Greenhouse

by Thomas A Easton

  He grinned to himself. Tige was still just a pup, though he was three years old and the size of a delivery van. Macks didn’t finish growing until they were eight. By then, Tige would be able to tow a multiple-wheel trailer to more distant places. He would wear only a small pod for his driver and the computer, and a hitch for the trailer. Already, Jim was looking forward to trading the local delivery work for the long hauls.

  What would Julia do? Julia Templeton was a year older than he, a year ahead in her career. She would qualify for the long hauls a year before him. But then! Then! He dreamed that they might run from coast to coast in convoy, together. They might even get married.

  A buzzing sound yanked Jim’s attention to the phonelike radio handset. He made a face, knowing that it had to be the Farm with a new assignment, a pickup that he could make if only he would go just a little bit out of his way. The dispatchers were like that, particularly with the indentured truckers, like him. They didn’t care that his shift had been over for two and a half hours already and that he was on the way home now and more than ready to put his feet up for the night. He was tempted to ignore the call and claim later that he had been out of hearing range. Unfortunately, he didn’t think they would believe him.

  He couldn’t refuse, he thought, and he couldn’t quit. Sometimes, loyalty or no, he thought he might as well be a slave.

  He reached for the handset, kicking at a loose cable on the cab’s floor. “Yes?…No, I’m not out of town yet…Yeah, I can make the pickup…Are you sure of that address? That’s a lousy part of town…All right. All right. See you in an hour.”

  He hung up, thinking of how tired and sweaty he was and wondering how long it would be before he could have a cold shower. He sighed, tapped the brakes with his foot, and said, “Sorry, Tige. We’ve got to turnaround.”

  The Mack bent his neck until one great eye peered at Jim through the open window. “That’s right,” he said. “One more job. And then we can go home. I’ll hose you down, too. That’s a promise.

  Tige snorted and shook his head, just as if he understood the words. Spittle flew. But he stopped and turned obediently.

  His new destination was on the other side of town. If he could drive directly there, it would take him only minutes, but the afternoon rush hour was starting now, and the traffic on the city’s streets was getting thicker with every passing minute. He looked up, seeing the relatively few jellyfish-based Floaters that were leaving the upper floors of office buildings. They were moored to balconies throughout the day; at night, their owners kept them in blister-like garages on the sides of their high-rise apartment buildings. And they never got caught in traffic. He was sure the other drivers, like him, wished they had one of the things.

  Jim sighed and maneuvered Tige onto the turf-paved beltroad that circumnavigated the city’s center, hoping that that would be faster. But even there, traffic stopped, started, crawled, and honked. He sighed once more. This was one aspect of city life that had never changed and never would. He yawned. His stomach rumbled again. He rummaged in a cabinet, found a stale pastry, and ate it. He stared at the honeysuckle vines that festooned the banks along the road, gorgeous in their blooms, sickening in their odors, and thought that the Farm was surely right to grub up every sprout that dared to show its tip on or near the property. That was a student chore, and he was glad to be at last immune to it, but it had to be done, or the students, the staff, the truckers, even the trucks, might…

  There, he thought, under that overpass, strewn across the pavement of granite blocks that kept the embankment from eroding, were a dozen honeybums. If his dad hadn’t…He had been sucking honey himself, then. Lethargic, passive, interested in nothing but reaching for another of the blossoms so conveniently to hand. On his way, though he had still been washing and shaving. He made a face. Most of them didn’t even try to find food. Whatever nutrients were in the honeysuckle wine were all they got, and their bodies showed all the signs of malnutrition. So did their life expectancies. Yet they did not suffer. The wine saw to that.

  The honeysuckle vines were everywhere, along roads, in alleys, climbing up utility poles and the sides of buildings. They were not extirpated as on the Farm because most people thought them pretty, though their scent might be a bit cloying. Nor did most people worry about the honey bums. They were, said some, bums even without the honey. Useless specimens who would resign no matter what from the human race. Others were more charitable but still refused to exercise their sympathies over the honey bums’ situation, perhaps because the bums posed no social problem other than visual clutter and a bit of rank body odor which was smothered anyway, most of the time, by the scent of honeysuckle. They were not given to crime, a blessing many credited to the euphoric in the honey. Or…In the past, drug addicts had been forced into crime to pay for their drugs. The wine was everywhere, and it was free.

  When the exit that he wanted came into view, Jim sighed with relief. It was clear, uncrowded. Only a few unfortunates like himself were driving into the city, and they had all the inbound roads to themselves. With luck, he thought, he would have the pod loaded and be on his way again in half an hour. Without luck—and surely that would be Murphy’s choice—the shipper’s representative would be a wizened old man, the cargo would be a hundred cases of vintage wine that had to be carried individually, one at a time, into the pod, he would have to do it all himself, and it would take hours.

  He swore. Julia Templeton was waiting at the Farm. She had had the day off, and both of them had been looking forward to his return, on time. But Murphy had had it in for them, hadn’t he? The Grey God hadn’t wanted them to have much time together, at least today.

  The beltway ramp had let him into a district of warehouses. As he searched for the address he needed, the buildings grew shabbier and more overgrown with honeysuckle vines, the streets dirtier, and the traffic sparser. There were few signs that the buildings were in use. Office windows were darkly lifeless, and the few shops—a diner here, its windows blocked with faded political placards; a newsstand there, its racks thick with comic books, many of them revivals of ancient superheroes who resonated with an age of gengineered transformations—seemed to have been dead for decades.

  Dusk was beginning to settle and streetlights were flickering on. Most of the lights, in this part of town, remained dark, their bulbs burned out or broken, but there was still enough light for him to see, a little back from the mouths of the alleys he passed, buried in green honeysuckle gloom, adorned with the pink and cream of the blossoms, clusters of tiny shacks assembled from packing crates and cardboard. In front of them, escaping their cramped confines, sprawled and crouched the district’s honeybums.

  The sound of a bumblebee drew his attention to a single Floater as it rose into view above the building to his left, its spinning propellor a translucent disk. He turned one more corner, and there was the warehouse where, the dispatcher had told him, he would find both a shipper and a cargo. But the building was as derelict as any he had ever seen, and far more derelict than any building he had ever seen in use. No pane of the glass that had once blocked weather from its small, high-up windows was left intact. The paving of the small loading area was cracked and potholed. The large door to the warehouse’s inside loading bay was undamaged, but the personnel door to one side was missing entirely. There were even gaps in the brick wall of the building, as if there, and there, and there, a giant child had kicked in pique. An alley to one side was choked with honeysuckle and crude shelters. There were no lights, and the dusk was growing thick enough to need them. He flicked on the headlights mounted on the leading edge of Tige’s pod, below the windshield, and aimed them at the empty doorway, but they did not penetrate the murk within the warehouse.

  Anger washed his fatigue away. The address was right, he knew. So where was his cargo? Where was the shipper? The headlights showed no sign that anyone had ever been here. The honeysuckle shoots before the warehouse door had not been trampled. There were no tracks in the dirt. Was
someone playing a mechin’joke? Or had the dispatcher screwed up?

  He opened the door to the pod and descended. Maybe there was another door, and lights or no lights they were inside waiting for him. Maybe they just weren’t here yet and he could stretch his legs. Or maybe they weren’t coming, and if he didn’t move around and exhaust some of the steam that was building up within him he would explode.

  He paced around the loading area, looking for tracks. There were none. He looked back at Tige and realized that he had left the pod’s door swinging open, unlatched, unlocked. He told himself that didn’t matter, for he would be back inside in just a moment, whether the shipper and the cargo were here or not. He walked along the roadway and peered around the building’s corner, down an accessway a little narrower than most alleys, and too narrow for vehicular traffic. It was free of honeysuckle, Jim thought as he looked for another entrance, because its surface was unblemished, uncracked concrete. Vines rooted elsewhere avoided it because its narrowness excluded sunlight.

  He could find no other entrance. Finally, angrily, kicking the honeysuckle out of his way as he stomped across the broken pavement, wishing he had someone to holler at, he approached the dark entrance to the warehouse.

  He was leaning forward to peer into the deeper darkness within when he heard a rush of feet behind him. Tige uttered a single deep, imperative bark. He spun around, and there, silhouetted against Tige’s headlights, was a figure rushing toward him, a club of some sort in its upraised hand. He had just time to see that his attacker was not dressed in rags, was no honey bum, before a blow knocked him senseless.

  When he awakened, he could barely make out the three figures bending over him. Night had completely come. The only light was a dim skyglow from more active parts of the city. But that light was enough for him to see the rags and know from that, and from the odors that washed over his prone body, that the three were honey bums. They had presumably emerged from their hovels in the nearby alleys once he had been still long enough. Now one was fingering his coverall. Another had a hand on his left shoe.

  Dimly, he sensed that the alley bums might retain a vestige of ambition that those who dwelled beneath the highway overpasses had lost. Not only did they build rude shelters, but they could recognize an opportunity when they saw one. If he were dead, if he failed to protest, they would quite happily strip him for his clothes, as well as for whatever might be hidden in his pockets.

  He groaned. He kicked. He flailed. The honey bums recoiled, and when he staggered to his feet, they fled. He felt the back of his head. It was already swollen, tender, and hot. It hurt, and he winced. The honey bums were assholes. Whoever had done this was a mechin’ asshole. Not a honey bum, no. A thief. He checked his pockets. His wallet was still there, holding still as many bills as it had before. Nothing was missing.

  He turned, looking for Tige.

  Tige wasn’t there.

  So that was why the headlights weren’t on anymore.

  He swore aloud: “Mechin’ Jeezuss on a crutch!”

  His breast pocket held two pens and a small light. He unclipped the light, clicked it on, and scanned the roadway. Julia had given him the light, and he had carried it ever since, though he had never, till now, needed it. He wished he could remember what the occasion had been.

  He staggered toward the corner and looked down the narrow alley. There was no sign of Tige. He backtracked and found no sign that Tige had been taken into the stygian blackness of the warehouse. There was only a small pile of Mack litter beside a pothole.

  “Mech!”

  Movement was making his head feel better. Now, he asked himself, where had those honey suckers gone? They couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with slugging him or stealing Tige. They didn’t have the energy, or the ambition. Or did they? They were ready enough to strip his dead body, if dead it was, and he supposed they could use money if they ever happened to get any. Could they have been hired? He remembered the silhouette. It hadn’t been that of a bum.

  Might they have seen anything? He turned toward the alley full of honeysuckle vines and heard a scrabbling noise back among the flimsy walls of the bums’ improvised tenement. He strode forward, kicking the sheets of cardboard aside, flattening roofs and walls, crunching meager possessions. He dismissed the uneasy thought that he should feel guilt for his rampage, that honey bums were human too. He was, he told himself, mad, angry, pissed, and woe betide anyone who got in his way.

  When one foot met a softer, more resilient mass, he used his light to be sure the mass was flesh, bent, grabbed its arm, and hauled it back to the loading area.

  The bum had neither shaved nor washed for at least a year. He looked like what Jim raked out of Tige’s curry comb on a rainy day, and he smelled worse. His skin felt as if ropy tumors, stiff and rubbery, were growing beneath it, and dimly, in the darkness, Jim could make out dark, twisting markings wherever the skin was not covered with the rags that had once been a coverall.

  Jim swallowed his revulsion, set the man down, squatted before him, and resolved to breathe through his mouth. Then he said, “Tell me. Or I’ll find a desert, and I’ll take you out in the middle of it, a hundred miles from honey, and I’ll leave you there.”

  “Tell’oo wha’?” The eyes were wide. The breath was foul. The gravelly voice was surprised and defiant, as any voice might be when its owner was interrupted by some rude stranger.

  “You saw. The bastard hit me on the head and stole my Mack. Who was he? Which way did he go?”

  The bum tipped sideways, caught himself on his hands, and began to crawl toward the alley. “Wan’ honey.”

  Jim grabbed for the back of the filthy coverall. The fabric had been of some quality, once, but now it was thoroughly rotten. It tore away in his hand. He shook shreds of embroidery from his fingers, shifted his grip, fought renewed revulsion at the greasy filth of the hair and the strange feel of the skin, and yanked the bum back into place. “Where’d he go?”

  The bum’s head swayed back and forth. “Don’ know. Don”memmer. Wan’ honey.” He tipped back into his interrupted crawl and Jim, disgusted, got up. He wiped his hands on the thighs of his coverall. He spat, a gesture of frustrated contempt for the uselessness of honey suckers, even of the human species in general.

  He shuddered to think that he could have become the same sort of creature. There had been a time when the honey had seemed a reasonable escape from the problems of his young life. But then his Dad had taken him to the Farm, and he had met Tige, and…He shook his head, winced at the burst of pain he gave himself, and turned toward the streets he had driven Tige down on his way to this trap.

  There were no pay phones in the derelict parts of the warehouse district. It took him half an hour to reach a more active region, one with more than one working street light to a block, with nightlights—and even desk lamps—burning in warehouse offices, with bus stops and—There!—a diner, still lit up, still doing business. A phone carrel was visible just inside the door.

  The smells of grease and meat and coffee struck him as he opened the door, in infinite contrast to the stink of the honey bum he had tried to question. His stomach growled, reminding him that he had forgotten that he was hungry. He rummaged in a pocket. There were plenty of bills in his wallet, he knew, for a meal. But the phone demanded coins, and he had only one pentagonal Mitchell dollar.

  He dialed his own room at the Farm. If Julia wasn’t there, the machine would return his coin and he could try the Farm’s main switchboard. But she was, and, “Jim! Where have you been?”

  He explained. “They stole Tige.”

  “Oh, no!” She understood. Any trucker would.

  “Come get me?”

  “Of course. But you’d better call the cops.”

  “I’m outta Mitchells.”

  “Get some change.”

  “After I grab a bite. Or I’ll call when you get here. Use the radio.”

  “Stingy ass. Maybe I’ll call’em for you.”

 
“Thanks.”

  He told her where he was, hung up, and turned toward the counter. He took his food to go and, minutes later, was sitting on the diner’s steps, eating and scanning the street and the mouths of those alleys that opened into it. He was hoping against hope that the thief or thieves would drive Tige past his gaze. But there was no traffic at all. All he saw, even here, was honeysuckle vines and honey bums hiding in their shadows.

  He was nearly done with his meal when he heard the siren and a Sparrowhawk stooped out of the sky to land on the street before him. Its talons scraped against the pavement as it landed. It cocked its head, marked as if it wore an ancient warrior’s helm. A reddish crest, resembling a tonsure, suggested that those warriors might have been monks as well. The plumage was dark-spotted cream on the underside. The throat was white. A red-brown tail jerked, and a hooked beak opened and closed.

  The pilot sat in a narrow bubble or pod of clear plastic, marked only by an oval doorframe, and within that, a small porthole. The police department markings were painted on the fittings that anchored the heavy straps that held the pod to the bird’s back. There was no need for structural metal or rotor-mountings, as in the helicopters that still were used at times. Two jet engines were strapped to the root of the bird’s tail.

  Hawks had replaced helicopters for many police purposes because their built-in weaponry, by its nature—beaks and talons as sharp as scythe blades, and larger—had more deterrent effect on evil-doers than machineguns or rockets. The Hawks were also quite effective at catching those who fled the scenes of their crimes.

  He hoped that this Hawk, and its pilot, could catch Tige’s thief.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 3