”
“See that you do,” Freda snapped, and hung up.
Talk about efficiency! The first rule in the first primer on administrative techniques was: be prepared for all contingencies. Such problems were supposed to be pretested, stress-analyzed, and response procedures mapped in advance by computer banks. And Charles Gaynor was going to give her a sanity hearing. If she had not already decided on his execution, she would have written her congressman, but by the time the letter arrived, she would be complaining about a dead man.
Even as she fumed, the base messenger entered, bearing an envelope marked “Immediate and Urgent.” She tore it open and read:
To Doctor Freda Caron the Executive Director of the Bureau of Exotic Plants sends his greeting. You are hereby directed to report before me between the hours of 4:58 and 5:24, Tuesday, March 21, 2237, to show cause why you should not be relieved of all duties for reasons of mental and/or emotional incapacity. Hearings will be held in the presence of Bureau medical authority.
Doctor Charles C. Gaynor
Executive Director
Bureau of Exotic Plants
U.S. Department of Agriculture
She had read the oracle aright. She put the letter in her briefcase and turned to Miss Manetti to complete her portion of the deposition regarding the crash and death of the pilot. After Miss Mane
tti had commenced to type, Freda commented on the sad condition of the Maintenance Department to the Commodore. He shared her indignation. “The Navy would never permit such inefficiency,” he said.
She accompanied the Commodore to his jeep, and they stood for a moment in silence, watching the litter bearers from the coroner’s office cross the fence on their stiles, lugging their ladder with them. Commodore Minor assured her he would stop by the maintenance office to keep an eye on the scraping to see that they did not bulldoze her greenhouse to the ground. Before he saluted her good day, he sniffed the air. “Looks like the cold front’s here. The Santa Ana is broken.”
She thanked Commodore Minor for his efforts and returned to the office, remarking to herself on the peculiar methodology of the Navy. Commodore Minor had sniffed the air to determine if the Santa Ana was broken, while a cold wind was blowing in from the ocean, a high haze had covered the sun, and the temperature was dropping like a Caron soufflé.
Time was the essence of victory now, and she plunged into completion of An Inquiry into Plant Communication, She was grateful for the anodyne of work when she heard the clank of a bulldozer beyond the fence and eventually the clink of the fence itself as the shearing blade ripped into it. Above the drone of Miss Manetti’s typewriter, the heavy tread of the tractor slashing into the loam was shearing an image of beauty that had sprouted in gold from her heart.
Freda tried to avoid thinking of events outside the door, but when Miss Manetti asked for and received a well-deserved break from her typing, the operation outside was brought in to Freda in a particularly abhorrent manner. The typist had stepped outside to watch the bulldozer, and she returned with an armload of Caron tulips.
“They were so beautiful, Doctor, I picked a bunch, but look how they droop.”
Freda looked down at the dead tulips, and her dream of beauty died. Singly, they had been pathetic in death. Their massed corpses produced only revulsion in her mind. Stalks which had once been gleaming and stalwart shone with a putrescent green, and the heads drooped from the girl’s arms with a slimy limpness. “Oh, throw those horrid things away, Miss Manetti. In an hour they’ll be smelling.”
As Miss Manetti complied, moving with impunity alongside the still intact A bed to the trash bin, Freda recalled that no one had warned the typist of danger, and for her there had been none. Freda glanced through the glass pane of the door to the outside thermometer. It read sixty-eight degrees, and she stifled a gasp of dismay. The crop duster had died racing to beat a cold front which would have made his work unnecessary. The bulldozer, clanking now outside the door, after tearing down the fence, could have been replaced by three Japanese stoop gardeners working in absolute safety in the sixty-eight-degree weather. Mr. Hokada had met death in the morning, when, if he had been permitted to finish his fan-tan game, he would have been alive in the afternoon.
Haste had truly made waste!
Her thoughts swirled around the dead pilot and Mr. Hokada. Something of them would remain, she consoled herself, at least in the records of the civil courts. The two dead men, not counting Hal Polino, whom she had already counted, represented an additional two million dollars in damage suits against the Bureau, once the Caron-Polino monograph on her desk was published. Mr. Harold M. Polino, senior, would be asking at least that much, alone, if he heeded the typewritten advice of “A Friend” that he would receive in tomorrow’s mail.
After an hours break for dinner, Freda and the typist were back at work. By ten p.m. the monograph and four copies lay completed and bound before her on the desk: the original for Bureau Archives, one for NASA, one for Agriculture, one for the Government Printing Office, and one for Doctor Hans Clayborg. Four she took to the night duty officer in the administration building in the company of Miss Manetti, and signed them in for Doctor Gaynor’s attention. Alone, she took Hans’s copy by the post office and dropped it into the “Urgent” slot. It was past eleven when she finally crawled into bed. It had been a busy five days, she thought, and the busiest sixth was due to arrive tomorrow.
Like an executive should, Doctor Gaynor made a habit of reporting early to his office each morning, to get in a “solid” hour before breakfast. Doctor Gaynor was particularly interested in publications by scientific personnel. In fact, if a member of his “team” did not publish something at least once a year, that team member was in for a lot of good-natured chiding from Doctor Gaynor, for a part of any Bureaus prestige rested on the number of publications it submitted to the Government Printing Office. Freda went to breakfast early and stayed late, waiting to greet the administrator, but Doctor Gaynor did not show up for breakfast.
Doctor Gaynor also skipped lunch.
Somewhere in the Administrators’ Translation of the Holy Bible, it was written: “What profits it an executive to gain a Bureau and lose a Cabinet post thereby?” Leaving the ladies’ lounge for her hearing before Gaynor, Freda walked in doubt of the Scripture. The Bible’s maxim was an exhortation to care and to keep caring; on the evidence of her feelings, the Bible was dead wrong. Not caring released energies, destroyed inhibitions, and gave one a better perspective on codes of ethics. The best administrator was the one whose symbol of authority was the second finger extended vertically from a clenched fist.
Drawing the mantle of unrighteousness about her light-green dress, Freda bounced toward the executive suite in her green-suede shoes, her buoyancy heightened by a message the sibyl had left on the wall: “Dear Freda, by a book too deep for reading, the white-haired boy is laid. A Friend.”
Hauteur of such coldness lapped around Mrs. Weatherwax that Freda feared the prim but efficient secretary might crack her neck with the nod she vouchsafed when Freda entered the reception office. “As goes Weatherwax, so goes Gaynor,” Freda remembered. The chill extended to the executive secretary’s voice as she said, “Doctor Caron, Doctor Gaynor is presently occupied in his inner sanctum. However, Doctor Berkeley has arrived for your hearing, and I am to show you in.”
As she escorted Freda to the door, Mrs. Weatherwax spoke from the corner of her mouth without moving her lips, “They intended a dart game with you as the target, but you lobbed a grenade. The tinhead’s been here since midnight.”
She held open the door. Her features were a model of formality, but from those ventriloquist’s lips Freda heard, “Shaft the bastards, Freda!”
The psychiatrist was sitting in the straight-back chair, working a crossword puzzle attached to a clipboard. His legs were crossed, and he was half-turned to the seating device reserved for Freda in front of the desk. The device was a black-leather contour lounge so highly suggestive of a psychiatrist’s couch that she imploded with fury: psychological warfare, a crude attempt at intimidation if she had ever seen one!
Instead of seating herself demurely and swinging, knees together, into position on the lounge chair, she mounted it from Berkeley’s side with a free swing to her legs that offered him a quick flash of inner thighs. She sprawled indolently as she spoke without a tremor, “How’s the advice to the lovelorn coming, Jim?”
“So-so.” He had tensed at the whirl of legs, and he continued to force his eyes into her eyes as he said, with studied nonchalance, “Have you decided to take any action on my memo?”
“No, but I’m open to persuasion. There’s a charming café in Old Town, the Mexicali, with rooms upstairs for private dining. Do you like Mexican music?”
“I could use a little right now!” he exclaimed. “Why don’t I call you after the hearing?”
“Sounds wonderful, provided I’m not found incompetent. You know what happens to psychiatrists who take advantage of incompetent patients.”
“Between you and me, and Gaynor’s microphone, I don’t think the old man’s got a case against you, and I’m beginning to think so with emphasis… But why the sudden change of heart toward my memo?”
“Oh, Jim,” she said, “I’ve seen so much death and destruction this past week, three men and fifty thousand tulips, that I’ve been reevaluat
ing life along Frommian lines. If I can do anything to bring a note of happiness into this world, I would like, in my little way, to do so… I was thinking of you this morning, Jim, when I wiggled into my dress, thinking of your philosophy of loving. I know you’ve had trouble getting your program launched, and I thought to myself, everyone brings his problems to the psychiatrist, but no one stops to consider that the psychiatrist has problems. So I resolved to declare my own personal little ‘Be Kind to Psychiatrists Week’ and help Doctor Berkeley with his problem.”
“Freda”—he was leaning forward, tense, beads of sweat beginning to ooze from his forehead despite the air-conditioner—“one of the first rules of analysis is to be honest with your analyst, so I’m putting it to you roundly: I’ve had a psychiatric cover on you since March fifteenth”—(Ah, Freda thought, the ides of March!)—“and some of your actions have been a little odd, not particularly from my point of view, I deal in odd behavior, but from an administrative point of view, which is bad, because the weight of analysis nowadays is swinging to administrative aberrations, and some of your requisitions have been dillies, there’s just no other word for it, they’ve been dillies, but between you and me and Charles’s microphone, I’m a member of the A.M.A., and I took that Greek oath… Hippo… Hippi…”
“Hippocrates,” Freda helped him.
“Yeah, that’s the one I mean. And I’m not violating my hypocritic oath nor the A.M.A.’s Code of Ethics. Not for Charlie, I’m not! Now, with you, it’s a different matter. In my clinical opinion, Freda, you’re normal… You’re not average, but normal… To tell you the truth, Freda, I have never seen a woman as normal as you in twenty years of practice. Now, about that Mexican music… I have to cha-cha before I can rumba, rumba before I can tango, but after I’ve tangoed, I’ve got about the smoothest-gliding bolero you’ve ever known, believe me! It’s sort of a cross between a waltz and a flamenco, and I can dance to that rhythm—”
He was primed, she thought. He was licking his lips in time to his hips, which were already moving to unheard mariachis, when the door of the inner sanctum opened and Doctor Gaynor advanced to his desk. It was a Doctor Gaynor Freda had never seen before.
