The Pollinators of Eden Read online

  “You think like Hal Polino,” she said.

  “Yes. We use a lot of intuition at Santa Barbara,” he said. “Human existence, as we know it, cannot survive the death and rebirth of universes; but were working on the problem, even to burying capsules of stabilized amino acids five thousand feet below the Sahara Desert. Chances that one of those capsules will bob to the surface of an unborn ocean on a planet containing a fragment of this one to give evolution a head start on the next cycle of creation are impossible chances. But we deal in impossibles at Santa Barbara.”

  “So that’s where the taxpayers’ money goes,” Freda snapped, “into a hole in the ground.”

  “Seeds might survive,” he ruminated. “If we could contrive a kernel of human corn—”

  “Now you sound like Paul Theaston!” she exclaimed, and, at Hans’s insistence, she explained Paul’s theory of orchid survival, slightly edited. “I thought he was a little wacky,” she concluded, “but all wackiness is relative. Human corn, hah!”

  “Speaking of corn,” Hans said, “did you hear about the squaw who sold her favors for five dollars or a pint of corn seeds?”

  “That sounds like a six-drink story,” Freda said, “and I’m one over my quota with four… It’s two o’clock! Doctor Gaynor might make a bedcheck.”

  “If Gaynor makes a bedcheck at two a.m.,” Hans said, rising, “Freda Caron had better be under the bed.”

  They supported each other to and in the elevator. Hans bade her good night at the elevator door before being wafted higher. Loss of entropy had claimed him for her own, he said. But she got the key in her door on the fourth pass and tacked toward her bed, musing over a strange discovery: after four cocktails, or four glasses of wine, she lost her aversion to being touched.

  She idly wondered what would happen after the fifth drink. An abreaction?

  She awakened almost at noon and leaped from bed in revulsion at her laziness, until it occurred to her it was not yet eight o’clock in California. Nonetheless, she dressed hurriedly and took the express elevator to the main floor, sprinting across the lobby to the dining room. When she reached the alcove reserved for Athenians, all three men were present, but Doctor Gaynor was occupied with a reporter from the Washington Post, and Hans and Jim hardly nodded a glum greeting. She assumed from the air of gloom that Rosentiel either had suffered a remission or had refused to testify. That fear was put to rest when she heard Gaynor tell the reporter that they were overjoyed that the former Secretary of Space, Henry Rosentiel, had agreed to testify in favor of Flora as an open planet. But, Gaynor wished to reiterate, any opinion expressed by the Secretary was his own and in no way reflected the opinion of the Bureau of Exotic Plant Life.

  When the Post reporter thanked Doctor Gaynor and left, Doctor Berkeley lifted a copy of the Washington Posthole, concealed on the seat beside him, and handed it to Freda. Spread across the front page of the crudely printed newspaper were the headlines: “Spartans Draft Navy for Fight Against Flora.” Beneath the headlines was a three-column cut of Gaynor and his party descending from the plane—the photographer had caught her in a three-quarter profile, not her most flattering pose—and beneath was the caption: “Portrait of Four Lambs at Fleecing Time.”

  She scanned the story. None other than Admiral Creighton, Chief of Naval Discipline, had been summoned to testify against the opening of Flora to a permanent scientific station. His adviser, she read with astonishment, was Philip Barron, Commanding Officer, USSS Botany.

  “Why, Captain Barron was enthralled by the planet!”

  “That’s what makes it tough,” Clayborg said. “Barron’s been there. If he never says a word—and he probably won’t—his mere presence hurts us. He’s in the position of a man testifying against his own wife, which means the lady is a tramp.”

  “If Rosentiel talks on the stand as he did to Hans and me,” Doctor Berkeley said to Doctor Gaynor, “I advise you to stress the psychological factors, Charles. Hit the Navy where they cant hit back.”

  “Hans, how strong is that friendship that you spoke about between Rosentiel and Heyburn?” Gaynor asked suddenly.

  “Rosie studied law under Heyburn at North Dakota,” Hans said. “He was Heyburn’s fair-haired boy, his campaign manager in the senatorial race. Heyburn recommended him for Space Secretary as a payoff.”

  “Sort of a father-son relationship?”

  “That and more, Charlie. Heyburn feels responsible about Rosie—his space madness—because Heyburn practically sent him into the wild black yonder.”

  “Heyburn has another loyalty, it says here,” Berkeley broke in. “The Navy. Without the Red River Repair Base and the Bismarck pad, North Dakota could fold up and go home.”

  “And there’s the USSS Heyburn” Freda pointed out.

  “The ship was named for his son,” Berkeley said, “who was lost in the Andromeda swirl… Say, let’s swap queens! Why not match the Spartans’ gold braid with Athenian pulchritude, Charles? Let Freda present our brief.”

  Gaynor whistled softly, “Jim, I play an aggressive game, but I can’t see opening a bid with a singleton ace.”

  “To make metaphorical hash,” Hans broke in, “I’m against leading with our right, because if our haymaker misses, we’ll all be knocked on our collective prats, and Freda will be wanting a new front tooth.”

  “I don’t like the idea of ordering Doctor Caron before that committee,” Gaynor said. “Those southerners lose their chivalry when a dime’s involved… If we can persuade Heyburn, he’ll find a way to swing their vote. I say, hit them in the fields of botany, psychiatry, entropy… Bring in Doctor Youngblood’s theory of an asylum… Hit them with your ideas, Hans, about plant adaptation on a dying planet, how vital to us is the knowledge of the process. Of course, exposing Freda to a Senate Committee, the publicity…”

  Freda, weighing matters quickly, finished Gaynor’s dubious sentence. If she appeared before a Senate hearing, with the resulting publicity, she would certainly come to the attention of the Secretary of Agriculture, who would be interested in these hearings. If she acquitted herself well…

  “Doctor Gaynor, anything worth believing in is worth fighting for. Since the Bureau is making this petition, I stand ready to assume any duty you gentlemen wish to assign me in the interest of Bureau policy.”

  “Good girl!” Berkeley exclaimed. “We could back her with Doctor Youngblood’s therapeutic theory as our big guns and blast those Navy battlewagons out of space.”

  “There’s a logic here,” Gaynor admitted, “as long as our principal aim is to sway Heyburn emotionally. Anything that wins is right. If Freda doesn’t mind the publicity, we’ll try it… Gentlemen, shall we order a round to toast our new Joan of Arc?”

  “I’ll take a bloody mary,” Hans said, “to honor the decision.”

  Somehow, Clayborg’s remark seemed sinister, and Freda resented the implication. It was as if Clayborg considered their cause lost because she had volunteered to present the Bureaus petition.

  Chapter Five

  Freda delivered the bureau’s petition before the committee without stage fright and with enough composure to regret that she had to keep a three-quarter profile to the cameras. At the end, the paraphernalia of national publicity—lights, cameras, and clicking steno pads—was less disconcerting than the gaze fixed on her by the former Space Secretary. Rosentiel made her wonder if only male nurses were employed at Saint Elizabeth’s.

  Surprisingly, the devils advocate, Senator Heyburn, was merely dismissing her with the thanks of the committee when the committee’s attorney rose to a point of order. “Doctor Caron,” he asked, “in reference to your allegation that Flora might benefit night walkers, doesn’t this conflict with the Stanford-Hammersmith experiment on the raptures of space?”

  “What’s the Stanford-Hammersmith experiment?” she asked.

  “Well, ma’am, if you don’t know the answer, then I… er… withdraw the question.”

  Before he finished stammering, the cham
ber was rippling with laughter, and when he retreated to stumble back into his seat, the ripples had grown to waves. Freda resumed her seat as Heyburn gaveled the room to order and whispered to Hans, seated beside her, “What is the Stanford-Hammersmith experiment?”

  “That question has a six-drink answer,” he whispered back.

  Admiral Creighton diverted attention from the lawyer’s embarrassment. When called by the clerk, he advanced to the witness area, the line of gold stars down the outer seam of each leg—insignia of the space pilot—glittering when he walked. He was in full dress, with epaulets and in-looped gold cordon and the gold stripes of a full admiral reaching from cuff to elbow. On a little patch of blue above his left breast, the gold was nicely balanced by fourteen rows of ribbons denoting honors, from a good-conduct citation at the academy to the Order of the Southern Cross.

  Hans had briefed her on Creighton before the hearing, and his record was formidable. Now Chief of Naval Discipline, he had been the first space sailor to “buckle the belt of Orion,” which had won him the Israeli Order of Job. He had been first to rip the veil from Venus—for that, the “Pour le Mérite” of France—and he had felt the magnetic storms lashing between the Seven Sisters. All in all, he was a typical space admiral.

  Speaking without notes, Creighton delivered the antipetition in a clipped voice, arguing that transport of civilians to Flora would incur problems of Navy discipline. He spoke of the two men who had jumped ship and of the peculiar biological qualities of the planet which made difficulties for search-and-seizure parties. “Fortunately, Captain Barron ransacked his boyhood memories and came up with a solution, which entails, however, the expense of sending bloodhounds to Flora.”

  Freda liked that! Captain Barron’s memories, indeed!

  “Flora invites lax discipline,” the Admiral continued. “Blue jackets on liberty, once out of sight of the quarterdeck, removed all clothing. They were never reprimanded by officers on liberty because the officers, also, were out of uniform, completely. Captain Barron had to order decals of rank or rating applied to the bare skin; but this compulsion to strip, caused by the climate of Flora, has sounded a general alarm throughout world naval circles. Transportation of personnel to any permanent scientific station located on Flora would have to be accomplished without aid from the Royal Space Navy or the Greek Merchant Navy and at grave risk to the morale of our own.”

  From purely naval matters, Creighton diverted his attack to the challenge-and-response theory of motivation. “Flora is a huge San Diego,” he said, pointing out that “goldbricking” in the Able Section of the Florian scientific expedition had hindered accumulation of hard-core information to the point where it was only ten percent of the median for other planets. “A fact that cost a dime on Ramsey 7 cost a dollar on Flora. We in the Navy are not generally concerned with budgetary matters, but patriotism forced us to call the Secretary of the Treasury’s attention to this price tag.”

  Admiral Creighton nodded, wheeled, and glittered out, followed by Captain Barron, who would have some explaining to do, Freda promised herself, when he got back to the base.

  Then the clerk called Henry Rosentiel to testify in favor of an open Flora.

  Thin, intense, the former Space Secretary impressed Freda with his speaking ability and his sanity. Despite the cameras, the crowded chamber, and the whispering that greeted his name, he had such control of his mania that not a tic was apparent. His voice quivered, but only with the passion in his plea.

  “If a man be mad with meekness, is it not fitting in the interests of a higher humanity that he be freed from surveillance? Is it not proper, taxwise, since the cost of his fetters is so much greater than the cost of his transport, that he be granted passage to a planet which might act as his sole warder until he yields, forever, to the pull of gravity?

  “Why, then, are we held prisoners of earth? From some impulse in the hearts of men which says that he who rejects earth betrays a mother? From some ancient code which says that he who honors not his mother dishonors God? Eyes which have looked on the naked stars, tongues which have tasted wine-dark space, lips which have kissed the skirt hems of infinity, reject this mother no more, and no less, than one who said, ten score and two centuries agone, ‘Woman, I know thee not!’ ”

  Rosentiel was ready for Flora, Freda decided. He was talking like a fourth-generation Florian already. Still, listening, she was drawn to sympathy with the man.

  “Few are the aeons remaining to Flora,” Rosentiel continued. “When her last sunset fades, when her dark sun claims her and a nova flares across the Milky Way for our children’s children’s delight, I pray that a mote of the being which was I shall be mingled in that glory. For I am done with an earth whose fruits are machines, where all Miltons are mute and a Cromwell would be a pleasant change from this unutterably inane. So, old friend and teacher”—here he turned toward Heyburn—“gentlemen of the committee, I plead for all who greet the dawns with sadness and evenings with delight. Grant us this sanctuary, where we may worship, in secret and alone, our mistress, the night.”

  Freda didn’t share the former Secretary’s disapproval of society and she didn’t understand the reference to Milton and Cromwell, but she felt that Rosentiel’s plea had been more effective than Creighton’s. The Admiral had tightened the purse strings, while Rosentiel had tugged at the heartstrings, putting the choice squarely before the committee, money or the heart, cash or humanity.

  Obviously Senator Heyburn had been touched. He was blowing his nose as he arose, and he gazed benignly down on his former student. “Yes, we have heard the bells at midnight, Cousin Shallow.”

  Clearing his throat, Heyburn turned to the audience and cameras. He thanked the petitioners and assured all parties that a fair and judicial atmosphere would prevail during the intracommittee debates on the petition, which would be held in camera. “When we discuss the stars, we discuss the future of mankind, and we on the committee are mindful of our trust to you, mindful, too, of the generations yet unborn for whom our universe is a heritage, and shall so remain, until this insubstantial pageant has faded.”

  Something he said must have aroused a memory, for the Senator’s eyes went slightly out of focus, and the memory triggered an idea, which suggested a phrase, which prompted a sentence, and the chain reaction set his hands to moving in the ritual of oratory. “Yet, it is not in the stars, but in ourselves, that our ultimate destiny lies, for the lights in the skies are but beacons to lead us, onward and outward, beyond stars, beyond the cycles of motion, until we are masters of all stars…”

  Freda had been covertly studying Rosentiel because he had been overtly studying her, and she saw his head twitch on the first “stars” Heyburn uttered. There was a pronounced pecking movement on the second “stars,” and when the Senator said “lights in the skies,” Rosentiel’s head snapped back.

  “… until we, until…”

  Heyburn’s eyes fell on Rosentiel, and his voice trailed into silence. Seated beside his old friend and mentor, the former Secretary was gazing toward a zenith far beyond the roof of the chamber. His mania had claimed him, and, to Freda, he looked for all the world like a mute coyote howling at the moon. Clayborg beside her breathed softly, “Rosie’s not listening, and we’re shucked.” (Freda heard him indistinctly, and she assumed that Hans Clayborg had said “shucked.”)

  With set features, Heyburn returned to his listeners. “… we bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades and loosen the belt of Orion. Class dismissed… er, session adjourned, thank you.” Then, amid the hubbub of rising voices and squeaking chairs, Freda heard the mellifluent voice of Senator Heyburn calling a page boy, “Son, will you get this thing out of here?”

  It was hard to assess the value of the day’s events, Doctor Gaynor said as they were driven to the hotel, because of the complex factors involved in Rosentiel’s moving speech and Heyburn’s possible reactions to his former student’s neck-snapping. His only comment on Freda’s presentation was an implied
rebuke: “Doctor, it might help if you read more widely outside your field.”

  She merely nodded, but Freda felt his remark unfair. By the time she had read and initialed Department Directives, Bureau Subdirectives, Executive Memoranda, Interoffice Memos, administrative-procedure pamphlets, and scientific papers he channeled to her, she hardly had time to wipe the ink from her fingers and scan the washroom bulletins, and she was a speed reader.

  Berkeley rushed to her rescue, wielding a drawn blade. “That Stanford-Hammersmith foul-up was partly my fault, Charles. I shouldn’t have let Freda see Doctor Youngblood’s odd theory on environmental therapy. His logic was so full of holes that even a lawyer could spot them.”

  With a single sweep of his blade, Berkeley had nicked her Adam’s apple and sliced Youngblood’s jugular.

  Gaynor asked Hans what their chances were for a favorable decision. “About fifty-fifty,” he answered. “Well know in a week or ten days.”

  “Heyburn said four days,” Gaynor reminded him.

  “I know, but Heyburn will call a recess.”

  At the hotel, Freda found a telegram: “Congratulate me. Am father of 2,016 babies. Within 8 days, if my little finger holds out, expect to be grandfather of 64,512. After that, what? Pollinator Polino.”

  Despite her gloom over the hearings, Freda was lifted by the telegram. Her exaltation carried over to dinnertime, when she was the only happy Athenian in the alcove. She explained her gaiety without showing the telegram; Hal’s tone was too familiar for proper teacher-student relations.

  Most of the unhappiness around the table was caused by a front-page photo in the Washington Posthole. Heyburn, hands waving in oratorical frenzy, was addressing the audience, while Rosentiel was gazing up and away. For the Senator, Freda knew the picture was worth one thousand insults, and, in Hal’s phrase, as soon as he saw it he would “go ape.”