The Pollinators of Eden (17 page)

“Doctor Caron, Peters got some interesting information.”

“About those tapes, ma’am. The ones you and Hal sent.”

“What about the tapes, sir?”

“They were merely given a four-B analysis, ma’am.” His “ma’am” sounded like “mum.” “Which is a courtesy analysis to honor an official request. It’s thorough enough, mind you, a four-B is, but I felt… Well, ma’am, I felt that they hadn’t been handled correctly. There were some smudges atop the spectrogram—”

“Did you call the attention of your departmental superior to this discrepancy?”

“Well, ma’am. You know department heads. Begging your pardon, ma’am. If your idea turns out well, it’s their idea; but if it doesn’t, you get your bloody teeth kicked in.”

Yes, she was familiar with such department heads, she thought, and she was also familiar with assistants such as Peter Henley, the ones who rose not by tearing down others but by bootlegging information on the sly to spring it on their superiors in the presence of their superior’s superiors later, at the right tactical moment. Peter Henley was known in some circles as an interdepartmental rat.

“Go on,” Freda said.

“I was thinking, ma’am, since the smudges occur at fairly regular intervals, they might be the lower nodes of higher-pitched sounds that Hal’s equipment didn’t pick up.”

“You think the tulips might be sounding at a pitch we can’t hear.”

“No, ma’am,” Henley said. “I don’t think so, because I have no evidence, officially. Unofficially, I have a piece of tape I pulled out of the boss’s wastebasket, but it just gave me a hunch.”

A veritable jackal, she thought. “May I see your visitor’s pass, Mr. Henley?”

His pass checked out. Hal had certified it. “Let’s continue this conversation in the office,” she said.

Hal had gathered her sunbathing gear, and he fell in beside her on the way to the greenhouse. “Peters from the University of Sydney. He’s in the States on a fellowship, and he’s one of Professor Grant’s students.”

Freda knew from Hal’s tone that she was supposed to know all about Professor Grant, but she didn’t. “Who’s Professor Grant?” she asked.

“He teaches a rather unique methodology. Tell her about it, Peter.”

“Doctor Grant’s theory is that no investigating procedure should use logic, because the basic elements of the universe are irrational. Doctor Grant says, take the bloody standard procedure and throw it in the bloody wastebasket.”

“He reminds me of a friend of mine,” Freda said, “Hans Clayborg.”

“Grant studied under Clayborg,” the Australian said.

“Yes, I remember now,” Freda said, highly pleased by her first attempt at name-dropping, “and Hans thinks highly of him.”

“Doctor Caron, here’s my evidence, for whatever it might be worth.” He pulled a roll of spectrograph tape from his pocket, snapped off its rubber band, and spread it on her desk. “This is the sound you hear,” he said, pointing to a jumbled pattern of wave lines. “But up here, you’ll notice, there are smudges on the tape.”

She would not have noticed them had he not pointed them out to her. They were so faint, they were hardly visible, and seemed discolorations of the paper. “I know so little about sounds, Mr. Henley, but couldn’t those be shadows from an overtone?”

“Logically, they would be, at first glance. Standard procedure calls for checking overtone shadows, and S.O.P. says they’re there. But these look a little pregnant to the left and then swing over to a right-hand pregnancy, which could mean an undertone shadow from a higher pitch, falling a little out of sync.”

“Couldn’t they be smudges from a soiled gripper on the spectra machine?” Methodologically speaking, she had feinted with her right and connected with her left.

Peter Henley flicked her haymaker aside. “I clean the machine with carbon tet containing dilute aniline. My smudges are all blue.”

“Very well, Mr. Henley,” she said wearily. “We concede they are suspicious smudges. What is the next step in this Bloody-Grant-Clayborg method?”

“Throw away the old tapes, and start over again, using a more sophisticated detector on a higher frequency. Why higher instead of lower? Because if the bloody tulips are trying to fool us, we’d logically figure they’re whispering low.”

She thought for a moment. Doctor Gaynor would never permit, and rightly so, the use of unauthorized personnel on the base, particularly if the request originated from her. Security measures had to be maintained. Moreover, Peter Henley had seen her virtually in the nude, and he knew what lay beneath her smock. One sirocco at a time was all she could handle. A hot wind blowing from the Outback would be too much. “I can’t permit you on the base, Mr. Henley.”

“I neither need to be nor wish to be,” Henley said. “I don’t want Gaynor to even know I’m in Fresno. Hal can plant the tapes for me, this afternoon, bring them to me, and I can analyze them from my diggings in Fresno.”

“Very well,” Freda said, “you have my unofficial blessing. Show Mr. Henley our tulips, Hal, but make it snappy.”

“First let me show you the A plot, Peter,” Hal said, ushering him through the door. “We expect another crop of seeds Monday, and I have a bet with Freda that the tulips can clear a toss of fifty yards…”

As their voices drifted out of earshot, Freda turned to stow her gear in the locker, wondering why all the young men from the English Confederation were named “Peter.”

Freda’s collision course with Saturday night and Sunday morning commenced on a sinister note before breakfast Monday morning. She had barely finished her orange juice when the waitress in the executive dining room brought her a cryptic note in Hal’s handwriting: “Get to the beds quick. Something’s gone haywire.”

Freda gulped her coffee, grabbed her coat to ward off the early-morning chill, and left her order of ham and eggs to be served to an empty chair.

Hal had come early to the beds, no doubt to change the tapes, and she noticed, as she rounded the corner of the greenhouse, the wasps were swarming in the A beds, and she called to him, “What’s wrong?”

“Look at the A beds,” he called.

She looked. The seedpods had burst.

“Were you in the tulips Sunday?” he called.

“No, I went to a concert in Bakersfield.”

“I was in Fresno with Peter, but it looks like I’ve won my bet on that distance throw by the A beds. They must have put the seeds in orbit.”

“Aren’t there any on the canvas?”

“None. Nary a seed, anywhere.”

She stepped back and looked onto the roof of the greenhouse. “Could they have shot them west, over the greenhouse?”

“I’ve been here only ten minutes, but I checked that. None in the grass on the other side.” He had come near her now, and his face wore an expression of concern and mystification. “This can be serious, Freda. I calculate we’ve got about seventy-two thousand seeds we can’t account for, minus a few from unexploded pods. If we’ve got runaway seed production here, our goose is cooked.”

“Perhaps the third harvest is barren. I know nothing about the life cycle of these plants.”

“Well,” he said, scratching his head, “that’s illogical enough for us to consider. But I can find out very quickly. Cover your ears, girl, for here comes that sound again.”

Moving carefully through the flowers, Hal reached over and pulled up a female tulip whose pod was unopened. She braced herself for the lament for the dead, but the tulips stood mute.

“Maybe no one liked this one,” he said, holding the limp stalk in his hand and prying a vane apart with his thumbnail. Before it opened, she could see the row of eight tiny seeds inside.

“It would have borne seeds,” she said, “as soon as the temperature had risen.”

“That’s why they’re not chanting their death chant,” he said. “It’s too cold. Do you have a motion-activated camera in the store room?”

“No. I have to requisition them from photo, and they’re not open.”

“Then I’ll make a side-door requisition,” he said, peering among the tulips for another unopened pod. “Keep an eye on this old girl, Freda, while I get the camera.”

He was back with the camera in less time than it would have taken after the stockroom was opened. “I used my I.D. card on the door latch,” he explained, “an old burglar’s trick. Any movement?”

“None at all.”

He focused the camera on the unopened seed sac and set the motion activator with a zoom attachment. When he had completed preparations, he stooped to pick up the dead plant and held it before her. “Look, Freda, cavity but no seeds.”

“The wasps!” she exclaimed.

“You’re right,” and to her surprise his face was flooded with relief. “And I’ll wager that within five days we’ll find shoots growing in H and I patches, exactly six inches apart.” He opened the remaining vanes and laid the plant down so the wasps could reach the seeds. “I don’t mind assisting in a Caesarean,” he said, “but I’m no abortionist. Since I’m convinced you’ve won your bet, Freda, I’ll buy your coffee and doughnuts at the canteen.”

It was not proper for teachers to fraternize with students; it hurt the teacher’s standing in the eyes of Gaynor. Since she was perfectly sure she had no standing with Gaynor, the consideration had become academic. Happily she accepted and strolled over several lawns with Hal to the canteen.

“What makes you so confident the seeds will be placed in the right beds?”

“The tulips know that the soil has been primed with rare earths. They’re not ready to try their wings yet. But I had better put a twenty-foot tarp up next Monday, as a temporary policy of containment. We should start a long-range policy, here and now. If those brutes get out of hand, it could be very serious.

“But, Hal, they’re so fragile and delicate and small and beautiful.”

“So are you, Freda, but they’re females, and, like you, they can be dangerous. If Old Pete can learn to talk to the boys, maybe we can reason with the males, learn to coexist.”

Once her strangely scheduled disturbances around Hal had passed beyond the working hours, working in the beds became, once more, enjoyable. The movies of the wasp transport carrying seeds to the H and I beds turned out exceptionally well, to the vast relief of both, who had feared a random expansion, and to their gratification, since the movies added valuable documentation to their monograph on the plants.

For a ground wasp to lay an egg in a flower which resembled a wasp cell presented a phenomenon, however unusual, which reflected the adaptability capabilities of ground wasps only. For the same wasp to transport a tulip seed and bury it in a wasp cell in the ground, laid out according to a pattern favoring the plants, would create questions in the mind of any scientist. Once the Caron-Polino theories were published, Freda knew, they would gain a wide hearing in scientific circles.

Of course, the entomologists and behaviorist psychologists would swoop down on their thesis and tear it to bits in defense of the modified behavior of social insects, but she and Hal would be able to count on the support of plant scientists and free-will psychologists. Ecologists would probably be split down the middle, but both sides would be fascinated by the symbiosis.

Hal pointed out a curious ramification when they were assessing potential supporters. Without a shadow of a doubt, the powerful florists’ lobby would be on their side. “Freda, I can see the headlines now: ‘Own a Flower Pet—Buy a Caron Tulip.’ ”

Despite their fun and games, once on the job Hal obeyed her promptly, never questioned her decisions, and even cut down on his profanity. Only once did he question her judgment. Immediately after they viewed the film of the wasp carriers in action, she commented, “You see, Hal, how wrong you were! The tulips are cooperating with me because they know I love them. They want to show their appreciation by being obedient.”

“Wrong,” he snorted. “They know if they get out of line, I’ll whip hell out of them.” In the darkness of the projection room, she giggled. She and Hal were behaving like a mother and father discussing the rearing of children.

Beyond their skylarking, and in a great measure responsible for it, lay the invisible, to her, and godlike figure of Peter Henley; and Hal was fast developing into the god’s first representative on the botanical station. Officially, or unofficially, Henley represented Linguistics, which had once spurned them, and he definitely represented a cloud on the veto Linguistics had issued. They used the code name ’Old Pete’ when discussing him at the canteen, an ideal cover name, since no one would think of referring to the real Peter Henley as “Pete.”

Hal was so enthusiastic about the man that Freda felt a beginning resentment toward the paragon of the irrational approach. “This man is an authentic genius, Freda,” Hal said. “The other night, we were out having a couple of brews, and he gave his interpretation of the United Nations Council in an emergency session, speaking in twelve different languages, including Swahili, and interpreting into English in an undertone. At the end, when they all started yelling at each other at once, the poor interpreter almost cracked up, and everyone at our table was fractured, completely fractured.”

“Who was at the table with you?” she asked, her voice suddenly harsh and suspicious.

“Oh, no one from the base,” he said, misinterpreting her anxiety. “Just a bunch of truck drivers on the L.A.—to-Frisco run.”

Nevertheless, she felt she would rest easier once Peter Henley was out of town and Hal was out from under his influence. As a footloose young bachelor with an Australian accent who had lain on nude Swedish beaches, he couldn’t be entirely innocent. Hal was weak around women anyway, and she didn’t trust Peter Henley. She remembered how his Adam’s apple had bobbed up and down at the sight of her bikini.

“How long will it take Old Pete to finish analyzing the tapes?” she asked.

“He figures on wrapping them up by the end of the week and going on to Dubuque. He wants to see what he can find among the Iowa cornstalks.”

“Oh,” she said, “I see your boy is a wit. Are you inviting him to join us Saturday night?”

“Absolutely not,” Hal explained. “He’s a wit, a raconteur, a genius, but I don’t want anybody entertaining Freda Caron Saturday night but Hal Polino.”