The Pollinators of Eden (27 page)

When he finally handed her the cigarette, she asked, “Are you married, Jimmy?”

“Not anymore. I failed as a husband, too.”

“That father image again?”

“No. Professional duties kept me from home so much, and I was detached around the house, thinking about problems, so my wife got bored.”

“I should think she would be willing to make sacrifices for the honor and prestige of being the wife of a lay saint.”

“A lay saint!” He took out a cigarette and lighted one for himself. “That’s the first time anybody ever called me that.

“Although your tool might be a question, Doctor, your art is love,” she said. “The moment I awakened, I felt in the presence of an old friend. Your wife did not know what flowers were at her feet. If I had been gifted with a husband such as you, not all the ills that earth inherits could have sundered us. I’m happy, Jimmy, that you’re my doctor, and I can never be completely alienated from a world that has such analysts in it.”

He dropped his eyes modestly, and they must have fallen on his wristwatch, for he leaped to his feet. “Enjoyed it, Freda. Books on the shelf. Read them. No correspondence. No visitors. Your nurse is Wilma Firbank, RN, and I’ll send her in. Don’t let her show you her judo chop.”

He was gone, and not a second too soon or too late.

She walked over to the shelf above the desk and looked at the books: Jowett’s
Plato
, Hegel’s
Dialectical Materialism
, Krafft-Ebing’s
Psychopathia Sexualis
. As she pondered the rather odd trio of volumes, she heard the key turn in her lock, and a square-shouldered, square-jawed woman of thirty entered, freshly scrubbed and wearing a starched uniform. Freda looked over and said, “You must be Miss Firbank?”

“Yes, ma’am, and I got to show you how to push some buttons, tell you about the hospital’s schedule, and explain some house rules.”

Freda listened, sizing the woman up. Wilma Firbank had open-faced candor, but her eyes seemed sad. Freda asked the nurse if she had been briefed on her case.

“They tell me, ma’am, you sort of fell in love with a planet. Must have been some planet.”

“It was a planet of love,” Freda said, “and it was glorious. Wilma, let me ask you: have you ever been loved by a man, totally, and for yourself alone?”

“No’m. I’m flatfooted and sort of waddle when I walk. Men like girls with curvy hips. Tell the truth, I kind of agree with them.”

“On Flora, I was once loved by a lissome, redheaded maiden with a caress lighter than a butterfly’s wings.”

“Sort of reminds me of a dietician who works here, Ruby May Washington, except Ruby May’s not redheaded. You’ll meet her.”

“I’m looking forward to meeting Ruby May Washington,” Freda said, superimposing a red orchid around the sandy hair of Wilma.

In cultivating friends in high places, Freda thought, it never paid to ignore the rank and file. Wilma would have connections with the hospital’s underground, and Freda’s private bathroom truly rendered her incommunicado. Besides, if her plan worked, she’d need two other women. Wilma Firbank would be ideal for the top terrace on Flora. If any more pigs came down from the forest, Wilma looked perfectly capable of converting them to pork with one judo chop.

It took Freda three days to persuade her doctor to smuggle a letter out to Hans Clayborg, because Doctor Campbell’s problems were far more deep-seated than she had assumed. He was terribly shy. His professional ethics had conditioned him, like Pavlov’s dog, against the use of his own couch. There were also technical problems, among them the lock on Freda’s door. The lock was operated from the outside, and Campbell had to use all of his persuasive powers to get the committee to move it to the inside.

On the day after she got her lock moved inside, she had a visitor from the Great Beyond, as inmates called the outside. Hans Clayborg bounced into her room, his electric hair atingle. Ostensibly he had come to discuss defects in the Stanford-Hammersmith theory with the head psychiatrist. Actually he had come in response to Freda’s letter.

They spent an excited preliminary half-hour swapping news, she of Flora and he of earth. The Caron-Polino theory, she learned, had taken the scientific world by storm. “The Caron Can-Can” had been banned from the airwaves as deleterious to the morals of the young, and Doctor Hector was new Chief of the Bureau of Exotic Plants. Doctor Gaynor was now supervisor in charge of floral arrangements at the San Diego Zoo. “I could spring you on a writ of
habeas corpus
,” Clayborg said, “but you’d have to stand trial for defection.”

“Getting out of Houston isn’t enough, Hans. I must get back to Flora, with your help. I want you to demonstrate mathematically that a few rungs from a human being’s DNA ladder can be spliced onto the double helix of a Florian orchid to produce seeds with enough human genes to bridge the death-creation gap between universes. Show that Mendelian laws, over generations, would produce functioning human beings from the seeds who could selectively breed out the nonfunctioning orchid traits. Give me imaginary seeds, Hans, to store in real urns.”

Hans lost his ebullience. “If I advanced that hypothesis, they would not put you on Flora. They’d put me in Houston. Whoever heard of human-orchid seeds?”

“I got the idea from your human corn.”

“Girl, that was simply boy-talk to polarize you along a germinal axis. The idea’s impossible!”

“You deal with impossibles at Santa Barbara, remember?… Hans, for the love of me, write a letter to the President. Tell him a union of dissimilar DNA molecules is theoretically possible—the Caron-Polino theory has laid the groundwork—and name me as field cystologist best qualified to conduct the experiment on Flora. Make the letter persuasive. Please, Hans!”

“Freda,” he groaned. “I deal with impossibles, true. But I persuade presidents with possibles. I know nothing about the DNA of Florian orchids.”

“There’s part of a seed in my greenhouse icebox at the station. Get it and formulate a theory. When Einstein sent his letter, Roosevelt probably neither knew nor cared that E=MC
²
, but he trusted Einstein.”

“But this would be a perversion of science to serve a human want!”

“It’s about time science was perverted to serving human wants! You’ll pervert your knowledge to seduce an innocent girl but balk at using it to persuade a callous chief executive. Very well! Then, think of this, you acolyte of pure science: if life just happens to be an entropic function, some of you altarboys are missing a devotional by not integrating the life force into the Unified Field Theory.”

“I never thought of
that
,” he said in genuine amazement. For a moment he was silent, numbed by the knowledge that there was something he had not thought of, but he waved his hand in dismissal. “I cannot flaunt my disciplines and bend an entire technology to the whims of a… a…” He managed a weak smile. “… a nymphomanic omniphiliac. I do worship science as an abstraction, and I’ll continue to, until someone shows me a better Truth.”

In desperation, Freda superimposed the image of a red orchid onto the head of Hans Clayborg, and the petals fitted his flaring hair perfectly. Now she could read his mind: he was throwing up verbiage to ward her off while he considered life force as part of a unified field. But he had thrown out the words “show me,” and the words were a rope with which she could hog-tie him.

“Hans,” she said slowly, “I can prove to you that the poetry of the human heart holds truths as valid as the abstractions of science.”

“Just how can you do that?”

“Turn the key in yonder lock,” she said, “and lay your teeth on the desk.”

Freda found that Doctor Campbell’s father had been so weak that his son could not identify with him, so Jimmy had become his own father image and had played the role of surrogate so strongly that he had repressed the growing boy. When his problem was finally analyzed, Doctor Campbell responded to therapy with enthusiasm. His haggard look faded with his father image, and what he lost as a psychiatrist he gained as a man. Empathy was replaced by character.

At the end of six weeks, Jimmy Campbell resigned from the hospital staff to become an automobile mechanic. His last favor to Freda was to pronounce her incurable. “It won’t do any good, Freda,” he said, “because they’ll never let the records out of this nut house, but anything you want from me, you get. We humanists must stick together.”

Doctor Campbell was replaced by a Frommian named Williams who lasted only two weeks. His philosophy of love and tender care was so amplified and reinforced by his patient that he was dismissed from the staff for laying siege to a nurse who had fled him and locked herself into a linen closet. Wilma, who was becoming a reliable pipeline to the hospital’s underground, told Freda that Williams left for Hollywood to become a movie producer.

He left too quickly to recommend Freda’s exile to Flora, but he did leave her with some rather curious additions to her library. Even Wilma was interested enough to borrow her copy of
The Well of Loneliness
.

Her Frommian was replaced by a Freudian named Smith, who brought her a copy of
The Theory of the Neuroses
, which was invaluable in helping her to help him think that he understood himself, but he resigned under peculiar circumstances. In the intense concentration on her psyche, the hospital staff had completely ignored her soma, and halfway through her third month in Houston, Freda was found to be two months pregnant. Her Freudian, Smith, who was poorly informed outside of his field, resigned her case, thinking himself responsible.

At least that was the reason he gave her. She had her doubts. Her condition was becoming apparent to a charwoman, and Smith told her he would become a sculptor and spend the remainder of his days re-creating her torso in marble. “No arms, no heads, Freda,” he told her. “Just breasts.”

She bade good-bye to one more humanist, feeling he had undertaken a fitting line of work. Smith had strong Oedipus tendencies.

For three full weeks Freda suffered a hiatus in which she had no analyst at all. Wilma, through channels, kept her posted. The hospital staff, concerned by the rate at which she used up analysts and by her pregnancy, caused, the staff assumed, by a hospital employee, was bringing in a Pavlovian from Cape Cod. The Pavlovian, Wilma understood, conditioned his patients with a form of continuing shock treatment so obnoxious that they fled into sanity to escape therapy.

Doctor Watts was his name. She feared to ask him his given name. He was a New Englander carved in Midwestern Gothic, prim-lipped, sandy-haired, square-jawed, with pale blue eyes that stared through her when he spoke. He had the commanding presence of a Captain Bligh, and he was in his late sixties. His age did not put him outside of her range of effective action, but her pregnancy had turned her thoughts inward. Her awareness of the needs of others was not blunted but merely set aside as she contemplated the growing fulfillment of her love for Paul Theaston.

She hoped her baby was Paul Theastons. Her period of hibernation between Paul and Hans left the matter in doubt. In any event, the child could have a father it could be proud of. Since she had substituted as a father image for Jimmy Campbell, it was highly unlikely that she could mother his child.

She did not even superimpose the image of an orchid on Doctor Watts, mostly because of his policy. He cultivated an obnoxiousness that stretched her understanding to such limits that she could not find the motive to comfort him, especially since she was fast losing the use of her primary means of extending comfort. The torso that had turned the Freudian to sculpture was becoming, in a word, unshapely.

Watts had read her case history carefully, listened to all the tapes, and had deduced much which Freda felt positive was not in the record. His greeting, when he entered her room, revealed the extent of his bookwork.

“You’ve been assigned to me, Miss Caron,”—he accented the “Miss” as he cast a scornful glance at her maternity gown—“because you acquired a taste for the florid on an alien planet which has thrown your stimulus-response reactions heavily to the response side. Fruits of your behavior are apparent from your appearance, but I’m here to help, not to pass judgment. If I were to blame you for this travesty on Christian motherhood, some of my blame might reflect on brother members of a profession devoted to alleviating human suffering, or perhaps an array of otherwise innocent male nurses, janitors, delivery boys, or whatever else might have crawled from the woodwork. I’m no namby-pamby do-gooder who blames society for the sins of its members. The sin is yours, Miss Caron.”

“Aren’t you being unkind, Doctor?”

“Not unkind. Truthful! The truth shall make you free, and the truth is that you’ve perverted every noble sentiment of womanhood to a loin-oriented pleasure principle. Repentance will help; atonement will cure. Humanists, Miss Caron, are lepers of the twenty-third century, and I’m not Saint Francis.”

“Yes, Doctor Watts.”

“To guard against your further depredations to our staff, I have assigned Doctor Harold Franks as your obstetrician. Doctor Franks is eighty-eight years old.”

In subsequent interviews Freda probed beneath the ice of Watts to find a vein of New Hampshire granite, stratified in layers of home, church, motherhood, and country. He resented her pregnancy as an affront to decent motherhood, but she was too involved within herself to point out a conflict between his attitude and his religious nature: motherhood, under any circumstances, could not be indecent, since it was an Act of God. Besides, she was also immersed in books on international law that Wilma brought her from the hospital library.

Hans Clayborg had a word about an Act of God when he called on her a week before the USSS Botany left on its final voyage to Flora. “Freda, your pregnancy ruined us. I’m convinced there is a possibility of DNA linkage in a pregnancy-pollination series between an orchid, you, an orchid, and Paul. Here are my formulae describing how the linkup could occur, but now it would take an Act of God or an edict from the President to get you to Flora. Congress would never cooperate, because Heyburn draws a big vote from legally married housewives.”