The Pollinators of Eden (13 page)

She turned and strode toward the greenhouse, eyes blazing, jaw set. As she started to swing open the door and open the questioning, she saw a purple smudge on the white paint of the glass near the door. Her fear subsided, but a residual kickback of anger remained at the sight of the smudge. Somebody had wiped his pollinating finger near the door.

Hal opened the door. “Welcome back, Doctor.”

“Hal, what are those horrid purple stains on the tulips?”

“Plant dye.”

“You used dye on my tulips, when you know it kills them?”

“I figured they were vulnerable only from the root system, so I took a chance.”

“Took a chance?” she flared. “What kind of procedure is that?”

“It worked.” He shrugged. “If I’d killed a few, what difference would it make? We have thousands of the brutes, and we may have to exterminate them all.”

“Over my dead body! You wait here. I want to look at the log.”

“May I remind Doctor Caron that this is Sunday, my day off,” he said, stooping to plug in the electric lead line.

“As of right now, it isn’t! Please remain in the area until I’ve checked your records.”

“Yes, ma’am. I intend to,” he said, almost insolently, backing toward the beds and uncoiling the line. “But all you’ll find in the log are observations. The deductions are up here.” He tapped his brow with his fingers, slowly, ominously, as he stooped to pick up a small, battery-powered electric fan.

He turned and walked away, dragging the heavy extension cord down the canvas path. Under the tension of his effort, she noticed, the muscles of his back were long and striated, like the muscles of a distance swimmer. It was almost indecent the way his torso rippled when he bent and swayed, and she made a mental note to post a notice on the greenhouse bulletin board that all personnel must be properly clothed while working in the seed beds.

At first Polino’s log was meticulous, even to his penmanship. After Tuesday, January 24, two days after she had left for Washington, his penmanship faltered. Since his first seed harvest occurred that day, she could forgive his subsequent haste. He had been busy pollinating. For the twenty-seventh she noticed an entry: “Detected sugar in nectar. No sugar before. Tulips must be aware bees are pollinators, and sugar attracts bees. How did they find out?”

On January 30 Polino had made another entry relative to sugar content of nectar: “Lab analysis shows sugar content of nectar now 22%. The bees are coming.”

Then the entries grew interesting from several points of view: as scientific observations and nonscientific observations, errors in record keeping, faulty use of nomenclature, and flights of fancy. This ingenue, Freda thought, is reading her first movie scenario.

February 2: Bees won’t do! Four honeybees got their heads crushed by the calyptra of female tulips.

February 4: A wasp laid an egg in a calyx.

February 5: More wasps arriving. They might serve. Found four wasps dead. Identified wasps as Masaridae, or Mexican ground wasps—the only species of wasps that feeds its larvae on honey and pollen.

February 6: Stained abdomen of a wasp purple. Stain showed on oviduct of 68 tulips before wasp died of fatigue. Caron tulips are conning wasps into thinking that they are laying eggs.

February 8: No wasp fatalities today. Stained another wasp green. Only ten stains showed on tulip oviducts. Tulips have learned not to work wasps to death.

February 10: More wasps arriving (From Mexico?) A beds germinating, B beds pollinated. C beds blooming. D beds growing. Preparing E and F beds for planting.

Freda closed the logbook with a thump and stalked into the garden. Polino was sprawled on the canvas between the blooming C beds and the green shoots of the D row. He had set up the portable fan to blow in the hundred-degree arc onto the blooms, and he was adjusting dials on the black box. As the fan blew against the tulips, they fluted and sang.

“What’s that?” Freda asked.

“A high-fidelity, stereophonic recorder,” he answered. “I tape their music and splice it into illogical progressions, and play the notes until I get disharmonies I like. I write them down and play them on Friday and Saturday nights at the Mexicali Café. These babies have turned me into the top guitar soloist in Fresno. Aficionados of dissonant jazz come from as far away as Madera and Dinuba to hear me play.”

“How interesting,” she snapped. “I must attend one of your recitals… At the moment, Mr. Hal Polino, there’s a matter of record keeping I’d like to discuss.”

“Doctor,” he said, rising, “I can tell from your expression it’s not something I want recorded. You might damage my equipment.”

“Come to the office!”

She turned and strode back to the greenhouse. When she entered, went to her desk, and opened the logbook, she turned to him and tapped the entry for February 6. “Flowers do not ‘con’ insects into ‘thinking.’ A manual of scientific observations is not a journal of wild speculations in the dialect of another century. Young man, you were assigned to me for one principle reason: to improve your methodology. Not only is this slipshod record keeping, it reveals a cavalier attitude toward scientific nomenclature and complete indifference to precision. I want you to understand that this logbook is an official record. It is signed by me and forwarded to the Department of Agriculture archives. All I want in this book are observed facts. Leave the synthesis of those facts to the computers, which are far better qualified to relate them to the existing body of knowledge than you or I. I want these pages rewritten Monday, without any references to plants indoctrinating insects or other theories, hypotheses, pipe dreams, or fantasies. Is that clear?”

“Yes, ma am.”

“Now, what’s this mumbo-jumbo about wasps? Sit down.”

He sat, uneasily. “I don’t know how to tell you, without using conjecture…”

“Polino, you’re talking off the record to me. Say what you please. I can discount it as you go along.”

“All right, I’ll tell you straight! For the first three days, after I moved the seedlings outside, I pollinated them, as you instructed, with a medical swab. But I found my little finger was more efficient, since cotton stuck in the plants. Inadvertently, I licked my finger, which didn’t matter. But one day I thought I tasted sugar, so I took some of the pollen nectar over and had it analyzed. The lab tests are entered.”

“That’s a reasonable observation,” she conceded, “and it was handled correctly.”

“Working with the plants all day, naturally I kept them under close observation. Doctor, you can take it or leave it, but they were experimenting, not me. One day, after the nectar turned sweet, I saw a hummingbird hovering over a bloom. Now, I’m not allowed to enter into the log what doesn’t happen, and that hummingbird didn’t touch the bloom. The tulip didn’t like the looks of the sharp-pointed spear, and, zap, the hummingbird took off. It didn’t come back. What’s more,” he added emphatically, “no hummingbird ever will.”

Freda restrained a smile at his emphasis and asked, “What’s your theory for that?”

“The air chamber of the tulip is sort of a Helmholtz resonator with a high pass filter. The tulip bopped the bird in the head with a high-frequency soundwave when it saw that needle point probing at its stigma.”

“Saw?” she asked.

“Sensed,” he corrected. “They emit their sounds from their calyx, and their petals could be echo detectors.”

This boy was mad, she decided. He was approaching the tulips from a perfectly irrational point of view… The same point of view, she suddenly recalled, that Hans Clayborg had suggested she adopt. Perhaps Polino might be of value to her, after all.

“There’s a possibility,” she agreed, “that an echo-ranging mechanism might be employed by the tulips, though purely as reactive behavior. Sunflowers are light-ranging devices, but I’ve never met a ‘thinking’ sunflower. What about the bees?”

“They worked all right with the males, but their hairs irritated the oviducts of the females. So out went the bees.”

“And in came the wasps,” Freda said.

“Yes, ma’am. When I first noticed the wasps, one was crawling up the stem and backing into the oviduct. I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t flying. I had seen a few flying around. So I took it over to ‘Bugs’ and had them identify it. When the wasp rested up a little while, it flew back to the tulip beds. So, I stained one, and found the tulips were working them to death.”

“Hal, quit personifying plants. All that happened is that the wasps found an ideal cell for laying their eggs.”

“Doctor,” he protested. “These tulips are intelligent. They found the only species of wasp on earth that could do them any good. Through some understanding of the ovulation processes of wasps, they’ve hypnotized the insects into believing that they are laying eggs. They lay some eggs, and the tulips let them hatch, but the wasps keep right on backing into the tulips long after they’ve quit laying. The tulips know more about the wasps than I do, so they’re smarter than I am. What’s more, those wasps have been laying their eggs in the ground for thousands of years. In less than a week, the tulips changed behavior patterns which took aeons to evolve, so they’ve pulled a trick beyond the power of human intelligence. I’m not a methodologist, and I’ll admit it, but I’ll bet you Paul Theaston knows these plants think. And I’ll bet that when Paul gets back, he’ll be bringing seeds of the damndest orchid this planet has ever seen.”

Freda couldn’t repress a smile, and Polino relaxed slightly. “I’m convinced he’s right, ma’am. Those orchids walk at night to do their own courting.”

“Hal, there’s not one item you’ve touched on here which cannot be explained logically… Have you discussed these tulips with anyone but me?”

“Certainly not, Doctor.”

“Why the ‘certainly’?”

“I don’t want a one-way trip to Houston. And I’m getting credit for their musical compositions. I like the money and the glory.”

“You mentioned your fear that these plants will have to be exterminated.”

“I think they’re dangerous. They’ve learned to adapt, and to those babies out there, the earth is an easy mark… They could eliminate the birds, the earthworms, and all the insects they don’t need.”

“But that would take hundreds of years.”

“They don’t care.”

“But they couldn’t eliminate us.”

“No, ma’am,” he said. “I don’t think they could hurt us… Unless Paul brings the orchids, and the orchids and tulips form an alliance. Then, watch out! The orchids could kill men with ease.”

“Are you telling me Paul’s life is in danger?”

“Absolutely not, Doctor. The orchids wouldn’t raise a tendril against Paul.”

“Why are you so confident, Hal?”

“Thanks for calling me ‘Hal,’ Doctor.” He grinned, visibly relieved. “The orchids would save Paul because he’s the only specimen they have, and they want to study him.”

Hal’s conversation on Sunday began a week of change for Freda, as Gaynor’s frostiness became publicly apparent. In the executive dining room he spent shorter and shorter periods of greeting at her table, busying himself with other department heads. Her stock went down two points because of his shortened greetings. When, by Thursday, he had not invited her into the Bureau Chief’s alcove to lunch at his table, other administrators were beginning to notice, and her stock dropped another three points.

Thursday was a particularly bad day. Hal had forecast a second crop of seeds from the A beds, but they didn’t materialize. Friday he was still worried, but Freda’s stock readings improved slightly. Captain Barron returned from Washington, and he and Commodore Minor joined her at lunch. Up four points!

“Captain Barron,” she said archly, “I was certainly surprised to learn of your boyhood among the bloodhounds of Arkansas.”

“Admiral Creighton sends you his apologies, Freda. His aide briefed him wrong… But I was surprised, also, that you presented the petition after you found my name on the list.”

“Doctor Gaynor thought my costume jewelry might help offset navy gold braid. We matched a foil against a broadsword.”

“Commodore,” Captain Barron said suddenly, “did you ever land on Carston 6?”

“Ah, yes,” the Commodore nodded. “The slugs.”

“Come, now, gentlemen,” Freda said, “what are the slugs on Carston 6?”

“Huge snails without shells. They travel through the dense foliage of the planet’s tropics,” Minor said, “by eating everything that gets in their way.”

Neither of the officers had indulged in gossip. They had not mentioned a name, but Freda knew she had allies. She belonged to another jurisdiction, and she was being rejected by her peer group; yet she had an anodyne for her hurt in the tulip beds. The A beds, heavy with seeds, had little time for music now, but the B group still sang lustily, and she found herself hurrying from lunch to spread an air mattress near the tulips and listen to their melodies while she looked up at the clouds.

Hal spent most of the week rolling out strips of canvas to catch the seeds and preparing the E and F beds for planting. He would lean over the A beds to point to his distant squares of spaded loam. “There’s your target, girls. Now, hit it. I don’t want to be cleaning up after you. And keep those seeds six inches apart. I don’t want to spend a week thinning the shoots.”

According to his calculation, the second crop from the A row, closest to the greenhouse, was overdue. The seeds should have been ejected from the pods on Thursday. When noon came Friday, Freda was tempted to pluck a pregnant female and dissect the ova pod, but Hal protested. “No, ma’am. I planted them in geometrical alignment. You could destroy my pattern. They’ll come along. The temperatures this week have averaged about four degrees less than the week before, and they’re sensitive to temperature.”

“About four degrees!” Freda exclaimed. “A detail as important as this shouldn’t be left to speculation… Give me the exact figures.”

Shaking his head ruefully, Polino went to the greenhouse to prepare a graph of the temperatures. The week ending on Thursday, February 9, showed a mean temperature 3.8 degrees higher than on the week following. On Friday, no seeds were ejected.