The Pollinators of Eden (8 page)

Freda was surprised to find reporters waiting at the Washington airport, and they were bustled immediately to the Senate Hearings Chamber to meet the members of the committee, with the press in attendance. She was charmed by Senator Heyburn, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Planet Classification. “I would recommend that the young lady adviser for the Athenians be kept in the background,” he told all present, who were mostly newspapermen, “because I function on this committee as the devil’s advocate, and I fear my duties might be imperiled with an angel in the house.”

Senator Heyburn exuded an aura of benignity. His large gentle eyes, his slow hand movements, his massive head with its lion’s mane of hair, were fitting backdrops for his voice. She had never heard another voice quite like it: though low-pitched, it rolled with a gravelly resonance that filled the chamber. Afterward Doctor Clayborg said it reminded him of a foghorn sounding through velvet, but Berkeley said it sounded like he was talking with a mouthful of mush.

Press reaction startled Freda. Heyburn’s remark about the Athenians insinuated that there were Spartans somewhere. The Spartans, she learned from the newspaper, were the southern senators on the committee who opposed opening any new planet to human colonization, since the manpower drain affected their section of the country more than others. Essentially, they were fighting to keep down the wages of their kitchen help, and Freda thought such a stand untenable; but the newspaper columnists were split down the middle. Some of them, even northerners, were supporters of the Spartans.

She had assumed that the petition hearing would be a gentlemanly get-together with Doctor Gaynor merely presenting his petition. Reports from Section Able had barely hit the newspapers, yet opposition was forming. On the first afternoon of the preliminary hearings, the attorney for the committee requested a four-day delay in order to assemble antipetition witnesses opposing a permanent scientific station on Flora. Freda asked Doctor Clayborg, who seemed to know politics, why anyone should oppose the station. “It sets a precedent,” he explained, “which the UN usually follows, and the UN, from Russian pressure, would throw it wide open. Russia’s unloading her Uzbek dissidents who’re pushing for local self-determination.”

In granting the delay, Heyburn made a rather long speech, Freda thought, giving as his reason “to further the continuing dialogue, pro and con, which makes this country great.”

“He means monologue,” Clayborg whispered to her. “Heyburn s cornered corn, and that ain’t hay.”

At the hotel, the Athenians lingered in the alcove reserved for them to discuss strategy. Doctor Gaynor—Freda never called him “Charles”—was disappointed by the delay. “I hoped to get my petition through before anyone could organize.”

“Charlie,” Clayborg snorted, “the battle lines were drawn before Flora was a gleam in Ramsbotham-Twatwetham’s telescope.”

“Maybe we ought to have a backup plea,” Berkeley said, “that’s not purely scientific, something to appeal to the bleeding hearts on the committee.”

“What about Doctor Youngblood’s idea,” Freda suggested, “for using Flora as a sanatorium for the earth-alienated. At least, they wouldn’t be falling down and breaking their kneecaps when they wander around at night.”

“I’d hate to give the young sprout a swelled head,” Doctor Berkeley said, “but, Charles, you mentioned you had confidence in him.”

“As a potential administrator, Jim,” Gaynor said. “I’m no judge of his professional know-how.”

“If you use that approach,” Clayborg interrupted, “I have a true ace in a real hole—Rosentiel. He’s confined over at Saint Elizabeth’s, and Rosie was Heyburn’s fair-haired boy before he took up stargazing.”

“Frankly, I wanted to avoid space madness,” Gaynor said, “but what do you think, Jim?”

“It would have shock value. As I remember, he was an excellent speaker and popular with the press.”

“That depends on which press you mean,” Gaynor said thoughtfully. “He was controversial in the established press.”

“But solid with the underground,” Clayborg said, “which is the only press with power in Washington.”

Suddenly Freda realized they were speaking of Henry Rosentiel, formerly Secretary of Space, confined these last five years to Saint Elizabeth’s with the raptures of space. As Secretary, Rosentiel’s perfectionism and sense of duty led him to ride the bridges of the space cruisers while awake, and there he had contracted that strange awe of distances called variously space madness, space rapture, and earth-alienation. In fact, he had attempted to defect from earth—an impossibility for one so prominent—and had been apprehended stowing away on a starship.

Unfortunately, the government bungled the affair. Even as the President’s press secretary was announcing Rosentiel’s resignation “for personal reasons,” his picture was appearing in the underground press showing him emerging from the ship between two S.P.s, his head bent back in the characteristic neck-snap of a “night crawler.” The photograph, taken from above him, had caught the wistfulness and hunger in his eyes with such poignancy that Freda remembered it to this day, remembered even the caption beneath it: “Like a Sick Eagle Looking at the Sky.”

“What about Rosie’s… er… oddity?” Gaynor asked Clayborg.

“He has control for extended periods,” Clayborg answered, “particularly when no one mentions stars or the night. But Jim here can go to Saint Elizabeth’s with me in the morning to vouch for his stability. If Rosie’s willing, Jim agrees, and you give the go-ahead, you’ve got your Gaynor Station, and I have an entropist on its staff.”

“Is it legal for a deranged person to testify?” Freda asked.

“It’s not a legal hearing,” Gaynor explained. “We’re simply trying to persuade Heyburn… Go ahead, Hans. But if Rosentiel agrees to testify, it must be stated plainly that his opinions do not reflect the official attitude of the Bureau.”

“I should have brought my tulip along to testify,” Freda said. “It could persuade Heyburn.”

“Freda and her talking tulips,” Gaynor said, patting the top of her hand with avuncular humor. By an act of will, Freda did not jerk her hand back but let him pat.

After the strategy conference she retired to her room to read, but her mind kept returning to Gaynor’s pat and her distaste toward it. She awaited the inevitable tap on the door or the ring of her telephone as she might have awaited the in-swinging spikes of an Iron Mary. Once Gaynor started his maneuvers in private, it would be impossible to conceal her revulsion toward being touched. She tried to think of him as a Shasta daisy, but her mind rejected the subterfuge. She arose and paced the room. Once his hand touched her thigh, all that she had worked for, chairmanship of the Bureau, elevation to the Department, eventual Cabinet membership, would be lost in a shriek of horror that could not be disguised as delight.

She paced harder, thinking she was letting herself be driven mad by a scribble on a washroom wall. Gaynor was married with three children, and he flashed his platinum wedding band at the slightest opportunity—and those men were the worst kind! Well, she decided, she would simply tell him that she had contracted a case of leprosy.

Leprosy was such an absurd straw to cling to that she smiled, and temporarily relaxed. At the precise moment her smile was broadest, the telephone rang.

She jumped, then hopped and skipped toward the instrument, standing over it for a moment to let it ring a second time. At least she wanted him to know she wasn’t eager.

She picked up the telephone and attempted a coo that ended in a croak, “Freda Caron speaking/’

“Hi, Freda. This is Hans Clayborg. I’m interested in your tulip. How about dropping down to the Rendezvous Room for a nightcap?”

“Hans! You bet your sweet burro I will!”

“What do you want to drink? I’ll order now.”

“Whatever you’re having, but make mine double.”

Hans awaited her in a corner booth, and he said, “They tell me you’ve got a tulip that’s out of this world.”

“It used to be. It’s near Fresno now.”

He was fascinated by her description of the Caron tulips. By the second nightcap, she was telling the entire story of Paul and his orchids, Hal and his trees, and the conspiracy they both suspected on the planet. Wide-eyed and supercharged, Hans could only say, “Wonderful!… Incredible!… Superb!”

Hans was as confused as Paul about the orchid pollinators. “Paul’s using the methodology I would use, and his deduction’s the same as mine; through some illogical inconsistency, the facts aren’t making themselves available. But your idea is good, too. Study the tulips and compute their solutions on a seven-foot level.”

When she finished and they commenced their third nightcap, Hans in a spluttering spray of words told her how he had come to study entropy: “Because I lost so much reserve energy chasing women when I was young, I grew interested in energy as a thing in itself.”

He tried to explain to her the reason for the past century’s rash of exploding stars in relation to Goldberg’s Law of Diminishing Entropy, but she could not share his horror at the death of stars. What if the life of the universe be shortened by forty billion years? As her psychiatrist would say, she couldn’t relate to forty billion years. If a few thousand stars blinked out over the weekend, there were still millions left.

He surprised her more by agreeing with Hal that the plants of Flora might be more intelligent than men, but he almost tipped her with the suggestion that Paul’s orchids were evolving away from—not toward—an ambulatory species. “That’s my reason for wanting an entropist on Flora. Somebody has to plan for the day the sun dies, and the planning has fallen, by default, to entropists. Those plants know about their dying sun from the weakened quanta jump in their chlorophyll process, and they could be preparing their species to survive the long winter of dying and the heat of rebirth.”

“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.”